The Matarese Countdown (35 page)

“Of course I’m not, Squinty,” Beowulf Agate had replied. “You think I’m as fruit-looped as you are? I know what I can do and what I can’t do even though I’m a hell of a lot younger than you.”

“Barely a year and a half, Brandon. Then why all these expenditures?”

“Because the lead I’ve got could be the breakthrough we need over here.”

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

“All right, I’ll be up-front, but only to a point, and you’d better accept it. I hired the best rogue agent the Stasi ever had, a cold-blooded son of a bitch wanted by a few governments as well as Interpol representing a few others. He’s off the books, off any and all records, with no name and no history. We’ve done it before, Squinty; we’ve got to do it again.”

“What’s his tariff?”

“Two thousand a day plus all expenses, and a bonus of a hundred thousand if he brings back the goods.”

“It’s outrageous, of course, but if what you say is true
and your rogue can pull it off, I guess we can live with it. We’ve paid more in the past. Pick up the supply funds at the Commercial Bank of Nova Scotia, there’s only one and it’s in the book. Ask for a vice president named Wister, he’s the finance contact. I’ll authorize an initial ten thousand.”

“There’s a financial good side, too, Squinty. Our man says that if he buys a grave, we’re off the hook. As he puts it, he hasn’t got any relatives he’d leave a deutsche mark to, so the hell with it.”

“He’s a confident bastard, isn’t he?”

“He’s both. That’s why he’s good.”

Damn
, thought Scofield as he approached the fifteenth-floor landing, out of breath. He should have quoted Squinty Shields five—
ten
times what he had told him! His fictional Stasi agent was such an inspiration he almost believed in the man himself. There was no question about it, mused Beowulf Agate, briefly resting his legs and his lungs, the out-of-sanction agreement with his brilliant German creation had to be restructured. Considerably upward. That was, if anything came from the Wichita operation, which, Scofield considered, he had better start thinking about.

Scanning the data they had gathered from the Atlantic Crown conglomerate, legally and illegally, two names kept surfacing. They were Alistair McDowell, chief executive officer, and Spiro Karastos, treasurer and chief financial officer. Their memoranda to each other, as well as to their subordinate departments, were almost robotically similar, mixing the corporatese with contemporary vernacular. Judging by analysis of isolated words and phrases, either or both could have been responsible for the instructions issued to Lieutenant Colonel Leslie Montrose, mother of the kidnapped James Montrose Jr.

It was a simple matter to learn the whereabouts of each man’s office and the schedules of the night cleaning personnel. The offices were on the sixteenth floor, so near to each other that there was a connecting door, and the cleaning crews who divided up their maintenance labors generally reached the sixteenth floor between one and one-fifteen in the morning; their chores took no longer than forty minutes.
It was further established that as the stairs beyond the exit doors had to be mopped and all debris removed, the doors to the floors’ corridors were opened in sequence. A well-rewarded cleaning woman, convinced that her job would not be in jeopardy—quite the contrary—agreed to place a rubber doorstop on the sixteenth-floor landing. She did, a hundred dollars richer in the cause of a harmless corporate prank being played by top executives. In addition, and in the spirit of corporate conviviality, she also agreed to keep the door to Alistair McDowell’s office unlocked. The purpose? So his corporate associates could surreptitiously place two dozen Happy Birthday balloons, along with a buffet of caviar and champagne, in their colleague’s office. Why not? The elderly corporate big shot, who had made the request in the parking lot, was such a nice gentleman, and dressed in one whale of an expensive suit. Pricey enough to feed her family for six months.

Beowulf Agate had retained a few of his more-persuasive talents. In other days, older days, he might have opted for less time-consuming, but riskier, preparations. However, the advancing years dictated a more carefully thought-out approach. In retrospect, he wished he had had the wisdom of such cautionary practices before. Perhaps it would have eliminated two shoulder wounds, three bullets in his legs, and a stomach puncture that took weeks to mend. So what? He couldn’t spring over a five-foot fence now, either. Five feet, hell, three with luck and a sore back!

