Dedicated to the men of the Secret Services of the United States of America.
Prologue
Dr. Harry Beachamp made his way down the empty corridor toward the end door where two Marine sentries stood, their rifles in hand.
"Morning, boys."
"Morning, sir," returned one of the sentries.
"How's the patient?"
"The same," said the young man, motioning for Beachamp to raise his arms. The doctor complied with a sigh.
"You'd think some of us might be exempt from this constant frisking."
"You know the orders, sir. No one gets through this door without a thorough search. No one." He ran his hands over the doctor's clothes, finishing at the cuffs of his trousers. Then, taking out a small portable metal detector, he repeated the process all the way up.
"It's just that it's all getting a little bit tedious. How's Bernice holding up?"
"Lieutenant Green seems to be all right, sir," the young man said, folding the detector and slipping it back into his pocket. "Although it hasn't been easy with a spitfire like this one." He reached over and opened the door.
The room was sparsely furnished; a hospital bed, a night-stand, a dresser for clothes — all in white. White blanket on the bed, white curtains, the only dab of color anywhere seemed to be the blue-black hair of the young woman who sat in a wheelchair facing the window, her back to the door.
Beside her sat a Marine nurse, also in white, her face drawn, drained of emotion. When Beachamp entered, she stood up and came forward. "May I speak with you a moment, Doctor?" she asked. "Alone?" This last word was added with a note of urgency.
"Of course, Lieutenant, but I'd like to see my patient first, if you don't mind."
"Oh, yes," said the nurse, backing off. "Excuse me, Doctor." She stepped in the direction of the far wall, working her hands anxiously in front of her.
Beachamp came around to the front of the wheelchair and placed himself on the window ledge so that he could look directly at the young woman. He felt his breath catch slightly in his throat. Her amazing beauty always took him by surprise. "How are you feeling today?" he asked gently.
Her dark eyes glared at him.
"Pain?"
She didn't answer.
"I would imagine," he went on.
Again, silence. She glared at him, her eyes as vicious and alien as the stare of a snake.
He opened his clipboard as though printed there somewhere was the secret of how to make her talk to him. The words TATIANA KOBELEV appeared at the top of the sheet. Nationality: RUSSIAN; Referred from: CLASSIFIED; Duration of stay: CLASSIFIED; Personal history: CLASSIFIED; Medical history: Good health except for the spinal injury.
He closed the cover and tapped it absently with his pencil, still staring at her. Scuttlebutt had it this was the girl who had taken a potshot at the President and killed a Secret Service agent, then had been wounded herself in the scuffle. The press had been thrown off the track. They were told she had been killed. Another girl had been buried in her place; a diary had been «discovered» that showed a mental history of instability. Then, once the public had been satisfied, Kobelev was rushed here to the military hospital at Camp Peary under the strictest security.
But all this was speculation, grist for the rumor mill. No self-respecting officer would be caught dead repeating such tripe. Still, he couldn't help but wonder if maybe the girl's hard attitude didn't stem from fear of being shot by a firing squad at any moment.
"I'm not here to judge," he said to her, softly touching her arm. "I'm a doctor. You're my patient. It doesn't matter to me what you've done."
She turned and stared sullenly out the window.
He leaned closer to her. He had taken several years of Russian in college, thinking someday to be able to read Tolstoy in the original, but he'd given it up when it drew too much time from his premedical studies. He could remember only a little of it now. "I want to be your friend," he said haltingly in her native tongue.
Her eyes flashed back to his, hate radiating from behind dark pupils.
He bent still closer, close enough now to feel her breath. "Believe me, Tatiana, I don't care what you've done," he said in English. "I'm a Christian man. I believe we are all equal in the sight of God."
Her lips puckered and she spat.
Immediately the nurse, who had been standing on the other side of the room, dashed forward. "Oh. Dr. Beachamp! I'm so sorry!" she exclaimed, pulling a crumpled tissue from the pocket of her uniform and dabbing the saliva from his face. "She is a wicked girl. Absolutely wicked."
"It's all right," the doctor mumbled absently. "Please." He took the tissue and wiped his eyes and the sides of his nose. "It's my own fault. They told me what to expect. I just refused to believe them, that's all. I won't make that mistake again, I can assure you," he added, straightening himself.
The nurse drew him into the comer by the bathroom. "Is it possible," she whispered, "that this girl's faking not being able to walk?"
The doctor drew himself up. "Absolutely absurd! Of course not. You've seen her charts, Lieutenant. You know the extent of the nerve damage she sustained. How can you possibly entertain…"
"The other day she indicated she wanted to urinate. I went to get a clean bedpan when I was called down the hall by an orderly who had an emergency on another ward. Ensign Poulsen. I believe you know who I mean."
"The accidental grenade detonation. Blind, isn't he? I understand he's taking it rather hard."
