Deep Cover

by Brian Garfield

  Culver said, “I already took the plates off. You bring those Air Force plates?”

  “In the trunk of my car.”

  “Okay. I’ll put them on soon as I finish up here.”

  “Take your time,” Belsky said. He looked at his watch in the reflected glow of Culver’s big flashlight.

  Squares of brown corrugated cardboard had been taped over the insides of the rear-door windows to make it appear from outside as if the truck were loaded with cartons.

  Belsky said, “Did you have any trouble?”

  “Naw. I waited down at Sierra Vista and when the truck came out the Fort Huachuca gate I tailed it out toward the highway and went by it on that narrow stretch above Tombstone—dumped out the spikes, and when it blew a tire I handled them easy with that rifle of yours. That’s a sweet silencer.”

  “What did you do with the bodies?”

  “Buried them out back of the barn here.” Culver lowered the sprayer and stood back to shine the torch along the truck and study his handiwork. “Let that dry overnight it ought to look fine. I’ll get those plates now.”

  Belsky waited while Culver screwed the Air Force plates onto the truck’s license-plate brackets. Afterward Culver straightened up and said, “That first ten thousand was real sweet, Mr. Beldon. I hope you got the other ten thou with you.”

  “Right here, Tim. You’ve done a fine job.” Belsky took an envelope from his pocket and when Culver came to take it from him, Belsky’s single blow to the throat crushed Culver’s windpipe.

  He carried the body to the car and got the pint of whiskey from the dashboard glovebox. He poured the whiskey over the corpse, draped a canvas tarp over the passenger seat of the car, and then lifted Culver into the seat. He drove out to the canyon highway, turned left toward the mountains, accelerated the car to high speed and on a leftward curve threw Culver’s body out. It was no easy maneuver but it was not the first time Belsky had performed it. The body bounced off the road and crashed into scrub brush. Leaning far over in the seat, Belsky pulled the passenger door shut and slowed before he reached the canyon park gate; he made a sedate U-turn and went back the way he had come. He noticed when he went by that the body was not visible from the road. That was all right. He returned to the farm, opened the barn door, drove the truck out and put the car inside the barn. He took the transceiver over to the truck and placed it on the seat, closed the loading doors and started the engine. He drove very slowly until he reached the paved highway because he didn’t want to kick up dust that would adhere to the wet paint. Going into Tucson he bounced along high up in the cab, maneuvering the truck with professional ease.

  He had obtained Culver’s name from the Los Angeles rezidentsia—the name of a habitual criminal willing to do anything for pay. But he couldn’t have let Culver run around loose afterward with the knowledge of what had happened to the truckload of GB3X nerve gas he had hijacked from the Army Proving Ground at Fort Huachuca.

  The gas was colorless, odorless, designed to kill within seconds.

  Belsky drove through Tucson on Wilmot Road and Fifth Street and Alvernon Way—main arteries—because he would attract less attention than by driving through back streets. When he reached Twenty-second Street he turned right and made all the green lights in the two-mile stretch to the railroad overpass. He turned right into the warehouse district that lined the Southern Pacific yards and drove the truck easily through the narrow clearance of the open doors of the corrugated-metal storage building Hathaway had rented two days before in the name of the Tanner-Kavanagh Packing Company.

  He switched off the headlights and closed the building’s overhead door before he climbed into the back of the truck with the flashlight and the can of aluminum spray paint and carefully obliterated the warnings and descriptive stencils on each of the twenty-four canisters. He was nearing the last of them when the blinker on the transceiver began to flash.

  The apparatus was programmed to tape-record the incoming message automatically and so he took the time to finish spraying paint on the canisters before he opened the transceiver case and rewound the tape to play it back and write out the message. It took two or three minutes to decode and when he was done he had filled a notebook page in his crabbed hand.

