The Third Magic (10 page)

CRONOS

P
rofessor Darling did not kill
all of the earnest young men who had sat in his book-lined study drinking tea, of course. He had chosen his protégés so carefully that a majority of those he recruited remained loyal to the cause during their entire careers. But there were exceptions.

Some of his boys reverted to type after leaving Cambridge. Some of them wanted to forget the wild talk of their student days and return to their family estates. Some of them became disenchanted with Communism, and no longer wished to sit in Parliament or run newspapers to further the cause.

These could not be permitted simply to walk away. One by one, each of them was eliminated by an assassin's bullet. In time the brighter recruits into the Coffeehouse Gang picked up on the fact that the weaklings among them were being culled like slow deer from a herd.

The name they gave to their unknown executioner was Cronos, after the Greek Titan who devoured his own children.

"Cronos is coming," they would whisper when one of their number tried to ease his way out of the Soviet box.

And Cronos always came.

He came even after the demise of the U.S.S.R., when the remaining members of the Coffeehouse Gang—those who hadn't been betrayed by some KGB officer or another looking to avoid the usual fate of a captured spy—were set adrift on their own. Eleven members of Darling's original fifty recruits had still been alive and working as double agents when the huge Soviet spy apparatus was dismantled. Titus Wolfe was among them.

Two of the eleven were named as enemy agents, and they were killed before they could talk. Some emigrated to Russia, where they were given new identifies and ordinary jobs. The others simply seemed to disappear.

Titus was very nervous during this time. He had been with MI-6 for three years, all the while delivering information to the KGB through a series of blind drops. With the exception of his Control, who only spoke with him on the telephone, Titus had been offered no human contact with the Soviets. He was still considered too junior to be trusted.

His lack of standing was probably what saved his life. That, plus Darling's increasing awareness that, were all of his recruits sanctioned, the panicked KGB would be tempted, sooner or later, to give over Darling himself to the West in exchange for some favor or other. These were hungry times, and spies were always regarded as expendable.

On the other hand, Darling realized, he might be able to use the agents he had trained from boyhood for his own benefit. If he were careful about it, what was left of the Coffeehouse Gang could be made into an autonomous organization that Darling himself could disappear into. Everything was already in place: There were agents with boats and planes and untraceable automobiles; experts in forging and stealing necessary documents; agents in place whose job had been to provide safe houses around the world. All of them were running scared now, expecting to be executed or arrested. All would cooperate with Darling, he was sure, and would thank him for the opportunity.

And best of all, it could all be offered, for a price, to mercenaries, free agents, private concerns, and governments that did not wish to involve their own intelligence operations.

And so it came to pass: One day Lucius Darling, renowned professor of comparative literature at Cambridge, simply disappeared off the face of the earth.

Titus found out about it through his Russian contact, who telephoned him especially to find out if he knew anything of his mentor's whereabouts.

He said that he did not. Then he hung up the phone and returned to his apartment in Munich, where British intelligence—his official employer—had assigned him, and waited for Cronos to come for him.

To his surprise, he found Darling on his living room sofa. Titus's first thought was that he had finally learned Cronos's true identity. So great was his fear that at first he could not even understand the words Darling was speaking, but slowly they began to permeate the fog of confusion and panic that had engulfed him since his conversation with the Soviet agent.

"The Russians have too much of a hammer over you," Darling was saying in his clipped, kingly accent. "If they don't kill you just for your association with me—which they probably will—they'll want you to go over and kill Poles and Afghanis for them."

Titus was speechless. For a full minute or more, he opened and closed his fists, which had gone stone cold with fear at the sight of his former teacher. "I thought you'd come to kill me," he said at last.

Darling smiled. It was a strange smile, musing, rueful, resigned. "What a terrible thing," he said softly.

"That is... I didn't..." Titus waffled.

Darling waved him down with a gesture. "I can help you to disappear, if you'd like. Aside from that, I'm afraid you'll be on your own for a time."

"Disappear?" Titus asked numbly.

"We can stage your death."

"Could you set me up with someone?"

"Yes, of course. But you've got to be careful. We don't want to compromise the Coffeehouse Gang."