"He was hysterical, sir. He'd gotten hold of a scalpel from somewhere and had one of the nurses by the throat. It took all of us the better part of an hour to calm him down. At any rate, I completely forgot about this one. When I remembered, I figured she'd either be in agony or wet the bed by the time I got back. But she wasn't, sir! She never said anything about it. The bedpan was dry and the toilet had been recently flushed!"
"Lieutenant, I'm sure you're imagining…"
"No! I know that toilet had been flushed because I'd left cigarette ashes in it and they were gone when I came back."
"Smoking in these rooms is strictly against regulations!"
"I'm willing to take whatever punishment you think is proper. But I'm telling you that girl is lying. She can walk. I'd bet my pension on it."
Beachamp smiled. "Before you end up poverty-stricken in your old age, Lieutenant, I think I should tell you that medically speaking, there is no way that girl could walk. It's absolutely impossible."
"Absolutely, sir?"
The doctor hedged. "There might be a very remote chance that the nerve endings were not severed. We may have missed it in our tests. But the possibility is so small it's not even worth discussing. And as for your toilet, I 'm sure one of the men outside came in and flushed it and didn't tell you. Did you ask?"
"No."
"There you are. I'm sure if we went outside right now and…"
The woman clutched at his arm. This girl is playing possum! I can feel it!"
Beachamp scrutinized her closely. "Is this duty beginning to wear on you, Lieutenant? Perhaps you could use some relief for a day or two. I'll speak to Colonel Forbes about a temporary replacement."
"Maybe you're right," she said, self-consciously withdrawing her hand from the doctor's arm. "Maybe I am imagining things. But I'll tell you one thing," she went on, turning in the direction of the girl who sat with her back to them gazing out the window, "there's something about her as cold as ice, and it goes all the way through."
"Yes, well…"the doctor muttered uncertainly, his eyes following the nurse's to the angular, unyielding back of the girl who seemed oblivious to their presence. "I'm afraid none of us is too fond of her. I'll speak to the Colonel."
* * *
Tatiana heard the stupid American doctor leaving, but she did not turn around. He and his asinine attempt at Russian! As though his vile tongue could do justice to the expressiveness of that language!
But she had to contain her anger. She had to keep her silence, build a wall around herself. And wait until the time was right.
And when that lime finally arrived, she'd have to depend on instinct. Instinct her father had taught her to depend upon and use. Attack, he said. Attack and keep on attacking until the enemy can no longer raise his head. And then keep on — keep on until you've utterly crushed him!
She thought about her enemy — his face a pulpy mass of blood — and it made her smile. It was the face of Nick Carter, the man who had put the bullet in her back, the man she hated more than anyone in the world. Revenge upon him would be sweet when it came. And it would come. In time. In time.
She twitched her toes inside the cloth hospital slippers. Her secret. She had to keep it from these stupid doctors at all costs. No one could know, no matter how they tried to take her unawares, no matter how many pins they stuck in her legs. Nothing could spoil the surprise she had in store for them, all of them. She would exercise at night. She would do isometrics in bed to work off the weakness that had crept into her body from the weeks of lying and sitting in this disgusting room. Then, when the time came, she would show them how well she walked. And ran.
The first to die would be that sniveling nurse. She'd find out whom she'd been dealing with all this time. What a pleasure it would be to watch the light of life fade from those dull eyes, to let death swell that sharp tongue of hers and silence it forever! But in time, not now. For now she must wait.
One
Nick Carter, the man uppermost in Tatiana Kobelev's thoughts, was oblivious to the hatred being directed toward him from the hospital at Camp Peary more than three hundred miles away. He lit another cigarette and dropped the match between the seats of the small rehearsal hall located on West 49th Street in New York City, then focused his attention again on what was happening onstage.
The director had stopped the show to make a minor adjustment, but now they were underway again, working on a scene from the second act of Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire.
Most of the actors were bad, some even terrible — stiff, uncertain of themselves, or so overconfident that their performances lacked balance and subtlety. But the young woman in the role of Blanche radiated power. She was Blanche Dubois. When she spoke, Carter could hear the harbor sounds, and smell the sweat and stench of the New Orleans slum. She was the epicenter of the entire production, and the director seemed to know it, checking with her time and time again as to how she wanted a scene done or if such and such a change met with her approval. Finally they broke for lunch, giving Carter the opportunity he'd been waiting for. He slipped backstage and knocked on her dressing room door.
"Who is it?" she asked impatiently.
"It's me."
"Who the hell is 'me'?" she asked, flinging the door open. She looked into his face, and her mouth dropped open in surprise. "Nick!" she exclaimed happily, throwing her arms around him.
"Hello, Cynthia."
"'Hello, Cynthia'? This is all you can say after two years? I pine for you half my young girlhood and ail you can say is. 'Hello. Cynthia'?"
"May I come in?"
"Yes, of course."
