“But not without a checkbook,” Baumann said.
“Right,” Dyson said. A housekeeper appeared with a tray of coffee and smoked salmon sandwiches, served them, and noiselessly vanished. “I mean, let’s face it,” Dyson went on, “I’m not exactly going to just show up at Sotheby’s Important Old Masters sale, am I? Not if I want to stay out of Leavenworth or wherever the hell it is the U.S. government wants to stash me. Anyway, stolen art’s a bargain-stuff goes for maybe seven or ten percent of the crazy prices they hold you up for at Wildenstein or Thaw or Christie’s-”
“I assume you didn’t break me out of Pollsmoor to talk about art, Mr. Dyson,” Baumann interrupted. “You had a ‘business proposition.’”
Dyson regarded Baumann for a long moment over his reading glasses, his eyes steely. Then his face relaxed into a smile. “I like a fellow who’s all business,” he said to his assistant.
Dyson’s cellular phone trilled on the table in front of him. He picked it up, flipped it open, and barked: “Yes?… Good God, what time is it there?… Does Mr. Lin ever sleep?… All right.” He pushed a button to sever the connection. Looking directly at Baumann, he went on: “The Chinese are going to take over Asia, believe you me.” He shook his head. “So they say you’re the best in the world.”
Baumann nodded curtly. “So I’ve been told. But if I were really so good, I wouldn’t have spent the last six years in jail, would I?”
“Too modest,” Dyson said. “My sources tell me BOSS screwed up. Not you.”
Baumann shrugged but did not reply.
“You were instructed to take out a member of the Mossad’s assassination unit, the kidon. Someone who was getting under Pretoria’s skin. Only it turned out the guy you whacked was some big-deal case officer-what’s the term, a katsa? Do I have this right?”
“More or less.”
“And then there’s lots of diplomatic fallout between Tel Aviv and Pretoria. Which sort of threatened to screw up Pretoria’s A-bomb program, which relied on Israel’s cooperation. So you get locked away. Life sentence. Spare them any embarrassment. Right?”
“Roughly.” Dyson had the basic idea right, and Baumann was uninterested in correcting the details. The salient fact was that this enigmatic billionaire had gone to great trouble to extract Baumann from prison, and men like this did not do such things out of humanitarian impulses.
About two months earlier, Baumann had been visited in his cell one afternoon by a priest, who, after a few moments of aimless chatter about Baumann’s religious faith, had leaned close and whispered to the prisoner that a “friend” from the outside wanted to aid his escape. The patron, a man of great resources, would be in touch soon through confederates. Baumann would be reassigned to the auto-repair shop at once.
Baumann had listened without comment.
A few days later, he had been transferred to auto repairs. A young fellow from the prison commandant’s office came by a month or so after that, ostensibly to discuss a problem with his car’s ignition system, but really to let him know that things were now in place.
“Now then,” Dyson said, opening a folder that Martin Lomax had slid before him. “I have a few questions for you.”
Baumann merely raised his eyebrows.
“Call it a job interview,” Dyson said. “What’s your real name, Mr. Baumann?”
Baumann looked at Dyson blankly. “Whatever you’d like it to be. It’s been so long I really don’t remember.”
Lomax whispered something to Dyson, who nodded and went on: “Let’s see. Born in the western Transvaal. Only son of tobacco farmers. Boers. Members of the Nationalist Party.”
“My parents were poorly educated and hardly political,” Baumann interrupted.
“You left the University of Pretoria. Recruited there to BOSS-what’s it called now, the Department of National Security or something, the DNS?”
“It’s been renamed again,” Lomax said. “Now it’s the National Intelligence Service.”
“Who the hell can keep track of this shit?” Dyson muttered. He went on, almost to himself: “Trained at the Farm as an assassin and a munitions expert. Top marks at the academy and in the field. Service loaned you out to various friendly spook services.” He glanced at the sheaf of notes. “Says here you’re single-handedly responsible for some fifteen documented terrorist incidents and probably a good many more undocumented ones around the world. Your cryptonym within the service was Zero, meaning you were top dog or something.”
Baumann said nothing. There was a tentative knock on the library door, to which Dyson abruptly shouted: “Come!” A tall, thin man in his late forties entered, bearing a sheet of paper. His face was sallow and concave. He handed the paper to Lomax and scurried from the room. Lomax scanned the paper, then handed it over to Dyson, murmuring: “St. Petersburg.” Dyson glanced at it and scrunched it into a ball, which he tossed toward a burgundy leather trash can, missing it by a few feet.
“In 1986, you were hired, on a freelance basis, by Muammar Qaddafi to bomb a discotheque in West Berlin. Bomb went off on April 5. Killed three American soldiers.”
“I’m sure whoever did it,” Baumann said, “had been assured by the Libyans that no American military would be present that night. Always better to do one’s own intelligence work.”
“If I wanted to hire an assassin, a mercenary, a soldier of fortune, they’d be lining up out the door all the way to Paris, you know,” Dyson said. “Guns for hire are cheap and plentiful. You fellows, on the other hand-rare as hen’s teeth. You must have been quite in demand.”
“I was, yes.”
“Says your native language is Afrikaans. But you usually speak with a British accent.”
“A reasonable facsimile,” Baumann replied.
“But persuasive. How the hell old were you when you did Carrero Blanco?”
“Hmm?”
“Luis Carrero Blanco.”
“I’m afraid I don’t recognize the name.”
“The hell you talking about? Luis Carrero Blanco, the president of Spain under Franco. Blown up in 1972. The Basques claimed credit, but they’d really hired some mysterious outsider. A professional assassin who got a quarter of a million dollars American for pulling it off. That wasn’t you?”
Baumann shrugged. “I wish it had been.”
The old man furrowed his brow and shifted in his wheelchair. He looked puzzlingly at Lomax, then back at Baumann. “If you’re trying to conceal something from me, I’d advise you to-”
“Now I’ve got a few questions for you,” Baumann interrupted, raising his voice ever so slightly.
Annoyance flashed in Dyson’s gray eyes. He scowled.
“How many people were involved in the operation to extract me from Pollsmoor?”
“That’s my business,” Dyson replied curtly.
“I’m afraid not. It directly concerns me and my welfare from now on.”
Dyson paused for a moment and then relented. He turned to Lomax, who said: “Two.”
“In all? Including the phony priest and the chap in the prison commandant’s office?”
“Just those two,” Lomax repeated with irritation. He inclined his head toward his boss for an instant, saw Dyson nod, and said quietly: “They’re both dead.”
“Excellent,” Baumann said. “All loose ends tied?”
“Professionally,” Lomax said.
“Let’s just hope,” Baumann said, “that whoever did the wet work was more professional than whoever’s in charge of security here at whatever this is called… Arcadia.”
Lomax compressed his lips into a thin line. His eyes flashed with anger, his face reddened.
“Look, goddammit,” Dyson said, his voice choked with fury. “You should be eternally grateful-you should damn well kiss the ground I wheel on for what I did to break you out of that hellhole.”
At this, Baumann rose slowly to his feet. He smiled wanly and turned to leave. “I do appreciate your assistance, Mr. Dyson,” he said, “but I didn’t ask for it. If I’m not satisfied that you have taken the necessary basic precautions to ensure that I am not traced, then I must refuse to have anything more to do with you.”