The Color Of Night (27 page)

Mara cleared her throat. He watched her as she held the cool, damp washcloth to her eyes for a moment. His mind was flying over the possibilities. There was so much to think about, it made him queasy. It occurred to him—shot into his mind like a bright spark—that she might be lying. Just as quickly he decided that if she was, if all of this doubled back on him again, they could have him. If she wasn’t who he thought she was, whatever was left was nothing he wanted. He could understand what she had done. God help him, it wasn’t all that different from what had happened with Romy. If he had learned anything at all from her, it was that if he was ever going to redeem himself from the years of lies, he was going to have to learn how to forgive. It was really the only way. If he was going to manage to stagger toward something better than what he was now, he was going to have to do it with damaged people like himself who were also looking for a way out. If they wanted to climb out of the darkness, if they genuinely desired it, he would gladly extend a hand. No one would be required to have a clean conscience. That kind of hypocrisy was no longer good enough.

She didn’t understand, and he really couldn’t have expected her to. As they talked into the afternoon, he watched her closely. Sometimes her eyes would slide away from him, slippery, lubricated by guilt. Deception was so insidiously destructive; and the first rule of survival for those who made it a profession was that you must never care about the people you deceived. It was the difference between dropping bombs on people from twenty thousand feet and going into their bedrooms at night and cutting their throats. The closer you were to them, the harder it was to live with what you did to them.

When you worked undercover, you had to learn not only how to wear a mask successfully, but also how to put a mask on whomever you were lying to. If they became real to you, if they became human, deserving of compassion or of any kind of consideration, you were ruined. So you had to lie to yourself in order to live with the lies you were living. It got to be tricky, and not everyone was made to live in that kind of labyrinth. It took its toll on everyone, but some people were completely destroyed by it. If you wanted to endure, you had to learn how to keep your deceit from becoming a vortex and sucking you down into its darkness.

The strangest part of it was that the damage that was done, the hurt that was inflicted, all happened within. Within the mind. Within the psyche. And, most grievous of all, within the heart.

“Are you nervous?” she asked.

Mara was standing at the windows, looking down at the street. She was sipping a glass of water, shifting her weight from one hip to the other.

They had gone out for a late lunch at a café not far from the Bibliothèque Nationale and had returned to the hotel arm in arm among the crowds on the sidewalks.

“Not nervous,” he said. “Anxious.”

He was sitting on the edge of the armchair, examining the documents he was about to put into his briefcase.

“That’s a distinction lost on me.”

“Obando is a far different man from Lu,” Strand said. “I’ll have to play him differently. I’m just trying to work it out.”

“I’m
nervous about it,” she said.

Strand slouched back in the chair and put his hands together, elbows on the fat upholstered arms of the chair.

“I’d like you to do something for me.”

She hesitated a moment, then turned to him, her back against the edge of the window frame.

“I can’t imagine how you could possibly justify my presence at that meeting,” she said.

“No, it’s not that.”

She waited.

Strand approached the Cafe Martineau from the opposite side of the Boulevard des Capucines. He walked past it several times, glancing across to assess its location, to get a feel for the kind of place it was. In the short time he watched the café, he saw no one enter or leave. Its name was written on the front window in gold letters against a black band, and a black border with gold trim framed the window itself. A black awning with a dark beige trim protected the entrance. It was a very smart address.

Finally, moving with the pedestrian flow, he crossed to the other side and approached the café from the direction of the Boulevard de la Madeleine. He saw nothing amiss. He opened the front door and went in.

“Yes, sir. May I help you?”

A young woman met him immediately, speaking in English. But her accent was not French. She had short dark hair that implied a businesslike mind underneath it. She wore a mandarin red suit and a black, open-necked blouse tucked in firmly to a thin waist. She was not the hostess, but she was working; it was no mistake that she allowed Strand to see the automatic pistol tucked slightly to one side into the waistband of her short skirt.

“I have an appointment with Mr. Obando.”

