made the first move. He was the stalker, the role established.
The strategy was classic: tracks clearly defined for the stalker to follow, and at the chosen moment-least expected-the tracks would not be there, the stalker bewildered, exposed-the trap sprung.
Like Bray, Taleniekov could travel anywhere he wished, with or without official sanction. Over the years, both had learned too many methods; a plethora of false papers were out there for purchase, hundreds of men everywhere ready to provide concealment or transportation, cover or weapons-any and all. There were only two basic requirements: identities and money.
Neither he nor Taleniekov lacked either. Both came with the profession, the identities quite naturally, the money less so--more often than not the result of having been hung by bureaucratic delays in the forwarding of payments demanded. Every specialist worth his rank had his own personal sources of funds. Payments exaggerated, monies diverted and deposited in stable territories. The objective was neither theft nor wealth, merely survival. A man in the field had only to be burned once or twice to learn the necessity of economic back-ups.
Chapter Six
Bray had accounts under various names in Paris, Munich, London, Geneva and Lisbon. One avoided Rome and the Communist bloc; the Italian Treasury was madness, and banking in the Eastern sateUites too corrupt.
Scofield rarely thought about the money that was his for the spending; in the back of his mind he supposed he would give it back one day. Had the predatory Congdon not flirted with his own temptations and made the of- ficial termination so complicated, Bray might have walked in the next morning and handed him the bankbooks.
Not now. The undersecretary's actions ruled it out. One did not hand over several hundred thousand dollars to a man who tried to orchestrate one's elimination while remaining outside the act itself. It was a very professional concept. Scofield recalled that years ago it had been brought to its zenith by the killers of the Matarese. But they were assassins for hire; there'd been no one like them in centuries, since the days of Hasan ibn-al-Sabbah.
There would be no one like them ever again, and someone like Daniel Congdon was a pale joke in comparison.
Congdon. Scofield laughed and reached into his pocket for his cigarettes.
The new director of Consular Operations was not a fool and only a fool would underestimate him, but he had the upper-Washington mentality so prev- alent in the management of clandestine services. He did not really understand what being in the field did to a man; he might mouth the phrases, but he did not see the simple line of action and reaction. Few did, or wanted to, because to recognize it meant admitting knowledge of abnormality in a subordinate whose function the department-or the Company--could not do without. Quite simply, pathological behavior was a perfectly normal way of life for a field man, and no particular attention was paid to it. The man in the field accepted the fact that he was a criminal before any crimes had been committed. Therefore, at the first hint of activity he took measures to protect himself before anything happened; it was second nature.
Bray had done just that. While the messenger from Taleniekov had been seated across the room in the hotel on Nebraska Avenue, Scofield had made several calls. The first was to his sister in Minneapolis: he was flying out to the Midwest in a couple of hours and would see her in a day or so.
The second was to a friend in Maryland who was a deep sea fisherman with a roomful of stuffed victims and trophies on the walls: where was a good, small place in the Caribbean that would take him on short notice? The friend had a friend in Charlotte Amalie; he owned a hotel and always kept two or three rooms open for just such emergencies. The fisherman from Maryland would call him for Bray.
So, for all intents and purposes, as of the night of the sixteenth, he was en route to the Midwest.. or the Caribbean. Both more than fifteen hundred miles from Washington-where he remained unobserved, never leaving the hotel room across the hall from the Soviet drop.
How often had he hammered the lesson into younger, less experienced field agents? Too many times to count. A man standing motionless in a crowd was difficult to spot.
But every hour escalated the complexity. All possible explanations had to be examined. The most obvious waS that the Russian had activated a dormant drop known