The Color of Night

CHAPTER 27

Mara walked up one of the narrow streets that led into the village, its steep grade pulling at the muscles in the backs of her legs. She wore a light sweater thrown over her shoulders, for it was still early enough in the morning that the air had a lingering sense of dampness to it. She carried one of her large sketchpads and a packet of pencils. The sun had not yet cleared the low eastern ranges, and the shadows in the small serpentine streets were still tinged with purple. She met only an occasional solitary figure, though the shop owners in some of the lanes were beginning to stir, their subdued morning voices punctuated by the sharp rattle of an iron grille rolling up to open the front of a shop.

She made several more turns, entering an even narrower lane, and loosened the button at the neck of her sweater. Even in the cool of the morning she was growing warm from the effort of walking on the continuous incline. She came to the walled grounds of a private estate and soon to its double-winged wrought-iron gates, which were locked. To one side was another iron gate, a pedestrian entry. She turned the latch and went through, closing it behind her.

Following a winding cinder path, she continued under old cypresses and linden trees to a small chapel on a promontory overlooking the lakes. In front of the chapel facing the lake was a stone courtyard flanked by hedges and terra-cotta urns filled with bright, orange red geraniums.

On a stone bench to one side of the chapel door a man was waiting, his legs crossed at the knee, a thermos sitting next to him with two coffee cups.

As she approached him he stood, but she gave him no opening to make a gesture of greeting before she sat down.

He hesitated only slightly, as if deciding not to say anything, and sat down again beside her.

Mara leaned her sketchpad against the bench, poured herself a cup of coffee, and picked up the cup. She looked at him.

“You’re a son of a bitch,” she said.

Bill Howard’s face was heavy with the strain of the past week. He looked tired. She had no idea how much trouble it had taken him to get here, and she didn’t care.

“How did you manage to leave him?” he asked

“He had to go down to Como. I told him I’d walk up the hill to sketch.”

“What’s he doing in Como?”

“I don’t know.”

Howard’s mouth tightened with impatience. “What’s he been doing?”

“He’s been on the Internet. He’s got the information Alain Darras gave him. He’s contacting somebody, or several somebodies, in that file.”

“You still haven’t looked at that?”

“How am I going to do that, Bill? He took it with him to Vienna and Geneva. When he’s here I can’t just walk over and say, ‘What’s this?’”

“When he’s asleep, for Christ’s sake,” Howard pressed. “When he goes to the bathroom… damn.”

She gave him a withering look. “You’ve been watching too much television.”

“Goddamn it,” he said, looking away in anger, “that’s what you were put in place to do. We need to know what names he got from Alain Darras. And why. You’re supposed to find out what he’s planning to do. You’re supposed to find out if there’s any way to pry the money out of those shelters. You’re supposed to find the key to his trick, goddamn it.”

“Ariana Kiriasis is dead.”

Howard’s head snapped around.

“He found her in her hotel suite in the Metropole in Geneva,” Mara said, “around noon yesterday.” She went on to tell Howard about her conversation with Strand the previous evening after he had returned from Geneva. She told him everything except what Strand was planning to do. She did not reveal his files in the Geneva bank vault, nor did she mention the four crime figures.

Howard leaned back against the front of the chapel, and both of them looked out to the lake. The heavy shoulders of the hills were still green black in the rising light, but they were only minutes away from attaining their full color. The opposite shoreline was skirted in a trail of fog that had not yet lifted. In the far distance the highest Alps were just catching the first light on their snow-powdered peaks.

“This has gotten out of hand, hasn’t it, Bill?”

“No.”

“Are you going to sit there and tell me that I’m not in any kind of danger?”

Howard’s effort to remain calm was almost palpable. It took him a moment to get his frustration under control before he spoke.

“You knew it could get dicey,” he said. “That’s why you went through the training, to prepare you for just this kind of thing. You were well informed about the possibility of being drawn in near the heat. But you personally? No one’s going to kill you, for God’s sake.”

“That’s not the picture I’m getting from Harry.”

