Legends

“Inoculations wear off.” She stood on her toes and kissed him lightly on the lips. “Bye for now, Martin Odum.”

“Uh-huh. Bye.”

Crystal Quest was in wrathful dudgeon. “There’s only one thing more revolting than having to target one of your own,” she declared to the wallahs scattered around her sanctum, “and that’s bungling the hit. Where do we hire marksmen these days, will somebody kindly enlighten me. Coney Island popgun concessions where you win a plastic doll if you topple the clown into the pan filled with dish water? Oh my God, it’s pathetic. Pa-the-tic.”

“We should have given the assignment to Lincoln Dittmann,” one of the newer wallahs suggested. “I understand he’s a crackerjack shot—”

Quest, her head angled, her eyes unblinking, gazed at the speaker as if he just might have come up with the solution to their problem. “Where did you pick up that nugget of information?” she inquired in a husky whisper, humoring the wallah before decapitating him.

The young man sensed that he had ventured onto quicksand. “I was reading into the Central Registry 201 files to get a handle on our assets in the field …” His voice faltered. He looked around for a buoy but no one seemed interested in throwing him one.

Quest’s mouth sagged open as her skull bobbed up and down in wonderment. “Lincoln Dittmann! Now there’s an idea whose time has come. Ha! Will somebody put the neophyte here out of his misery.”

Quest’s chief of staff, a thick skinned timeserver who had weathered his share of storms in the DDO’s seventh floor bailiwick, said very evenly, “Dittmann and Odum are one and the same individual, Frank. You would have seen that they were cross-referenced in the 201 files if you’d read the fine print on the first page.”

“That’s strike one,” Quest informed Frank. “If you read the fine print on your employment contract, you’ll see that we operate by the three-strikes-and-you’re-out rule in the DDO.” She swiveled three hundred and sixty degrees in her chair as if she were winding herself up. “Okay. I’ll recapitulate,” she said, stifling her irritation. “We made an honest effort to talk Martin Odum out of walking back the cat on Samat Ugor-Zhilov. Martin’s a consenting adult. He’s doing what he has to do. And we’re going to do what we have to do to make sure he never catches up to the Samat in question. This is a priority matter, which means it gets our full and undivided attention. Where did Martin Odum go when he left Israel? What leads is he following? Who is he planning to talk to? And what resources do we have on the ground—what resources can we throw into the theater of eventual operations—to make sure I get to wear my sackcloth and ashes before this thing blows up in our faces?”

1997: MARTIN ODUM PLAYS INNOCENT

LEANING OVER THE DEAD DOG, MARTIN SLIT OPEN ITS STOMACH with a safety razor, then reached in with the gloved hand to cut out the organs and create a stomach cavity. He motioned to one of the fedayeen students, who removed the frame from the hive and gingerly set it down on the road next to the dead dog. “Honey is very stable,” Martin said with a laugh. “Tell him it won’t blow up in his face until it’s detonated.” Using a spatula, he carefully scraped the beeswax from the honeycombs until he had accumulated a quantity the size of a tennis ball, then wired it to the tiny homemade plastic radio receiver and slipped the package into the stomach cavity. Using a thick needle and a length of butcher cord, he sewed up the opening. Rising to his feet, he stepped back to survey his handiwork.

“Any questions?” he demanded.

One of the fedayeen said something in Arabic and the Russian with the heavy gold ring on his pinky translated it into English. “He asks from how far away can we set off the charge?”

“Depends on what equipment you’re using,” Martin said. “A cordless phone or a Walkman will work up to a half a mile away. One of those automatic pagers that doctors wear on their belts can set off a charge five, six miles away. A VHF scanner or cellular mobile phone is effective for ten or twelve miles as long as the weather is good and there is no frequency jamming.”