Siro by David Ignatius (short books to read txt) 📕

at this late stage. “I suspect that they discovered the nature of our game the same way half of Washington seems to have found out—as a result of gossip among people who are supposed to keep secrets, but don’t; and through cable traffic that is supposed to be secret, but isn’t. They may also have had a bit of help.”

“From whom?”

“From that appalling fellow Ascari, the Iranian.”

“How do you know?”

“The Greeks apparently photographed him entering the Soviet embassy in Athens. He was mad at Hoffman.”

“Oh, Jesus,” said Taylor. “How much do you think he told the Russians?”

“Quite a lot, I suspect. Though he may not have told them all the details about his cousins, the smugglers. For business reasons.”

“Where’s Hoffman?”

“He’s gone to ground. I suspect that he’s angry at me again.”

Stone took a sip of his coffee and dropped in another lump of sugar. It disappeared with a kerplunk.

“Bad news,” said Taylor.

“I suppose so,” said Stone, determined to regain his happy equilibrium. “Although I’m not sure it really matters all that much. If Congress knows, why shouldn’t the KGB? Anyway, I believe we’ve got our people out of harm’s way.”

“Not all of them,” said Taylor. “You’re forgetting Anna’s man. The Armenian.”

“So I am.”

“He’s got problems. When he goes to pick up that package in a couple of weeks—with your extra goodies thrown in—he’s going to get nailed.”

“Quite likely. I agree.”

“So shouldn’t we try to call off Ascari’s delivery service?”

“I suspect that’s impossible. Ascari’s friends and relations are probably already on their way. I doubt we could call them back now even if we tried.”

“We could at least send a message to the Armenian, warning him to stay away from the drop site.”

“Dreadful idea. Any message would be insecure. It would almost guarantee that he would get caught. This way, he at least has a chance.”

“You had better tell Anna. This means a lot to her. She’s going to be upset.”

Stone looked at Taylor with that blank, affectless gaze that most people regarded as a mark of professionalism.

“Why do we have to tell her?” he said. “It doesn’t matter, and she would only be tempted to do something silly.”

Stone buttered a piece of toast.

Taylor stared at him. “I must not have heard you right,” he said.

“You heard me fine. You’re just getting sentimental.”

“Fuck you,” said Taylor. With this last, cold-blooded exchange, something had snapped in him.

“Worse than sentimental,” said Stone. “You’re becoming rude. And disloyal.”

“Fuck you,” Taylor said again. For him, the long seduction was over. He was, in that moment, sick to death of Stone and his fellow conspirators—people who, for all their noble pretenses, had their thumbs pressed permanently on the moral balance. He stood up from Stone’s finely laid breakfast table, rattling the china cups and saucers.

“Sit down,” said Stone.

“I’m sorry,” said Taylor. “But I’ve had it. Find somebody else.”

“Sit down,” he said again, in that resonant voice that had parted the waters of life for so many years. Taylor ignored him.

“I’m leaving,” he said. “You tell Anna about the problem with the Armenian, or you can count me as an enemy from here on out. And I warn you, I’m the wrong person to have as an enemy. I’m no pushover, like your country-club friends. I’m as devious as you are, and I don’t give a shit what happens to me. Or you. So you tell Anna. Got it?”

Stone didn’t answer, but Taylor knew he would do it. If there was any consistently reliable aspect of Stone’s character, it was his ability to discern and act upon his own self-interest. Taylor walked up the flagstone terrace of Stone’s garden, through the French doors, and let himself out onto the early-morning commotion of N Street. It wasn’t a new beginning. That would be unlikely for a man of Taylor’s age and temperament. But it was at least an end.

42

Stone proposed to meet Anna at the place where they had begun nearly a year before—the Holiday Inn off I-270. “How sweet,” said Anna sarcastically when he suggested it. It seemed like one of Stone’s typical ploys, and she wondered what the old man could possibly want from her now. But when she got to the motel, and saw the too bright wallpaper and the tacky furniture, she felt something like nostalgia. It was like the compulsion that brings people back to high school reunions; they might not care any longer about the place or the people, but they still want to mark the distance traveled.

The I-270 industrial park surrounding the motel looked the same a year later, only more so. A new Mexican restaurant had opened, along with several more office buildings to house the new companies that had come to feed at the federal trough. Many of them seemed to specialize in the defense establishment’s latest obsession, known as “C-three-I,” for communications, command and control, and intelligence. One of the newly arrived firms, headquartered across the highway from the Holiday Inn, proposed to build “hardened” facsimile machines that would be able to send messages even after a nuclear war. The machines would cost several hundred thousand dollars apiece, but as the company’s executives liked to say, you couldn’t put a price tag on the nation’s security.

Stone was already in the motel room when Anna arrived. A year ago, he had seemed a figure of measureless mystery to Anna. Now she felt she knew him as well as her own father; rather better, in fact. Gone, too, was the look of intense fatigue that had struck Anna at their first meeting. In its place now was a kind of empty glow, like the look retired people get when they begin spending their time playing golf in Florida.

“This will all blow over,” said Stone after shaking hands.

“I’m not so sure,” said Anna. “They’re asking a lot of questions, and they already seem to know most of the answers.”

“They have to do that, make a show of it. But when they’re