The Sisters Page 28

  Francis explained, "the Sleeper will know he was controlled by the Company and not his masters in Moscow. All we have to do now is arrange for them to be captured. The story they tell will eventually lead the authorities to Carroll and me. My disappearance, my written confession, the scribblings they will find hidden in my garbage pail will all confirm that the Sleeper was activated, and controlled, by the Company.

  Let the Director try to deny it when he is hooked up to a lie detector!"

  Once again exaltation manifested itself as a twitch of a cheek muscle.

  The person on the other end of the line cleared his throat, almost as if he were embarrassed. "There is a complication," he said carefully.

  It took a moment for the word to sink in, it was so unexpected. Francis repeated it to be sure he had heard correctly. "Complication?"

  "The telegram that was sent to the Company was also sent to us at the embassy."

  "To you?" Francis breathed into the phone. "Why would they send the awakening signal to you?"

  "Several days ago, the Potter cornered one of our sweepers in a hotel,"

  the voice on the phone recounted tunelessly. "Unfortunately for us, he recognized him."

  "Recognized the sweeper?" Francis couldn't believe this was happening to him.

  "He had seen him once before, in Moscow, some years ago, when the sweeper was given a medal," the voice said.

  The phone started to buzz in Francis' ear. He force-fed his last handful of quarters down the slot. The line cleared. "Are you still there?" he shouted.

  "So you see," the voice continued as if there had not been an interruption, 'they will have posed the question: if the Sleeper was being controlled by the Americans, as the Potter said, why was he being swept by Russians who knew his itinerary?"

  "How could you assign a sweeper whom the Potter could recognize?'

  Francis asked incredulously.

  The person on the phone cleared his throat again. "Our resources in this hemisphere are limited," he said defensively. "When you told us you thought the Potter might be trying to catch up to the Sleeper and stop him from carrying out his assignment, we called in the Canadians, Ourcq and Appleyard. We have used their services for years. It did not occur to us to check to see if the Potter might know one of them. But then it did not occur to us that they would fail to eliminate him if, as you suspected, he was following the Sleeper."

  Francis' mind was racing. "The telegram they sent to the Company, to you-it means they are not sure who is controlling the Sleeper. Of course, why didn't I see it! They don't know! So they fired off the awakening signal left and right, and are waiting to see which side understands it, which side responds to it. Then they will know who awakened the Sleeper. And knowing, they can try to save their skins.

  They can deal from strength."

  "I can see," the voice on the phone said from what seemed an enormous distance, "that we have come to the same conclusion."

  Francis transformed his face into a mask of pained innocence. "I will turn up at Combes’ Retreat. Your telegram was routed to me, thank you very much for sending it, I will tell them. Yes indeed, I am your control. You want to know whom I work for? Surely you are joking! I work for the organization that arranged the Potter's defection, that awakened the Sleeper, that sent him across the country to terminate a Prince of the Realm we could no longer put up with. Why did we want a Russian sleeper? Because if you had been caught in the act, an eventuality that we had to plan for, the Russians would have been blamed. But you weren't caught in the act. You got away. The Prince of the Realm is no longer among the living, so we have accomplished what we set out to accomplish.

  You, in turn, seem to have figured out who was controlling you, else why would you have sent a telegram containing the awakening signal to the Company. We share a mutual interest now-you must both disappear. With the resources at my command, I can arrange this." Feeling his quarters were about to run out, knowing that he had used his last one, Francis began talking rapidly. "Only sit tight. Don't move. Give me twenty-four hours. I will organize everything-money, identities, travel plans. Of course they will agree. What choice will they have? After that it will only be a matter of an anonymous phone call to the local police.

  Detectives will capture a shooter who was controlled by the Company. I will disappear, leaving behind confirmation." Francis' cheek muscle twitched again. His voice soared half an octave. "It is still the perfect crime!"