The room was packed with crates of costumes, wigs, and other paraphernalia. He lifted a copy of the script from a chair and sat down. "Hawk sent me," he said simply. "We've a job for you."
"Business, is it?" she said, disappointed. "I should have known. You wouldn't come all the way up here just to pay a social call."
That's not true. Cynthia. When they told me you'd been selected for this assignment, I couldn't wait to get here."
"Really, Nick? If you weren't such a Don Juan, I could almost believe that. David Hawk. I haven't heard that name in a long time. How is the old bastard?"
"He survives. He's tough. He has to be. But this time he needs your help."
"I've heard that song and dance before. It seems to me I remember you and me hotfooting it across the deserts of Iran one step ahead of the Ayatollah."
"We appreciated what you did."
"Swell. I get a letter of commendation from the President, and I can't even show it to anybody. That, and a broken heart. Now you want me to do it all over again?"
"I didn't break your heart, did I?" asked Carter with a smile.
She had been leaning against the dressing table. She came to where he was sitting and ran a hand through his hair. "You 're an asshole, Nick. You know you did. You made me love you, then you ran off to Algeria or some damned place and that was the end of it. Tell me, this job Hawk has in mind — will you be working with me?"
Carter stood up and took her into his arms. "Yes."
"Closely?"
He kissed her neck. "Very."
She made a sound low in her throat that was half groan and half sigh, and pulled away from him. "It's no use. We open in Philadelphia in seven days for a month's run, then we return here. I can't just walk out on them now."
"I saw the rehearsal. You're the best thing in the show."
"It's a big chance for me, Nick. I'm no longer just an understudy. I've been learning."
"It's important, Cynthia."
Her eyes never left his face. "How important, Nick? Tell me the fate of the world hangs in the balance. Make it easy for me."
"Your Russian is still passable?"
"I was raised over there, remember? Until my father defected."
"Who's the most important individual in the Soviet hierarchy?"
"You mean officially, or who has the most power?"
"The most power."
"I'd have to say the head of the KGB. Everyone's afraid of him, even the Premier."
"What if I told you there was a man standing in line to seize that power, a man so totally evil, so obsessed with destroying both his country and ours, that he makes Hitler look like a Boy Scout?"
The hate in his voice made her suddenly cold, and she tried to laugh. "You're not serious, are you?"
"Deadly. I tried to kill him once, but I failed to make certain the job was done. I won't make the same mistake again."
"Who is this maniac? What's his name?"
"Nikolai Fedor Kobelev."
The girl's face turned white. "Oh. Nicky!" she exclaimed.
"You know of him?"
She sat down heavily in the chair behind her. "I know him all right. His name has been a curse in my family for years. He was a cipher clerk in State Security. An opportunity for a promotion came up, and it was between him and another clerk. The competition didn't last long. The other clerk was found at home, stabbed through the neck. That other clerk was my mother. I was a year old at the time."
"I didn't know."
She shook her head, the memory hard. "He pulled strings, managed to shunt the blame onto my mother's alcoholic brother. Uncle Piotr is still in Siberia doing life."
Carter's hands fell to his sides. "I'm sorry," he said. "I wasn't told. If I had known, I would have requested they assign somebody else."
"No, Nick! I want to do it. I have to. Don't you see? I owe it to my mother and my family. If you're going to run an operation on Kobelev, I must be there."
Carter shook his head. "There isn't room on this assignment for personal vendettas. The man has to be taken out cleanly, professionally, completely. There can't be any slip-ups."
"I can do it, Nick. I swear I'll do exactly what you say. But I have to be there when you put the knife in him."
Carter sighed. There wasn't much time. Finding another actress might take months. Besides, Cynthia's resemblance to Kobelev's daughter was almost uncanny.
"All right," he said at last, pulling a card from his pocket. "Show this to the receptionist at the base hospital at Camp Peary at fourteen hundred hours tomorrow. I'm afraid we're going to have to do a little surgery on your face."
"I don't care. Do whatever you must."
He took her chin in his hand and looked into her eyes. "Good girl," he said.
* * *
The next afternoon Carter placed a call to an unlisted number in Washington, D.C., and was told the «subject» had been accepted and the «experiment» would begin as planned. Thus he knew that Cynthia Barnes, nee Katerina Burjeski, had made her appointment at Camp Peary and that the CIA-selected doctors had found her suitable for surgery. That night he packed a bag and caught a plane for Phoenix.
His eventual destination was a small dude ranch on the outskirts of Tempe. Ostensibly it was a run-down tourist attraction that had seen better days, but in reality it was a rest haven for the agents of AXE, the super-secret information gathering and political action organization of which Carter was a charter member. AXE was doubly secret, secret even from the Central Intelligence Agency, its funding hidden in a maze of budget referrals and footnotes, and finally tucked safely into the President's own Special Expense Account so as to be utterly untraceable. Carter had worked his way through the ranks to the designation N3, Killmaster, a name that spoke more eloquently than any job description as to his purpose and capabilities.
