Cold War Trilogy - A Three Book Boxed Set: of Historical Spy Versus Spy Action Adventure Thrillers

by William Brown

  Manny saw it, too. “You said if you had five minutes alone with him, you’d make him talk? Looks like he had the same idea, Mike. He wasn’t trying to kill you or grab you. He wanted to make you talk.”

  Michael guessed the same thing, but why? What did they think he knew?

  “There’s no ID on the body. I didn’t think there would be, clean as that guy works," Manny mumbled. “But we’ll dust the van for prints and run the two stiffs through our files anyway. Who knows? Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

  “Is that blood?” he heard Leslie ask. She was standing in the doorway, pointing to a dark spot on the carpet near the rear door. “Just like in the alley.”

  Michael leaned over and saw the small, dark spots plus a reddish-brown streak on the door handle. He touched the biggest one with his finger. It was still wet. There were only a few drops, but this far back in the van they could only be from the painter. “I got off a couple of shots at him in the alley. Must have clipped him — nothing very serious, or there’d be a lot more; but it’s a start.”

  Michael had seen enough. He turned and jumped down onto the pavement, feeling a desperate need for sunshine and a big gulp of fresh air. It was like that bitterly cold February morning in Königsberg. An ancient evil had crept out of its dark lair and was on the prowl again. Michael knew it would keep coming out and keep killing and maiming until someone took a bright light, crawled in after it, and made certain it never came out again. Hodge understood that, so did Eric Bruckner, the real one, and so did Mike Randall. They had all seen it first hand, and that was the thin golden thread that stretched out across the years to bind the three men together.

  “We’ll get him,” Manny boasted confidently. “He couldn’t have gotten far, not on foot. We got the freakin’ city buttoned up tight now and we’ll get him.”

  Michael looked at Manny and shook his head. “You’re wasting your time. He had the angles figured long before you got out of bed this morning, and he’s long gone.” Michael paused, sniffing the air. “Can’t you smell it?” he asked. "That’s the stink of raw arrogance and that guy’s got a terminal case of it.”

  A half-mile south, at the end of a small backwater pier, the Captain of an old Greek freighter paced back and forth across the bridge, listening to the wail of police sirens to the north and east. He had been around, and he was not stupid. He looked down at the pier, then at his wristwatch and began to pace even faster. The tide was running, and he should have cast off fifteen minutes ago. He was sorely tempted to do precisely that and leave that insufferable German and the two Spaniards behind, but the Captain did not have quite enough nerve to do that, not yet. The ship’s owners in Berne had paid him to drop the three men off in New York and to wait to bring them back out again — paid him handsomely, he had to admit — and they expected him to follow orders and keep his mouth shut. The telegram was specific on that point. So he swallowed his pride and continued pacing, listening to the police sirens as they circled the area. But there was no question in the Captain’s mind. That damned German had done something bad. He knew what the Germans were like. He had seen them during the war, and this arrogant blond pig stunk of the SS.

  Two more minutes. The telegram be damned; by God, that was all the time he would give him. Finally, just as the Captain had screwed up enough courage to tell his deck hands to cast off, a taxi bounced down the pier and rolled to a stop at the foot of the gangplank. The rear door opened and that damned German stepped out. The man stood there on the pier slowly stretching, as if he were waking from a nap. He tossed some folding money into the driver’s lap and looked up at the ship’s railing where his eyes met the Captain’s angry glare head on. That cheeky bastard, the Greek thought. If the man had the slightest remorse or trepidation, he didn’t show it. He threw a leather satchel across his shoulder and sauntered up the gangway as if he owned it.

  “You are late!” the Captain seethed, his hands gripping the rail. The German stopped at the top of the ramp and cocked his head, looking at the Captain with an expression of mild amusement; but he offered no excuse.

  “You are late, I said!” the captain repeated, desperate to reassert his authority.

  The German smiled innocently. “Then I suppose we should leave, shouldn’t we,” he answered, as if he had solved the Captain’s grand dilemma for him with a single stroke.