  "I quite agree with your analysis," the voice on the line said. "I authorize you to-"

  The buzzing filled the receiver. Francis searched frantically to see if he had overlooked a quarter in one of his pockets. Reluctantly he placed the receiver back on its hook. I quite agree with your analysis, the voice on the line had said. I authorize you to ... what? Fingering his pale green bow tie with rust-colored stripes running horizontally through it, Francis stepped out of the booth into the sunlight. He thought he knew what he was authorized to do.

  He was authorized to put the finishing touch on the perfect crime.

  Propped up amid the pillows at the end of the bed, nibbling nervously on an already mutilated fingernail, Kaat recognized it for what it was: an acronical (occurring at sunset) anagnorisis (denouement of a plot).

  The Sleeper took his eyes off Francis for the first time since he entered the room. "She collects words that begin with the letter A," he informed the Potter, who was sitting at the bridge table, his eyes half-closed, his Beretta out in plain view on the torn green felt.

  "He knows that," Kaat said from the bed. "He also knows what my first name is, which is more than you know."

  "I see," said the Sleeper, and he did: the complicity between the Potter and Kaat was thick enough to cut with a knife.

  Francis, leaning against a fireplace that had been bricked over, produced a particularly innocent smile. "To move on," he continued, looking from the Sleeper to the Potter and then back to the Sleeper again, "all I need is twenty-four hours to put together the package.

  There will be an appropriate amount of money. There will be passports, driving licenses. Social Security cards for everyone, including the girl. There will be plane tickets to the country of your choice. Do you prefer the southern or northern hemisphere? Sun or snow? Are you urban-oriented, or do you feel more at home in a rural atmosphere? I know you Russians put great store by your dachas," Here Francis forced a dry laugh through his lips.

  Kaat said, "That is an unusual bow tie you have on.

  "Thank you." Francis said, taking Kaat's comment for a compliment. "I'm rather attached to it myself". If my apartment was on fire and I could save only one tie from my rather large collection, this is definitely the one I would pick."

  The Potter said, "There is still the question of the sweepers to straighten out."

  "If you were controlling me, as you say," the Sleeper asked Francis,

  "how is it that the Russians were sweeping my trail?"

  With almost no effort Francis managed to project pained innocence. "You are referring to the Canadians who go by the names of Ourcq and Appleyard. It is true that they have been used on several occasions by our Russian friends; one of them, I don't remember which, was said to have been awarded a medal for services rendered. But they have nothing against accepting a free-lance contract now and then to augment their income. In this particular instance, we hired them to sweep your trail in order to keep the Potter from catching up with you. Obviously, if you had learned that he had betrayed you to the Americans, you would not have carried out the assignment we gave you. Using sweepers who employed Soviet techniques had an added advantage, from our point of view: if you spotted them, it would only reinforce your conviction that you had been awakened and sent on a mission by your legitimate control in Moscow. If you were caught in the act, we wanted the onus to fall on your masters in the Kremlin. You are both professionals. Surely you can understand our attitude even if you cannot sympathize with it."

  "Personally," Kaat piped up from the
bed, "I don't believe a word he says. He was a liar in his previous incarnations. He is a liar in his present incarnation. He will surely be a liar if he is lucky enough to have a future-"

  Downstairs, the chimes that Combes's ex-wife had brought back from Memphis sounded.

  The Potter reached for his Beretta. Francis fingered his bow tie. "Are we expecting anyone?" he asked into the silence.

  The Sleeper shook his head.

  "Maybe it is Combes," Kaat whispered, "returning from wherever he raced off to in such a hurry this morning-"

  "We would have heard his car," the Potter said.

  "He wouldn't ring his own doorbell," the Sleeper said. He put his ear to the door of the room. "Someone's coming into the house."

  "Francis?" a voice called from the entrance of Combes's Retreat.

  "My God, it's Carroll!" exclaimed Francis. "Carroll, we are up here," he called back. To the others he explained, "Carroll is my partner. We are a team. I more or less specialize in forests, he in trees."

