“I have a project for you,” Reid said. “This one is big.”
“What do you want me to do?” Zerkel asked, his eyes bright.
“We'll discuss that later. I want you in Washington tonight. Is there any reason you can't leave L.A.?”
“Money,” Zerkel said. “But maybe I don't want to go anywhere until I know what's coming down.”
Nobody in the diner was paying them any attention. The waitress brought Zerkel a cup of coffee and refilled Reid's cup. When she was gone Reid handed the younger man fifteen well-circulated one hundred dollar bills.
“I want you at Dulles no later than midnight. A Yellow cab with the roof number 659 will pick you up and bring you out to a place I have in the country.”
“What if I don't like what I hear? I'm bored, not suicidal.”
“You can get out, no hard feelings. Nothing lost. But you'll like this deal, I guarantee it.”
Zerkel didn't have to think very long. “No later than midnight,” he said.
“Good,” Reid said, rising. “And for God's sake get your hair cut, shave off that moustache, and put on some decent clothes.”
Â
It was after six by the time Dominique Kilbourne showed up at her apartment. McGarvey watched from the stairwell door as she got off the elevator and came down the corridor. When he stepped out she stopped in her tracks, and for an instant, before she covered it up, she looked terrified.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“Of course I am,” she said sharply. “You just startled me. What are you doing here?”
“I'm going to Portland tomorrow. I wanted to talk to you before I left.”
“How was Moscow?”
“You don't want to know,” he said. “When I see Kennedy I'm going to tell him that I no longer need you as a contact.”
“I asked you a question. I want to know how it went for you in Moscow. Did they agree? Can you give me the courtesy of answering that?” She seemed brittle.
“It looks as if they'll help.”
“They said so?” she demanded sharply.
“What is it, Dominique?” McGarvey took her arm. Something was wrong with her. She was flushed.
“Well, I think we're all in danger now.” She pulled away.
“What happened when I was gone?”
“They came here to my apartment the first night after you left.”
“Who did?”
“Two of them, dressed in black. They broke in, but they didn't steal anything.” Her lower lip was quivering. “Nothing is missing, except my security and my peace of mind. It's just that I never thought it would happen to me. I mean, what did they want?”
“Were you inside?”
“I caught them in the act,” she said. She laughed nervously. “It's gotten to the point that I'm afraid to open my own goddamned door. Aren't you going to say âI told you so?'”
“Did you call the police?”
“No.”
“David?”
She shook her head. “I waited for you. This is right down your alley, isn't it?”
He took the key from her, opened her door, and ducked inside, keeping to the left. The apartment was ablaze with lights.
“I keep them on,” Dominique said. “I can't come back to a dark apartment.”
It was all right. There was nobody this time. “Where were they?”
“I don't know. Maybe in the bedroom.”
McGarvey went into the bedroom and took apart the telephone on the nightstand. The bug, including its pickup, transmitter, and battery, was smaller than an
ordinary postage stamp. It had been installed behind the mouthpiece. There was no mistaking what the device was.
He removed it, then put the phone back together and looked up. Dominique stood at the bedroom doorway.
“What was that?” she asked.
“It's a bug,” McGarvey said. The time for lying to her, and keeping her out in the cold, was over. “It's a transmitter so that they can listen in on what you're saying.”
“Everything that I said ⦠and did ⦠they listened to everything?”
McGarvey nodded. “Pack a bag. I'm getting you out of here.”
Dominique's face twisted into a grimace, her eyes narrowed. “Those dirty bastards,” she swore through clenched teeth.
There was something alarming in her posture and sudden anger. “Did you get a look at them? Did you recognize them?”
“No,” she said. “It was dark, and it happened too fast.”
McGarvey stared at her for another long moment. She was lying, but there wasn't much he could do about it now except get her out of the way.
“Get packed,” he said.
Â
Edward Reid stared at the television set in the living room of the Sterling, Virginia, farmhouse, astonished but pleasantly surprised by what he was learning. He'd expected a breakout, but not this.
The Japanese had attacked and sunk a Russian navy vessel in the Tatar Strait with a loss of all hands. The CNN news report was vague on when this had happened, but it was specific in denouncing the White House and State Department for not sharing what they knew with the American public. CNN had learned of the attack from unnamed sources in Tokyo.
