“The only time I ever came out on a wet operation was that one night when that idiot Pashin showed up without a driver’s license. You needed a driver’s license to buy that much ammonium nitrate, even in Virginia! That idiot. GRU begged the committee for help, and I had the best identity running, so I drove down to Leesburg and bought it. I met him in the restaurant to tell him where it was secured. He was a brilliant operator, but in little practical things like that he was stupid.”
“And you were unlucky. Trig the human camera had followed him.”
“I always worried about that. That was my one moment of vulnerability. But now, you’ve taken care of that for me.”
“Who are you?” said Bob. “You have to tell me that.”
“I don’t have to tell you anything. I can kill you and I’m forever secure.”
“In seventy-one, you were the source of deployment intelligence, weren’t you?”
“You bet I was,” said Bonson. “I invented chaos. It was the best professional penetration in history, the way I orchestrated it.”
“You killed the little girl on the bridge, right? Amy Rosenzweig, seventeen. I looked it up. I saw how much trouble it caused.”
“Oh, Swagger, goddamn, you are smart. We picked her up, shot her up and dropped her into the crowd. It was a massive dose of LSD. She never knew what hit her. My friend Bill here”—he indicated a man on his team—“did it. She freaked and went over. God, what a stink it caused; it almost wrecked the credibility of the U.S. government in that one thing. The pressure it caused.”
“Those are your boys, aren’t they, your security team? Which of ’em killed poor Peter Farris?”
The five men in suits arrayed around Bonson glowered at him. They had hard eyes, glittering with pure aggression, and taut, professional faces. Their pistols were in their hands.
“That was Nick.”
“Who got the picture of Donny and my wife?”
“That was Michael. You’d like them, Swagger. They’re all ex-NCOs in the Black Sea Marines and SPETSNAZ. They’ve been with me for a long time.”
“Who blew the building in Wisconsin?”
“That was a team job.”
“And when you were running the mission against Solaratov, you were really running it against PAMYAT. Against Pashin, who was now a nationalist, and if he wins the presidency it sets you guys back even farther. You always knew Pashin was Fitzpatrick, but you had to find a way to get that information to us without compromising your position. You turned everything inside out, so that in the end, the American government was working in the interests of the communist party. The Cold War never ended for you, right?”
“It never will. History runs in cycles. We’re in retreat now, largely underground. But we’ve been underground before. We started underground. We have to eliminate our enemies in Russia. First Russia, then the world, as the great Stalin understood. We’ll be back. This great, rich, fat country of yours is about to explode at the seams; it’ll destroy itself and I’ll help it. I should get the directorship shortly. From there, politics. The very interesting part of my plan is just about to start happening.”
“Who are you?” boomed Bob.
Why was he talking so loud?
“I’ll tell you. But first, you satisfy me: when did you know?”
“I began to suspect at the meeting when the kid wanted to let Solaratov take out Julie and nab him on the way out. That was the smart move; even I knew that. But you said no, you couldn’t do that to me. Fuck you, that was never you. You could send anybody down. I knew that about you from what you done to Donny. So when you say you could never do that, I knew you was lying. You had to stop Solaratov. That was your first mission.”
“Smart,” said Bonson. “Smart, smart, smart.”
“It gets me thinking. In seventy-two, you guys must have been shitting because you let the most important witness to Pashin and Trig get away. You couldn’t track him because a good officer gave him liberty and then he was on his way back to Vietnam. He has to be killed, not only to protect Pashin, but to protect you. So … how do the goddamn Russians know where he is and what he’s doing in Vietnam? How can they target him? That’s a very tough piece of info to come by, and their whole plan turns on it. They had to have someone inside. Someone had to get into naval personnel and figure out where the boy was. Somebody had to target him. Solaratov was only the technician. You was the shooter.”
Bonson stared at him.
“Funny, how when you make the breakthrough, it all kind of swings into shape,” Bob said. “It all makes some kind of sense. Your last mistake: how fast the information got to Moscow, got to higher parties in PAMYAT, to destroy Pashin’s presidential thing. Man, that was fast work. You’re telling me the Agency is that fast? No way. Had to be some inside thing, someone who just had to make a phone call. Damn! And everybody keeps saying, ‘Ain’t it funny the communist party really benefits from all this?’ Yeah, the real joke is, through you, the communist party is running all this. Who are you?”
“You are smart,” said Bonson. “You just weren’t quick enough, were you?”
“Who are you?” repeated Bob.
“You’d never believe this, but I’m history. I’m the future. I’m mankind. I’m hope. I’m the messiah of what must be.”
He smiled again, a pure pilgrim of his own craziness.
“Not even Solaratov believed that shit,” said Bob.
“All right, I’ll tell you,” said Bonson. “And then I’ll kill you. This is a great privilege for you.”
“Who are you?”
“You’d know the original family name, or you could dig it up. It’s in some books. My parents were working-class Americans and fervent members of the American Communist Party. In 1938, the year I was born, they were asked to drop out and go underground for the committee. Of course they agreed. It was the greatest honor they’d ever been paid. So they renounced the party, turned on all their friends and spent the next fifteen years working as couriers, cut-outs, bag men for the atom bomb spies. They serviced the Rosenbergs, Alger Hiss, Klaus Fuchs, the whole brilliant thing we ran in this country. They were heroes. My father was a great man. He was greater than your father, Swagger. He was greater, braver, stronger, tougher, more resilient than your father. He was the best and my mother was a saint.”
Bonson’s eyes shown with tears as he recalled the beauty of his mother.
“You know the rest. NSA decrypts finally gave them away. My father hung himself in a holding tank on Rikers Island. My mother got me out, and then poisoned herself as the agents were coming up the stairs to arrest her. They were heroes of the Soviet Union! They gave it all to the revolution. Someone in the network got me out of the country, and by the following Tuesday I was in Moscow. I was fourteen years old and totally American, a Yankees and Giants fan, with an IQ of 160 and an absolute commitment to bringing down the system that murdered my parents. I was trained for six years. When I reinfiltrated I was already a major in the KGB. I’m now a three-star general. I have more decorations than you’ll ever dream about. I am a hero of the Soviet Union.”
“You’re a psychopath. And there ain’t no Soviet Union,” said Bob.
“Too bad you won’t be around to see how wrong you are.”
The two ancient enemies faced each other in silence.
Finally Bonson said, “All right. That’s enough. Kill him.”
The team raised their pistols. The suppressed 9mm bores looked at Bob. There was complete silence.
“Any last words?” asked Bonson. “Any message for the family?”
“Last words?” said Bob. “Yeah, three of ’em: front toward enemy.”
He turned his hand over to show them what it held and Bonson realized in an instant why he had been speaking so loudly. Because he was wearing earplugs. He held the M57 electrical firing device, the green plastic clapper with a wire running down to the painting, behind which stood on its silly little set of tripods an M18A1 antipersonnel mine, better known as a Claymore. One or two, the faster, may have tried to fire, but Bob’s reflexes were faster still as he triggered the demolition.