  Carroll could be heard mounting the staircase. The Potter nodded at the Sleeper, who shrugged and pulled open the door of the room. Looking pale as death, Carroll appeared on the threshold. He was clutching a tiny pistol in his right fist and aiming it at Francis' stomach.

  "If you come in and tell us who you are," Kaat said with a nervous laugh, "I'll tell you who you were."

  Carroll stared at a point on the wall over Francis' right shoulder. "How could you have done it?" he asked in a voice that trembled with hate. He arched his neck and dispatched a finger to patrol the no-man's land between his neck and his starched collar. "We were colleagues, you and I. We were comrades in arms. We were sisters!"

  Francis' mask of pained innocence started to melt. "What are you talking about?" he breathed in a barely audible voice.

  Carroll stepped into the room. "You are not going to deny it, I hope. We are well past that stage. G. Sprowls saw you drop the empty matchbook under your seat after the film. He identified the woman who recovered it." He advanced on Francis, who shrank back into the wall. "I am going to end your life," he announced. "I am going to begin your death."

  From across the room the Potter asked calmly, "How did you find us?"

  Carroll never shitted his gaze from the wall over Francis' shoulder. "My colleague G. Sprowls has been looking for you. He had lines out. One of them paid off. The local police got a report of a stolen Chrysler turning up at Combes's Retreat. There were descriptions of you, of the girl, and after the death of the Prince of the Realm, of the Sleeper."

  Carroll must have noticed the Potter's finger curling around the trigger of the Beretta, because he said very quietly, "My colleague is nearby.

  He is not alone. I tell you this in case you are thinking of resorting to violence."

  Kaat said, "I don't understand a thing he's saying, and he's speaking English."

  The Potter stood up from the table, slipped his Beretta into his jacket pocket, walked over to the window and stared out at the sun dipping toward the edge of the prairie. It occurred to him that the Sleeper's father had been wrong-for him, there was to be no life before death. "I think I understand," he said, turning back to the room. "The Company of yours wanted to eliminate the Prince of the Realm, and put the blame for his assassination on the Russians in order to discredit those outside the intelligence and military communities who favor a detente with the Soviet Union. But one of the two principal planners was actually a Soviet agent working, in all probability, for Department 13, the assassination specialists of the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti.

  After the assassination, after the capture of the assassin, he would disappear. A confession would turn up in the mail of a senator known for his support of the Prince and his opposition to the intelligence community. If something happens to me, the confession would say, I have arranged for this letter to be mailed to you. Acting on precise verbal orders issued by my superiors, I and my partner organized the death of the Prince. We awakened a Soviet sleeper and used his services so that the blame would fall on Moscow. Something along these lines. There would probably be a cache of documents somewhere-transcripts of conversations, deciphered one-time pad messages, notes on my defection and debriefing-to support the story. There would be corroboration from the giggling idiot you sent to Vienna to debrief me; you probably sent him, as opposed to going yourself, just so there would be an outside witness to my defection."

  Carroll raised his free hand to his cheek muscle. "You were supposed to shred the office notes, the messages, but you saved every scrap of paper," he told Francis. "G. Sprowls found them in the false bottom of your garbage pail."

  Francis said weakly, "It was a perfect crime."

  The Sleeper asked the Potter, "How did you figure it out?"

  The Potter shrugged. "Once you told me you never sent the picture postcard with your address on it, everything became clear. The only people who knew where you were, who knew I had entered the Walter Whitman line that awakened you in your dossier in my own handwriting, were our Russian colleagues. So the plot originated with them. If an American had the good sense to get to you through me, he had to be working for the Russians too."

  The Sleeper nodded thoughtfully. "You are still the novator," he noted.

  The Potter turned to Francis. "Are the Cousins behind it? Is the blind man behind it?"

