Free Atropos by William L. Deandrea Page A

slowly. “Yes,” he said. “I do. Three of them.”
    “All right,” Trotter said. “Don’t make me beg for it. Who? And in what connection.”
    “Samuel Currus, Arnold Gillick, and Jacob Feder.”
    “Gillick and Feder,” Trotter said.
    “And Currus. They are all buggers.”
    “I assume,” Trotter said, “that you are not using British slang.”
    Bulanin laughed. “My friend, I sometimes think that if you had been Russian, or I American, we might have ruled the world together.”
    “If that’s your idea of a good time,” Trotter said.
    “It might be nice to try for a month or so,” Bulanin said. “But to answer your question, no, I was not using British slang. Though for all I know, any or all of these gentlemen might be buggers in that sense as well. No, what I was talking about was electronic surveillance and all that implies. When I was in the Washington KGB office, Currus, who lived in San Francisco, and Gillick, who lived in New York, I believe, were on a list of people who would do good work for the proper money, without asking from whom the money came. I myself never used them, but some of our people did.”
    Trotter nodded. It made sense to use nationals of the target country for things like bugging, if you could find them, and save your own people for the absolutely most delicate cases. You never knew when one of your experts had been made by the opposition until you ran a lengthy and strenuous security check. And your own people were in for a tougher time if they were caught. They could do you more damage in that case, too.
    “What about Feder?” Trotter wanted to know.
    “He was—what is the phrase?—a must to avoid. He works for you people. Doesn’t he? At least for the U.S. government in some regard.”
    “Do tell,” Trotter said dryly. His father was going to love hearing about this. You spend years congratulating yourself on how well a cover works, then you find out the opposition has been laying off your boy because they know he’s yours and they don’t want to make complications.
    “Oh, yes,” Bulanin said. “The word was that he was the best in the business, too. He even had an open reputation in the private sector, and an enormous private income from it. That was another reason to leave him be, of course. If he was doing the espionage work for something other than money, he had to be a true patriot.”
    “Patriot enough to be killed?”
    “I don’t know what you mean.”
    “Feder’s dead. All the men on that list are dead.”
    “Under suspicious circumstances, I presume. Or—”
    “Or I wouldn’t be here, right. I had the research department up all night on this. Somebody is murdering electronic-surveillance experts. Does that make any sense to you?”
    Bulanin frowned. “Not really. It would seem to me that the tape, or whatever else technology has come up with recently, could be expected to outlive the person who made it.”
    “It seemed that way to me, too,” Trotter admitted. “But I thought I’d ask if your old firm had any plans along these lines.”
    “No. It doesn’t make any sense.”
    “I was about to say that I respect your brain and ask you if you could make any sense out of it.”
    Bulanin scowled. He looked at the glass of vodka in his hand as if he didn’t know how it got there. He raised it to his mouth and took a long pull, then scowled again.
    “The only thing ...” he said. “But that doesn’t make any sense, either.”
    “Let’s hear it.”
    “Well, if one of the names on that list had learned something he shouldn’t, or had betrayed the KGB in some way, they might well correct his manners. That was Borzov’s, you know. Borzov would never say ‘kill.’ Yes. They might correct his manners, and it occurred to me that it might occur to the KGB as a good idea to leave a few other bodies around as a smoke screen, but doing it this way would only draw an investigator’s attention to the skill that led to his association with my old