The Istanbul Decision (3 page)

The next day a short article appeared in the
Sun
saying an unidentified body had been found in an air terminal lavatory. That was all. Carter watched the papers for the next few days, but there was no follow-up. He assumed the man's Russian origin had been discovered, and the FBI had taken over the case, blacking out the news media. He also assumed the FBI would be more interested in finding out what someone from that particular New York address was doing in Phoenix than they were in who killed him. Therefore, the security net around AXE and its rest facility in Phoenix would remain intact, a secret even from America's own internal investigating agency.

And although the FBI might never unravel how a KGB agent managed to wander into a bathroom at the Phoenix airport to die, his presence there was no mystery to Nick Carter. It was Kobelev, who had the whole of the Executive Action branch of the KGB at his beck and call, making good or: his threat to kill him.

And yet, to Carter's thinking, it was a stupid ploy, an angry slab in the dark motivated by pure vengeance with very little planning, hardly worthy of a man of Kobelev's ingenuity and resources. It indicated the man was desperate now that his daughter was being held in this country and knowing he couldn't get at her. And desperate was just the mood in which Carter wanted him. Desperate suited Carter just fine.

Thus began Nick Carter's stint of intensive training at the Phoenix rest facility. It ended almost a month later to the day when he received a phone call from David Hawk, the acerbic founder of the AXE organization and the only man Nick Carter ever called sir. True to Hawk's well-known dislike for long telephone conversations, the message was terse: "She's ready."

Within twenty-four hours of receiving Hawk's summons, Carter arrived at the base hospital at Camp Peary. He passed through two of the security checkpoints unaided, one at the gate in front of the hospital and another just outside the elevator on the fourth floor. At the door to ward «C» he was detained while a gruff Marine sergeant made a phone call. In a few minutes a slender, distinguished-looking man in a business suit came out and introduced himself as Dr. Rutherford. He signed the sergeant's book, then led Carter down a long corridor.

Rutherford explained that Camp Peary was where the Company brought its military trainees from foreign governments, also its political defectors and persons in need of stringent protection. It was designed so that persons inside would have no clue as to where they were being kept, neither which country nor even which continent. Security here, the doctor told him, was airtight.

Carter listened patiently although he'd heard it all before. He knew, for example, that Tatiana Kobelev was being held in this very building only two floors above them.

Halfway down the hall the doctor stopped in front of a blank white door. "You'll have to continue from here by yourself, Mr. Carter," he said dryly. "I'm not allowed inside."

"Very well, Doctor. It was nice to have met you," said Carter, putting his hand on the knob and waiting for the doctor to leave.

But he didn't.

"I've told your superior, Mr. Hawk, that I deeply resent not being allowed to participle in the final stages of our little project," he said, an edge of anger in his voice. "These things need a delicate hand or weeks of work may be sacrificed. I told him my security clearance is the highest of anyone in the hospital. And the unusualness of this experiment and the way it was run…"

"If David Hawk said you weren't allowed inside, I'm sure he had his reasons," Carter said, cutting him off. "I've never known him to do anything without good reason. Now if you don't mind. Doctor, I'm expected."

Rutherford scrutinized Carter's rugged features for a second, then realizing his complaints were falling on deaf ears, he abruptly said, "I see," turned on his heel, and left.

Carter waited a few seconds and opened the door. Hawk was sitting in a small swivel chair in the middle of the doctor's examining room, smoking a cigar. Across from him on the examining table sat a young woman in a hospital gown, her entire head wrapped in gauze bandage except for two small slits for her eyes.

"Come in, Carter," Hawk said gruffly.

"Morning, sir," said Carter.

"Good morning, Nick," said the young woman.

"Good morning, Cynthia," said Carter, recognizing her voice.

"Rutherford give you a hard time?" Hawk asked, getting up to make sure Carter had locked the door. "That's the trouble with the whole CIA — too many people think they have the need to know. I wish we could have used our own facilities."

