Whirlwind (4 page)

Sam, upon hearing his minions give Charlie’s premises a clean bill of health no covert recording devices, sir; no transmitters, sir; no surreptitious electronic equipment at all, sir at last entered Charlie’s den, a high-ceilinged room whose floor was scattered with tribal carpets from a dozen countries, and whose walls were lined with old oak bookshelves. Those shelves overflowed, jumbled proof of Charlie’s omnivorous reading habits, books and magazines alike. And displayed among well-thumbed volumes of history, philosophy, and science were innumerable souvenirs of a former spy’s career.

Near the bottom on the left: a jewel-studded fan of hammered gold, a gift from a doe-eyed Persian lass who spent ten years in Charlie’s employ, and who, not so coincidentally, had been the Ayatollah Khomeini’s favorite mistress.

Top shelf, left bookcase: a Soviet tank commandant’s dress uniform dagger. The colonel had been out of uniform when Charlie took it, and out of uniform he stayed until someone untied him the next morning. By then he was fearsomely frostbitten.

Right bookcase, third shelf: a Cohiba cigar box bearing a scribbled message, Hope to catch you on your next visit a double entendre to which Fidel Castro had appended his spiky signature.

Here and there among the books, visitors could find signed photos of Charlie with every president since Richard Nixon, some few of whom were smiling sincerely.

Pride of place went to a treasured Exacta lib camera Charlie had used his entire career; technologically obsolete by the 1970s, it nonetheless produced the best close-up photographs of Iraq’s antiaircraft targeting systems, circa 1990, that anyone had ever seen. Right next to the antique single lens reflex sat another outdated camera a vintage 1994 analog Sony camcorder that Charlie had used to obtain footage that made even so worldly a man as the director of Central Intelligence blush.

Sam barely gave Charlie’s bric-a-brac a glance as he lowered himself into the shabby horsehair armchair to which his host pointed him.

Charlie sat facing him. “Can I ask a favor, Sam?”

“Certainly.” Sam was covertly trying to kick Esmeralda, one of Charlie’s countless cats, away from his leg.

“Let me click on the TV. Now that I have some investments, for which I thankee kindly, I want to keep my eye on the stock ticker.”

Sam’s eyes narrowed with suspicion; Charlie could almost hear him think: What’s he up to now? “Go ahead, needle me all you want. Whatever makes you happy.”

“You know,” Charlie smiled, “those eighteen months I spent in the pen weren’t a total waste of time.” He picked up a remote control and twiddled with its buttons. Sam glanced over his shoulder at the television: CNBC, with stock prices crawling across the bottom of the screen. “I met lots of CEOs, learned how to play the market like a pro. I suppose I should thank you for that. But then again, probably not.”

Sam pulled out a handkerchief and blew his nose. Charlie smirked. Sam was hellishly allergic to the feline kind.

Shooting a healthy dose of decongestant into both nostrils, Sam began to tell his story. At no time did he observe that Charlie’s remote control was one of those ever-so-handy “universal remotes,” a clever and useful device that could activate not only a television set but also a VCR, an audio system, a DVD player, and, if you happened to have one, an outdated low-tech Sony camcorder conveniently pointed at the chair in which you’d just seated your guest.

Charlie was still feeling smug when Carly came into the room and ruined his good spirits. After offering Sam a cup of coffee, she shooed Esmeralda from the room. The poor cat hadn’t managed to reach a single one of the tuna-flavored treats Charlie had sprinkled beneath Sam’s seat.

Three cups later, Sam had finished telling an embarrassing tale. Charlie, however, was not satisfied with mere embarrassment.

A videotape of the watery-eyed national security advisor confessing to a series of security blunders was fine as far as it went. However, it did not go far enough. Charlie would need juicier material when as was inevitable Sam tried to double-cross him.

An admission that the chairman of the Armed Services Committee muscled the military into buying shoddy goods from his political bank rollers was more along the lines of what Charlie was looking for. However, in Washington such kickbacks were barely considered criminal; most politicians thought of them as a patriotic tradition, rather like Columbus Day and the Fourth of July, really.

Charlie eyed Sam; Sam studied his manicure. What the hell, Charlie thought, I’ve still got an hour and thirteen minutes of videotape left. The little worm is bound to make another mistake.

