Authors: David Hagberg

Countdown (13 page)

BOOK: Countdown

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IT WAS JUST SIX in the evening when Trotter decided there was little else he could accomplish from his office. So far they'd heard nothing from McGarvey, but then he hadn't expected much of anything this soon.

Turning off the light in his third-floor office he got his briefcase and stepped outside. His secretary had left a half hour earlier and the corridors were already settling down for the night shift.

Three doors down, he punched in a five-digit access code which admitted him into the Operations Center. There the OD monitored all incoming calls and messages for operations that
were currently on the critical list. It was his job to make a preliminary evaluation and then contact the proper section if an immediate follow-up was needed.

Trotter had cut his teeth in this section in the early days, and still maintained an interest in the case officers who were assigned OD duty. He made it a point to stop in on a regular basis to talk with them, get to know them on a personal basis. Besides, he was worried about McGarvey. Not so much for the man's physical safety, he'd shown that he was capable of taking care of himself, but because of the kinds of hell McGarvey always seemed to leave in his wake. This time they were dealing with a sensitive ally.

Tom Dunbar, the early shift OD, looked up from his console when Trotter came in. He was a no-nonsense Harvard graduate who at the age of thirty had already shown his mettle and finesse in two important foreign postings. He would be rotated to the Russian Desk within the next few months preparatory to an assignment in Moscow. The big one.

“Slumming tonight, John?” he asked.

“I'm on my way home. Maybe put on a steak, have a couple of beers,” Trotter said. He'd lived alone in a big house across the river since his wife had died several years ago. In actuality he intended to have a glass of wine and perhaps a sandwich and then go to bed.

“Sure, rub it in. I'm stuck here until midnight, and I've got to be back first thing in the morning for a physical.”

“No rest for the wicked,” Trotter quipped. “Anything yet on STANDHOPE?”

STANDHOPE was the computer-generated operational name for McGarvey's assignment to Israel. But it was in the blind. Only a very few people within the Agency actually knew the details. This number did not extend to the OD, who merely worked from a short list. If anything at all came in he had a list of four people to call: the general, the Agency's general counsel, the DDO, and of course Trotter.

“Nothing in the last half hour,” Dunbar said. “Was there anything from last night that I should know about?”

Trotter shook his head. “Probably not. It's just getting started.”

“Your baby?”

“In a manner of speaking. Anyway, I'll be home if anything does come up. I'd appreciate a call no matter what.”

“Sure thing,” Dunbar said. “Enjoy your steak.”

“Thanks, I will,” Trotter said, and he left, taking the elevator down to the ground floor, turning in his security badge with the guards at the door and heading across the parking lot to his car.

It was always like this, he thought, during the first critical hours of an operation. This time, however, it was worse because not only were they spying on a friendly nation, they were using a free lance to do it. The general had never really answered his direct question of what the Agency's position would be if the operation were to fall apart. “We'll see” was the best he'd been able to get.

He had just reached his car when someone came running across the parking lot from the main entrance.

“Mr. Trotter. Hold up, sir,” the man called out. He was one of the security people from the front desk.

Trotter automatically reached up to his lapel to see if he had forgotten to turn in his badge, but he remembered that he had.

“It's the general, sir,” the guard puffed. “He wants you upstairs on the double.”

Something clutched at Trotter's gut, and he hurried back across the parking lot.

“I just received a call from Lorraine Abbott,” the DCI said when Trotter walked in.

Howard Ryan, the Agency's general counsel, was seated across the desk from Murphy.

“Has McGarvey made contact with her?” Trotter asked.

The DCI motioned him to a seat next to Ryan. “Yes, and she sounded plenty upset.”

“It's just two in the morning over there, what's happened?”

“Possible big trouble for us,” Ryan answered.

“Evidently he's on his way out to En Gedi,” the general said. “Dr. Abbott told me that he arranged a little show for their Mossad tails and managed to break free.”

It sounded like Kirk. “And she hasn't heard from him since?”

“That's right,” the general said. “He left several hours ago,
and she thinks there is a very good possibility that he was arrested or even shot.”

“Surely she wasn't calling from a hotel phone?”

“No. A public phone on the street. They might come up with the number, but they won't get any further than that.”

“Well, we gave him the assignment,” Trotter said. “It's going to be up to us to get him out of there if he is in trouble.”

The general's eyes narrowed. He was in one of his dangerous moods. “You explain it to him, Howard.”

“We're going to have to deny him if he was actually arrested while on military property,” the counsel said.

“Goddamnit â¦” Trotter started, but Murphy held him off.

“He's armed, I assume,” Ryan said.

“We sent it over in the diplomatic bag. But remember what he did for us, and the Israelis, in Germany. Let's just not forget that now. And we did send him on this assignment, after all. We owe him, sir.”

“What do you suggest?” the general asked coolly.

“You're personal friends with Isser Shamir. Call him.”

“And tell him what?”

“That a mistake has been made and we'd like our man back, in one piece.”

“He'll naturally ask what McGarvey was doing at En Gedi.”

“Lie to him,” Trotter said with a straight face.

The DCI and Ryan exchanged glances. “Short of that, John. Let's say that there was some compelling reason that made such a call impossible. Then what?”

