The Kingmaker

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Katrina and I arrived at Dulles International Airport at 10:00 A.M. and went straight to baggage claim. The whole plane ride back to America we had sat side by side without exchanging a word. We had watched three lousy movies because it gave us an excuse to ignore each other.

Our relationship was fraying. I’m no expert on women, but the yardstick I have learned to go by is that when they frown and sneer at you more than they smile, love is not in the air. Astounding flash of the obvious you might say, but back in kindergarten those girls who sneered at me the most actually wanted to play doctor. And recall, please, that when it comes to men and women everything is complicated. And of course, generationally, culturally, and otherwise, we were wildly different, and that spilled over also.

I spent a good part of the flight, however, contemplating Alexi’s assertion that the CIA agreed that this mysterious cabal existed and was ripping apart his region. I couldn’t make sense of it. I mean, if the CIA knew such a thing, why hadn’t it been made public? There are things you keep from the public and things you don’t. True, the CIA has this weird thing about secrecy that sometimes goes to extremes, but I couldn’t comprehend how this one could be kept in the bag.

In keeping with Russian efficiency, it turned out our luggage had gone to who-the-hell-knows-where, adding to my already foul mood. After forty minutes of hassling with the lost claims folks, we drove straight to the Virginia office, where Imelda was waiting. Safes were parked everywhere and having run out of wall space, Imelda had begun stuffing them in my tiny cramped office, turning it into an unusable storeroom.

Imelda looked awful-her hair was frazzled, and papers were piled in stacks and mounds everywhere.

She shoved her glasses down on her nose and said, “Hope you two had a great friggin’ time while Imelda been doin’ the real work.”

Sensing that my mood was already crappy enough, she stopped grumbling and said, “Ain’t found nothin’ that’s gonna help, tell you that. We gotta client with a trouser snake problem. They got it on tape, too, him talking to girlfriends and ordering up whores from some escort service.”

“Right… we know. What else?”

“They had him under physical surveillance for a few months, so there’s safes full of logs and reports. Might be twenty or so entries where he went to hotels, sometimes at lunch, sometimes in midafternoons, usually with women who did not resemble his wife.” She rubbed her eyes, another sign of how stressed out and exhausted she was, then added, “The good shit ain’t here yet, though. Golden’s still sittin’ on it.”

I patted her shoulder, and Katrina stayed to help clean up or, more likely, avoid me, while I went into my office and called Eddie’s secretary, saying I was ready to meet.

That distasteful task done, I called Homer’s house to warn him I was coming. In reply, he just hung up the phone. Forty minutes later I pulled into the circular driveway in front of the big white-brick house. The Porsche had a temporary metal fence constructed around it-not wanting to seem too uninventive, I crouched down and let the air out of the rear tires.

That put me in a slightly better mood as I marched up to the front door and rang the bell. You’d think that since I had called, they’d be primed to answer, but two minutes passed before the door swung open. It was Mary, with that toe-curling smile.

I shuffled my feet. “Hey. How’s things?”

She leaned against the doorjamb. “Except for these damned never-ending releases about the things my husband was supposed to have done, okay. Would you like to come in?”

“I’m not in the mood to run into him. Let’s walk.”

We studied each other’s faces. One of the things about Mary was that she always could read my mind pretty well. And one of the things about me was that I always could read her face pretty well. So she knew I was troubled, and I knew she knew, if that convoluted trail of logic makes any damned sense. The point being, we were both on notice.

We strolled down the driveway without saying anything until we got to the street and were passing beneath the naked branches of the trees. The fall had been incredibly warm, but the weather was finally turning frosty, and you could smell rotting leaves and the odor of wood burning in fireplaces.

She asked, “How was Moscow?”

“You knew I was there?”

“I tried calling you at your office. Some grumpy female sergeant told me where you were.”

“Crappy, disappointing, and dangerous.”

“Why was that?”

“There was an ambush. Katrina and I got caught in the middle of it.”

She grabbed my arm. “Oh my God, Sean. What happened?”

“We were in an embassy car when a truck blocked our way. When I turned around there were three goons holding guns.”

“But you’re okay?”

“I’m fine, but an Army captain named Mel Torianski isn’t. Forever isn’t, if you get my meaning.”

Her expression turned sad. “I knew Mel. He worked for Bill. He was always very nice. God, I can’t believe he’s dead.”

“The ambush was intended for him… one of those wrong-place-at-the-wrong-moment deals for Katrina and me.”

Okay, yes, I was lying to her. Shame on me for that, but I was offering her plausible deniability. Given her employer and those lie detectors, she might need it. On a more selfish note, the fewer people who knew of Katrina’s and my little conspiracy to conceal the truth, the better. As I mentioned earlier, I’m a lawyer.

Anyway, she was shaking her head. “Poor Mel. I always liked him. I don’t get it, though. Why would anybody want to kill him?”

“I don’t know. The Russian police said it was Chechens. Some of your spook buddies were looking into it, but obviously weren’t sharing their theories with us.”

“Well, I’m just glad you’re okay.”

I drew a few breaths and wondered how to approach this next point, because frankly it was delicate, delicate, delicate. Unfortunately, there just wasn’t any way to soft-shoe into it.