“‘The picture you’re getting from Harry.’ That’s good, Mara. Christ. He’s messing with you. You’ve got to recognize when he’s messing with you.”

“You ever work undercover, Bill?”

He rolled his head to one side, knowing what was coming.

“You know a lot about it, then, don’t you?”

“Look, I’ve run people undercover all my career,” Howard fired back. “I’ve run Harry Strand undercover, for Christ’s sake. Tell me you’re experiencing something I haven’t seen before, something all new. That’s good, Mara. You’re such an old hand at it.”

“If FIS isn’t going to get into this, then I’m getting out.”

“You don’t get out,” Howard said.

Mara wheeled around and flung her coffee past Howard’s head, splashing it against the stone wall of the chapel. It was a deliberate near miss, and they both knew it, but Howard hadn’t flinched. They stared stiffly at each other. Mara’s anger was so tightly wound within her that she knew Howard could feel it, too.

“What makes you think I don’t see through you, Bill? What is it about me that makes you think I would walk headfirst into a firestorm just because you told me to do it?”

Howard didn’t speak. Their faces were close enough to each other for her to see the quivering in the soft pouches beneath his eyes that told her he would like to slap her off the bench. But he didn’t speak, and he didn’t move. He didn’t take his eyes off her.

“Shit.” She stood up, leaving her empty cup on the bench beside the thermos. She crossed her arms and walked a few feet toward the promontory. She was beginning to despise Bill Howard. She was beginning to think she was on the wrong side of the moral situation here. She was beginning to think… a lot of things.

Howard pretended her flash of anger hadn’t happened.

“You haven’t been able to talk to him about the money,” he said.

“I sent it to you, what he told me.”

“But we need specifics. What are the names of the charities? Where are they established? Who administers them? How many are there?” Howard stood, too, and put his hands in his pockets. “Our legal people need some thing to get them started. This situation is developing very quickly, very quickly. If Strand dies with this information… Christ.”

“Why the hell don’t you just pick him up?”

“That was answered in Briefing Mara 101. You were supposed to be our response to that answer. You were supposed to be the solution.”

She turned around. “Bad faith, Bill. That’s what that training was, that’s what this exercise is. You misrepresented Harry Strand to me. You didn’t tell me his wife had been murdered.”

“We didn’t know that.”

“But you suspected… in your damned black heart you knew it because you knew Schrade had discovered the embezzlement. You should have gone to Harry, you should have told him.”

“You don’t know what the shit you’re talking about, Mara.”

“I know you misrepresented this operation to me. You misrepresented the threat to me. You misrepresented the risk to me.”

Howard stood with his feet planted firmly, his shoulders slumped, his depressing brown suit beginning to show its unimaginative hue as the sun was just now touching the crest of the dark hills on the opposite shoreline. He ignored her remarks.

“At the very least,” he said, “you could goddamn well find out what he plans to do.”

“You know the man-how easy do you think it’s going to be to get him to give that up?”

“Who the hell ever said anything about easy? Just get it.”

They faced each other. Silence.

“Maybe things have changed, Mara,” he said. Still he hadn’t moved. “Tell me plainly what you want to tell me. What do you mean ‘if FIS doesn’t get into this’?”

They stared at each other.

“If Harry Strand is killed, I’m going to blow the whistle on this whole thing.”

He looked at her and shook his head slowly, his mouth forming a faint, sour smile as though he pitied her predictable and disappointing performance.

“God… damn.” He snorted. Now he moved, taking a few steps to one side. “You know what? I’m going to tell you something. Four of us were involved in signing off on your training. We met almost every day to compare notes on the progress you were making. Almost every day. When it came time to say you were ready to roll, I was the only dissenting voice. I was overruled by the other three members of the task force.” He paused and shook his head again. “I told them… I told them this is what you’d do. I told them you were not a professional, that you would fuck it up in the end. I said, ‘The woman won’t be able to stick it out if it gets scary.’ I knew you didn’t have it in you.”

“Pat yourself on the back, Bill,” Mara said, “then tighten your ass, because if you think you know me so well that you think I won’t follow through with my threat, you’re going to soil your pants when I do it.”

