At the far end of the corridor the stairway was surprisingly undamaged and free of debris, though the smoke became heavier as he raced down from the third floor.
At street level the pharmacy was burning furiously, but no one was doing anything to put out the flames. A few nurses were helping patients escape from the hospital, but there appeared to be no organized efforts at rescue yet. Everyone seemed to be in varying states of shock.
Outside, directly in front of the hospital, a dozen people sat or lay on the grass, the clothes scorched off their bodies, their skin flash-burned and blistering.
The only thing that Nakamura could think was that the American bomb had touched off an ammunition dump nearby, or perhaps ignited a gas works. But there seemed to be no fire concentrated in one area.
An ambulance was overturned in the middle of the driveway, on fire as was a big, black car behind it. An American car, Nakamura realized, his stomach clutching as he pulled up short.
His car. A Chrysler.
“No,” he shouted, leaping forward.
He had to swing wide of the ambulance, the heat was so intense, and on the other side he had to pull up short again. There was no possibility of getting close to the Chrysler. Its gas tank had evidently ignited, spewing the synthetic fuel in the tank forward into the passenger compartment. Black, greasy smoke rose up into the dust-filled sky, and flames completely engulfed the big car.
Suddenly enraged, Nakamura stood ten yards away from the burning car, and began hopping from one foot to the other. Burned and wounded passersby paid him absolutely no attention. People were crying for help, or for mizu—water, and others were screaming, Itai! Itai! It hurts! It hurts! It was a scene from hell.
Gradually a familiar voice began to separate itself from the others in Nakamura’s ears. A man crying “Tasukete! Tasukete, kure!” Help, if you please!
Nakamura turned in time to catch his driver Kiyoshi stumbling from behind the overturned ambulance. The back of his jacket and trousers had been completely burned away, as had some of his flesh. Part of his spine and a few ribs were exposed, obscenely white in contrast with his beet-red skin.
Kiyoshi fell backwards onto the pavement, and immediately lurched onto his side, a high-pitched inhuman keening coming from the back of his throat, his burned hands outstretched as if in supplication.
Nakamura reached him. “What happened, Kiyoshi? Where is Myeko?”
Kiyoshi’s eyes focused on Nakamura. “Nakamura-san, what has happened?”
“Where is Myeko?” Nakamura shouted, grabbing Kiyoshi by the shoulders and shaking him. “Myeko?”
“In the car,” Kiyoshi cried. “She is dead. I could not save her. She is dead. Help me, Nakamura-san. Please help me.”
Nakamura sat back on his haunches and looked down in contempt at his driver. There was absolutely no hope for the man. No medical science in the world could help him. Life was for the living.
He looked up at the destruction all around him, then back at the ravaged body of his chauffeur, who had served him well for nearly ten years.
Life was for the living, and Nakamura knew that he would be one of the survivors. At all costs.
Somehow he would return to Nagasaki to his wife and children and to his factory and laboratory to do what had to be done before the enemy arrived.
BOOK ONE
1
PARIS
JULY 2, 1992
POLICE SERGEANTS PIERRE CAPRETZ AND EUGENE GALLIMARD watched as the Air Service panel truck bumped toward them along the dusty ILS access road. In the distance to the east, runway 08 was flattened in perspective because of a slight rise in the ground level, and because of the thin haze that had hung over Paris and her environs for the past two days. Farther in the distance, windows in the Orly Airport terminal building glinted and sparkled in the morning sun.
The stink of burned kerojet was on the breeze because an Air Inter L-1011 had just taken off for Montpellier with a tremendous roar that rattled the windows of the maintenance gate guard hut. The silence in the aftermath was so deafening that Capretz had to shout.
“He’s not on the schedule.”
Gallimard shrugged, but as he watched the van through narrowed eyes his left hand went to the strap of the Uzi slung over his shoulder. A driver, but no one else so far as he could see. The van was familiar, or at least the logo on its side was, but they’d been warned about a possible terrorist attack on a European airport within the next ten to twelve days, and he was nervous.
