Time of Reckoning

by Walter Wager

  “Siegenthaler,” the man snarled—and then he vomited all over the rug.

  Yes, it was the sort of thing she’d do.

  Or they could be Sovs who knew the name of the local CIA supervisor. That sort of information was almost impossible to keep secret in major cities around the world, where both sides—and the local security chiefs—knew who ran U.S. and Russian intelligence nets. Maybe these two bleeders were bluffing, weren’t CIA after all.

  “Crash Dive,” the blond with the ruined scalp suddenly sighed. “She said Crash Dive,” he remembered.

  “Jeezus,” Cavaliere said as he wondered whether Merlin would accept this proof that he’d smashed up two of his own operatives and destroyed considerable U.S. government property. Angelo Cavaliere looked around the blood-spattered, blast-battered room slowly, tried to guess what Merlin could say now.

  He’d done it, and damn near done in two CIA agents in the violent process.

  What could he possibly say?

  “One minute,” Merlin announced in a shockingly cool voice.

  The son of a bitch was still computing.

  “You’ve got about one minute, Angie, to move these gents out of this shambles up the hall to my room. Here’s the key.” He tossed it, and Cavaliere caught it by sheer reflex.

  “What the hell am I supposed to do with them, Merl? These gents—whose eardrums and guts you just bombed—need a doctor.”

  Merlin was already at the door. “They’ve got an emergency number. When you get them inside my room, they can call for a medical crew—one of our own.”

  “Hey!” Cavaliere objected.

  “Keep them in the can. Don’t let them bleed on my bed, will you?”

  The dazed duo were both muttering, but nothing that made much sense.

  “And where the hell are you going?”

  “Hardenbergstrasse, to boot the ass of a very pretty and tricky black lady who caused this whole mess. Meet me there.”

  Incredible.

  After what he’d done, Merlin was righteous—briefly.

  Then he was gone.

  29

  It wasn’t just an act. Merlin genuinely believed that the Hilton disaster was entirely the fault of his ex-wife.

  She’d always been too nosy, too intellectual, too aggressive to leave him alone. She’d never trusted him completely. She’d tried to manipulate him, using all her knowledge and woman techniques and the sophisticated “personnel” approach of a well-educated administrator.

  He gunned the Audi out of the garage, barely controlling his fury. Nobody—man or woman—was going to manage Merlin. Probably thought she was protecting him with a backup surveillance team. Shit, didn’t she realize he was sure to spot them? Christ, she was goddam lucky he hadn’t killed them both. Neither of them too sharp anyway.

  Goddam lucky.

  Station officer or no station officer, he was going to beat on her executive butt. Hard. After all these months this woman could still get him angry. It was ridiculous. He had to be careful to handle this confrontation in a totally professional manner, strictly by the book with no trace of any emotional involvement or personal crap. Men tended to favor attractive women, and she was certainly that. She used it. Used everything, except the black thing. Merlin had never known why, and now he didn’t care.

  He’d never entirely understood her.

  She certainly hadn’t understood him—not really.

  Perfect marriage?

  The Audi was half a block from the Amerika Haus when he heard the gunfire. His trained ear identified the rapid-fire weapon instantly. It was the same kind of squirt gun the terrorists had used to spray the Ku-damm his first day in town—an L2A3 Sterling, probably stolen from some British Army depot. Staggered box magazine with thirty-four rounds of 9-millimeter stuff, 1280-feet-per-second velocity. Infantry job.

  Merlin pulled his .357 Magnum, pointed the Audi right at the front door of the U.S. cultural center. He was still forty yards away when they came running out, with the man with the Sterling first to hit the sidewalk. The three others—two male and one female—were dragging a woman who had once been Merlin’s. He was stunned for half a second, then extremely angry. He saw the rear door of a brown panel truck open, recognized the face of the woman inside as that of Lietzen’s homicidal mistress. Merlin pressed down on the gas pedal, and the man with the Sterling blew away half of his windshield and some key bits of the Audi’s pipes and wiring.

