Shadow Wars, page 21
“Carl Halder is officially dead.”
“That’s what they said, but I’m not sure they believe it.”
“They’ll run into a dead end on Carl. Forget it,” Smith said curtly. “Do they have any idea where Katherine is?” he inquired more cautiously.
“No, they lost track of her in Nürnberg.”
“Who lost track? Did they say?”
“Some German group called …” He paused for a moment. “It’s right on the tip of my tongue. These goddamn initials they’re always using in the military. Ahh … GSG-Nine was the term they used.”
It was Smith’s term to exclaim, “Jesus! That’s hostage rescue. They’re good, very, very good. Just how the hell did they get involved?”
“I told you, Norman. These goddamn SEALs. There ought to be a standing order that they stay out of this type of duty. They’re nosy. They have no respect. Shit, Norman,” Ellyson remarked in language very unsuited to his style, “those sons of bitches are going to fuck things up for—”
“Wallace!” Smith barked. “Calm down. Now why don’t you just have Captain Ryng recalled. Or, if you want, I can use some of my old contacts. I’ll see what I can do if it’s going to cause you any problems back in Washington.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Norman. Is Alzheimer’s setting in? Remember I told you he was called back to Washington for a conference in the White House? Well, he’s untouchable now. Gilbert Crandall says so and I don’t think you or any of your Pentagon cronies can change things. It was just our luck that he was given some sort of special assignment over here at the same time.”
“Can’t you find out what he’s doing for Crandall?”
“If I could, I’d tell you. I’ve already tried. Gilbert was very gracious in declining to discuss it further with me, said it was better if I didn’t know since it didn’t affect me personally. I figured that at least he’d talk it over with his closest aides, so I tried Jim Clifford. We were at Oxford together and he usually knows when Gilbert farts. He was taken completely by surprise. Didn’t know who Ryng was. Couldn’t figure out what I was talking about. The same with Art Landy who knows everything that goes on in the city. I got through to Sam Ina, Don Short, Ed Meehan, Hank Taron, even Andy Textoris. Nothing. Zip. So much for clout.”
Norman Smith had spent a lifetime handling crises and convincing others he could manage any problem. He sensed now that Wallace Ellyson was for the first time showing signs of strain. For the man who aspired to become secretary of state by reforging a powerful U.S. presence in Europe, he was acting like anyone other than John Foster Dulles. “Wallace, we’re working together because of our separate talents. You handle the diplomacy and stop worrying about Katherine. She’s just fine. I’ll handle Ryng. Okay? Capiche?”
Ellyson expelled a deep breath over the phone. “Oh, all right. Capiche. Where is Katherine now?”
“It would be foolish of me to say anything, Wallace. Halder says she’s comfortable, well fed, pissed off at the people taking care of her, being a complete bitch, but she is just fine. Believe me. And once again, here’s someone else telling you you’re better off not knowing something. When she comes home, can you imagine if you let slip just once something you knew about her whereabouts? Wallace, if she found out you were involved, she’d never forgive you. And I think you could kiss a cabinet appointment good-bye also.” Smith was well aware of Halder’s reasoning—as long as Katherine Ellyson remained under the German’s control, her father was much easier to deal with.
“Like I said, Norman, capiche. Capiche, capiche, capiche.” He understood that Smith was making an effort to appease him, without actually stating it, in order to keep him away from Halder. He also knew that no harm would come to Katherine because Norman Smith would see to that. Smith seemed to exercise a strange hold over all of them. “Okay, so what do you mean you’ll handle Ryng?”
“Don’t be concerned with it, Wallace. Capiche?” Smith laughed softly to himself.
To Ellyson, it was a crude snicker, the type one overheard in men’s rooms. “I don’t want anything that will reflect poorly on the embassy now,” he cautioned.
“It’s been a pleasure talking with you today. I think we should discuss things more often at this stage. Investments can be tricky when you least expect. Good-bye, Wallace.”
“Good-bye, Norman.”
General Norman Smith had been in enough campaigns in his lifetime to know that it was time to regroup and make some alterations to the master plan. His strategy would be the same but his tactics must be altered to adapt to the changing situation. Captain Ryng was more of a problem than he’d anticipated after his earlier conversation with Ellyson, but certainly not an insurmountable one. And now he had some doubts about Ellyson, too. This was the man whose ambitions fit perfectly with Smith’s own concept of strength through confrontation. Was Ellyson displaying occasional signs of wavering when certain things didn’t fall into place as he anticipated? Norman Smith couldn’t accept that in a man.
Paul Voronov had been comfortable with the interrogation of General Raskova even if the process of developing hard intelligence had been cut short. He’d established the man’s involvement in the plot against Sergei Markov and had gained a little of his own revenge. But now that he was sitting in the president’s office explaining what he’d accomplished, he realized he shouldn’t have been so pleased with himself. Raskova had died because Voronov allowed his temper to get the better of him. With more self-discipline, a trait he was secretly proud of, he would have recognized Raskova’s weakness and slowed the interrogation. But anger and revenge had overpowered reason and discipline and those few short moments when self-control might have succeeded had hastened Raskova’s heart attack. While he could report with confidence to Sergei Markov that the head of the KGB’s Second Chief Directorate had turned against him, he still could not identify others involved with Raskova. Nor did he know who in France was giving Raskova orders or why Westerners were involved. There had been one name—Halder—that the cooperating Germans were chasing down for Ryng. And he was sure he’d been so close to learning the location of the weapons stockpile, but he still had only part of a name babbled by a man in the midst of a heart attack.
