The Espionage Game

by Susan Glinert Stevens

  Grigori Sechenov shook; he knew that he had little choice. Either he obtained the computer in the next day, or there would be no day after it for him. “Da,” he agreed in a hoarse whisper

  “Unbelievable!” the president exclaimed as he laid the latest satellite photographs on the top of his desk. “The whole damn mountain is gone! That must have been a hell of a explosion! Are you certain that one of those nukes didn’t go off?”

  “We are fairly certain that none did,” Secretary of Defense Gilbert Van Dyne replied. “The hole would have been much larger if any had.”

  The phone rang.

  “Excuse me, gentleman,” the president said as he reached for it. “That must be my call to Prime Minister Harkabi.

  “Hello, this is President Hayward,” he announced himself.

  “Ah, Mr. President,” he heard Avraham Harkabi reply. The old man’s voice quavered as though he were worried. “You must be up late. I hope nothing is going wrong.”

  “Quiet the contrary, Mr. Prime Minister. I have the best news in the world for you. Khalid’s super cannon has been destroyed!”

  “Barukh atah Adonai, eloheinu melekh ha-olam. Blessed art Thou, Lord our God, King of the universe,” Harkabi prayed aloud, then he fell silent for a few moments. “How?” he asked.

  “A very brave man went in and bombed it.”

  “Are you sure that it’s been destroyed?”

  “I have the satellite photographs in my hands, Mr. Prime Minister,” the president said. “They were taken less than an hour ago, as soon as the sun was high enough to see. I’ll have copies sent to you.”

  Avraham Harkabi again fell silent. The president heard what sounded like sobbing. “You must excuse me,” the old man said. “You have no idea what a burden you have lifted from my shoulders. I thank you for calling me. Now I must let you go, for it must be two a.m. in Washington. I’m sure you want to go to sleep.”

  “Shalom,” the president said, remembering the greeting from his campaigning efforts.

  “Shalom, and may God bless you,” Harkabi replied as he hung up.

  “That was the first pleasant phone call I’ve ever had with that man,” the president noted as he put the telephone down. He glanced at the clock on his desk and winced. It was 2:14 a.m. “God, it’s been a long day, and thankfully, it’s over. I guess we can all go home and get some sleep at last,” he added as he looked at his guests. His eyes fell upon Director Jonathan Boswell and his expression suddenly hardened. “I want him fired!” he roared.

  “Who?”

  “Dr. Gloom and Doom, that’s who.”

  “You mean Lazarus Keesley?”

  “Goddamn right! If I had followed his advice, I’d still be in the same barrel. ‘No!’ he insisted, ‘don’t send that computer!’ I’ve had it with him. I want him out! Understand!”

  Shocked, Director Boswell stared at the president for several seconds before replying, “I’ll take care of it in the morning.”

  Chapter Forty-five

  Beep—beep. Beep—beep. Beep—beep. Beep—beep.

  Doctor Lippert ignored the heart monitor beeping away noisily in the back of the operating room. He was concentrating on trying to save the life of the man now lying on the operating table. Two hours of frantic work had passed, but blood was still leaking out of the numerous holes the bullet had punched through the pilot’s viscera. Why the wounded pilot survived as long as he had remained a mystery to Lippert as he continued to search for the leaks. Blood continued to spurt out as fast as they could pump more into the pilot’s veins.

  Beep—beep.

  The sudden silence was electrifying. The heart skipped a beat, then another. Then it stopped.

  “Blood pressure’s dropping!” the anesthesiologist cried. He reached over and thumped the pilot’s chest with his fist.

  Beep—beep. Beep—beep,the heart tried again, but only twice.

  “BP is still falling!”

  “Intra-cardiac adrenalin! Shock paddles!”

  “Don’t fail me now, not after all you’ve been through!” the surgeon pleaded.

  “Hit it!” one of the assistants shouted as he slammed the shock paddles onto Jerry’s chest. An instant later, Jerry’s body convulsed as the high-tension electric shock surged through his body.