  The Audi was still moving on its momentum, and the black woman was screaming as they hustled her into the truck. The Sterling hammered again. Merlin had dropped flat on the seat, undamaged except for an ear gashed by shards of glass. He opened the door beside the steering wheel, dived out into the street and rolled over into firing position.

  His first slug knocked the machine gunner back against the building, and his second must have hit one woman who was pushing Diane McGhee into the truck. She staggered, and her allies jerked her into the vehicle. Someone threw two—maybe three—tear-gas grenades, and the terrorists raced away with Merlin firing blindly into the choking mist.

  He heard a crash, saw his Audi had rammed a parked Toyota and didn’t care. With his car dead he couldn’t pursue, so he did what he could. He ran into the Amerika Haus, saw Freddy Cassel slumped semiconscious on the floor near her receptionist’s desk and charged right past her to the CIA office.

  The door was wide open.

  The husky security man, Jeff Anderson, was sprawled across the doorway to the station officer’s suite. There was blood on the rug—a lot of it. Anderson’s shirt was drenched in it, so much that it came through his seersucker jacket. The phone on Anderson’s desk had been ripped from the wall, and so had that in the inner office. Merlin ran back, saw Freddy Cassel moving and—dammit—her phone wrecked too. He sprinted up the corridor, saw a door marked MUSIC and pushed it open.

  There were seven people seated in front of tables adorned with phonographs—listening to music. They were wearing headsets, and several didn’t even notice Merlin’s arrival. Those who did—including a plump fifty-eight-year-old widow who was fond of Aaron Copland’s works and younger men who’d treat her badly—almost wet their pants. Merlin was bleeding from his ear, carrying a terribly menacing Magnum and looking as if he might use it at any moment.

  There was also an assistant music librarian at a small desk. She had brown hair, falsies and an M.A. in music from Vander-bilt, the Princeton of the South. She knew a great deal about country, jazz, blues, soul, show tunes and even rock—as well as American symphonic, operatic, chamber and liturgical works. She knew little about wild-eyed men with large-bore handguns, however.

  “May I help you, suh?” she offered politely.

  Merlin noticed that she had lovely blue eyes and some excellent dental work—and a desk telephone. He picked up the instrument, dialed the number of the Hilton swiftly.

  “Suh, you can’t make outside—”

  He waved the gun and she stopped talking.

  “Angie?”

  “Made the call, Merl. Everything’s okay.”

  “No, it isn’t. The Martians just snatched the Black Queen, and the Watchdog’s leaking red all over the floor.”

  It probably made sense if you were good at literary acrostics and crossword puzzles, the woman facing Merlin thought, but this was no time to interrupt to ask.

  “Full alert. Notify all our friends and neighbors, local and Bonn. Brown van—no, panel truck—could be an Opel, heading west, maybe three minutes ago. We need a meat truck for the Watchdog to get him to a secure hospital—U.S. Army, not Kraut—and we need a cleanup team to cover here.”

  “They’re on their way.”

  “Make it fast. In about three minutes we should be ass-deep in local law.”

  The assistant music librarian, who had kept her hands clasped tightly as she stared at the Magnum, smiled graciously as Merlin slammed down the phone.

  “You really aren’t supposed to—”

  Merlin never heard the
end of the sentence. He dashed back up the hall, reached Freddy Cassel just as the high-low-high-low horns announced that police cars were arriving. The Berlin cops were quick, savvy and numerous. Eight men erupted from cars, guns drawn as they moved in warily. Three of those men were pointing weapons at Merlin seconds later.

  “Lietzen-Stoller,” he told them. “That bastard on the sidewalk was one of them.”

  The police told him to put down his gun, and he laid it on the receptionist’s desk.

  “There’s a wounded man bleeding back there,” he added. The senior cop nodded, and one of the others hurried in the direction that Merlin had pointed.

  “And who are you?”

  “My name is Frank Wasserman. They kidnapped a woman who worked here—black, pretty, early thirties. Took off in a brown Opel delivery truck maybe four minutes ago.”

  Three more officers entered, and one was sent to put out a radio alarm. “He’s dead,” said one of the newcomers with a nod toward the street.

