NOT ONLY HAD I HAD BLANKET COVERAGE all the way from Newark, and from New York a few days earlier; they also wanted me to know they were on me. That's what that little popup screen featuring Muhlenberg and Hofstra had been all about-a message: We've got you in our sights, we'll always have you in our sights, so give it up or else. The wrecked Norton and the guy in the poncho in front of my Adams Morgan apartment calling me paranoid were part of the same campaign. But give what up? My spiral notebooks, my laptop, my luggage were gone. Since the only thing I had left was the photo, that had to be the prize. Whoever was after me knew there were two copies from the missing 201 file. One was accounted for, with John Millis's blood splattered all over it. That left one at large, and that meant me. Time to tie up loose ends, then change course.
I went back in the airport, bought a telephone card from the news kiosk, placed a call to New York University, and got the all-night operator.
"Normal business hours-"
There's been an accident, I explained in my best broken English. A traffic fatality on the road to Lyon. All we've been able to recover was a plastic faculty ID card.
The operator transferred me to the campus security office, which assured me that no one by the name Patricia Hoag-Carrington taught at NYU, adjunct or on staff, classics department or anywhere else.
"But-"
"No one."
My second call was to Chris Corsini, the one person in America who should have gotten used to my calling in the middle of the night.
"Corsini, it's Max."
"Great. It's-what-two-oh-three in the morning." I could practically hear him checking his Breitling.
"Sorry."
"Why do I have the feeling I'm about to board the lunatic express?" In the background, I could hear his wife telling me, him, someone to die.
"I need a real big favor. A name."
"It can't wait, I'll bet."
"I wouldn't be calling… I need it in the next twenty-four hours."
"Jesus. Okay. Whose?"
"Wait. Is there a pay phone near you?"
"How would I know? I own my-"
"A 7-Eleven? An all-night pharmacy? Something like that."
"I guess so. Why?"
"Here. Take this down." I read off the number in front of me on my own pay phone. "Find one and call me from it. Five minutes."
"You're sloshed, Max. Fucked up in the head. Or both."
He hung up. I called him back.
"Chris, this is life or death. I'm not fucking with you. I can't take the chance your phone is tapped."
"All right, all right. My God, I've lost my mind, too. Not five minutes, though. Ten. Maybe fifteen."
He called me back in ten. I could hear trucks grinding by on a highway not far away.
"I need to know who was sitting in seat 37G, AF 19 last night."
"Huh?"
"I'll explain later. A woman."
"Shit almighty. You barely get away from one and now you meet some bimbo on an airplane who refused to give you her name. Maybe not such a bimbo after all."
"First thing Monday, call your compliance officer and give him the flight number, the seat number. He can get his private investigator to check airline reservations. Air France is either on Apollo or Saber airline databases. He'll figure it out."
"They'll take me out in a straitjacket."
"Match the seat number to a credit card, and you get a name."
"Why don't you get one of your shady friends to do it?"
Shady friends? Maybe Chris knew me better than I ever realized. But the private security business is a tiny, tight world, and everyone in it is tied to some intel service one way or another. Chances were very good that this little trace request would end up in Langley no matter how carefully I couched it. Outsourcing through Chris was just about my only chance to hide my hand.
"Chris, I really, really need this."
"If I promise to do it, you'll let me go home and back to sleep?"
"Not yet."
"Shit."
"Another number. Take it down." I read off Webber's cell phone, the one I'd cajoled out of him at headquarters. "I need to know every call he made Friday after five."
"Is this legal?"
"Your compliance guy will know the way it works. They get it from the international registry."
"Okay." That's what he said. What he meant was, he'd do it, and I'd pay him back for the rest of my life.
Next I called Yuri Duplenski in Damascus. The phone sputtered as if it might catch fire any moment. I kept yelling Yuri's name into the static, until finally a voice boomed back at me.
"Who?"
"Max. Max Waller."
"Who?"
I was shouting into the phone so loud, people stopped to stare at me.
"Max?" Yuri finally said. "Max!"
Yuri and I hadn't seen each other since 1984 when he was working for the GRU, Soviet military intelligence, in Beirut. Our last get-together had been a memorable one, though: a vodka binge that ended as so many of them seemed to do when one of us got the brilliant idea of driving up to the Biqa' and firing off a rocket-propelled grenade at Israeli lines. Fortunately, I ran my car into a ditch before we ever got out of Beirut.
At one point I'd considered recruiting Yuri as an informant. I even loaned him two thousand dollars after Moscow started asking about some money that seemed to have gone missing from his till. My loan saved Yuri from a recall to Moscow, maybe worse, and in the normal course of events, I could have used it to reel Yuri in to our side. But I eventually decided he wasn't recruitable. Yuri had big dreams. There was no way the CIA could ever pay out the kind of money he was after. I never got around to asking him for the money back, just swallowed it. I wasn't going to mention it to him now on the telephone. But he and I understood our bonds were deeper than friendship.
"You know how to drink yet, Max?" Yuri had no intention of letting me forget our last ride.
"Yes. No. Anyhow, I need a ride out of Europe."
I'd read in an intelligence report that after the breakup of the Soviet Union, Yuri had left the GRU for the black-arms market and was now operating a fleet of ships and planes around the Med, Africa, and the Middle East. Or maybe he was still in the GRU, selling arms. It didn't matter. In Russia, lines separating state business and criminal business have never been very well defined.
"I got it," Yuri said. "There's a woman after you."
"Actually it's something else."
"Italy. La Spezia," he said. "First stop is Benghazi. Then-"
"I'll take it." I'd figure out later where to get off.
I could hear him leafing through some kind of book, running his finger down a list, cursing the tiny print and his failing eyesight.
"She leaves the day after next at-" He lost his spot, fumbled again with the schedule, and found it once more. "Oh two hundred. An auto transport. Just show up."
"Who do I ask for when I get there?"
"Ask for? Max, you don't need to ask for anybody. The captain will be looking for you. He'll have your cabin ready. I'll greet you myself when the ship docks."
The final call was to Rikki, my daughter. Her fourteenth birthday was in three days. I was going to send her something nice from Zurich. No more. The phone rang eight times before her voice-mail greeting kicked in: a parade of barking dogs. I had no idea what it meant. I waited until they were through, then sang "Happy Birthday" into the phone in Arabic. The woman at the phone station next to mine looked at me as if she thought I might explode myself any moment.
I headed for the elevators but, instead of waiting, raced down the stairs to the basement level again and through the same cafeteria where I'd almost been run over-the place was still a mess. The Algerian baggage handler I'd met there years before had shown me an employee exit at the back of the kitchen, up a small flight of stairs. The door wasn't alarmed, just one sleepy security guard who nodded at me as I went through. Walk with enough authority and you can blow by half the security guards in the world.
Outside, I headed straight for one of the employee bus stops. Eight of them were idling at the curb. I jumped on the one going to Vitry-sur-Seine just as it was starting to pull away. No one got on after me, the most positive note I'd had in a while.