Extraordinary Powers (4 page)

Steams cleared his throat. “Not in all ways.”

His meaning was clear. “As if that’s a qualification,” I said.

“He seems to think it is.”

“What does he want done anyway?”

The waitress, a large-bosomed woman in her late fifties, refilled our coffee cups and gave Steams a sisterly wink. “Pretty routine stuff, I’m sure,” Steams said, brushing crumbs off his lapel.

“So why me? What about Donovan, Leisure?” That was another white-shoe law firm, based in New York, founded by

“Wild Bill” Donovan, the head of the OSS and a major figure in the history of American intelligence.

Donovan, Leisure was also known to have links to the CIA. For something as secretive as intelligence, it’s amazing how much is “known” or “rumored.”

“No doubt Truslow does some work with Donovan, Leisure. But he wants local counsel, and of the Boston firms, there aren’t many he feels as comfortable about as he does us.”

I was unable to suppress a smile. “

“Comfortable,”” I repeated, savoring Steams’s delicacy. “Meaning he needs some sort of extracurricular espionage work, and he wants to keep it all in the family.”

“Ben, listen to me. This is a wonderful opportunity. I think this could be your salvation. Whatever Alex wants, I’m sure he’s not going to ask you to get back into clandestine work.”

“What’s in it for me?”

“I think something could be arranged. An emergency loan, say. An advance as a lien against your equity stake in the firm. Taken out of your end-of-the-year share of the firm.”

“A bribe.”

Steams shrugged, took a deep breath. “Do you believe your father-in-law died in a genuine accident?”

I was uncomfortable at hearing him articulate my private suspicions. “I have no reason to disbelieve the version I was told What does this have to do with—”

“Your language betrays you,” he said angrily. “You sound like a fucking bureaucrat. Like some Agency public affairs officer. Alex Truslow believes Hal Sinclair was murdered. Whatever your feelings about CIA, Ben, you owe it to Hal, to Molly, and to yourself to help Alex out in any way you can.” After an uncomfortable silence I said, “What does my legal ability have to do with Truslow’s theories about Hal Sinclair’s death?”

“Just have lunch with the guy. You’ll like him.” “I’ve met him,” I said. “I have no doubt he’s a prince. I made a promise to Molly—”

“We could all use the business,” Steams said, examining the tablecloth, a sign that he’d just about reached the end of his patience. If he were a dog, he’d emit a low growl at this point.

“And you could use the money.” “I’m sorry, Bill,” I said “I’d rather not. You understand.” “I understand,” Steams said softly, and began waving for the check. He was not smiling.

“No, Ben,” Molly said when I returned that evening.

Normally she is effervescent, even playful, but since her father’s death she was, understandably, a very different person. Not just subdued, angry, despondent, mournful—the range of emotions anyone goes through with the death of a parent—but uncertain, hesitant, introspective. It was a very different Molly these last few weeks, and it pained me to see her like this. “How can this be?”

I didn’t know how to respond, so I just shook my head.

“But you’re innocent,” she said, on the edge of hysteria “You’re a lawyer. Can’t you do something?”

“If I had been smart enough to spread my money around, this wouldn’t have happened. Twenty-twenty hindsight.”

She was making dinner, something she does only when she needs the therapeutic benefits that cooking provides. She was wearing one of my rattier college sweatshirts and oversize jeans and stirring something in a saucepan that smelled like tomatoes and olives and lots of garlic.

I don’t think you would call Molly Sinclair beautiful the first time you saw her. But her looks grow on you so that after you’ve known her for a while, you’re amazed to hear anyone express the opinion that she’s anything less than stunning.

She’s a little taller than I, five foot ten or so, with an unruly mop of kinked black hair; blue-gray eyes and black lashes; and a healthy, ruddy complexion, which I think is her finest feature. I’ve always considered her somewhat mysterious, slightly distant, no less so now than when we met in college, and she’s graced with a serene temperament.

Molly was a first-year resident in pediatrics at Massachusetts General Hospital, and at thirty-six she was older than anyone else in her year, since she started late. Which is very Molly: she’s a serious procrastinator, especially when she has better things to do. In her case, this meant trekking through Nepal for more than a year after college. At Harvard, even though she knew she’d eventually end up in medicine, she majored in Italian, writing her thesis on Dante—which meant she was fluent in Italian but not so fluent in organic chemistry.

Molly was forever quoting that line from Chekhov, to the effect that doctors are the same as lawyers, but while lawyers merely rob you, doctors rob you and kill you too. She loved medicine, though, far more than she cared about material possessions. She and I had often talked half seriously about quitting our jobs, selling this albatross of a house, and moving somewhere rural, where we’d open a clinic to treat poor kids. The Ellison-Sinclair Clinic we’d call it, which sounded like a psychiatric hospital.

She turned down the heat on the sauce, and together we walked to the sitting room off the kitchen, which, like every room in the house, was a mess of lumber, spackling compound buckets, copper pipes, and such, and everything covered with a fine layer of plaster dust. We sat down in the overstuffed armchairs that were protected temporarily with plastic drop cloths.

Molly and I had bought a beautiful old town house in Boston’s Back Bay, on Marlborough Street, five years ago. Beautiful, that is, on the exterior. The interior was potentially beautiful. It was the height of the market, a few months before the bottom fell out you’d think I’d have been smarter, but like everyone else I figured real estate prices had to keep skyrocketing and the house was what real estate ads sometimes call a “handyman’s dream.”

“Roll up your sleeves,” the ads say, “and use your imagination!” The realtor didn’t call it a handyman’s dream, but then, the realtor also didn’t tell us about die arthritic plumbing, the carpenter ants, or the rotten plasterboard. People used to say in the 1980s that cocaine was God’s way of telling you you have too much money.

In the 1990s, it’s a mortgage.

I got what I deserved. The renovation was an ongoing project not unlike the construction of the pyramids at Giza. One thing led to another. If you want to repair the crumbling staircase you must put in a new load-bearing wall, which necessitates well, you get it

At least there were no rats. I have always had a rat phobia, an irrational, uncontrollable terror of the little beasts beyond the revulsion everyone else experiences. I had ruled out several houses before this, houses Molly adored, because I was convinced I’d glimpsed the silhouette of a rat. Exterminators were out of the question; I believe that rats, like cockroaches, are fundamentally nonexterminable.

They will survive us all. Every once in a while, while we were browsing in a video store, Molly would have a little fun at my expense by pulling out a cassette of the rat horror movie Wittard and suggesting we rent it for the evening. Not funny.

And as if we needed more stress, we had been arguing for months about whether to have a child. Unlike the normal pattern the woman wants one while the husband doesn’t I wanted a kid, or several kids, and Molly vehemently didn’t. I thought it odd for a pediatrician such as she to insist that the secret of raising a kid right is not to be its parent.

As she saw it, her career was just getting started, and the timing was all wrong. This always touched off the fiercest quarrels. I’d say I was willing to split the responsibilities with her equally; she’d counter that no male in the history of civilization, has ever shared the child-raising duties equally. The plain fact was, I was ready to have a family when my first wife, Laura, died, she was pregnant and Molly wasn’t. So the arguments continued.

“We could sell Dad’s house in Alexandria,” she began.

“In this market we’d make next to nothing. And your father didn’t leave you anything. He never cared much about money.”

“Can we take out a loan?”

“Using what as collateral?”

“I can moonlight.”

“That’s not going to do it,” I said, “and you’ll just wear yourself out.”

“But what does Alexander Truslow want with you?”

What, indeed, when the world swarms with lawyers far more qualified? I didn’t want to repeat Steams’s suspicion that Molly’s father had been murdered: in any case, that didn’t explain why Truslow wanted to sign me on. No reason to upset her further.

“I don’t like to think about why he wants me,” I said lamely. Both of us knew it had to do with my CIA background, probably with my fearsome reputation, but that still didn’t answer why, precisely.

“How was the NICU?” I asked, meaning the neonatal intensive-care unit at Massachusetts General Hospital, where, since her father’s funeral, she had been doing her rotation.

She shook her head, refusing to let me off the hook. “I want to talk about this Truslow thing,” she said. She fingered one of her curls anxiously and said, “My father and Truslow were friends. Trusted colleagues, I mean, not necessarily close personal friends. But he always liked Alex.” “Fine,” I said. “He’s a good person. But once a spy, always a spy.”

