The Infant of Prague
- Автор: Granger Bill
- Серия: November Man #8
- Год: 1987
- Язык: французский
- Год: Warner
- ISBN: 0446347809
- Жанр: Триллеры
Электронная книга - «The Infant of Prague». Краткое содержание книги:
For in a humble Chicago parish church, the sacred statue of the Infant of Prague is found weeping real tears. A visiting Czech child star actress, transfigured by the wondrous event, declares, on live television, her intent to remain in American in the name of Christ and freedom.
Only an operative as cynical and seasoned as the November Man can sense the sinister link between two dramatic, yet apparently unrelated defections. A miracle has plunged him into a vast global adventure. And it will take a miracle to get him through it alive.
The defection of a highly visible Czech sparks an international crisis, and the November Man is caught in the middle.
The tough guy understood right away.
“Presumably, she is safe now?” His voice had dropped a notch. The John Law tone was missing.
“Yes.”
“Did he say anything about… leaking this to… to his girlfriend?”
“No.”
“Why do you bring it up?”
“Because I put him on a train nearly three weeks ago and I didn’t tell him everything. I didn’t tell him the FBI wanted to talk to Miki. I didn’t tell him that Miki had been flogging himself for months with no takers. I didn’t tell him that this might be extremely dangerous. I said to him, ‘Be careful.’ It is something your mother might say to you. He got caught in the middle and it nearly cost him his life, not to mention costing us his services. He has made the best of a bad deal. He has repaired some of the damage.”
“You call killing four men in cold blood repairing the damages?”
“They were nothing, Mr. Director. You know that and so do I. Let’s stop dancing.” Hanley flared and it was as rare as an earthquake in Kansas. “The girl wanted to go home to Prague. He told me that. He talked to her a long time on the plane.” They did not know about the Section plane. There were matters they had no need to know.
“That still doesn’t justify—”
“You are talking like a Philadelphia lawyer,” Hanley said, though he had never met one. “I assure you of the resourcefulness of this agent. If you cut his string and put him outside, he won’t run away. He’ll wait for you. He has Miki and by now he has more information than Mrs. Neumann was able to give you in the last hour. Miki knew everything about the operations. He was a gossip and a gossip is inquisitive. I can assure you that this matter can be handled two ways: directly, quickly, by us; or you can bleed to death with a thousand cuts.”
NSC did not speak. FBI frowned but was silent. For a long time the four of them were silent.
“I can reach the President at Camp David,” NSC said. “I’ll have to explain it to him. Jules Bergen is one of his friends.”
“You don’t have to tell him about that part yet. Just about the CIA and the operation,” Hanley said.
“Yes. I suppose so. When do you make contact with your man?”
“He makes contact with me. I will have to see the paper.”
“You can take my word for it.”
“I’m afraid—”
“Hanley, are you questioning my integrity?” said the director of the NSC. He had seen them all, Hanley thought, they come and go and for a little time, they strut onstage as though there were no more elections.
“He is,” Hanley said.
“Damn him. Did you ever think of just lying to him?”
“Yes,” Hanley said. “But that’s what started the trouble, isn’t it?”
37
“This is very bad,” Jules Bergen said. He had said it once before, at the beginning of the meeting. No one pointed that out.
It was very late and the cleaning women were moving through the executive offices in their gray uniform dresses, polishing and emptying and wiping things down. The three men were in Jules Bergen’s suite at the northwest corner of the forty-ninth floor.
Jules was away from the other two men. He stood, small and precise, at the window wall and stared down at the narrow crosstown street. The yellow river of cabs surged up Sixth Avenue and a private scavenger truck was making a noisy collection of trash from the bowels of the network building.
Jules turned and looked at Willis and Ben Herguth.
“The President called me,” he said. “He said he had received a disturbing report about me, about the CIA, he said he called out of friendship.”
“What are we going to do?” Willis said.
“Anna Jelinak is on her way to Prague,” Jules said. “That’s because of you, Ben. I am really disappointed in you. That’s a terrible thing. Do you know what I got by messenger three hours ago? A jewelry box from our friend in Prague. It contains a finger with a ring on it. A finger as token that Miki is no more. Except I don’t think that’s the case. Do you think that’s the case, Ben?”
Ben felt utterly miserable.
“Julie—”
“Stop calling me that, Ben,” Jules Bergen said.
“I’m sorry. Four guys got whacked in Chi. How do I know this guy is gonna knock over the place? I told you I got on it right from the start, told everyone to button down because this Devereaux guy was coming into the States. Then I got this guy who knew Devereaux in the old days, this guy Ready, he’s after Devereaux now, I told him two hours ago the guy was holed up in Paris. All we gotta do is find out where. If he’s—”
“Who is Ready?” Jules asked.
“Well,” Willis broke in. “He’s a contractor, very independent, his files are washed in the Firm and I can’t get everything on him.…” Willis hesitated. Files on Ready were deliberately incomplete. “He knew about Miki, he knew all about him, I put him onto Ben and he said he would put the hit on Devereaux and Miki for five figures.”
“Is this the way it’s done?” Jules said.
“You gotta understand,” Willis said. “Nobody at that end of the business advertises in the Yellow Pages.”
“Anna Jelinak was trade,” Jules said. “Devereaux got Anna and gave her back to the Czechs in exchange for Miki. I got Miki’s finger but the fucking government has got Miki’s story. Your government, Willis, the one you guys are supposed to be in charge of. The FBI is on to our case and National Security is on your case. We are going to take the count together because of the incompetence of your agency, Willis. Why didn’t you get Anna back to Prague in the first place? Why didn’t you sanction Miki the moment he wanted to come across?”
“Nobody thought it would get this far,” Willis said, echoing the words used by scores of his predecessors suddenly caught in the middle of a scandal.
“This was business. And you didn’t take care of business. You had the contacts with Henkin,” Jules said. “And you helped us get favored treatment in exchange for ‘muling’ a few hundred arms every time we packed up our movie equipment and headed home from Prague. Henkin was greased, Langley got its arms to ship to Afghan rebels and we were… compensated. The money was cleaned very nicely in Prague. And now the FBI is going to want to know about casino gambling revenues and where they went. And the National Security Council is going to want to know what Langley knew and when Langley knew it about trading in arms with a Communist country. What a stupid idea, to take Czech arms and send them to the Afghans.…”
“Not so stupid,” Willis said. “The rebels knocked over an arsenal twenty-nine months ago, all kinds of Soviet and Czech weapons. The Soviets just don’t have any idea of how many because they’re nearly as fucked up as our own quartermaster corps. So we give the rebels Communist weapons. And Henkin makes money. And you get a chance to clean a lot of money while you’re making movies. Don’t bring this all down on the Firm, Jules. We can all share a little blame for letting this go so far—”
“Where is Miki?”
Jules never shouted.
Ben Herguth grabbed his own mouth and squeezed it until it hurt. When it really hurt, he let go. He said, “Look, Julie, this is a bombshell, no doubt about it. But we know the source. It comes out of one guy. This guy Devereaux. All we do is whack him.”
“All we do is whack him,” Jules mimicked. “That’s what you said about Kay Davis in Chicago. Is she whacked?”
Ben Herguth said nothing.
“She is not. If there had been no Kay Davis, there would have been no ‘miracle’ and there would have been no defection of Anna Jelinak and—”
“Look, Julie, you want her whacked, I’ll whack her myself. And right now, I got the guy going in after Devereaux. He’s in Paris, it’s a matter of time, he hasn’t come out yet. So just wait a couple more hours and—”