Reid maintained that the Cold War with Japan began
on December 7, 1991, when the Japanese Diet in Tokyo defeated by a large margin a resolution that would have formally apologized for the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor fifty years earlier. A faction of the Japanese population still demanded an apology for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This was the same day that President Bush had been at Pearl Harbor making a speech and dropping a wreath on the remains of the battleship
Arizona.
He reached for his drink and took a deep pull at the straight Irish whiskey, barely tasting its harshness. The Japanese were not looking for a confrontation with the Russians. Although Siberia contained many of the natural resources that Japan desperately needed, Tokyo had never publicly considered that option. It was more interested in developing mineral recovery operations in countries along the western Pacific rim, Thailand, Vietnam, and the Malaysian peninsula. The Japanese would open mines and build towns to house the mine workers, their families, and the ancillary families who would run the grocery stores, restaurants, department stores, and public works. These people would become consumers of Japanese manufactured goods, the radios and televisions, the trucks and automobiles, and the Nintendos and digital watches. Two birds would be killed with one stone. Japan would get the mineral resources it so badly needed while creating new markets for its products. The only fly in the ointment was the United States, which wanted those markets for itself, and whose navy ruled supreme.
Reid took another long pull at his drink, finishing it. He got up and went to the sideboard where he poured another, then stood there, lost in thought.
Japan understood full well that it had no chance whatsoever to win an all-out war with the United States. Certainly not now, and very likely not for some years to come. But Japan did not want to dominate the world, as it had wanted to in the forties. It wanted control only of the western Pacific. Nothing more.
It could not win a shooting war, but knew that it would have to face increasingly tough trade agreements
that could cripple its growth. It had to do something. Japan was out to finesse the United States by playing a series of cards it knew the United States could beat, but hoped it wouldn't. The attack in the Tatar Strait was the opening move.
Reid was smiling when Mueller came from the stair hall. “Zerkel is here,” the German said.
“Good.” Reid put down his drink. He had a few cards of his own to put in play. “Bring him right in, Bruno. We've got a lot of ground to cover tonight.”
Â
By afternoon, a light breeze sprang up, and although it was chilly the garden was still pleasant. Sokichi Kamiya sat on the broad, scrubbed teak deck, his bandy legs folded beneath him as he listened to the gurgling of the waterfall and the music of the windchime in the gnarled old tree. Kamiya, eighty-one, controlled the vast research and development
zaibatsu
called Mintori Assurance Corporation, which had been involved since shortly after the war with everything from pure electronics and electronic components research to missile development and nuclear energy.
Beside him sat his old friend and business acquaintance, Hiroshi Kobayashi, who at seventy-nine controlled the banking
zaibatsu
of Kobe, second in power and resources only to the Bank of Tokyo.
“It is gracious of our young friend, Yamagata, to share with us the pleasure of this place,” Kamiya said. He had been contemplating the rock “future” and “hope” in the freshly raked garden beside the pool of golden carp, certain that its soul was at peace here, especially named as it was, and especially in this setting.
“The storm clouds are gathering, my friend,” Kobayashi said.
They'd watched the CNN report on the new Guerin hypersonic transport and on the incident in the Tatar Strait. Neither had come as a surprise, but the White House remained silent, which both men took as an ominous sign. The upcoming economic summit between the United States and Japan worried both of them, not
so much for its likely content, but because of the timing of the talks. They were not quite ready.
“All of what has come to pass was inevitable. We move from this point forward.”
“Agreed,” Kobayashi said. “But I think there will be many more dangers.”
“Because of Guerin's announcement?” Kamiya asked harshly, but without raising his voice.
“It's possible they know something. Enough to offer the countermove.”
“They would have gone to Washington with it. We would have heard.”
“Perhaps not,” Kobayashi said, apologetically. “Excuse me, I do not wish to disturb your peace, but we cannot afford to wait any longer. If we are to move, it must be now.”
Kamiya composed himself. He felt a sense of frustration and loss for the spirit that had gone out of his country. “Of course you are right, my old friend.”
“What will you do?”
“Send
Yamagata-san
to Washington and to Portland. He will find out for us how to stop them.”
“And how much they know or suspect?”
“Yes,” Kamiya said, focusing again on “future” and “hope.” “We will instruct him at once. He can leave in the morning.”
