Extraordinary Powers Read online

  Truslow was outside, tending the fire as we drove up. He was in casual attire: a plaid woolen shirt, bulky moss-green wide-wale corduroy pants, white socks, and boat shoes. He kissed Molly on the cheek, clapped me on the back, and pushed vodka martinis at us. I realized for the first time, consciously, what it was about Alexander Truslow that intrigued me. In certain striking ways—the mournful cast of the brow, the dogged honesty—he reminded me of my own father, who died of a stroke when I was seventeen, the summer before I went off to college.

  His wife, Margaret, a slender, dark-haired woman of around sixty, came out of the house, wiping her hands on a bright red apron, the screen door clattering behind her.

  “I’m sorry about your father,” she said to Molly. “We miss him so much. So many people miss him.”

  Molly smiled and thanked her. “This is a wonderful place,” she said.

  “Oh,” Margaret Truslow said, approaching her husband and touching his cheek fondly with the back of her hand, “I hate it out here. Ever since Alex retired from CIA he’s made me spend practically every weekend and every summer out here. I put up with it because I have no choice.” Her expression, doting and wearily amused, was the sort you might use on an errant but beloved child.

  “Margaret much prefers Louisburg Square,” Truslow said. Louisburg Square was a small, exclusive enclave atop Beacon Hill, where Alexander Truslow owned a town house. “You two live in the city, don’t you?”

  “Back Bay,” Molly said. “You might have seen the Men at Work signs and the trash heaps. That’s us.”

  Truslow chuckled. “Renovation, I take it?”

  Before we could reply, two small children came tearing out of the house, a little girl of about three, bawling, being chased by a somewhat older boy.

  “Elias!” Mrs. Truslow called out.

  “Now, cut it out,” Alex said, scooping the girl up into his arms. “Elias, don’t torment your sister. Zoë, I want you to meet Ben and Molly.”

  The little girl looked at us warily with a tearstained face. She then buried her head against Truslow’s chest.

  “She’s shy,” Truslow explained. “Elias, shake hands with Ben Ellison and Molly Sinclair.” The boy, towheaded and pudgy, thrust a small fat hand at each of us in turn, before he ran off.

  “My daughter…” Margaret Truslow began to say.

  “My deadbeat daughter,” Truslow put in dryly, “and her workaholic husband are at the symphony. Which means their poor kids have to have supper with their boring old grandparents. Right, Zoë?” He tickled the girl with one hand, holding her up with the other. She giggled, almost reluctantly, and then resumed crying.

  “Our little Zoë seems to have an earache,” Margaret said. “She’s been crying since she got here.”

  “Let me take a look,” Molly said. “You probably don’t have any amoxicillin around, do you?”

  “Amoxi-what?” Margaret said.

  “That’s all right. I think I’ve got a 150cc bottle in the car.”

  “An honest-to-goodness house call!” Margaret Truslow exclaimed.

  “And no charge either,” Molly said.

  * * *

  Dinner was prime Americana—barbecued chicken, baked potatoes, and a salad. The chicken was delicious; Truslow proudly gave us his recipe.

  “You know what they say,” he said as we tucked into our dishes of ice cream. “By the time the youngest children have learned to keep the house tidy, the oldest grandchildren are on hand to tear it to pieces. Right, Elias?”

  “Wrong,” Elias replied.

  “Do you have children?” Margaret Truslow asked.

  “Not yet,” I said.

  “I believe that children should neither be seen nor heard from,” Molly said. “Ever again.”

  Margaret looked momentarily scandalized, until she realized that Molly was kidding. “And that from a pediatrician!” she mock-scolded.

  “Having kids was the greatest thing I ever did,” Truslow said.

  “Isn’t there some book,” Margaret said, “called Grandchildren Are So Much Fun, I Should Have Had Them First?”

  Both Truslows chuckled. “There’s some truth to that,” Alex said.

  “You’ll have to give all this up if you go back to Washington,” Molly said.

  “I know. Don’t think it hasn’t been weighing on me.”

  “You haven’t even been asked yet, Alex,” his wife said.

