Critical Mass

by David Hagberg

  “Give me photographs so that he can be clearly identified, and tell me about his haunts in Washington, and I will take care of the rest.”

  “A word of caution before you begin, Ernst. Unless McGarvey has involved himself directly in your operation, stay away from him.”

  “Did you know him? Personally?”

  “I was an aide to General Baranov. I saw what McGarvey did to Arady Kurshin the first time they met.”

  “Then you have a personal interest.”

  “Yes, I do. And you must listen to me. If you are going to go up against him, you better stack the deck heavily in your favor. Back him into a corner. Take away his will to fight. Hurt him, even cripple him. But until those things are achieved, be very careful, because he’ll not hesitate to kill you first.”

  “I’d go one-on-one with him,” Spranger said. “There isn’t a man on this earth I fear.”

  “You would lose,” Radvonska said, and the simple directness of his statement stopped Spranger cold.

  Tatiana was watching him, a very faint smile on her lips. Spranger had the urge to reach across the table and slap it from her arrogant face.

  “Then I will back him into a corner first, as you say.”

  “Yes, and I will help you,” Radvonska said.

  “How?”

  “By telling you about his ex-wife in Washington, but more importantly about Elizabeth, his daughter, who is presently in residence at a private school outside of Bern, Switzerland.”

  “Why haven’t you gone after him?”

  “We don’t do things like that anymore,” Radvonska said. “But you do.”

  “Yes, I do,” Spranger said, and he couldn’t keep the smile from his face.

  25

  “THE QUESTION COMES BACK TO EXACTLY WHAT HE WAS working on that got him killed,” Bill Neustadt, head of the CIA’s forensics team in Tokyo, told Ed Mowry. “It’s been more than three days and still we don’t have the answer.”

  “It’s frustrating, Christ, don’t I know it,” Mowry said. “I was his assistant COS and he didn’t say a word to me.”

  By contrast to Neustadt and most of the others Langley had sent over to help with the investigation, Mowry was a short, undistinguished man in his late forties. With a paunch, a receding hairline and a red, bulbous nose he was anything but athletic-looking. But he was a competent administrator and a good field agent in the industrial and economic espionage arena, which Japan had become.

  “No contact sheet, no references in any file, no note on his desk calendar, nothing in his apartment, no mention to anybody why he was going to the Roppongi Prince Hotel that night, not even to his wife, and yet he was wearing a wire.”

  Mowry and Neustadt were meeting in the embassy’s screened room in the section of Tokyo called Minato-ku. The hotel where Jim Shirley had been murdered was barely a half-dozen blocks to the west. It was after eight Tuesday morning, and none of them had gotten much sleep since Friday.

  “Unfortunately the recording equipment he had taped to his chest was completely destroyed,” Neustadt continued. “In the meantime the Tokyo Metropolitan Police are starting to ask some tough questions. For instance: Witnesses say that Shirley met with a man at the hotel bar. A Westerner. The Dunée imposter?”

  “Unknown.”

  “For instance: Were we aware that Shirley was heavily invested on the margin in the Tokyo Stock Market?”

  “We’ve been over this a dozen times, Bill. This has taken me completely by surprise. All of it.”

  “I’m getting the impression that he was making ready to jump ship. Quit the Company and settle in here for the duration.”

  “It certainly looks like it,” Mowry said glumly. “His wife Doris apparently has no plans to return to the States.”

  They were alone in the conference room. Neustadt leaned forward. “So tell me, Ed, do you think he was doing a little freelance work on the side? Something that may have backfired on him?”

  Mowry had asked himself that same question a dozen times over the past seventy-two hours. “If you had suggested such a thing to me last week, I would have punched you in the nose.”

  Neustadt sat back and shook his head. “Beats me what I’m going to write in my report.”

  The telephone rang and Mowry picked it up. It was his secretary just down the hall. “Sorry to disturb you, Mr. Mowry, but when you get a chance there’s someone in your office who wishes to speak with you. She says it’s urgent.”