“We must take drastic action if this is to succeed.”
“Whatever it takes,
Kobayashi-san,
” Kamiya said. He smiled, thinking about how civilized the Japanese were compared to the Americans.
Yamagata-san,
who was almost like a son to him, would have to live among the barbarians for a time. That thought gave him sadness. Still, he smiled.
Â
McGarvey and Carrara met for breakfast at 7:30 A.M. in the Howard Johnson Motor Lodge coffee shop. For the first fifteen minutes McGarvey did all the talking. When he was done, Carrara glanced toward the entrance.
“Is she upstairs now?” he asked.
“Five-oh-three,” McGarvey said. “I'm leaving for
Portland in a couple of hours, but before I go I wanted to make sure someone would keep an eye on her.”
“The Bureau will watch her, and I'll have her apartment swept, but you know as well as I do, Mac, that if they want her they'll get her, unless we take her out to the Farm where she can be isolated.”
“She won't do it.”
“Any idea who it was?”
“No,” McGarvey said. “But they left these.” He handed over the three bugs he'd found in the telephones.
“I'll have Technical Services take a look,” Carrara said, pocketing the devices. He sat forward. “If they were Russians I could understand it, but if they were Japanese, I'll be worried.”
“Me too,” McGarvey said. “In the meantime Moscow has agreed to help out.”
“What else?”
“That's it, Phil, unless you'd care to tell me what the White House's reaction would be to a retaliatory strike by the Russians.”
Carrara whistled long and low. “Is that what they told you?”
“Not in so many words, but they're thinking about it.”
“You never were one to screw around,” Carrara said.
“I'm trying to save an airplane company here, that's all.”
“And maybe get us into a shooting match?”
“Or keep us from one,” McGarvey said. “Think about it.”
T
he black Zil limousine bearing Russian Foreign Intelligence Service director Aleksandr Karyagin glided down a narrow dirt lane through the birch
forests along the Istra River east of Moscow. The only person in the car, besides his driver, was his bodyguard. Both men were personally loyal to their director, more loyal to him than even to Russia, or the Commonwealth of Independent States. He had handpicked them as his aides years ago, and even during the worst of economic times they and their families lived well.
A few kilometers off the main highway the road had not been plowed after the last snowstorm so they'd had to stop and put chains on the back wheels. The darkness of the late afternoon, the thin cut of the road through the forest, and the tinkle of the tire chains lent an air of isolation to the place, broken only by the sophisticated communications equipment built into the back seat. He was never out of touch with his staff, or with his masters at the Kremlin. Never.
Because of the crises in the Tatar Strait his leash had been pulled up short. Yeltsin and that pissant, Minister of Defense Colonel-General Vyacheslav Solovyev, had called him on the carpet for a “lack of understanding of the Japanese problem.” That coming directly on the heels of the latest rounds of deep budget cuts. The KGBâKaryagin still thought of the organization by its old nameâwas being hamstrung by a lack of Western currencies just at a time when its foreign intelligence-gathering operations were needed the most. The fools were convinced that the new World Market rouble, which was being traded some places outside of Russia, would survive. All they had to do was look around. They could buy wheat, medical supplies, and even some other badly needed commodities. But when it came to buying technology, or tractors or heavy earth-moving equipmentâdurable goodsâthe World Market rouble was worthless. As it was worthless in Tokyo.
Yeltsin had been his mentor, but Karyagin no longer trusted the man, whom he viewed as too self-serving to be reliable. Look at the promises he had made to Polunin. Karyagin had the instincts of a politician, or at least an understanding of a politician's second sight. He
understood that he needed some insurance in the form of advice from the one man on earth whom he trusted without reservation to have only the best interests of the
Rodina
at heart. He'd managed to get a message to the man this noon on a secure telephone link, but still there were risks.
“There's something blocking the road ahead, Mr. Director,” his driver said, breaking him out of his thoughts.
His bodyguard pulled out a fifteen-shot, 9 mm Beretta 92SB pistol and switched the safety off. “Slow down,” he warned the driver. He looked in the rearview mirror to make sure no one was behind them.
Karyagin sat forward, the automobile's powerful headlights illuminating something about a hundred meters ahead. For a second or so his stomach tightened and his heart quickened. This was not so much like the old days when the only dangerous enemy that a Russian officer or politician had was his immediate superior. Political assassination had finally come to Russia from the West.