The muscles of his calves still throbbing from the climb, he shook his legs one by one rapidly, harshly, and started up the final flight. As promised, the small rubber stop kept the crash door open barely an inch, sufficient without being apparent. Again in the arrogance of satisfactory security, there were no cameras in the hallways; a team of night watchmen patrolled the corridors, checked the office doors, and clocked in with their keys at the end of each floor. Scofield reached the top step, approached the door, and pulled it back just enough to glance down the hallway. He immediately shoved it back against the rubber; a guard was walking toward him, dangling the large metal security key
that he would insert into the watchman’s clock at the end of the hall, only feet from the exit staircase.

Suddenly concerned, Bray crouched, removing the doorstop and painfully holding the heavy steel door by his fingertips so that barely a slit of light showed. His right hand in agony, his fingers on fire, he held his breath in an attempt to suppress the pain. At last, he heard the click of the watchman’s time clock and the sound of the guard’s footsteps retreating toward the elevators. He again pulled the crash door open slightly, plunged his left hand into the tiny space, and removed his right, bringing it to his mouth for warm moisture. The uniformed guard stood by an elevator; he pressed the button and the undisturbed panel instantly opened. The man disappeared and Scofield, perspiration gathering at his hairline, quickly walked into the dim hallway.

The cleaning crew had disappeared, the silence comforting. Bray rapidly made his way down the corridor, checking the nameplates and the titles on the doors.

ALISTAIR MCDOWELL
CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER

It was the center door directly ahead at the far end of the hallway. There were no similar doors on either side, signifying a suite, not a normal corporate office. Scofield reached for the glistening brass knob, hoping his rewarded cleaning lady had duplicated her service at the exit staircase. She had. Slowly Bray turned the knob and cautiously opened the door, prepared to run if an undetected alarm went off. None did, and he swiftly entered, pivoting, and closing the door as he switched on his small, powerful flashlight with the blue beam. He circled the room with it, aiming the light at the floor, then crossed to the four large windows, found the cords, and pulled the heavy drapes across the glass. He was ready to start his search.

Alistair McDowell was a family man and apparently wanted everyone to know it. Emphatically. There were at least two dozen silver-framed photographs placed about his
huge polished desk and in the bookshelves between the windows. They depicted three children in varying stages of growing up, from infancy in their mother’s arms to teenage status. They were seen with their parents and the accoutrements of the progressing years: cribs, baptismal robes, playpens, swings, tricycles, bicycles, tennis racquets, horses, and Comet sailboats. What was shown was a limited history of the Good Life, deserved by a God-fearing man who was proud of his family, his community, his church, and his country. The fruits of his industriousness were wealth, happiness, and stability. It was the American way; he reveled in it.

And if Beowulf Agate’s suspicions were even close to the mark, one Alistair McDowell would be among the first to destroy that way of life by restricting it to a select elite, with its legions of sycophants—read slaves.

The desk drawers, two of which were locked, presented no problem for the prongs but neither did they reveal anything helpful except, perhaps, for an appointments calendar. Scofield removed his miniature camera with the 1,000-ASA film and photographed every page; it took nearly fifteen minutes. He then proceeded to examine the entire suite, starting with the unexpected bedroom beyond the right wall, the interior of the office itself, and ending with a conference room on the left, stern but elegant in its heavy simplicity. The search had uncovered several items that required intensive examination. First among them was a wall safe concealed behind a row of leather-bound legal volumes. They had caught Bray’s attention, for regardless of McDowell’s vaunted ability in management, he was not an attorney.

The thick tomes were there to impress his visitors, not for practical research. They were also an excellent front for a wall safe. Another discovery was a locked closet that, when manipulated open, revealed an obviously state-of-the-art computer and a curved white plastic chair, the enclosure so small only one person could sit inside. A third object was a four-tiered locked mahogany file cabinet that awkwardly stood below the painting of an old English hunting scene, as if the interior decorator had forgotten to build it into the
wall. The last entry in the revaluation sweepstakes was the most curious: a large freestanding antique music box that was placed above a carved cherry wood cabinet, the price undoubtedly in the neighborhood of thirty thousand dollars, if not a great deal more.