The Litchfield Municipal Airport in Phoenix is rather small, in spite of the city's size, with concourses for deplaning passengers at one end and a large lobby with a double baggage carousel in the center. At the far end, doors lead to the parking lot. Carter arrived at 9:58 P.M. exactly and went directly to the baggage carousel.
He was relatively sure the usual broken-down station wagon with Mesa Verde Dude Ranch printed on the door in flaking gold letters would be waiting for him outside to take him the rest of the way to Tempe, and he was equally confident the driver would have been more than willing to tend to his bags as well, but Carter much preferred to look after his own luggage.
Over his shoulder he carried a small leather bag that contained his toiletries and other personal effects, as well as whatever book he was currently reading, usually a foreign language grammar or contemporary political history. But it was his other case, a finely tooled handmade Brazilian two-suiter, that he missed most whenever he flew, and for which he watched now with a steady gaze as the carousel began to turn and luggage began dropping to the rail. This bag held the small arsenal of personal weapons he had about him always: a 9mm German Luger complete with silencer, affectionately called Wilhelmina; and a small, pencil-thin stiletto. Hugo, that fit in the chamois sheath he always wore on his forearm He possessed one other weapon, dubbed Pierre, a gas bomb that fit high on his left thigh, almost like a third testicle. But it was plastic and was able to pass through metal detectors without so much as a beep, a feat impossible for the other weapons. They had had to be packed away and had been out of his grasp now for almost six hours. The effect on him couldn't have been stronger if he'd been walking around all that time without clothes.
Like a determined little train of cars on a roller coaster, the bags, one by one, rode to the top of the carousel, then tumbled down, presenting themselves with a clunk to the several dozen travel-weary passengers at the bottom who closed in to snatch them up as they rode by. Carter waited, waiting for the familiar outline of his bag, when suddenly he felt the eyes of someone in the crowd staring at him. The alarm bell in the back of his head began to clang, the danger signal tingling in every nerve of his body.
He gave no sign that he knew. Calmly he collected his bag and made his way directly to the men's room.
In the reflection of the concession stand window he saw a man in light slacks and sports coat separate himself from the crowd and move in the same direction, a telltale bulge under the left arm of his jacket. The men's room was deserted except for an older gentleman standing at one of the urinals. He didn't bother to turn around as Carter entered, selected the last toilet stall in line, put a dime in the slot, and went in.
He took down his trousers, sat down, and pulled the suitcase up onto his lap. In a matter of seconds the old man would finish up and go, leaving Carter alone in the room. That, no doubt, was what the man outside was waiting for.
Carter unlocked the case as the old man finished, walked to the sink, and ran the water. Then he stepped to the towel dispenser. It rattled loudly as he cranked out several feet of paper towel.
From under a neatly pressed pair of Yves St. Laurent slacks on the bottom of the case Carter retrieved a wooden box.
The door swung open, the bustle of the terminal suddenly filling the room. The old man had left. Another second and the door swung open again, this time admitting a man whose step was a good deal surer and more distinct than the old man's shuffle.
Carter held his breath while these new footsteps hesitated briefly by the door, then continued on.
Time was running out. Carter found the correct key and opened the box. Wilhelmina gleamed and smelled faintly of gun oil. On the right, also resting in the Styrofoam, was a clip, and along the top of the box nestled a stubby cylindrical silencer. Carter took out the gun and silencer and fitted them together, making only as much noise as absolutely necessary to turn their perfectly matched, well-oiled threads.
The footsteps stopped at the next stall. Carter picked the ammunition clip from the box and held it in his hand. The jingling of coins in a pocket gave Carter his cue. At the same instant the dime slipped into the slot and clattered through the door lock's mechanism. Carter jammed the ammo clip in the butt of the gun, using the sound of the coin to mask the metallic clack as he drove the clip home. The man entered the stall, and Carter levered a live round into the chamber and took off the safety.
The man in the sports coat faced the toilet, whistling faintly as the steady stream of his urine thudded into the water below, his ill-polished Florsheims sticking out beneath his pale trousers scant inches from where Carter watched under the lower edge of the partition.
Then the shoes left the floor. One was raised to the paper dispenser bolted to the partition wall. The bolts creaked slightly under the unusual weight. The other disappeared as it was placed on the toilet seat. Carter twisted around, watching the upper edge of the partition.
The half moon of the man s head appeared above the flat horizon of the partition, and Carter fired, the bullet making two virtually simultaneous sounds in the tiled bathroom: the chunk sound of the explosive gases being dissipated in the silencer, and the thud of the impact on the man's skull, like a strong finger thumping a melon.
The entire line of stalls shook violently as the man's body pitched backward. An interval of silence lasted only a split second, then there was another thud as the body slammed into the small space above the toilet, the gun clattering to the floor. It came to a spinning halt at Carter's feet, a huge Graz-Buyra, standard Komitet issue.
