Time to Kill (6 page)

‘Pennsylvania.'

Close, thought Slater. Almost too close. ‘Where's he going?'

‘How the hell do I know? If I did I certainly wouldn't tell you.'

‘I don't think it was very secure, telling me in a letter like that.'

‘It's the system.'

‘Everyone like me get such a letter, simply sent through the mail?'

‘There aren't a lot of people like you,' said Peebles, in weak sarcasm. ‘Guys who've been involved in criminal cases, organized crime prosecutions, sure, all the time.'

‘How many people like me have you sent such letters to?'

‘If I was asked that by somebody else like you, would you want me to answer?'

‘The letter said if I had any cause or reason for further information I was to call you,' reminded Slater. ‘How many calls do you get from defectors?'

Peebles hesitated. ‘You're the first I've had.'

‘What about your department?'

‘We don't share cases,' lied Peebles, his embarrassment turned to anger at believing he had been made to look stupid.

‘You any reason to believe I am at any risk from Mason's release?'

Peebles looked sideways along the bench in genuine astonishment. ‘Absolutely not! I told you, he's been a model prisoner. He wouldn't have got maximum remission if there was a history of threats, would he?'

‘You're not operational, a field agent, are you?'

‘What's that got to do with anything?'

‘Maybe a lot. Perhaps we'll need to keep in touch?' suggested Slater. There'd been little to arouse any professional fear. What incongruities there had been were easily accountable by the fact that Peebles was clearly a back office clerk.

‘If there is a need, let's do it properly next time, OK?'

‘Very much OK,' came back Slater. ‘You need to talk to me you do just that, telephone and arrange this sort of meeting. Not send a letter that could have been intercepted or mislaid and caused me all sorts of problems.'

‘I don't imagine there being a need.'

‘Keep in mind the approach I want if it does.'

Slater remained on the park bench, watching Peebles walk away, not once bothering – or allowing himself – to look back. An adequate check, as far as it had gone, decided Slater. Now came the hopeful double check. Slater hailed a passing cab to take him back to the station, where once again he stacked his pocket-bulging coins on the telephone kiosk ledge, fed seventy-five cents into the box and dialled his long ago ascribed number at the CIA's Langley headquarters.

‘Yes?' demanded a voice before the telephone appeared to ring.

‘I want to speak to Burt Hodges.' The raw-boned, laconic-voiced Texan – certainly not this voice – had been his case officer from the moment of his defection and through the seemingly never-ending debriefing sessions.

‘Who?'

‘Hodges. Burt Hodges.'

‘There's no one of that name here. Who is this?'

‘I once had a lot of dealings with Burt Hodges. This was the number I was given to keep in touch.'

‘How long ago?'

Slater swallowed. ‘Fifteen years.'

‘No one named Burt Hodges has worked here in the ten years I've been here. Why don't you tell me your name? Maybe I can help?'

‘What about Art Cole?' He'd been Hodges' partner, a sharp-featured, critically impatient man, Slater remembered.

‘Art retired maybe eight, nine years ago.'

‘Can you tell me how to get in touch with him?'

‘No,' refused the voice, at once. ‘You give me your name, a number to reach you on, and I'll try to get a message to him.'

It had been a stupid, unprofessional attempt, Slater accepted. ‘It doesn't matter.'

‘Maybe it does. If you don't want to give me your name why don't we set up a meeting? It might be that I could help with whatever you wanted to talk to Burt or Art about.'

It was extremely unlikely but perhaps Jack Mason still had friends, acquaintances, within the Agency. The debriefing agents – the CIA department to which he knew he was connected – had never known his Frederick relocation. ‘It doesn't matter,' repeated Slater, replacing the phone before the man at the other end could argue any further.

