“You have him in custody?”
“Yes, excellency.”
“Be careful that he does not escape. If he were to escape, I could not avenge my dear friend Gregor as I wish to do.”
“Your wishes will be carried out, excellency. I shall keep you informed. Speed your recovery.”
“I am feeling very much better already; I will be back into my office soon.” He hung up, then turned to Hewlitt. “What is now to happen?” he asked in English.
“I heard the conversation,” Hewlitt said, “and I say the same. Speed your recovery.”
He turned and left while he was still in command of himself.
The conference room at Thomas Jefferson was usually extremely well ordered, a reflection of the man whose desire to keep things shipshape had characterized his many years in the Navy. For almost twenty-four hours that standard had been abandoned as the room became a strategy center, plans headquarters, restaurant, message command post, and very nearly a dormitory. The members of the First Team occupied it almost continuously, and there was a steady flow in and out of the second level of command and all of the support personnel who worked directly with the managers of the operation. Occasionally used coffee cups were cleared away and accumulations of discarded notepaper were removed, but the atmosphere in the room became continuously heavier nonetheless and there was no fault in the air conditioning.
The admiral sat, and he paced up and down. He consulted charts, conferred with his colleagues on a hundred different points, and read incoming messages with almost savage eagerness the moment that they were received. Like the good commander that he was, he gave careful thought to the idea of surrendering himself and his colleagues. He explored the idea fully and rejected it: it would betray the President, the country, and the whole complex organization that had been so painstakingly constructed to meet the exact emergency with which it was now confronted. To throw all of that away would be to sentence the entire country to serfdom for the indefinite future, and that was not the purpose of the command that he headed. He had the Magsaysay; at least he was determined to carry on with the assumption that he did, and with that single but almost unbelievably potent force available he was in the game to win. In warfare there were no second prizes.
He left the room and returned in a blackened mood. He called over one of the service personnel who was emptying ashtrays and pointed. “It’s all out of toilet paper in there,” he declared.
“I’m sorry, sir,” the man answered. “I hope that there was something else available.”
“What did you expect me to use — a moonbeam?” Haymarket barked.
The man didn’t blink. “If you accomplished that, sir, I would like to shake your hand.”
The admiral relented and smiled; there was not a man or a woman in the underground complex who had not been hand-picked. “Fix it, will you?” he finished mildly and went back to his work.
He was passed a message, read it, and at once called for attention. “They’re putting Hewlitt in,” he reported. “Mark is going in too; I don’t agree with that, but I can see arguments both ways.” Colonel Prichard, who headed up all of the internal operational projects, looked concerned. “We can’t afford to blow him,” he warned.
“Totally agreed,” the admiral answered, “but Mark knows what he’s doing; if he went in, he had a reason.”
Walter Wagner was thoughtful for a moment. “If they try to capture both of them, we could be in trouble,” he pointed out.
General Gifford shook his head. “They won’t take Mark. He is equipped to prevent that.”
“And they won’t be able to stop him?”
“No.”
That was that and Wagner subsided. The admiral wanted to ask Ted Pappas once more what he thought of Hewlitt and his chances of success, but he held himself in check because he had already put that question three times and had gotten a precise, careful, and exactly similar answer each time.
Another message came in; Admiral Haymarket read it and swallowed hard. “Who is Asher?” he asked.
“A Washington ex-Marine cab driver; his name is Frank Jordan,” Colonel Prichard answered.
“How good is he?”
“A pretty good man, I’d say. Not the lightning brain type, but far from stupid. I’ve never met him, but the reports on him are very good. Loyalty unquestioned. Why?”
The admiral read the message one more time. “He’s been captured,” he announced. “He was taken directly to the White House.” “That means Rostovitch,” Wagner said. “Write him off and pray for his soul.”
“Can we help him?” Prichard asked. “We still have people in there. Several of them are top shots.”
“How much does he know?” the admiral asked quickly.
“Not too much. He controlled Hewlitt for a while and helped to set up the safe house. Both of those are blown. He knows Mark, but only as Percival.”
The admiral made a hard decision. “We can’t help him,” he said. “It would cost at least a man to do it and we’d be right back where we started. God bless him.”
General Gifford looked up. “I’d like the room cleared,” he said. Immediately, and with complete understanding, all those present who were not actually members of the First Team abandoned their usual posts; when the door had been closed behind the last man through, the general waited a few seconds and then spoke briefly. “You told me privately that Barlov, the director of White House security, was with us. To what degree is that true?”
The admiral looked around the table. “This is not to be breathed to anyone under any conditions,” he said, then he waited to let that sink in. The men he was facing were of very high intelligence and unquestioned dedication, but even with that he hesitated. Then he told them. “He is a British agent, one of the most valuable that they have.”
“Then we have to assume that he can’t blow his cover, no matter what the opportunity to save our man,” General Gifford said.
The admiral nodded. “There was a classic sea engagement once during which the British Navy sank a German heavy cruiser. When the admiral in command heard, he was badly shaken. The executive officer on board the German ship had been a British agent much more valuable than the ship and its crew.”
Stanley Cumberland said, “I remember reading about that.”
The admiral touched a signal which indicated that the room was once more open to those who had legitimate business inside. Then, for the next half hour, he was as restless as any of his immediate associates had ever seen him. He paced the floor, unwittingly frustrated because it was not a deck, and kept his brain at constant flank speed. If there was an angle anywhere, anything whatever that he could do, he would find it. Two or three times he stopped to say something, then at the last moment thought better of it and went back to his pacing.
“Sir.”
The man who handed him the message looked him in the eye first, which indicated that it was something very important. Hay-market took it, said the shortest silent prayer of his life, and then read what it contained.
He looked up and about the room, then read again. The words on the paper could not be mistaken, and he knew better than to ask if the transmission had been accurate. There was no mistake in the signal.
All this took him no more than a few seconds; when he looked up a second time he saw that the room was still and that all movement had stopped. They were waiting.
“Gentlemen,” he said. “I’ll give this to you just as I have it here. It’s from a source inside the White House which is five by five in every way.” That meant, as his hearers knew, that the information was considered totally accurate and the source unimpeachable. “Asher interviewed by Rostovitch. Conflict followed, Rostovitch repeat Rostovitch killed. Asher badly beaten, but alive in custody.”