“And the photograph?” Molly asked. “Of you with-your throat slit?”
“These days,” Sinclair said wearily, “even that’s not impossible. A contact who was once affiliated with the Media Lab at MIT-”
“Sure,” I said. “Digital retouching of photographs.”
He nodded; Molly looked puzzled.
I explained: “You remember a couple of years ago when National Geographic ran a photograph on its cover, where they moved the Giza pyramid over a bit so it would fit?”
She shook her head.
“A big controversy in certain circles,” I said. “Anyway, they’re now able to retouch photographs in such a sophisticated way that it’s pretty much undetectable.”
“That’s right,” Sinclair said.
I continued: “So that the focus would be not on whether you’d really been killed, but how.”
“Well,” Molly said to her father, “you fooled me. I thought you’d been murdered, I thought your throat had been slit before the car crash, my own father had been murdered! And here you were all the time, sailing in a lake in Canada.” Her voice grew steadily louder, angrier. “Was that the point? Was the point to make me think you’d been killed? Was the point to do that to your own goddamned daughter?”
“Molly-” her father tried to interject.
“To terrify and traumatize your own daughter? For what?”
“Molly!” he said almost desperately. “Listen to me! Please, hear me out. The point was to save my life.”
He took a deep breath, and then began.
SIXTY-FIVE
The room in which we sat-all picture windows and spare, plain wooden furniture-was steadily darkening as dusk approached. Gradually our eyes became used to the darkness. Sinclair did not get up to switch on lights; neither did we. Instead, we sat, transfixed, watching his shadowed form, listening.
“One of the first things I did after moving into the director’s office, Ben, was to order up from the archives the sealed transcript of your court-martial fifteen years ago. I’d always had my suspicions about it, and even if you wanted to put the whole thing behind you and never hear another word about it, I wanted to know the truth of what happened that day.
“Had this been the bad old days, the matter would have died there. But the Soviet Union had dissolved, and former Soviet agents were suddenly accessible to us. The trial transcript listed the true identity of the fellow who’d tried to defect-Berzin-and through a complicated channel I won’t go into, I managed to contact him.
“Somehow, his own side had learned that he had tried to defect. I assume Toby had informed them. So Berzin was imprisoned-fortunately, they pretty much stopped shooting their own people when Khrushchev came to power-and later released, sent to live in some one-horse town about seventy-five miles north of Moscow.
“Well, the new, post-Soviet government had no interest in him. Therefore, I was able to strike a deal with the guy. I arranged safe passage for him and his wife. In exchange, he gave me the file he’d been trying to sell in Paris-proving that Toby was, or rather, had been, a Soviet asset code-named MAGPIE.”
Molly interrupted, “But what does that mean, a Soviet ‘asset’?”
“MAGPIE was no ideological sympathizer of Communism,” Sinclair explained. “That sort of thing went out in 1956, if not before. Apparently Toby had been caught by a sharp-eyed KGB type embezzling Agency funds. He was given an ultimatum: Either you cooperate with us, or we tell Langley what we know, and face the consequences. Toby chose to cooperate.
“Anyway, this Berzin fellow told me he had a tape of his meeting with you and Toby, and he played it for me. It confirmed everything. You’d been set up. I allowed Berzin to keep the original of the tape-I made a copy-if he would give it directly to you when the time came, when you asked for it.
“I checked, and learned that Toby was not in a sensitive position any longer. He was in charge of certain outside projects that seemed marginal to me-extrasensory perception and the like-and stood no chance of ever coming to fruition.”
“Why didn’t you arrest him?” I asked.
“It would have been a mistake,” Sinclair said, “to arrest him until I had the others. I couldn’t risk alerting them.”
“But if Toby was one of the conspirators,” Molly asked me, “why was he willing to be in such physical proximity to you in Tuscany?”
“Because he knew I was way too drugged to do anything,” I explained.
“What are you talking about?” Sinclair said.
Here Molly turned and gave me a significant glance. I turned away: what was the point of telling him, even if he did believe us?
I said: “Your letter explained about the gold, about how you helped Orlov get it out. Apparently you wrote that letter right after you met with him in Zurich. What happened after that?”
“I knew the appearance of all that gold in Zurich would set off all kinds of alarms,” he said, “but I had no idea what that would mean. I sent Sheila over to meet with Orlov, to conduct a second round of negotiations, make final arrangements. Hours after she returned from Zurich, walking near her apartment in Georgetown, she was killed.
“I was heartbroken and terrified. I knew I had gotten in over my head. And I was sure I’d be next. I was witnessing a war over this gold, probably being waged by the Wise Men. I barely could think-I was in a state of shock, grieving for Sheila.
Although I could barely see Hal’s face, I could see from his silhouette that his face was drawn, though whether from deep concentration or great tension, I couldn’t tell. I focused my mind, trying to pick up any thoughts I could, but there was nothing; he wasn’t close enough.
“And then they came after me. It was a matter of hours after Sheila’s death-two men broke into my house. I was keeping a gun by my bed, naturally, and I killed one of the attackers. The other one-well, it was a standoff. But obviously he didn’t want simply to knock me off; he had more elaborate plans. It had to look like an accident. So he was constrained somewhat.”
“You suborned him,” I said.
Molly said, “What?”
“Correct,” Hal replied. “I suborned him. I struck a deal with him. After all, the head of the CIA has his resources, does he not? In essence, I turned him, exactly as I had been taught to do in my tradecraft-training days. I have my discretionary budgets. I could pay him handsomely-and more important, I could provide him with protection.
“I learned from him that Truslow had sent him to kill me, as he had had Sheila killed. And the gold would be out of my hands, out of American and Russian government hands-and into the hands of the Wise Men. Truslow had already begun his preparations to set me up, having false photos made that showed me in the Cayman Islands, dummied-up computer travel records, and whatnot. He was going to have me killed and then have me take the fall for the missing money.
“I knew then that Truslow was rotten. That he was one of the Wise Men. That he wouldn’t stop until he had gained full possession of the gold. And that I would have to disappear.
“So, I had a photograph created-one that showed me quite convincingly dead. It was all the evidence he needed to take to Truslow to collect his half-million dollars. And once I had ‘died’-once my lookalike had burned in the car crash-he was safe. For him it was a great deal. As it was for me.”
“Where is he?” Molly asked.
“Somewhere in South America, I believe. Probably Ecuador.”
And for the first time, I heard one of Hal’s thoughts, clear as a belclass="underline" I had him killed.
By now the pieces had begun to fall into place, and I interrupted Sinclair’s tale.