“I acted irrationally,” he admitted, “out of anger. It was only a few short days ago that I was supposed to be his next victim.”
“You are probably more dangerous to yourself than Raskova’s people are when you react like this. What’s done is done. Forget it.” Markov was in the habit of serving tea from an ornate samovar to visitors in his office but this wasn’t the time to offer tea. Voronov needed more than just tea. “Self-doubt can often be more of a hazard than a bullet. You need a drink. Then we’ll talk.” Markov considered himself as well disciplined as Voronov, but enjoyed the excuse to have a midday drink. He extracted a bottle of vodka from the tiny refrigerator behind his desk along with two ice-cold liqueur glasses, and filled each one to the brim. Then he smiled at Voronov, pushed a glass across the desk to him, and said, “You are not allowed to refuse a drink from your president.”
“I may be tired, but I don’t think I’m crazy.” Voronov waited until Markov had the glass halfway to his mouth before he said, “You were right that first day we talked.” He raised his own glass in Markov’s direction. “To the Americans. We do need them. I think we have more enemies than we realize.” He gulped down half the vodka, then stared at the glass with a half-smile before shaking his head. “No, not today. I’d want another if I drank this one too quickly, and then another, and—who can say how many more? There’s too much to do.”
“Do you feel safe with Raskova gone?” Markov inquired curiously.
“Not when I read the papers.” Voronov placed the half-full glass on the table between them. “This wasn’t one man working on his own agenda. Look what’s happening in so many cities around us. It’s not just here. It’s all around us, all over Eastern Europe. The journalists are writing exactly what someone wants the people to think.” Before a grinning Markov could interrupt, Voronov raised an index finger to make his point. “I know what you’re going to say, that that’s what they’ve always done. But it’s different this time. And it’s not the same as always. It’s someone on the outside, someone powerful enough to control the news. Whatever is negative has become news. Whatever is positive is cut by the editors. You were correct in sensing the problem but I sometimes feel it’s already too big for us.”
The remainder of the vodka disappeared from both their glasses. Voronov studied Markov’s face to see if he agreed. “I guess I’m a little scared now. The problem is much bigger, much deeper, and we know so little. I would be more optimistic with more of this.” He turned the glass upside down and tapped it with a fingernail.
Markov smiled sadly. “As we all would. Unfortunately, we don’t have the time to enjoy such luxury. But not everyone is against us. I have loyal friends and some of them have come to me to express their support. They have the same feelings we do. Some have been asking questions. And some have even offered names.” He shrugged thoughtfully. “I don’t know how many of them are accurate and how many are just a way of getting back at old enemies.”
Voronov nodded cautiously. There were probably more names that belonged on that list than Markov wanted to believe. He was sure of that because he believed the methods he used with General Raskova were closer to a last resort than either of them wanted to admit. But he also had to relieve Markov of much of the burden. He said, “We have no choice but to bring your most loyal together somewhere. They have to understand they are not alone. You have to arrange it because you are still the one person they believe in, and they wouldn’t trust me blindly. But you can’t appear. It would be giving too much away if just one of the wrong people associated you with that group. I want it where it would be least expected, right around Moscow, so people can drive there separately. There are too many eyes at the airport and railroad station.”
“Will you see them all at once?”
Voronov thought about this. “No. You’re right. Maybe two groups hopefully the same day. We don’t have time for more than that. But remember, the orders have to come from you and you have to explain to them personally that I am your direct representative, exactly as if you were there. And they also have to understand that they may work with Americans—with them,” he repeated, “rather than against them.”
Markov was wholly in agreement. “When I last talked with President Crandall, he indicated he’s doing much the same thing—relying on his closest advisers.” There were no other choices. His country was coming apart around him.
The efficient embassy garage left the car right outside the front entrance within minutes after Ryng called for it. He would have taken it immediately but a phone call from Adolph Geyer had detained him. Then David Chance came into his office to brief him on the new intelligence that had been developed after tracing Eva Werth and Konrad Braun back to their Stasi days. The counterfeit passports in Braun’s apartment in Berlin had provided a wealth of data that was being faxed to customs officials in the cities he’d worked in. Then Braun’s time in each country would be compared to local events. They had a break! One worth delaying his schedule for.
The car brought to the front was an older Mercedes that had been with the embassy for years. When Ryng reported he would be detained, the Marine at the gate had it moved across the street to an area reserved for diplomatic vehicles. No one paid attention to it again because neither the ambassador nor any of his senior-level people intended to use it.
The Mercedes exploded in a sheet of flame just as Ryng walked out the front door of the embassy. It was not a terrorist attack on Americans in general, nor was it intended to maximize the kill in the immediate vicinity. It was a timed bomb set under the driver’s seat. If he had survived the blast, the ensuing flames were intended to finish the job. By the time the fire brigade had extinguished the flames, the car was a molten mass.