  “You kill him?” asked the sergeant.

  Merlin nodded, and the sergeant sensed that this was nothing very special to the American who perched on the edge of the desk. Merlin was in no mood to handle more questions, so he decided to cut the conversation short.

  “Try Karl Grad, BND in Bonn.”

  The cop nodded. It was one of those messes.

  “You have any kind of official identification, Herr Wasserman?”

  “No. Just my passport. I’m a furniture salesman.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  Freddy Cassel opened her eyes, made some sort of sound. Merlin reached down, raised her gently.

  “Frank—Frank, they had—guns.”

  “I know. They’re gone. You all right?”

  She blinked several times before she answered. “I feel sick—hit me with a gun.”

  The sergeant ordered one of the police to take her out, and to radio for the ambulance to hurry.

  “Tell your men that some friends of mine will be here soon, five or six men in cars and a U.S. Army ambulance,” Merlin said.

  “All furniture salesmen?”

  Merlin nodded.

  “All armed like you?”

  “Some may be carrying submachine guns. It’s a highly competitive business, sergeant.”

  The policeman almost smiled. By now the corridor was filled with employees and visitors, all nervous and curious. One of those most concerned was the Amerika Haus director, and it was his office phone that the sergeant used. By the time he returned to the lobby, five more “furniture salesmen” were entering the building.

  “Merlin?”

  “Seal off the back offices, and keep an eye on that cop back there with Anderson.”

  The other Berlin police looked at their sergeant, who shrugged his assent and turned to the American with the bleeding ear.

  “Merlin?”

  “My middle name. I have several. Can I take my gun?”

  “In a little while. I’m just waiting to hear from my headquarters about this fellow Grad you mentioned… You’re bleeding from your left ear, you know.”

  Merlin thanked him for pointing this out, and then the sergeant offered to get a bandage from the first-aid kit in his car. “Unless you prefer an American bandage,” he added as the U.S. Army corpsmen entered with the stretcher.

  “Thanks. We’ll fix it at the hospital.”

  Merlin sent the ambulance team back to collect the wounded man, and the sergeant said nothing until the Americans returned with a white-faced Anderson on their litter.

  “Just a moment,” the police sergeant ordered stiffly.

  It could have gotten unpleasant, for no one is supposed to leave the site of a serious crime—in Berlin or anywhere else—until the cops have all the information they want.

  “You want to kill him?” Merlin challenged.

  “I want to hear from this Grad.”

  A young policeman hurried in, whispered something to the sergeant, who nodded.

  “Take your pistol, furniture salesman. I have been told to extend to you all courtesies as a friend of the Federal Republic.”

  Merlin scooped up his gun, thanked the sergeant again and led the medics out onto the street, where a dozen police were holding back a small crowd.

  “There’s a dead guy on the sidewalk,” one of the corpsmen pointed out as they prepared to slide the stretcher into the ambulance.

  “No kidding,” Merlin responded, and he said nothing more until they reached the emergency ward of the U.S. Army hospital. He was computing. All the while the doctors worked over the wounded man—as the plasma dripped and the scalpels cut and the clamps held pieces of the CIA security man tightly—he computed. He was still calculating and figuring as the needles closed the hole.

  Crash Dive.

  How did the Martians know?

  Who set this up?

  Why now?

  Crash Dive.

  He added, subtracted, divided—again and again.

  Where did they have her?

  Who had betrayed her?

  What did they want?

  Merlin thought, analyzed the possibilities over and over with Cavaliere, who’d joined him, and then thought some more. He smoked and paced and smoked, and he cursed now and then.

  Crash Dive.

  Something added up wrong.

  “Crash Dive,” he repeated angrily for the thirtieth time.

  “You said that. As a matter of fact, you’ve been saying that every couple of minutes for more than two hours,” Cavaliere announced.

  “Crash Dive.”

  The cigar smoke was almost unbearable.

  “For God’s sake,” Cavaliere grumbled, “can’t you say anything else?”

  Merlin stopped pacing, yawned.

  For a moment he stopped calculating and he felt.

