The Istanbul Decision (15 page)

He scurried back to the cabin and let himself down cautiously on the ladderlike structure of the window frame, being careful to step only where the crosspieces were welded to the top and bottom. Then, using the heel of his shoe, he kicked out the glass all the way to the edges.

He glanced briefly around the cabin, wondering if there were anything useful he might take. But there was no time, and at this crazy angle in the dark, rifling through the lockers would be next to impossible.

He raised his hands over his head and jumped. The cold water covered him, the logical extension of the fog. He began swimming even before he reached the surface, pulling himself forward, heedless of where he was going, until the wave the trawler made as it slid off the rocks washed over him.

Then he treaded water for what seemed an eternity, one more piece of flotsam amid a growing population of debris, until finally a chunk of hull large enough to support him floated by, and he pulled himself onto it.

Daylight found Carter huddled on his makeshift lifeboat, his knees tucked glumly under his chin. During the night the fog had lifted, and although he could now see where the boat had impaled itself — a rocky mass of land that he felt had no business being in the middle of the lake — he had drifted too far to swim to it. He sat, bobbing and shivering, sullenly staring at the waves peak and flatten on the vast, empty expanse of water.

The thought of Cynthia ran continually through his mind. She was coming to mean more to him than just a fellow agent in trouble, or even a woman he had once loved who was in danger and needed him, although either one of these would have been enough to make him brave the fires of hell to reach her. She was beginning to personify the entire debt Kobelev owed him, and the more he thought about it, the larger it seemed.

Vadas was dead. He had never surfaced after falling out of the boat. At one point during the night Carter had found what looked to be a wad of clothing floating with some boards on the water. He speared it with a piece of broken handrail and rolled it over. It was Vadas, his blank eyes staring out of white sockets, a pink gash dividing his forehead where he'd smashed it against the boat's control panel. This brought to ten the number of deaths since the operation against Kobelev had begun.

It was more than just the innocent lives that had been forfeited, or even the political ramifications of a man like Kobelev attaining power among America's enemies. It was more than the foiled assignment in Russia. His wanting Kobelev dead extended to his entire career as an agent. The man epitomized everything Carter had fought against; he negated everything Carter had risked his life time after time to preserve. If he failed again and Kobelev lived, he would tender his resignation, no matter what Hawk said. Success meant that much to him, and yet, as he sat watching the waves lap over the edges of his tiny raft, he never felt so far from accomplishing his goal.

He pulled a wood chip from the ragged comer of his little boat and absently tossed it into the water. It landed a few feet away and bobbed stubbornly. He watched it for a while, then noticed another object on the horizon, about the same apparent size as the wood chip but moving and growing steadily larger. Within a few minutes the faint roar of an outboard motor rose to accompany it.

It was an open boat with a woman in the back, steering. She was bearing directly for him. In a minute or two he recognized her as the girl from the cafe, whose advances he'd rebuffed the day before.

"I'll be damned…" he said half-aloud.

She cut the motor a few yards from him, and the boat drifted to a standstill inches from his feet. "Get in," she said brusquely in pure American English.

"What in hell…?"

"Just get in. We haven't much time."

Carter swung a leg over and had no more than shifted his weight from the section of hull to the boat when she gunned the motor, spilling him into the bottom. He was up in time to see his tiny island of salvation slipping into the distance.

"Who the hell are you?" he asked.

"Name's Stewart. Roberta. Lieutenant Commander, junior grade. Naval Intelligence."

"You?"

"Right."

"I assumed you were a…"

"A man. I know. Everyone thinks that. Well. I'm not."

"No," he said a little weakly, "I guess not. But how did you know I'd be out here?"