“The same could be said for you.”

“I made a promise to you, Mol.”

“So you think Truslow wants you to do clandestine work for him?”

“I doubt it. Not at my billing rate.”

“But it involves CIA.”

“No question about that CIA is the Corporation’s single biggest client.” “I don’t want you doing it,” Molly said. “We talked about it already that’s your past. You made a clean break stay away.”

She knew how important it was to me to separate myself from the clandestine operative work that brought out the icy ruthlessness in me.

“That’s my instinct, too,” I said. “But Steams is going to make it as hard for me to say no as he possibly can.”

Now she got up and knelt on the floor facing me, her hands on my knees.

“I don’t want you working for them again. You promised me that.” She was rubbing her hands back and forth on my thighs as she spoke, seducing me away, and fixed me with a beseeching stare, more inscrutable than usual.

“Is there anyone you can talk to about this?” she asked.

I thought for a moment, and at last said, “Ed Moore.”

Edmund Moore, who was retired from the Agency after thirty-some years, knew more about the inner workings of the CIA than just about anyone else in the world. He had been my mentor in my brief intelligence career my “rabbi,” in intelligence argot and he was and remained a man of rare instincts. He lived in Georgetown, in a wonderful old house, and he seemed to be busier now, since his retirement, than in his active days in the Agency: reading seemingly every biography ever published, attending meetings of CIA retirees, luncheons with old CIA cronies, testifying before Senate subcommittees, and doing a million other things I couldn’t keep track of.

“Call him,” she said “I’ll do better than that. If I can clear my calendar tomorrow afternoon, or the day after, I’ll fly to Washington to see him.”

“If he can spare the time to see you,” Molly said. She had begun to arouse me, no doubt her very intention, and as I leaned forward to kiss her neck, she suddenly exclaimed, “Oh, great. Now the damn putanesca sauce is burning.”

I followed her into the kitchen, and as soon as she had turned off the burner—the sauce was now a hopeless cause—I encircled her from behind.

Things were so charged between us that with a little nudge in either direction, we could be embroiled in an endless argument, or … I kissed her right ear and made my way slowly downward, and we began to make love on the floor of the sitting room, plaster dust or no plaster dust, pausing only long enough for Molly to go find her diaphragm and put it in.

That evening I called Edmund Moore, who delightedly invited me to join him and his wife for a simple dinner at their home the next evening.

The next afternoon, having postponed three eminently postponable meetings, I caught the Delta shuttle to Washington National Airport, and as dusk began to settle over Georgetown, my taxi crossed the Key Bridge, rattled over the cobblestones of N Street, and pulled up to the wrought-iron fence in front of Edmund Moore’s town house.

THREE.

Edmund Moore’s library, in which we sat after dinner, was a magnificent two-story affair lined with shelves of oak inset with cherry. The second tier was ringed with a catwalk; several library ladders rested against the first-tier cases. In the dim lighting the room seemed to glow amber.

Moore had one of the finest personal libraries I had ever seen, which included an impressive collection of books about espionage and intelligence. Some of them were accounts by Soviet and East Bloc defectors, which Ed Moore had placed with American and British publishers, in the years when the CIA did such things. (Openly, anyway.) Entire bookcases were devoted to the works of Carlyle, Dickens, Ruskin.

They had the look of those books you could purchase by the yard from an interior decorator to simulate the look of an old baronial library, but I knew that Ed Moore had painstakingly collected them all at auctions and in book shops in Paris and London, and in secondhand stores and barns throughout the U. S.” and no doubt had read them all, at one time or another.

A fire crackled in the fireplace, illuminating the room with a cozy ocher light. We sat in worn leather armchairs before the flames. He sipped a 1963 vintage port of which he was especially proud; I had a single-malt.

I appreciated the atmosphere Moore had so carefully arranged for himself. In his town house we were no longer in Georgetown in the 1990s, crammed with video rental places, Tan-O-Ramas, and Benettons, but in Edwardian England. Edmund Moore was a midwesterner, really an Oklahoman, but over his years with CIA he’d become as tweedy and Ivy League as any Yalie or Princetonian in his generation. It wasn’t an affectation; that was simply what happened after enough time in an organization like the CIA. In fact, the Agency had changed around him.