  “Quite right,” Truslow said. “And to be honest, replacing your father is a rather daunting prospect.”

  Molly nodded.

  “Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example,” I put in.

  “And now,” Truslow announced, “I hope you lovely women don’t mind if Ben and I wander off somewhere and talk shop.”

  “Fine with us,” his wife said with asperity. “Molly can help me get the kids down. If she can bear to be around kids, I mean.”

  * * *

  “A few weeks ago,” Truslow said, “the Agency apprehended a would-be assassin. A Romanian. Securitate.” We sat in a stone-floored room that he seemed to use as his study, both of us at a large ashwood table. The furniture in the room was old and worn; the only discordant note was the modern black telephone-and-scrambler unit on the desk.

  “He was interrogated. He was tough.”

  I didn’t know what he was getting at, so I waited in silence, tensely.

  “After several difficult interrogation sessions, he finally broke. But even then, he knew very little. A very professional job of compartmentalization. He said he had something to offer us. Something about Harrison Sinclair’s murder…” His voice trailed off.

  “And?”

  “And before he was able to spill, he died.”

  “One of the Agency’s overzealous interrogators, I take it.”

  “No. They were able to infiltrate the system, get to him, take him out. Their reach is impressive.”

  “And who are they?”

  “A person or persons,” he said slowly, ominously, “within CIA.”

  “Do you have names?”

  “That’s the thing. They’re very well insulated. Faceless. Ben, this group inside Langley—it’s a group long rumored about. Have you heard of the Wise Men?”

  “Yesterday you mentioned some sort of council of elders,” I said. “But who are they? What are they after?”

  “We don’t know. Too well cloaked, behind a series of fronts.”

  “And you’re saying that these … ‘Wise Men’ … were behind Hal’s murder?”

  “Speculation,” he replied. “It’s possible that Hal was one of them.”

  I felt a little vertiginous. Hal, it appeared, had been killed by someone trained by the East German secret service, Stasi. Now Truslow was talking about a Romanian. How did the pieces fit? What was he implying?

  “But you must know something about their identities,” I prompted.

  “We know only that they’ve managed to siphon off tens of millions of dollars from various Agency accounts. All done in a highly sophisticated manner. And it appears that Harrison Sinclair pocketed some 12.5 million of it.”

  “But you don’t seriously believe that. You know how modestly Hal lived.”

  “Listen, Ben. I don’t want to believe that Hal Sinclair embezzled a cent either.”

  “You don’t want to believe it? What the hell are you saying?”

  Instead of replying, Truslow handed me a manila file folder. Its label bore an Agency filing designation: Gamma One, which was a higher level of classification than I’d ever before been privy to.

  Inside was an assortment of photocopies of checks, computer printouts, blurry photographs. In one photo, a man wearing a Panama hat was standing in some kind of lobby.

  It was unquestionably Hal Sinclair.

  “What’s all this?” I asked, although I already knew.

  “Hal at a bank in Grand Cayman, evidently waiting for an appointment with the bank’s manager. The other shots are of Hal a
t a variety of banks in Liechtenstein, Belize, and Anguilla.”

  “Proving nothing—”

  “Ben, listen to me. I was one of Hal’s closest friends. This knocked me out, too. There were several days during which Hal was missing—sick, allegedly, or taking a brief vacation. And was unreachable, or he’d arrange it so that he called in to the office. Evidently that’s when he’d make the deposits. They’ve got records of trips he made using several false passports.”

  “This is bullshit, Alex!”

  He sighed; this obviously distressed him. “That’s his signature on the registration papers for an Anstalt, a nonshare, limited-liability ‘letter box’ corporation based in Liechtenstein. The true owner’s identity, as you’ll see there, is Harrison Sinclair. And we’ve got copies there of intercepted wire transfers of funds to Bermuda trust accounts. Liberian-owned, of course. Telephone records, telexes, wire transfer authorizations. A real maze, Ben. Layers upon layers, shells inside shells. It’s proof, pure and simple, and it breaks my heart. But there it is.”