“Let me give you something to think about,” Howard said, moving again, going the other way, arms folded and head down as he gave some thought to what he was about to say.

“You may be right, up to a point, about our bad faith. We didn’t tell you absolutely everything. For instance, here’s a fact we didn’t tell you about Harry Strand: He’s a dead man.” He squared around on her. “There’s nothing we can do about it.”

Mara frowned at him.

“No, that’s the honest to God truth,” Howard insisted. “Harry’s right about the FIS having no influence over Wolf Schrade anymore. In fact, not only do we not have any influence, but Schrade knows that the assassination of one of our former officers would be the ultimate insult to us, one which we would suffer in total silence. He knows. That’s just one more reason why he’ll see to it that it happens. What’s more, Mara, Harry knows this better than anyone.”

“So you’re just going to stand by and watch it happen, with your arms folded, shaking your head at the shame of it all, trying to snatch the money out of Harry’s hands before he stops breathing?”

“He could come to us for help, Mara. Did you ever think of that?”

“He did.”

“No, he didn’t. He came to us and threatened us.”

“You don’t buckle to threats.”

“No, we can’t.”

“But you’ll ‘help’ him. If he comes in… with the money… you’ll cut a deal.”

“Yes. That’s right.”

She looked at him. “I’ll bet it’ll be a sweet deal, too.”

Howard didn’t respond.

“What if…” She stopped.

Howard tilted his head, waiting.

Mara turned away from him and faced the lake. Howard hesitated and then walked over and stood close to her. In front of them the morning was rising against the Alps. Below, the waterfront was beginning to come alive. An early sailor moved out from the harbor, well before the morning breeze, his boat chugging slowly under its own power toward the open lake. No doubt there was a romantic at the helm, yearning to be the first to raise his canvas, to sail quietly, and alone, into the rising sun.

“Let me be clear about something,” Howard said. “We’re not going to give you a hell of a lot more time. They’re weighing their options again back in Washington. My guess is that they’re going to be coming after the money. It’s over half a billion dollars, Mara.”

She shot him a look. They had never told her how much money was involved. She just knew it was millions.

“They’ll probably prosecute,” Howard went on. “Do you understand what I’m saying here? For that kind of money they’ll go for his throat. As for his ‘insurance,’ we’ll argue that he’s an intelligence officer, for God’s sake. He knows how to doctor films, tapes, recordings, documents. That’s his trade. No, he’s not a righteous man, he’s a rogue officer, a greedy rogue officer just like dozens of others who have shamed U.S. intelligence agencies over the years. He’s got to be taken down. We’ll crucify him. By the time it’s over, if he doesn’t go to prison, he won’t have any kind of a life left at all. For that kind of money-I don’t care how he’s invested it to protect it-for that kind of money we’ll pull every string we can get our hands on.”

Howard turned to her. “Mara, get him to give it up. Look, he miscalculated. Hell, it happens. Convince him to walk away from it. He can keep the interest he’s made during the past four years. It’s a goddamn lot of money.”

Howard’s voice changed. When he spoke again it was flat, clinical.

“If Schrade’s people don’t kill him, our people are going to make him wish they had. Convince him to give it up. He’ll get a life out of it.”

It was late afternoon, and they were still several hours away from leaving for the Villa d’Este to meet Lu. They undressed and lay on the bed, their balcony doors open to the afternoon warmth and the faint sounds of the harbor. Everything in Bellagio was languorous. Here even the black kites that scavenged the shoreline and the alpine swifts that skimmed the surface of the lake for insects did so in an unhurried manner that was at once graceful and serene. Strand could smell the water and the cypresses on the hillsides and the faint sweetness of Mara’s body.

The idyllic setting was in sharp contrast with the reality of their situation and with the roiling emotions that he struggled to temper. There were treacherous days ahead, and a sense of ever shortening time wore and tore at him like a debilitating fever. He had been enormously relieved that Mara had chosen to stay with him, not only because it confirmed how much they meant to each other, but also because he could not in good conscience have allowed her to go. If she had fled, she would have lost even the dubious protection he was able to give her. Schrade would have found her in days.

