Legends Read online

  “The plot thickens!”

  “We knew the CIA didn’t want me to find Samat—my old boss told me as much when she invited me down to the Chinese restaurant.” Martin thought about the exploding honey that had killed Minh and the two bullets that a sniper had shot at him in Hebron. He led Stella to one of the rows of plastic seats out of earshot of other passengers. “How did things go with your sister after I left?”

  “She tried to talk me into staying in Israel. What would I do here?”

  Martin said, “Israel is also a pressure cooker—you could go around telling anti-Israeli jokes for a living.”

  “Very funny. As a matter of fact I know a good one. The rabbi told it to me. Question: What is anti-Semitism? Answer: Hating Jews more than necessary.”

  “That’s not funny,” Martin said.

  “What’s funny about it,” Stella insisted angrily, “is that it’s not funny. I could kick myself for trying to make someone without a sense of humor laugh.”

  “My pal Dante had a sense of humor,” Martin said, a faraway look in his eyes. “He left it in a room over a bar in Beirut.”

  Stella decided to change the subject. “Samat’s uncle sounds like a real Russian mobster.”

  “I thought he could give me an idea where to start looking for Samat. He said if he knew where to look he wouldn’t need me.”

  “Do you think Samat really ran off with all that money? What will his uncle do if he catches up with him?”

  A voice over the public address system announced that the flight to London was about to start boarding. Martin climbed to his feet. “What will he do to him? I suppose he’ll tickle him to death.”

  Stella said, “You’re stepping out of character and telling a joke.” Squinting, she studied Martin’s face. “Okay, you’re not telling a joke.” Around them passengers were collecting their hand luggage and starting to head toward the stairs leading to the boarding gate. “I wish I were going with you. I’m getting used to your sense of humor.”

  “I thought you said I didn’t have one.”

  “That’s the part I’m getting used to.” She stood and grazed his elbow with the back of her hand. “I hope against hope you’ll call me from London.”

  His eyes took in the triangle of pale skin on her chest. “I admire your ability to hope against hope.”

  She toyed nervously with the first button on her shirt that was buttoned. “Maybe I can infect you.”

  “Not likely. I’ve been inoculated.”

  “Inoculations wear off.” She stood on her toes and kissed him lightly on the lips. “Bye for now, Martin Odum.”

  “Uh-huh. Bye.”

  Crystal Quest was in wrathful dudgeon. “There’s only one thing more revolting than having to target one of your own,” she declared to the wallahs scattered around her sanctum, “and that’s bungling the hit. Where do we hire marksmen these days, will somebody kindly enlighten me. Coney Island popgun concessions where you win a plastic doll if you topple the clown into the pan filled with dish water? Oh my God, it’s pathetic. Pa-the-tic.”

  “We should have given the assignment to Lincoln Dittmann,” one of the newer wallahs suggested. “I understand he’s a crackerjack shot—”

  Quest, her head angled, her eyes unblinking, gazed at the speaker as if he just might have come up with the solution to their problem. “Where did you pick up that nugget of information?” she inquired in a husky whisper, humoring the wallah before decapitating him.

  The young man sensed that he had ventured onto quicksand. “I was reading into the Central Registry 201 files to get a handle on our assets in the field …” His voice faltered. He looked around for a buoy but no one seemed interested in throwing him one.

  Quest’s mouth sagged open as her skull bobbed up and down in wonderment. “Lincoln Dittmann! Now there’s an idea whose time has come. Ha! Will somebody put the neophyte here out of his misery.”

  Quest’s chief of staff, a thick skinned timeserver who had weathered his share of storms in the DDO’s seventh floor bailiwick, said very evenly, “Dittmann and Odum are one and the same individual, Frank. You would have seen that they were cross-referenced in the 201 files if you’d read the fine print on the first page.”

