Home Goes The Warrior (36 page)

Then the car behind him turned on its red and blue flashing lights. The sound of the siren came in through the open sun roof. Randall glanced down and spat out an expletive. “Shit!” He’d been going 70 in a 55 mph zone! He could see the state trooper’s hat in his rear-view mirror. An unmarked police car! Such sneakiness always pissed Randall off. But there was no sense making a big deal out of it. He slowed and looked for a wide spot to pull off the road. He turned on his flasher to indicate a turn. Soon a pull-off area came into view. He pulled in and stopped.

In his mirror, he saw the trooper climb out of his car, clipboard in hand. Randall reached in the glove box and found his automobile registration. Then he clicked the switch that rolled the driver’s side window
down. He put on his best smile and asked the trooper, “Was I going too fast, Officer?”

The trooper turned to face him, and suddenly Randall realized that the man had his big service revolver out and pointed at him. “What the hell?”

“Get out of the car very slowly, sir. Don’t make any quick moves or I’ll blow your head off. Move very slowly and keep your hands where I can see them.” The trooper opened the door with his free hand and gestured with his gun barrel for Randall to come out.

Randall eased out of the seat, keeping his hands in plain sight. “What’s going on, Officer? I know I wasn’t going any faster than the other cars on this road.”

“It may be nothing, sir. We’re on alert for a car like this that was involved in a crime. If this isn’t the right car, you’ll be on your way in a few minutes.”

Randall relaxed. He had almost reached into his pocket for his ever-present cyanide pills. But this was just a case of mistaken identity. He almost chuckled at the coincidence. After all these years, he’d finally been forced to buy an American car, and this is what it brought him! Mistaken for a common criminal! Soon he’d get rid of this thing and get another Mercedes, a real car. “Okay, Officer, I understand.”

Then suddenly he didn’t understand anymore. Another car pulled in front of him and disgorged four more men, obviously plain clothes policemen, who hurried back to where he was standing. Two grabbed his arms and put him in handcuffs. Another was going through his pockets. They found the little plastic case with the cyanide pills.

“Got ‘em!”

“Keep looking. Take his clothes off. Look for anything that might be sewn into the seams. Get his shoes and socks off. Doc, are you ready?”

“Yeah. But do you really want to do a cavity search here beside the expressway?”

“Absolutely! We lost the last one because we left pills on her somewhere. I ain’t losing this one!”

Suddenly, Randall knew it was over. The shock was too much. His knees gave way and he found himself hanging between the two men holding his arms. Dimly, as if from far away, he heard the leader say, “Mr. Symington, I
am FBI Special Agent Thomas Wright. You are under arrest for the murder of Mr. Bernard Shapiro. Anything you say may - -”

Randall had come erect at this. “Murder? Murder? What the fuck are you talking about? I am above murder, far above murder! I am too big for you. I’ll be free and living in a real country while you’re still picking shit with all of the other ridiculous capitalistic pigs in this overrated sty of a country. I am far too valuable for your petty system to hold.”

His aristocratic features were red with emotion, and his expression made it very plain that he considered this all to be simply petty harassment by his inferiors.

Special Agent Wright seemed genuinely apologetic as he answered him. “Gee, I’m sorry, Mr. Symington. But I don’t think you understand. You see, we know all about your little spy games. For decades, we’ve been feeding you bullshit so you could pass it on to your Soviet friends. But you overstepped when you killed an American. Now you’re going to Leavenworth for a long, long, time. But thank you for helping us win the Cold War.”

“What? That’s a lie.”

“Nope. I imagine that your friends in Russia will eventually figure it out. When they do, you’ll probably be safe from them in prison. Too bad, but that’s the way it works. Now, please bend over. The Doc wants to check something.”

The former playboy was nude and screaming as the paramedic did a thorough check of his anal recesses. It wasn’t until he’d repeated his words several times that they became understandable. He was screaming, “I’m not a common criminal! I’m a hero! I’m going to be in the history books!” He was still repeating this when he was pushed into the back of a police car for the ride to jail.

Randall Symington was in custody.

As Randall was being taken from his car beside the expressway, Tom was on the radio. “Okay! It’s a go! All teams move in. We have Big Bird
in custody. I repeat, Big Bird is in custody. Get the others! Watch them for cyanide pills. Lock down the big house! Let’s move, everyone!”

The four agents had been waiting impatiently for almost four hours in the security office of the Crystal City office building occupied by the Navy Electronic Systems Command. When they received the radio message that activated their mission, they moved to the elevator, accompanied by two of the building’s government security guards. They rode the elevator directly to the sixth floor and then walked into a cubicle they had checked out the night before.

