Coming from Holloway, that was praise indeed. FACE agents secretly thought they were the best, and secretly Holloway thought so, too. He had made quite sure of it.
They came from everywhere; Brook’s background was fairly typical.
His mother had been Swiss; his father, a foreign service officer at State, had married her and brought her to the United States. Peter Brook had been raised in a middle-sized, middle-class town. Outwardly he was the median young American at the outset of his career. But he had grown up speaking French and German as well as English, and with his home training in languages he had acquired Spanish and Italian, and even some Russian, at school. The Army had immediately placed him in intelligence. Then the CIA had recruited him, and there he had received his training and early experience in espionage. FACE pried him loose from the CIA in one of Holloway’s periodic raids on the personnel of other security organizations, who would grumble and curse in vain. FACE — Holloway — had friends in astonishing places.
Brook could understand why the official intelligence agencies looked on FACE with disapproval. FACE came in handy for the jobs they were not permitted to touch; they were professionally jealous of the freedom they believed it enjoyed as a non-governmental agency.
FACE was largely financed by foundations and corporations. On all the other floors of the building it carried out legitimate activities designed to promote international cultural exchanges and so spread about the world the more salubrious aspects of the American scene. It was a nice, gentlemanly, even humane way of fighting the Russians and the Chinese. But that was its cover. Its real purpose was the dirty fight, and the in-group of business and government leaders formed the Special Research Section of FACE, with Holloway as its director, for precisely this purpose.
Brook glanced through the folder. “Krylov is in Tokyo. Why do I take a plane to Albuquerque?”
“Because Benny Lopez will join you there,” Holloway said.
“Good enough.” Benny Lopez was a gem.
“And because Lopez will take you to see General Levashev. What do you know about Levashev?”
“Only what every Joe Blow in the trade knows. What was it the Undersecretary said? When Levashev defected it was like getting one of their rockets.”
“The Undersecretary,” Holloway said, “talks too much. Levashev is hidden away in New Mexico. No one else — but no one — except a few top-security guards knows where he is. The place has a hundred defenses, none of them visible. It would be as easy for an assassin to get to him as to the ready room at SAC.”
“But what has General Levashev to do with this Krylov business?”
“For one thing, Levashev knows Krylov, and he can fill you in on details about him; the better informed you are about this man the better prepared you’ll be to bring him over. More important, when you do bring Krylov over—” Brook noted absently that Holloway did not say “if” “—we want a confrontation. Levashev’s been out of the center of things in Moscow for over a year, and with what Krylov can tell him in bringing him up to date Levashev can put a lot of twos together for us. Need anything else?”
Brook shook his head.
Holloway immediately turned back to the pile of paper work on his desk.
Chapter 3
The ends of the wooden viga beams protruded from the thick walls like thumbs; the geometry of Navajo blankets was worked into the décor. It made the Albuquerque airport unique. Brook always enjoyed landing there.
At a travelers’ booth he worriedly asked where hotels and courts were listed. The girl in the booth had a skin like coffee, but there was no trace of Indian in her neat suit and horn glasses; she looked out of place. She flashed the automatic smile of service girls everywhere.
“I’m looking for a court not far from the university,” Brook said. “I’ll be doing some research for a few days.” He made his explanation sound necessary. He had thrown it in as part of his cover, a precaution against the farout possibility that he was being tailed. It was Standard Operating Procedure; wherever you went you carried a cover, and you uncovered it in a manner appropriate to what you were pretending to be whenever you got the chance, although not in an obvious way.
The girl produced her list. Brook chose the motor court he had had in mind all along. He thanked her bashfully, retrieved his luggage, and hailed a taxi.
In his motel room he went through the routine motions of refreshing himself. It was unnecessary; the jet trip had been clean and untiring. But you never knew. Researchers in the common view were absent-minded, fussy, obsessive personalities; their habits were usually ritual. So much for the probably nonexistent tail. Brook sat down in the plastic overstuffed chair, lit a cigarillo, and waited for the knock on his door.
He wondered why he had been upset by last night. He had been summoned to Holloway’s desk before in the midst of a passage at arms and legs, and it had never produced more than a momentary annoyance and regret. It was one of the minor drawbacks of his profession. He decided that what had bugged him was the summons coming so close to the beckoning carrot. Megan was a tasty one; it was the ones you never quite got around to who stuck in a man’s mind. Oh, well, she’d still be there when he got back from Japan.
Then suddenly Brook decided that it hadn’t been interrupted sex at all. It was Holloway. What had it been about Holloway? He had seemed his usual inhuman self, a man who had long since stopped asking why to concentrate on the hows. And yet Brook could not get over the feeling that there was something about this run that... he could not quite put the feeling into a word. Whatever it stemmed from, Holloway had given no hint of it. But like all good agents Brook had developed a highly sophisticated sense for wrongness — the thing that made a man turn around at the approach of danger when there was no physical reason to do so.
Brook glanced at the television set on the other side of the room and half decided to turn it on. Introspection in an agent could be lethal... then why had he chosen to be one? He almost laughed. He had always been a parodox — an inner-directed, outgoing man. He could not deny to himself that, in spite of its disciplines and restraints, he enjoyed his work. He had the talents for it, the linguistic skills, the reflexes, the ability to blend with the wallpaper. He liked the travel part of the job, the assortment of people it gave him the opportunity to meet and observe — his major at college, in fact, had been cultural anthropology, and if his life had worked out differently he might at this moment be jotting down notes on significant tribal rites on some Pacific island. Instead, he was in a profession where deceit was the way of life and moral values were ignored. He smiled, thinking about it. Pete Brook, the nondescript guy who sat here in an inexpensive suit and who, without makeup or change of costume, could pass for anything from a truck driver to a college professor, outwardly the mildest and most predictable of conformists, had in the regular course of his employment broken every law on the books, including murder. Maybe that was the nitty-gritty. He was able to do all the forbidden things that every man darkly wanted to do and, instead of being punished for them, was paid.
He heard the signal knock he had been waiting for and got up to let Benny in.
Benigno Lopez was far from inconspicuous, although he was dressed as inconspicuously as Brook. Lopez had the high chest and short legs of the Aztec ancestor who had, willingly or not, mixed her blood with the blood of some conquistadore; his cheekbones were broad and his eyelids had the epicanthic fold. He looked more like an Indio than the peónes of his native Mexico. He was nearly Brook’s age, but already the deposits of the years were fleshing out his jowls. He could have been a Mexico City businessman except for his mashed nose. He was a good man in a fight, one of the best.