  PRIORITY UTMOST

  DANGERFIELD TUC 6 APR

  VIA NUCSUB 4

  KGB 1

  CIPHER 1548 SG

  SENT 0527 GMT D ACKNOWLEDGMENT UNNECESSARY MESSAGE BEGINS X PREVIOUS INSTRUCTIONS CONFIRMED X EXECUTE PLAN B3 1830 7 APR CONFIRMED X HENCEFORTH BE ALERT FOR COUNTERFEIT INSTRUCTIONS THIS FREQUENCY X EXAMINE CIPHER REFERENCES WITH UTMOST CAUTION X HENCEFORTH ALL LEGITIMATE INSTRUCTIONS FROM VR WILL CONTAIN PHRASE FROM FATHER CHRISTMAS X REPEAT X FROM FATHER CHRISTMAS X RELY ON YOU X VR X MESSAGE ENDS 17661 42 6474

  It was nearly two o’clock in the morning when Hathaway arrived at the warehouse. He said, “I got a million things to do. I hope this ain’t going to take long.”

  “Not long at all,” Belsky assured him.

  “Where’d you get that truck?”

  “Have you got time to waste asking pointless questions?”

  “Sorry.” Hathaway’s uniform was rumpled. He glanced into the truckbed.

  Belsky said, “It’s a nonlethal gas. I want you to have your men secrete some of these canisters in the ventilation and circulation systems to cover all occupied rooms of the launch complex. You’re to rig the valves with electrical switches so that they can be opened by remote control from the exit you plan to use when you evacuate our people after the missiles have been fired. Do you understand?”

  “I know what you’re telling me but I don’t get the point.”

  “When you and the others leave the launch complex we don’t want you followed and we don’t want people buttonholing any of you and asking hysterical questions. If you trigger these canisters when you leave, the gas will render everyone unconscious in the launch complex. They won’t regain consciousness for at least two hours and that will give us ample time to get everyone into the aircraft and be on our way.”

  It was an expedient lie. Hathaway and his men had had twenty years to make friends with Air Force enlisted men, some of whom would be in the launch complex. There wasn’t any point in burdening Hathaway’s conscience with the knowledge he was going to murder them.

  Belsky climbed into the back of the truck and carefully lifted four of the canisters out and left them on the floor of the warehouse. “I’ll need these for another location,” he said. “You may take the rest.”

  “Truck and all?”

  “Of course. How else did you expect to smuggle them into an Air Force base?” Belsky picked up the transceiver and turned toward the door. “I’ll use your car. I’ll be at Ludlum’s.”

  “What happened to the car we gave you?”

  “It got mislaid,” Belsky said, and went outside.

  Chapter Seventeen

  It was four o’clock in the morning before Fred Winslow found a moment to make his way to the coin-operated public phone in one of the underground day rooms. He wasn’t sure it wasn’t tapped but he took the chance. He put through the call to Celia and exactly half an hour later he made a vague excuse and slipped up to the surface. She was waiting outside the fence and he eeled into the car past her. “I haven’t got very long.”

  In the starlight the boniness of her face was accentuated; her eyes looked very large; her smile was fixed and meaningless. Winslow said, “They’ve put a tail on Alec.”

  “Well, we thought they might.” She looked preternaturally tired—too tired to care about anything at all.

  He said, “Tomorrow night. They’ve ordered us to shoot the missiles tomorrow night. Half-past six.”

  “Dear God,” she whispered.

  “At China. All the targets are in China.” He had been doing that for hours—saying things twice. He shook his head violently, trying to clear it. “Dangerfield says the strike will wipe out most of China’s retaliatory missiles and the Russians won’t come int
o it at all unless the Americans start shooting at Russia first. He said they’d allowed him to tell us that much because they want to reassure us that our children have a good chance to escape being caught under an atomic blast.”

  “He’d have said that whether it was true or not.”

  “I know,” he said. “I know. But it could be true, couldn’t it?”

  “Because you want it to be true? How can we believe anything that man says? Truth means nothing to them—why should it? They tell us what they want us to know.”

  He was carrying an executive call-up—a radio-activated pocket device that would emit a high-pitched whistle if he was needed down below. He kept waiting for it to sound.