"No," Titus said. "Certainly not. Thank you, sir. I hope I'll be able to make this up to you one day."

In time to come, Titus Wolfe would make Lucius Darling a very rich man. But at that moment, when he realized that he would be living out the rest of his life as a man with no permanent identity, no career, not even a country to serve, he was terrified. He had been trained as a soldier in a cold war that had ended. As of now, he would be not a citizen of the world, but the world's outcast, belonging nowhere, living for no reason other than the fear of death.

H
is existence ended officially
in the early hours of morning, when his car careered dramatically into the Amper River. The "accident" was a fairly simple matter to arrange: All it took was for the steering mechanism of his two-year-old BMW 540i to be set so that it would veer off the bridge without a driver.

Although there had been no traffic on the bridge itself at three a.m., when the occurrence took place, dozens of people saw the automobile's flying exit through the guardrail. Later, when the car was recovered, MI-6 was able to find enough traces of Titus Wolfe so that even without a body they could determine with some certainty that he had been in the car during the accident and had probably drowned. They also found the timed mechanism that had forced the car off the road. The secret service concluded that Wolfe's death had been the work of German terrorists who had discovered that he was a British agent.

Titus was given a military memorial service at the Queen's expense. His youngest sister, who was working as a domestic in Manchester, was astonished when she was notified of his death to learn that he had been driving a car worth forty thousand pounds. Professor Darling's parting words to him had been, "Go to Panama. In Colon, look for a boat named
Sea Legs.
"

That was the last time Titus ever saw him, although he continued to work through Darling's byzantine network of contacts. Wherever Titus went, sooner or later he would receive a message through some member or other of the Coffeehouse Gang, which would lead him through a series of further calls, messages, and meetings, until the exact details of his assignment were made clear to him. Sometimes he met directly with his employer of the moment; at other times, he had no idea for whom he was working.

The system was a work of genius.

In Panama, Titus discovered that the captain of
Sea Legs
was a man named Richard Edgington. Several years Titus's senior, Edgington had been one of the brightest stars during the Gang's pub-crawling days. Supported by an indulgent and wealthy family, he hung around Cambridge for some time after his graduation, publishing tracts that condemned British foreign, economic, and domestic policy, and talking treason with the glib tongue of a natural orator.

Too visible and outspoken to work for either MI-6 or the Soviets directly, Edgington's function had evolved into serving as a sort of general getaway driver for his compatriots who often found themselves in need of fast transportation to another country.

It was a fairly lucrative business—a real consideration for Edgington, since his father had found out about his Communist leanings and cut him off financially. He had been given the boat, however.

Sea Legs
was a cumbersome, old-fashioned six-hundred-foot yacht decorated with brass and heavy teakwood trim. It had been a jewel back in the thirties, when Edgington's father had had it built, but through the years it had fallen into disrepair. By the time Titus Wolfe walked up its gangway,
Sea Legs
was such a wreck that it seemed incredible to him that the thing could even remain afloat.

But its looks were deceiving. Beneath its decrepit exterior, it contained an engine more powerful than any police vessel in open water. It had been provided by Lucius Darling, through a chain of contacts, as had nearly half a ton of weaponry, all of it carefully hidden inside the wallboards and flooring.

Most of the profit generated by
Sea Legs
as spy transport went to Darling, but Edgington augmented his income considerably by running cocaine and heroin between North and South America. In this way he had achieved not only financial independence from his family, but had actually become rather wealthy.

"Never had to work a day in my life for it," he said with amusement.

Titus told him about his own situation—about Darling's intercession and his own decidedly vague prospects for the future.

"Well, the don did tell me what you've been doing for a living." Edgington took two tinned beers off a shelf and offered Titus one. "I say, does a field agent do anything besides kill people?"

Titus felt his face reddening. He was unaccustomed to discussing any aspect of his work with anyone.

"I'm trying to see what you'd be good for, you see." He held out the beer again. Titus ignored it.

"You—you can help me?"