"If you don't mind my asking, sir, why aren't we? This organization leaks like a sieve."

"Exactly what I'm counting on, Carter. When the time is right, we want to make sure the right information is being passed on to the target. But this part of it," he said, turning to Cynthia, "must be absolutely secret. We split the face into three different sections and had a different doctor working on each. No one of them knew what the finished product would look like. Here," he said, handing Carter a pair of blunt-nosed nurse's scissors. "Why don't you do the honors?"

"Me, sir?"

"Just be gentle with her."

Carter began cutting the swath of bandage that ran along her neck, then worked his way up the jawline to the temple and across her forehead. The bandage fell away easily, revealing reddened, taut skin that was remarkably scar-free. When the bandage had been completely removed, he stepped back to get a good look at her. "Amazing," he said.

"Uncanny, isn't it?" remarked Hawk, producing a life-size photo of Tatiana Kobelev and holding it up next to Cynthia's face.

"I couldn't tell them apart," marveled Carter.

"Let's hope her father can't either. At least not at first."

"May I see a mirror?" asked Cynthia.

Carter retrieved a small standing mirror from the supply cabinet and handed it to her. She turned her head slowly from side to side, studying it from different angles.

"It's a nice face," Carter offered.

"It's not my face."

"You're still very beautiful."

"You can have your old face back when this business is over," Hawk said. "Meanwhile, you two've got work to do. I want you to start training together, get to know one another again, think like a team. In the meantime, word will be dropped here that we intend to move Tatiana to the St. Denis Clinic outside Dijon. Supposedly, a French surgeon will be there to do one last operation on her back. It'll be perfect, isolated, quiet. Kobelev won't be able to resist. He'll have to figure that even if it is a trap, it'll be the only time Tatiana will be close enough to the Soviet Union to make a grab for her. What he won't know is that it won't be Tatiana he'll be grabbing."

"You mean…?"

"That's right, toots," interjected Carter. "You're the bait."

Carter didn't see Cynthia again until the following afternoon when they started their training together in a little-used loft in the hospital complex. By this time most of the redness was gone, and her face had returned to its natural color. The resemblance mat had been striking before was now even more remarkable.

"You look just like her," he said when she entered the room. "I had hoped for a reasonable physical similarity, but this is really something. The only way I could tell you apart is your voice."

"I've been working on that," she said, pulling off her robe, revealing her beautifully proportioned body clad in a black leotard. "These Americans might not look like ogres," she said, lowering her voice half an octave and stretching her vowels, British style, "but they have the most bourgeois tastes."

Carter laughed. "That's her to a T!"

"Hawk gave me some tapes to study. I think I've just about got her down pat."

"You could certainly fool me."

"Could I, Nick?" she asked, her expression suddenly serious. "What about her father? Can I fool him as well?"

"You don't have to fool him for long, just long enough for us to take care of him." He smiled. She forced a smile, but the troubled look never completely left her face.

A brief silence descended, but Carter picked up the thread again quickly. "Hawk wanted me to take you through some drills to get you out of harm's way when the bullets start to fly. He says you're a bit rusty."

"Okay," she said with a shrug. She was standing very close to him, and her fragrance filled his nostrils. For a moment he was reminded of the night they had spent together on the desert outside of Teheran. It was a pleasant memory. They had been camped at an oasis. The Ayatollah's troops had lost track of them temporarily, and they had taken the opportunity to make love on a blanket under the stars. When they'd finished, they lay back in one another's arms, and listened to the grunts of the camels and the gentle wind bending the palms. Pleasant. But something else was tangled up with it, another unconscious association not at all pleasant, and it left him with a confused feeling.

"How shall we begin?" she asked. "Do you want to attack me and see how my defenses are? Nick? You with me?"

"I'm here. Just lost in thought for a moment."

"Attack me and I'll see if I can fend you off."