  “That’s strike one,” Quest informed Frank. “If you read the fine print on your employment contract, you’ll see that we operate by the three-strikes-and-you’re-out rule in the DDO.” She swiveled three hundred and sixty degrees in her chair as if she were winding herself up. “Okay. I’ll recapitulate,” she said, stifling her irritation. “We made an honest effort to talk Martin Odum out of walking back the cat on Samat Ugor-Zhilov. Martin’s a consenting adult. He’s doing what he has to do. And we’re going to do what we have to do to make sure he never catches up to the Samat in question. This is a priority matter, which means it gets our full and undivided attention. Where did Martin Odum go when he left Israel? What leads is he following? Who is he planning to talk to? And what resources do we have on the ground—what resources can we throw into the theater of eventual operations—to make sure I get to wear my sackcloth and ashes before this thing blows up in our faces?”

  1997: MARTIN ODUM PLAYS INNOCENT

  LEANING OVER THE DEAD DOG, MARTIN SLIT OPEN ITS STOMACH with a safety razor, then reached in with the gloved hand to cut out the organs and create a stomach cavity. He motioned to one of the fedayeen students, who removed the frame from the hive and gingerly set it down on the road next to the dead dog. “Honey is very stable,” Martin said with a laugh. “Tell him it won’t blow up in his face until it’s detonated.” Using a spatula, he carefully scraped the beeswax from the honeycombs until he had accumulated a quantity the size of a tennis ball, then wired it to the tiny homemade plastic radio receiver and slipped the package into the stomach cavity. Using a thick needle and a length of butcher cord, he sewed up the opening. Rising to his feet, he stepped back to survey his handiwork.

  “Any questions?” he demanded.

  One of the fedayeen said something in Arabic and the Russian with the heavy gold ring on his pinky translated it into English. “He asks from how far away can we set off the charge?”

  “Depends on what equipment you’re using,” Martin said. “A cordless phone or a Walkman will work up to a half a mile away. One of those automatic pagers that doctors wear on their belts can set off a charge five, six miles away. A VHF scanner or cellular mobile phone is effective for ten or twelve miles as long as the weather is good and there is no frequency jamming.”

  Martin, trailed by his three students and the translator, set off up the slope and went to ground behind the rusty wreck of a U.N. jeep. They didn’t have long to wait. The Isra’ili patrol, led by a soldier scanning the dirt road with a magnetic mine detector, appeared around the bend. The soldier searching for mines passed his metal detector over the dog and, getting no reading, continued on. The officer behind him came abreast of the dog. Something must have caught his eye—the crude stitches on the stomach, probably—because he crouched next to the animal to have a closer look. Martin nodded at the fedayeen holding the automatic pager that had been rigged to transmit a signal to the plastic receiver inside the dog’s stomach. Below, a dull blast stirred up a fume of mustard-colored smoke. When it cleared, the Isra’ili officer was still crouching next to the dog but his head could be seen rolling slowly toward the shoulder of the road.

  “Comes as news to me that honey can explode,” the Russian whispered, his thick Slavic accent surfacing indolently from the depths of his throat.

  The sulfurous stench of the burnt beeswax reached Martin’s nostrils and he had trouble breathing. Gasping for air, he bolted upright in bed and blotted the cold sweat from his brow with a corner of the sheet. His heart was beating furiously; a migraine was pressing against the back of his eyeballs. For a terrible moment he didn’t know who he was or where he was. He solved the second problem first when he heard the hacking cough of the old man two rooms down the corridor of the boarding house and
knew where he wasn’t: southern Lebanon. When he figured out which legend he was inhabiting, his breathing gradually returned to normal.

  When his plane landed at Heathrow, four days before, Martin had breezed through passport control without a hitch. “Here on business or pleasure, is it?” the woman custom’s agent in the booth had asked. “With any luck, pleasure, in the form of licensed tabernacles and museums, and in that order,” he’d answered. The woman had flashed a jaded smile as she stamped him into the country. “If it’s pubs you’re looking for, you have come to the right corner of the world. Enjoy your stay in England.”

  Collecting his valise from the baggage carousel, Martin had started following the signs marked “Underground” when a portly young man with a peaches-and-cream complexion had materialized in front of him. “Mr. Odum, is it?” he’d asked.

  “How come you know my name?”