  The Captain turned scarlet, but he held his tongue. If any of his regular crew dared talk to him like that, he’d toss the fellow overboard. Unfortunately, the German was different. It was not merely the cable from Berne or the man’s twisted smile or even those chilling blue eyes. It was the streak of crazy-mean the Captain saw lurking behind them. There was no sense in tempting fate. He valued this comfortable billet, with all its bribes and side payments, far too much to do something that stupid; so he turned away, avoiding both the humiliation and the danger that this evil-eyed German represented.

  Glancing down at the empty pier the Captain asked, “Where are the others? Those two grease-balls who came aboard with you? Aren’t they coming?”

  The German stopped and looked back down the gangplank to the pier, seemingly surprised by the question. “You mean they aren’t here already?” he asked, feigning innocence.

  “No, they aren’t here!” the Captain exploded. “They went ashore with you, man! Don’t you know if they’re coming back or not?”

  “Me? No, I can’t say as I do,” the German shrugged nonchalantly. Then he turned and walked past the Captain, leaving the Greek to figure it out himself.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Moscow

  Sergei Varentsov was not a happy man.

  He spent his entire career working hard, kissing more asses than he could count, and carefully choosing the right coattails to hang onto. It had taken him years, but he had climbed the Ministry of State Security’s tall ladder, one slippery rung at a time. Finally, good things were coming his way. He had become one of the party’s “nachalstvo,” or “fat cats,” a minor one perhaps; but he now had his own shiny Volga sedan, a large apartment on one of Moscow’s nicer boulevards, and a cozy dacha on a lake in a birch forest in the country, where he spent quiet afternoons giving very personal dictation to his young, buxom secretary. The exclusive foreign currency shops were open to him and he had his pick of the finest imported clothes and whiskey. Best of all, he could be as rude as he wished to old friends.

  Tough, confident, and supremely arrogant, Varentsov had risen to be the Head of Section S of the MVD’s ultra-secret First Directorate. True, it was one of the smaller of the MVD’s sections and it was equally true that he was only the temporary head; but Sergei Varentsov wasn’t some damned file clerk. He had arrived, and he was finally ready to get his due. He could feel it in his bones, until this business in New York blew up in his face. Why? Why now, just as he was finally getting ahead? It was not fair!

  Bad luck or not, Varentsov was no fool. He knew he was in serious trouble the instant he read the cable ordering him to report immediately to Yuri Serov in Moscow. Serov was the Chief of the First Directorate, by far the most powerful of Lavrenti Beria’s immediate subordinates, and the vultures would be circling high above Dzerzhinsky Square screeching for all to hear, “Failure! Failure!” They would be swooping in at this very moment, waiting for their opening. Their sharp claws would be out and their beaks open, ready to rip a bloody hunk of meat from his dead ass.

  Ever since Varentsov left New York, he had been trying to figure out who had brought this catastrophe crashing down on his head. His brain raced. It must be that fool Neptune. Obviously, that stupid German botched his meeting with the Nazis when he returned to Bonn. He must have said something or done something to tip off the Americans or the German police. Where was the mistake? What could it possibly have been? A slip of the tongue? A glance? A wrong look? Despite the years of training, he was an incompetent amateur. Or, could there be more to it? Varentsov’s thoughts turned dark and sinister. Could Neptune be a double agent? Is he working for the
Americans? Or for Varentsov’s own enemies inside the MVD? Could he be a mole, planted in Leipzig by the Nazis decades ago? But how should he play it with Serov? The more he looked at the problem, the more Varentsov knew his best chance was to convince Serov that Neptune had been a clever double agent all along. His best chance? It was probably his only chance. While he was away, his own ambitious assistants would have drawn their long knives and sliced and diced him into little pieces every chance they got. Whispers, insinuations, accusations.

  Inevitably, the whispers would have risen up the back stairwells of the Kremlin, all the way to the fifth floor where they would have found a warm welcome in Serov’s ear. "Yuri Vladimirovich," they would start. “This business in New York is most embarrassing. It was unfortunate we did not have a more experienced hand at the tiller, eh; someone in charge, with the experience to supervise such a critical operation. The time and money he squandered? Some are calling it criminal.” Then they would drive the knives in deep, up to the hilt. “What has Comrade Beria said of this fiasco, eh?”

