Legends

She straightened in the seat. “Yes, sir, I did. Dante and I go back a long way—I’m sure the fact that I delivered the message in person convinced him we were not playing pickup sticks.” She listened for a moment. Up front the wallah surmised that the tinny bursts resonating from the earpiece were conveying exasperation in both tone and content.

Quest scratched at her scalp through her rust colored hair. “I am definitely not going soft, Director—soft is not my style. I ran him when he was operational. Fact that he came in from the cold, as that English spy writer put it, doesn’t change anything. As far as I’m concerned, I’m still running him. As long as he doesn’t remember what happened—as long as he keeps his nose out of this Samat business—there’s no reason to revisit that decision.” She listened again, then said, coldly, “I take your point about unnecessary risks. If he steps over the fault—”

The man on the other end of the phone finished the sentence for her; the wallah at the wheel could see his boss in the rear view mirror nodding as she took aboard an order.

“Count on it,” Quest said.

The line must have gone dead in her ear—the Director was notorious for ending conversations abruptly—because Quest leaned forward and dropped the telephone onto the passenger seat. Sinking back against the door, staring sightlessly out of the window, she started muttering disjointed phrases. After a while the words began taking on a sense. “Directors come and go,” she could be heard saying. “The ones who wind up in Langley through their ties to the White House aren’t the keepers of the flame—we are. We man the ramparts while the Director busts his balls working the Georgetown dinner circuit. We run the agents who put their lives on the line prowling the edge of empire. And we pay the price. Field agent drinks too much, controlling officer gets a hangover. Field agent turns sour, we curdle. Field agent dies, we break out the sackcloth and ashes and mourn for forty days and forty nights.” Quest sighed for her lost youth, her femaleness gone astray. “None of which,” she continued, her voice turning starchy, “would prevent us from terminating the son of a bitch if it looked as if he might compromise the family’s jewel.”

Martin’s bedside alarm went off an hour before first light. In case Fred had managed to plant a microphone after all, he switched on the radio and turned up the volume to cover his foot falls and the sound of doors closing. Still in his tracksuit, he climbed to the roof and worked the bellows of his smoker, sending the colony of bees in the second of the two hives into a frenzy of gorging on honey. Then he reached into the narrow space between the top of the frames and the top of the hive to extract the small packet wrapped in oilcloth. Back downstairs, Martin opened the refrigerator and stuck a plastic basin under the drip notch. In the faint light that came from the open refrigerator, he unfolded the oilcloth around the packet and spread out the contents on his cot. There were half a dozen American and foreign passports, a French Livret de Famille, three internal passports from East European countries, a collection of laminated driver’s licenses from Ireland and England and several East Coast states, an assortment of lending library and frequent flyer and Social Security cards, some of them brittle with age. He collected the identity papers and distributed them evenly between the cardboard lining and the top of the shabby leather valise with stickers from half a dozen Club Med resorts pasted on it. He filled the valise with shirts and underwear and socks and toilet articles, folded Dante Pippen’s lucky white silk bandanna on top, then changed his clothing, putting on a light three-piece suit and the sturdy rubber soled shoes he’d worn when he and Minh had hiked trails in the Adirondacks the year before. Looking around to see what he’d forgotten, he remembered the bees. He quickly scribbled a note to Tsou Xing asking him to use the spare front door key he’d left in the cash register to check the beehives every other day; if there wasn’t enough honey in the frames to see the bees through until spring, Tsou would know how to brew up sugar candy with the ingredients under the sink and deposit it in the hives.