  He said, “No, it’s not true. We’re programming the missiles to hit sites in the north and west of China. We’re not going to hit the sites on the Yellow Sea and those are the ones that are aimed at the United States. Dangerfield says they haven’t got enough range to get much deeper into this country than the Pacific Coast but that isn’t true either. If that really was the case he couldn’t expect our launch people to believe the Pentagon was under attack by Chinese missiles, could he?”

  “You’ve got to get a grip on yourself, Fred.”

  He gripped her forearm. The chilly sweat of fear streamed down his ribs. He pulled his head around toward her and said, “Have you thought about it? What we talked about?”

  “How could I have thought about anything else?”

  “I know. But what I meant was have you decided?”

  “No. Not for myself. But I’ll do whatever you decide, darling.”

  “Maybe this is one time I’d really rather have you make the decision.”

  “I can’t.”

  He sat studying the backs of his hands and then turning them over and studying the palms. Finally he pressed them together until the knuckles cracked. She was watching him anxiously and he felt his face color under her stare. “We’re grotesques,” he muttered. “Twenty years leading double lives—twenty years is so long when you break it up into hours but it still isn’t long enough. We’ve become middle-aged Americans. We chose to forsake everything Russian—the flavors and smells and sounds of Russia. You can’t steal the results of the next election from the government safe. You don’t wait for the tramp of police boots, the knock on the door, transportation to penal squads in a slave camp, legions of secret police.… I remember how we used to seal the windows in the wintertime and go to bed very early and sleep in all our clothes because we couldn’t afford fuel.… God, stop me, Celia, I’m babbling.”

  She twisted in the seat to grip him on both shoulders. His face slumped forward and he turned unashamedly toward her; she printed warm gentle kisses on his tear-streaked face.

  “I had my mind made up,” he said. “I was ready to do it. And then they told me they had someone following Alec—just to keep me in line, they said. Oh Christ. Alec’s just a boy. We can’t make him share in our guilt.”

  “He’s twenty-two years old, Fred, and he’s going to suffer whatever happens. He’s going to lose us whatever we do.”

  “Should we do it, then?”

  “I can’t—I don’t know.”

  He thought of Alec, husky with young energy.

  She said, “What do the rest of them think?”

  “I haven’t asked them. I can’t speak for them. How could I ask them? They’d report me to Dangerfield and we’d both be killed.”

  She said nothing. He thought of Barbara, fourteen years old and away in California with her school chums and her silver fingernail polish. He tried to remember whether Sacramento was within fallout radius of the California defense bases. It must be; there were so many bases. Russian roulette: how many missiles did the Chinese have? How many would they launch at California targets? How many would penetrate the ABM defense screen? But all it took was one. He thought of the film lectures: We project a fifty-mile destruction radius for the Chinese twenty-megaton warhead. …

  He said, “I’m going to do it,” and the sound of his own voice electrified the skin of his spine. “I’m going to do it, Celia.”

  She was watching him; in the bad light he couldn’t make out her expression. He asked softly, “What do you think, then?”

  “No. First you decide you’re going to do it and then you ask me what I think. No. If you were sure of yourself you wouldn’t have asked me now—you see what you’re doing, Fred? You want me to tell you you’re wrong, because then you can get all worked up with self-righteousness and indignant rationalizations and you can get angry enough to convince yourself that you are right. But we can’t play that game this time. It’s too much—too much at stake. We can’t decide out of anger.”

  He reached for her hand—blindly, timidly; he was looking the other way. “You’re right. I always do that, don’t I.” He wanted the buzzer in his pocket to summon him away because down below, working, he could fix his mind on practical technical things. But it remained still.

  “We still have a little time.” He looked at his watch. “Thirty-seven hours and forty-five minutes, to be precise.” His mouth twisted.

  “Refusing to make a decision—that can be a decision in itself, you know.”

  He nodded. “The idea is we’re all supposed to leave together when it’s done.”

  “I know. Nicole talked to me. I’m to be at the airport at five-thirty tomorrow evening. The side gate, where the old entrance used to be.”

  “It’s an older runway they don’t use too much anymore. I had to get clearance for a so-called training flight to use it tomorrow evening. I gave them some official-sounding gibberish and they yawned their way through it and gave us permission because they don’t have much air traffic out there at that time of night anyway. They’re flying us to Cuba, you know.”

