Potboiler

The second man was hugely tall and broad as a bear. An entire carton of Marlboros jutted from one pocket of his tentlike sportcoat. In the background was a contingent of expressionless men armed with machine guns as well as a squad of improbably buxom women wearing the uniforms of the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders.

“I have no idea,” Pfefferkorn said.

“East Zlabian Lord High President Kliment Thithyich,” Paul said.

“The guy I shot?”

“You didn’t shoot him.”

“I didn’t?”

Paul shook his head.

“Thank God,” Pfefferkorn said.

“If I were you, I wouldn’t start congratulating myself just yet. You did kill Dragomir Zhulk.”

“Oh.”

Paul minimized the photo of Savory and Thithyich. “A lot of what Savory told you was true. The books were coded. Bill did work for us. And you were his intended replacement. But the part about Blood Eyes causing Kliment Thithyich to get shot was bullshit.”

“Then who shot him?”

“He did.”

“He shot himself? Why?”

“To create a pretext for invading West Zlabia,” Paul said. “He’s already filthy rich—casinos, mostly, plus some telecom and media—but control of the West Zlabian gas field would bump him up to the big leagues. He’s tried rallying international support for an invasion through more respectable channels. You might’ve noticed his campaign to promote awareness about West Zlabian human rights violations? It didn’t catch on. The opposite, in fact: Thithyich actually lost a few neutral-to-favorable percentage points, probably because, as our own polls indicate, ninety-six percent of people haven’t heard of either Zlabia, and eighty-one percent of those that have can’t tell them apart. You can imagine how antsy Thithyich must be getting if he’s willing to fake an assassination attempt. It hurts, getting shot in the ass.”

“Then why didn’t he invade?”

“Because he’s a chicken. Remember, before the Wall came down, we propped up guys like him as a bulwark against the Soviets. They have the most grotesque sense of entitlement. He was counting on our support as part of any offensive. We’ve since made it clear that we have no intention of getting involved in another war for the sake of lining his pockets.”

“So there was no code in Blood Eyes?”

“There was, but it was a dummy—a call-and-response code. We wanted to test whether your name brand would have sufficient penetrance to be useful for future operations. And did it ever. Perfect score.”

“But I mangled it,” Pfefferkorn said.

“Mangled—”

“The flag. ‘In one fluid motion.’”

“That wasn’t the flag.”

“It wasn’t?”

“No.”

“Then what was?”

“‘Sank to his knees, gasping for breath.’”

It depressed Pfefferkorn to realize that he had let such a wretched cliché slip through the cracks. “How did you know I would take the manuscript in the first place?” he asked.

“We knew. We have a profile on you running back to the seventies. You were emotionally needy, financially strapped, alternately self-congratulatory and self-loathing, led to believe that your more successful friend held you to be the superior writer. It was the perfect storm of ego and greed. And, like I said, you showed big promise. We were all set to bring you in and give you the hard sell when forty percent of our covert network, including all of Zlabia, was scrapped due to budget cuts. Believe that? Thirty-three years of work—gone, overnight.” Paul shook his head forlornly. “Politics.”

“How does Blood Night fit into all of this?”

“Thithyich got wind of the cuts. From Savory, presumably. So he hurried up before our operatives in the field were recalled and had Savory slip you a doctored code—”

“Blood Night.”

“Right. Sayonara, Dragomir Zhulk.”

“Let me get this straight,” Pfefferkorn said. “Thithyich got Savory to get me to get my publisher to get your men to do his dirty work.”

“Give him points for creativity. We don’t communicate with the operatives directly. They only scan for the flags. There was no way for them to tell the difference between a real code and the doctored one. It was a masterstroke. With Zhulk gone, nobody’s driving the bus. There are at least half a dozen factions vying for control: the Party, sure, but also the anarcho-environmentalists, the Trotskyites, the Chomskyites, the nihil-pacifists, the open sourcers. It’s a total free-for-all. All the East Zlabians have to do now is pick their moment and they’ll waltz right across the border.”

Pfefferkorn massaged his temples. “So who kidnapped Carlotta?”

“That would be the May Twenty-sixers. West Zlabian counter-counter-revolutionaries. Third-generation hard-liners raised during perestroika on a steady diet of disinformation, believing themselves the last great hope for Communism and dissatisfied with what they perceive as Zhulk’s passivity, although ironically, it’s his propaganda machine that created them in the first place. They’ve seen Thithyich building up his forces and they’re spoiling for a fight. They’re also short on firepower. So that’s what they’re asking for.”

Pfefferkorn thought. “The workbench.”