“I’ve gotten out of these kind of scrapes before,” she had assured him. “I’ll be free again within a few days.”
Minutes later the captain’s voice came over the intercom, announcing that the plane was being forced to land in Zurich by an armed hijacker but that the passengers were not in any danger whatsoever. Everyone was asked to stay calm and the delay would be kept to a minimum.
When the jet had landed in Zurich, the captain coolly approached Nikki and her stewardess hostage, holding his hands in the air.
“What next?” he asked her in German-laced English.
She pulled the blade from the stewardess’s throat, freeing her as she handed the knife over to the captain.
“I’m turning myself over to your custody. Get the passengers off this plane fast. There’s a bomb on board.”
Locke let himself be swept away in the rush that followed.
Chris broke free from the body of passengers and collected his thoughts in a men’s room stall. Mandala might have men waiting at the jet’s final destination in Paris, so that city was out of the question for him. He had to head for another, less traveled city, someplace less likely to be within the dark man’s reach.
He made his way from the men’s room and stopped at the TWA counter where a clerk provided him with the answer: a flight leaving for Madrid in ninety minutes. The wait was nerve-racking but necessary. He went to the gate early and sat facing the runways with his back to airport pedestrian traffic. He could see no one and no one could see him.
Hours later, from a phone booth in Madrid, he called the number Dogan had given him. It rang once, was answered, and a tone followed. Chris was brief in summing up what had happened. His first two lines, in fact, said it alclass="underline"
“Nikki’s out of it. I’m alone.”
Part Nine:
Washington and Keysar Flats, Sunday Afternoon
Chapter 32
Saturday afternoon, Calvin Roy was working on Van Dam’s files when CIA director Peter Kennally appeared unannounced in his office.
“To what do I owe this pleasure, Major Pete?” Roy said, looking up. He pulled his glasses off and massaged his tired eyes, then ran his hands over his bald dome.
“Depends on what kind of mood you’re in, Cal. I’d like to keep my job when you get confirmed as Secretary.”
“Got a reason why I’d put an ad in the paper?”
“One just turned up.” Kennally moved forward but didn’t sit down. “One of our agents was quarantined, a Division Six man named Dogan.”
Roy mocked putting his hands over his ears. “I’m not supposed to hear stuff like that.”
“This time you’d better. It turns out Dogan was in Liechtenstein at the same time Locke was, and apparently they were supposed to meet at a hotel room in Rome. And the quarantine order was restricted. That means somebody doesn’t want Dogan coming in at all.”
“How do you know all this?”
Kennally sighed. “Because one of our agents went to Rome and got himself killed in Dogan’s place. That’s what put me on to the connection in the first place. The hotel was the one our man in Locke’s house received a call from. I did some checking. It seems Dogan’s original assignment was to kill Locke.”
“Where in hell did that order come from?”
“Executive sanction.”
“Van Dam?”
“I might have started with him but the restricted status on Dogan originated at a lower level. Group commander, station leader — something like that.”
“Christ,” Roy muttered. “So one of our agents is ordered to kill Locke, probably ends up joining him instead, and then becomes the object of a kill order himself.”
Kennally nodded. “I’ve lifted the quarantine but it’ll take a while for word to filter into the field.”
“Ever have a cow piss on ya while you were drawin’ milk, Major?”
Kennally just shrugged.
“Well, that’s what I think’s happening to this country right now, and I ain’t got the slightest idea where, when, or how.” Roy hesitated. “Your men got shooting clearance on this Dogan, Major?”
“Some of them will certainly interpret it that way.”
“Then let’s hope they got bad aim.”
Dogan was still awake when the sun came up Sunday morning. He wasn’t hungry or thirsty. He just lay there hoping the phone would ring, because if it didn’t he would be helpless.
The route he had taken into Washington had been long and tiring, for he had taken a number of precautions to avoid identification and capture. There had been several plane changes and brief trips by train and bus along the way. The worst stretch of the journey came in Lisbon, where a fogged-in airport stranded him for six maddening hours. Only a bribe assured him of passage on the first plane out. But it still took him until late Saturday afternoon to arrive in Washington.
The fact that Locke was alone again bothered Dogan only slightly. After all, by now the college professor would have linked up with Masvidal, and their raid on Mandala’s Keysar Flats airfield was only hours away at most. Masvidal was supposed to contact Vaslov with confirmation of the rendezvous, and Vaslov, in turn, would contact Dogan. So far no call had come and Dogan found himself increasingly uneasy.
He had spent Saturday night on the phone tracing down old contacts and making new ones, channeling each call through sterile exchanges but keeping them short in case the ciphers had been changed. The end result was to gain him a series of meetings with government officials starting with the Department of Agriculture and moving on to Brian Charney’s State Department bureau. He needed allies as well as evidence for the strategy he would implement later today even as Masvidal — and Locke — set out to destroy the canisters in Keysar Flats. If all went according to plan, Dogan would then be free to deal with Mandala personally at San Sebastian. Audra St. Clair’s words had confirmed that another phase of Mandala’s plan would begin there, one that would destroy South America’s farmland as well. It would end where it had started, and Dogan would be the one to end it.
The phone rang, startling him. Only Vaslov knew where to reach him. The Russian’s call had come at last.
“Yes?”
“Sorry for the delay in reaching you, comrade,” Vaslov said, voice flatter than usual. “But there has been a complication and it has taken me this long to sort everything out.”
Dogan felt his stomach sink. “What happened?”
“The Sanii Corporation’s plant in Liechtenstein has been destroyed by several well-placed bombs. Many people were killed or injured. Everything is gone.”
“It makes sense. Mandala’s covering more of the Committee’s tracks. He doesn’t want the crop genetics research to fall into anyone else’s hands and disrupt his plans.”
“There is more, comrade. The perpetrators of the explosion have already been arrested. Officials are calling it a major breakthrough in the assault on terrorism.”
Dogan knew the rest before Vaslov continued.
“Our friend Masvidal and over fifty of his troops were apprehended in Spain after a gun battle that claimed many lives. That final bit is right off the Associated Press wire…. Are you there, comrade?”