Carter quickly stood and dressed himself. He put the Luger in his jacket pocket and the Russian gun in his suitcase. Then he climbed the partition and peered down into the next stall.
The man was dead, had been since the Luger's bullet pierced the frontal lobe of his brain, passed through his skull, and blew out a large section of the back of his head. The partition wall behind him was splattered with blood, gray matter, and bits of bone. There was nothing to be done about that now.
Letting himself down into the stall. Carter hurriedly went through the man's pockets. A New York driver's license identified him as Josef Mandaladov, thirty-eight, and gave his address as the same building that housed the Soviet mission to the United Nations.
Carter had just stuffed the billfold into his own pocket when the lavatory door swung open again and two youngsters came in, talking loudly over a percussive disco beat that emanated from the "boom box" they were carrying. One of them went to the urinals while the other stayed by the sinks. Carter held his breath, not daring to move.
When the one had finished at the urinal, he joined his companion by the sink where the two of them talked for several minutes. Laughing heartily, they finally left, the sound of their laughter and the insistent beat of the music dying only gradually on the tiled walls.
Carter lost no more time. He continued searching the body until he found what he was looking for a Frontier Airlines ticket that showed Josef Mandaladov had boarded the same plane as Carter at National Airport in Washington. He had been booked through to L.A., but had deplaned here in Phoenix, no doubt when he saw Carter getting off. This meant he had no idea of Carter's ultimate destination, and that the existence and location of AXE's rest facility here were still secure.
Carter stuffed the plane ticket in his pocket. Then, after making sure from the angle of the body that the blood seepage on the floor would be minimal, he pulled himself up over the partition into his own stall, gathered up his suitcase, and walked out, leaving Mandaladov's stall closed, the word «occupied» showing in the tiny window on the lock.
It would be ten or twenty minutes before the body was found, and by that time he planned to be many miles away.
He crossed the terminal and went outside. As he'd expected, the bartered Chevy wagon was waiting curbside. Manuel Sanchez leaned against the door. His expression split into a smile when he saw Carter.
"Evening, señor," he said, taking the suitcase and throwing it in the back seat. "Did you have a good flight?"
"Smooth as a baby's ass," Carter said, getting in and slamming the door. "Shall we go?"
* * *
The next day a short article appeared in the Sun saying an unidentified body had been found in an air terminal lavatory. That was all. Carter watched the papers for the next few days, but there was no follow-up. He assumed the man's Russian origin had been discovered, and the FBI had taken over the case, blacking out the news media. He also assumed the FBI would be more interested in finding out what someone from that particular New York address was doing in Phoenix than they were in who killed him. Therefore, the security net around AXE and its rest facility in Phoenix would remain intact, a secret even from America's own internal investigating agency.
And although the FBI might never unravel how a KGB agent managed to wander into a bathroom at the Phoenix airport to die, his presence there was no mystery to Nick Carter. It was Kobelev, who had the whole of the Executive Action branch of the KGB at his beck and call, making good or: his threat to kill him.
And yet, to Carter's thinking, it was a stupid ploy, an angry slab in the dark motivated by pure vengeance with very little planning, hardly worthy of a man of Kobelev's ingenuity and resources. It indicated the man was desperate now that his daughter was being held in this country and knowing he couldn't get at her. And desperate was just the mood in which Carter wanted him. Desperate suited Carter just fine.
Thus began Nick Carter's stint of intensive training at the Phoenix rest facility. It ended almost a month later to the day when he received a phone call from David Hawk, the acerbic founder of the AXE organization and the only man Nick Carter ever called sir. True to Hawk's well-known dislike for long telephone conversations, the message was terse: "She's ready."
Two
Within twenty-four hours of receiving Hawk's summons, Carter arrived at the base hospital at Camp Peary. He passed through two of the security checkpoints unaided, one at the gate in front of the hospital and another just outside the elevator on the fourth floor. At the door to ward «C» he was detained while a gruff Marine sergeant made a phone call. In a few minutes a slender, distinguished-looking man in a business suit came out and introduced himself as Dr. Rutherford. He signed the sergeant's book, then led Carter down a long corridor.
Rutherford explained that Camp Peary was where the Company brought its military trainees from foreign governments, also its political defectors and persons in need of stringent protection. It was designed so that persons inside would have no clue as to where they were being kept, neither which country nor even which continent. Security here, the doctor told him, was airtight.
Carter listened patiently although he'd heard it all before. He knew, for example, that Tatiana Kobelev was being held in this very building only two floors above them.
Halfway down the hall the doctor stopped in front of a blank white door. "You'll have to continue from here by yourself, Mr. Carter," he said dryly. "I'm not allowed inside."
"Very well, Doctor. It was nice to have met you," said Carter, putting his hand on the knob and waiting for the doctor to leave.