When Wallace Ellyson surveyed the wreckage, his face turned a pasty white and his jaw dropped like an old man’s. A woman and a small child had been unfortunate enough to be passing by as the device exploded. Their mangled bodies lay in the street, the child without one arm, the mother now pathetically naked from the waist down. This, he realized, was what Norman Smith meant when he said over the telephone that he’d take care of Bernie Ryng. Ellyson was an ambitious man, cunning, scheming, a dirty player, but he’d never before also considered himself a murderer—and the intent of the bomb was no less than murder! The pathetically torn corpses in the street attested to that.
Arkady Malik heard that explosion just as if it had gone off in his own vehicle. He’d been fifteen hundred miles away in Moscow, an hour’s difference in time, but it was just a split second’s electronic transmission from his office. Terrorist-style bombings and resulting civilian deaths had a way of attracting media attention and instantly circling the world. He was conscious of his fists opening and closing in frustration. Not a word had been said about responsibility for the bomb, but he somehow sensed it had been Ellyson, an act of frustration by a man not well suited to this shadow world—and a horrible mistake! It was an assumption based totally on Malik’s dislike of Ellyson, a man he knew mostly by word of mouth since they’d met just twice.
This was the one thing they’d been able to avoid until that moment. Malik had done any number of things through anger that he readily admitted later were foolish. But he couldn’t imagine himself ordering something like that bombing, especially in front of Ellyson’s embassy. And with that thought, he wondered curiously why he automatically assumed “they”—“us”! They’d been reasonably adept at dictating the news and manipulating public opinion to their advantage. While there was no immediate way to trace the device, Malik knew there were experts who could eventually do so.
News reports said nothing about the intended target. The embassy statement simply explained that vehicles were often brought to that area for the use of the next official who required it. There was no way that Malik could have known at that moment that it had been meant specifically for Bernie Ryng, though he sensed its purpose, and no one—not Ryng, not Ellyson, not a soul in the embassy—was going to provide anything that might help the instigators. Why do “they” necessarily have to be “us”? Why?
But Malik sensed trouble. Everything had seemed so perfect until the past couple of days. There had been no breakdowns. Even he had no idea of the identity of the men two stages under him and he’d never had the desire to learn their names. That was the way it had been intended. But he did know General Raskova. He’d worked with the man on occasion, liked him, and now he was among the missing. He was quite familiar with Wallace Ellyson also, although that was more from Norman Smith’s vantage point, and the bombing had taken place adjacent to Ellyson’s embassy. That was enough to convince the excitable Malik that there was a break somewhere. It was no coincidence. Ellyson, he was sure, was involved by default, if nothing else. It was the nature of the individual. He belonged with them.
On that evening when the slivovitz had flowed freely at Malik’s dacha by the Black Sea, the American general had commented that someday Wallace Ellyson expected to be secretary of state and that it would be a touch of luck if that ever happened. Norman Smith also said he would do everything in his power to see that it happened. “Yes, it would be a unique touch of luck,” Smith had repeated that night at the dacha.
“Lucky for who?”
“For us,” Smith responded with a coy wink.
“Do you like Ellyson?” Malik queried.
General Smith looked back at him with an amused expression. “No, not exactly. He’s a pompous ass. He also has a way of being one of the most offensive people I’ve ever met.”
“Then why do you feel it would be advantageous to us?”
“Wallace Ellyson is a Machiavellian.” He glanced at the Russian, who was staring at the lights reflecting off the Black Sea. “Are you familiar with him … with Machiavelli, I mean … his writings … ?” Smith asked tentatively, afraid of insulting the man.
General Malik nodded absentmindedly without turning toward the American. “Umm … The Prince, I believe it’s called. We’re not barbarians you know. We read. We’re aware of Western thinkers.” He turned and studied a surprised Norman Smith before adding, “A benevolent dictator is what I remember most about Mr. Machiavelli from our course on Western thought. Correct?”
“Correct,” answered a subdued Smith.
“You’ll find that we know as much about the political thinkers you people esteem as you do. That includes Machiavelli who, I believe, is not highly regarded by your liberals. But just as Americans study about Marx, Lenin, Engels, or any of our other theoreticians, we do the same with Westerners. Sometimes more. But that’s not what you were talking about.” He paused and studied the surprised American general. “Yes, I am familiar with what you were discussing as it relates to Mr. Ellyson. Tell me more about him.”
“You might like the way he thinks. I do.” Smith poured another finger of slivovitz and sniffed it. The heady odor of plums and alcohol no longer assailed his nose. Too drunk, he thought. But he wasn’t about to let this Russian intimidate him. “Wallace Ellyson believes that the only way the United States government can survive in its present form is if our nation remains powerful. The only method of maintaining that strength is through a strong economy, and that can only be achieved by promoting a consistently powerful worldwide military force. I think perhaps he sees intimidation in the same light as leadership. But whatever it’s called, that wouldn’t be possible without the loyal opposition,” Smith concluded with a chuckle.
