“Will they help us without it?” Kennedy asked.
“I don't know. But I suspect we'll have to offer them some incentive. Something they want, because they're going through a very difficult time with the Japanese. If their spying for us in Tokyo were to be exposed they'd suffer for it. It would be a severe political embarrassment for them.”
“And us,” Dominique said.
“Yes, and us,” McGarvey agreed. “Yemlin is taking my request to his people in Moscow. If you're still interested in my help take my suggestion back to your board of directors, or whoever it is who makes these kinds of decisions for your company. But, don't screw around, Mr. Kennedy.”
“Believe me, I won't screw around,” Kennedy said. “I'll talk to Al Vasilanti tonight. What about you?”
“My daughter may come down from New York. I'll be with her. I'll be in touch.”
“You're married?” Dominique asked.
“Ex,” McGarvey said.
She looked at him oddly for a moment, then smiled wanly. “I think I can understand that.”
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Marine Lieutenant Stan Liskey should have been a naval officer because he knew his way around the Pacific Ocean better than he did the battlefield. In fact he'd never seen combat, but as a kid he'd sailed from California with his father and two uncles in the four-thousand-mile sleigh ride down to Tahiti and the fabled South Seas islands of Captain Cook. In the summer after his graduation from high school he single-handed a thirty-one-foot Pacific Seacraft cutter in the San Francisco-to-Honolulu race, coming in third on corrected time. He wanted to serve his country as a military officer, but he liked little boats, not big ones, so he joined the Marines. After two years at Camp Pendleton, and two more in Washington, D.C., he was stationed in Okinawa in the East China Sea three hundred miles south-southwest of the main Japanese islands, and it suited him just fine.
He was a tall, husky man, with the deeply lined and etched face of the sailor, and the square-shouldered, short-cropped look of the Marine officer, but with a smile almost always at the corners of his mouth as if he were having a little trouble taking anything too seriously. Running his hand over the section of boat bottom he'd just sanded, his smile widened a little.
“Smooth as a baby's ass,” he muttered to himself, then switched on the small finishing sander and continued to work on the bottom.
She was the
Fair Winds,
a twenty-two-year-old factory-finished Westsail cutter originally out of Port Angeles, Washington. At thirty-two feet on deck, she displaced more than ten tons, and by modern standards she was considered to be so heavy and so slow that she could barely get out of her own way. But she was ruggedly built, with scantlings that even the Finns or the Taiwan boatmakers weren't building to any longer. With the proper skipper she'd stand up to just about anything that any ocean on earth could dish out.
She'd made her first circumnavigation from 1980 to 1986, by way of Hawaii, the Samoas, Australia, across
the Indian Ocean to South Africa, then northwest, following the trades to the Caribbean, then the Panama Canal, and finally the long run out to Hawaii where she doubled her track, and then back home to Washington state.
A new set of owners sailed her around the world from 1987 to 1990, this time up the Red Sea, through the Suez Canal into the Mediterranean, and then across the Atlantic to Florida.
The last owners had trucked her to Vancouver where they'd sailed her up the Inside Passage to Alaska, out into the Aleutians, then down to Japan and finally Okinawa, where the wife put her foot down: “Me or the boat,” she told her husband, and she won.
Liskey bought the boat two months ago, put her up on chocks at Sporty's Commercial Boatyard on the south end of the island, and had painstakingly brought her back to like-new. Now he knew every nut and bolt, every screw, every foot of wiring and plumbing, and every square inch of fiberglass, inside and out. By this afternoon the bottom would be sanded and painted and she'd be back in the water. In two days the rigging would be fully tuned, and the sea trials finished, and on Monday his and Carol's thirty-day leaves began.
Navy Lieutenant, j.g., Carol Moss popped out into the cockpit from below, where she'd been varnishing bright-work, and peered over the side. She was a plain-looking woman with short, dishwater-blonde hair, pale green eyes, and an athletic, almost stocky build. She had a devastating smile that could light up the darkest of rooms, and that could never be mistaken for anything other than what it was: sincere. At twenty-five she was five years younger than Liskey, which was, she maintained, exactly as it should be. She planned on marrying him, and she definitely wanted an older, wiser man, someone who knew more than she, and had more experience. Her father had brought her up that way.
Liskey looked up at her, and she smiled. He'd been daydreaming again. “Caught me,” he said.
She laughed out loud, the sound musical. “Keep that up and you're going to sand a hole right through the hull.”
“Not this one,” Liskey said, thumping the side of the boat with the heel of his hand. “Are you done up there?”
“All set for the cushions, which I'll pick up tomorrow. Soon as they're in I'll start loading the provisions. Other than that we're set up here. How about you?”
“Another couple hours of sanding, and then the paint,” he said. “We'll be in the water by this afternoon.”
Carol smiled. The day was warm. She wore shorts and a halter top. Like Liskey, she spent a lot of time in the sun and was well-tanned. “How about a cold beer? Then I'll help you.”
“Sounds like a good deal to me,” Liskey said, and Carol ducked below.
He put the sander down and shaded his eyes against the sun so that he could see past the breakwater to the East China Sea. They would have thirty days together, island hopping all the way to the Japanese main islands. Isolated anchorages when they wanted them; charming little fishing villages if they wanted that sort of thing; and even bigger cities once they reached Kyushu if that was their desire. Besides the sailing, though, Liskey wanted to be with Carol. It would be a test, he figured, to see if they were compatible with each other. Thirty days alone on a small boat would see to that. The prospect of it excited and frightened him at the same time. He did not want to lose her, but he didn't want to give up sailing either.
