surveillance detection regardless, he thought. Sharif had been followed.
He turned right, allowing himself a few seconds to get his bearings, locate this street corner on the map of Berlin he carried in his mind, and drop into one of the pretimed and perfectly cased routes he’d perfected over months of wandering black in the German capital. Surveillance detection was a simple technique, though hard to master: A man walking a route he knew at a briskly maintained pace would always outstrip his more tentative followers, and the distance between them would lengthen inexorably as the agent covered more known ground. Eventually he could enter The Gap—the brief period of time when he would actually be out of sight of his pursuers—and get his real business done. Service a dead drop. Leave film in a letter box. Hand off a document in a brush pass with an apparent stranger. Or simply vanish. Without the surveillance team ever realizing he’d known they were there.
Tonight, Eric intended The Gap to fall squarely near one of the entrances to the Friedrichstrasse train station. But at the corner of Friedrichstrasse and Unter den Linden, as he waited for a light with the rain beading his black leather jacket, he felt rather than saw the black Mercedes slide alongside him. Nosing at the curb as two men got out.
They aren’t on foot, he thought, and they came out of nowhere.
And then the automatic pistol in his ribs. The hands, firm and insistent, gripping his arms. They thrust him headfirst into the backseat without a word.
It was Scottie Sorensen’s habit to rise before five-thirty, an hour of darkness in the fall of the year, but on this night he had no intention of sleeping. He sat in his oak-paneled library with a glass of vintage rum close at hand, and listened to the news bulletins on public radio. By the time Cuddy called from the DCI’s house in Georgetown at 1:13 A.M ., Scottie was already tearing down Langley Pike alone.
He’d left his wife sprawled facedown in the king-size bed, her slim brown arms flung out like an angel’s and her fan of blond hair lying like a discarded wig on the pillow. Now that he was nearly sixty, insomnia spiked Scottie’s sleep at least four times a week—and he would wake, mind churning, to creep through the vast spaces of the house, a shadow amid other shadows. How many surreptitious entries had he made, over the long spiral of years? All the Soviet consulates in remote corners of the world, plundered by night through a faulty window or a coded lock whose secrets he’d bought with his faultless charm; the voice-activated transmitters stashed in such ordinary objects as ashtrays and chair legs and even, once, the stuffed heart of a child’s teddy bear. All the rooms of women, too, with marriages and secrets to betray—some of them seduced for the greater good of America, others for the greater good of Scottie Sorensen.
Spying had been his proxy for deeper motives: the desire to penetrate, to thieve, to take something for nothing. Now that he was lapped in his final posting, the morbidity of Headquarters, insomnia was his passport to memory. His dark kingdom.
Lola never even knew at what hour he left her bed on these midnight excursions. Would she, he wondered, really care?
She was his third wife and the current source of his wealth: a twenty-six-year-old studio executive’s daughter born and bred in L.A. She’d married Scottie two years before, after a whirlwind romance in which he’d managed to figure as James Bond, Sean Connery, and the daddy she’d always yearned to please. They met during a period of uncharacteristic earnestness on Lola’s part: an internship on Capitol Hill wangled by her father, who’d contributed heavily to the last Republican campaign. She was twenty-three then, blond and sinuous and fresh as a newly opened daisy. Scottie had noticed her during one of his routine pilgrimages to the Senate Intelligence Committee; he’d invited her for drinks.
He turned right, allowing himself a few seconds to get his bearings, locate this street corner on the map of Berlin he carried in his mind, and drop into one of the pretimed and perfectly cased routes he’d perfected over months of wandering black in the German capital. Surveillance detection was a simple technique, though hard to master: A man walking a route he knew at a briskly maintained pace would always outstrip his more tentative followers, and the distance between them would lengthen inexorably as the agent covered more known ground. Eventually he could enter The Gap—the brief period of time when he would actually be out of sight of his pursuers—and get his real business done. Service a dead drop. Leave film in a letter box. Hand off a document in a brush pass with an apparent stranger. Or simply vanish. Without the surveillance team ever realizing he’d known they were there.
Tonight, Eric intended The Gap to fall squarely near one of the entrances to the Friedrichstrasse train station. But at the corner of Friedrichstrasse and Unter den Linden, as he waited for a light with the rain beading his black leather jacket, he felt rather than saw the black Mercedes slide alongside him. Nosing at the curb as two men got out.
They aren’t on foot, he thought, and they came out of nowhere.
And then the automatic pistol in his ribs. The hands, firm and insistent, gripping his arms. They thrust him headfirst into the backseat without a word.
It was Scottie Sorensen’s habit to rise before five-thirty, an hour of darkness in the fall of the year, but on this night he had no intention of sleeping. He sat in his oak-paneled library with a glass of vintage rum close at hand, and listened to the news bulletins on public radio. By the time Cuddy called from the DCI’s house in Georgetown at 1:13 A.M ., Scottie was already tearing down Langley Pike alone.
He’d left his wife sprawled facedown in the king-size bed, her slim brown arms flung out like an angel’s and her fan of blond hair lying like a discarded wig on the pillow. Now that he was nearly sixty, insomnia spiked Scottie’s sleep at least four times a week—and he would wake, mind churning, to creep through the vast spaces of the house, a shadow amid other shadows. How many surreptitious entries had he made, over the long spiral of years? All the Soviet consulates in remote corners of the world, plundered by night through a faulty window or a coded lock whose secrets he’d bought with his faultless charm; the voice-activated transmitters stashed in such ordinary objects as ashtrays and chair legs and even, once, the stuffed heart of a child’s teddy bear. All the rooms of women, too, with marriages and secrets to betray—some of them seduced for the greater good of America, others for the greater good of Scottie Sorensen.
Spying had been his proxy for deeper motives: the desire to penetrate, to thieve, to take something for nothing. Now that he was lapped in his final posting, the morbidity of Headquarters, insomnia was his passport to memory. His dark kingdom.
Lola never even knew at what hour he left her bed on these midnight excursions. Would she, he wondered, really care?
She was his third wife and the current source of his wealth: a twenty-six-year-old studio executive’s daughter born and bred in L.A. She’d married Scottie two years before, after a whirlwind romance in which he’d managed to figure as James Bond, Sean Connery, and the daddy she’d always yearned to please. They met during a period of uncharacteristic earnestness on Lola’s part: an internship on Capitol Hill wangled by her father, who’d contributed heavily to the last Republican campaign. She was twenty-three then, blond and sinuous and fresh as a newly opened daisy. Scottie had noticed her during one of his routine pilgrimages to the Senate Intelligence Committee; he’d invited her for drinks.
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