“Mr. Woolfolk...”
“Calvin.”
“Calvin, did Hawk tell you about me?”
Woolfolk’s thin lips twisted in a slight smile. He said, “Son, I’ve known about you for a long time. Nick Carter. N3. Killmaster. You ought to know that my knowledge of AXE goes back almost to its very beginnings. I’m an old friend of David Hawk’s.”
“What are the men on this list really after?”
“Not money. For them, money is just a tool. They don’t really give a damn about money. Control is what they’re after. When you can control the lives of hundreds — hell, thousands — of other men, well, son, that’s a pretty heady feeling.”
“Which of them has the most power?”
Woolfolk stood up slowly. “I can’t tell you that, Nick. I just don’t know. I guess it’s your job to find out, isn’t it?”
“Alright, Calvin. Thanks for the help.”
He shrugged his bony shoulders. “Think nothing of it. You just call on me any time you feel like it.”
I watched him walk off in a loping, loose-jointed stride, quickly disappearing around the curve of the path.
Five men. Eleven days in which to uncover the KGB “plant.” There were two ways to root him out. I could start digging for him — and it might take a year or more to get the information. Or I could make him come after me.
He wouldn’t do it himself. He’d send someone else. And if I could spot that someone else, I’d be able to track him back to the man who’d issued the order, and from that man to the next one higher up. And if there weren’t too many in the chain, and if I were lucky and they didn’t get me first — well, I’d get my man. Maybe.
After awhile I got to my feet and walked down Arlington Street to Newbury Street and the Ritz Carlton Hotel.
Every city has at least one hotel like it. The hotel where people with quiet money and social status stay because of the panache, the atmosphere, the ambience — whatever you want to call it. It’s something that takes two or three generations to develop; an individual tradition of superbly efficient but unostentatious, service.
My bags were already in my room. Hawk had seen to it that they were sent directly from Andrews Air Base even while I was being driven to National Airport to catch the Eastern shuttle flight. All I had to do was sign the register at the desk. The first thing I did after I closed the door behind the bellhop was to put in a transatlantic call to Jacques Crève-Coeur in Marseilles.
The telephone rang half a dozen times before he picked it up.
I said, “’Allo, Jacques?” and before I could go on, the receiver crackled with his curses.
“You know what time it is here?” he demanded. “Don’t you have any consideration at all? Why must you deprive an old man like me of his sleep?” It was not quite 9:00 P.M. in France.
“You’ll get all the sleep you need in your grave. Jacques, were there any repercussions from that little incident on the beach?”
“Little incident! An understatement, mon ami. No, there were no repercussions. Why?”
“Do you think the opposition found out I was responsible?”
I heard him gasp. “Mon dieu! This is an open line! Why are you suddenly so careless?”
“Trust me, Jacques.”
He caught on quickly. “No, so far they don’t know about you, although they’re trying hard to find out who it was. Is it that you want me to pass the word along?”
“As soon as you can, Jacques. Such a channel is available to you?”
“One of the best. A double agent. He thinks I don’t know that he works for the KGB as well as for us,”
“Let them know that I rescued the Russian, Jacques. Let them know he told me everything he discovered. Also, let them know that I’m now in Boston.”
Jacques said somberly, “They’ll be after you, Nick. Take care.”
“Someone will be after me, Jacques. Let’s hope it will be soon.”
I hung up. There was nothing more to be said. What I had to do now was to wait, and my hotel room was not the place for it. Not if I wanted action. I had to expose myself and see what happened.
What happened was that two hours later I met a young woman. She was in her late twenties or early thirties and carried herself with the kind of poise other women envy and try to imitate. Brown hair, neatly brushed so that the ends curled in to frame an oval face. Just enough makeup to accentuate grey-blue eyes and the barest touch of lipstick to outline her full mouth. A blue, rough-nubbed linen jacket and short skirt and a paler blue turtleneck cashmere sweater covered the lines of an exceptionally feminine body.
Downtown Boston is a city made for tourists. Within a dozen blocks there are half a hundred places of historical interest. I had wandered across the Common to the Granary Burial Ground on Tremont Street — Ben Franklin’s final resting place.
Like most of the other tourists, she carried a camera. As she unslung it from around her neck, she came up to me and held it out. Smiling, she asked politely, “Would you mind taking my picture? It’s very simple. I’ve already set it. All you have to do is press this button.”
The smile was friendly and, at the same time, remote. It’s the kind of smile that pretty girls learn to turn on when they want something, and yet still want to keep you at arm’s length.
She handed me the camera and moved back, lithely stepping up onto the edge of Franklin’s grave marker.
“Be sure you get it all in,” she said. “The whole monument. Okay?”
I raised the camera to my eye.
“You’ll have to step back a few feet,” she told me, still smiling her warm but impersonal smile. But there was no warmth in those blue-grey eyes. “You’re really too close.”
She was right. The camera had a telephoto lens mounted on it. All I could see of her through the finder was the upper part of her torso and her head.
I started to move back, and as I did so, the weight and the feel of the camera in my hands told me that something was wrong. It looked like any one of a hundred thousand Japanese single lens reflex cameras of that particular popular model. There was nothing outwardly different about it to arouse my suspicions. But my instincts were suddenly screaming at me, telling me that something was wrong. I’ve learned to trust my instincts thoroughly, and to act on those instincts without delay.
I took my finger off the shutter release and moved the camera away from my face.
On the pedestal, the woman stopped smiling. Anxiously she called out, “Is there anything wrong?”
I smiled reassuringly back at her. “Not a thing,” I said and turned to the man standing a few feet away. He’d been watching the little by-play between us with an envious expression on his round face. He was short and bald and wore heavily-framed glasses, and he was dressed in a plaid summer jacket and bright red slacks. The look on his face said plainly that, while he wished she’d chosen him, he was used to the fact that pretty women never noticed him. I guess he might have been a nice guy. I’ll never know. He was a loser, one of the world’s little people who somehow always wind up with the short end of the stick.
I pressed the camera into his pudgy hands and said, “Do me a favor, will you? Take a picture of both of us.”
Without waiting to hear his reply, I sprang up onto the base of the marker beside the young woman and put one arm tightly around her waist before she could stop me.
She tried to twist away. There was real fright in her face. I held her even more firmly to my side, my arm gripping her torso, feeling the softness of her flesh under the softness of the cashmere sweater.
“No!” she cried out. “No! Don’t!”
“He’s just going to take one for my scrapbook,” I told her pleasantly, but my arm never relaxed its unbending grip on her in spite of her struggles and the smile on my face was as false as hers had been a moment before.