What appeared to have been once a tiny one-bedroom flat had been converted haphazardly over the years into a dismal little combination pornographic photographer’s studio and porno-video rental outfit. I sat on a grimy molded plastic chair, waiting for Jean to finish his work. Jean-I never knew his last name and didn’t care to know it-did a healthy sideline business producing excellent false documents, passports, and licenses, largely for freelance operatives and small-time crooks. I had had occasion to do business with him a few times before, during my Paris assignment, and found him to be reliable and a good craftsman.
Could I trust him? Well, nothing in this life is certain, I suppose. But Jean had all the motivation in the world to be trustworthy. His livelihood depended upon his reputation for discretion, which a single act of betrayal would tarnish forever.
I had spent forty-five minutes glancing dully through a dog-eared movie magazine, having grown bored with inspecting the empty video boxes on display on his counter. There were more fetishes and variations in the porno biz than I had ever imagined (“Spanking” and “Hard” and “Trisex” and some deviations I’d never heard of), and all of them were available on video now.
It was after midnight. The photographer had locked the front door and drawn the shade to guard against what little street traffic might come by at that time of night. From the inner room I heard the whir of a hot-air photographic dryer.
At last Jean appeared from the darkroom. He was a small, wizened man in premature middle age, bald and worried-looking, wearing small round wire-rim glasses. He smelled strongly of potassium permanganate solution, which he’d used to artificially age the documents.
“Voilà,” he said, placing the papers on the counter with a flourish. He smiled with some pride. The job had not been terribly difficult: he had been able to work with the entire set of CIA-prepared documents that Molly and I had been given, in effect recycling them, reusing our photographs, and altering numbers where necessary. He had provided one set of Canadian passports and two sets of American ones for us. Molly and I were now fully documented as either American or Canadian citizens.
I inspected all four sets carefully. He did meticulous work. He also charged outrageously. But I was in no position to negotiate.
I nodded, paid him his small ransom, and walked down to the street. There was the whine of mopeds, the acrid stench of diesel fumes. Even at this time of night people roamed the streets of Pigalle, searching for quick gratification. A scraggly gang walked by, who looked to be of college age, dressed in the latest French take on the sixties-leather jackets in black or brown or American-type varsity letter jackets (the effect marred by odd emblazoned slogans like “American Football,” which only made them seem all the more counterfeit); long hair, rolled-up jeans, and orthopedic-looking oxford shoes of the sort you might see nuns wearing. Someone roared by on an enormous motorcycle, a Honda Africa Twin 750.
In the next few minutes I placed several phone calls to old contacts from my CIA days. None of them was connected in any official way to governmental intelligence services; each worked mainly on the wrong side of the law (a difficult distinction in the espionage trade): from a souvlaki shop owner who laundered money for others (at a fee, naturally) to an armorer who custom-altered weapons for assassins and hit men. I succeeded in waking each one of them up with the exception of one night owl who seemed to be out at some dance club with a bimbo and a cellular phone. Finally, through an old friend who had been useful as an expediter years before, I located what my French operative friends sometimes call an ingénieur, an “engineer,” or a fellow skilled at clever circumventions of the international telephone systems. Within the hour I was at the ingénieur’s apartment, in a decrepit 1960s-vintage high-rise in the twentieth arrondissement, off the Avenue de la République. He eyed me through the peephole for a few seconds, and then opened the door. His apartment, scantily furnished with cheap furniture, smelled of stale beer and sweat. He was small and pudgy, wearing a pair of dirty, paint-spattered jeans and a stained white Hard Rock Cafe T-shirt under which bulged an enormous potbelly. Obviously he had been sleeping, like most of the rest of Paris; his hair was disheveled and his eyes were half shut. Without so much as a grunt of social pleasantry, he thrust his thumb toward a smudged white telephone on a coffee table topped with fake-wood-grain Formica that was chipped around the edges. Next to the coffee table was a hideous mustard-yellow sofa whose stuffing was coming out in several places. The phone was precariously balanced atop a set of Paris phone directories.
The ingénieur didn’t know my name and naturally didn’t ask. He had been told only that I was an homme d’affaires, but then, probably all his clients were hommes d’affaires. He was making a very quick five hundred francs for allowing me to use an untraceable phone.
Actually, the call I was about to place was traceable, but the trace would come to a grinding halt somewhere in Amsterdam. From there, though, the link was routed through a series of pass-throughs to Paris, but no electronic tracing equipment yet invented could track it that far.
The ingénieur took my money, grunted porcinely, and shuffled off to another room. Had I had more time, I would have preferred a more secure arrangement than this one, but it would have to do.
The receiver was smudged with greasy fingerprints, I noted disapprovingly, and it smelled like pipe smoke. I punched in the number, and a sequence of strange tones followed. Presumably, the signal was gavotting somewhere around Europe, under the Atlantic Ocean, and perhaps even back to Europe, before it made its by-now-feeble way to Washington, D.C., where the Agency fiber-optic telecommunications system would enrich the signal and put it through its own electronic paces.
I listened for the familiar clicks and hums, waited for the third ring.
On the third ring the female voice announced, “Thirty-two hundred.” How could the same woman always answer the phone, no matter the time of day or night? Maybe it wasn’t even a human voice at all, but a high-quality synthesized one.
I responded: “Extension nine eighty-seven, please.”
Another click and then I heard Toby’s voice.
“Ben? Thank God. I heard about Zurich. Are you-”
“I know, Toby.”
“You know-”
“About Truslow and the Wise Men. And the Germans, Vogel and Stoessel. And the surprise witness.”
“Jesus Christ, Ben, what the hell are you talking about? Where are you?”
“Give it up, Toby,” I bluffed. “It’s all about to come out anyway. I’ve pieced enough of it together. Truslow tried to have me killed, which was a serious mistake.”
There was a quiet whoosh of static faintly in the background.
“Ben,” he said at last. “You’re mistaken.”
I checked my watch and saw that the connection was ten seconds old by now, long enough to trace the call… to Amsterdam. They would pinpoint my location as Amsterdam, which would be useful misdirection.
“Naturally,” I replied sardonically.
“No, please, Ben. There are things going on that can’t be understood… without a full perspective. These are dangerous times. We need the help of people like you, and now with your ability, it’s all the more-”
And I slowly hung up the receiver.
Yes. Toby was involved.