“Call Central,” he said.
“Right,” Capretz replied, but for a moment he stood where he was watching the approaching van.
“Pierre,” Gallimard prompted:
“Mais oui,” Capretz said. He turned and went into the hut, where he laid his submachine gun down on the desk. He picked up the phone and dialed 0113 as the van pulled up to the gate and stopped.
Gallimard stepped around the barrier and approached the driver’s side of the van. The driver seemed young, probably in his mid- to late-twenties. He had thick blond hair, high cheekbones, and a pleasant, almost innocent smile. His white coveralls were immaculate. He was practically un enfant, and Gallimard began to relax.
“Bonjour. Salut,” the young man said, grinning. There was something wrong with his accent. He was definitely not a Frenchman, though the nametag on his coveralls read: Léon.
“Let me see your security pass.”
“Yes, of course,” Léon said pleasantly. He reached up and unclipped his badge from the sun visor and handed it out. “You need to see the work order?”
“Yes,” Gallimard said, studying the plastic security badge. It seemed authentic, and the photograph was good, yet something bothered him. He glanced back at the hut. Capretz had his back to the window, the phone to his ear.
Léon handed out the work order for an unscheduled maintenance check on one of the ILS transmitters. The inner marker. The document also seemed authentic.
“Problems?”
“You were not on our schedule,” Gallimard said. “And we have been warned about a possible terrorist attack.”
Léon laughed. “What, here? Maybe I’ve got a bomb in the back and I mean to blow up some runway lights.”
“Maybe I’ll just take a look in the back, if you don’t mind.”
“I don’t care. I get paid by the hour.”
Gallimard stepped back as Leon got out of the van, and together they went around back where the young man opened the rear door.
“Take a look.”
Gallimard came closer and peered inside the van. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Tools, some electronic equipment, and what appeared to be bins and boxes of parts.
A metal case about five feet long and eighteen inches on a side caught his eye. “What’s in the big box?”
“A VHF antenna and fittings.”
Gallimard looked at him. “I’ll open it.”
Léon shrugged.
Gallimard climbed into the van and started to unlatch the two heavy clasps on the box when a movement behind him distracted him. He looked over his shoulder, as Léon raised what looked to be a large caliber handgun with a bulky silencer screwed to its barrel.
“Salopard …” Gallimard swore as the first shot hit him in the left side of his chest, pushing him backward, surprisingly without pain. And the second shot exploded like a billion stars in his head.
Léon ducked around the side of the van and looked over tc where the other security guard was still trying to get through on the phone. He’d apparently seen or heard nothing. Concealing the nine-millimeter Sig-Sauer behind his leg he started waving and jumping up and down.
“Hey, you! Inside there! Help!”
Capretz turned around.
“Help me!” Leon shouted.
Capretz came to the door, a puzzled look on his face that turned to concern when he didn’t see Gallimard.
“It’s your partner. He’s down. I think he’s had a heart attack.”
The Orly te
rminal was a madhouse. July and August were the traditional months when Parisians took their vacations, and they streamed out of the city in hordes.
No one paid any particular attention to the three men who entered the main departures hall and went up to the offices on the mezzanine level. Two of them, Bob Roningen and Dor Cladstrup, were field officers from the CIA’s Paris Station. Beyond the fact they were both bulky, well-built men in their mid-forties, there was very little to distinguish them from the average businessmen. Nor, apparently, was anything bothering them at the moment. They were doing something totally routine.
The third man, however, was extremely nervous, glancing over his shoulder from time to time as if he suspected someone was following them. He was Jean-Luc DuVerlie, an electro-mechanical engineer for the Swiss firm of ModTec, GmbH, and he was frightened that the information he’d come to Paris to give the CIA would cost him his life. He was having second thoughts about it.
