Authors: Robert Ludlum
“Get up,” said Varak, the weapon at his side, not bothering to level it at his prisoner. The red-haired man struggled, wincing while he pulled himself up by the rim of the marble washbasin. “Go back in there and sit down,” ordered Milos, shoving the agent through the door to the desk.
“Who the hell
are
you?” asked the man breathlessly, plummeting into the chair, still holding his arm.
“We’ve met, but you wouldn’t know about it. A country road in Mesa Verde, west of a certain congressman’s house.”
“That was
you
?” The agent shot forward, only to be pushed back by Varak.
“When did you sell out, federal man?”
The agent studied Milos in the wash of the desk lamp. “If you’re some kind of naturalized spook from a cross-over unit, you’d better get one thing straight. I’m here on special assignment to the Vice President.”
“A ‘cross-over’ unit? I see you’ve been talking to some very
excitable people.… There is no cross-over unit and those vehicles around Grinell’s house were dispatched from Washington—”
“They weren’t! I just
checked
!”
“Perhaps the Bureau wasn’t informed, or perhaps you were lied to, it doesn’t matter. Like all privileged soldiers from elite organizations, I’m sure you can claim that you were merely following orders, as in removing fingerprints and searching for hidden documents of which you know nothing.”
“I don’t!”
“But you did sell out and that’s all that matters to me. You were prepared to accept money and privileges for services rendered under your official status. Are you also prepared to lose your life for these people?”
“
What?
”
“Now, you get this straight,” said Varak quietly, raising his automatic and suddenly pressing it into the agent’s forehead. “Whether you live or die means absolutely nothing to me, but there’s a man I must find. Tonight.”
“You don’t know Grinell—”
“Grinell is immaterial to me, leave him to others. The man I want is the one whose fingerprints you so carefully removed from this apartment. You’ll tell me where he is right now or your brains will be all over this desk, and I will not bother to clean them up. The scene will add a further convincing nuance of evil consistent with everything that’s taking place out here.… Where
is
he?”
His entire body trembling, his breath short, the red-haired man spat out the words rapidly. “I don’t know and I’m not
lying
! I was ordered to meet them on a side street near the beach in Coronado. I swear I don’t know where they were going.”
“You just called.”
“It’s a cellular phone. He’s mobile.”
“Who was in Coronado?”
“Just Grinell and this other guy, who told me where he walked and everything he touched here in Vanvlanderen’s place.”
“Where was
she
?”
“I don’t know. Maybe she was sick or had an accident. There was an ambulance across from Grinell’s limo.”
“But you
do
know where they’re going. You were about to call the airport. What were your instructions?”
“To have maintenance get the plane ready for takeoff in an hour.”
“Where is the plane?”
“San Diego International. The private strip south of the main runways.”
“What’s the destination?”
“That’s between Grinell and his pilot. He never tells anyone.”
“You offered to call the pilot. What’s his number?”
“Christ, I don’t
know
! If Grinell wanted me to call him, he would have told me. He didn’t.”
“Give me the cellular number.” The agent did and the Czech committed it to memory. “You’re certain it’s accurate?”
“Go ahead and try it.”
Varak pulled the gun away and replaced it in his shoulder holster. “I heard a term tonight that fits you, federal man. Scum-rotten, that’s what you are. But as I said, you’re of no consequence to me, so I’m going to let you go. Perhaps you can start building your defenses as the obedient soldier betrayed by his superiors, or perhaps you’d be better off heading to Mexico and points south. I don’t know and I don’t care. But if you call that mobile phone, you’re a dead man. Do you understand that?”
“I just want to get out of here,” said the agent, bolting out of the chair and running into the sunken living room toward the marble steps and the foyer door.
“So do I,” whispered Milos to himself. He looked at his watch; he was late for the Sound Man downstairs. No matter, he thought, the man was quick and would quickly grasp what he wanted from the tapes and the transcripts. Then he would borrow the Sound Man’s car and park it in the lot at San Diego’s international airport. There in a private strip south of the main runways he would find the traitor of Inver Brass. He would find him and kill him.