  Beep—beep … Beep—beep … Beep—beep. Beep—beep.

  Madeline tossed and turned in her bed. A cold sweat came over her as she woke with a start.

  “Jerry,” she whispered fearfully.

  “General Winslow, I believe!”

  William Winslow looked up from his beer at the man who addressed him. It was a Turkish Air Forcealbay , or colonel, with three gold stars and an olive wreath on each of his shoulder boards. Winslow didn’t recognize the man, nor the voice that had only a slight accent when he spoke English.

  “Imagine, that I should run into you here, at the Incirlik Officer’s Club, after all these years!” the Turk exclaimed, extending his hand.

  Bill Winslow tried to place the man. The Turk acted as though he realized that he might have made a mistake.

  “Excuse me? But you are General William Winslow?” There was a puzzled expression in the man’s eyes while he waited for an answer.

  “Yes, I am,” Winslow told him, “but you have me at a disadvantage, Colonel.”

  “Ah,” the man exclaimed. “I never forget a face or a name. For a moment, you had me worried. We met in Paris, ten years ago. Remember?”

  “I’m afraid not,” Winslow replied, but nevertheless got up and shook the man’s hand, “Join me?” He paused, indicating that he didn’t remember the man’s name.

  “Ah, I am Ismet Bayar, General,” he said, formally introducing himself. “We were both military attachés back them. We met at one or two parties.”

  “Have a beer,” Winslow suggested cordially. “I haven’t been back to Paris in all that time. Tell me, has it changed much?”

  “Oh!” Ismet exclaimed. “You will not even recognize it! The French have gone mad. They destroy Paris. It should not be permitted, I tell you. Last week, when I was there, I could not even walk the Champs- Elysées. It is now filled with American fast food joints.” Ismet frowned uncertainly. “That is the word, ‘joints’?”

  Bill Winslow laughed. “Yes, it is. And I guess I don’t blame you for being upset by the invasion, particularly when you consider all the fine restaurants in Paris. Or did those disappear, too?”

  “Thankfully, no” Ismet replied. “In fact, I went to a very fine one just recently. See, I have the matchbox from it. It is the Tour d’Argent, very expensive, but such a fine view of Notre Dame, and their roast duck is fabulous.”

  Winslow picked up the little wooden box covered with shiny blue foil and examined it. The restaurant’s name was embossed in gold across the cover.

  “I used to collect matchboxes back then,” Winslow reminisced. “I don’t believe I ever managed to get one from the Tour d’Argent. May I keep this one?”

  “Oh, sure, sure,” Ismet answered with a wave of his hand. “I have plenty at home.”

  The message from Director Boswell was waiting on Lazarus’ desk when he came in to work. Boswell wanted to see him at once.

  “I have some good news and some bad news, Laz,” Boswell announced when Lazarus entered office. “Sit down and I’ll tell you about it.”

  Lazarus picked one of the chairs in front of Boswell’s desk and plumped down.

  “The good news is that the ATASF took out that goddamn cannon,” Boswell said. “Blew it to hell and back. The bombs must have set off the cannon’s powder magazine.”

  “So the nukes were probably destroyed too?”

  “Yes. And since nobody has seen Khalid Ribat lately, he may have been in there, too.”

  “What’s the bad news?” Lazarus inquired.

  “The president is, ah,” Jonathan Boswell hemmed, “still pissed that you opposed him in sending in the ATASF. All he knows is that the cannon and the nightmare it caused him are go
ne. From his viewpoint, had he followed your advice, both the cannon and that nightmare would still exist.”

  Boswell looked at Lazarus for a second. “However, if it means anything to you, you were right. That valley was filled with antiaircraft guns. It certainly looks like the whole thing was a trap for the ATASF.”

  Lazarus gazed blankly at Jonathan Boswell. “I was afraid of that. Did they get it?”

  “Fortunately, no,” Jonathan Boswell replied haltingly. “However, the pilot was severely injured—but the airplane and the computer are safely back at their base in Incirlik.”

