“Are you okay?” Gatler sounded genuinely concerned. The contrast between the irritation in Mike’s voice at first being awakened and the concern he was now expressing hit Yocke hard.
“I guess so, Mike. Sorry I bothered you at home.”
“It’s okay, Jack. Write the story. Take your time and do it right. Kolokoltsev, huh? The Russian nationalist?”
“Yeah. Bigot. Anti-Semite. Holy Russia and all that shit. A Nazi with a red star on his sleeve.”
“You write it. Do it right.”
“ ’Night, Mike.”
“ ’Night, Jack.”
He hung up the phone and stood in the lofty, opulent hotel lobby at a loss for what to do next. Over in the corner a pianist was playing, and the tune sounded familiar. Yocke’s heart rate and breathing were returning to normal after the half-mile jog to the hotel, the only place he would find a telephone with a satellite link to call overseas. The Russian phone system was a relic of Stalin’s era and couldn’t even be relied upon for a call across town. But Yocke was still shook. The surprise of it as much as anything…damn!
Soviet Square…in front of that statue of Lenin as The Thinker…with a Pizza Hut restaurant just a block up the street where they serve real food to real people who have real money in their jeans. Hard currency only, thank you. No dip-shit Russians with only rubles in the pockets of their Calvin Kleins…
The clerk behind the counter was staring at him, as were several of the guests queued up at the cashier’s counter. Now the clerk said something in Russian. A question. He repeated it. He seemed to have lost his English.
Jack Yocke shrugged, then headed for the elevator with the clerk staring after him. He should have made the call from the phone in his room. If he had thought about the effect of his conversation on the clerk, he would have.
As the elevator door closed Yocke recognized the music, Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five.” He began laughing uncontrollably.
At the American embassy Jake Grafton spent a few minutes with the ambassador, then was shown to a small office that was temporarily unused. There he began his report to General Brown on the conference today. He wrote in longhand and handed the sheets to Toad to type.
“It went well?” Toad asked.
“Maybe.” Too Russian. Jake, you could screw up a wet dream.
He had about finished the report when there was a knock on the door and Lieutenant Dalworth stuck his head in.
“Admiral, I have a message for you,”
Dalworth held out the clipboard with an envelope attached. “Just fill in the number of the envelope and sign your name, sir.”
Jake did so. As Dalworth left the room Jake ripped open the envelope, which was marked with a top secret classification. It had of course been decoded in the embassy’s message center.
FYI LTGEN A.S. Brown died last night in his sleep. News not yet made public.
FYI — for your information, no action required. Without a word Jake passed the slip of paper across to Toad Tarkington.
“Just like that?” Toad asked with an air of disbelief.
“When your heart stops, you’re dead.” Jake Grafton folded the message and placed it back into its envelope. It would have to go back to the message center for logging and destruction. He tossed the envelope onto the corner of the desk. “Just…like…that.”
“For Christ’s sake, CAG, we’ve got to—”
“No!”
“We can’t just—”
“No.”
Toad turned his back for a bit. When he turned around again he said in a flat voice, “Okay, what are we going to do?”
“I don’t know,” Jake said.
What could he do? Write a letter to the president?
“What did Herb Tenney do today, anyway?”
“He went out this morning after you left,” Toad told him. “Came back about two or three.”
“He’s got an office?”
“He’s in with the other CIA types. They’ve got a suite just down the hall and their own radio equipment and crypto gear. They don’t use the embassy stuff.”
“Who are the other spies?”
“Well, there are about a dozen, near as I can tell. Head guy is a fellow named McCann who has been here a couple years. I met him at lunch. One of those guys who can talk for an hour and not say anything. A gas bag.”
It was impossible, a cesspool of the first order of magnitude. “Shit,” Jake whispered.
“Yessir. My sentiments exactly.”
“Have they got a safe in their office?”
“I suppose so. I haven’t been in there.”
“Go in tomorrow morning. Look the place over.”
“If I can get in.”
“Tell Herb you want the tour. Gush. Gee-whiz.”
“Yes, sir.”
Toad threw himself into a chair. He sighed deeply, then said, “Y’know, I really wish you and I had a nice safe job back in the real world — like bungee jumping or explosive ordnance disposal on a bomb squad. Something with a future.”
Jake Grafton didn’t reply.
Albert Sidney Brown dead. Damn, damn and doubledamn!
Well, it was time to call a spade a spade. The odds that Brown’s ticker picked this particular time to call it quits were not so good. Ten to one he was poisoned. Murdered. By the CIA, or someone in the CIA. Christians in Action.
If the CIA really did it he and Toad were living on borrowed time. Perhaps they had already been served half of the binary chemical cocktail. And any minute now Herb Tenney or one of his agents might get around to serving the chaser.
“You and I are going on short rations as of right now,” Jake told Toad. “Go down to the kitchen and get us some canned soda pop and some food that we can eat right out of the can.”
“What do I tell the cook?”
“Tell him we’re having a picnic. I don’t know. Think of something. Tell him I’m sick. Go on.”
After Jake delivered his report to the message center for transmission, he went up to his room. The door that led to Toad’s room was open and he was standing in it.
“Someone was in here today,” Toad said.
“You sure?”
“No, sir. But my stuff is a little different.”
Jake felt in his pocket for scratch paper. On it he wrote, “Look for bugs.”
It took fifteen minutes to find it. They left it where it was.
“Are you hungry, Admiral?”
“No.”
Jake took off his uniform and lay down on the bed. He turned off the light.
Two minutes later he turned it back on, got out of bed and checked the door lock, then asked Toad to come in for a moment. With Tarkington watching, Jake took the Smith & Wesson from his bag, checked the firing pin, snapped the gun through all six chambers, then loaded it.
No doubt the bug picked up the sound of the dry firing. Well, that was fair warning. If anyone came in here tonight Jake Grafton fully intended to blow his head off.
“‘Night, Toad.”
“Good night, sir.”
Sleep didn’t come. Jake tossed and turned and rearranged the pillow to no avail.
The problem was that he was totally alone, and it was a strange feeling. Always in the past he had a superior officer within easy reach to toss the hot potatoes to. Everyone in uniform has a boss — that is the way of the profession and Jake Grafton had spent his life in it. Now he had nowhere to turn.
He should have, of course. He should be able to just walk upstairs and get on the encrypted voice circuit to Washington. In just a few minutes he would be bounced off a satellite and connected with the new acting head of the DIA, or the Chief of Naval Operations, or even the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Hayden Land. The problem was that the CIA might be monitoring the circuit.
Not the CIA as an organization, but whoever it was that had a grubby hand on Tenney’s strings. The agency was so compartmentalized that a rogue department head might be able to run his own covert operation for years before anyone found out. If anyone found out. If the man at the top took reasonable care and kept his operation buried within another, legitimate operation, it was conceivable that it might never be discovered.