The Ransom of Black Stealth One

by Dean Ing

  The connection was lousy, but from the first few words he knew who it was. And he wasn't entirely sure his phone was secure.

  "Medina here," he said.

  From far away, years away: "Get me Speedy Gonzales," in that unforgettable dry, gruff whiskey baritone. Absolutely no doubt about it. Corbett, and only Corbett, had dared call him that at the Snake Pit because the insult underlined the antagonism they wanted to maintain in public. Kyle Corbett, HolyMarymotherofGod ...

  Medina switched hands, shoving the one with the ring into a hip pocket. " 'E's not 'ere, señor, I theenk." Not for any other man on earth had Raoul Medina ever played the pocho fool this way, but it was as if he'd opened an old book, fondly remembered, a book from whose faded pages he could still quote at length.

  "You write a cute ad, Speedy. Talk to me."

  "Just trying to sell a homebuilt," Medina said. "Call you back from a pay phone." If they were listening, he could show them the Imp; admit a little, hide a lot.

  The silence was not true silence, but tiny squeals and white noise for a five-second eternity, the kind of delay a dead man might employ while deciding whether he trusted this spirit medium named Medina. Then, "You'll need a shitload of quarters. And if you can't call in fifteen minutes, don't bother."

  "You wasteeng time," Medina said in his singsong fool voice. He took down the numbers, a string beginning with "011-52-491," and then another string. Not CONUS, continental U.S., for sure. Then, his voice husky, Medina said, "I knew it, I fucking knew it!" But he was talking into a dead phone.

  Three miles away and thirteen minutes later, Medina ducked out of the Mart into the twilight with four rolls of quarters and sprinted for the phones that nested against the Mart's outside wall inside tiny shrines to Mammon. He knew he was cutting it close and a gangling youth with the complexion of a pizza slouched next to one phone, oblivious of the swarthy man who slammed a quarter into the other machine.

  Nothing; out of service. "God DAMN," said Medina, and jerked the boy upright. "Life or death, young man. Hang up. Please!" He knew it didn't sound much like "please," it sounded more like "or else."

  The boy wrenched himself loose, looking down at this slit-eyed latino, donning a mask of youthful outrage. "What the fuck, man; what the fuck," he said, and turned away to resume talking.

  The youth felt himself spun completely around, dropping the receiver, this time registering true shock at this sudden attack on a Friday evening by a madman in public. Medina cradled the boy's throat with his left hand, his right fist drawn back.

  "This," he said, letting his fist vibrate, "or this." And he offered the roll of quarters. The boy blinked twice. Ten seconds later Medina was alone, stammering to the operator because his alloted fifteen minutes were up. And even after he got the international operator it took him twenty-six bongs, at three seconds per bong, to feed the damned machine.

  But when he heard the connection go through, there was hardly any buzz at all. "Digame, señor," said the voice he had already despaired of hearing again.

  "JesusMary, I had to mug a fucking kid for this phone," Medina said shakily. "Sounds like amateur night, wherever you are."

  "Cantina. Speedy, just one thing. If somebody's running you, remember: I won't get mad. You do remember?"

  "Fuck you, Mr. Depew," Medina replied, letting the flash of anger steady him. "I'm not calling for anybody, but I feel a cold breeze blowing up my personal tailpipe. Something's coming down, and I checked out Mr. Depew's box a long time ago so I figured you might still be suckin' wind, and I don't know who else to turn to."

  Laughter from Kyle Corbett, from the far distance and the distant past. "You seem to have something for sale. Something humongous."

  Black Stealth One had spawned several pet names among the men who had designed and built her. Between Medina and Corbett, the word was "humongous" because of its great wingspan. Since both men were NSA, they knew that the agency's equipment was incredibly sophisticated and had been for years. Voice-coded, word identifier machines could monitor hundreds of thousands of telephone lines at once, especially those that used international trunk lines. A word like "stealth," or "CIA," or even "hellbug" could flag a conversation for recording—even tagging the locations of both phones. With this shared knowledge, they resorted to their own jargon. "The sale isn't kosher, but the bird is flying, and, man, it does everything we hoped."

  Corbett: "You don't mean the Imp?"