  Pure wild impulse. No, intuition.

  “Metaphor!” he called out loudly.

  “Well, you never said that before,” Cavaliere approved and took another sip of the cold black coffee.

  30

  “Metaphor!”

  “I think I like Crash Dive better, Merl. At least I know what you mean.”

  Merlin ground out his corona, smiled for the first time in hours.

  “Metaphor! Why not?”

  “Is there something you forgot to tell me, Merl?”

  It wouldn’t be anything new.

  Merlin never told anybody everything.

  “Let’s find a doctor,” Merlin proposed.

  Since his ear was now adorned with a neat bandage, Merlin wanted the physician for someone or something else. Whatever it was, it had something to do with Metaphor—whatever or whoever that was. Cavaliere was confident that Merlin would explain it—most of it—reasonably soon. They found the surgeon who’d worked on Anderson, and that dedicated healer found Merlin’s idea appalling.

  “That’s preposterous. Mr. Anderson is still in serious condition, and I certainly don’t intend to endanger his recovery—perhaps his survival—by giving him sodium pentothal.”

  Dr. Milton Margolis was indignant, a condition not uncommon among graduates of the University of Chicago medical school. He didn’t know that Anderson was security officer for the Berlin station, that this CIA unit had been penetrated and that Merlin was gambling that he might recall something—anything—under drug-assisted hypnosis that could give a clue to the Red agent code-named Victor.

  “It’s just a shot in the dark—a long shot in the dark,” Merlin admitted, “but to tell you the truth, I’m just a bit desperate.”

  “You’re a bit crazy,” snapped Margolis, who was known for his neat stitching, big mouth and terrific backhand shot. “I don’t know just who you are, Mr. Wasserman, but I can tell you no civilian is going to give orders to a major in the U.S. Army.”

  “You’re right, doc. Excuse my dumb manners. May I please use your phone? It’s important.”

  “Keep it short, will you?” Margolis urged in tones that were brisk and officio
us.

  “I want the tie line to Heidelberg. This is a priority call—urgent—to Brigadier General Theodore Brieant at G-two. He’s deputy commander, G-two, USAEUR.”

  Dr. Margolis was surprised and confused, so he did what any well-educated and surprised and confused man would do to cover his embarrassment. He scowled—rather well. He was still making that rotten face seventy seconds later, when General Brieant’s aide asked who was calling and was told that it was a Mr. Kraft from Saigon.

  “Merlin, you bastard!” General Theodore Sanford Brieant roared into the phone half a minute later. “I knew it was you, you bastard!”

  “How’s it goin’, Ted?” Merlin answered breezily.

  “You’re the bastard who’s been tear-assing all over Germany in a U.S. Army car and uniform! Don’t deny it, Merlin!”

  Merlin tapped the ash off his new cigar, cleared his throat. “Good to talk to you, fellah. Mighty pleased you got your star, Teddy boy. Hope you got my congratulatory wire.”

  “I’ll wire your tool to a fence post! Who the hell do you think you—”

  “I’m the man who knows where the bodies are buried, chum. Operation Sinbad? That was way back before you got your star, remember?”

  “I’m warning you, Merlin—”

  “Don’t warn me, and don’t waste my time either, if you want to keep that goddam star. You plugged into Ajax?”

  Ajax was the central NATO intelligence communications net, with a monster computer at its gut.

  “Of course,” Brieant answered warily.

  “Then put this on the wire. Metaphor. Try the fucking priority classification on that, general.”

  Major Margolis was shuffling through some X rays, dazed that any mere civilian would dare to talk to a general like that. For a full thirty-five seconds he debated whether Merlin was pretending, or whether the deputy commander of military intelligence for the U.S. Army in Europe was on the other end of that phone.

  “Solid Gold,” Brieant finally confirmed. “The rating is Solid Gold, highest priority. Is this one yours, Merlin?”

  To General Brieant’s credit, he didn’t ask about Metaphor itself. He remembered how impatient Merlin was with questions he considered prying—a category that started with “How’re ya feeling?” and went on from there.