"I followed you after that little meeting we had at the hotel cafe yesterday. You came to within a block of Friedrich Schwetzler's apartment, the local smuggler. His operation is something of a joke around here. The frontier guards tolerate it because they feel sorry for him, but I know one of the guardsmen, a buffoon named Franco. He told me if Schwetzler ever got ambitious, they would have to sink his boat. Then word came through about you, and they closed the border. I guess that meant Schwetzler, too. I was talking to Franco in the cafe last night, and he told me he was on a detail mat moved one of the signal buoys out here in the shallows. When he thought of what that would do to Schwetzler, he laughed so hard he almost choked on his wine. Everyone knows how Schwetzler finds his way down the lake. At any rate, when Schwetzler's man didn't show up in the cafe at the usual time, I figured he'd gotten hung up out here. You with him."

"He got hung up, all right," said Carter solemnly. "Permanently."

"I know his wife. Poor Mardya."

After a moment's silence while they contemplated the widow's sorrow, it occurred to Carter that he should make some apology for the things he'd said to Roberta the day before. But the thought passed. "How do you know so much about what goes on around here?" he said instead.

"I teach English and Hungarian to the children of the Soviet diplomatic mission in Budapest… and play cat-and-mouse with the local KGB."

"Oh?" he said, taking interest. "I suppose they know about Tatiana Kobelev's escape."

"Tatiana the Brave?" The girl laughed. "The children are making a heroine of her. They compare her to Eliza running from the hounds."

Carter looked at her, trying to make the political and literary connection.

"Didn't you know that
Uncle Tom's Cabin
is required reading for well-bred Soviet children? Simon Legree is the prototype capitalist pig."

"That's an interesting interpretation," he said with a sigh.

"Yesterday they invented a new game," she went on. "One of them is Tatiana, and the other children play the American soldiers. They chase each other all over the schoolyard."

"So the word's out," Carter said. "But does
he
know?"

"Kobelev? Absolutely not. Word has it that Tatiana has expressly forbidden anyone to contact the train with the news she is free. Something about wanting to see the look of shock on a man's face when she finally shows up. We don't know who she intends to surprise."

"Me," said Carter. "That buys us a little time anyway. Where's the train now?"

"Sidetracked in Györ."

"Györ? It was due in Budapest."

"For some reason he had it pulled off the main line in Györ. He must have something in mind. He's invited the Hungarian circus to come in and entertain during the delay."

"Györ," Carter said. It seemed to suggest something just out of reach. Then suddenly he realized what it was. "We must get to Györ immediately."

Roberta shoved the accelerator as far forward as it would go, and the little boat skimmed across the water at a respectable speed. Within twenty minutes they had reached the Hungarian shore, picked up Stewart's car, a battered Fiat modest enough by Western standards but impossible for a schoolteacher in Hungary if it weren't for the fact that she worked for the Soviets, and were speeding down the main trunk road into Budapest by way of Györ. She drove while Carter talked.

"The entire U.S. intelligence community has been studying Kobelev ever since he started to emerge from the ranks of the KGB. His methodology, his networks, his plans — even his most intimate personal habits — are collated, analyzed, then rotated into the information pool that all services have access to." Roberta glanced at Carter. "I've made it a hobby," he said. "I've spent hours poring over the stuff. I know every flyspeck on every page. Kobelev's maternal grandmother was Hungarian. Her last known whereabouts is a state housing project in Györ."

"Wait a minute," said Roberta, tearing her eyes from the road for a brief second. "You don't really think Kobelev is going to interrupt his dash home just to pay his respects to his grandmother, do you?"

"You don't know him. He's a man given to dramatic gesture. In Russia when I was posing as a defector who wanted to join his ranks, he wanted to test my loyalty. He could have done it any number of ways — left himself exposed at some critical time, waiting to see what I would do, something subtle to trap me into thinking I could kill him and get away with it. But what does he do? He stages an elaborate fencing match in front of his entire family. You see? He's like a bullfighter working close to the horns. He thrives on danger. Besides, we know the grandmother is important to him. She all but saved him from an overbearing father. And we know he hasn't been out of the Soviet Union for almost a decade, so he can't have seen her lately."

"All right," said Roberta, her bright eyes flashing. The prospect of being in on the Kobelev kill obviously excited her. "Suppose you're right about the grandmother. What do we do then?"