*   *   *

Mason's summons to the warden's office came two days after the parole board debacle. The only person he recognized, apart from Hubert Harrison, was Glynis Needham, whose trouser suit today was a muted brown check. There was no introduction to the other three men. A woman technician sat beside tape-recording apparatus on a separate table, a back-up notebook already open before her. Mason had expected Frank Howitt to be present, but he wasn't. The chief prison guard hadn't been on the landing in the last two days. Gerry Garson had, but studiously ignored Mason.

Harrison said, ‘We'd like you to help us with what happened when you went to the Washington parole board meeting.'

‘Is this an official enquiry?'

‘Not yet,' said the governor. ‘We're just trying to get things straight in our heads.'

‘Shouldn't I be allowed legal representation?'

There was a stir among the unnamed men. One of them, a fat, white-haired man, said, ‘Why should you need a lawyer?'

‘I believe myself to have been the victim of a conspiracy,' declared Mason. ‘I believe an attempt was made by Prison Officer Frank Howitt to have my remission revoked by staging an apparent attempt by me to escape from custody.'

There was a fresh stir throughout the room. The records clerk looked up from her scribbled notepad to check her machine.

‘That's a serious accusation,' said the gruff-voiced parole officer.

‘To have lost five years remission would have been very serious to me indeed,' said Mason.

‘Why don't you tell us what happened?' suggested another of the unnamed men.

‘I have already given an account to the parole board, which Ms Needham has heard,' said Mason. ‘The parole board also heard from police officers at Reagan airport to whom I immediately surrendered, after Prison Officer Howitt vanished. I don't think it advisable for me to give any further details until I've had the opportunity to discuss everything in full with my attorney and received legal advice upon filing a civil claim upon my release.'

‘A conspiracy needs the involvement of more than one person,' said the third stranger, who had so far not spoken.

‘I know,' said Mason.

‘Are you alleging more than one person was involved in a conspiracy against you?'

‘I could be.'

‘Who are they?'

‘They will be named in any claim, if I am advised to make one,' said Mason.

‘This threat might need to be brought before the parole board, for their consideration,' warned Glynis Needham.

‘As would that threat need to be brought before a civil court, most definitely if it in any way influenced my already agreed remission,' said Mason.

The woman flushed. The white-haired man said, ‘I don't think Ms Needham's remark was a threat.'

‘That's reassuring,' said Mason.

‘There's no cause for this meeting to degenerate into acrimony,' said the warden.

‘That's reassuring, too, sir,' said Mason. ‘I'd like to use this opportunity formally to request a meeting with the lawyer who represented me at my trial and who settled the estate after my mother's death.' Already knowing from his close study of his own file that it was, he added, ‘I would expect the name of my attorney to be on my records. I can, of course, supply it if it's not listed.'

‘That is your right,' agreed Harrison. ‘There doesn't appear to be any further progress we can make here today.'

‘I would like everyone here to accept and understand that this is the very last thing that I want – or wanted – to happen,' said Mason.

‘An asshole!' declared John Peebles. ‘Prancing about like someone out of a James Bond movie.'

‘They're not worth watching,' judged Bourne, the film buff.

‘He didn't put me down, though,' insisted Peebles. ‘I told him not to be so fucking stupid and to scurry back into his little hidey-hole. And not to bother us again with stupid questions.'

‘Well done,' said Bourne. Liar, he thought.

Five

I
t was gone nine by the time Slater had checked David's homework and they'd eaten supper together and settled the boy before Slater and Ann were alone. Even then Slater hesitated, briefly tempted to break the vow and not after all tell Ann of the letter, uncertain of her reaction. But he didn't, even more fearful – and professionally aware of the erosion that deception brought – of her somehow discovering that he had abandoned their solemn, mutual promise at the first moment of pressure.

Slater said, ‘There's something you should see.'

Ann looked up, smiling, from her book. ‘What?'

Without any preliminary explanation Slater offered her the letter, watching as the colour as well as the smile drained from Ann's face. She looked up at him and whispered, as if sharing a secret, ‘Oh my God!'

‘It's all right,' insisted Slater.

‘How can it be all right! How can anything be all right!'