But he didn't.
"I've told your superior, Mr. Hawk, that I deeply resent not being allowed to participle in the final stages of our little project," he said, an edge of anger in his voice. "These things need a delicate hand or weeks of work may be sacrificed. I told him my security clearance is the highest of anyone in the hospital. And the unusualness of this experiment and the way it was run…"
"If David Hawk said you weren't allowed inside, I'm sure he had his reasons," Carter said, cutting him off. "I've never known him to do anything without good reason. Now if you don't mind. Doctor, I'm expected."
Rutherford scrutinized Carter's rugged features for a second, then realizing his complaints were falling on deaf ears, he abruptly said, "I see," turned on his heel, and left.
Carter waited a few seconds and opened the door. Hawk was sitting in a small swivel chair in the middle of the doctor's examining room, smoking a cigar. Across from him on the examining table sat a young woman in a hospital gown, her entire head wrapped in gauze bandage except for two small slits for her eyes.
"Come in, Carter," Hawk said gruffly.
"Morning, sir," said Carter.
"Good morning, Nick," said the young woman.
"Good morning, Cynthia," said Carter, recognizing her voice.
"Rutherford give you a hard time?" Hawk asked, getting up to make sure Carter had locked the door. "That's the trouble with the whole CIA — too many people think they have the need to know. I wish we could have used our own facilities."
"If you don't mind my asking, sir, why aren't we? This organization leaks like a sieve."
"Exactly what I'm counting on, Carter. When the time is right, we want to make sure the right information is being passed on to the target. But this part of it," he said, turning to Cynthia, "must be absolutely secret. We split the face into three different sections and had a different doctor working on each. No one of them knew what the finished product would look like. Here," he said, handing Carter a pair of blunt-nosed nurse's scissors. "Why don't you do the honors?"
"Me, sir?"
"Just be gentle with her."
Carter began cutting the swath of bandage that ran along her neck, then worked his way up the jawline to the temple and across her forehead. The bandage fell away easily, revealing reddened, taut skin that was remarkably scar-free. When the bandage had been completely removed, he stepped back to get a good look at her. "Amazing," he said.
"Uncanny, isn't it?" remarked Hawk, producing a life-size photo of Tatiana Kobelev and holding it up next to Cynthia's face.
"I couldn't tell them apart," marveled Carter.
"Let's hope her father can't either. At least not at first."
"May I see a mirror?" asked Cynthia.
Carter retrieved a small standing mirror from the supply cabinet and handed it to her. She turned her head slowly from side to side, studying it from different angles.
"It's a nice face," Carter offered.
"It's not my face."
"You're still very beautiful."
"You can have your old face back when this business is over," Hawk said. "Meanwhile, you two've got work to do. I want you to start training together, get to know one another again, think like a team. In the meantime, word will be dropped here that we intend to move Tatiana to the St. Denis Clinic outside Dijon. Supposedly, a French surgeon will be there to do one last operation on her back. It'll be perfect, isolated, quiet. Kobelev won't be able to resist. He'll have to figure that even if it is a trap, it'll be the only time Tatiana will be close enough to the Soviet Union to make a grab for her. What he won't know is that it won't be Tatiana he'll be grabbing."
"You mean…?"
"That's right, toots," interjected Carter. "You're the bait."
* * *
Carter didn't see Cynthia again until the following afternoon when they started their training together in a little-used loft in the hospital complex. By this time most of the redness was gone, and her face had returned to its natural color. The resemblance mat had been striking before was now even more remarkable.
"You look just like her," he said when she entered the room. "I had hoped for a reasonable physical similarity, but this is really something. The only way I could tell you apart is your voice."
"I've been working on that," she said, pulling off her robe, revealing her beautifully proportioned body clad in a black leotard. "These Americans might not look like ogres," she said, lowering her voice half an octave and stretching her vowels, British style, "but they have the most bourgeois tastes."
Carter laughed. "That's her to a T!"
"Hawk gave me some tapes to study. I think I've just about got her down pat."
"You could certainly fool me."
"Could I, Nick?" she asked, her expression suddenly serious. "What about her father? Can I fool him as well?"
"You don't have to fool him for long, just long enough for us to take care of him." He smiled. She forced a smile, but the troubled look never completely left her face.
A brief silence descended, but Carter picked up the thread again quickly. "Hawk wanted me to take you through some drills to get you out of harm's way when the bullets start to fly. He says you're a bit rusty."
"Okay," she said with a shrug. She was standing very close to him, and her fragrance filled his nostrils. For a moment he was reminded of the night they had spent together on the desert outside of Teheran. It was a pleasant memory. They had been camped at an oasis. The Ayatollah's troops had lost track of them temporarily, and they had taken the opportunity to make love on a blanket under the stars. When they'd finished, they lay back in one another's arms, and listened to the grunts of the camels and the gentle wind bending the palms. Pleasant. But something else was tangled up with it, another unconscious association not at all pleasant, and it left him with a confused feeling.