  Lazarus winced when he heard that the pilot was hurt. “You mean that the CLEO computer system is still in Turkey?”

  “I know your concerns, Lazarus,” Director Boswell told him gently. “However, the reason I’ve asked you in is to suggest that you take a little vacation. You’re tired.”

  “I had a good night’s sleep.”

  Jonathan Boswell studied Lazarus. “Let me put it bluntly; you’re on the president’s shit list. He’s blaming you for not getting that cannon sooner.”

  Lazarus Keesley glared at Jonathan Boswell.

  “I know that it wasn’t your fault,” Jonathan Boswell said, holding up his hands. “President Hayward will see things in a better light in a few days. However, it would be best if you were to go on a little vacation— until things quiet down.”

  Lazarus Keesley continued to glare at him.

  “Goddamnit, Lazarus,” Jonathan Boswell begged, “what do you want? I don’t want to lose you—you’re too valuable to me.”

  “All right,” Lazarus answered finally. “Under one condition.”

  “What’s that?”

  “That you ask the president to get the ATASF and Cleo out of Turkey immediately. With that sort of temptation, anything can happen.”

  The car door slammed, startling Madeline. She glanced at her wristwatch. It was just after eight in the morning.

  “Jerry,” she called hopefully. Madeline rushed to the door and flung it open. An Air Force officer in a Class A uniform was walking down the path. Stars glittered on his shoulder boards; it was General Randall Teuschler. His face was drawn.

  “Madeline,” he said as he came to attention in front of her. Unconsciously, she rubbed her hand over her abdomen as she thought of her child. “Yes,” she answered in a whisper, her heart racing.

  “I’m sorry, Madeline, but I have some bad news,” he began. “Jerry has been seriously wounded. He still might not make it. I have a plane waiting to take you to Turkey.”

  “Papa Bear,” Wilma called from the bedroom, “will you come to bed?”

  “As soon as I’m finished packing, Honey Bear,” he called back from the bathroom. “I told you that I have a flight out of here at 0600 hours. It’s going to be a lot easier if I have everything packed and ready.”

  “I want you now,” she pouted. “Who knows when I’ll get to see you again?”

  “Coming,” he responded. He entered the bedroom and slipped his bathrobe off. Wilma smiled when she saw that he was already hard.

  Lazarus gazed at the brochures that the woman running the travel office in the CIA headquarters handed him. He had his choice of the Hawaiian Islands, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, Acapulco, Cozumel, or Cancun. Europe was prohibited. It wasn’t a vacation, he decided; it was an exile.

  “‘By all the holy glue in China’,” he grumbled. Angrily, he randomly pulled one of the brochures out of the pile and handed it to travel agent.

  “This one,” he announced without looking.

  Wilma felt a gentle nudge. She had often felt it before when her Papa Bear had to get up in the middle of the night. She enjoyed cuddling and so slept with her arms around him, forcing him to break her hold whenever nature called. She was used to it, and thought nothing of it when he slipped out of bed and trotted to the bathroom down the hall. Content and comfortable, she fell back into a deep sleep.

  A few minutes later, a gentle click disturbed Wilma.

  “Papa Bear,” she called.

  There was no answer.

  “Papa Bear, are you there?”

  She waited in the dark for a moment.

  “Are you okay?”

  Panicked by the thought that he might have tripped in the dark and hurt himself, Wilma scampered out of bed and searched in the dark for the light switch. She found it and turned it on. He wasn’t in the bedroom.

  As her heart raced, she slipped on her robe and rushed to the bathroom. It too was empty. A moment later, she heard the car start, and, as she ran to the front of the little house General Winslow had been assigned for his temporary quarters, she heard the car drive away. By the time she got the front door open, the car was out of sight.

  “Bill,” she called. “Where are you going? It’s only two in the morning!”

  Tick, tick, tick.

  Grigori Sechenov peered bleary-eyed at the antique clock sitting on the marble mantelpiece in his office, wondering who would possess it next.

  “I’ll probably never know,” he told himself, “and it might very well have a new owner by sunset.”