  Medina: "Oh hell, no. That's all assembled. Main ingredient of my own, uh, Depew kit, if I can ever get it flight-tested. I'm talking humongous, man. We made the target weight, it's stable as a table, and I'm the only one checked out to test it. But somehow, word has got out, and there's a buyer."

  "Who's the buyer?"

  "Nice people; they make flashlights that backfire." The NATO designations for Soviet aircraft included the MiG "Flashlight" and the "Backfire" bomber.

  "If you think I'd help you sell, you can get stuffed."

  "Not me, JesusChristno! It's from the very top, a scam to sell, uh, Number Three, and pass it off as humongous."

  Another laugh, full-gutted and now more relaxed. "Sounds cute to me. Might even work."

  "Yeah? Listen, it's already working for somebody, but I'm not sure it's us. The drill is for me to ferry Number Three and hide it near, uh, let's say Mazatlan. Then snatch our humongous bird when its wings are wet and while everybody in the country goes nuts to make it look good, I stash humongous in New Mexico, fly down and pick up the fake, and then—you'll love this—ditch the fake offshore where they can see it and pick up the pieces. That way I don't have to face 'em, but I have a long swim. And I leave without even getting to see what five million worth of Swiss tickets looks like."

  "Mazatlan, you said?" Corbett's tone was not pleasant.

  "Please deposit five dollars and twenty-five cents for the next three minutes," said a disinterested female voice.

  Medina told her to count the bongs and fed the quarters in. Then he spelled out "Regocijo" using the standard phonetic alphabet, "Romeo-Echo-Golf-Oscar-Charlie-India-Juliet-Oscar" because he could think of no other way to do it. "It doesn't smell right. It's not our turf."

  "Plus, you could get popped, Speedy."

  "That's crossed my mind," Medina admitted.

  "What do you want from me, a backup?"

  "Honest to God, I'm not sure what I want, or what you can give. Just advice, maybe."

  "I'll tell you what doesn't smell right. It's too neat a coincidence, making the switch so near where I am already. And I don't believe in coincidence. What I do believe in is my hide. And I'm wondering whether somebody's running you without your knowledge, to get to me. Maybe they don't intend you to ferry Number Three down here."

  "Wrong. I've already done it."

  "No shit! Well, you can't blame me for a few suspicions," Corbett grumbled. "Right now I'm thinking the high-techs who could be listening in will already have figured out exactly where I am, but this isn't their turf and I'll be long gone before they could get here, so I'll tell you. I'm in Aguascalientes. See why I might worry about the coincidence? But if you've already stashed one bird, all I'd have to do is verify that. Maybe take it myself," he chuckled.

  "I wouldn't. Old guy named Julio might just put some holes in you. And I'd kiss him for it. That's all I need, you fucking me over from that end and heavy brass from our old employer trying to run me from this end."

  Medina wondered at the pause, because it was a long one. Then Corbett said, "Our previous employer, you mean?"

  "You got it. They're coordinating this. Hell, my briefings are with a guy who'd probably love to know you're still mean as ever. Initials Delta Whiskey; is that enough?"

  "Enough. I wish you could tell him, Speedy, but you can't. Guys like him absolutely cannot afford to take chances on guys like me. Neither can you, but it sounds like you're hung out to dry already."

  "Feels that way, too. By the way, why did you fake that accident?"

  "You mean, was
I turned or just greedy? Neither. Maybe we can puzzle it out one day. Not now. Right now I need to get a feel for timing. When are you slated to start the real shitstorm blowing?"

  "About a week, ten days. I'm already dealing with the buyers—and as soon as we wet down the humongous wings, I'm supposed to haul ass. That's the holdup, and I can't delay it." He wanted to say, My God, I've already done sabotage on Black Stealth One to buy this much time, what do you want from me. But if they were being monitored, that admission would have bought him twenty years in the slammer.

  As if they were telepathically linked: "We've talked long enough," said Corbett, "but I have to know more, with exact map coordinates. I want you to call me in an hour from somewhere else. I won't be here but I've already got my alternate number. Only the last five digits are different. Got it?"

  "On an open line? I'm not sure you should—"

  "Just listen," said Corbett, maddeningly calm. "We take the last digit of Mr. Depew's old address number, if you remember it."