“Okay,” she said. “This is the right place.” Two men came up behind her. “Put the briefcase down there,” she said, indicating a small marble-topped bistro table next to the reception podium.

Strand did as he was told and raised his arms as the two men checked him for whatever they didn’t want to find. Strand took the opportunity to glance farther into the café, empty except for a few more of Obando’s assistants scattered here and there. He thought he saw Obando halfway back, sitting alone at a table. Apparently the Colombian had bought the exclusive use of the café for a few hours.

After the men were finished the woman approached him again with an electronic wand with a digital readout and began going over him. Up and down his sides, between his legs—strictly efficient, nothing cute—over his back. She asked him to take off his suit coat. He did, and she went through the arms, through the pockets, over the seams.

“You’re very thorough,” he said.

“Yes,” she said. The two men were busy doing the same thing to the briefcase.

When she was finished, she held his suit coat for him and helped him put it on. She smiled.

“Thank you for being so patient,” she said. As if on cue, the two men finished with his briefcase. “Please”—she tilted her head for him to follow her—“Mr. Obando is waiting.”

It was odd to see the café empty. The staff was nowhere in sight. Only Obando’s silent bodyguards stood politely against the walls of the long, narrow establishment. Each of them looked as if he could have been the café’s owner or a very subtle maître d’.

As Strand and the woman approached Obando’s table, she stopped and Strand stepped past her. Obando had been watching him approach, but he did not get up or offer his hand. He motioned to the only other seat at the table. Strand sat down.

“Harry Strand,” he said, introducing himself.

Obando nodded. “Harry Strand,” he repeated. His hair was a natural light caramel, parted on the left, wavy, beautifully barbered. He was forty-two years old but looked younger. “Well, Harry, lay it all out for me.”

Strand had heard recordings of Mario Obando that had been made in Tel Aviv while he was doing business with an Israeli drug dealer. The dealer was the one who sounded like the foreigner. Obando sounded as though he’d been born and raised in the San Fernando Valley. You could have spent an evening with him and never known he was Colombian. Obando’s files recorded how he had hated to be pegged by his accent. He hated the stereotype. So he had worked on it. It had disappeared.

So Strand laid it all out for him. From his briefcase he withdrew all the material he had copied from the Geneva bank vault on the two Obando operations—an arms smuggling conduit and a European drug distribution channel—that had been closed down because of Schrade’s information. He placed a packet of photographs on the table along with a CD, several cassettes, and fifty-seven pages of documentation. He laid them out like a fortune-teller with a deck of cards. He outlined the two failed operations, told him how they had failed, then told him why they had failed.

Obando kept his eyes on Strand. At his elbow was an empty glass with a last sip of a grenadine
sirop l’eau
remaining in the bottom, an ashtray with one butt in it, an opened pack of cigarettes, and a gold Dunhill lighter.

As he had done with Lu, Strand told Obando who he was and gave him some background on his career in the intelligence profession. By the time he had finished, Obando understood that Strand knew things about his organization that Obando had thought were secure. He also understood that the information inside the material on the table before him would confirm everything that Strand had said. As with Lu, when Strand finally stopped he had not yet given Obando the name of the traitor who had been responsible for creating so much havoc for Obando’s enterprises.

Obando stared at him. His face portrayed no tics, no indication of what he was thinking or how he was feeling about what he had heard. He was simply a businessman listening to business talk.

He took his eyes off Strand and raised a hand. One of his men came over.

“Harry, would you like something to drink?”

He ordered Scotch and ice.

“I’ll have the same damn thing,” Obando said. As the man turned away Obando picked up the cigarettes, offered one to Strand. Strand shook his head, and Obando lighted one for himself and sat back.

“You know, I’m
still
pissed about that business in Amsterdam,” he said, blowing smoke to one side. “On that one deal, that one deal alone, I lost—” He stopped himself. “I took a
very
big hit. Not just the money. It destroyed an arms conduit that I’d invested more than a year putting together.” He paused. “You worked on that?”

