The Istanbul Decision (2 page)

"Really, Nick? If you weren't such a Don Juan, I could almost believe that. David Hawk. I haven't heard that name in a long time. How is the old bastard?"

"He survives. He's tough. He has to be. But this time he needs your help."

"I've heard that song and dance before. It seems to me I remember you and me hotfooting it across the deserts of Iran one step ahead of the Ayatollah."

"We appreciated what you did."

"Swell. I get a letter of commendation from the President, and I can't even show it to anybody. That, and a broken heart. Now you want me to do it all over again?"

"I didn't break your heart, did I?" asked Carter with a smile.

She had been leaning against the dressing table. She came to where he was sitting and ran a hand through his hair. "You 're an asshole, Nick. You know you did. You made me love you, then you ran off to Algeria or some damned place and that was the end of it. Tell me, this job Hawk has in mind — will you be working with me?"

Carter stood up and took her into his arms. "Yes."

"Closely?"

He kissed her neck. "Very."

She made a sound low in her throat that was half groan and half sigh, and pulled away from him. "It's no use. We open in Philadelphia in seven days for a month's run, then we return here. I can't just walk out on them now."

"I saw the rehearsal. You're the best thing in the show."

"It's a big chance for me, Nick. I'm no longer just an understudy. I've been learning."

"It's important, Cynthia."

Her eyes never left his face. "How important, Nick? Tell me the fate of the world hangs in the balance. Make it easy for me."

"Your Russian is still passable?"

"I was raised over there, remember? Until my father defected."

"Who's the most important individual in the Soviet hierarchy?"

"You mean officially, or who has the most power?"

"The most power."

"I'd have to say the head of the KGB. Everyone's afraid of him, even the Premier."

"What if I told you there was a man standing in line to seize that power, a man so totally evil, so obsessed with destroying both his country and ours, that he makes Hitler look like a Boy Scout?"

The hate in his voice made her suddenly cold, and she tried to laugh. "You're not serious, are you?"

"Deadly. I tried to kill him once, but I failed to make certain the job was done. I won't make the same mistake again."

"Who is this maniac? What's his name?"

"Nikolai Fedor Kobelev."

The girl's face turned white. "Oh. Nicky!" she exclaimed.

"You know of him?"

She sat down heavily in the chair behind her. "I know him all right. His name has been a curse in my family for years. He was a cipher clerk in State Security. An opportunity for a promotion came up, and it was between him and another clerk. The competition didn't last long. The other clerk was found at home, stabbed through the neck. That other clerk was my mother. I was a year old at the time."

"I didn't know."

She shook her head, the memory hard. "He pulled strings, managed to shunt the blame onto my mother's alcoholic brother. Uncle Piotr is still in Siberia doing life."

Carter's hands fell to his sides. "I'm sorry," he said. "I wasn't told. If I had known, I would have requested they assign somebody else."

"No, Nick! I want to do it. I have to. Don't you see? I owe it to my mother and my family. If you're going to run an operation on Kobelev, I must be there."

Carter shook his head. "There isn't room on this assignment for personal vendettas. The man has to be taken out cleanly, professionally, completely. There can't be any slip-ups."

"I can do it, Nick. I swear I'll do exactly what you say. But I have to be there when you put the knife in him."

Carter sighed. There wasn't much time. Finding another actress might take months. Besides, Cynthia's resemblance to Kobelev's daughter was almost uncanny.

"All right," he said at last, pulling a card from his pocket. "Show this to the receptionist at the base hospital at Camp Peary at fourteen hundred hours tomorrow. I'm afraid we're going to have to do a little surgery on your face."

"I don't care. Do whatever you must."

He took her chin in his hand and looked into her eyes. "Good girl," he said.

The next afternoon Carter placed a call to an unlisted number in Washington, D.C., and was told the «subject» had been accepted and the «experiment» would begin as planned. Thus he knew that Cynthia Barnes, nee Katerina Burjeski, had made her appointment at Camp Peary and that the CIA-selected doctors had found her suitable for surgery. That night he packed a bag and caught a plane for Phoenix.