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At 0800 sharp, Foreign Intelligence Service Colonel Mikhail Amosovich Lyalin was shown into the office of the head of First Chief Directorate General Leonty Dmitrevich Polunin, and although he wore civilian clothes as most SUR officers did these days, he approached the vast desk, brought his heels together, and saluted smartly.
He'd been called upstairs because of the overnight from Washington. Yemlin's highly unusual request had caught them off guard. There'd not been a hint of anything like it. Thank Christ he happened to be here when it came in. At least he'd had a few hours to prepare himself. As chief of the First Department, which ran U.S. and Canadian operations, he was Yemlin's boss and it was expected of him.
On the surface Yemlin's message was intriguing because of the many possibilities raised, yet disturbing because of the way the Washington
rezident
had been approached and the information the Americans had about SUR operations in Tokyo. The Siberian Far East had plenty of problems without a Japanese complication. But a high-tech airplane factory in Moscow was something to think about. Lyalin had been doing nothing but for the past five hours.
General Polunin, was a bear of a Russian, with a thick, square face, bushy black eyebrows, and the biggest ears Lyalin had ever seen on a human being. The saying went that what the man couldn't hear hadn't been spoken yet. He'd wanted to get into politics, but in 1991 Boris Yeltsin had promoted him to chief of the First Directorate, which was responsible for the former KGB's foreign operations, promised him the entire SUR within five years, and made him swear a personal oath of allegiance. The five years were up soon, but it didn't look as if the general would be getting his promotion. This latest development from Washington, however, Lyalin thought, might help.
“Good morning, General,” Lyalin said.
“Have a seat,” General Polunin said, returning the salute. “Yegorov will be here in a few minutes. Enough time for your briefing?” Colonel Yegorov was chief of the Directorate's Seventh Department, which oversaw operations in Japan and the region.
“Yes, sir,” Lyalin said, again thanking Christ that he'd personally checked the overnights. “The book cable has been verified as authentic.”
“I hope that was done before it was sent to me.”
“It was, General. I want to assure you that this isn't some hoax or disinformation plot.”
The general's eyes never left Lyalin's. “What about Yemlin? Is the man to be trusted? He hasn't gone insane?”
“He's to be trusted, and I think he's as sane as any of us. His two concerns outlined in the message were Kirk McGarvey's veracity and the man's knowledge of our Tokyo operations. Network
Abunai
is our major asset in the region.”
“The name McGarvey is familiar. Why?”
“Because of the trouble we've suffered at his hand,” Lyalin said. He too had heard the name, but he'd been flabbergasted when he'd pulled up the American's file. If he'd been one of General Baranov's team in the old days, he would have made damn sure that McGarvey was killed. As it was, he found it nearly impossible to fathom that Viktor Yemlin had come face-to-face with the man and lived to tell about it.
He passed McGarvey's thick file across the big desk. “It would be easier for you to look through his dossier.”
“CIA?”
“A former field officer, an assassin actually. But he was fired from the Agency some years ago. Since then he's done contract work for them on an irregular basis.”
General Polunin opened the file to several photographs of McGarvey. Immediate recognition dawned in his eyes. He looked up. “He killed Baranov, and Kurshin, and the others.”
Lyalin nodded. “Evidently Guerin Airplane Company has hired him to straighten out this problem with the Japanese. Fascinating.”
“To say the least.”
“We stand to gain a great deal from this.”
“Yes, or lose a lot. Is the offer legitimate?”
“Yemlin seems to think so. But I'll need approval before I can tell him to proceed.”
The general thought about it for several long seconds.
“I'll talk to Yegorov first, and then I will take it upstairs. We'll see, Mikhail Amosovich. We'll see.”
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It would be light soon, and the farmhouse had been quiet for a full two hours. Bruno Mueller lay hidden beneath the rock wool insulation in the attic, his face pressed against the rough ceiling boards above the living room. At just under five-feet-nine, he was an unremarkable-looking man with a bland complexion, hazel eyes that sometimes watered, sand-colored hair that was thinning in back, slope shoulders, a slight paunch, and a face that was forgettable. He'd been the perfect spy, able to blend into any scene in Europe or America. He was also a complete sociopath; human life meant absolutely nothing to him.
After the cops and the Action Service
Schwein
had finally cleared out, the helicopter pilot and the other one, called Henri, had stoked the fire on the grate and had dozed off, the pilot in a big chair and the other on the couch. Mueller could see them through a crack. Stupid little men, afraid to go into the bedroom and sleep in a perfectly good bed even though the bodies of the farm couple had been removed and most of the blood cleaned up. But the pilot had to be very good to have gotten down here from Paris in the storm. Mueller had heard them talking about it. The pilot had balls, and his presence was a stroke of luck.
But even though he figured he would get out of this fix, like he'd gotten out of every other one since his childhood, he knew that there was little or nothing left for him. There were very few places where he would be welcomed. Libya, Iran, perhaps Lebanon, if he wanted, which he didn't. Nor were there any masters left worth serving, or any causes still viable enough to fight for. The religious fanaticism of the Shiites or the Hezbollah were not for him. The superpower struggle was over and his side had lost, as he'd secretly feared it might from the moment he'd seen America with his own eyes.
Born in Leipzig in 1952, he'd been a child of the Cold
War, the Berlin Wall nothing more than the fence along any frontier between two nations. His childhood was troubled, his father an alcoholic, and his mother a petty thief and sometime informant to the East German Secret Police, the Stasi. When Bruno was seventeen, lagging in school, always in trouble, he killed a homosexual one night after receiving what he said was the worst blow job of his life, and the Stasi recruited him out of jail where he was awaiting trial. He was their kind of man: young, therefore trainable; common looking, therefore the perfect chameleon; and a killer of queers, therefore pragmatic.