He reached out as if to grab her by the shoulder, but she caught his arm, twisted it, stepped through, and in an instant he was sprawled flat on his back ten feet down the mat.

"Not bad," he said, jumping to his feet. "Now finish me off."

She came toward him, a bullish determination in her eyes, and suddenly he knew what it was that had confused him earlier. The look in her eye, her hair, her face, were exactly the same as Tatiana's the night she had supposedly killed her father in their
dacha
outside Moscow. The menace and loathing that had seemed to fill her entire being as she came running from the study, knife in hand, and plunged it into her father's chest came back to him in a flash, along with all the hatred and dread he'd felt for her at that moment. Without realizing what he was doing, he lowered his shoulder, grabbed Cynthia by the forearm, and catapulted her into the air. She spun once, awkwardly, like a stuffed doll, and landed on the edge of the mat with a sickening thud.

As soon as he realized what he had done, he ran to her. "You all right?" he asked.

She groaned and rolled on her side, gasping for air.

"Lie back," he told her. "You've had the wind knocked out of you."

For several minutes she lay with her eyes closed, trying to breathe. Then she looked up. "You take… all this… pretty seriously… don't you?"

"It's the way you look," he said, helping her to sit up. "You reminded me of Tatiana and all I went through in Russia."

"That must have been rough." Cynthia said, finally getting a deep breath and feeling her ribs to make sure nothing was broken. "Hawk told me about it in a general way, but I never did get the particulars."

He sat down beside her. "Your friend Kobelev has come a long way since the days he was a cipher clerk. He's still ruthless as ever, but his plots have taken on a new ingenuity — an ingenuity bordering on sheer genius for death and destruction. We'd been watching his progress as a case officer, then administrator in Department S for some time. Then when they transferred him to Executive Action, we got worried, but he was still something of an unknown quantity. All that changed with the
Akai Maru
incident. By that time we'd realized things had gotten out of hand."

"A Japanese oil tanker. We found oil drums aboard that Kobelev had irradiated with strontium 90, one of the most toxic substances in the world. Our estimates said that if that shipment of oil had ever been delivered, the incidents of cancer in California would have increased fifty percent."

"That's insanity! It goes beyond espionage. It's an act of war."

"That's why he has to be stopped. Shortly after that we learned Kobelev, or the Puppet Master as they call him, was in line to become chief administrator of the entire KGB. If that had happened, his power would have been limitless. He's already professed a desire to see our two countries at war. He has some half-baked idea of seizing power in the aftermath of a nuclear confrontation."

"Is he crazy?"

"He may very well be. You wouldn't know it to talk to him, but he must be. Crazy the way Hitler was crazy."

"You talked to him?"

"I did more than that. I 'defected. Tried to become his chief lieutenant. Hawk developed a plan for assassinating the son of a bitch by convincing the Russian intelligence I was a disgruntled CIA caseworker who wanted to work for the KGB. The idea was to get me close enough to put a bullet in him, then get out of the country somehow. We figured Kobelev knew me from the
Akai Maru
and that he might be interested in having me on his side if he thought I was sincere."

"How'd you manage to convince him?"

"By giving them files of sensitive material we knew they wanted. Real files. We turned over some valuable information, put some agents' lives on the line, but we felt it was necessary to get me close enough to kill him. You see, we had a time factor. Another few days and the Presidium was going to make his appointment official. After that, as chief administrator, he'd have been under such heavy security we never could have gotten to him."

"Then I take it the mission failed."

"You might say that." Carter's face darkened. It was clear he took it as a personal defeat. "I was about to pull the trigger when Tatiana, his daughter, suddenly rushed in and stabbed him. I found out later it was all an act. She only pretended to stab him. It looked real and it sure convinced me — so much so I even helped her get out of the country to avoid prosecution for patricide, which turned out to be exactly what they wanted."

"It was all an act," Cynthia said, marveling at the scam.