Moskowitz said, “You sound like you’re plotting to do it yourself.”
“Only way to figure it out, Professor. Put yourself in the other guy’s shoes and decide how you’d do it if you were him.”
Forrester said, “The point is, it can be done. That’s what terrifies me. Fifty or a hundred fanatics with Nazi minds—if that’s all it would take, it’s fantastic.”
Spode turned up Cherry Avenue past Bear Down football stadium and north into the campus—stolid brick buildings on incongruous palm-tree-studded lawns. Spode pulled up by the administration building. Kids walked by in bunches and Moskowitz’ glance swiveled to follow girls’ legs. “When will you want me in Washington to testify?”
“Guest set the hearings for three weeks from Monday—the twenty-fourth,” Forrester said.
“I’ll be there.” Moskowitz extended his knobby hand across the back of the seat to grip Forrester’s. “The odds still stink, but I’ve got a little hope—for the first time. Don’t bail out on me, Senator. Pleasure to’ve met you, Mr. Spode.” Moskowitz got out of the car and trailed after a trio of long-haired girls as if attached to them by a leash. Spode’s eyes didn’t dally on the girls at all; Forrester couldn’t remember having seen Spode this tense.
“All right, Top, what’s the matter?”
“Not sure. Wait till I get to a phone. That call I had, it was important but we couldn’t talk on that line.”
Spode drove onto a gas-station apron and Forrester watched him put through his call in the glass booth. When Spode came back he said, “Okay, we’ve got to talk.”
Spode handed him five photographs and talked while he drove. “His name’s Leon Belsky. He’s Russian KGB, one of their good ones. I took the pictures last night because I bumped into him at Trumble’s—he was doing the same thing I was but he was looking for bigger game. I took the pictures and his gun to somebody last night to find out who he was.”
“The Agency?”
“Aeah. Look, follow this because it all gets to a point. I left the gun and the negatives with Art Miller—he’s the guy who developed them for me. I gave you the Phaeton specs this morning but I held out on the rest because at that point you didn’t need to be involved in it. But now there’s two dead guys and a third guy missing and they’re all tied into it, and you need to know about it because I think they’re after you and me now.”
Forrester’s scalp contracted. “Then you’d better spell it out. Who’s dead and who’s missing?”
“Ross Trumble’s dead, for one.”
Forrester stared at him.
Spode turned the wheel to take a corner. His jaw had crept forward to lie in a hard line. “In his bathroom on a pile of broken glass with his wrists cut open. They made it look like suicide, but it wasn’t. I was the one who broke that glass and Trumble wasn’t there at the time. So now we know what Belsky was looking for—he was looking for Trumble, to kill him. But we still don’t know why. The letter Trumble wrote you from Phoenix—maybe that will have some answers.”
It was a quiet street, cottonwoods and elms throwing pools of shade. Spode pulled to the curb and switched the engine off. “The other dead one’s Art Miller. The guy who had your negatives and Belsky’s gun. Remember I left the stuff with Miller last night. It was a stupid mistake and you see what it cost Miller. If you want to plant a bug on somebody a gun’s a good place to put it—bug your gun and then let somebody take it away from you. There must have been a beeper in Belsky’s Smith and Wesson, and Belsky must have followed the signal right to Miller’s house. They found Miller dead a few hours ago. The gun and the negatives are gone so Belsky must have taken them with him.
“The missing guy is one of Orozco’s private operatives—the one Trumble was trying to reach when he called Orozco’s office, remember? Sawed-off guy called Craig. He had some hook-up with Trumble and now he’s missing too and possibly dead. Whatever it is, it’s big, and we’re in it, you and me. Belsky traced back as far as Miller and if he was scared enough to kill Miller then he’s scared enough to kill both of us if he gets a chance at us; he knows I can identify him, and he’s got to assume I’ve told you all this since I work for you. He’s got no way of knowing Miller was an Agency man—he’ll assume Miller was just a pal with a darkroom who developed my pictures for me. So he may figure if he knocks off the two of us fast enough he’s safe.”
“I see.” Forrester was pawing his big jaw; things were going by very fast and he was trying to keep focus. It was as if they had leaped back more than twenty years to Korea: military counterintelligence, all the training and the months of experience in the lines, drifted through his mind in flashes and he sorted out the useless questions and narrowed his attention like a cone toward the significances. In the end he said, “Then the question is why this man Belsky came here and killed Ross Trumble. I assume the Agency must be in high gear by now looking for him.”
“Sure. Not that they’ve got much chance of finding him. He’d checked into a motel under the name of Meldon Kemp and they’ve got a man on the place but there’s no chance at all he’ll show up back there. Nobody even knows where to start looking because nobody knows what he’s after. If he only came here to kill Trumble then he’d be halfway back to Moscow by now, but I don’t think that was it. If they’d wanted an assassin they wouldn’t have had to use a man as important as Belsky. Anyhow if it was hit-and-run why’d he go out of his way to trace his gun back to Miller and kill him? He’d have run for it instead. No, Belsky’s still around here and he’s still worrying about me. And you.”
“It’s hard to grasp, Top.”
“It might be easier to understand if it made any sense.” Spode looked at his watch. “They’ve put tracers on Ross Trumble to see if they can come up with something at that end. Right now we can’t see any connection between him and Belsky outside of the Phaeton thing, and why the hell should Belsky kill him over that?”
Forrester shook his head.
Spode reached for the key. “They told me I could call back and find out if they’ve dug up anything that helps. I may as well try.”
When Spode came back to the car from the telephone kiosk his eyes were busy—like an animal that knew it was being stalked. He started the car and headed into the back streets. “The Agency sent a man to cover my place in case Belsky showed up looking for me but it looks like Belsky beat them to it. The place has been searched—quick but thorough. Maybe looking to see if he could find any indications whether I’m still working for the Agency. He’s got to be hoping like mad I’m free-lancing now and didn’t call in the troops.”
This Belsky was a professional but that wouldn’t make him immune to the seductiveness of hope. He would tend to believe what he wanted to believe—that Spode was independent and that Washington wasn’t onto him. It would make Belsky a little less careful but it would put Spode’s life in jeopardy and Forrester found himself worrying about that at the expense of wider concerns. He was a man to whom friendships had always been as sparse and infrequent as they were profound. He had nothing much in common with Top Spode other than shared experiences that went back twenty-odd years but Top was one of the finest men he had ever known and in a personal sense Top’s individual safety was of more importance to him than a truckload of state secrets.
Spode found a place to park where there was nothing in sight but a few houses and two sleepy mongrels on a lawn. “A few developments. I left voice-activated bugs at Trumble’s house and the Agency retrieved the tapes a while ago when the cops were taking the body away. There were a couple of voices, just fragments, one guy calling another guy ‘Sarge’ and telling him to take it easy with the knife. My ex-boss figures they must have killed Trumble somewhere else and snuck the body back into the house, and one of them had to cut him to pour some blood over the floor and make it look like Trumble killed himself in the bathroom. Incidentally the local cops aren’t in on this; they bought it as a suicide.”