“Mary, I’ve also learned a great deal about your marriage.”

She didn’t say anything, so I continued, “For example, about Janet Winters, and how you played hardball to get rid of her.”

“That was years ago,” she replied.

“Yes, it was. And I learned that Bill subsequently screwed around on you more times than I’ve brushed my teeth. I learned all about the Siberian Nights Escort Service, and all the other women he was sleeping with. You knew about them, too, didn’t you?”

“I do now,” she admitted.

“Why didn’t you warn me about this?”

She looked away and replied, “How did you learn about it?”

“Adultery is on the list of charges. Bill put us on to his former secretary, and folks in the embassy told us about the rest.”

She turned back to me with a sad, resigned smile. “I’m sorry. I know I should’ve told you. I thought about it a few times.”

“That isn’t an answer.”

“No, you’re right. Which reason do you want to hear? The one that will make me sound good or the truth?”

“Start with the truth. If that’s too ugly, we’ll take a stab at the prettier one.”

She started walking. “All right, truth-Bill wasn’t the man I thought I was marrying. You’ve never heard that one before, right? When we were dating he seemed so damned perfect-kind, solicitous, witty. He can be incredibly charming when he wants to.”

“But he changed afterward?”

“Not really, no,” she said, seeming perhaps confused, or maybe troubled. “He was a good husband. Parts of him were hard to take… his vanity, his ambition. Irritating things, certainly, but in the scheme of things, not worth wrecking a marriage over.”

“And when you discovered Janet Winters?”

She looked at the ground and chuckled. “There was a bad day. I learned about her from the charge card entries. Do you believe it? I don’t know what made me madder-her or the prosaic way he let me discover it.”

“Her, would be my guess.”

She nodded. “I confronted him, of course. We’d just had Courtney a year or two before. I was shocked… heartbroken… every stereotypical thing you expect a cuckolded wife to be. And he was everything you expect a cheat to be. He swore it was the first time, that he’d been stupid, crazy, was sorry, and the rest. He promised it wouldn’t ever happen again.”

“And you believed him?”

“I wanted to. I went through the next phase every wife who’s been cheated on goes through. I wondered what I did wrong, how I wasn’t meeting his needs, the whole list of insipid questions.” She paused to chuckle again, I suspect not because she thought it was funny, but the opposite. “I went on a diet, opened an account at Victoria’s Secret, took cooking lessons. You wouldn’t have recognized me.”

“And then Moscow?”

She nodded. “The second time around you don’t get hysterical. Trust me, I’ve read every pop psychology book there is on the subject. The second time, you either divorce them, kill them, or become resigned to it. I obviously didn’t divorce or kill him, so you know the second half of this tale.”

“Did you confront him?”

“No.”

“That’s a little odd, isn’t it?”

“Perhaps. I thought my reasons were good. In every other way, our marriage was strong. The kids were happy and I didn’t want to destroy that, either. What I did was stop having sex with him.”

“He didn’t wonder why?”

“He knew why. He didn’t want the ugly confrontation either.”

“Okay, I got all that. How come you didn’t warn me?”

“We’re still on the truth?”

“Still there.”

“I was too embarrassed. I… well, I couldn’t tell you.”

“Because we used to be an item.”

“Exactly. For some odd reason, I wanted you to believe we had a perfect marriage.”

“Silly reason.”

“I guess.”

I took another deep breath. “By the way, I met Alexi Arbatov. Nice guy.”

Her face turned blank. “You… you what?”

I thought if I slipped that in damned quick, we’d get past the hard part. This falls under the old mashed-potatoes-and-peas theory, where you hide the peas under the potatoes so your mother thinks you ate them. It never worked then, either.

“Mary, he’s a witness. Maybe the key witness.”

“Sean, what were you thinking? Oh Christ.”

“It’s okay. I did that little three-stripes-on-the-statue deal and we met secretly.”

“Bill told you about that? Don’t you know what you’re doing? Alexi’s the most important asset we’ve ever recruited. Do you have any notion what they’ll do to him if he’s caught? This isn’t about you and your client.”

“Yeah, it is. Inconvenient, I know, but I have an obligation to follow every avenue, and Alexi’s an avenue.”

“Wrong. Bill’s using you. He’s turned you into a puppet. He’s manipulating you into exposing Alexi.”

“You sound like you think Bill’s guilty.”

“No, I don’t… or maybe… oh hell, I don’t know what I think anymore.” She rubbed her forehead, like she had a king-size migraine. She said, “Bill’s angry, right?”

“Oh, I suppose you could say that.”

“I know what he’s like when he gets this way. He gets vengeful. He’s probably mad enough to try to burn Alexi to get back at the CIA. You can’t be part of that.”

The only problem with her logic was that it had been my idea to meet with Alexi, not his. You could argue that Morrison left a trail of breadcrumbs that led me in that direction; I just didn’t believe that he was that devious. Or that I was that gullible. I said, “Why didn’t he expose him before? Say Bill was a traitor, why didn’t he give him away long ago?”

