The Kaisho by Eric Van Lustbader Page B

so they tried to make my silence permanent,” Lillehammer said as if reading Croaker’s mind. Of course, that wasn’t true; he had merely seen the direction of Croaker’s scrutiny. “I suppose they could have slit my throat and been done with it, but that was not their way. I had frustrated them, and they wanted me to live with what they would do to me. They tried to sever the muscles that worked my lips. As it happened, they failed. I count myself fortunate.”
    Croaker was about to ask him who they were, when he realized it really didn’t matter. And perhaps in his day he had encountered as many of them as had Lillehammer. It appeared as if he and this Brit might have a great deal in common.
    Lillehammer fingered his upper lip. “Pity I can’t grow a mustache. Whatever they did to me killed the hair follicles here.”
    He shrugged. “Well.” He rubbed his hands together briskly. “We’d better get down to it. The wind’s swung round and is picking up. As it is, we’ll have a bumpy ride home.” He peered through one of the cabin windows, where the brace of sailboats had turned and were running for the shelter of Marco Island. No other boats seemed to be around. “Back to Dominic Goldoni. Your intelligence is spot on, as far as it goes. Fact is, yesterday, Goldoni inexplicably and overtly broke his covenant with the federal government of the United States.”
    “What did he do?”
    “He got himself killed, is what he did.”
    “Dominic Goldoni dead,” Croaker mused almost to himself. “Seems impossible.”
    “Not only got himself killed, but did so in a manner that has got the best people at WITSEC totally freaked out.”
    “Can you tell me why?”
    “Well, now, that depends,” Lillehammer said, “on whether you agree to work with me on this.”
    Croaker thought a moment. “Why the hell would you want me? You’re obviously a fed very high up in the bureaucratic organization. You’ve got zillions of candidates to choose from who are younger, trained in the latest techniques.” He swept his right hand toward the antisurveil-lance case. “I mean, I had no idea that kind of hardware existed.”
    Lillehammer shook his head. “Don’t give me the old war-horse routine, it won’t hold with me. I found your name in our computers. You worked with Nicholas Linnear some years ago when he was recruited by C. Gordon Minck, who was then head of Red Station, our Soviet Affairs bureau. You and Linnear ferreted out a very nasty mole in Minck’s henhouse.” He frowned. “The truth is I can’t trust anyone back home, not until I’ve discovered how someone got to Dominic Goldoni, a man supposedly tucked away from all harm.
    “Frankly, I need help. Goldoni had strict orders not to call anyone from his house where the line could be tapped at the other end, and never to meet with someone without his WITSEC handler’s knowledge. So how did this happen? WITSEC’s record of protecting its inductees who obeyed the rules was, until this incident, absolute.”
    “So somebody got to him someway.”
    Lillehammer looked away for a long moment. Then his head came back and his piercing blue eyes fixed on Croaker’s face. “The way I see it, someone inside, someone he trusted, betrayed him. I’m telling you his security was one hundred percent as long as he didn’t break the WITSEC rules.”
    Croaker turned the problem around in his mind awhile before he said, “It’s clear you need help, but I doubt it’s from me. I’m a maverick. I never was much good at memorizing the rule book. I go my own way.”
    Lillehammer looked him square in the face. “Just answer this question: Are you intrigued enough to be my field man—or would you rather continue your quiet existence chauffeuring beer-guzzling businessmen around this pond?”
    Croaker laughed. “You do have a way with words, Mr. Lillehammer.”
    “Call me Will.”
    Croaker looked down at the extended right hand before taking it in his and squeezing it. “Why