I didn’t doubt that Ronan’s conjecture about Iranian intentions was correct. “But, even if what you say is true, they’re still decades away from achieving the ability to produce a nuke, and Bushehr is not a weapons-oriented facility.”
“My friend, would you rather kill a viper when it is hatching from its egg or when it is six feet long? And don’t forget that with Russian help the Iranians will make faster progress.”
“What does all this have to do with how we ended up in this room this evening?”
“’Follow the money.’ Isn’t that what you Americans say? Stankov was a banker, but that would not normally raise a red flag. When we learned from your friend in Paris that a CIA officer had been killed after meeting him, Stankov immediately became more interesting to us. His death tonight leads me to believe that he possessed information of vital importance to someone in the Voskreseniye organization. But what he knew apparently died with him, isn’t that so, Harry?”
Stankov’s packet was burning a hole through my pocket. I had to get out of there. I didn’t relish the idea of sharing a dungeon cell with the man who had attacked me. For an insane second I actually felt some nostalgia for a frothy latte in the Company cafeteria.
The next phone contact was scheduled for two o’clock Saturday afternoon which would be eight AM in Washington. It was well after midnight now in Vienna.
Ronan was staring at me across the table. It wasn’t a friendly look.
“Ronan, I’m tired and I’m still half in shock. I am truly grateful to you and Sasha for saving my life, but I need some rest and some time to think about what you’ve told me. I'll try to dredge up something from what I know of Stankov that will help. Nothing that happened tonight explains anything other than that someone had a strong reason to kill Stankov. I agree that he must have known something, but whatever it was probably died with him and Thackery.”
Ronan was not a happy camper. He stood abruptly, gesturing to Sasha, and said, “Please excuse us for a moment.”
The two left the room, closing the door behind them, but they didn’t go far because I could hear their rapid conversation in their own language. They were clearly in disagreement, probably over which torture technique might work best on me. There was an ominous silence before they returned.
Ronan made no attempt to conceal his ill humor.
“I’m very disappointed, Connolly. You owe your life to us. Where I come from, that means something. Apparently you have a different view. Sasha will take you back into town now. We will meet again tomorrow. Right now I have some unfinished business downstairs.”
But he didn’t leave the room. He just stood there scowling in a way that made me think I was lucky to still have all my fingernails.
Sasha quickly fetched our coats and herded me to the door pursued by Ronan’s glare. We traversed a short corridor to the side door into the courtyard where she rushed to the driver’s side of the Skoda and was in it before I could move to open the door for her. I sat in the front seat beside her, and without a word she put the car in gear, turned around, and drove through the gates.
CHAPTER 29 – Evasion
She stared straight ahead. It was still raining, and the wipers squeaked across the windshield. Before we had gone too many blocks she broke the uncomfortable silence.
“Eitan believes you know more than you are saying, and I agree with him.” She shot me a sidewise glance. “He also knows that you are alone and without support from your organization. This is a dangerous position for you.”
She was playing me, of course, undoubtedly following Ronan’s script.
“That was quite an argument you had with him back there,” I said. “What did he want to do? Make me disappear? Pull a couple of fingernails to see what he could find out?”
She shot me an exasperated glance, and I received the distinct impression that she personally had no compunctions about pulling fingernails.
Several months would pass before I would learn about her and Eitan Ronan.
*****
She had been only 12 when her parents were permitted to immigrate to Israel from the Soviet Union in 1971. Her father, an engineer, had found work at a small firm in Jerusalem. They spent two happy years integrating into Israeli society, and then on 6 October 1973, on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year, the armies of Egypt and Syria mounted a coordinated two-front attack on Israel. Sasha’s father, in his early forties and a reservist, was immediately called to active duty and assigned to a mechanized unit under Major General Ariel Sharon to repel the Egyptian attack across the Suez Canal, held by Israel since the 1967 war. Within days the masterful Egyptian attack pushed across the canal and, using sophisticated Soviet-supplied weapons, inflicted crippling losses on the Israelis. In short order the Egyptians had placed 90,000 soldiers and 800 tanks across the Canal, and the Israeli predicament was dire.
Within three weeks, and after a desperate struggle, the Israelis had repulsed the attack and driven the invaders back into Egypt while on the Syrian front Israeli forces advanced to within twenty miles of Damascus.
Sasha and her mother were frantic with worry. Finally, a large, rough looking man in a dusty and ragged Israeli paratrooper uniform appeared at their door. He introduced himself as Captain Eitan Ronan. He told them of how he and his men had been pinned down in the irrigation ditches and embankments of an abandoned experimental agricultural station known as the Chinese Farm by withering fire from well-entrenched Egyptian forces. Sergey Turmarkin, in one of the armored half-tracks sent to evacuate them, had purposely driven his vehicle in front of Ronan’s position to protect the unit.