  That post office box! "Ri-i-ight," said Medina, grinning in spite of himself. The number had been "six."

  "I'm gonna give you some simple arithmetic using that last digit as a baseline. First number: subtract one. Second number: add three. What the hell are you laughing at?"

  "This is so goddamn amateurish, man," Medina cackled, "I swear it's almost fun."

  "Hold that thought," growled the dead man in Aguascalientes, and continued before the operator could cut them off. When the lank youth returned with a carload of friends a few minutes later, they found the telephone abandoned.

  Medina had to write a check and talk like hell, but an hour later his jacket swayed with its load of quarters as he bought a ticket to see the only local movie that wasn't besieged by Friday night crowds. There would be no background noises around the pay phone in there, and the place had four exits. As he stuffed the first quarter in, he began to laugh. The reason the movie wasn't mobbed was because the place showed old classics. Tonight's feature, with Robert Ryan and Harry Belafonte, was The Odds Against Tomorrow. If he believed in omens, Medina thought, he'd be running for the exit.

  Medina did not believe in omens. He believed in Swiss francs; he believed that the element of surprise might work very well for a dead man who placed himself properly while other men watched an airplane crash in the ocean; and he was starting to believe it could be wonderfully profitable to meet Kyle Corbett at Regocijo.

  NINE

  Once a month, though on no set schedule, Sasha spent an evening isolated in his basement workshop and quietly briefed the cat. Like most men in the intelligence community, he had heard rumors of his own existence—had even known when believers first dubbed him "Sasha"—for years. Before Ivan the Terrible distinguished himself by getting noisily trapped in Sasha's garbage can one night in 1982, the solitary self-briefings had always heightened Sasha's sense of alienation. An agent run by any government could at least depend on a case officer to hear his troubles. In this sense, Sasha was not an agent at all, but very much an operative.

  He had long ago given up the notion of sharing his secret with any human, but Ivan the Terrible, grown from a scrawny young delinquent into a sleek gray tiger-stripe torn, was a cat who knew how to listen without making value judgments. Sasha had found himself whispering to the cat one night across a pair of ruled yellow pads and an open tin of Chicken of the Sea, and his self-briefing went uncommonly well, and Ivan seemed to enjoy the attention even after the tuna was gone. While stirring the ashes of his notes that night, Sasha had resolved to pick up one of the latest CCI bug-finders. It seemed vanishingly unlikely that his basement would be bugged, but a commercially available Mantis unit would remove all doubt about audio bugging. To be exposed while talking with a house cat, after years of flawless espionage, was the kind of cosmic joke that inevitably would be retold throughout spookdom. Sasha went to considerable trouble so that he could talk espionage to that cat because, by God, it worked.

  On this evening, Sasha finished his old business and then, after scribbling on the left-hand pad, proposed his next move. "Scenario: I tell them about the swap and give them the Regocijo site, too," he murmured to Ivan, who merely flexed a forepaw and watched the pencil intently. Perhaps it reminded him of a mousetail. "That gives them one intact aircraft, if they're competent. But"—he moved the pencil to the other pad—"that eventually could narrow the search pattern for me."

  That second pad contained only a list of names, a list that had narrowed by necessity over the years. The list included all, and only, the men who could have passed all of those messages over embassy walls. The length, and the complications, of that list had been Sasha's initial reason for these monthly self-briefings; with a memory that was less than absolutely perfect, he knew he must refresh it by writing and updating that list periodically, with careful rethinking on the validity of each name, then destroying his notes. The idea of keeping such files in the house on paper or hard disk was more than horrifying: it was obscene. Sasha felt no comfort knowing that the list of names, once over a page long, had become easier to remember. For the list could not grow longer, only shorter, as men died or left the field on which this global game was played.

  The fundamental problem for Sasha, as a player, was that CIA had two moles in Dzerzhinsky Square. Only their case officers knew their identities. Neither was aware of the other's existence in the KGB, but either of them might one day gain access to the KGB file on Sasha. In which case, CIA and NSA would soon know everything in that file. Therefore, with the list now truncated to less than a dozen, it was absolutely crucial that every morsel of Sasha's revelations be known to a select list—each of whom might be taken for Sasha.