"How shall we begin?" she asked. "Do you want to attack me and see how my defenses are? Nick? You with me?"
"I'm here. Just lost in thought for a moment."
"Attack me and I'll see if I can fend you off."
He reached out as if to grab her by the shoulder, but she caught his arm, twisted it, stepped through, and in an instant he was sprawled flat on his back ten feet down the mat.
"Not bad," he said, jumping to his feet. "Now finish me off."
She came toward him, a bullish determination in her eyes, and suddenly he knew what it was that had confused him earlier. The look in her eye, her hair, her face, were exactly the same as Tatiana's the night she had supposedly killed her father in their dacha outside Moscow. The menace and loathing that had seemed to fill her entire being as she came running from the study, knife in hand, and plunged it into her father's chest came back to him in a flash, along with all the hatred and dread he'd felt for her at that moment. Without realizing what he was doing, he lowered his shoulder, grabbed Cynthia by the forearm, and catapulted her into the air. She spun once, awkwardly, like a stuffed doll, and landed on the edge of the mat with a sickening thud.
As soon as he realized what he had done, he ran to her. "You all right?" he asked.
She groaned and rolled on her side, gasping for air.
"Lie back," he told her. "You've had the wind knocked out of you."
For several minutes she lay with her eyes closed, trying to breathe. Then she looked up. "You take… all this… pretty seriously… don't you?"
"It's the way you look," he said, helping her to sit up. "You reminded me of Tatiana and all I went through in Russia."
"That must have been rough." Cynthia said, finally getting a deep breath and feeling her ribs to make sure nothing was broken. "Hawk told me about it in a general way, but I never did get the particulars."
He sat down beside her. "Your friend Kobelev has come a long way since the days he was a cipher clerk. He's still ruthless as ever, but his plots have taken on a new ingenuity — an ingenuity bordering on sheer genius for death and destruction. We'd been watching his progress as a case officer, then administrator in Department S for some time. Then when they transferred him to Executive Action, we got worried, but he was still something of an unknown quantity. All that changed with the Akai Maru incident. By that time we'd realized things had gotten out of hand."
"Akai Maru?"
"A Japanese oil tanker. We found oil drums aboard that Kobelev had irradiated with strontium 90, one of the most toxic substances in the world. Our estimates said that if that shipment of oil had ever been delivered, the incidents of cancer in California would have increased fifty percent."
"That's insanity! It goes beyond espionage. It's an act of war."
"That's why he has to be stopped. Shortly after that we learned Kobelev, or the Puppet Master as they call him, was in line to become chief administrator of the entire KGB. If that had happened, his power would have been limitless. He's already professed a desire to see our two countries at war. He has some half-baked idea of seizing power in the aftermath of a nuclear confrontation."
"Is he crazy?"
"He may very well be. You wouldn't know it to talk to him, but he must be. Crazy the way Hitler was crazy."
"You talked to him?"
"I did more than that. I 'defected. Tried to become his chief lieutenant. Hawk developed a plan for assassinating the son of a bitch by convincing the Russian intelligence I was a disgruntled CIA caseworker who wanted to work for the KGB. The idea was to get me close enough to put a bullet in him, then get out of the country somehow. We figured Kobelev knew me from the Akai Maru and that he might be interested in having me on his side if he thought I was sincere."
"How'd you manage to convince him?"
"By giving them files of sensitive material we knew they wanted. Real files. We turned over some valuable information, put some agents' lives on the line, but we felt it was necessary to get me close enough to kill him. You see, we had a time factor. Another few days and the Presidium was going to make his appointment official. After that, as chief administrator, he'd have been under such heavy security we never could have gotten to him."
"Then I take it the mission failed."
"You might say that." Carter's face darkened. It was clear he took it as a personal defeat. "I was about to pull the trigger when Tatiana, his daughter, suddenly rushed in and stabbed him. I found out later it was all an act. She only pretended to stab him. It looked real and it sure convinced me — so much so I even helped her get out of the country to avoid prosecution for patricide, which turned out to be exactly what they wanted."
"It was all an act," Cynthia said, marveling at the scam.
"Every bit of it. We think even the promotion from the Presidium was phony. He set us up to get his daughter into this country so she could kill the President. And she damn near succeeded."
"Where did this happen?"
"In New York. Outside the UN."
"You mean it was Tatiana Kobelev who tried to kill President Manning in New York? I thought it was what's-her-name, Millicent Stone, the one who died. They published her diary and everything."
Carter shook his head. "The FBI fabricated the story. They had to. Tatiana is a Russian national, don't forget. If it had gotten out who'd really pulled the trigger, it would have strained things between our countries forever. It may have even called for a military response."