  I didn’t know what to make of it all; from everything I could tell, they had the goods. But it made no sense. My late father-in-law a con artist, an embezzler? You had to know him as I did to realize how hard that was to accept. Yet there’s always that tiny seed of doubt. We never really know another person.

  “The key lies in Sinclair’s meeting in Zurich with Orlov,” he continued. “Think: What does Zurich say to you?”

  “Gnomes.”

  “Hmm?”

  “The gnomes of Zurich.” The phrase, I believe, was coined by a British journalist in the early sixties, referring to Swiss bankers, who are so helpful and discreet with mafiosi and drug “kingpins,” as they’re called.

  “Ah, yes. Precisely. It’s a safe guess that when he and Orlov met in Zurich, they were transacting something. It was no social call.” He added musingly: “The head of the CIA and the last-ever head of the KGB.”

  “Circumstantial,” I said.

  “Perhaps. I hope to God there’s an explanation for all this. I believe there may well be. So you understand, I hope, why I want you to clear his name. The Agency has hired me to locate an enormous sum of missing money—a fortune that will make the 12.5 million that Hal allegedly embezzled seem paltry. I need your help. We can kill two birds with one stone: we can at once find the money and establish Hal’s innocence. Can I count on you?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes, you can.”

  “It’s maximum-clearance stuff, Ben, you understand that. You’ll have to go through the usual rigmarole, the polygraph, the vetting, and so on. Before you leave tonight, I’m going to give you a scrambler for your office phone which is compatible with the scrambler on my personal phone at work. But I must be honest: there are many people who will seek to hinder your work.”

  “I understand,” I said. The truth was, I didn’t understand, or didn’t understand fully, and certainly I had no idea what precisely he had in mind until the next morning.

  TEN

  I remember the events of the next morning with an eerie clarity.

  The offices of Truslow Associates, Inc., occupied all four floors of a narrow old brick town house on Beacon Street (a short walk, I realized, from where Truslow lived on Louisburg Square). A brass plaque on the ornate front door announced: TRUSLOW ASSOCIATES, INC., with no explanation; if you had to ask, you weren’t supposed to know.

  The office was pleasantly upscale. You had to buzz to enter a small antechamber, where a well-coiffed receptionist checked you over, and then you were buzzed through to a sedate waiting room, quietly elegant and very expensively furnished. I waited for ten minutes or so, sunken in a comfortable black leather chair and browsing through Vanity Fair. The choice of magazines was that or Art and Antiques or Country Life: anything but business magazines, for heaven’s sake. No unsightly copies of Barron’s lying around here.

  At exactly ten minutes past the scheduled appointment time, Truslow’s secretary emerged from whatever more important business was detaining her (coffee and danish, I guessed) and escorted me up a set of creaky, carpeted stairs to Truslow’s office. She was a classic executive administrative assistant, mid-thirties, pretty, and efficient, in a Chanel suit and belt and a power Chanel gold necklace. She introduced herself as Donna and asked if I wanted some Evian water, coffee, or freshly squeezed orange juice. I asked for a cup of coffee.

  Alexander Truslow rose from behind his desk as I entered. The light in his office was so bright that I wished I’d brought sunglasses. It flooded in through the tall windows and bounced off the antique white walls.

  Seated in a leather chair beside Truslow’s desk was a round-shouldered, dark-haired, bulky man in his early fifties.

  “Ben,” Truslow said, “I’d like you to meet Charles Rossi.”

  Rossi rose, gave me a bone-crushing handshake, and said, “Good to know you, Mr. Ellison.”

  “Same here,” I said, though I doubted that would prove to be true. We both sat down, and I added, “Ben.”

  Rossi nodded and smiled.

  The secretary set a cup of freshly brewed coffee in an Italian ceramic mug before me. It was very good. I extracted a yellow legal pad from my briefcase and my Mont Blanc rollerball.

  After she had left, he typed something into the Amtel keyboard in front of him, the device that allowed him and his secretary noiselessly to communicate during meetings or phone calls.

  “What we’re about to discuss with you has to remain a matter of utmost secrecy.”

