“He wants you to come after him,” Hawk said. “But why? You’ve never had any dealings with the man.”
“I don’t know,” Carter said. He thought back to the dead Cuban on the beach. Lashkin at the U.N. Was he the key? Was Ganin working for this Lashkin? And if that were the case, what or who was the man, that he was going to such lengths to come after one AXE operative?
“What about the attack force, Nick?”
“They were Cubans.”
“You took out three of them?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Did you get to question any of them?”
Carter held his silence for a long time. He had never lied to David Hawk. He had never thought such a thing possible, but at that moment he seriously considered it. Ganin was after him. So be it. But the bastard had killed an innocent woman. Either Ganin, or whoever directed the Soviet operative, was responsible. And they would pay.
“I see,” Hawk said softly. He turned in his chair and looked out the window toward the Dupont Plaza Hotel across the circle. “I understand how you feel, Nick. Believe me, I do. But you must understand that we are a nation of laws.”
“I understand, sir,” Carter said. In his mind he was flipping the mattress over and seeing Sigourney’s body for the first time.
“We have our charter, within which our operations are limited. There are certain things we can do, and there are others we cannot,” Hawk said. He turned back. “If we operate under the law, then we can all sleep at night. We can know that what we are doing is morally correct. Our jobs are necessary.”
Carter kept hearing his own words over and over again in his mind: I want you to stay here, in this room, no matter what happens. Christ, he had killed her. She had trusted him. She had... loved him.
“If we use their methods, if we run off with a total disregard for an individual’s rights, then we become one of them,” Hawk continued.
Carter’s head came up, and he met Hawk’s eyes. “I believe I still have fifteen days left on my vacation, sir,” he said evenly.
Hawk’s eyebrows rose, but he nodded. “You do.”
“I’d like to take them.”
A fragile stillness seemed to descend over the office. Hawk’s lips were pursed, his hands folded together in front of him on the desk. There was so much Carter wanted to say at that moment. But he knew that anything he would say would only serve to worsen an already bad situation. The man across the desk from him was more like a father to him than any man Carter had ever known. There was no person on this earth whom Carter had more respect for than David Hawk. But Sigourney... she shouldn’t have suffered for this business. For all her toughness, for all her bravado, she was one of the innocents.
“Where would you go... if I allowed you to finish the remainder of your leave?” Hawk asked.
Carter considered his answer in light of the manner in which Hawk had asked the question. His boss was being straightforward with him.
“New York, first.”
“And then?”
Carter shrugged. “I honestly don’t know, sir. Europe, possibly. Back to the Caribbean.”
“The Soviet Union?”
“As a private citizen... possibly.”
“In two weeks you would be back?”
Carter nodded.
“During that time, you would not be asking for help?”
“Perhaps I might make a call from time to time, for information. But no covert help, as such.”
“You would be on your own.”
Again Carter nodded.
Hawk reached out to the telephone console on his desk. Carter suddenly realized that the tape recorders that normally operated whenever Hawk was speaking with someone in his office had been turned off. Hawk was reaching for the switch. His hand hovered over the button.
“Is it that important to you, Nick?” he asked.
Carter looked down at his hands. “Yes... she was, sir.”
Hawk flipped the switch, the tape recorder’s green jewel light winked on, and he looked up.
“You still have a bit more than two weeks on your leave, Nick. I suggest you get yourself off somewhere and relax. There’ll be a lot of work for you when you get back.”
Carter got to his feet, his eyes never leaving Hawk’s face. “Yes, sir,” he said. “Thank you.” He turned and went to the door.
“Nick,” Hawk said.
Carter turned back. “Sir?”
“I spoke with Sigourney’s father. He understands. He’d like to see you... later.”
A heaviness clamped down on Carter’s chest. “Yes, sir. I had intended to talk to him when I returned from my leave.”
“Good luck,” Hawk said, and Carter turned and left the office.
He took the elevator down to Operations, where he stepped into his office and closed the door. At the desk that he used between assignments, he keyed his computer terminal, fed in the proper identification and codes for access to the agency’s restricted data banks, and asked for available information on Arkadi Konstantinovich Ganin, and anything on the name Lashkin connected with the United Nations in New York.
While he was waiting for the information to come up, he opened his desk and took out a pack of his special cigarettes, lit himself one, then put in a call to AXE’s armorer.
“N3 here. I need a couple of gas pellets.”
“In connection with what assignment, sir?” the man asked.
“Clear it with Hawk,” Carter snapped. “I want them here in my office in fifteen minutes.” He slammed the telephone down.
The computer screen began filling with information on Ganin. According to the preface, it was mostly speculation. There was no known description, although whoever had entered the report on the computer estimated a man of Ganin’s reputed abilities would probably be no younger than thirty, and certainly no older than fifty. Listed were a dozen probable assignments attributed to the Soviet operative, all of them spectacular but many of them contradictory. In one instance, Ganin supposedly assassinated a general in the Chinese army in Peking, and yet within six hours he was credited with kidnapping two people in Athens. Impossible.
The latest entry showed that Ganin was probably connected with the new Soviet assassination bureau — Komodel — and had probably participated in an operation on St. Anne’s Island involving an AXE operative.
Nothing new there. Ganin was a mystery man. Not so Lashkin, for whom the computer had a lot of data.
Petr Sergeiovich Lashkin was born in Leningrad in 1935, which made him fifty-one now. He had attended Moscow State University, studied law, and then had joined the army as party adviser. Later he was recruited into the KGB and began his overseas postings. At the moment the man was number two in KGB operations out of the U.N., under the cover of adviser to the Soviet’s Security Council delegation. He was married and had two children; his family lived in Moscow. In New York he was living with his secretary, Lydia Borasova, a woman in her late twenties, in an apartment in Murray Hill off East 36th Street.
Several photographs came up on the printout, showing Lashkin to be a heavyset man with thick dark eyebrows, wide-set eyes, and ponderous Slavic features. There was one photograph of Lydia Borasova, a good-looking blonde.
Carter ripped the photos from the machine and stuffed them into his pocket.
The door opened and Rupert Smith, head of Operations, stuck his head in. “We all heard, Nick. We’re sorry.”
Carter looked up and nodded absently. “Thanks, Smitty.”
“Are you back, or are you leaving again?”
“I’m leaving in about five minutes,” Carter said. He flipped off the terminal and got up.
Smitty glanced at the machine. “Lashkin’s name is flagged. Your query came up on my terminal.”
“Something I should know?”
“Are you on to something that I should know about?” AXE’s Operations chief asked. He was a very sharp individual. He and Carter got along well, and the man never pulled any punches.