But then he realized what it was. “It's all right,” he said. “The road to the dacha must be bad. They've sent a sleigh for me.”
The troika's driver stood up and waved at them. A second figure, bundled up in an overcoat and fur hat, sat in the back, and as they got closer Karyagin could see that there was no one else, not even a bodyguard.
“I'll come with you, Mr. Director,” Karyagin's bodyguard said.
“Very well, but put away your gun. It won't be needed tonight. There's no reason to make them nervous.”
The former President of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, looking hardy and well rested, pushed back the fur rug covering his lap as Karyagin climbed aboard the three-horse sleigh behind his bodyguard and the driver. When he was settled they shook hands.
“Thank you for seeing me on such short notice, Mr. President.”
Gorbachev shrugged and smiled. “Go,” he said softly to his driver, and they lurched forward, the bells on the horses' harnesses sharp in the intensely cold, crisp night air.
Within minutes they were well out of sight of the limousine's headlights. Even though Karyagin was truly isolated now, he felt at ease. Gorbachev had survived a coup attempt.
“What do your Washington assets tell you?” Gorbachev asked, finally.
“I'm sorry, Mr. President, about what?”
“An American response to our retaliation for the Tatar Strait.”
It was always startling when Gorbachev came directly to the point. It was un-Russian. “Nothing yet. The White House is silent, although the news story has appeared finally on CNN.”
“When is our ambassador going calling?”
“Within thirty-six hours,” Karyagin answered. Yeltsin had brought it up at their meeting. “We're still studying the possibilities.”
Gorbachev's smile widened, as if to say
I'm sure you are studying the possibilities.
“The instructions have not yet been sent to Washington?”
“No. Everybody is expecting it, of course. But at this point there's absolutely no predicting how their President will respond. And now he has his hands full with Tokyo. The economic summit is scheduled next month, so he's in a difficult position. But so are we.”
“Indeed we are. Tokyo Station was able to give no warning?”
“None ⦔ Karyagin hesitated, and Gorbachev picked up on it.
“But?”
“The attack may not have been directed by the government, or even by the military as an autonomous action. It's possible that a
zaibatsu
may have been formed to foment trouble between us. The submarine captain may have been one of them.”
Gorbachev looked at him sharply. “For what purpose?”
“I have no hard evidence of this, Mr. President, I'm merely speculating. But I suspect that the Americans are going to want to act as a peacekeeper in the region. They'll try to talk us and the Japanese into making concessions. If that happens, Tokyo will be in a much stronger bargaining position at the summit. It'll give a little to insure the peace, so it'd be the United States's turn to give a little.”
“Japan was always the buffer against a breakout into the Pacific by our navy in case of war,” Gorbachev said. “So Washington gave them anything they wanted. But now that relations between us and Washington have been normalized, Japan is no longer so important.”
“Japan may be trying to bring the tensions in the region back into play.”
“You said a private
zaibatsu
was involved, and not the government.”
“There is a commercial interest. Without concessions from the United States, Japan is going to find itself in very difficult financial times.”
Gorbachev fell silent. The frozen river was a few yards off to their left, and a light breeze had sprung up, dropping the wind chill lower.
“The Japanese apparently targeted Guerin Airplane Company for an unfriendly takeover. I met with one of the company executives yesterday. Guerin's offering to build a one billion dollar high-tech airplane-wing factory in Moscow and train our engineers and workers to run it.”
“In exchange for what?”
“Information about this Japanese takeover attempt from our intelligence unit in Tokyo.”
“What are you asking me, Aleksandr Semenovich?”
Karyagin needed no time to frame his question. He'd been thinking about it for a day and a night. “Who should we court as our allies? The United States or Japan?”
“We should stand alone,” Gorbachev said after another long silence. “I think it would be wise if you found the
zaibatsu
behind all of these recent moves before any decision is made.”
“But Boris Yeltsin is in a dream world. I don't think he understands what's really happening.”
Gorbachev smiled wanly. “Would you be President?”
“No,” Karyagin said.
“Then stick to intelligence gathering, Aleksandr Semenovich, so that you may better advise your President.”
The rebuff stung. For the first time in Karyagin's career he felt truly alone.