Bait on the hook, Charlie cast his line. “So you call this thing Whirlwind, eh?”

“That’s the project designation. But don’t ask what it is, or who’s sponsoring it, or “

“Air Force code name.”

Sam’s jaw tightened.

“Sam, Sam, don’t look at me like that. The flyboys have been using Whirlwind as a code name off and on for fifty years. First time around it was for their original realtime computer. It’s been back three or four times since. Don’t deny it, this is Air Force stuff, and we both know it.”

“You’re only guessing.”

“Sure,” Charlie answered with a predator’s grin. “But how many times have you known me to guess wrong?”

Sam started to reply, then stopped himself.

“Okay,” Charlie continued, “tell me again about how this Kolodenkova girl managed to get away.”

“You should call her a woman, not a girl.”

“I don’t work for the government anymore. I can be as politically incorrect as I damn well please. Now let’s have the story.”

“I told you once. Why should I tell you twice?”

“Because I need a laugh.”

Charlie’s cat strolled back in. Looking daggers at it, Sam sneezed. “Okay, okay. You’re wearing out my patience, but I suppose that’s what you want.”

Got it in one, Sambo, Charlie thought.

“When the second generator went out, things became confused. There were two foot patrols and a crew in a Hummer near the fence. Somebody tripped and discharged his weapon. The GIs in the other patrol thought they were being shot at. They returned fire. Damnit, Charlie, quit laughing. I know it sounds like the Keystone Kops, but it was it is serious business. Anyway, by the time everyone worked out who was shooting at whom, the

Kolodenkova woman had reached her car. Our boys managed to put a few rounds into it, but not enough. She hightailed it out of there. So…” Sam sighed. “.. . You see, it’s a small base, Charlie, sixty enlisted men, five noncoms two officers, and a few dozen civilian scientists. The only transportation they have are deuce-and-a-half trucks and Humvees no good for highspeed pursuit. The base commander had to radio for help. Problem is the second explosion damaged the radio shack. It took a while to get communications back online.”

Had to radio for help? Hmm … that should tell me something. “How long were they offline?” he asked.

Closing his eyes, pressing the balls of his fingers against his sinuses, Sam whispered, “Four fucking hours.”

“Even if Kolodenkova kept under the speed limit, she’d have been at least two hundred miles away before “

“You think I don’t know that? You think that little fact has escaped my attention?”

Charlie always trusted his intuition. At the moment it was telling him he was pushing too hard. “Just thinking out loud, Sam. No criticism implied. Now I think you’d better let me see the dossiers on these two the late Dominik whatever-his-name-was, and the Kolodenkova girl.”

Sam snapped open his briefcase. “They’re right here,” he said, passing Charlie two manila folders.

“How did you ID them so fast?”

Sam sniffed. “Give us some credit, Charlie, we do know who plays for the other team.”

Nodding, Charlie opened the first folder. Dominik Grisin. Age twenty-nine. His photos portrayed a handsome lad with a high forehead, thick black hair, and a strong jaw. Born in Belgorod. That explained his good looks Ukrainian blood.

Master’s degree in electrical engineering at the University of Kiev, a fine school; its mascot, Charlie remembered, was a wise-cracking duckling. After college Grisin pulled six years of duty with the Russian embassy in Washington one of the Siglnt specialists who baby sat the radio interception gear in the embassy’s basement. Charlie wondered how many indiscreet cell phone calls the late Dominik had tapped. And what prices the power brokers who made them later paid.

Two months on turtle duty. Hmm… why was that? Was Grisin being punished? Not likely. If his dossier could be believed, Dominik had been a rising star. So then … he probably had been assigned short-term, a job to give him a little applied field craft before he moved up the ladder.

Charlie raced through the file. No use studying the record of a player whose piece was no longer on the board. The real issue was the other player, the one who was still in the game, although where in the game was the question, wasn’t it?

He flipped the folder open. His first thought: pretty girl. No, make that a gorgeous girl. And add an exclamation point! Quite obviously, the Agency’s photographers agreed. They’d taken countless pictures of her. Here she was in a slightly dowdy gown at an embassy function, there she was in flattering light but unflattering dress leaning against a bar talking to someone with his back to the camera …. Close-ups that were nearly portraits. Medium shots. Full-length photos. Yup, boys will be boys, and boys do love taking pictures of pretty… hmpf!.. . women.