Trotter almost asked what could be so compelling, but he held the question in check. “Short of that, I would suggest that we take this over to the president. Immediately this evening. He can call the PM. They owe us. They started spying on us first.”

The general had been hunched forward over his desk, his shirtsleeves rolled up, exposing his thick forearms. He leaned back now, settling his bulk into the big leather chair. He nodded.

“Let's say we get him out of there, John. What's next?”

“Knowing McGarvey, if he actually got into the facility, he will have found out what we asked him to find for us. If it's positive, if he can confirm the existence of their weapons stockpile,
then we go ahead with our original plan. It's a safe bet that Baranov won't back off.”

Again the general and Ryan exchanged glances.

“You're talking about bait here, aren't you,” Ryan said softly.

It was the same thing McGarvey had said. And it was true, of course. But it was the business.

“I'm talking about using a resource to its best advantage,” he said without blinking.

The DCI nodded again. “If he was identified in Germany, they'll pull out all the stops to get him.”

“Yes, sir.”

Again the DCI glanced at Ryan. “I'll see what can be done. But maybe we've made a mistake. Maybe we should have told the Israelis that the Pershing had been targeted on En Gedi.”

“It would have tipped our hand,” Ryan said.

“Springing McGarvey isn't going to do us, or him, much good either.”

TEL AVIV

Lorraine Abbott sat in her darkened hotel room chain-smoking cigarettes and looking out across the dark Mediterranean. Although it was a clear night the horizon was an indistinct blackness. Way out at sea she thought she could see the lights of some slow-moving ship, but then it disappeared, her night vision destroyed as she lit another cigarette.

For the tenth time she told herself that she had done the right thing by telephoning Murphy on the special number he had given her more than three years ago. He had sounded noncommittalâof course, it was an open lineâbut he had told her to return immediately to her hotel and sit tight. He would look into things and get back to her.

California just now seemed like a long way off. Her first mistake had been sticking it out here in Tel Aviv. She had won points with Mark O'heay, the NPT Inspection Service operations director, but she hadn't accomplished a thing by remaining.

Her second mistake had been listening to McGarvey. He was an arrogant, conceited, macho sonofabitch. That had been her first impression, and nothing that had happened since had changed her mind.

And he was a spy. Not her variety, not simply an eavesdropper or an observer, but a legitimate gun-carrying spy. A James Bond in Rambo warpaint. It made her sick to think that she had gone along with him. Not only had he seriously jeopardized her position here in Israel, it was possible that she would be asked to resign from her NPT position, which, though it wasn't crucial to her career, provided her with â¦ what?

She turned that thought over in her mind. Burnout, her department head called it. “You can jaunt off all over the world from time to time. It's better than reading science fiction. Recharges your batteries.”

What if they had shot him, the same thought that had driven her to call the general invaded her consciousness again, and her hand shook as she stubbed out the cigarette in the overflowing ashtray.

Someone was at the door. She thought she heard a key grating in the lock. She turned around at the same moment the door burst open, snapping the chain, and an instant later the room lights came on.

Two men, guns drawn, were standing there.

Lorraine had raised a hand to her mouth in shock, but she found that she couldn't do anything else, not even cry for help.

Two other men crowded into the room, one of them checking the bathroom, and the other looking in the closet, the chest of drawers, and even under the bed.

“Dr. Lorraine Abbott?” one of the gunmen asked in English.

She nodded, finally finding her voice. “Who are you?”

“Military Intelligence, Doctor,” the gunman said. “You are under arrest.”

“Arrest? My God, on what charge?”

“Espionage.”

A pale blue Volkswagen camper van was parked at the edge of the beach across the street from the Uri Dan Hotel. Two
young clerks from the Hungarian Embassy were in the front, making out, his hand beneath her sweater, cupping a breast.

In the back, Arkady Kurshin was watching the hotel's front entrance through binoculars. McGarvey was currently away from the hotel. He'd been seen leaving earlier in the company of a so far unidentified blond woman. The woman had returned soon afterward, had left once, and had come back again.

“Who is she?” he'd asked the man seated next to him.

“I don't know yet,” Aleksei Piotrovsky, KGB's number-two man in Israel, said. “But I do know those pricks who came up in that gray Mercedes.”

“Mossad?”

“No, AMAN. The question is, what the hell are they doing here at this hour of the morning?”

It could be because of McGarvey, Kurshin thought. The moment they'd been informed that he was here in Tel Aviv, he had flown directly from his hotel in Rome where he'd been waiting for further word from Baranov.

“There can only be one reason for him to be in Israel at this point,” Baranov had explained. “It's because of the Pershing. They know we were going after En Gedi. He's come to find out for himself.”

“Either that or tell the Israelis.”

“I don't think so,” Baranov had replied. “But it gives you the easy opportunity to take him out. Don't miss.”

“Here they come,” Piotrovsky said.

Kurshin raised his binoculars in time to see the four AMAN plainclothes officers emerge from the hotel. They had brought the blond woman with them, her hands held curiously stiff behind her back.

It took him several seconds to realize that she was handcuffed. They had arrested her. He lowered the binoculars again. What had they stumbled across here? And where was McGarvey?

“I want to know who that woman is, within the hour,” he said.

Piotrovsky glanced over at him and swallowed. This was one man, he thought, who was to be placated at all costs. “Yes, Comrade,” he said.

BOOK: Countdown

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