Smith listened for long minutes as the CIA chief fidgeted on the cheap, Scotchgard-treated sofa.
"No," Smith finally said. "It is a matter of the utmost gravity. I would recommend that we immediately notify the USSR of the danger to the two remaining men." He paused. "Yes, sir. We can handle that. I don't think anyone else has the
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capability." He looked at Stantington. "Most especially the CIA."
The admiral flushed.
Smith said, "Yes, sir." He extended the telephone toward Stantington. "It's for you," he said.
Stantington rose and walked across the office. He could feel his pedometer clicking against his hip as he strode. He took the telephone.
"Hello."
The familiar Southern voice bit into his ears like an electric drill.
"You know who this is," the voice said.
"Yes, Mister President," Stantington said.
"You will do nothing about Project Omega, do you understand? Nothing. I will handle what has to be done diplomatically. What has to be done in the field will be done by others. The CIA will remain out of this. Totally and one hundred percent out of it. You have it, Cap ?"
"Yes, sir."
"Now I suggest you get back to Washington. Oh, another thing. You will forget, totally forget, the existence of Doctor Smith, Folcroft Sanitarium, and Rye, New York. Got it?"
"Yes, sir," Stantington said. The telephone clicked off in his ear.
Stantington handed the phone to Smith who put it back in the desk drawer, which closed with a heavy-locking click.
Smith pressed the buzzer on his desk. Stantington did not hear anyone enter but Smith spoke.
"You will escort the admiral back to the helicopter so he may return to Washington."
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Stantington heard Remo's voice. "He doesn't have to go in the Hefty bag?"
Smith shook his head.
"Good. I don't like schlepping things around all the time. Not even for you, Smitty."
Chiun's voice said, "Some people are suited only for the most meager forms of work."
"Knock it off, Little Father," Remo said.
"Get him out of here," came Ruby Gonzalez's voice. "These CIA people gives me a headache."
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CHAPTER SEVEN
But Admiral Wingate Stantington had already told someone of Doctor Harold Smith's existence.
Vassily Karbenko sat on a bench on a footbridge over the Potomac River. The spires and domes and statuary of official Washington were behind him. His long legs were sprawled out in front of him and his ten-gallon hat was pulled down over his face. His thumbs were hooked into the tunnel belt loops of his blue cord trousers and he looked as if he would be altogether at home if he were sitting on a straight-backed wooden chair, leaning against the wall on a wooden porch in front of the Tombstone sheriff's office a hundred years earlier.
From his early youth, Vassily Karbenko had been tagged for big things. He was the son of a physician and a genetic scientist and in his teens after World War II, he had been sent to study languages in England and France. While in England, he had seen his first American movies and had become an instant fan of the old American West. It seemed to be the life all men should have-being a cowboy, working the range, sleeping next to a campfire at night.
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"If you like America so much, defect," his roommate told him one night.
"If it weren't for my parents, I might," said Karbenko. "But who said I liked America? I just like cowboys."
He returned to Russia when his studies were completed, just in time to see his parents marched off to a workcamp in one of the Stalinist purges. Russian science at the time was securely in the hands of a fraud named Lysenko, whose approach to genetics and heredity was that there was no such thing as genetics and heredity. Believing that an organism could alter and perfect itself in its own lifetime might have made for good Communist politics, but it was awful science. It was twenty years before Russia's agriculture program began to recover from the hole Lysenkoism had dug for it.
Still, while he was a zero as a scientist, Lysenko was a very astute politician and when Vassily Karbenko's father challenged his scientific know-nothingism, it was the senior Karbenko and his wife who were marched off to Siberia.
Ordinarily, this kind of blot on the family record should have ruined whatever chance young Vassily had to move up in the Soviet system. But Stalin himself was soon gone, shot by some of his most trusted advisers, and almost as a reaction to that, Vassily Karbenko found himself riding a wave of promotions through the Soviet spy system, aided by his friendship for a minor party bureaucrat who had inexplicably risen to become the Soviet premier. Along the way, Vassily found out that his parents, like mil-
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lions of others, had been executed in Russian slave camps.
Karbenko had not yet adopted his cowboy style of dressing. That came when he was assigned to the United States in the early 1970's.
It could have been one of the tragedies of his life to find, when he got to America, that there were very few real cowboys left and none of them were like those in the movies he had grown up with.
But by this time, he had come to a new realization. In the 1970's, spies were the cowboys of the world. Working for a government, yes, but basically on their own, responsible in the end for what they did and not how they did it.
Karbenko was a very good spy and a very dedicated Russian. But he still wore his cowboy suits, like a display of mourning clothes, for a world he had been born too late to enter.
Karbenko heard footsteps coming along the footbridge toward him and he tilted up the corner of his hat to notice the Russian ambassador to the United States heavily puffing his fat way toward him.
Anatoly Duvicevski sat next to Karbenko, took a handkerchief from the breast pocket of his well-cut single-breasted suit, and mopped the sweat from his brow.
"You aren't exactly difficult to spot in that costume, Karbenko," said Duvicevski. He made no effort to hide the disapproval in his voice.
"The fellow down to the right, reading the newspaper. He's one of them. There's another in the telephone booth at the end of the bridge to the
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left," Karbenko said. "The one you passed without noticing."
Duvicevski glanced left and right.
"So the Americans know we're meeting," he said.
"But of course they know we're meeting, Comrade," Karbenko said. He drawled the "comrade" so it sounded like "pardner." "If the Americans can't hold a secret meeting in Washington, why should we be able to? It comes down to the fact that this is a nice day and this is a pretty spot for a meeting. The air is fresh and the birds are singing. Should we meet in a stuffy office somewhere and inhale each other's cigar smoke? And for what purpose? Because they will still know that we met."
Duvicevski grunted. Karbenko reassured him by clapping a large bony hand on his knee.
"So what happened?" he asked the still-sweating ambassador whose face had broken out in a second round of sweat.
"I just left the President. He explained Project Omega to me."
"Explain it to me," said Karbenko.
"It is a Doomsday plan that the Americans thought of in the fifties. It was supposed to go into action if they lost an atomic war but it has gone into action now and they do not know how to stop it."
"We have two diplomats dead," Karbenko said. "How many more targets are there ?"
"Just two," said Duvicevski. He looked at the Russian spy with narrowed eyes. "The ambassador to England and the premier."
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Karbenko whistled. "You have already so advised the Kremlin ?"
"Of course," said Duvicevski. "The premier is under special security guard. And all types of extra personnel have been assigned to protect the ambassador in London."
"How has the Kremlin received this news?" Karbenko asked.