Blonde hair over her shoulders most of the time, but occasionally up in a tight French twist. Big blue eyes, and you know the kind I mean. Wide forehead, elegant eyebrows arched like a seagull’s wings. A lower lip so full and ripe that even a man of my advanced and decrepit years wonders how it would taste. Perfect cheekbones, not the switchblade Slavic sharpness of your typical Russian lass, but high and smooth and wholly bewitching. Yeah, I could look at Irina Kolodenkova for a real long time, and not think I’d looked long enough.

“A major babe,” Sam opined.

“Understatement. Beauties like this… and more credit to her for turning down the job… are the kind of gals they try to pressure into becoming swallows.”

“Becoming what?”

Charlie glowered. A careerist and nothing but, Sam cared so little about the art of intelligence that he didn’t even bother to learn the lingo. “Swallows. Agents who use sex to gather intelligence.”

Sam laughed coarsely. “She could swallow me any time.”

Charlie frowned him into silence. Shuffling the photographs to the side, he turned his attention to the dossier’s paperwork.

Okay, what do we have here? Third child of a naval officer, a light cruiser commander, and at his age that’s as far as his career will go. Two older brothers, and both of them commissioned in the Russian navy, just like dad. A military family, through and through. But Irina doesn’t join the regular forces, instead she signs up for intelligence work. Makes sense. The Russian navy is not an equal opportunity employer. Women run desks, not ships, and their career progression correlates directly with the number of senior officers they sleep with. Which this girl who most definitely did not become a swallow was bound to know.

Sam, although he did not know it, was in an empty room. Charlie wasn’t there anymore. He’d floated off to a space outside of space. Alone and un-reachable, his mind roamed free, toying with scanty, scattered puzzle pieces. Extrapolate, extrapolate. Pieces of a puzzle their shape and texture and color have a message and a meaning. I can’t see the entire picture, because there aren’t enough pieces. But I can imagine. I can hypothesize. I can infer.

And nine times out often he’d be right because he was one smart cookie, although when he was wrong good men died, and he wished he’d never been born.

He almost stopped. Stopped right there. Was ready to quit on the spot. Give Sam back his files, and to hell with it, because as good as he was, he made mistakes, and he wasn’t sure he could live with himself if he made another.

Instead he thoughtlessly flipped a page in Irina Kolodenkova’s dossier. And his eyes lit up.

Oh, lookee, lookee. She made the Russian Olympic fencing team. She even brought home the gold! We’ve got a talented girl here. But more than that, a smart one. Fencing is the most intellectual of sports, three-dimensional chess and you play it in real time. In any other game, a great athlete beats a good one every time. Not in fencing. Physical fitness is only half the fight The rest is brainpower. And young Irina appears to have a surfeit of that.

She’d be a challenge. He couldn’t resist a challenge.

He closed his eyes. The puzzle is truth. Each piece is a fragment of truth. But truth is irreducible. It cannot be broken into parts. And therefore, if you have even the smallest scrap of truth, you have the entire thing. The trick is being able to examine those few shards that come your way, and see in them what they always were and always will be. The puzzle is not the pieces; the real and genuine puzzle is the one and only way in which they can be assembled.

Smiling, he looked again at the dossier. Ha! Just like every new agent, they gave her a month in D.C. and a month at the UN before her first real assignment the San Francisco legation, nice duty for any spy. Of course, same as with every virgin that comes to town, the Agency dispatched various boyos to feel her up. They’re supposed to accidentally bump into her at a bar or a restaurant or a bookstore or wherever, and open a dialog. Worst case, they find out what kind of a critter they’re dealing with; best case they lay the groundwork for a little counterespionage. But not this time. Oh, God, no! She made utter jackasses out of everyone they put next to her. Hellfire and damnation, reading these poor guys’ reports makes even me cringe!

There’s an art. Students of the craft call it cold reading. Every self-styled psychic in the world uses it. Cheapjack gypsy fortune-tellers at the county fair and high-priced flimflams who charge movie stars and presidents’ wives two thousand dollars an hour for horoscopes they’re all cold readers, each and every one. Cold reading came easily to Charlie. He didn’t even think about it. It was just something he did, a talent, a gift, a knack for seeing the obvious.