  “Who is it?”

  “Yaeko Hataya. She’s a USIA translator from downstairs.”

  “I’m going to be tied up all day. Have Tom or one of the others talk to her.”

  “Sir, she says it’s about Mr. Shirley.”

  Mowry glanced at Neustadt, who was reading one of the files. “Be right there,” he said, and he hung up. There’d been rumors that Shirley had had a mistress. So far she’d not come forward, and no one knew who she was.

  Neustadt looked up. “Something?”

  “One of my translators is getting excited. I’ve got to go hold her hand for a minute or two.”

  “Why don’t you go over to the safehouse and get some rest. You look like I feel … like shit. Nothing’s going to happen until Langley wakes up anyway.”

  “I guess I will,” Mowry said, getting up.

  “The apartment is clean,” Neustadt said. “But use your own driver. I’ll have my people right behind you.”

  “Will they stick around?”

  “Probably. We’ll see.”

  “I’ll be glad when this is over,” Mowry said, and he left the conference room.

  “I put her inside,” his secretary, Amanda Richardson, said. “Poor kid is terrified.”

  “I’ll talk to her. In the meantime get my car and driver around front. I’m getting out of here for a few hours.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The young woman was seated in front of his desk when he came in. Her hands were folded primly in her lap. She looked vaguely familiar to Mowry, who thought he might have seen her around the embassy. If she’d been Shirley’s mistress, he’d had good taste.

  “My secretary tells me that you know something about Jim Shirley.”

  “I was there when he was killed,” Kelley Fuller said in a small voice.

  Mowry had gone around behind his desk, and was about to sit down. He stopped. “You were there, at the Roppongi?” he asked, incredulously.

  “In front, on the path behind the trees. I saw everything. It was horrible.”

  “Why did you wait to come forward?” Mowry demanded. He reached for the phone, but she half rose out of her chair.

  “No,” she cried. “You mustn’t tell anyone. Not now! Not yet!”

  “The investigators are here from Washington. They have to be told.”

  “Especially not them,” Kelley said. “Jim was just as afraid of Washington as he was of the people here in Tokyo.”

  “What people? What are you talking about?”

  “Jim called it the chip wars. There was money, so much it was hard to imagine. Billions.”

  “Of yen?”

  She shook her head. “Dollars. In gold and diamonds. Jim said that so much wealth had corrupted everyone who’d come near it.”

  “Was Jim investigating this group?”

  “Yes,” Kelley said. “He was going to accept some of their money. But he had to prove that he believed in them. It had something to do with the Tokyo exchange. He would get information, and then he would buy some stock. I don’t understand it all.”

  “Then why was he killed?” Mowry asked, barely able to believe what he was hearing, and yet instinctively feeling it was true.

  “I don’t know. But he was worried that someone in Washington had found out about what he was doing. Don’t you see, Mr. Mowry, that nobody’s to be trusted? Nobody?”

  Their investigation into Shirley’s assassination was getting nowhere. The Station had all but closed shop. Nothing of value was coming in or going out, and there w
as no telling how long the situation would last. The Japanese authorities were enraged, and Langley was hamstrung.

  “Where are you staying?” Mowry asked, making his decision.

  Kelley looked up and shook her head. Tears were sliding down her cheeks. “I ran away to the country Friday night, and I just got back now.” She sat forward. “I can’t go back to my apartment. Not now. Someone … might be watching.”

  “Were you working with Jim?” Mowry asked.

  “Yes. He and I were … friends.”

  “Will you work for me? Will you help me find out who killed him? Together we can stop them.”

  She shook her head again. “I’m frightened. I don’t know what to do.”

  She looked very fragile. Totally at wit’s end. “I’m sorry, Miss Hataya, but we’ll have to go through normal channels with our investigation in that case.”

  “No, please!”

  “What is it?”

  Kelley was wringing her hands. “I need a place to stay that’s safe. That no one knows about.”

