Powers had allowed himself in the years past, rising in the ranks of the agency to deputy director of intelligence before his short-lived retirement, to play the game according to the rules: to honor the status quo. Push a little in Turkey, or Iran or Lebanon, but give a little in Afghanistan, in Poland, and in the Caribbean Basin. But it was over. The honeymoon had ended. The opening shots had been fired in a war that could no longer be denied.
Kennedy had held his Cuban missile crisis. Here now was another crisis. Much subtler, perhaps, but none the less deadly for its obscurity.
Powers turned away from the window. In appearance as well as in intellect, he was reminiscent of William F. Buckley, Jr., with perhaps a bit of William Colby thrown in. He listened now to the ghosts of ten thousand decisions made from this office and wondered if, indeed, he was the right man for the job.
“Baranov,” Powers said softly, no longer able to hold the memory in check. They had done battle before, and it was said he was back in Mexico City. Back at the helm of CESTA. They said he was just an agent runner. A network man, not another Andropov, but Powers knew differently.
He looked again at the window, but this time he focused on his own reflection in the glass. He looked haggard. Worn-out. His daughter Sissy told him he wasn’t eating his Wheaties. But Katy Moss, his secretary, and Lawrence Danielle both knew the trouble … or thought they did. When you’re frightened, push ahead; it’s the only cure. Whoever had said that never sat behind this desk, Powers decided. And through the entire season he would stop at odd moments to think back to this very evening. To the beginning.
2
A frigid winter had given way to a nasty spring in Lausanne, Switzerland. Kirk Collough McGarvey, an expatriate American in his early forties, lay awake in bed on an early April morning, morosely listening to the hiss of the rain against the windows and the breakfast sounds of Marta Fredricks in the kitchen. Tall, husky, he was the archetypical form of the disgruntled American living overseas: his hair was too long; he wore an unkempt beard; and his clothes always seemed a bit too shabby, ill-fitting, and hastily chosen. In the several years he had lived here he had taken on the manner of a somewhat bemused scholar whose concentration on his studies left little time for the more mundane day-to-day routines of modern life. In his role, he would have fit in well in the intellectual community of any university or exclusive English boarding school for gifted scholars. But it was nothing more than a role, a protective barrier against a world he figured had gone quite mad; a role that was beginning to wear quite thin, however.
Last night he had been cruel again. He and Marta had argued bitterly, and he had said some things he wished he hadn’t, no matter their truth. She had stood her ground and taken every bit of it, which had increased his blind rage.
“Fight back, for Christ’s sake,” he bellowed. “Don’t stand there taking the bullshit.” God, how he despised meek compliance. Namby-pamby subservience. Downtrodden acceptance of whatever any asshole wished to dish out.
Yesterday had been a bitch of a day. It had begun at the bookstore when a haughty Swiss customer pretended that she could not understand his French. He had turned her over to his partner, Dortmund Fuelm, whose French was nearly nonexistent. The woman, confronted with a gentleman of her own nationality, suddenly blossomed like a wilted rose having been given a fresh spray of cool water. The post had come around noon and included a longish, nasty letter from his ex-wife’s lawyer in Washington, D.C., saying that it was once again time for him to increase the amount of his alimony and child-support payments. If need be, the attorney hinted, the matter could be brought into the Swiss courts, which probably would not be effective in jarring loose money, but it would certainly be an embarrassment to him. The between-the-lines message was that the attorney was sleeping with Kathleen and was taking McGarvey’s intransigence personally. He was probably a Washington up-and-comer who deserved Kathleen, though McGarvey wondered if the poor sod understood that he was being used by a woman who was probably the most self-centered bitch in a town devoted to self-service. That very afternoon he had whipped off a particularly scathing letter, but better sense stayed him from posting it until he could calm himself down. He walked over to the Lausanne Palace Hotel for a late lunch on the terrace with its magnificent view. But his peace did not last. Dortmund’s beautiful though bratty twenty-eight-year-old daughter, Liese, had followed him and now barged right up to his table.
“Aren’t you going to ask me to join you? Buy me some lunch?” she said. She worked for an engineering firm nearby. “Or wouldn’t Marta approve?”
Instead of the leisurely filet of sole and half bottle of pouilly-fuissé he had contemplated, the two hours seemed to drag interminably with the egocentric kid prattling on about how he should dump Marta and move in with her.
“Daddy adores you, of course, but if you didn’t want him to know, it could be our little secret.”
“No secrets.”
“Fine,” she said, brightening even more. “Then we’ll tell him that …”
“We’ll tell him nothing, Liese, because nothing will happen.”
Finally managing to disentangle himself by three o’clock, he walked up to the library to continue the research he had begun six weeks ago on Voltaire, who had lived and worked for a time in Lausanne. But he found that his concentration had been shot to hell; reading a rare edition (with notes in the margin) of Candide, his mind bounced back and forth between Kathleen, Liese Füelm, and Marta, so he gave it up and was back home by four-thirty.
“Bad day?” Marta asked innocently when he came in. She was ten years younger than he but looked even younger than that, and had a glow about her. She was tall, not unattractive, with long dark hair, wide eyes, and sensitive lips. She carried herself with an athletic grace. In the winter she skied, in the summer she swam, and year-round she jogged five miles each morning, rain or shine, after which they would have breakfast and then often make love.
“Kathleen has sent a lawyer after me, and Liese is up to her old tricks again,” he said, throwing off his coat, and opening a beer.
Marta smiled. She was fixing their dinner. “There’s nothing your ex can do to you in Switzerland. As far as concerns Liese, why don’t you jump her bones. She’ll back off fast enough. She’s only flirting, you know.”
“Fucking. That’s your goddamned answer for everything, isn’t it?” McGarvey snapped. “Christ on a cross!”
She looked up, her eyes bright. “I’m sorry, Kirk …”
“Yes, you are.”
She had started to cry then, which really set him off, so he had proceeded to take her apart, piece by piece, bit by bit, attacking her eating habits, her physical fitness insanity (as he called it), her sense of clothing style or lack of it, her constant prattling about totally inconsequential shit, and her sex-solves-everything juvenile attitude. And she stood and took every bit of it. Had it been him on the receiving end of such a tirade, he would have lashed out. She had not, which made him even angrier.
It was his turn to be sorry this morning, though he knew it didn’t really matter. He suspected he could say or do almost anything to her, and she would remain. Out of love, or loyalty, or for some other, darker reason?
“You awake in there?” she called from the kitchen.