The vehicle had been destroyed by a Soviet Sagger anti-tank rocket. Sasha would never forget watching the unashamed tears leaving white tracks down Ronan’s grimy face as he recounted her father’s last moments. “He ordered his men out of the APC and then drove it directly into the line of fire. He displayed more courage than I can tell you,” he said. “He knew what would happen, and he sacrificed himself to save us.” Ronan had made it his business to learn the identity of the heroic APC driver. He promised that Sasha and her mother would always have him to rely upon. From that moment Sasha determined that she would fight her country’s foes, just as her father had done.
Ronan, with no family of his own, had watched the gangly teenager grow into a beautiful woman, determined to go to war with her adopted country’s enemies. Of course, boys had been attracted to her in droves, but she took none of them seriously. She never permitted mere recreational sex to progress to anything that might lead to a permanent relationship. She completed university and excelled at every military training course, and finally, upon Ronan’s strong personal recommendation, was recruited from the IDF by Mossad in the early eighties.
*****
Her voice constricted, she said, “Mr. Connolly, Eitan came to Mossad from the Paratrooper Brigade. Losing fingernails should be the least of your worries. But, no, he does not want to ‘disappear’ you. He is in fact quite concerned for your safety, and the safety of whatever you are concealing from us. He simply does not want to lose you.”
“I don’t think there was anyone else hunting Stankov besides the nut job you took prisoner. If there had been another shooter, we would have had a harder time of it. There was nobody else around.”
“But someone sent the shooter, and when he doesn’t report, they will send someone else to take his place.”
She was right, but my immediate objective was to put some distance between myself and the Israelis. I planned to be well out of Vienna before another assassin appeared, and I hoped never to see Eitan Ronan again.
“Look, Sasha, I’m really tired. I need to get some rest so I can think this thing through rationally. If he was on his own, even if when his boss notices that he’s missing a hit-man, no one will know what happened to either him or to Stankov. Stankov was missing for a long time before tonight, and it’s a long-shot that anyone would connect him with a naked, mangled corpse on a slab in the
Vienna morgue.”
“They knew how to find you,” she said flatly. “What that tells me is that WE, Eitan and I, are the only REAL security you have right now.”
She took a breath, then, “Have you been completely honest with us, Harry? It’s very important.”
Her eyes pleaded, and I found them hard to resist – more innate feminine wile.
I replied in time-honored masculine fashion. I lied. “I have to think things out. If something occurs to me, I’ll share it with you and Ronan.”
Sasha didn’t bother to conceal her disbelief. She expelled a weary sigh and asked, “Where are you staying, Harry?”
“Drop me at the Hilton am Stadtpark.”
Of course, she wouldn’t believe I was actually lodging there.
She tried again. “Please believe that at this time you have no one else you can rely upon. You will be dangerously exposed without us.”
Without her Tyrolean hat her ash blond hair had fallen loose, nearly covering the side of her face nearest me.
“Don’t worry. I'll be OK, and I’ll be in touch.”
“How do we contact you?”
“How do I contact you?”
Not bothering to hide her exasperation, she extracted a card from her coat pocket and handed it over. It was a business card from a Vienna-based export-import company.
“My personal phone number is written on the back. Call me, and I will meet wherever and whenever you say.”
She didn’t sound very hopeful.
CHAPTER 30 – The Key
She pulled off of the Opernring and drew to the curb across the street from the brightly lit entrance to the Hilton. Turning to me she put a hand on my arm.
“Don’t wait too long.”
Then she turned to stare through the windshield and refused to look at me again. I stepped out of the car and stood watching as she sped away. I regretted that I would never see that perfect face again.
The Israelis would not forcibly detain a CIA officer, but they would not let me get away this easily and had probably slapped on a tail, so I headed south towards Karlsplatz away from the Hilton as soon as Sasha’s car was out of sight. I was bone tired, ragged, and hurting. The Hilton was only a few blocks from the pension on Walfischgasse, but I wound my way through back streets heading away from the Opern Ring, and soon confirmed at least two shadows.
After an hour of slogging through the city streets I slipped through a narrow alley, sprinted around two corners, and concealed myself in a darkened doorway. When I was sure I had eluded my pursuers, I headed for the pension.
It was after four AM when the night clerk answered my ring and the street door opened with an angry buzz. I climbed the poorly lit stairs and trudged wearily past the reception counter studiously ignoring the clerk’s irate glare as he took in the disreputable state of my clothing. In Vienna, even slightly dishonest hotel clerks have a sense of propriety.
I took a quick shower.
Wrapped in the threadbare bathrobe provided by the management, I cast a longing look at the narrow, lumpy bed, but turned instead to the small writing table on which lay Stankov’s packet.
It contained a single item – a small, flat key attached to an oblong, numbered metal tag identifying a locker at Vienna’s Sűdbahnhof train station.
I groaned and pulled on some clean clothing. I had to get to the train station as soon as possible or risk losing whatever was in the locker. Many train station lockers were coin operated and limited to 24 hours. The meeting with Stankov had taken place hours ago, and I had no idea when he had rented the locker. It was too risky to delay retrieving whatever he had left there.