  Some of those names made him smile. Helms, who'd been hounded out of the top slot: no longer on the list, but he'd been on the early ones. No matter that it was ridiculous to even consider it; for a time, Helms could have done what Sasha was doing.

  Charles Foy, whose entry into the middle echelons of NSA had been thought political, years before. But Foy had risen by shrewdness and tenacity—and he'd known every secret Sasha had exposed. Definitely still on the list. And Foy's deputy, Sheppard? Impossible to know with certainty, but Sheppard might have had access to every datum over the years. He belonged on the list. Aldrich, however, had come into NSA too late to have access to the early stuff. Sasha mildly regretted keeping that name off the list.

  Colby, up through the ranks and stepping on toes as he climbed, first a protege of Helms but finally his nemesis. No longer on the list. Too bad; some people on both sides might once have bought that one.

  Randolph: a long and checkered career in CIA, one of the few who'd gone through the ranks to the very top. It could be Abraham Randolph still. Weston, next down the line, had been around the Company almost as long as Randolph and might be slightly more believable. Weston could have divulged thousands of critical items. What a useful irony that the man who had made a pastime of searching for Soviet moles in the CIA could still be Sasha himself! Unruh, privy to most of Weston's operations, was as unlikely as Sheppard but still a possibility.

  And Maule and McEachern in CIA, as well as Elerath and Vasilik in NSA: two now near retirement, the other two still candidates for a few more years. And who could tell when an embolism or a drunk driver might shorten the list at random?

  "Can't do it, Ivan; at least four candidates who don't yet have the need to know. And in three cases there's no compelling reason why they ever will." The cat yawned and tucked its forepaws under its breast. "Play it close to the vest, hm? You're right, I can't let them narrow the search any further. The Blue Sky craft is better than nothing."

  He continued to stare at the cat, which closed its eyes and began to purr. It did not show interest when he began to scribble again, lining out, rewriting, speaking disjointed phrases now and then.

  It bestowed only a bored glance when Sasha, tapping on the pad, said, "Scenario: I report Black Stealth One as described by witnesses to be a flying
wing, a vertol at that, with some means of becoming literally invisible. No more, no less. I tell them it must meet those criteria to be the real thing. Everybody on the list has the need to know those details, even those of us who haven't actually seen it."

  Ivan and Sasha traded a long glance, and Ivan blinked first. "So the welcoming committee will know it's paying for a gold brick. As for the poor bastard who's doing all the flying: at the least, he won't get the ransom money. Without the devil's own luck, he won't get back at all.

  "Well, it can't be helped, Ivan. I can't divulge any more because if I burn myself over this, I can't be in place later. You understand that by now, surely."

  It may have been some faint noise; or perhaps the unusual note of supplication in the man's voice. For whatever reason, the cat flowed up and across the table, springing unhurriedly from table to workbench to shelving, where he sat peering at a mousehole with iron-clad patience.

  "All right, you don't understand. I can accept that," Sasha said, tiring of this parodied conversation, yet unwilling to abandon it. He studied Scenario Two briefly, then sighed and gathered the paper pieces of his alter ego for ritual cremation.

  He turned before kneeling at the furnace. "Let me tell you something, Ivan," he said to the back of the cat's head. "There are times, these days, when I'm not sure I understand either."

  TEN

  On a Wednesday afternoon, Petra Whirled out of Brown University's failure analysis lab in a foul mood, sockless in her Reeboks, shoving her zippered nylon bag down into the bike's basket as if the nylon carried the image of her prof's inscrutable face. Hsia had dinged her seven points for ignoring conventional approaches on her term project—but she could regain those points before end of term by pulling an all-nighter, doing it by the book this time.

  She fitted her helmet on, thrusting stray tufts of honey-tinted hair under the helmet's plastic rim so they wouldn't whip into her eyes, then donned her bike chain like a necklace and swung a slender jeans-clad leg over the old American-made Schwinn. A man's bike, not even one of the trendy foreign jobs, but the thing was sturdy as a brick with that extra bar on its frame and mounting it was no problem for someone who never wore skirts on campus. For Petra Leigh, the Schwinn made a statement as clear as Uncle Dar's old musclecar.