The Traitor

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

When I awoke I was in a hospital bed. I moved my eyes — an IV bottle hung on a hook, sun streamed in a window. I tried to move, but the effort required was too great.

“He’s awake.” The voice was French, in heavily accented English.

Two women’s faces came into view. One I recognized: Sarah Houston.

“Hey, babe.” My voice came out a whisper.

“Hey babe yourself, Tommy Carmellini. Welcome back to the land of the living.”

I swallowed a time or two and worked my eyes around. My head … I couldn’t turn my head. I tried to lift my right hand; the effort required was huge. Then I got it going and lifted it to my head, which was swathed in bandages.

“You have a fractured skull. Bullet hole in your left arm, some burns, a ton of bruises — that’s about it.” Her face was maybe a foot from mine. God, she looked good!

“How long have I been here?”

“Four days.”

I thought awhile, trying to remember. I recalled Willie shouting, and the explosion. “How’s Willie?”

“Oh, he’s okay. Got singed some, but only his head was sticking up above the stairwell. They kept him for a couple of days, then sent him home. He’s back in Washington.”

“Good. Another week in the whorehouses would have finished him off.”

She sat on a chair beside the bed and grasped my right hand. “The summit is over. The French never told the press about the bomb. They explained that there had been a minor accident in the next room, and that was that.”

“Minor accident…”

“I’m supposed to call Grafton when you wake up.”

“Don’t hurry. I want to look at you awhile.”

She had a good smile. In fact, her smile reminded me of my mother’s, back when I was young. And I really liked her eyes, which were big and brown. Say what you will, brown eyes are the best.

“Hey, babe,” I said. “When we get back to the States, what say you and I move in together?”

The smile widened. “Yes,” she said, and kissed me.

Jake Grafton brought his wife, Callie, when he came. After the three of us visited awhile, Callie excused herself and the admiral pulled the chair over to the bed. They had me cranked up and told me I was going to sit up the next day, but I wasn’t there yet.

“Do you know you’re in the same hospital that Henri Rodet checked himself out of?”

That thought hadn’t occurred to me. I told him so.

“He shouldn’t have gotten onto the chateau grounds, and wouldn’t have if the French had told their security folks that he had been fired. But this being France, they were afraid someone would leak it to the press and questions would be asked that would embarrass the government. So they still haven’t told anyone that he was fired. Only that he died in an accident.”

“Don’t you love it?” I said.

“It turns out that the morning the summit began, Rodet had a visitor here in the hospital. The ministry had pulled the guards since Rodet was no longer on the team, but, as I said, they didn’t tell anyone, including the guards.” Grafton gave the French Shrug. “The visitor stayed about fifteen minutes. No one could discover how he arrived or how he departed, except for the fact that Rodet apparently drove a stolen car to the Conciergerie, went up to his office for a few minutes, came down and drove off. The stolen car was found parked at a subway station a couple of stops from Versailles.”

“This visitor. Abu Qasim, you think?”

“Perhaps. It’s a possibility, anyway. The French investigators couldn’t get a description. They fingerprinted the room, but two days later, after the room had been cleaned twice. It was hopeless. No one who saw the visitor had any reason to remember what he looked like.”

“Nondescript,” I muttered.

Jake Grafton leaned back in his chair and exhaled a bushel of air. “Boy, would I like to have been a fly on the wall when those two talked. Maybe the visitor was going on to the chateau with the radio transmitters to set off the bomb. Maybe he was wearing the vest containing a bomb. Maybe Rodet insisted that he go in the other man’s place. We’ll never know.”

“So this Qasim, if he exists, is still out there.”

“Yep.” From an inside pocket Grafton produced a picture. It was actually a computer-drawn picture of a face. “Recognize him?”

The face was of a man in his forties, perhaps fifty, clean shaven, intelligent, with regular features. “Well…”

“Sarah made this from the photo you took of the old man in the park.”

“Abu Qasim,” I said.

“Perhaps,” Grafton said, and pocketed the picture.

I thought about it awhile; about terrorists and traitors and bombs. This really wasn’t a world I wanted to live in. Who the hell would? “I want out of the agency,” I said a bit later. “I’ve had enough.”