His eventual destination was a small dude ranch on the outskirts of Tempe. Ostensibly it was a run-down tourist attraction that had seen better days, but in reality it was a rest haven for the agents of AXE, the super-secret information gathering and political action organization of which Carter was a charter member. AXE was doubly secret, secret even from the Central Intelligence Agency, its funding hidden in a maze of budget referrals and footnotes, and finally tucked safely into the President's own Special Expense Account so as to be utterly untraceable. Carter had worked his way through the ranks to the designation N3, Killmaster, a name that spoke more eloquently than any job description as to his purpose and capabilities.

The Litchfield Municipal Airport in Phoenix is rather small, in spite of the city's size, with concourses for deplaning passengers at one end and a large lobby with a double baggage carousel in the center. At the far end, doors lead to the parking lot. Carter arrived at 9:58 P.M. exactly and went directly to the baggage carousel.

He was relatively sure the usual broken-down station wagon with Mesa Verde Dude Ranch printed on the door in flaking gold letters would be waiting for him outside to take him the rest of the way to Tempe, and he was equally confident the driver would have been more than willing to tend to his bags as well, but Carter much preferred to look after his own luggage.

Over his shoulder he carried a small leather bag that contained his toiletries and other personal effects, as well as whatever book he was currently reading, usually a foreign language grammar or contemporary political history. But it was his other case, a finely tooled handmade Brazilian two-suiter, that he missed most whenever he flew, and for which he watched now with a steady gaze as the carousel began to turn and luggage began dropping to the rail. This bag held the small arsenal of personal weapons he had about him always: a 9mm German Luger complete with silencer, affectionately called Wilhelmina; and a small, pencil-thin stiletto. Hugo, that fit in the chamois sheath he always wore on his forearm He possessed one other weapon, dubbed Pierre, a gas bomb that fit high on his left thigh, almost like a third testicle. But it was plastic and was able to pass through metal detectors without so much as a beep, a feat impossible for the other weapons. They had had to be packed away and had been out of his grasp now for almost six hours. The effect on him couldn't have been stronger if he'd been walking around all that time without clothes.

Like a determined little train of cars on a roller coaster, the bags, one by one, rode to the top of the carousel, then tumbled down, presenting themselves with a
clunk
to the several dozen travel-weary passengers at the bottom who closed in to snatch them up as they rode by. Carter waited, waiting for the familiar outline of his bag, when suddenly he felt the eyes of someone in the crowd staring at him. The alarm bell in the back of his head began to clang, the danger signal tingling in every nerve of his body.

He gave no sign that he knew. Calmly he collected his bag and made his way directly to the men's room.

In the reflection of the concession stand window he saw a man in light slacks and sports coat separate himself from the crowd and move in the same direction, a telltale bulge under the left arm of his jacket. The men's room was deserted except for an older gentleman standing at one of the urinals. He didn't bother to turn around as Carter entered, selected the last toilet stall in line, put a dime in the slot, and went in.

He took down his trousers, sat down, and pulled the suitcase up onto his lap. In a matter of seconds the old man would finish up and go, leaving Carter alone in the room. That, no doubt, was what the man outside was waiting for.

Carter unlocked the case as the old man finished, walked to the sink, and ran the water. Then he stepped to the towel dispenser. It rattled loudly as he cranked out several feet of paper towel.

From under a neatly pressed pair of Yves St. Laurent slacks on the bottom of the case Carter retrieved a wooden box.

The door swung open, the bustle of the terminal suddenly filling the room. The old man had left. Another second and the door swung open again, this time admitting a man whose step was a good deal surer and more distinct than the old man's shuffle.

Carter held his breath while these new footsteps hesitated briefly by the door, then continued on.

