The Sisters (29 page)

Hell, it would take them that long just to figure out where the shots had come from!

Sipping from his Coke, squinting this time because of the sunlight, Khanda surveyed the traffic passing the warehouse. A thin smirk stretched across his lips. In four days he would know if his calculations were correct.

The Director, tall, thin, Midwestern in origin but very nouveau Georgetown in the way he dressed and carried himself, came around the desk and held out the box of chocolates toward Carroll. "The ones with the gold wrappers are filled with brandy," he told him. He flashed what had passed for an encouraging smile in the days when he had been an investment banker. "Two of them will ruin you for an afternoon. Three and you can testify before a Senate oversight committee and feel no pain whatsoever."

The Deputy Director, sitting on a couch made of leather as soft as kid gloves, chuckled appreciatively. G. Sprowls, leaning casually against a bookcase, looked on with his usual half-smile etched on his face.

Carroll helped himself to a candy, undid the gold wrapper and popped it into his mouth.

"What did I tell you?" said the Director, settling back into his wicker swivel chair, a family heirloom that he had brought with him when he took the job.

Carroll swallowed. "Very good," he agreed. He arched his neck and wedged a finger under his starched collar. "You have done what you can to put me at ease. Now why don't we get on with it."

The Deputy Director leaned forward on the couch. "You are not going to he difficult, I hope."

Carroll concentrated on the wall above the Director's Toulouse-Lautrec, another family heirloom. "I'm not at all sure what I'm going to be," he admitted.

The Director tapped the eraser end of a pencil against his desk blotter.

"If I understand you correctly," he told Carroll, "you take the position that I personally authorized an operation."

A muscle in Carroll's cheek twitched once as he nodded in agreement.

"Good. Fine," said the Director. "You are one of the old hands around the shop. I don't for an instant doubt that you and your colleague-what is his name again?"

"Francis," Carroll offered.

"Francis, exactly I don't doubt that you and Francis are not motivated, like some people around here who shall remain nameless, by the current watchword, 'Don't do something, just stand there.' "

"We view the world situation as desperate," Carroll conceded. "We think it is-you yourself said it when you were pinning a medal on one of our neighbors recently-two minutes to midnight. If someone doesn't do something about it, and fairly quickly, time will run out on us."

"That is exactly how I see things," the Director, who had been well-briefed by G. Sprowls, insisted.

Carroll shrugged. "You spoke about the need for unleashing the Company.

"I have made no bones about where I stand," the Director readily agreed.

"It is a matter of life or death, in my view."

"When you spoke at that reception for one of our British colleagues,"

Carroll continued, "you made a point of recalling Winston Churchill's preference, during the Second World War, for invading the Dardanelles before France."

"It would have changed the map of Europe," the Director pointed out. "It would have been the allied armies, and not the Red Army, that liberated the captive countries of Eastern Europe. We would have installed friendly democratic governments before they could have installed their dictatorial Communist regimes." "Everyone understood what you were getting at between the lines," Carroll went on. "What we need in the Western world are leaders who are not soft on Communism."

"Leaders who are not afraid to bite the bullet," the Director offered.

"Who will stand up to the Communists," the Deputy Director added, "and not cut and run every time they confront them, whether at conference tables or invasion beaches."

"That's nicely put," the Director said approvingly. "I couldn't have phrased it better myself."

Everyone was staring at Carroll. Carroll was still focusing on a spot on the wall.

"So you see,' the Director went on, "we are all of us in the same boat.

If I authorized an operation, I won't back away from it now."

"Between us," the Deputy Director said, "what are you up to?"

"You can count on me to stand behind you," the Director vowed.

G. Sprowls straightened up at the bookcase. "You awakened the Soviet sleeper," he drawled, "and sent him off to kill someone whom you knew the Director wanted dead. That's it, isn't it?"

Again a muscle twitched in Carroll's cheek, only this time it wouldn't stop. He nodded imperceptibly. "Who?" G. Sprowls asked quietly. "Is it anyone we know?" the Deputy Director demanded. "The Russian ambassador, say, or that actor out in Hollywood who plays the Commie game by speaking out all the time against racism?"