The telephone rang, jarring Kendrick out of a fitful sleep. Disoriented, his eyes centered on a hotel window and the heavy snow whirling in circles in the winds beyond the glass. The phone rang again; blinking, he found the source, turned on the bedside lamp, and picked it up, glancing at his watch as he did so. It was five-twenty in the morning.
Khalehla?
“Yes, hello?”
“Atlanta stayed up all night,” said the hospital’s chief of pathology. “They just called me and I thought you’d want to know.”
“Thank you, Doctor.”
“You may not care to. All the tests are positive, I’m afraid.”
“Cancer?” asked Evan, swallowing.
“No. I could give you the medical term, but it wouldn’t mean anything to you. You could call it a form of salmonella, a strain of virus that attacks the lungs, clotting the blood until it closes off the oxygen. I can understand why, on the surface, Mr. Weingrass thought it was the cancer. It’s not, but that’s no gift.”
“The
cure
?” said Kendrick, gripping the phone.
After a brief silence the pathologist replied quietly, “None known. It’s irreversible. In the African Kasai districts they slaughter the cattle and burn them, raze whole villages and burn them, too.”
“I don’t give a
goddamn
about cattle and African villages!… I’m sorry, I don’t mean to yell at you.”
“It’s perfectly all right, it goes with the job. I looked on the map; he must have eaten in an Omani restaurant that served central African food for imported laborers perhaps. Unclean dishes, that sort of thing. It’s the way it’s transmitted.”
“You don’t know Emmanuel Weingrass; those are the last places he’d eat at.… No, Doctor, it wasn’t transmitted, it was planted.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Nothing. How long has he got?”
“The CDC says it can vary. A month to three, perhaps four. No more than six.”
“May I tell him it could stretch to a couple of years.”
“You can tell him anything you like, but he may tell you otherwise. His breathing isn’t going to get any easier. Oxygen will have to be readily available.”
“It will be. Thank you, Doctor.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Kendrick.”
Evan got out of the bed and paced about the room in growing anger. A phantom doctor unknown in Mesa Verde but not unknown to certain officials in the United States government. A pleasant doctor who only wished to take a little blood … and then disappeared. Suddenly Evan shouted, his cry hoarse, the tears rolling down his face. “
Lyons
, where
are
you? I’ll
find
you!”
In frenzy he smashed his fist through the window nearest him, shattering the glass, so that the wind and the snow careened through the room.
Varak approached the last of the maintenance hangars in the private area of San Diego’s international airport. Police and armed customs personnel in electric carts and motorbikes drove continuously through the exposed narrow streets of the huge flat complex, voices and static erupting sporadically from the vehicles’ radios. The individual rich and the highly profitable corporations who were the area’s clients might avoid the irritations of normal air travel, but they could not avoid the scrutiny of federal and municipal agencies patrolling the sector. Each plane prepped for departure underwent not only the usual flight plan and route clearances but thorough inspections of the aircraft itself. Furthermore, each person boarding was subject to the possibility of being searched on probable cause, almost as if he or she were a member of the unwashed. Certain of the questionable rich did not really have it that good.
The Czech had casually gone into the comfortable preflight lounge where the elite passengers waited in luxury before takeoff. He inquired about the Grinell plane, and the attractive clerk behind the counter was far more cooperative than he had expected.
“Are you on the flight, sir?” she had asked, about to type his name into her computer.
“No, I’m only here to deliver some legal papers.”
“Oh, then I suggest you go down to Hangar Seven. Mr. Grinell rarely stops in here, he goes straight to preclearance and then to the aircraft when it’s rolled out for inspection.”
“If you could direct me …?”
“We’ll have one of our carts drive you down.”
“I’d prefer to walk, if you don’t mind. I’d like to stretch my legs.”
“Suit yourself, but stay in the street. Security here is touchy and there are all kinds of alarms.”
“I’ll run from streetlight to streetlight,” Milos said, smiling. “Okay?”