  “If I provided you an apartment like that, would you help me?” .

  “Yes.”

  Tokyo Station maintained two safehouses within the city. One, near the Ginza shopping district, was an open secret, but expenses for the other were buried in one of the embassy’s housekeeping accounts. Only a few key station personnel even knew the place existed. Ironically it was located less than a hundred yards from the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Headquarters on Sakurada-dori Avenue and within sight of the Imperial Palace.

  “We’ll go there now,” Mowry said, rising. “And you’ll tell me everything you know. Everything.”

  Shizuko Igarshi was parked across the street from the U.S. embassy when Edward Mowry came out with a young Japanese woman, and they both got into the back of a waiting Lincoln Town Car.

  The woman was somewhat unexpected, but then it was very common for Occidental men away from home to have young mistresses.

  Igarshi kick-started his Honda 250 as the gunmetal gray Lincoln pulled smoothly away from the curb. He waited, and moments later a blue Toyota with two Americans inside pulled out of its parking spot, shot across the road, and fell in behind the Lincoln. It was as he had been told to expect. Mowry would be protected.

  But who was the girl?

  Igarshi waited for a break in the traffic and headed after them, keeping a couple of cars behind the Toyota.

  The girl was probably not important, but he’d been taught to keep an open mind, especially when it came to Americans, and those around them. “They are a crude, bellicose and unpredictable people,” he’d been warned. It was true.

  Mowry’s driver, a Japanese contract employee, knew the city well, and in less than ten minutes he pulled up in front of a sprawling three-story apartment building near the Imperial Palace’s broad Sakurada Moat.

  The Toyota made a sudden U-turn and parked directly across the street, leaving Igarshi no other choice but to continue beyond.

  Mowry had already gotten out of the car, and the girl was just climbing out at that moment. Her eyes locked with Igarshi’s for an instant, and then he was past.

  Around the corner, thirty yards away, he hurriedly parked his motorcycle and rushed back to where he could see the front entrance of the apartment building. Mowry and the girl were going inside, and the Lincoln was leaving. But the Toyota remained.

  Igarshi pulled off the paper air filter that covered his face, and wiped his mouth. For just that split second he thought he’d seen a hint of recognition on the girl’s face. But that was not likely.

  Killing Mowry, he thought, would be even more interesting than the first one, because this time they would have to take out the two Americans in the Toyota, as well as the girl.

  26

  MCGARVEY CALLED RENCKE’S NUMBER FROM A PAY PHONE downtown near the White House a few minutes before eight in the morning. He’d expected it to ring a long time, because Rencke would be in bed asleep by now. But it was answered immediately.

  “Yes!”

  “It’s me,” McGarvey said. Rencke had sounded breathless.

  “Listen, Mac. All hell is breaking loose. I mean the shit has really happened. So it’s up to you, but I say run and don’t look back. The bastards want you. And listen, if you want my guess, I’d say it has something to do with Tokyo. They’re killing people out there.”

  “Is your line still clear?”

  “They’re killing people out there, aren’t you listening?”

  “Is your line clear?” McGarvey repeated the question slowly. He could envision Rencke bouncing off the walls.

  “Yes, yes! Clear, clear! But I don’t know for how long.”

  “Calm down, Otto, and tell me what’s going on. Did you pick something off the computer?”

  “Hoo, boy, you betcha I did. The jackpot. On Friday, Tokyo time, which makes it … I don’t know, Thursday or Saturday or something here, the friggin’ chief of Tokyo Station was assassinated. Everybody went bananas over there and over here and everywhere. They red-lighted the thing.”

  “Who killed him?”

  “Nobody knows. The Japs, apparently. Two of them in masks and hardhats. We got the masks and one of the hats at Yokosuka doing a DNA search. But now it looks as if the assistant chief of station has been targeted. Operations has evidently fielded a blind asset who got cold feet, or something.”

  “Is anyone making a connection between Tokyo and K-1?” McGarvey asked.