  Francis managed to produce a sickly smile. "The blind man is my control," he said. "We met secretly in Mexico a year ago. He had heard people in high places rant against the Prince of the Realm after the humiliation they suffered at his hands during the missile crisis. He took this for an order. He and I devised a perfect crime. We would get rid of the Prince of the Realm in such a way that the blame would fall on the Company, on Carroll here. For this we needed the services of a Russian sleeper. To get the sleeper, we needed to force the defection of the man who trained him. Which is where you came in. We gave away the three sleepers you had inserted into the United States in order to ruin you professionally. Then we got you to defect and give us access to the agent you always referred to as your last and best sleeper."

  The Sleeper looked across at the Potter. "Was I really your best?"

  The Potter said, "My last and my best. Absolutely."

  Francis' knees began to give way and he had to hang on to the bricked-over fireplace to keep from sagging to the floor. He felt drained of energy, of hope, of all possibility of exaltation. "For the blind man,"

  he informed Carroll, "there was a bonus. Do you remember the German diplomat you brought in during the war? The one with the valise full of very useful papers?"

  "What has that got to do with it?" Carroll demanded.

  "There was a go-between in the affair, a Soviet agent working under deep cover in Germany," Francis told him. "You were already a rabid anti-Communist at the time. So you betrayed the Soviet agent to the Gestapo.

  One less Commie to deal with later, you probably said. They tortured him for weeks. At one point the Germans poured lye in his eyes. He was blinded for life."

  The Potter said, "The blind man who runs Department 13 was the Soviet agent betrayed by your partner here?"

  "The blind man worked nineteen years to get his revenge," Francis said.

  "He came within a hairsbreadth of having it.

  Outside, the sun was knifing into the horizon. From under the window of their room came the sound of someone walking on gravel-except there was no gravel under the window, there was just prairie. Everyone in the room stiffened.

  "He may still get his revenge," Francis said. He stared vacantly at the tiny pistol in Carroll's hand. "Don t you see it, Carroll-to G. Sprowls we are all loose ends."

  "You are my loose end," Carroll sneered. He lowered his gaze until he was looking directly into Francis' eyes. "I detest you as much as anyone can detest another human being."

  Francis straightened with an effort and regarded his executioner. "I have loathed you from the moment I met you," he told Carroll. His lips seemed t
o curl insolently over the words he spoke. "If your life depended on it, you couldn't see the forest for the trees. '

  Carroll's tiny pistol jumped imperceptibly in his fist. Francis exhaled as if he had been punched in the chest. He looked down at the ragged hole that had suddenly appeared in the front of his tweed jacket. Blood oozed from it. He brought a hand up to cover the hole, almost as if it embarrassed him.

  Carroll stepped up to Francis and pressed the pistol to a point over his heart and pulled the trigger again. When he removed the pistol, Francis sank to the ground.

  Kaat, thoroughly frightened, leapt off the bed to join the Potter at the bay window. "Here's the thing, ' she whispered fiercely. "The Tibetans say that your last thoughts determine the quality of your reincarnation.

  Mine are of you. I hope to God we are reincarnated at the same time. I would like to spend an entire life with you sometime."

  The Potter took the Beretta from his jacket pocket and pulled Kaat close to protect her from what was surely coming. He smiled at his last, best Sleeper as he spoke into Kaat's ear. "We will share conspiracies," he said. "It will be us against the world," he said. "For us, there will be life before death, he said. "If you please," he said.

  "What did I do with the fucking lighter?" Ourcq muttered to himself.

  Appleyard stopped imitating someone walking on gravel long enough to say, "Don't tell me you maybe can't find it."

  Ourcq finally produced the lighter from a side pocket. "Stop imitating every fucking thing you hear and cover me," he ordered. Fitting a crutch under one armpit, gripping the homemade incendiary grenade filled with a flammable magnesium-like substance, he limped along the side of the house until he was directly under the bay window.