"So Kobelev had it planned from the beginning. Lure you to Russia to provide legitimate entry for his daughter so she could kill the President. Amazing."
"The man is diabolical. He has to be stopped at any cost."
"Poor Nicky," she said, gently running her fingers through his hair. "You look as if you're taking all this on yourself."
"I had a chance to kill him in Moscow and I blew it. He'd contrived this fencing match between us, thinking he'd humiliate me in front of his wife and daughter. He didn't know I was an intercollegiate champion for four years in a row. I could have run him through, but I didn't. I thought I'd get another chance. But if I'd skewered him then as I should have…"
"If you'd killed him in front of his entire family you never would have gotten out of Russia alive, and our side would have lost one of the most valuable agents it has. Don't be so hard on yourself, Nick." She leaned over and kissed him. It was meant to be a reassuring peck, but her lips lingered a few extra seconds, savoring the sensation.
"Do that again and I might not be able to control myself."
She put her arms around him, her hand resting on the nape of his neck. "What do you think I've been waiting for?" she asked huskily. Gently she pulled him down with her onto the mat. He smiled and followed her without the slightest hesitation as she brought her leg up around his, and pressed against his body.
For all her strength, she was incredibly soft, and in a few moments they were both nude, and Carter was kissing her neck, and her lovely breasts, her nipples hard now as her chest rose and fell.
"Nicky… oh. God, Nicky," she moaned softly, her fingernails beginning to scratch his back.
And then he was inside her, and they moved in an easy, graceful rhythm, like two athletes or a pair of dancers, their passion mounting, but gently.
She cried out in the end, her legs wrapped tightly around his waist, at the same moment Carter thrust deeply one last time.
They finished their workout around eight o'clock. Cynthia put on her robe while Carter stood staring out the large arched window at the end of the huge room.
"What are you thinking?" she asked, coming up behind him and looping her arm through his.
"I was thinking how nice it would be right now to go out and eat Chinese. I know a nice little place not far from here."
"I can't leave."
"I know, but every now and then I get a yearning to lead a normal, everyday sort of life."
She squeezed his arm, and together they stared down at the puddles glistening in the streetlight at the far end of the parking lot.
It was raining over the entire eastern seaboard from Stowe, Vermont, to Charleston, South Carolina, but out over the Atlantic the clouds dissipated, and in Paris at this particular moment, the weather was crisp and dry.
With six hours of time difference it was already two in the morning Paris time, and in spite of the fabled "nightlife Parisienne," the city's streets were practically deserted. Even the legendary Champs-Elysee's traffic was light — a taxi, a private car, and of course, every now and then, a truck.
One such truck, a squat white one, pulled out of a narrow alley onto the famous avenue. Ahead was the Arc de Triomphe and a dozen streets to the east the Palais de l'Élysée, where at this hour the president of France lay sleeping.
Two men sat in the truck: Jean, the driver, a wiry little Parisian whose looks greatly belied his august physical strength; and beside him, Guillaume, older and heavier, his sailor's watch cap pushed to the back of his head and a Gauloise eternally stuck to his lower lip.
They turned left on the Avenue General Gallieni and crossed the Seine on the Pont Alexandre III. Here the city began to change, subtly, but significantly all the same. The streets became cleaner, the shrubs better trimmed, the sidewalks in perfect repair.
Jean turned in at the rue Avignon and slowed. The street was quiet, not a soul stirred. Under a line of chestnut trees Mercedes, Peugeot, Citroen, and Cadillac limousines were wedged next to the curb bumper-to-bumper. Beyond these were the house fronts, cold gray stone with thick wooden doors behind screens of wrought-iron filigree. Bronze plaques identified each: Ambassade d'Espagne, Ambassade d'Italie, Ambassade d'États-Unis. At this last building Jean cranked the wheel, and the big truck lumbered down the long driveway toward the back.
The row of refuse cans stood against the north wall surrounding the compound. Jean stopped the truck with a bounce and a hiss of air brakes, ground the shift lever into reverse, and when the rear bumper of the truck was within a few feet of the cans, stopped it again.
The two men climbed out, pulling on thickly soiled gloves, and began dumping the cans. They were halfway down the line when the sound of someone clearing his throat forced Guillaume to turn around. Standing at the edge of the truck's rear was a uniformed figure, his flat-topped hat making his head seem disproportionately large in the darkness. At his hip was a revolver.
"How you boys doin'?" the figure asked.
"Comme çi, comme ca," Jean said offhandedly. He picked up another can, slung it onto the back of the truck, banged it empty, and replaced it.
"Where's your partner, Estaban?"
"Sick," said Jean. "Mal à l'estomac." He made a face and a hand motion around his middle to indicate how poorly Estaban was feeling.
"Who's this guy, then?"
"Permettez-moi… mon ami, Guillaume." Jean said.
Guillaume bowed his head uncertainly, watching Jean for his cue out of the corner of his eye.