Edgington laughed. "My dear boy, didn't Darling tell you? We've all stuck together. All of us from the old days. We don't work together or anything like that, of course, although I do see quite a few of the old boys in the course of my travels. I imagine I'm the only one who sees any of the others. But we do keep in touch, do one another favors, that sort of thing. Quite valuable, actually."

"The ... the whole Gang just slipped out from under the Russians?" Titus asked.

Edgington laughed. "Well, we didn't all take to your sort of work, old man, guns blazing and all that. We're not all in as much difficulty as you are." He took a long pull from the bottle. "Carsons, for example, works in the Department of Immigration. He can get you papers into or out of just about anywhere. And Henry—remember Henry, tall fellow—well, he's with the Exchequer. Access to all sorts of confiscated counterfeit money." He chortled. "Can you imagine, free money for the asking? No English currency, of course. That's burned straightaway. But no one cares about drachmas or pesos or yen. Comes in handy in a pinch, you can be sure of that."

"I see," Titus said, his mind reeling. "And all of them, the, the Gang ..."

"They were all working for the Reds in one capacity or another, although usually indirectly, through Darling. Still, there's risk, especially now that the Soviet machine is folding up like a Chinese box. We've had to stay together. Saved each other's arses more than once, I can tell you."

"You're saving mine now," Titus said humbly.

"Oh, you'll pay for it," the captain said with a grin. "The Coffeehouse Gang doesn't let you ride free for long."

E
dgington was able to
find Titus work as a strong-arm for a Colombian cocaine exporter. His job was to kill people in the cocaine kingpin's own circle who had become untrustworthy either through greed or power. An assassin's assassin. It was a supremely disagreeable job for Titus, but under the circumstances he could not afford to be choosy about what he did for a living.

For several months he languished in a sleazy hotel room in Bogota, hardly daring to step outside except to perform his duties, and wondering how long it would take for his Colombian employer to get rid of him with yet another hit man, when he was approached by a rival drug lord who offered Titus the equivalent of fifty thousand British pounds to blow up a boat in Manaus, Brazil.

He never asked what was on the boat, or who it belonged to. He simply did the job, collected his money, and left for Miami the following day.

In time, he—or rather his work, which was extraordinary by any standard—became known among the most discreet and dangerous segments of nearly every civilized country in the world.

Titus himself, however, remained an almost perfect mystery. For one thing, there were no photographs of him. One of the few advantages of his growing up in extreme poverty was that his childhood likeness had not been preserved anywhere. And once he got to Cambridge, Professor Darling had ensured (so subtly that even Titus had not been aware) that his protégé was not photographed for any reason. He had been thinking of the boy's future as a Soviet spy back then, but Titus's anonymity was of even greater value in his new incarnation as a mercenary.

No one outside the Coffeehouse Gang knew his name, either. The Colombian and his closest henchmen, who all happened to be on the boat in Manaus when it exploded, had called him "the English." The Brazilians had not known even that much about him.

Before long, Titus's skill became so finely honed that no one even identified his jobs as the work of one man. Only in the late nineties, following a spate of bombings on behalf of a number of Middle Eastern concerns, did an American journalist speculate that the terrorist activities filling the newspapers over the past two years might be the handiwork of a single brilliant mind.

The journalist, through painstaking but stunningly erroneous research, even found a name for the hitherto unknown terrorist: Hassam Bayat.

Titus had been drinking coffee in an Algerian cafe when he read about his new identity. He had laughed aloud: It had taken the press the better part of five years to pick up on the clues Titus had left leading to his false identity, but some bumble-headed writer had finally taken his subtle bait. Soon every counterterrorist organization in the world would be looking for "Hassam Bayat"—an Arab. Once the ball got rolling, no one would look twice at a blond, blue-eyed Englishman with the right papers. By the time he passed Rapid City, South Dakota, Titus Wolfe was getting excited. The initial phase of the Cheyenne assignment had occurred without incident. He was in the United States, his passport stamped, his presence unsuspicious. He had an appointment with the head of the purchasing department at the Air Force base to show some metal dies from a company in Minnesota. The real sales representative, with whom Titus had conversed in a bar two weeks before, was now decomposing in a Minneapolis parking garage.