  Unfortunately, every word of it was true, Varentsov sighed. He made the worst mistake of his career — not the one back in New York when he relied on that incompetent fool, Neptune. No, he had botched things far worse than that a dozen times before, and gotten away with every one of them. This time, his mistake was the one he made right here in Moscow before he left for New York. This was his plan, his operation, and he kept it entirely to himself. He was the one who fired Radetsky, and then flew off to New York to supervise Neptune’s visit, personally. In fact, he insisted on it. He went for all the credit, all the glory, and refused to let anyone else near it. So when it blew up, Varentsov had no one else to blame. What a fool he’d been, and all because he wanted to prove he could handle a big operation without any help or interference. What a stupid, egotistical blunder that was. He wanted all the credit, and now he would be slathered with all the blame. For an experienced Kremlin bureaucrat, that was a mortal sin and always fatal.

  In the past, Varentsov always enjoyed the long drive from the airport to MVD Headquarters on Dzerzhinsky Square in the center of Moscow. With his own limousine and driver, he loved to lean back in the plush leather seats and remember the bad old days, when he rode a crowded tram to work with the rest of the great proletarian unwashed. His memories were still vivid of the tiny, walk-up flats where he used to live. He remembered queuing-up at the side door of MVD Headquarters with the rest of the “Little Fish,” being forced to show his ID card to some slant-eyed guard who could not even read the Russian Cyrillic letters. Fortunately, those days were long gone, and Varentsov would burn in hell before he would ever let them return. Why should he? He’d spent years doing Beria’s and Serov’s dirty work in the Ukraine and in the Crimea. He had gladly taken on all their “wet work,” rounding up traitors, liquidating collaborators, sending their rivals off to the work camps in the Gulag, doing anything and everything Beria or Serov wanted without ever questioning or flinching. Surely, Serov wouldn’t chuck him out because of this one little miscalculation. Would he? Varentsov felt a cold chill run down his spine as he realized that to protect himself from Beria, Serov would do precisely that and much, much more.

  The limousine rolled to a halt before the imposing iron gates of MVD headquarters, and Varentsov felt his knees go weak. Get a grip on yourself, he ordered. If Serov smelled even a whiff of fear or guilt, Varentsov knew he was doomed. Confidence, confidence, he reminded himself as he forced himself out of the car. He stood up tall, thrust his shoulders back and marched directly up to the guard at the front door, handing the man his papers with a quick, arrogant sneer. The guard snapped to attention and Varentsov smiled, knowing he still had it. Yes, the more he thought about it, the less he was inclined to take this crap lying down. He was Varentsov, Head of Section S, and he would show them all!

  Varentsov blew through the outer door in two long strides, but his bravado began to fade before he strode halfway across the lobby floor. By the time he stepped inside the elevator and took that agonizingly slow ride up to the fifth floor, his legs were shaking again. The elevator doors opened and at the far end of the long, carpeted hallway, he saw two beefy uniformed guards, one on each side of the polished double doors to the Director’s office. They stared holes through Varentsov as if he were not even there. They knew; they had seen it a thousand times before. They smelled the stench of failure and fear on him, and they knew he was finished. It was all because of that idiot Neptune. Who could have figured the New York Police would save that cursed American from those Nazi gunmen? The vaunted SS! Trained killers! Crack shots! How times had changed, he moaned. How times had changed.

  Varentsov prayed the guards would make him stand and wait in the hallway for a few minutes longer until he gathered his wits, but no such luck. They immediately opened the doors and ushered him into Serov’s cavernous office, escorted him across the thick oriental carpets, and left him standing in front of Serov’s desk like the class dunce who had been called to the headmaster’s office. Varentsov waited, barely breathing. From outward appearances, the bald, thick-necked man in the dumpy blue suit sitting behind the desk could be a truck driver or a plumber; but he was none of those things. He was Ivan Alexandrovich Serov, Chief of the First Directorate of the Committee for State security, the MVD, the spymaster himself. Smart, ruthless, and efficient, if Serov pushed the red button hidden under the edge of his desk, Varentsov would disappear forever.

