Two blocks from the apartment Ganin hailed a cab and took it over to the Tudor, a hotel just around the corner from the U.N.
After he checked in, he went back out, walking aimlessly for several blocks until he came to a telephone booth where he placed a credit card call, under the name Hildebrandt, to a number in Helsinki, Finland.
It was answered on the third ring by a gruff-voiced man speaking English. “Yes.”
“It’s Bruno,” Ganin said softly despite the transatlantic hiss and signal loss. Signal-enhancing equipment, along with voice-print analyzers, were attached to the line.
There was a hollow silence on the line while the electronic identification procedures were automatically carried out by the equipment in the basement of a Helsinki apartment house.
Fully sixty seconds after the call was answered, another connection was made, a distant telephone began ringing, and Ganin stiffened slightly.
This time the line was answered on the first ring. “You’re leaving within the hour, is that correct?”
It was Kobelev. He knew.
“Yes.”
Again there was a silence on the line. Ganin could almost visualize Kobelev at his desk. He would be hopping from foot to foot, the metal plate in the back of his skull glinting dully. He would look the fool at this moment, excited as he was. He was anything but.
“He is activated,” Ganin said. “It was exactly as you predicted it would be. It is only a matter of time now.”
“No variations on the theme?”
“None. It was exactly as you said it would be. Exactly.”
“I know him, you must understand. I know his soul. He was mine — he was in my grasp at one time.”
Ganin was afraid the man might say something compromising over the open line. “I will go ahead. I will be there when he arrives.”
“Yes, you will, Arkadi,” Kobelev said.
Ganin couldn’t believe that Kobelev had used his name. Chances were, the line was not being monitored, at least not from the New York end. But in Finland it would be dangerous. Or... was Kobelev playing even a deeper, more devious game? After all, the girl was the loose end. Kobelev had predicted Carter would not kill her, and he specifically forbade Ganin from silencing her. Were there plans within plans? Kobelev had carefully maneuvered Carter into this situation. Was he also playing with Ganin?
“You will call me from Paris and let me know the next stage,” Kobelev said.
Ganin hung up.
Six
It was past ten by the time Carter finally cleared the city and took to the secondary roads that led northwest into the Adirondack Mountains. The night was very dark, and fifty miles north of the city, traffic had thinned to only an occasional car or truck.
He lit a cigarette and settled back as some of the tension began to dissipate. He was hurt, he was confused, and he was wary of the apparent ease with which he had been maneuvered.
Sigourney’s murder had only been the teaser, the one act guaranteed to get his attention, the one thing that would bring him out in the open.
In New York, Lashkin had been another ploy, there only to lead him to Lydia, who provided him with the notion that Kobelev was still alive. Kobelev, the puppet master, was the driving force behind the new Komodel. Kobelev, the master spy, was running Ganin. If it were true that Kobelev was still alive and was running Ganin, they would be a nearly unbeatable combination.
As he drove, Carter’s mind went back to his nearly fatal encounters with the Russian, the first one five years earlier aboard the Akai Maru, an oil tanker bound for the West Coast.
Kobelev’s diabolical scheme had involved the radioactive material Strontium 90, with which the tanker’s load of oil had been contaminated. Had the shipment reached the refineries in California, and had it been refined into gasoline, hundreds of thousands of people would have been contaminated.
As it turned out, the shipment was intercepted, but several good people had been killed, and Carter had vowed to stop the man.
By then Kobelev had risen high within the ranks of the KGB, and when it was rumored that he would soon be promoted to head the Komitet, Carter was assigned to go after him.
Hawk’s dangerous plan was to set Carter up as a traitor. Carter would defect to the Russians, offering his services to Kobelev himself. When he got close enough to the man, and in a position where he could manage an escape, he would pull the trigger.
Against an ordinary man the scheme would have worked, but Kobelev had been ahead of them every step of the way.
Carter had defected, had been accepted by Kobelev, and had been sent to Europe on a test mission in which he was to kill the child of a CLA operative whom Kobelev wanted to turn.
Once the Killmaster had proved himself, Kobelev’s plan was to have Carter return to the States to assassinate the President.
In the end, however, Kobelev had shown his true colors. He murdered his own wife in front of Carter’s eyes, and then Kobelev’s beautiful daughter murdered her father in retribution. Or so Carter thought.
Carter could still see her at the foot of the stairs in Kobelev’s dacha outside Moscow, plunging the blade of a knife into her father’s back. He would see Kobelev going down, the life ebbing from his body.
Carter and Tatiana Kobelev had run, escaping from the Soviet Union. Back in the States, the girl was to point out the Soviet operative who would assassinate the President. Instead, at the last moment, she pulled out a gun and very nearly succeeded in killing the President herself. Carter had stopped her with one bullet from his Luger, downing her but not killing her.
He skirted Albany and pushed on to the northwest, stopping sometime after midnight for gasoline and something to eat at an all-night truck stop. He was tired, mentally as well as physically. In his mind’s eye two visions kept alternating like flashing neon signs. The first was Sigourney’s body, and the second was his final confrontation with Kobelev.
AXE used Kobelev’s daughter as bait to lure the Russian out of the Soviet Union. And it had worked, to a point, though his coming out was well prepared, his field intelligence was superb, and the troops he surrounded himself with were the very best in all of the Soviet Union.
The end had come aboard the Orient Express on its final leg into Istanbul, high in the mountains of Bulgaria. It had been winter then. Carter had killed Tatiana Kobelev on that mission, and he and Kobelev were in a duel to the death atop a car of the speeding train, the Russian agent set on revenge. Suddenly the timbers of a bridge had rushed at them. At the very last moment, Carter had dropped down. Kobelev’s back had been to the bridge.
“You can’t fool me—” Kobelev’s words had been cut off by the sickening thud of wood against bone. He was slammed facedown on the car, the back of his head little more than a raw flap of skin and bone. Carter, who was sprawled only a few feet away, had reached out to hold the body, but before he could get a grip, the vibration of the train had moved it to the edge, and it had slipped out of his grasp. Kobelev had hit the ground below and rolled into the icy froth of the river.
Then the water had its way, tumbling and smashing the body against the rocks, burying it in torrents of foam.
Was it possible that Kobelev had survived? Carter asked himself for the hundredth time, his thoughts coming back to the present. It was nearly impossible to believe, and yet the man had fooled them all before.
If it were so, if Lydia Borasova was telling the truth, if Kobelev and Ganin were working together, it would end this time. He would make sure of it. No matter what, it would end this time.
It was nearly dawn by the time Carter reached the McCauley Mountain ski area north of Albany, then turned down a narrow gravel road that led back to Little Moose Lake.