“I’m afraid it doesn’t prove anything. Exposing Alexi would’ve been suicidal. If Alexi were arrested by the Russians, there would’ve been an internal investigation. It’s routine, and only ten living people know about Alexi. The rest of us take lie-detector exams. Bill would’ve hung a neon sign over his own head.”

“Yeah, well, Alexi thinks Bill’s innocent. In fact, he agrees with Bill that this whole thing’s a frame job.”

Her face turned very still and very tense. “He told you that?”

“He’s convinced of it.”

“And did he say who framed Bill?”

“He thinks it’s some cabal in Moscow he’s been trying to crack for about ten years.”

She stared off at the trees. “Oh shit, Sean… not Alexi’s cabal.”

“He told me you knew about it.”

“Of course I know about it. He’s been mumbling about it for twelve years. It’s his fixation. For Godsakes, we even encouraged his belief. It was all part of the plan.”

“What plan?”

She suddenly stopped talking. She folded her arms across her chest and stared down at the ground. She had obviously already crossed that line where Alexi’s name was going to be a topic of discussion at her next lie detector session. Up to this point, though, she could blame it all on her husband’s pesky lawyer and his incessant nosiness. The next explanation was the big one, the disclosure that put her on quicksand.

When she looked up, she put her hand back on my arm. “Sean, how do you think we recruited him in the first place? The first time he met Bill he began complaining about some mysterious force that was tearing apart his country. He was obviously groping to see what we knew. So we sent back Bill to tell him we suspected the same thing. It was a ruse. We used his vulnerability to establish an alliance. Like many people of extraordinarily high intelligence, Alexi is paranoid.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because the Agency’s top psychiatrist has been helping us manage him this whole decade. Do you know the code name of this operation? ‘The Patient.’ Alexi’s paranoia is the hook that allowed us to make him an asset. We fed it. We constructed operations to exacerbate it. Why do you think he betrayed his country? Alexi is extremely patriotic. In his mind, he’s not betraying his country, he’s trying to defeat some dark hidden force that hijacked his nation. Sound familiar?”

“What about Yeltsin’s election? The way he tells it, there’s no plausible way Yeltsin went from zip to victory inside three months.”

“Oh, please. What the hell does Alexi Arbatov know about politics? For Godsakes, he’s a KGB hack. His knowledge of politics was shaped at Moscow University under the Communists. Do you know what he was taught? That democracy is a capitalist farce where rich men buy candidates and foist them upon the poor working class. To get inside his head we even got copies of the course books he was taught with. You have no idea how much work and effort went into recruiting and managing him. If you expose him, the whole world is going to crash down on your head. I’m worried for you. That’s why I’m explaining this.”

“You still didn’t explain how Yeltsin won.”

She very patiently said, “Yeltsin won because the other candidates were too unattractive and politically clumsy. He won because the big money backed him, and he was an incumbent who used the power and prestige of his office. It happens in this country all the time. Look at some of the hacks that hold high office and get reelected again and again. But when Alexi told us about his dark suspicions we said, ‘Yes, yes, you’re right, Alexi, there does appear to be something mysteriously sinister.’ The same thing with Chechnya and Georgia and Azerbaijan. I assume he told you about those, too. We were validating his fears, Sean. We were maintaining him as an asset.”

To my credit, I had entertained the notion that Alexi’s tale was suspect-that he was lying to me, or leading me down a blind path or was just plain wrong. But I’d never even suspected he was delusional. My client struck me as delusional, but Alexi?

But then I didn’t have a highly paid psychiatrist guiding me through the twisted labyrinths of Alexi’s head. It now seemed so obvious. The CIA torqued his paranoia in a calibrated campaign to turn him into a traitor. He was a highly moral man who worked in an immoral profession for an immoral government and constructed bogeymen to salve his troubled conscience. They’d focused on his vulnerability, exactly as folks in their profession are taught.

I stared off at a wisp of smoke trailing out of a chimney. “Wow.”

She was holding both my arms and staring into my eyes, measuring something, maybe whether there was a brain somewhere inside that head. Then she smiled. “I know your intentions were good. You’re out of your depth though. Just… please, be more careful. I talked you into taking this case, and I’d never forgive myself if you got hurt.”

We began walking arm-in-arm back to the oversize barn she called home. I said, “And about your husband’s cheating… I’m sorry it turned out that way. It must’ve been miserable for you. Believe me, I took no joy in discovering it.”

“I warned you it wasn’t a perfect marriage. I wasn’t exaggerating, was I?”

“Why didn’t you just divorce the son of a bitch?”

“The same reason I married him instead of you.”

“And what was that?” I asked.

“I misjudged.”

We were at the front door. She turned and looked into my eyes. This was one of those earthshaking moments when a real dramatic thing has been said, and some kind of equally dramatic follow-up is needed. She was leaning slightly toward me-all I had to do was pull her into my arms.

I’m not a complete stickler on professional ethics, but I have my limits. She was married, and that’s one thing. She was my client’s wife, and that’s another thing. She was a vision from my past who tugged at my heart and filled my dreams, and that’s yet another thing.

I pondered all these clashing thoughts until the moment turned awkward, she backed away, went inside, and closed the door.

I was not having a good day with women.