“I was in charge of the intelligence on it. I was the one who finally took it to the Netherlands’ Centrale Recherche Informatiedienst and worked with them until they closed you down.”

Obando grinned and shook his head. “Goddamn.”

The two drinks appeared. Obando raised his, said, “Prosit,” and took a sip.

He pointed at the material Strand had put on the table. “This is my man, huh?”

“That’s right.”

Obando looked at Strand, saying nothing. Strand’s back was to the light that came in through the front window. Being oblique, the light diminished quickly inside the café, so that Obando was softly illuminated, but the surrounding furnishings were quickly lost in a dusky haze. Here and there the edge of a picture frame or the corner of a gilt-framed mirror glinted from the shadows.

“Why?”

“I worked with this man a long time,” Strand said. “There are personal reasons…”

“Like what?”

Strand waited a beat. “The reasons are personal,” he said. “I won’t discuss them with you.”

Obando was very good at keeping his thoughts to himself; neither his body language nor his face gave a hint of what was going on in his mind.

While keeping his eyes on Strand, he drank from his Scotch and took a last drag on his cigarette before mashing it out in the ashtray. Strand noticed that although Obando was a stocky man, not heavy but thick chested, his hands were the hands of a thin man, with long, narrow fingers.

Obando finished putting out the cigarette and opened the manila envelope of photographs. He looked at them one at a time. After he had finished looking at the last one, he reached for his cigarettes again. He lighted one.

“Wolfram Schrade,” he said. He swallowed a mouthful of Scotch, then another. “Life is full of surprises,” he said.

Strand said nothing.

“I didn’t expect it to be him. Never would have.”

“That’s why I’ve provided so much documentation.”

“You worked with him closely, then.”

“I did.”

“How long?”

“Almost a decade.”

“That’s fascinating.” He studied Strand. “But that’s over. You’re out. And Schrade broke off with FIS…”

“Right.”

“Okay. What about now? Anything else along those lines?”

“Probably.”

Obando jerked his head. “Ah.”

“I suspect he’s working with either the British or the French now. Maybe even the Germans.”

“You suspect.”

“I no longer have the ability to get proof of that. But I’d bet money on it.”

“Would you bet your life on it, Harry?”

Strand didn’t hesitate. “There’s nothing in this world that I’d bet my life on, Mr. Obando. Certainly not anything having to do with Wolfram Schrade.”

Obando picked up the last photograph and looked at it again, considering it.

“This is a far from perfect world, Harry.” Pause. “What if I told you this piece of shit lives a charmed life?”

“Which means,” Strand said, “that Wolf Schrade is making himself so valuable to you at this time that, for now, you are obliged to overlook his past injuries.”

“That’s pretty good, Harry. Bottom line: I can’t be your dark angel.”

“Can you expand on that a little?” Strand asked.

Obando shook his head slowly. “It’s personal,” he said soberly and without a hint of irony. “I won’t discuss it with you.”

It was a fine piece of one-upmanship, the sort of thing that was second nature to men in Mario Obando’s line of work. The world of legitimate business provided a warm and fertile environment for male strutting, but it was nothing compared to the showy displays of male ego that occurred in the crime world. In Obando’s milieu, no available opportunity to squirt a few cc’s of testosterone in your adversary’s direction was allowed to pass. For the younger ones, like Obando, a smart mouth was the extra edge that made them feel just that much more clever than their opponents. They had to be smart, look smart, and sound smart. And, of course, they had to be brutal.

“Even if I can’t help you directly,” Obando went on, having made his point, “perhaps I can give you something in return. I know you didn’t do this from the impulse of a warm heart, Harry, but regardless, you did me a favor.”

He dropped his eyes to Strand’s glass. The Scotch was gone, the ice was melting. He looked toward one of his men and held up two fingers and then flicked his wrist downward, pointing at the empty glasses. He dropped his arm and looked again at Strand. He put out his cigarette, turned slightly to one side, and crossed one leg over the other.