The night clerk was asleep in a stuffed chair in the lobby and grumbled to be awakened again to unlock the street door. I had changed into jeans, a thick cotton turtleneck sweater and suede half boots. The only suit I’d brought was ruined. My Burberry was the worse for wear from last evening’s festivities, but it was all I had. The pistol I had recovered from the sidewalk was a reassuring weight in my coat pocket.
It had stopped raining, and some Alpine crispness could be felt in the air, even here at the center of the city. It was only a couple of kilometers to the Südbahnhof, so I could hoof it fairly quickly. In the deserted streets surveillance would be easy to spot.
I headed south along the length of Walfischgasse to Schwartzenbergerstrasse to Prinz-Eugen Strasse and within a few minutes stood before the horrible sixty-ish façade of the Südbahnhof, another monument to modern Austria’s lack of taste.
The next telephone contact with Jake Liebowitz was scheduled for about nine hours from now at two PM Vienna time. Whatever I found in the locker, it was time to go home and turn this mess over the Jake. Life is short enough as it is, and mine had almost come to an abrupt end just a few short hours ago. I was surprised to discover how much I still valued it. My neck was still sore despite the hot shower; I was exhausted, and seriously out of sorts. Jake had inveigled me into this mess because he knew he could rely on my quaint belief that the Agency owed some loyalty to its agents and because he trusted me. I owed the Agency no loyalty, and I could no longer trust anybody. Stankov was the only reason I was here, and with him gone it was Jake’s turn to handle the mess.
I could not suppress the vision of Stankov, dead, gruesomely killed before my eyes. The shabby little Russian would not be dead had I not preyed upon his weaknesses all those years ago in Berlin. Likewise, young Thackery, dimwit that he had been, was dead, and but for my original recruitment of Stankov would today be pursuing the next rung up the bureaucratic ladder at Langley. They were just more threads in the tapestry, broken patterns of lines that all intersected with Harry Connolly.
Tonight I would be on a train back to Paris where I would treat myself to a fine meal. I would pay Volodya a good-bye visit, and we would share a bottle of iced vodka that would soften the chastisement I intended to inflict upon his august person for not warning me about his Mossad connection.
Then I would figure out what do to with the rest of my life. Escaping almost certain death is cathartic and leads one to realize how precious life is, even a life that had been shattered.
*****
The station was deserted except for the usual scattering of lounging bums and skanky prostitutes that populate such venues around the clock. It did not take long to locate the baggage section and the rank of lockers nearby. I matched the number of the tag on Stankov’s key to a unit, inserted it in the lock and opened it.
Inside was a battered leather valise that contained an assortment of clothing and toiletries. I lifted the bag out and walked back to the exit, the bag in one hand and my other gripping the pistol in my pocket.
Twenty minutes later I was back at the pension ringing the doorbell. The night clerk was no happier to see me return than he had been to see me leave. I resolved to give him more money.
Back in my room I spread the contents of the bag over the writing table. Stankov’s clothes smelled just like the man himself and obviously had been worn often and cleaned infrequently. The toilet kit did not include deodorant. But there was a half-full bottle of Courvoisier, probably a treat purchased with the American money.
The interesting stuff was at the bottom of the bag – two envelopes, one large brown one and another small white one folded over in the middle. The large envelope contained forty-five thousand dollars. The Agency had been less generous than one might have expected with its termination package. Stankov should have had over a hundred thousand dollars in his account by now.
The weasel lawyers had found a way to short him.
The smaller envelope contained a single, unlabeled floppy computer disk.
I stared at the blue plastic square for a moment and wondered if what it contained was really worth the lives of two men. Whatever it was, Jake would have the resources at Langley to find out.
At long last I fell onto the bed and sank into sleep. It was nearly seven AM. In seven hours I would call Jake and say auf wiedersehen to Vienna.
CHAPTER 31 – Maryland
Saturday, February 15
It was six AM, and the winter sky would remain dark for another hour when Jake Liebowitz’s Volvo pulled away from his house in Potomac and onto I-270 North. Two hours later, satisfied that he was not being tailed, he pulled into a strip mall just off the highway, parked and entered a restaurant that catered to the breakfast crowd. In the back, near the entrance to the lavatories, was a pay telephone. It was now eight AM in Washington on a Saturday morning – two PM in Vienna.
Jake did not expect Connolly actually to call because he expected him to be dead. The ambush he had helped arrange had been perfect, too perfect to fail. But Jake was a consummate professional, and he believed in being thorough, so now he waited beside the pay phone, just in case. Connolly might have missed the meeting with Stankov, and he would have to set up something else, but this was doubtful. Jake knew his friend too well. He was, therefore, startled when the pay phone began to ring.
Liebowitz grabbed the phone off its hook before the first ring was complete. “Harry?!”
He listened in amazement for the next sixty seconds.
His face gray with disbelief, he said, “I can’t believe Stankov is dead.”
He was thinking fast.
“Shit, Harry, I agree it’s time for you to come in, but not on your own. Not after what’s happened. You need some local protection. Tell me where you’re staying, and I’ll get some muscle from Vienna Station to see you safely out of the country. I want you to fly directly back to Washington.”
Harry's Rules Page 11