"I lay the trap and spring it."

"What about me?"

"I want you at the train," Carter said. "No matter what does or does not happen, one of us must be on that train when it pulls out of here. Do you understand?"

She nodded solemnly, and he reached over and pecked her on the cheek.

Translated from the Hungarian, the sign in the dirt and stone plot that passed for a courtyard read: "Béla Kun Housing Project. Erected 1968. Western Hungarian People's Housing Collective." Beyond the sign stood six concrete rectangles, seven stories high, each rectangle composed of many smaller rectangles, each smaller rectangle with an iron balcony railing across it, and from each balcony railing a line of wash flapped in the late morning sunlight. It was Sunday, the family day. People milled on the sidewalk, and promenaded up and down the street, laughing and talking with neighbors and pushing baby carriages.

Carter sat in Roberta's Fiat, parked in a line of cars directly across from Building "A," his eyes sifting the movement on all sides of him, alert for anything unusual.

The grandmother was definitely here — Judit Konya, age ninety-three, first floor center — and she had received a message earlier in the day that had set up a bucket-brigade conversation between her apartment door and the phone because she was too old to make it to the end of the hall. Carter knew this thanks to a garrulous maintenance man with an acute appreciation of fine Hungarian wine who was not averse to receiving several bottles as a present in exchange for a little information.

And yet even though remembering the grandmother's name, then finding it in a phone book of thousands of Hungarian names — all of which began to look alike after a few pages — was a small triumph in itself, the mere fact that she was here was no guarantee Kobelev was coming. The longer Carter sat, the more he began to suspect he wasn't, and that in his zeal to find a chink in Kobelev 's armor, he had succeeded only in wasting more time, precious seconds that brought Cynthia closer and closer to the inevitable debriefing and execution deep in the bosom of Mother Russia.

He folded the newspaper he'd been using to cover his surveillance and got out of the car. A sick feeling in his stomach told him everything was going wrong. He put his hands in his pockets and walked resolutely to a small restaurant at the end of the block. Three old men playing
ultimo
on an upended crate stopped talking as he walked by, and he realized he was beginning to raise suspicions in the neighborhood, which only increased his uneasiness.

The owner-manager, a heavyset, round-faced man, was having an animated conversation with a young man at a back table in the otherwise empty room. He looked up as Carter walked in and gestured impatiently. Carter went to the counter to the phone. It was the fourth time this morning he'd made this call, and the ritual with the owner had abbreviated itself into a routine.

He was slipping, he told himself as his connection went through; he was getting sloppy. The whole block knew he was here, waiting for something, and that wasn't good. If he had any sense, he'd abandon this whole line of action.

"Nick?" Roberta Stewart was on the line.

"Anything yet?" he asked in Hungarian.

"The circus just got off. Isn't it funny how Kobelev thinks? He's kidnapped the entire train, won't let anybody off, yet he still feels he has to keep the passengers entertained. It's almost as if he's apologizing for the inconvenience."

"He's mad. I just hope his egomania proves his undoing," said Carter.

"Then there's nothing new on your end either?" she asked, a bit of anxiety spilling into her voice.

"Nothing."

"Listen, Nick, I've been thinking. Kobelev doesn't know me from Adam. He's got a whole slew of flower girls lined up here waiting to board. I could get one of those costumes real easy…"

"Absolutely not," said Carter, cutting her off.

"But Nick…"

"No, Commander. You've been outranked. I've changed my mind. You 're not to make any attempt to board that train. Is that clear?"

"Yes, sir," she said after a long hesitation.

"I don't want to hear any more of that kind of talk. I'm coming to the conclusion Kobelev is still on board and has no intention… wait a minute."

The sleek outline of a black Soviet-made Zil limousine with diplomatic tags suddenly appeared in the restaurant's plate-glass window.

"I think I'm getting a bite. I'll get back to you." Carter hung up and strode out the door. The limousine moved slowly up the street, stopping every few buildings.