  “Yes, she told me.”

  “What’s the point of their keeping us alive after we’ve done the job here, Celia? That’s what keeps nudging me to decide to do it. The feeling that no matter what assurances Danger-field gives us it still makes sense for them to kill us all. He killed Bud Sims, you know. We’ll all be together in that airplane—it wouldn’t be any trouble at all for him.”

  “He’d be killing himself too.”

  “Maybe he’s willing to do that. Maybe he’s a good German—obeying all orders without question; maybe he’s prepared a parachute for himself. Or maybe at the last minute he’ll arrange to be left behind and the plane will blow up after takeoff. I keep thinking how easy it would be for him to do things like that—there are so many ways. As long as any of us remain alive, even in Russia, we’re a danger to them. We’re no danger dead.”

  “I’ve thought of those things too,” she said, “but I can’t put those pictures out of my mind. The ones he showed us—that Mongolian, Manchurian, whatever he is, Tircar. The children tortured and murdered while the parents watched.”

  He closed his eyes. That was all he had been able to think of—Alec and Barbara. “That’s what Dangerfield wants us to do. Remember those pictures and obey orders.”

  “They’re offering a trade. They’ve made a bargain with us. As long as we put ourselves in their hands our children will be left alone.”

  “I don’t know. I keep thinking there must be a way to do it without condemning Alec.”

  “Perhaps there is. But I think we must be prepared to make the decision on the basis that we’d be sacrificing Alec’s life if we went against them.”

  “I can’t do it now,” he said, and was ashamed when his voice broke. He reached for the door handle. “I’ve got to think it out more clearly. I’ll decide, but I just can’t do it now.”

  “My poor darling,” she murmured, and he squeezed her hand tight as if to draw a current of strength from her. When he got out of the car she stared at him with eyes that looked like two holes burned in a blanket.

  Chapter Eighteen

  When Forrester pulled the door softly shut behind him it drew Top Spode’s glance; Spode had been sitting by the window
staring out, eyes narrowed in a thoughtful squint. “Morning.”

  “Haven’t you been to bed at all?”

  “No. You don’t look like you slept much yourself.”

  “Not much.” Forrester’s dreams had left an aftertaste of fear, though all memory of them had gone.

  “She all right?”

  “I don’t know.” Ronnie had taken it badly; she had been ill half the night. “She won’t see a doctor.”

  “Asleep now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then let her sleep,” Spode said.

  Forrester was dressing while they talked. “Have you been on the phone?”

  “All night. Nobody knows anything. Belsky hasn’t turned up. They found the car he rented on a parking lot. He’ll never come back for it. I don’t know if it fits into this but somebody hijacked a truckload of nerve gas from Fort Huachuca.”

  “Nerve gas,” Forrester muttered, buttoning his cuffs. “God.”

  “Yeah.” Spode picked up the phone and said, “Room service, please.… Hello, this is three twenty-seven, send up a pot of coffee and two cups and a plate of bacon and eggs, will you? Bacon fried crisp and two eggs over hard.… Yeah, thanks.”

  “Don’t you want anything to eat?”

  “I had a couple of doughnuts an hour ago where I made a few calls.” Spode got out of the chair and stretched; Forrester heard the ligaments crackle. “I’ve been letting myself be seen around town but nobody’s taken any potshots at me.”

  “He may be long gone, Top.”

  “Then why did he kill Art Miller? No, I can’t buy it.” Spode scowled outward—the sky was cloudy above the rooftops across the way. “My ex-boss and I kicked around a lot of things on the phone to see if anything rang any bells. The Agency’s been picking up signs of a big Chinese flap along the Russian border—bigger than anything they’ve ever seen. The President’s holding an emergency session of the National Security Council this morning. Since I’m not on the payroll there were certain things I couldn’t be told on the record, but reading between the lines I gathered that one or two friendly KGB types have made overtures to their opposite numbers in the Agency to feel us out about taking sides in the event of an eruption over there.”