Time was running out. Carter found the correct key and opened the box. Wilhelmina gleamed and smelled faintly of gun oil. On the right, also resting in the Styrofoam, was a clip, and along the top of the box nestled a stubby cylindrical silencer. Carter took out the gun and silencer and fitted them together, making only as much noise as absolutely necessary to turn their perfectly matched, well-oiled threads.

The footsteps stopped at the next stall. Carter picked the ammunition clip from the box and held it in his hand. The jingling of coins in a pocket gave Carter his cue. At the same instant the dime slipped into the slot and clattered through the door lock's mechanism. Carter jammed the ammo clip in the butt of the gun, using the sound of the coin to mask the metallic
clack
as he drove the clip home. The man entered the stall, and Carter levered a live round into the chamber and took off the safety.

The man in the sports coat faced the toilet, whistling faintly as the steady stream of his urine thudded into the water below, his ill-polished Florsheims sticking out beneath his pale trousers scant inches from where Carter watched under the lower edge of the partition.

Then the shoes left the floor. One was raised to the paper dispenser bolted to the partition wall. The bolts creaked slightly under the unusual weight. The other disappeared as it was placed on the toilet seat. Carter twisted around, watching the upper edge of the partition.

The half moon of the man s head appeared above the flat horizon of the partition, and Carter fired, the bullet making two virtually simultaneous sounds in the tiled bathroom: the
chunk
sound of the explosive gases being dissipated in the silencer, and the thud of the impact on the man's skull, like a strong finger thumping a melon.

The entire line of stalls shook violently as the man's body pitched backward. An interval of silence lasted only a split second, then there was another thud as the body slammed into the small space above the toilet, the gun clattering to the floor. It came to a spinning halt at Carter's feet, a huge Graz-Buyra, standard Komitet issue.

Carter quickly stood and dressed himself. He put the Luger in his jacket pocket and the Russian gun in his suitcase. Then he climbed the partition and peered down into the next stall.

The man was dead, had been since the Luger's bullet pierced the frontal lobe of his brain, passed through his skull, and blew out a large section of the back of his head. The partition wall behind him was splattered with blood, gray matter, and bits of bone. There was nothing to be done about that now.

Letting himself down into the stall. Carter hurriedly went through the man's pockets. A New York driver's license identified him as Josef Mandaladov, thirty-eight, and gave his address as the same building that housed the Soviet mission to the United Nations.

Carter had just stuffed the billfold into his own pocket when the lavatory door swung open again and two youngsters came in, talking loudly over a percussive disco beat that emanated from the "boom box" they were carrying. One of them went to the urinals while the other stayed by the sinks. Carter held his breath, not daring to move.

When the one had finished at the urinal, he joined his companion by the sink where the two of them talked for several minutes. Laughing heartily, they finally left, the sound of their laughter and the insistent beat of the music dying only gradually on the tiled walls.

Carter lost no more time. He continued searching the body until he found what he was looking for a Frontier Airlines ticket that showed Josef Mandaladov had boarded the same plane as Carter at National Airport in Washington. He had been booked through to L.A., but had deplaned here in Phoenix, no doubt when he saw Carter getting off. This meant he had no idea of Carter's ultimate destination, and that the existence and location of AXE's rest facility here were still secure.

Carter stuffed the plane ticket in his pocket. Then, after making sure from the angle of the body that the blood seepage on the floor would be minimal, he pulled himself up over the partition into his own stall, gathered up his suitcase, and walked out, leaving Mandaladov's stall closed, the word «occupied» showing in the tiny window on the lock.

It would be ten or twenty minutes before the body was found, and by that time he planned to be many miles away.

He crossed the terminal and went outside. As he'd expected, the bartered Chevy wagon was waiting curbside. Manuel Sanchez leaned against the door. His expression split into a smile when he saw Carter.

"Evening,
señor,"
he said, taking the suitcase and throwing it in the back seat. "Did you have a good flight?"

"Smooth as a baby's ass," Carter said, getting in and slamming the door. "Shall we go?"