“That was our deal. We’ll keep you on the payroll until the docs say you’re well, then … What are your plans?”

“Don’t have any.”

“I’ll be back to see you in a couple of days to see how you’re doing.” The admiral held out his hand, and we shook. “Thanks, Tommy,” he said.

A couple of weeks passed before the French doctors were willing to let me leave the hospital. They took my bandages off and I got my first look at my new, pink hide. My arm healed up and so did the gash in my leg. I felt like a new man. Looked like one, too.

Since the Graftons were in Europe for another six months, the admiral said Sarah and I could use his beach house in Delaware until we got a place of our own. He even gave me a key, which I thought was a nice gesture. Shape I was in, it would have taken me an hour to pick the lock on his door.

So we flew home and landed at Dulles. Someone from the agency met us and drove us to Delaware. Grafton had called ahead, and the guys had my old red Benz coupe parked in his driveway.

The first few days were great; then Sarah got bored and started talking about going back to work. She had to have something to do, she said, and someone was going to have to support us. She lasted through the weekend, but Sunday afternoon I drove her to Maryland and dropped her off at her place. She kissed me and told me she’d see me on Friday night. I drove back to Delaware alone. I’d been alone most of my life, but this time it felt different.

I managed, though. I got out on the beach every morning, watched storms come in, walked for miles and thought about things. It was winter, so the winds were raw and it rained almost every day. Rain or shine, I walked the beach. I worked my jog up to a run and began increasing the distance every day. I worked out at a gym in town. The football wars were entertaining; I didn’t read the newspapers or watch the news on television. Life was very pleasant, especially on the weekends, when Sarah came over to the beach.

Still, the sword was hanging over my neck and I could feel it: I was going to have to figure out what to do with my life. Sarah told me that a time or two, just a reminder. Even so, I was in no hurry. The world kept turning, just as before.

The lease on my apartment in Maryland expired, so I spent three days moving out. Some of my stuff I put in storage, but most of it went to the Salvation Army. I was ready to move on. What the heck — maybe we could live at Sarah’s place.

Willie Varner drove over from Washington one Saturday evening for dinner. I grilled some steaks and Sarah made a huge tossed salad.

“What you gonna do for a living, Tommy?”

“I’m listening for your answer,” Sarah murmured. See, that’s how women work — they apply pressure until you buckle like an empty beer can.

“Watch you work our lock shop and take half the profits,” I told Willie, after a glance at my roommate, who was up to her wrists in lettuce.

He reached into his pocket and pulled out some coins. He put four quarters on the kitchen counter. “There’s your half of what was left this month after we paid my salary.”

I laughed and left the quarters there. He didn’t pick them up, though.

He wanted to talk about Paris and Henri Rodet. “Thought we were goners when you zapped ol’ Henri. I knew something was bad wrong, him being there in the kitchen, after what you and Grafton said, so I went after him with a big carvin’ knife. It was like stabbin’ a wall. He whacked me in the head with a pistol, slowin’ me down somewhat. But I knew he was wearin’ somethin’ under his coat, probably a bomb like those damn suiciders. That’s why I shouted at you when you were gettin’ ready to zap ‘im. Thought we were goin’ to get blown to kingdom come, and sure ‘nuf, damn if we didn’t. That thing popped and about cremated us.”

A little later he said, “Wasn’t much left of ol’ Henri, Grafton said, and what there was was fried. We was real lucky, Tommy. Real lucky that Henri didn’t get his ass up that ladder and pop that thing in the attic where those cylinders were. Might have set them off. Then you and me would be singin’ in the angel choir, and we’d have a lot of company.”

I nodded and turned the steaks. Luck is a fickle lady; she’s here one minute and gone the next.

After Willie left and Sarah and I were alone, I asked her, “I know it’s classified and all that, but what did the code breakers get out of those telephone computers we got from Rodet?”

“Nothing.”

“That’s what Grafton said they’d find.”

“I worked with the wizards. They used random number decryption theory and everything else they had on the stuff and got zilch. There was no code to crack, because there was no message. It was just random letters and numbers.”