  I nodded, took a sip of coffee. Some rich French-roast-plus-something-else blend; remarkably good.

  “Charles, if you’ll excuse us,” Truslow said. Rossi got up and left the office, closing the door behind him.

  “Rossi is our liaison with CIA,” Truslow explained. “He came down from Langley especially to work with you on this.”

  “I’m not sure I understand,” I said.

  “I got a call from Rossi last night. Given the sensitivity of the project we’ve been hired to do, the Agency, understandably, is concerned about security. They’ve insisted upon implementing their own clearance procedures.”

  I nodded.

  “It seems a bit excessive to me, too,” Truslow went on. “You’ve been vetted and cleared and all that nonsense. But before you can be cleared fully, Rossi would like to run you through some preliminary stuff. We’re required, by contract with the Central Intelligence Agency, to flutter all outside employees.”

  “I see,” I said.

  He was referring to the polygraph, the lie detector, to which all Agency employees are subjected a few times in their careers—at the beginning of their service, periodically thereafter, and sometimes after vital operations or in extraordinary cases.

  “Ben,” Truslow went on, “you see, as the centerpiece of our investigation, we’d like you to track down Vladimir Orlov, and learn whatever you can about what happened in his meeting with your father-in-law. Orlov may have been playing a double game on Hal Sinclair, and I want to know whether he did or not.”

  “Track Orlov down?” I said.

  “This is about all I can tell you until you’ve been cleared. Once you’ve been fluttered, we can talk more.” He pressed a button on his desk, and Rossi returned.

  Truslow came around the side of his massive desk and clapped Rossi’s shoulder. “I’ll turn you over to Charlie at this point,” he said, and then gripped my hand. “Welcome, friend.”

  I could see Truslow turn once again to his Amtel and punch a button on his phone. As I left his office, I caught a last glimpse of him, a brooding, dark figure of intense energy silhouetted against the brilliant morning sunlight.

  * * *

  Charles Rossi drove me, in a dark blue government-issue sedan, across the river to an ultramodern building in the Kendall Square section of Cambridge, near the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Raytheon and Genzyme and all the other high-powered, high-tech corporations.

  Leaving the elevator on the fifth
floor, we entered a very functional-looking reception area, all chrome and steel and industrial-gray carpeting and blond woods. On the wall that faced us was a drab nameplate that said DEVELOPMENTAL RESEARCH LABORATORIES: AUTHORIZED VISITORS ONLY.

  I knew at once this was a CIA-owned operation. Everything about it—the unrevealing name, the anonymity, the forbidding stillness—screamed Agency. I knew CIA ran labs and test facilities in the suburbs outside Washington, and in a building on Water Street in New York City; I hadn’t realized they also had a facility in Cambridge, in the land of MIT, but it made perfect sense.

  Saying very little, Rossi led me through a set of large metal doors, which he opened by inserting a magnetic card in a vertical slot. The doors opened, yielding a view of an enormous room containing row upon row of computer terminals. In front of most of them people sat typing.

  “Not much to look at, huh?” Rossi observed as we stood at the room’s entrance. “Pretty dull stuff.”

  “You should see our firm,” I replied.

  He laughed politely. “There’s actually a range of projects going on here. Microdevices, automated cryptography, machine vision, things like that. Are you familiar…?”

  “Not terribly,” I admitted.

  “Well, take automated cryptography. This is funded by DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration, a part of the Defense Department.”

  I nodded as he escorted me toward one terminal, a SPARC-2 workstation, at which a wiry young bearded man seemed to be working furiously. “Now, this terminal is made by Sun Microsystems, and it’s ‘talking’ to a supercomputer, a Thinking Machines Corporation CM-3.”

  “I see.”

  “Anyway, Keith here is developing plain-text encryption algorithms. That means codes that are, theoretically at least, unbreakable. In simple English, that will allow us to translate, encode top secret information into a form that’ll resemble some innocuous-looking document in English—not nonsense, but real prose. Then, by means of speech recognition, our computers will be able to decrypt it—trapdoor codes, I mean, knapsack codes, that sort of thing.”