They went down a short corridor, and at the far end Cladstrup knocked at the unmarked door.
DuVerlie looked back the way they had come, and Roningen shook his head.
“There’s no one back there. We came in clean.”
“But it is not your life at risk,” the Swiss engineer said, his English good, but heavily accented. He was barrel-chested with a square face and extremely deep-set eyes beneath thick, bushy eyebrows. He looked like a criminal, or an ex-boxer who’d been beaten too many times in the ring.
“You came to us, remember?” Cladstrup said evenly.
DuVerlie nodded. “Maybe this was a mistake.”
“Fine,” Roningen said, holding out his hands. “Why don’t we just call it quits here and now? You go your way and we go ours.”
“They would kill me. Within twenty-four hours I would be a dead man. I have explained this. You don’t know these people.”
“Neither do you.”
“I know what they are capable of doing. I told you, I saw it with my own eyes.”
“When you show us, we’ll go from there,” Cladstrup said, as the door was buzzed open. They went inside where they turned over their plane tickets and passports to the French passport control officer behind a desk. A second policeman, armed, stood to one side.
“You’re booked on flight 145 for Geneva, is that correct?” the passport officer asked stamping the exit visas.
“That’s right,” Roningen said.
The cop looked up at DuVerlie with mild interest, then handed back their documents. “It leaves in thirty minutes. There is coffee and tea in the waiting area. Maurice will show you the way and he will stay with you until it is time to board. You will be the last on the aircraft. And please do not try to leave the waiting area until you are told. Comprenez-vous? Do you understand?”
“Yes, thank you,” Roningen said, and they followed the second officer out where they took another corridor nearly the length of the terminal building to a small but pleasantly furnished VIP lounge. The windows overlooked the flight line where the plane they would board would be pulling up momentarily. No one else was using the lounge this morning.
A telephone on the wall buzzed, and the cop answered it.
“After you have seen their weapons cache, as I have, then you will have to believe me,” DuVerlie said.
“It’ll be a start,” Roningen said. “And the body.”
“It’s there unless the police have discovered it. Leitner was an important engineer. Perhaps the best at ModTec.”
“What was he giving those people?” Cladstrup asked, looking over toward the cop who was still talking on the phone.
“First I will prove to you that they mean business. And then we will discuss what you will do for me.”
“We’ll see.”
“You know they killed him because he was stupid. He threatened to go to the police unless they gave him more money. But the police couldn’t help him.”
“So he told you instead.”
“We were friends,” DuVerlie said. “I was supposed to be his insurance.”
“Right,” Roningen said wearily. Already he was getting tired of the man, but Langley thought DuVerlie’s story was interesting enough for at least a preliminary follow-up. Depending on what they found or didn’t find in Lausanne, they would decide what to do next. But the Swiss engineering firm built, among other things, electronic triggers for nuclear weapons.
Capretz had the presence of mind to grab his weapon from the desk before he rushed across to the van. Something was drastically wrong but he couldn’t put it together. The phone was out of order; no matter what number he dialed he was connected to a recording asking him to wait. And now this.
Thumbing the Uzi’s safety to the off position he came around to the open door at the rear of the van. Léon was a couple of yards off to his right.
Gallimard was down and not moving inside the van. Something was definitely wrong. “Eugène,” Capretz called out. He didn’t know what to do.
“Something happened to him and he just collapsed,” Léon said, excitedly. “Maybe it’s his heart. Do you know CPR?”
“He has nothing the matter with his heart.”
“Well, I don’t know. He didn’t say anything. He just fell down.”
“Eugène,” Capretz called and stepped closer. There was something on the side of Gallimard’s head, but the interior of the van was in relative darkness and Capretz couldn’t make it out. But he understood that he was going to have to call for help somehow.
He turned to ask the Air Service man if there was a two-way radio in the van in time to see a large pistol suddenly materialize in the man’s hand. The first shot hit him in the right arm, driving him nearly off his feet. He started to bring the Uzi around, when a thunderclap burst in his head.