  The young man, his body wrapped in a belted trench coat a size too large for him, had ignored Martin’s question. “Could I trouble you to come with me, sir,” he had said.

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “I’m afraid you don’t.”

  “What are you, five or six?”

  “MI5, thank you, kindly. Six thinks you’re radioactive, wouldn’t touch you with a ten-foot pole.”

  Martin could see three other men in trench coats closing in on him as he limped behind the young man across the arrival hall and up a flight of steps to a balcony overlooking the hall. Peaches-and-cream stopped before an opaque glass door with the word “Perishables” stencilled on it. He rapped on the glass twice with his knuckles, opened the door and politely stepped aside. Inside, a middle-aged woman dressed in a man’s pinstriped suit and tie was busy calling up file folders on a computer terminal. Without looking up, she inclined her head toward an inner door with the words “Supervisor, Perishables” stencilled on the glass. In the inner office, Martin discovered a black man with a shaven head studying the baggage carousels below through the slats of a partly closed venetian blind. The black man swiveled around in his seat and sank back into it. “I’ll admit it, you don’t look like your average serial killer to me,” he said in a soft purr.

  “What does an average serial killer look like?”

  “Glassy stare as he avoids your eye, bitten finger nails, mouth drooping open, saliva drooling down the stubble of his chin. Bela Lugosi sort of role.”

  “Are you a cop or a movie critic?”

  Snickering at Martin’s question, the Supervisor, Perishables began reading from a yellowing index card. “Last trace we had on you, you were a bloke with two incarnations. In the first, you were Pippen, Dante, an Irishman who declined to help us with our inquiries after the IRA blew open a bus in central London. In the second, you were Dittmann, Lincoln, an American arms merchant peddling his wares to the highest bidder in the Triple Border area of Latin America.”

  Martin said, “Case of mistaken identity. You’re confusing me with the antiheroes of B films.”

  “Don’t think we are,” the Supervisor, Perishables allowed. He arched his brows and took a long look at Martin, who was shifting his weight from one foot to the other. “If we had chairs, I’d invite you to rest your arse on one of them. Sorry ‘bout that.”

  “Been sitting from Tel Aviv to here,” Martin said. “Glad to stretch my legs.”

  “Yes, well, in Israel you were passing yourself off as Martin Odum, a ruck of a private detective working out of the New York borough of”—he checked his file card—“Brooklyn. That’s quite inventive, actually. Some nonsense about hunting for a missing husband so his wife could get a religious divorce. It goes without saying, knowing your track record, neither our antenna in Israel nor our Perishables division here in London swallowed the cover story. So what are you hawking this time round, Mr. Dittmann? Used one-owner Kalashnikovs? That Ukrainian-manufactured passive radar system they say can detect Stealth aircraft at five hundred miles distance? Nerve gas masquerading as talcum powder? Seed stock for biological agents that cause cholera or camelpox?”

  “None of the above.” Martin smiled innocently. “Search me.”

  “Don’t mind if I do.” He touched a button on a console. Martin could hear a buzzer wheeze in the outer office. The young man with the peaches-and-cream complexion and the woman who had been working on the computer terminal entered the room. “Would you be so kind as to give us the key to your valise, Mr. Dittmann,” the woman asked, “and then disrobe.” The black man came around the desk. Martin could see he was the kind who worked out at a gym often enough to hope the man who was supposed to help the police with their inquiries would resist.

  Martin glanced at the woman. “I’m the timid type,” he remarked.

  “Nothing you ’ave, guv’nor, she ’asn’t seen,” snapped peaches-and-cream in a mock cockney accent.

  The two men concentrated on Martin, stripping him to the skin and going over every square inch of his three piece suit, underwear and socks. The Supervisor, Perishables paid particular attention to his shoes, inserting them one at a time into a contraption that projected an X-ray image of the shoe onto a glass plate. The woman emptied the contents of the valise onto the desk and began examining each item. Toothpaste was squeezed out of its tube into a plastic container that had Chinese writing on the side. Cold capsules were split open and inspected. The small container of shaving cream was emptied and then cut in half with a hacksaw. Standing in the middle of the room, stark naked, Martin tried to imagine the anti-British joke that Stella would concoct out of the episode, but he couldn’t come up with a punch line. Stella was surely right when she said he didn’t have a sense of humor. “I suppose you are going to compensate me for property destroyed,” he ventured as he started to pull on his clothing.

