Lubeck felt the presence behind him in time to duck but not in time to avoid the blow. It crunched down on his collarbone, snapping it. Lubeck howled in pain and rolled away. The transmitter flew aside.
“Field Mouse, do you read me? Field Mouse, what’s going on there?”
Lubeck looked up into the grinning face of the giant in white. Chinese for sure, he decided. Weaponless, the giant approached him making no effort to be subtle.
Lubeck struggled back to his feet, hunching to keep the pain of his shattered collarbone down. The giant was going to try to finish him with his hands. Fine.
Because Lubeck had his pincers.
He held them low behind his left hip, out of the giant’s sight. By the time the big man saw them, they’d be carving up his midsection as easily as the plywood Lubeck used for practice. Lubeck hunched over further, backpedaled, made himself an easy target.
The giant kept coming, pace steady and unvarying. Lubeck baited him further, faked a stumble, readied his pincers.
The giant came into range and reached down for him.
Lubeck swung his pincers forward and up in a blur of motion. His target was the midsection, though by the time he yanked his deadly steel out it would have reached the Chinese giant’s throat.
The giant was still grinning when the pinchers reached him. Lubeck felt them bang into something, and at first thought it was an illusion caused by the swift entry into flesh. But they hadn’t entered at all. Lubeck’s entire body trembled with the force of impact, the steel pincers meeting something harder.
Lubeck tried for the giant’s midsection again but the strike was halfhearted and the results the same. As he pulled the pincers back, the giant latched onto them and yanked.
The pincer apparatus came free with a pain Lubeck couldn’t believe existed. His teeth sliced through his tongue and blood filled his mouth. The world was a daze before him and he was only slightly conscious of the Chinese giant’s open hand crashing into his nose, splintering his brain with the shattered bone.
The last thing he saw was the giant’s grinning face.
“Field Mouse, please acknowledge,” the transmitter continued to squawk through static. “Field Mouse, please—”
The giant silenced the transmitter with one crunch of his heel, while down below flames had begun to swallow the corpse of San Sebastian.
Part One:
Washington, Monday Afternoon
Chapter 1
Brian Charney lowered his glass of Chivas Regal on the rocks to the coffee table, neglecting to use the coaster. Leaning forward off the couch, he grabbed the cassette tape and fingered it.
Its contents held the reason for one man’s death. Its existence almost surely held the basis for a second’s. Charney had been part of that death sentence, and the Chivas couldn’t change that no matter how smoothly it went down.
Charney drained the glass anyway.
He had walked back to his brownstone apartment from the State Department, hoping the walk would clear his head. Instead it only clouded it further. He had turned on only one light in the brownstone and didn’t raise the shades, keeping the early-spring sun beyond the windows so he might lose himself in the dimness. But the dimness did not blot out the effect of the apartment. It was expensively and exquisitely furnished. Charney much preferred the house in Arlington, but the divorce settlement had given that to Karen and their two boys. He saw them on alternate weekends. Sometimes.
Charney refilled his glass and ran the events of the day through his head yet again. Of the two best friends in his life, one was dead and the other had been chosen to follow him. Charney had come home early because the job was everything and the job had made him do it. God, how he hated the damn job, but he had to admit he’d be lost without it.
He had waited outside Undersecretary of State Calvin Roy’s office for only ten minutes that morning before being ushered in. Roy was his liaison in affairs of intelligence.
“I hope this is important,” Roy said in his southern drawl, offering Charney the usual seat before his cluttered desk.
“It is,” Charney assured him.
“I cancelled a full block of appointments to see you, son. There’ll be some people mighty upset over that. They came a long way to see me.”
“So did this,” Charney said, producing the tape.
Roy rose slightly out of his chair to look at it. He was a diminutive, balding man with a wry smile that expressed his uncompromising, often cynical approach to his position and politics in general. He would probably never rise beyond the post he held now, nor did he aspire to. Working behind the scenes suited him just fine, providing room to maneuver and breathe. A native Texan who had grown up amid much wealth but enjoyed little himself, Roy owed no one anything — a trait rare enough in Washington to make him a man to be both respected and avoided. He had nothing to lose. Stepping on toes didn’t faze him, even if it meant crushing them.
“It contains Alvin Lubeck’s last report,” Charney continued, popping the cassette into the recorder on the edge of Roy’s desk. “Rather incomplete but interesting all the same.”
Charney pressed PLAY. Lubeck’s voice filled the room, intermixed with static. The fear was obvious and, in his final words, the panic.
“San Sebastian was a farming community. I‘m in a position overlooking the fields now. It appears that … Oh, my God, this can‘t be. It can‘t be! I‘m looking out at—”
Charney pressed STOP. “That’s it.”
Roy’s face had sombered. “You mind tellin’ me where San Sebastian is?”
“Colombia. Deep in the southeast.”
“So Lubeck transmitted this to the Bogotá station. They send someone in after him?”
“Yes, but the team couldn’t get into San Sebastian or even close to it. The whole area’s on fire and all they can do down there is pray for rain.”
Roy nodded. “So whatever it was Lubeck saw ain’t there no more.”
“That’s right,” Charney acknowledged.
“What do you make of that, son?”
“Somebody started the fire to cover something up. And they took Lubeck out for the same reason.”
“Lubeck wouldn’t go out easily,” Roy muttered nervously. “You mind tellin’ me how he ended up at a giant barbecue in a South American piss country?”
“Following a trail he picked up in London.”
“What trail?”
“We assigned him to run interference for the World Hunger Conference scheduled for two weeks from now in Geneva.”
Roy considered the words. “Sounds like he was addin’ manure to a fallow field.”
“He was past his prime,” Charney said painfully. “We wanted to ease him out, but he wasn’t ready to go.”
“And set out to prove you wrong. Looks like he did a pretty decent job. You boys gotta let me in on your methods for personnel evaluation.” Roy hesitated, shook his head. “God damn, what’d he find down there that was worth murderin’ a whole town over? He file any other reports?”
Charney shook his head. “This was the first we heard from him officially. Wanted to be sure, I guess. If he was onto something big, he wouldn’t want us to pull him off or send in the cavalry.”
“Whole mess stinks to high heaven,” Roy muttered. Then his eyes sharpened. “We gotta find out what he saw down there, son, gotta find out what he knew.”