"I have no doubt whatsoever that you have done the right thing," the Director observed. "But there may be loose ends to tie up. There may be ways we can enlarge the operation, or set in motion other auxiliary operations designed to take advantage of your"-he searched frantically for an appropriate word, and came up with-"initiative Carroll brought his fingertips up to his cheek to still the twitching.

Then he quietly pronounced the name of the target of the operation that he and Francis had launched.

The Director stiffened in his wicker swivel chair as if he had received a heavy jolt of electricity. The Deputy Director s mouth gaped open and he collapsed weakly into the relative safety of the couch. Only G.

Sprowls accepted the revelation with anything resembling equanimity. "Of course," he muttered to himself, 'how could I have missed it!"

"You what?" the Director cried when he discovered how his vocal cords operated. "You had the audacity, the temerity, the gall to order the assassination of-" He couldn't bring himself to say the name of the target.

"I must be dreaming," the Deputy Director moaned from the couch. "I must be imagining things." He looked at G. Sprowls. "Tell me I am imagining things," he pleaded. "Tell me I will wake up at any moment and laugh at this whole business."

Carroll shifted his gaze from the wall to the window. "You authorized the operation," he reminded the Director. "You admitted as much a few minutes ago. There are witnesses . . . the walls have ears."

"My walls,' the Director announced in an icy voice, "do not have ears. I authorized nothing of the kind. It never occurred to me that anyone would interpret my comments as an invitation to launch an operation. You and your friend are certifiably insane. Stark raving mad. My God, do you realize what has happened? If anybody in Congress or the press gets so much as a whirl of this, the Company will be ruined forever."

G. Sprowls came around behind the Director's desk and whispered for a moment in his ear. The Director appeared to calm down instantly. His eyes narrowed, and he began tapping the eraser end of his pencil thoughtfully against the blotter again. G. Sprowls looked at Carroll and asked in his slow drawl that suggested he knew the answer, "Who exactly knows about what you have done?"

"I know. Francis knows. Now you three know."

"If I can recapitulate," G. Sprowls said evenly. "You organized the detection from the Soviet Union of the Potter, who gave you the identity and awakening signal of a Soviet sleeper. You and Francis delivered the signal, activating the sleeper and dispatching him on a mission. Even as we speak, a Soviet agent-"

The Director saw what G. Sprowls was driving at. "Born and raised in Communist Russia, recruited and trained by the KGB and presumably-who could prove otherwise?-still under its operational control . . ."

The color had flooded back into the Deputy Director's face, and he leaned forward and finished G. Sprowls's line of reasoning. "A Soviet agent is travelling across the country to commit a crime."

Carroll leapt out of his chair. "Don't you see the infinite possibilities, the absolute beauty of the operation? If our sleeper succeeds, we eliminate someone who has hurt the United States more than any single person in recent history; someone who has sucked up to the Communists and tied the hands of those of us who are willing and able to fight them. If the sleeper is caught in the act, his identity will eventually come out, and the whole Soviet intelligence apparatus-"

"The whole idea that you can conduct business as usual with the Russians!" the Director interjected.

"-will be discredited," Carroll plunged on. "If, by any chance, the sleeper is not caught, we will identify him and place the onus for the assassination on his masters in Moscow." Carroll sank back into his chair, drained. "It is like a diamond with many facets-it is the most perfect, the most beautiful operation that has ever existed in the annals of intelligence work," he continued in an undertone. "The worst that can happen is that the sleeper will fail and the Russians will be blamed for the assassination attempt. The best that can happen is that he will succeed-and the Russians will be blamed for the death."

The Director regarded Carroll, then lowered his eyes to his blotter, then abruptly swivelled his chair around so that he could stare out the window. "I have to admit," he said after a moment, "it does have a certain-" He didn't finish the phrase.