I was beginning to see a glimmer. “So they didn’t communicate with the computers,” I said slowly as I thought it through. “They were red herrings. Marisa was the mailman, the go-between.”

“The computers and the codes were there to deflect attention from her,” Sarah explained. “Rodet was trying to protect her.”

“You think he loved her?”

“I think she is Qasim’s daughter, and he loved Qasim.”

Sarah said that like she believed it, but I wasn’t buying it. “Are the French sweating her?”

“She’s disappeared.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope. Grafton told me Abdullah al-Falih, who might be Qasim, had a daughter and a son. The Mossad assassinated the son a couple of years ago.”

“And the daughter?”

Sarah shrugged. “Marisa is about the right age.”

I still didn’t believe it. Seeing the look on my face, she added, “It’s a possibility, nothing more. Someday you’ll have to ask Abu Qasim.”

“Naw. I’m out of it,” I said, “and I intend to stay out. Someone else can hunt ‘em.”

Having definitely and absolutely eliminated one of the ten thousand possible ways to spend the rest of my life, I felt better. I was making progress. Only 9,999 more to consider.

Sometimes I thought about Al Salazar and Rich Thurlow and Elizabeth Conner. Sometimes I wondered how Marisa Petrou was doing, how she was getting on with her life. Was she Abu Qasim’s daughter?

The more I thought about it, the more likely it seemed. Yeah, I know, true believers sign up for paradise and they do whatever it takes to get there. Still, letting those clowns cut on her face… The women I knew would need more than faith to undergo that ordeal, even with an anesthetic.

Abu Qasim — willing to sacrifice his daughter and his friend for his vision of God’s war. Whew!

That reality was so alien to my world that I didn’t want to think about it. I wanted to watch football and walk on the beach and enjoy my moments with Sarah. Aren’t we all like that? Don’t we all wish to retreat occasionally from foul reality?

Finally I broke down and started reading the newspapers again. Mainly for the sports, you understand. More earthquakes, bankruptcies, volcanic eruptions, political shenanigans, terrorism; the French put a tax on international airline tickets sold in France to fund the war on African poverty. The Denver Broncos looked like the team to beat in the postseason.

However, one morning I found an interesting three-paragraph item on an inside page of The Washington Post: Richard Lewellan Zantz, an American expatriate, age twenty-eight, was shot to death the previous day at a sidewalk cafe in Rome. Someone walked up, pulled out a sawed-off shotgun, and blasted him four times with buckshot. Then the shooter walked away into the crowd. Eyewitness identifications were nebulous — no one got a good look at the killer. Too busy taking cover, I guess. Italian authorities promised to bring the villain to justice.

Ol’ Gator. Five ounces of lead administered in four doses. Adios, asshole.

Two months after Sarah and I arrived in Delaware we still hadn’t rented an apartment in Maryland, and I hadn’t figured out what I was going to do for a living. Sarah was getting very testy.

One Friday morning the telephone rang: Jake Grafton was calling from France.

“Hey, Tommy,” he said.

“Although my wishes are a little late, happy new year, Admiral. Your house weathered the holidays and is none the worse for it.”

“Had enough loafing yet?”

“Well…”

“Ready to go back to work?”

“What do you have?”

“UPS will bring you some airline tickets tomorrow. It’s snowing here. Pack accordingly.”

I took a deep breath. “Okay,” I said. We talked for a bit about Sarah and Callie, but it was a transatlantic call.

After we hung up, I called Sarah. “Hey, babe, you’ll never guess who called.”

“Let’s see… Your mother is in Hawaii, the president is in China, you said no to that movie producer and the ballet company… Was it Jake Grafton?”

“How’d you know?”

“He called me first. Wanted to know if I thought it would be okay to call you.”

“And you said yes.”

“I love you, Tommy, more than you will ever know. But you have to keep being you — I know that. I’ll be here when you come home.”

“Thanks, Sarah. See you tonight.”

After I hung up, I remembered her comment a few weeks earlier about Marisa. So when did she and Grafton have that little conversation?

The more I thought about it, the more amusing it was. She knew all along that Grafton would eventually call me. Women!