Legends

The DDO’s people in Langley had anticipated this and laid in the plumbing. If someone nosed around the Trieste clinic, he would come across a record of a Lincoln Dittmann being treated by a bone specialist for three days, and paying his bill in cash the morning he was discharged. As for the book, Cannon Fodder had a paper trail. The Egyptian’s contact would discover a 1990 reference to the publication of the book in Publishers Weekly. If he dug deeper he would come up with two reviews, the first in a Virginia junior college student newspaper praising one of the school’s own teachers for his Civil War scholarship; the second in a Richmond, Virginia, historical quarterly devoted to the War of Secession, accusing Lincoln Dittmann of having plagiarized great chunks of a privately printed 1932 doctorate treatise on the battle of Fredericksburg. There would be a small item in a Richmond newspaper repeating the plagiarism charge and reporting that a committee of the author’s peers had examined the original treatise and Dittmann’s Cannon Fodder, and discovered entire passages that matched. The article went on to say that Lincoln Dittmann had been fired from his post teaching history at a local junior college. Chain bookstores would have reported modest sales before the book was withdrawn from circulation. If anyone hunted hard enough, copies of the first and only edition (what was left of the original five-hundred-book print run) could be found in the Strand in Manhattan and several other second-hand bookstores across the country. On the inside of the back jacket there would be a photograph of Dittmann with a Schimelpenick jutting from his lips, along with a brief biography: born and raised in Pennsylvania, a Civil War buff from the time he started visiting battlefields as a youngster, an expert on the Battle of Fredericksburg, currently teaching Civil War history at a Virginia junior college.

Waiting for the Egyptian to return, Lincoln plucked a Schimelpenick from the metal tin in his jacket pocket and held the flame of a lighter to the end of it. He inhaled deeply and let the smoke gush through his nostrils. “Mind if I smoke?” he inquired politely.

“Smoking,” Leroy remarked, “poisons the lungs. You ought to give it up.”

“Trouble is,” Lincoln said, “to give up smoking you need to become someone else. Tried that once. Went cold turkey for a while. But it didn’t work out in the end.”

After awhile the Egyptian returned to the room and settled into the wooden chair set catty-corner to the sofa. “Tell me more about what you did in Croatia?” he instructed Lincoln.

Croatia had been Crystal Quest’s brainchild. For all her imperiousness, she was old school: She believed a good legend needed more than a paper trail to give it authenticity. “If he’s supposed to be an arms merchant,” she’d argued when she dragged Lincoln up to the seventh floor at Langley to get the director to sign off on the operation, “there’s got to be a trail of genuine transactions that the opposition can verify.”

“You’re proposing to actually set him up in the arms business?”

“Yes, sir, I am.”

“Whom would he sell to?” the director had demanded, clearly unsettled by the notion of one of the Company’s agents establishing his bona fides by becoming a bona fide arms merchant.

“He’ll buy from the Soviets who are running garage sales from their arsenals in East Germany, and deliver to the Bosnians. Since U.S. policy tilts toward the Bosnians, our Congressional oversight commissars won’t give us a hard time if they get wind of it, which they won’t if we’re careful. The idea behind this is to put Lincoln in the path of one Sami Akhbar, an Azerbaijani who buys arms for an al-Qa’ida cell in Bosnia.”

“As usual you’ve covered all the bases, Fred,” the director had noted with a flagrant lack of enthusiasm.

“Sir, that’s what you pay me for,” she’d shot back.

Lincoln had spent the next four months tooling around the Dalmatian coast in a serviceable Buick, avoiding the Serb undercover agents like the plague, using a fax to contact a shadowy Frankfurt entity and purchase truckloads of the Soviet surplus arms being sold off by Russian soldiers soon to be recalled to the USSR from East Germany, meeting the drivers at night on remote back roads as they came across Slovenia, then arranging for delivery at crossing points on the Dalmatian coast between Croatia and Bosnia. It was at one of these pre-dawn meetings that Lincoln first felt the fish nibbling at the bait. “Could you get your hands on explosives?” a Muslim dealer who went by the name Sami Akhbar had casually asked as he took possession of a two-truck convoy loaded with TOW antitank missiles and mortars and handed Lincoln a satchel filled with crisp $100 bills bound in wrappers from a Swiss bank.

Lincoln had dealt with Sami five times in the past four months. “What do you have in mind?” he had inquired.

“I have a Saudi friend who is shopping around for Semtex or ammonium nitrate.”