  Serov let Varentsov stand there for at least five excruciatingly painful minutes before he even acknowledged his presence. “Varentsov,” the Chief pronounced his name as if he had found something disagreeable stuck to the bottom of his shoe. “Tell me,” he finally looked up, “how does a fool like you rise to a position of such immense responsibility in our organization? Can you explain that to me?” he asked, daring Varentsov to attempt an answer. “We can blame your limited intelligence on your parents. That’s a common enough fault among the Russian peasantry; but if we punished them all, who would be left to plow the fields and dig the potatoes, eh?”

  The Chief’s eyes were as cold as a gravedigger’s as they bore into him. “Unfortunately, you are not some harmless corporal or supply clerk, are you? We can tolerate almost any peccadillo in the lower ranks, but you are a Colonel in the MVD, one of the elite of the elite. So where was the failure? Was it the system? Is that it? A massive case of collective stupidity? Or could there be more to it? Are you a foreign agent, a treacherous mole sent here to gnaw at us from the inside? Which is it, Varentsov? Are you a congenital idiot, or part of a monstrous conspiracy hatched right here in the Kremlin to bring me down?” Serov glared at him. “I must know the truth. Your miserable little life no longer matters to me, but I must explain to Comrade Beria why I allowed a cretin like you within a mile of the most sensitive intelligence operation we have run in a decade.”

  “Well, uh… as you know, Comrade Serov,” Varentsov stammered, wringing his hands. “This seemed like the perfect opportunity to draw the Fascists into our plan…”

  “Into our plan?”

  “Well, into my plan, Comrade. You see, I thought we could…”

  “You thought?”

  “Yes, Comrade, the plan was to use the Fascists to kill the American for us. Perhaps I miscalculated a bit, but… "

  “Miscalculated a bit? No, no, no, Varentsov, you are an imbecile, and imbeciles cannot calculate at all!"

  “But Ivan Alexandrovich, my standing orders, the ones you yourself approved, were to use Neptune to infiltrate the SS and the Nazi brotherhood in order to observe the Fascists from the inside and draw them in.”

  “Draw them in?” Serov’s voice lashed out like a Cossack’s whip. “You certainly accomplished that, didn’t you? You drew them in so well that they almost snatched this fellow Randall from under your very nose. They weren’t there to kill him, you fool; they were there to kidnap him and ply him with drugs. Now, why do you think they would do that, Varentsov? Why?”

&nbs
p; Varentsov stammered helplessly, “I… I don’t know… It makes no sense to me, Comrade Serov, absolutely no sense.”

  The Chief cocked his head and stared at Varentsov, studying him for a long moment. Varentsov knew this was the moment of truth, when Serov was deciding what he would do with him. “You are an idiot. You truly are an idiot, are you not?”

  “I… they… they… they did a very stupid thing. I…”

  “No, Varentsov!” Serov cut him off with an angry sweep of his hand. “You may be certain the SS did it for a good reason, a VERY good reason, because they think the American knows something. That much should be obvious even to an utter incompetent like you. They tried to grab the man and make him talk, because they want answers, Varentsov. Answers! While you did not even know there were any questions.”

  Varentsov stood before him like a whipped dog.

  Serov glared. “Now, we shall have the devil to pay before we learn a blasted thing about their plans. You are the one who should have grabbed this fellow Randall and questioned him. Can’t you see that? You should have made him tell his tale. All you accomplished was to draw further attention to Neptune. Now, we have the Americans involved, the West Germans, the Nazis, and probably those damned Israelis as well. They will all be asking questions, digging through the files and the records, probing, questioning, and that will ruin everything.”

  Varentsov dared not reply. He hung his head, thanking a merciful God that Serov was still talking and that he was still standing here, not being dragged out the door.

  “So you were going to observe the SS? You were going to infiltrate them and draw them into your clever web?” Serov glared at him. “Varentsov, they were in and out of New York before you even knew they were there. Observe them? Infiltrate them? I fought the SS in the Great Patriotic War, and they ate incompetents like you for breakfast.”