“Fred Lebedev, you’re under arrest. You have the right - -” Their target surprised them by diving toward the floor and grabbing for his jacket, which was lying across another chair in the cubicle. His reflexes were fast, but not fast enough. Two of the men were on top of him immediately and his hands were jerked behind him. He was handcuffed as one of the FBI agents pulled the little pill box out of his jacket pocket. “Okay, guys, take him to the bathroom and strip him. Doc, check him thoroughly. Let’s go. Jim, stay here and guard his desk. We want a complete inventory of everything in this cubicle.”

Fred Lebedev, aka Fedya Lebedev, was in custody.

There were a dozen FBI agents and six CIA people in the group that descended on the Symington mansion. Included in the group were security experts, bomb experts, experts in espionage equipment, as well as criminal investigative specialists. George Gold, Tom Wright’s boss, was in charge. As planned, the senior people on the security and bomb squads took the lead on entering the mansion.

On their arrival, the door was answered by a maid, one of three they found cleaning the building. An older man was working outside on
the extensive lawns and shrubbery. All four were taken into custody immediately, and quick interviews revealed that they had been brought here by Symington to do their jobs. All were from Central American countries and all were in the United States illegally. Apparently Randall Symington had brought them here with promises of citizenship and had then held them in virtual slavery under threats of deportation. The four immediately offered full cooperation with the agents, and two of the maids were put to work guiding teams around the huge structure.

Nothing unusual was found for the first few minutes. Then one team found a door that was locked and alarmed. The maid with the team told them that she was never allowed in this part of the home. In halting English, she explained to the agents that, “Mr. Symington, he tell me that I be killed if I ever go there. He show me gun and tell me he shoot me if I go there. I don’t go.”

“Where is the gun he showed you?”

She shrugged. “I dunno. It big gun, long like this.” She held her hands at arm’s length to demonstrate.

An alarm specialist was working on the alarm keypad, and soon had the faceplate off and the alarm pad hanging by its wires. Suddenly he backed away from it. “Get me a bomb guy.”

The bomb specialist was there immediately. The man who had asked for him pointed to the alarm pad. “There’s too many wires coming out of this thing. Could the extra wires go to a big banger?”

The bomb man took a long careful look and then turned to the agent in charge of the group. “Get everyone outside. This thing is wired to do something if the wrong code is entered in the pad. It could be a bomb, or even a series of bombs. I think I can take care of it, but I want everyone outside just in case. Please send in my boss, Jimmy, so there are two of us looking at this.”

Soon everyone was in the driveway, tensely grouped behind their cars while the two bomb experts worked in the house.

While they waited, a Spanish-speaking FBI agent from the criminal investigative unit began talking to the maids and the gardener. Shortly thereafter, the agent motioned for his boss to join them. “They say that there’ve been others who worked here and disappeared. The Symington
bunch told these people the others had been sent home. But the gardener tells me there’s an old graveyard back in the trees that he thinks has had some recent activity. Want to take a look?”

“Yeah. Let’s get one more guy to go with us. Be careful of the gardener. He might have something up his sleeve.”

“Okay, Boss.” The three agents followed the gardener off into the trees behind the mansion while the others stayed behind the cars.

Soon after they disappeared into the trees, one of the bomb squad people came out of the building. Speaking into his walkie-talkie, he asked George Gold, the agent in charge, to come to the porch. When George arrived, the agent said, “Please come with me. I don’t think everyone should see this.” George gave him a quizzical glance, but nodded. He got on his walkie-talkie and told everyone else to stay behind cover. Then he followed the bomb disposal expert into the mansion.

The door that had been locked was now open, and the other bomb man was guarding it. George walked through and stopped cold. “Oh my God!” He continued standing there, staring at the room before him, his head slowly swiveling from right to left as he stared. “Oh my God! Oh my God!” He couldn’t think of anything else to say.

The room was once the mansion’s ballroom, judging by the high ceiling and the bandstand at the opposite end of the room. But it had been converted to fit the needs of the Symington espionage ring. An elaborately carved conference table occupied a corner of the room to the right of the door. Cubicles with five desks were to the left, and a double row of file cabinets was lined up on the far side of the desks. But what was most impressive was the electronic suite that filled the rest of the big room. Communication electronics of a multitude of types were there. Microfiche readers and reader-printers stood beside automated microfilm cameras and the projectors that displayed the finished microfilm products. Some of the electronics showed known manufacturers’ nameplates, while others had lettering on them in a host of foreign languages.

George stared for a few moments more. Then he turned to the two men with him. “What about the bombs? Were there any?”

“Yep. There were three big ones that we found immediately. Plus, it looks to us like every one of those electronic cabinets has a little
self-destruct bomb in it. All we have defused so far are the three big general-use bombs. The smaller ones will take us days to remove. What do you want us to do?”

“You made the right call. We aren’t going to let the multitudes outside see any of this. For now, only the bomb people come in here. I’ll get plenty of guards around the house so that no one can get in or out without us knowing it. By the time you’ve got this safe, I’ll have a team of experts here to analyze all of this stuff. For now, I’m going to take some pictures so I can take them back to our leaders in Washington.”