  All he knew was thatZerkalo had been given the message. The rest was up to a man he hadn’t seen for over ten years.

  So much depends on him. Will he succeed?Grigori Sechenov worried.

  “My god, what happened?” Wilma cried when she ran into the nearly dark hangar. Only a few light bulbs dangling from the high ceiling were on. Hastily dressed in her fatigues, she stopped next to the ATASF. Two of her security policemen lay beneath it in a pool of blood. The hatch used to install Cleo in the aircraft hung open. Cleo was clearly missing; only a few loose cables dangled out of the opening.

  “Hold it right there, Wilma,” General Winslow said from behind her. “You shouldn’t have followed me.”

  Confused and shaken, Wilma turned. Winslow was standing in the shadows of the dimly lit building, next to one of the side doors. Fully dressed and wearing an overcoat, he started walking toward her.

  “Bill!” she exclaimed. “What the hell is going on? Where are the other guards?”

  Winslow chuckled as he approached. “I reduced the guard to just two last night, after you went to my quarters.”

  “What?”

  “You shouldn’t have followed me,” he repeated.

  Wilma shook her head vigorously. “No, Papa Bear, I didn’t. You woke me when you left. I didn’t follow you; I couldn’t. You were gone by the time I got to the front door. I just came down here to see if you came here.”

  She glanced down at her men. They were obviously dead, large pieces of their heads had been blown away by bullets.

  “What happened?” she begged. She looked back toward Winslow, who had stopped just a few feet from her.

  “I’ve been ordered to defect,” he said. He held up a matchbox in one hand. “Right now, and I’m to take Cleo with me. I wish you hadn’t followed me.”

  Wilma shook her head vigorously. “Defect!”

  “Certainly,” he replied casually. “Most spies do, sooner or later.”

  “What? You, a spy? But how?”

  “Do you know what it’s like to be Pete Winslow’s baby brother?” he snarled. Ancient anger boiled up while he spoke. “Everyone says that he arranged my promotions. Everyone says that without his influence I’d be nothing, a failure.”

  General Winslow’s face reddened with anger while he remembered whisperings behind his back. “And you know, Wilma,” he added bitterly, “they were right. Pete always looked after me. I was always his kid brother—he protected me. None of the school bullies ever picked on me because they all knew that my big brother would beat the crap out of them if they messed with me. Later, when he entered politics, he used his influence to help me.

  “He never let me fail,” Bill Winslow lamented. “I was never able to prove myself—even to myself. I never did anything on my own.”

  Winslow looked sadly at Wilma. His expression changed to an enigmatic smile and then h
e chuckled. “Except I did, Wilma,” he said proudly. “I played the most dangerous game of all—the espionage game—and won. I’m the best spy that ever was.”

  “No!” Wilma protested in disbelief. She took a step toward him. Winslow took his hand out of his overcoat. It held a short pistol with a very fat barrel. Wilma recognized it as a Russian P-6 silenced Makarov pistol.

  “You killed them!” she hissed when she realized what had happened. Images of Papa Bear, her lover, walking up to her men and slaughtering them at point-blank range flashed through her head as he aimed.

  Ptewu. Ptewu.The little pistol coughed twice. Both bullets hit Wilma in the heart. Her mouth hung open as much in surprise as shock; she stared speechlessly at him for a second before crumpling to the floor.

  Bill Winslow waited a moment before kneeing down beside her body. He felt for a pulse—there was none.

  “I’m sorry, Honey Bear,” he whispered sweetly, “but you shouldn’t have followed me.”

  Wiping a tear from his eye, he bent down, kissed her on the cheek and then gently closed her eyes. She seemed asleep to him—that’s the way he wanted to remember her. He then got up, went to his car parked just outside the hangar’s side door, and drove away.

  Chapter Forty-six

  Lazarus’ banishment and subsequent exile were both short-lived. Two of the Secret Service agents assigned to guard the president woke Lazarus in the early hours of the morning by banging noisily on his front door until he answered. The president’s orders were specific: bring me Lazarus, and do so immediately.