Shoving the pistol in the belt of his coveralls, Léon safetied the Uzi, laid it in the back of the van and then hefted the security guard’s body in the back as well.
Closing the door, he scuffed dirt over the bloodstains on the road so that if anyone came along they would not notice that anything had happened here.
Around front he raised the road barrier, then went into the hut where he took the phone off the hook, listened, then replaced it. He wore thin leather gloves so that he would leave no fingerprints, and the patterns in the soles of his boots were common. He’d purchased the boots at Prisunic, a discount store in Paris, five days ago. They were untraceable, as was the van which was nevertheless legitimately registered to Air Service here at the airport, though the company did not own it.
He drove beyond the barrier, then went back and lowered it.
Behind the wheel he checked his watch before he headed the rest of the way to the ILS installation just off the end of the main east-west runway. He had twenty-eight minutes to go.
2
KIRK CULLOUGH McGARVEY HAD ALWAYS HAD BAD LUCK WITH women, especially saying goodbye to them. This instance was no different, except that it was the second time he was saying goodbye to Marta Fredricks.
“I don’t understand why you don’t just come back to Lausanne with me now,” she said. They sat together in the back seat of a taxi heading out of Paris to Orly Airport. She was tall, athletically thin and wore her dark hair long, nearly to the center of her back.
“I have a few more things to take care of here first,” he said. “And I think it’ll be better all the way around if you pave the way.”
She looked into his eyes and smiled. “You’re probably right. And then?”
They’d avoided that subject for the week she’d been with him in Paris. And then what, he asked himself. He was quitting Europe, and returning to his ex-wife Kathleen in Washington, D.C. Or at least he and she were going to give it a try.
Tall and husky, McGarvey was a good-looking man with wide, honest eyes that sometimes were green and other times gray. He was in his mid-forties and had lived in Europe for a number of years, including a time in Lausanne where he’d run a small bookshop as a cover. He’d been in hiding then, as he suppo
sed he still was. Once a spy, always a spy.
He’d been a loner for the most part, though in Switzerland he and Marta had lived together. Ex-CIA assassins made the Swiss nervous, and Marta, who worked for the Swiss Federal Bureau of Police, had been assigned to watch him. “Watch you, not fall in love with you,” she told him once. “That I did all on my own.”
She was looking at the passing scenery, and he studied her profile. A blood vessel was throbbing in the side of her long, delicate neck. She’d come as a complete surprise, showing up on his doorstep last week.
“I heard you were in Paris. Thought I’d drop by to say hello while I was in town.”
She’d moved in with him, of course. They’d had no discussion about that, because she was still in love with him.
But she had brought, besides her presence, a flood of memories for him. Some of them good, or at least tolerable, but most of them difficult. What spy looks back on his past with any joy? Or what soldier, for that matter, looks back at past battles with any fondness? They had been at war. And he had killed in the fight. Not a day went by without some thought for the people whose lives he’d ended. Sometimes he’d been close enough to see the expressions on their faces when they realized they were dying. Pain and fear, of course, but most often their last emotion had been surprise.
He especially remembered the face of the general he’d been sent to kill in Santiago, Chile. The man had been responsible for thousands of deaths, and the only solution was his elimination. But McGarvey’s orders had been changed in midstream without him knowing about it. He returned to Langley not a hero but a pariah, and the CIA had released him from his contract.
Switzerland had come next, and then Paris when the Agency had called him out of retirement for a “job of work” as his old friend John Lyman Trotter, Jr. , had once called an assignment.
More death, more destruction, more pain and heartache. He’d lost a kidney in the war. He’d nearly lost his life. He’d lost his wife, and the loneliness, that at times was nearly crushing, rode on his shoulder like the world on Atlas’s. He figured he could write the book on the subject.
Critical Mass Page 2