In watching her come to this decision, Strand observed yet another dimension of her personality. She was not simply giving up, yielding to his wishes. Rather, her decision was the result of her sensible assessment of her circumstances. She must have reasoned that her best chances of survival lay in trusting him, even though, despite her personal feelings about him, she must have found it difficult to do. It was this calm common sense that he had been slow to appreciate. In most people a talent for balanced judgment was not an attribute that advertised itself. But in an attractive woman it was even less readily apparent. Beauty was too often an unintended diversion, a distraction that seduced one’s attention away from the essential qualities of the person who possessed it.

“Where is Wolfram Schrade?” she asked, breaking the silence. Her head was on his shoulder, her long legs running alongside his, her breasts against his side.

“What do you mean?” He was surprised at the sudden question.

“Do you really think he doesn’t know where we are, or does he know and he’s just… waiting?”

Strand decided not to finesse the answer. “I’ve asked myself that a thousand times,” he said. “I honestly think that when we left Rome, the way we left Rome, we slipped his surveillance. And I think we’re still clean.”

“What makes you believe that?”

“I told you last night, if he knew where we were, I think he would’ve let me know that he knew. Just like he did in Rome with the videotape.”

“You don’t think Ariana’s death was a similar notice?”

“Maybe you’re right… but I don’t think so. If that’s the way he’s working and if he knows where we are… why are you still alive?”

Mara said nothing, but she grew very still, her breathing momentarily interrupted. He felt a pang of conscience. God, that must have sounded raw to her, grim evidence that his theory was sound. In truth, he was talking with far greater confidence than he was feeling. A pall of anxiety lay upon him that acquired a denser gravity with each shocking death.

As for the FIS surveillance, he was even less sure about having eluded that than he was of having escaped Schrade’s private intelligence operatives. He knew what the FIS was capable of doing, but he also knew that excellence in surveillance required planning, and planning took time. He was beginning to have doubts about how long they had been on to him. If they had known about the embezzlement scheme before Ariana went to them-if they had had time to actually target him for a surveillance operation-it would be a serious challenge to hide from them.

So in part his argument was specious, an attempt to portray a confidence in their safety that he really did not feel. Moreover, he guessed that she knew what he was doing. He thought he felt her body gradually tense against him.

“What about you?” she asked.

“He wants to kill me. And maybe he will-eventually. But not until he gets his money. I’m okay until he either gets it or knows once and for all that he can’t get it.”

A murmur of voices wafted in from the balcony, a man’s laughter, a shout, and then they subsided and were gone. He could almost feel her thinking. And he could feel the impulse to speak rising from her abdomen against his hip, rising until it emerged on her breath, almost apologetically.

“Why don’t you just give him the money, Harry?”

He had anticipated that question since the moment in her bedroom in Rome when he had told her what he had done. She had waited far longer to ask it than he had guessed.

“I can’t,” he said.

Pause. “What do you mean?”

“It’s not possible.”

“You’ve spent it?”

“No. I haven’t spent any of it.”

She was silent, but again he could sense the turmoil of her disquiet. She didn’t move. There was no caressing hand, no tucking into him to be closer than close. She didn’t ask him what he meant, and she didn’t press him further on his questionable assessment of the danger they were in. It was an unexpected and unusual display of restraint, and Strand found himself as curious about the reasons for her reticence as about her ability to deal with her fear in a manner that seemed extraordinarily controlled. The extremity of their circumstances was becoming a foil for revealing the complexity of Mara’s personality. It was yet another shifting, unstable element in a kaleidoscope of shadows.

Then her hand, which had been resting on his chest, moved around to his side, and she drew herself closer. They lay that way for a long time, floating away in their own thoughts as the afternoon grew balmy. After a while he stopped trying to feel her thinking, concentrating instead on the hum of the cicadas in the cypresses. Her breathing grew steady and shallow as she slipped into sleep. Against his intentions, he too grew light-headed and drifted away.