G. Sprowls and the Deputy Director exchanged knowing looks. "If the Soviets are blamed," the Deputy Director offered from the couch,

"Congress and the public will begin to see the world as we see it; as it really is! The Company will be unleashed to take its place in the front line of battle. We won't have to go begging hat in hand up on the Hill every time we need a few hundred million dollars."

The Director slowly swivelled back toward the room. It was apparent that he had come to a decision. "As far as I am concerned, gentlemen," he announced in a businesslike tone, "this meeting never took place."

The Deputy Director's eyes widened in complicity. "What meeting," he asked innocently, "are you talking about?"

There were loose ends, (There were always loose ends, the Potter would tell his students at the sleeper school, it was one of the few things people in their line of work could count on.) G. Sprowls was authorized to tie them up, a matter, he confided to the Director, of erasing footprints so that nobody could see who had passed this way.

Oskar, who happened to be recruiting for his network in East Berlin at the time, received a coded message summoning him West for an urgent meeting. Using one of his many aliases, he crossed through Checkpoint Charlie, took a taxi to a business district, and continued on foot to his safe house in West Berlin. He buzzed twice, sensed someone looking at him through the peephole, then heard the locks on the door being opened. He wasn't so much alarmed as annoyed when he didn't recognize the man who held the door for him; the fewer people he was exposed to, the safer he felt. But he became upset when the second man, waiting for him in the living room, turned out to be a stranger also. "So," Oskar said in German, sensing that something out of the ordinary was happening. "You must have a very important message for me, yes?"

The man Oskar spoke to was leaning against the wall next to a phony fireplace. He was wearing an overcoat and carrying a bouquet of plastic roses. The other man, the one who had let him into the apartment, came into the living room behind him and closed the door. "We are delivery men," the man next to the phoney fireplace told Oskar. He spoke German with a distinct Bavarian accent.

Oskar didn't like the look of him. "So what is it you are delivering?"

he asked.

"Your body," the Bavarian replied just as the other man stepped forward and plunged a long, thin kitchen knife up to its hilt into Oskar's back.

"Why?" Oskar managed to gasp, as if it would be easier to deal with death if he understood the motives of his killers; as if his own fate, as long as it was logical, would be acceptable.

The Bavarian only shrugged. "They only told us who, not why," he informed Oskar.

The man behind Oskar caught him under the armpits and lowered him gently, solicitously even, to the floor. Oskar attempted to turn his face and get his mouth off the dirty carpet. But he couldn't move. He could feel the strength ebbing from his body. Someone was feeling for his pulse. He tried to open his eyes, to work his lips, to tell them to be sure not to bury him until they were positive he was dead, yes?

Because he had a lifelong horror of waking up in a sealed coffin. But he was too dizzy to function. The carpet under his face was suddenly spinning; a whirlpool was sucking him into its center. Why? he thought to himself as he plunged head first toward it. At the last instant of consciousness, an acceptable answer occurred to him: Why not!

Within an hour of Oskar's rendezvous in the safe house, two middle-level West German intelligence operatives-the senior of the two habitually pinned a black homburg to his head with the curved handle of an umbrella, the junior trudged around in galoshes at the slightest hint of rain-were driving along an autobahn toward Berlin in response to a verbal summons from an American contact. They chatted about pay scales, and the political situation in West Germany, and whether they would live to witness the reunification of the two halves of their country.

Galoshes told Homburg he was curious to know what had become of the dwarflike Russian defector and his floozy of a wife whom they had been assigned to welcome to Vienna several months before. Homburg shook his head. Curiosity, he informed his younger colleague, was what killed the cat. Galoshes took the hint and didn't pursue the subject.

Hounding a curve thirty miles from their destination, the Mercedes veered out of control. The steering pinion had snapped-at least that was what an in-house postmortem attributed the accident to. The car skidded off the highway, down an embankment into a ravine, where it burst into flame and exploded, killing the two men instantly.

The afternoon of Oskar's disappearance, Svetochka's body was discovered at the bottom of an elevator shaft in a downtown Vienna office building.

There was a suicide note, written in her own hand, in the pocket of the used fur coat she had bought the previous week with the money she had wormed out of one of the Austrians in return for services rendered.