‘Listen. Please listen.' Quietly, over-stressing the control, Slater recounted the Washington visit and his encounter with Peebles, at her interrupting insistence relaying word for word everything about their exchanges, as well as his assessments of them.

‘You think he made up the amendment legislation!' she challenged at once.

‘I thought he guessed at it,' qualified Slater. ‘And I was right. When I couldn't reach the guys I originally dealt with at Langley I checked at the Library of Congress. It was a House bill in 1992 that included the release warning: it was primarily intended for organized crime witnesses within the programme.'

‘Why didn't …?' Ann waved her arms, seeking the identity.

‘Peebles,' supplied Slater.'

‘Why didn't Peebles know the right statute?'

Slater shrugged. ‘He's a form-filling clerk, not accustomed to being questioned or needing to show any initiative.'

‘How do you know that?' demanded Ann.

‘It was practically written on his forehead.'

She didn't smile. ‘That's not good enough. You know that's not good enough.'

‘Darling, it's OK.'

‘It's not OK,' she refused. ‘I said it would never go away and it never will.'

‘Jack's been a model prisoner. That's why he's got his remission.'

‘You don't know him. No one knows him like I do. He won't have forgotten. Or forgiven. He'll want to expose us, maybe even to the Russian embassy. Hurt us as much as he can. What would it do to David? Oh my God!'

‘How can he find us?'

‘I don't know,' said the woman, emptily. ‘But I know that he'll try.'

‘And fail. There's no way he can find us.'

‘We can't be sure,' said Ann, even emptier. ‘Pennsylvania's the next goddamn state!'

‘That's not going to make it any easier for him. Or dangerous, for us.' Spacing the words in the hope of reassuring her, Slater said, ‘Jack Mason doesn't know where we relocated. Ann Mason and Dimitri Sobell have vanished: ceased to exist.'

‘I knew it was all going to come back, one day,' she insisted, her mind blocked.

Slater hadn't expected the collapse to be as bad as this; hadn't expected a collapse at all. Until this moment he'd believed that over the years they'd laid all the threatening, haunting ghosts: talked everything out to exhaustion and satisfied each other – and themselves – that they could never be discovered for who they had once been and who they were now. He was certainly convinced that he had moved on and was disappointed to find that Ann hadn't, that in effect Ann had been deceiving him with her assurances and insistences. What else wasn't she sure about? Them maybe? If she wasn't then the deception was practically unimaginable. So why was he imagining it; raising his own, taunting ghosts? She had to love him as totally as he loved her. He supposed on balance he had made the greater sacrifice, although he'd never considered it as such, in abandoning his very existence and his country for his love of her. But after the first few days of understandable disbelief at truly learning who he was and what his function had been, running her husband as a traitor, Ann had just as willingly stepped out into the unknown; been prepared even for the retribution from Moscow he'd honestly warned could engulf them if they were ever found, as well as enduring the humiliation and exposure of their affair at Mason's trial, although fortunately she'd been spared an actual court appearance. Never once had she questioned or complained about the surreal initial months, months that stretched into more than a year, totally stripping herself of one, albeit miserable life to adopt another. And she wasn't questioning it now. Ann was behaving like this, seeming almost immediately to crumble,
because
she'd adapted so completely and loved him so absolutely and she was terrified of losing everything they had.

He said now, ‘Nothing's come back. Nothing
is
going to come back. All right, maybe I was knocked off balance when I got the letter. Which obviously I had to check out. Now that I have I'm satisfied there's nothing sinister; nothing for us to worry or panic about. We just go on as we have been doing for most of the past fifteen years, living our lives, enjoying our lives. Nothing bad is going to happen to us. I won't let anything bad happen to us.'

‘You said Peebles told you Jack will be out in four or five weeks?'

Slater saw that his wife was wet-eyed, although not actually crying. ‘Something like that.'

‘You definitely said four or five weeks!'

‘I know what I said, Ann. There's no reason for us to argue.' He couldn't remember the last time they had even squabbled.