“Thank you, Mr. Troyanovsky.”
A thin smile allowed itself to appear on the Russian’s handsome face. “You might be interested to know, Mr. Harrigan, that the premier has a liking for you. He respects you.”
“I appreciate that.” Harrigan found a small smile of his own. “I’m not sure I deserve it, but I appreciate it.”
Krueger, who had stepped to one side to answer a walkie-talkie call, now sidled up next to Harrigan.
“You’ve got to come with me,” Krueger told him.
“Now?” Harrigan asked irritably. “Sam, I have just a few things to do here, in light of this situation — can’t this wait?”
“No,” Krueger said, in a manner that conveyed Harrigan’s single option in the matter.
Out in the corridor, when an elevator arrived and Harrigan began to step on, Krueger fell back.
“Are you coming, Sam? I mean, it’s your party, isn’t it?”
“Not hardly,” Krueger said, planted firmly on the other side of the elevator doors. “He’ll be waiting for you in the basement.”
“Who will?”
“Company man.”
“Jesus Christ,” Harrigan muttered as the doors swooshed shut. That was all he needed — CIA intervention; or maybe his dream was about to come true, and Allen Dulles was waiting down there to transform him from goat into hero. Somehow that seemed just a little unlikely, and the rapid descent of the elevator only added to the sick feeling in his stomach.
The elevator doors slid open in the basement of the Beverly Hills Hotel to reveal a man leaning against the opposite wall smoking a cigarette in a holder, smoke curling upward in a near question mark.
Harrigan didn’t know the man — and yet he did.
Lanky, at least ten years older than Harrigan, the spook looked like a high-rent undertaker in his black Brooks Brothers suit with the crisp white button-down shirt and thin black tie, his dark Brylcreemed hair parted on the side. His eyes were china blue and almost pretty, an anomaly in a once handsome face ravaged by time and dirty jobs that somebody had had to do.
As Harrigan stepped out of the elevator, the man switched the affectation of the cigarette-in-holder to his left hand, extending his right.
“John Munson,” the man said. “Would you like to see my I.D.?”
“You show me yours,” Harrigan said, shaking the clammy hand, “and I’ll show you mine.”
They held up their respective I.D. wallets — this was no situation in which to cut corners — and Harrigan said, “I figured you guys’d be lurking around.”
“Our accommodations aren’t as nice as yours,” Munson said, taking a draw from the cigarette-in-holder, ironic amusement seemingly etched permanently in his features. He gestured and showed Harrigan the way, down a narrow hallway past doors marked LAUNDRY and HOUSEKEEPING, where the pink decor of the fabled hotel continued even in its bowels. In the narrow, windowless, claustrophobic confines of the basement, however, the color reminded Harrigan of Pepto-Bismol — some of which the queasy agent could have used about now.
The two men approached a final door, STORAGE, which Munson opened, Harrigan following him inside.
Bigger than a broom closet, though not by much, the room had walls lined with metal racks, loaded with cleaning supplies and hand tools; a few mops and brooms leaned casually against a wall, disinterested bystanders.
A card table took up the rest of the room, where sat a chubby man in white shirtsleeves and another thin black tie, headphones straddling his bald head like a bad comb-over. On the table, next to a sweating bottle of Coke and a half-eaten corned-beef on rye dripping with hot mustard, a large tape recorder whirred, in the process right now of being rewound.
“Khrushchev’s room?” Harrigan asked, gesturing toward the machine.
Munson nodded. “We put the bug in right after his people swept it.”
The combination of smoke, cleaning fluid, and corned-beef on rye was not helping Harrigan’s stomach.
“We swept it, too,” the State Department man said.
“No, the guy working for you was really working for us. He was installing devices, actually, not just checking for them. Hope you don’t mind.”
“Anything to help a brother agency.”
The hand with the cigarette holder gestured, making abstract smoke patterns. “I think you’ll find this… of interest.”
“You mean, you’ve got everything on tape,” Harrigan said, perking, realizing what that spool might hold. “You know exactly what went down in that room!”
“Well, now,” Munson said slowly, sighing smoke, invoking an old radio catchphrase, “I wouldn’t say that…”
Harrigan waited for the CIA agent to continue.
“You see, we’ve been keeping an eye on a certain Chinese assassin for some time…”
Harrigan grunted. “China — should have known. That lead from Formosa…”
“Actually, not Nationalist China — Red.”
“Red!” Harrigan was stunned.
“…At any rate, this hitter is a freelancer named Lee Wong; but our operative lost track of him in Hong Kong last month. We considered him a good candidate for use in a K hit, and figured, if such an attempt were to be made on the trip, California with its ample Oriental population made sense for where he might surface.”
“Red China,” Harrigan said to himself, as if tasting the words, trying to get some recognizable flavor out of them. “They wouldn’t dare… would they?”
Another sigh of smoke. “Mao Tse-tung is reportedly furious over Khrushchev’s visit.” Munson made a melodramatic gesture with the cigarette holder. “Views it as a ‘sell-out’ — the Russians consorting with the enemy, so to speak.”
Harrigan was frowning, shaking his head, damn near incredulous. “And that’s enough for Mao to start World War III over?”
Munson smiled wickedly. “It might be — if China were on the sidelines, waiting to come out on top.”
And now Harrigan had to nod — he could see the terrible “sense” of it…
“We have it on good authority,” Munson continued, “that relations between Russia and China have atrophied, although both countries make a concerted effort to lead the free world to believe otherwise.”
But now Harrigan was shaking his head. “What in hell makes you think that, Agent Munson? I work the State Department beat, remember — and I’ve seen nothing but cooperation between Russia and China.”
“That’s because the State Department — at least on your level, Agent Harrigan — is unaware of Khrushchev’s refusal to give Mao the bomb.”
Harrigan’s eyebrows shot up. “The A-bomb? Mao wanted Russia to share atomic secrets with them…?”
Munson shrugged. “They are supposedly allies. You can see how Mao might consider such a refusal… less than gracious.”
“Jesus, Joseph, and Mary… Well thank God for that much. Maybe Khrushchev means it, all this disarmament talk.”
“Perhaps he does,” Munson said. “And the failure to share with China, shall we say, one from column A? That discourtesy isn’t the only breach between the Red giants — there’s also Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin… his determination to erase any memory of the former dictator — who is still revered in China, after all. That is seen by Mao as an outright act of betrayal.”
“That I can understand,” Harrigan said, half a smirk carving itself in his cheek. “Mao and ol’ Joe Stalin have a hell of a lot in common.”
“Aptly put,” Munson said, nodding; then he drew on the cigarette-in-holder and, as if suggesting a round of golf, said, “Let’s play the tape.”
The two men looked at the chubby technician, who during their discussion had returned his attention to his sandwich; he switched on the machine with a mustard-smeared finger.