Ballet! by Tom Murphy

Author:Tom Murphy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Subject Value
ISBN: 9781626813922
Publisher: Diversion Books
Published: 2014-10-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8

In the bureaucratic jargon of the new CIA they called it tradecraft, and you can believe it had nothing to do with selling Aunt Martha’s homemade jellies. Tradecraft was any of a hundred techniques for covering up an operation. The Delage Feather and Trimming Company was tradecraft. It traded in counterespionage and information gathering and sometimes in death. Whatever you called it, thought Dave Loughlin, it was high time to turn on the old tradecraft faucet, rusty these years and months.

Dave stood in the early darkness of six o’clock, checking out the side entrance of the Hotel Carlyle, the Seventy-sixth Street side. A doorman, so complacent-looking he might have been carved in stone, stood tall and gleaming in his comic-opera uniform and cap under the infrared heat reflectors that glowed with costly warmth from the underside of the immaculate marquee. A huge black Mercedes-Benz 600L limousine floated up to the entrance and disgorged a young woman in floor-length white mink. It was not your typical Holiday Inn, this Carlyle, all class and Continental understatement, tea in the lobby that resembled one of the smaller drawing rooms in Buckingham Palace, Jack Kennedy’s New York address during his presidency, playground of kings. Ivan Sokolovny had come up in the world.

The hotel filled the corner at Madison Avenue and Seventy-sixth. The logical way into the elegant little Bemelmans Bar was to use its own entrance on Madison. Tradecraft suggested a more circuitous route, through the Seventy-sixth Street entrance, past the discreet little registration desk, turn left, through Small Drawing room Number One—too chic ever to be called a lobby—turn right, through Drawing Room Number Two and up the three stairs into the bar itself. That was how tradecraft might attempt to throw a setup off balance.

And Dave Loughlin knew it could be a setup, maybe a hit, maybe a compromise. A small but well-remembered tremor started its cold journey up his spine. Fear. How long had it been since Dave had involved himself in something big enough or risky enough to generate fear? And fear of what? Of Ivan? Of the very possible assumption that KGB had a mole planted at Langley, that they knew what he suspected, that they wanted his little investigation nipped in the bud? Dave rubbed his chilly hands together and walked past the unsmiling doorman, uncomfortably aware of how unlike a typical Carlyle guest he must look.

Dave was halfway through Small Drawing Room Number One when he felt a sharp pressure at the base of his spine, the unmistakable thrust of a gun barrel. Very good, David, he told himself with more irony than fear. You really walked right into this one. Maybe in your next incarnation you could find work as a bowling pin. He said nothing, kept walking, looked neither left nor right. The thing at his back was not imaginary. It kept right on walking with him. And immediately behind the gun barrel were the bulk and the warmth of a large physical presence, hanging with him, meaning business.

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