“I don’t like to use them. They’re expensive to replace. I can see well enough; that’s all that counts.”
“But what if you hit something?”
There was silence.
“Are you trying to tell me how to run my boat?”
Felker spoke to the back of the Italian’s head. “You could hit something in the dark.”
“I never hit anything I don’t intend to hit.”
For a moment, the remark made no impression on Felker; but he was trained, he had reacted quickly before.
He looked up.
The sullen man at the wheel had turned even as the boat surged over the swells to the Lido. He had a large black pistol in his hand.
The first shot struck Felker in the right shoulder and spun him half around, slamming him back into the red vinyl seats.
Silencer.
For a dazed moment, before the pain began, Felker did not even know he had been shot.
In the next moment, he leaped over the side and fell into the turgid waters of the Adriatic.
The water closed over his head and he held his breath as he sank, saving his strength for the struggle back to the surface. In the inky depth, his shoes felt like weights on his feet. He allowed himself a moment to sink farther while pushing them off with first his heel and then his bare toes. Then he kicked upward and broke the surface after an agonizing moment.
He saw nothing.
Then he heard the purr of the motorboat in the darkness. The young man was looking for him.
Carefully, he treaded water; he felt the throbbing pain of his shoulder begin to overwhelm him. He would not accept the pain; he had been given pain before. He closed his eyes a moment and felt the salt water scratching at the lids. He endured the pain, and when the wave of hurt passed, he felt nausea rise in him. The water was cold and his belly felt rigid; the cold, after a moment, numbed the pain. His right arm was growing stiffer by the minute in the still-icy spring waters.
Felker did not panic; he turned slowly in the water and looked for bearings. It appeared that the Piazza San Marco and the Lido were about the same distance from him, each about a mile. The young man in the boat had chosen the spot carefully.
Suddenly, he saw a flash of white in the water.
The boat had turned, was bearing down on him, this time with the running lights on and a spotlight probing at the black swells.
Again, he let his body sink in the water. The clothing dragged him down, and he unfastened his belt while submerged and pushed out of the wet, clinging material of his trousers. His pistol sank beneath him into the icy blackness. The water pressed at his chest and face, but he swam carefully beneath the surface for as long as he could.
He saw the white underbelly of the boat pass over him. He couldn’t stand it anymore. He inhaled, and the water rushed into his nose and lung and mouth; frantically, he broke the surface, coughing for air. The panic had seized him that time; it was the panic he had felt when the British agents had tortured him in the safe house in Germany.
His right arm was completely stiff, detached now in mind, merely a memory of an arm. It was difficult to tread the swells in the wake of the white boat. The waters lifted him, the waves slapped him. The sea had roughened. Again he swallowed water and shivered. The coldness pressed from without and within.
He listened for the white boat, but there was only silence now. Slowly, with pain, he began to swim awkwardly with one good arm for the lights of San Marco piazza; maybe it wasn’t a mile, as it seemed; distances deceived in the water.
He struggled for ten minutes, but the lights of the island of Venice seemed no closer. The water seemed to drag at him, plucking at the bared skin of his legs, numbing his feet, numbing his hands reaching out in the darkness.
And then he saw it.
Bearing down from the Lido was the great, gray shape of a bulky vaporetto, its lights blazing. Felker began to wave frantically with his good arm, but each time he lifted his hand, he sank a little beneath the surface. He shouted to the boat.
And then the large, slow-moving water bus changed direction slightly.
They saw him! Felker wanted to laugh. They were coming for him.
Survive, survive!
Survived Malta and the ambush, survived the British torture, survived in Lakenheath; again and again, and now he would survive this, get back to his rooms, take a warm bath and get into dry clothing and take the midnight train to the mainland and go to Bremen, find his friends, find what went wrong—
The boat struck him and churned over his body and slid on; the remains were mangled in the screws at the back of the old craft propelling it on.
8
Anyone who had followed Hanley this morning — and who knew his habits — would have been surprised.
Each day, at precisely eleven forty-five A.M., he would leave his cold, bare office hidden in the rocklike edifice of the Department of Agriculture building on Fourteenth Street and walk two blocks to the little bar and grill that still survived the encroachment of a more fashionable Washington around it. Each day, he would order exactly the same lunch — one cheeseburger and one dry martini straight up — and he would sit in the same booth in the back of the narrow diner and leave the same tip at the conclusion of the meal.
But this morning, though he left at the usual time and started up the same street, he turned at K Street and walked two blocks west to Sixteenth, turned again, walked across the street against the lights, and entered a large office complex on L Street, just two blocks from the Washington Post building.
The telephone instructions had been urgent, he knew, but the calm voice had delivered the time and place of the meeting and even the way to walk there in exact tones. Hanley was to leave at the usual time, the voice had instructed. But how in hell did they know about the usual time, Hanley had thought, and then dismissed it. Of course they would have known those things.
It was not necessary to tell Hanley to be alone.
He had met the other man once before, during the Gdansk matter. This was much the same thing. Perhaps it was worse.
Hanley walked through the narrow lobby of the building to the door marked Stairs, which led down a concrete well to the underground garage. There were two layers in the garage, according to the man who had telephoned him that morning at home. The man he would meet would be waiting on the lower of the two subbasement floors.
Hanley’s steps echoed hollowly on the stairs as he descended slowly.
He had not brought a pistol, though he was authorized to carry one and had even been issued a standard .357 Colt Python revolver. He did not like pistols because he did not use them well. Besides, he could not believe there was any real danger; he was not a field agent; he was in Washington.
The message from Rome had started the business. He had received it thirty-two hours before.
Felker. He had disappeared before the final contact in Venice.
Worse, four hours later, the agent called Cacciato had been found garroted in the bottom of an empty Coca-Cola delivery boat floating free in the turgid waters of a back canal in the old city. It had been a picturesque murder, and photographs of the dead agent had been splashed across the front pages of the Italian newspapers. An anonymous communication sent to Reuters in Rome had correctly identified Cacciato as an intelligence agent of the United States and of R Section; but the part-time correspondent for Reuters who had checked with the American embassy had been informed that R Section did not operate in Italy. So the Reuters man guessed he was a CIA agent.
Hanley had received a facsimile of the front page of the Milan paper, Corriere della Sera. Cacciato, in his familiar bow tie, had appeared to be sleeping in the picture. There was scarcely a mark visible, the garroting wire had been so fine. A professional sort of job.