  The Supervisor, Perishables took the question seriously. “You go ahead and replace the items in question and send us the bill,” he said. “If you address it to Heathrow, Perishables, it should get here, shouldn’t it, lads and ladies? Everyone knows who we are. Mind if I ask how long you reckon on staying in the country, Mr. Dittmann?”

  “No. Ask.”

  Supervisor, Perishables didn’t crack a smile. “How long you reckon on staying in the country, Mr. Dittmann?”

  “My name is Odum. Martin Odum. I’m in Britain to tell anti-English jokes that will spread across the country like wildfire and take people’s minds off the drudgery of day-to-day life. I plan to stay as long as folks keep laughing.”

  “He’s certainly original,” the black man told his associates.

  Peaches-and-cream accompanied Martin down to the arrival hall. “No hurt feelings, I hope, gov’nor,” he said, falling back into his phony cockney accent and trying to sound ironic.

  Following the signs leading to the underground, Martin quickly spotted the two men who were following him, one about fifteen paces behind, the other ten paces behind the first. What gave them away was their habit of concentrating on the windows of the boutiques every time he turned in their direction. As Martin reached the escalator down to the train level, the first man peeled away, the second closed the gap and a third hove into view behind him. The resources they were devoting to keep track of Lincoln Dittmann made Martin feel important; it had been a long time since anyone thought he was interesting enough to lay on a staggered tail. As always in situations like this, Martin was more preoccupied with the agents he didn’t see than the ones he was meant to spot. He took the Piccadilly line to Piccadilly Circus and the escalator to the street, then leaned against the side of a kiosk to give his game leg a rest. After awhile he strolled toward Tottenham Court Road, stopping at a chemist shop to buy toothpaste and shaving cream, eventually at a pub with a neon sign sizzling over the door that brought back memories of the Beirut waterfront and Dante’s Alawite prostitute named Djamillah. He settled onto a stool at the dimly-lit end of the bar and sipped at his half pint of lager until half of it was down the hatch. Opening his valise, he slipped the packet of false identity papers into the white
silk bandanna, then mopped his brow with it and stuffed it into the pocket of his suit jacket. Hefting his small valise onto the bar, folding his Burberry across it, he asked the bartender to keep an eye on his things while he used the loo in the back. Martin didn’t even bother checking the tails, two outside in the street, one at a corner table in the front of the pub; they were all young, and young meant green, so they would fall for the oldest trick on the books: They would keep their eyes glued to the half consumed glass of lager and the valise with the raincoat on it, and wait for him to return. Depending on their relationship with the Supervisor, Perishables, they might or might not report that Martin had gone missing when he failed to come back.

  Martin remembered this particular men’s lavatory from a stint in London a lifetime ago. He’d been on his way to the Soviet Union and stopped off for a briefing from MI6’s East European desk. What cover had he been using then? It must have been the original Martin Odum legend because Dittmann and Pippen came later, or so it seemed to him. In a remote corner of a lobe of his brain he had filed away one of those tradecraft details that field hands collected as if they were rare stamps: This particular lavatory had a fire door that was locked, but could be opened in an emergency by breaking a glass and removing the key hanging on a hook behind it. To Martin’s way of thinking, this clearly qualified as an emergency. He found the glass and retrieved the key and opened the fire door. Moments later he found himself in a narrow passage that gave onto a side street and, as luck would have it, a taxi stand.

  “Paddington,” he told the driver.

  He changed taxis twice more and only gave his real destination to the final driver. “Golders Green,” he said, settling into the backseat and enjoying his fleeting triumph over the warm bodies from five.

  “Any particular place on Golders Green?” the driver asked over the intercom.

  “You can let me off near the clock at the top. I’ll walk from there.”