Â
In many respects Louis Zerkel was just as crazy as his half-brother Glen, the Earth Stewards terrorist. His insanity took the form of acute paranoia. Everywhere he looked, there seemed to be conspiracies. His life's mission was to counteract these conspiracies with elaborate counterplans. He was forty-six, and he'd been filling endless notebooks and computer disks with counterplots since 1963 when President Kennedy had been assassinated on Zerkel's twelfth birthday.
Another trait he shared with his half-brother was his brilliance, something they'd inherited from their father, not their mothers. The elder Zerkel had been a U.S. Army criminal investigator stationed in West Germany when he met and married his first wife, with whom he had Louis. A few years after they returned to civilian life in the States, she'd divorced him, and a couple of years later he married his second wife and they had Glen. He worked for the San Francisco Police Department as a special investigator on unsolved capital crimes. But as good an investigator as the man was, he was just as odd. Most people who came in contact with him, including his co-workers, his superiors, and even his family, shied away. There was something about his eyes, the set of his mouth, his stance that looked like a leopard's, or some feral animal that might be docile at that moment but could spring out and devour you without warning.
Police Sergeant Donald Zerkel finally put the barrel of a .357 Magnum pistol in his mouth and blew his brains out one afternoon in the bedroom of his ranch-style house as his wife and her lover watched in horror from where they lay in each other's arms.
By then Louis had graduated from the University of California at Berkeley, with a 4.0 average in electronics engineering, and was working for IBM in upstate New York. His younger brother, Glen, was in his senior year at UCLA as a physics, mathematics, and philosophy triple major with a 4.0 average.
The boys came back for the funeral, attended by a lot of people who were relieved that the man was finally dead. Afterward, at the house, the brothers got into a terrific argument about Glen's mother, who in Louis's words was nothing but a “filthy adulteress” who'd caused their father's death. That was in 1980, and they'd not seen or talked to each other since, although there'd been one news story some years ago about Glen being a suspect in an act of environmental terrorism somewhere in Montana or Idaho. Except for one interview, no police had come calling to ask Louis about his brother, and over the years he'd stopped thinking about his sibling.
A final trait he shared with his brother was a love-hate relationship with women that bordered on fear. In 1984 he took a job in the Bay Area. Many of his co-workers and neighbors were gay or lesbian, and not having the slightest clue about his own sexuality, he'd been confused. He'd always heard that you were supposed to be able to tell just by looking if a person was a homosexual. But he'd never been able to do it. Since the scare about AIDS he'd been ten times as confused. In fact one of his recent conspiracy theories involved the HIV syndrome, which he thought might be a plot by Zambia to kill off the white race so that Africans could rule the world. He conveniently turned a blind eye to the black people dying in droves because of it.
Women were a mystery to him, necessary but frightening.
Except for a couple of the female engineers on staff with him, the occasional prostitute he had sex with, and Dr. Shepard, his psychiatrist, he steered clear of them.
The morning was cold and gray. Louis Zerkel pulled into the parking lot of InterTech Corporation's Alameda research center and assembly plant a few minutes before eight. At six-feet-five he was taller than his half-brother, his frame more filled out. But he had the same rawboned look that made them appear to be the rugged, outdoors type. Women, and for that matter men, found them attractive because of that look, and because their intelligence gave them an air of self-confidence.
He tried to put his thoughts in order so he could wipe what he knew had to be a stupid grin off his face. Overnight he'd discovered a new conspiracy. This one very big, bigger in his mind than the AIDS plot, as big as the Communist Party's “Evil Empire” plot against the United States. In hindsight he should have seen this coming on the day in 1984, two months after he'd started with InterTech at its downtown office in San Francisco, when he overheard the president of the company taking orders from a pair of Japanese from Tokyo. They'd spoken in Japanese, a language that Zerkel did not know, but he'd been able to tell by the tone of their voices that the Japanese were giving an American orders. He just knew it, but he'd not done a damned thing about it, and now he was sick at heart and excited at the same time.
As a conspiracist, which is how Zerkel thought of himself, he kept abreast of world events. On a daily basis he monitored all the major television news networks and news programs, including the specials, with the help of six television sets and six video recorders. He scanned at least three dozen newspapers, news magazines, and newsletters. Once a month he flipped through the latest volumes of
Books in Print
and the
Guide to Periodical Literature
to see what was new.