“Not a bad idea,” the girl replied. “Last week a Beverly Hills
hotshot got juiced in here and wanted to walk, too. He took a wrong turn and ended up in the San Diego jail.”
“For simply walking?”
“Well, he had some funny pills on him—”
“I don’t even have aspirin.”
“Go outside, turn right to the first street, and right again. It’s the last hangar on the edge of the strip. Mr. Grinell has the best location. I wish he’d come in here more often.”
“He’s a very private person.”
“He’s invisible, that’s what he is.”
Varak kept glancing around while nodding his head at the drivers of carts and low-slung motor scooters who approached him from both directions, some slowing down, others rushing past. He saw what he wanted to see. There were trip lights between the row of hangars on the right, connecting beams from opposing short poles in the ground designed to look like demarcations—of what? wondered the Czech. Lawns between suburban houses of the future where neighbor feared neighbor? On the left side of the street there was nothing but a vacant expanse of tall grass that bordered an auxiliary runway. It would be his way out of the private field once his business was concluded.
The clerk at the preflight lounge had been accurate, Milos mused, as he neared the immense open doors of the final hangar. Grinell’s plane
was
in the best location. Once cleared, the aircraft could move out to the field through the opposite door, takeoff imminent as controlled by the tower—no minutes wasted during slow hours. Certain of the rich had it better than he thought.
Two uniformed guards stood inside the hangar at the edge of the drive where the blacktop met the concrete floor of the interior. Beyond them a Rockwell jet with men crawling over its silver wings stood immobile, a metal bird soon to soar into the night sky. Milos studied the guards’ uniforms; they were neither federal nor municipal; they were from a private security firm. The realization gave birth to another thought as he noted that one of the men was quite large and very full in the waist and shoulders. Nothing was lost in trying; he had reached his post for the kill, but how much more satisfying it would be to execute a traitor at close range, making certain of the execution.
Varak walked casually down the asphalt toward the imposing entrance of the hangar. Both guards stepped forward, one crushing out a cigarette under his foot.
“What’s your business here?” asked the large man on the Czech’s right.
“Business, I think,” answered Varak pleasantly. “Rather confidential business, I believe.”
“What does that mean?” said the shorter guard on the left.
“You’ll have to ask Mr. Grinell, I’m afraid. I’m merely a messenger, and I was told to speak to only one person, who should convey the information to Mr. Grinell when he arrives.”
“More of that bullshit,” added the shorter patrol to his companion. “If you got papers or cash, you gotta get ’em precleared. They find somethin’ on the plane they don’t know about, it don’t head out, and Mr. Grinell will explode, you get me?”
“Loud and clear, my friend. I have only words that must be repeated accurately. Do
you
get
me
?”
“So talk.”
“One person,” said Varak. “And I choose
him
,” continued Milos, pointing at the large man.
“He’s dumb. Take me.”
“I was told whom to choose.”
“
Shit!
”
“Please come with me,” said the Czech, gesturing to the right behind the trip lights. “I’m to record our conversation but without anyone in earshot.”
“Why don’t you tell the boss
himself
?” objected the overlooked guard on the left. “He’ll be here in a couple of minutes.”
“Because we’re never to meet face-to-face—anywhere. Would you care to ask him about it?”
“More bullshit.”
Once around the corner of the hangar, Varak raised his cupped left hand. “Would you please speak directly into this?” he said, again pleasantly.
“Sure, mister.”
They were the last words the guard would remember. The Czech sent the hard flat base of his right hand into the man’s shoulder blade, following the blow with three chops to his throat and a final two-knuckled assault on his upper eyelids. The guard collapsed, and Varak swiftly began to remove his clothes. A minute and twenty seconds later he was overdressed in the large man’s private security uniform; he cuffed the trouser legs and shoved up his sleeves, pulling the uniform over his wrists. He was ready.
Forty seconds later a black limousine drove down the street and stopped at the base of the asphalt entrance to the hangar.
The Czech moved out of the shadows and walked slowly into the chiaroscuro light. A man emerged from the huge car, and although Milos had never seen him, he knew that man was Crayton Grinell.