  “If they are, they’re not logging it in operational files. But the situation has definitely got their attention. Nuclear triggers from the Swiss. K-1’s Swiss bank account loaded with yen. It’s got to make somebody wonder. Operations has nixed your Swiss trip. It’s already in housekeeping. I’d say, run.”

  “I can’t. I’m already in too deep.”

  “Aren’t we all,” Rencke said.

  “I’m going to need more help from you, Otto. If you’re willing to stick with it.”

  “Tall orders or short orders?”

  “Very tall.”

  “May have to go to pink,” Rencke said, but McGarvey didn’t catch the meaning.

  “I need to find out two things. First if there have been any incidents involving the theft of fissionable material, enough to make a bomb, or the theft of initiators. Anywhere in the world.”

  “At any given time there’s a half ton or more of plutonium missing. And it only takes seventy pounds or so to make a big bang. But you want to know if any of these incidents have any ties, however remote, with K-1, or especially with the Japanese. Right?”

  “Right,” McGarvey said. “And secondly … I don’t know how you’re even going to get started on this one, but, assuming that the Japanese are interested in getting their hands on nuclear weapons technology, or better yet the actual item, and assuming that the Japanese government itself is not involved, I want to know what Japanese interest group, military faction, or even private concern or corporation, would have the most to gain from such a project.”

  “We’re talking big bucks. Major yen.”

  “That could be a start. Whoever it is would have to have the expertise to make contact with Spranger and his group. Maybe someone with East German ties.”

  “Or from the War,” Rencke suggested. “Germany and Japan were allies.”

  “Yes,” McGarvey said. “See what you can do.”

  “Okay. And thanks for the Twinkies.”

  One of Carrara’s people met McGarvey downstairs and escorted him up to Operations on the third floor. There was a buzz of activity, and everyone seemed more animated than usual; on edge, in a hurry.

  The DDO was just emerging from the briefing auditorium and he led McGarvey the rest of the way into his office. “We’re putting Switzerland on the back burner for the moment. We’ll let our assets already in place handle it. The general wants to know if you’re interested in taking on an assignment in Japan.”

  “I don’t know. I’ll have to talk to him, and then think it ove
r.”

  “No time,” Carrara said. “I’ve got a private jet standing by at Andrews for you. It’ll get you to Tokyo via Seattle and then the Aleutians first thing this morning … Tokyo time. You can catch up on your reading on the way over.”

  “Does this have any connection with the STASI group? I asked about the Japanese connection yesterday.”

  “Frankly I don’t know, Kirk. And that’s the truth. I just hope to God it doesn’t have a connection. The Japanese and nuclear weapons is a thought I’d rather not dwell on.”

  McGarvey held off for a long moment. Carrara was agitated. He wanted the man to focus his attention on what was being said.

  “I’ll probably take your assignment, Phil, but of course I’ll need to know what’s expected of me, and I still want to know what you were holding back yesterday.”

  Carrara looked at him bleakly, as if he were a man who knew he’d just been backed into a corner. “The two things may be mutually exclusive.”

  McGarvey said nothing.

  The DDO started to reach for the phone, but then stayed his hand. “Which do you want first?”

  “Orly.”

  Carrara nodded, as if he’d known that subject would be first. “DuVerlie was a snitch. He was going to show us where a fellow ModTec engineer was buried so that we would believe the fantastic story he was trying to sell us. He wanted a lot of money. I mean a lot of money.”

  “We’re still talking about nuclear switches?”

  “Yes,” Carrara said. “The STASI group, which we’re calling K-1, had approached another ModTec engineer with an offer to buy the switches. When the engineer held out for more money they killed him and hid his body. But DuVerlie found out about it, and figured he would be safer dealing with us than them, and probably make just as much money in the bargain.”

  “You knew about this K-1 group before DuVerlie approached you?”

  “Yes,” Carrara answered. “And we’d picked up rumors that one-four-five would be shot down.”