What piqued his curiosity, however, were the unique contents within the locked cabinet, once again subjected to Bray’s sophisticated prongs. It was a self-contained electronic unit, but not a computer, for it was designed for a single purpose and nothing else. Beowulf Agate recognized it at once, recognized the typewriter keys and the four succeeding cylinders that rolled forward and in reverse, slowly, as if inexorably, until all were synchronized and came to a halt, its elusive problem having been solved, a cipher broken. It was a decoding unit designed around the principles of the converter that had cracked the famous Enigma, the cipher machine used by the German high command to send encrypted messages in the Second World War.

The one modern addition to this machine was obviously usurped from the computer. Instead of a printed page that emerged from the lowest platen, there was a small television screen mounted on top of the equipment. Scofield recalled his earlier days in London while working with British intelligence and how he had been fascinated by the stories about cracking Enigma. An English colleague had taken him to a branch office in Oxford where an updated version of a decoding machine was in operation, the proximity to the university for purposes of immediate scholarship and research.

“Type in the word ‘aardvark,’ ” the young MI-5 officer named Waters had said. Bray did so and the screen instantly printed out the words
SCREW OFF, ASSHOLE
. “I’m afraid a few of our graduates in training have a warped sense of humor,” Geoffrey Waters had continued, chuckling. “Now, spell out the phrase ‘The apple rolls far from the tree.’ ” Again, Scofield did as he was told, but this time the screen went to work in a civilized manner.
MEETING CONFIRMED STUTTGART AS SCHEDULED
. “That was an actual transmission we intercepted from a mole we unearthed
last week in the Foreign Office sent to the Stasi in East Berlin.”

“What happened?”

“Oh, he went to Stuttgart, all right, but I’m afraid he never came back. One of our lads over the Wall told the Stasi he was a double.”

Brandon found the switch and turned on Alistair McDowell’s personal decoder. For the hell of it, he typed in
aardvark
. The screen displayed the word
INSUFFICIENT
. At least the American product was better mannered. He then inserted the sentence
The apple rolls far from the tree
. The screen faded as the cylinders rolled, finally coming to a stop. The letters appeared:
ADDITIONAL DATA REQUIRED—ZERO SEARCH
. Trees and rolling apples were not in cipherable fashion. Scofield pulled out his camera and took several photographs of the machine in the hope that the manufacturer might be found. Whoever it was would have to be among those contractors for the military and/or the intelligence community dealing in maximum-classified materials. In the parlance of the trade, it was a possible.

Bray returned to the file cabinet, switching on a nearby floor lamp. There were four drawers so he pulled over a straight-backed chair and started at the bottom, beginning with letters
T
through
Z
, seven index dividers, within which were numerous file folders.

The reading was not only laborious, it was also paralyzingly dull. The vast majority of Alistair McDowell’s correspondence and memoranda concerned acquisitions, potential acquisitions, marketing strategies, budgets, profit margins and how to improve them. The minority consisted of matters of less import, such as copies of bland speeches made to Rotary Clubs, chambers of commerce, and corporate and trade conventions, as well as letters to politicians, equally bland, and a few to the headmasters of several private schools (apparently the McDowell offspring were not so squeaky-clean after all). Plus an assortment of memos from the chairman involving past and current negotiations, his strong points italicized. Scofield’s eyes were glazed, his
mind numbed by the banality of the files. Until the letter
Q
—under the inexplicable title of “Quotient Group Equations.”

What did it mean? What were “quotient group equations”? There were five folders filled with handwritten pages of numbers and symbols, formulas, or formulae, of one sort or another, but what they signified, Bray hadn’t a clue. Yet instincts born in years past came back to him. They meant
something
that Alistair McDowell did not want anyone to understand. Otherwise there would be headings on the pages, descriptions—no matter how brief—of the contents. Instead, there was nothing, no inkling whatsoever.

Scofield knew that
quotient
was a mathematical term, as was
equation
, but where the
group
fit in was beyond him. He looked around the office, hoping to find a dictionary. He did, naturally, on the lower shelf of a bookcase. Carrying it to the desk, he glanced at the windows, making sure the drapes were completely closed, and turned on McDowell’s lamp. He opened the dictionary, flipping through the pages until he reached: