To the Death am-10

by Patrick Robinson

  “Right. And a very dangerous one for Carla. Just a bit of bad luck. This randy bastard from the garage waits outside the hotel and tries to give her the Big What-Ho. Attacked her in some kind of sexual frenzy. For Carla, there was no alternative but to kill him. Quickly. And efficiently, like all special operators.

  “And that meant she had to get the hell out. And now she’s gone, probably abroad, certainly under a different passport. She’ll never be found.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “For a start, no one knows her name, no one has the remotest idea what country she’s in, and she left, apparently, no trace. No one even knows where she lived.”

  “Okay. But the truth may come out in the next few days.”

  “I wouldn’t put your life savings on it. Miss Carla was a complete professional. Assume, just for a moment, I’m on the right track, and then look at what she did. Her objective is to find out from Kathy’s mum when Arnold is going on vacation.

  “She enters the country almost certainly on an American passport, otherwise the forgery would have been picked up at the immigration desks at the airport. She makes her way to Mrs. Gallagher’s little town and immediately gets a job at the local hotel. She befriends no one, except for one person — Mrs. Gallagher, surprise surprise.

  “No one ever sees her arrive at the hotel, and no one ever sees her leave at night. No one has ever seen her car, not even Mrs. Gallagher. You know why?”

  “No, ’course I don’t.”

  “Because she never had a car.”

  “So how did she get to work and home at night?”

  “She had a chauffeur, who dropped her off at different places close to the hotel, quiet streets only. And at night he waited for her at an agreed place. She just slipped across the parking lot and ran to where her car was waiting. Until the night when Matt Barker decided to ambush her.”

  “Was the chauffeur her boyfriend?”

  “Christ, no. More likely a fellow member of Hezbollah or Hamas, or maybe even from a Middle East embassy. Someone right here in the USA gave her that dagger to protect herself if necessary. She’d never have tried to bring it through airport security herself.”

  “Well, it all sounds plausible, and I do remember that hotel manager saying she must have removed her documents from the file. And she plainly gave a false address, that Bowling Wharf or whatever it was.”

  “Listen, Jane. Sooner or later, someone’s going to report a missing tenant in an apartment block. Remember Emily’s words, apartment, doorman, balcony. And the police are going to trace Carla Martin’s passport, and it will be a dead end, and no one will ever have heard of her.

  “And we’ll still be the only people who care about her real purpose. Because Emily told Carla all about the admiral’s trip to London, his hotel, date and time of departure from Washington. And someone is going to be waiting for him. And that someone is going to try to kill him. Arnold’s life is in the gravest possible danger.”

  “Is anyone going to believe all this?”

  “I doubt it. Certainly not Arnold.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “I’d like to stop him from going. Which will be a lot like trying to stop a freight train with your bare hands.”

  1000 Friday 6 July Police Station, Brockhurst

  Detective Joe Segel had more “information” on his plate than he knew what to do with. There had, so far, been more than sixty-five “sightings”—people who claimed to have seen a youngish lady fitting Carla’s description driving toward Brockhurst during daylight hours.

  The vehicle identifications were more diverse than the geographic locations, ranging from small compact automobiles to huge SUVs. A few callers claimed to know where she lived, and Joe Segel had been moving police cruisers all over the area to check out the possibility of “apartment, doorman, balcony,” as reliably mentioned by Emily Gallagher.

  Three had emerged as possibilities, but police checks had revealed no one answering Carla’s description in residence, no one having gone missing, and no female who was out after 10:30 P.M. on Monday night. All three of these expensive apartment blocks employed assiduous doormen who logged in every resident on a computer, every night. None of the buildings was named Chesapeake Heights.

  Joe considered all of that added up to a huge disappointment. But the biggest stone wall he ran into was the identification of Carla Martin. Computerized records revealed only three white females of that name born in the USA in May 1982. Joe Segel trusted Jim Caborn on that one.

  Further checks revealed that two of them had never applied for passports. The other Carla Martin had been born on May 27, 1982, in Baltimore, Maryland. She was unmarried and now lived in Phoenix, Arizona, where she worked at a high school, teaching physical education. There were approximately 278 students, about 19 teachers, and 67 parents perfectly willing to swear that Miss Martin had been running three soccer games last Monday until seven o’clock in the evening, nine o’clock in Brockhurst. No, she did not have a part-time job moonlighting in a hotel bar 2,350 miles away in Virginia.

  The local Phoenix police did interview Miss Martin, but only half-heartedly, since she was plainly innocent of any crime. They thus failed to discover that her first cousin on her mother’s side, Kathy Streeter, was married to Mr. Dori Hussein, a cultural attaché at the Jordanian embassy, in northwest Washington, D.C.

  Like his colleague, Ahmed, Mr. Hussein was a field officer for Hezbollah. And a good one. Documents were his specialty, having graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design.

  Well, how the hell did the Brockhurst Carla get ahold of the Phoenix Carla’s passport? That was essentially what Joe Segel wanted to know. Although he realized it was a blind alley, because the passport Carla showed to Jim Caborn was blatantly a forgery, and could have been scanned and copied in a dozen different ways. The forgers might even, in a blind coincidence, have invented all the names, dates, and places.

  And had Carla used it to enter the United States, IF she was foreign? Who the hell knew? And anyway, that was none of Joe’s business. All he wanted to know, for chrissakes, was who had killed Matt Barker. And the only certainty with which the day had presented him was that a lady who taught sports at an Arizona high school was not guilty.

  A blanket check of all ports of entry on the East Coast of the United States had revealed nothing. There was no record of any Carla Martin. And the fact that Joe Segel did not even have a proper name for his prime suspect was really bothering him.

  But at ten minutes before noon on that Friday morning, he got one. Fred Mitchell, the ex-Green Beret who manned the door by night at Chesapeake Heights, called in to reveal that he almost certainly knew the barmaid the police were seeking. Better yet, he knew her address and apartment. “Sir,” said Fred, “she lived right here in this building, and I’m afraid she might be dead.”

  Detective Segel rounded up two officers, boarded a police cruiser, switched on the warning lights and siren, and sped out to Chesapeake Heights. And there Fred informed them that one of the tenants looked exactly like the photo-kit versions he had seen in the local newspaper last night and on a television news program. What was more, she worked nights, usually arrived home around 11:30 P.M. Yes, all apartments above the tenth floor had balconies. There was an especially large one on the penthouse floor where the lady lived.

  “However, sir,” said Fred, “she wasn’t no Carla Martin. Nossir. Her name was Jane Camaro. She had been in residence for only a couple of weeks. On a four-month rental lease she had paid for in advance. Cash, the evening she arrived.”

  Detective Segel nodded, unsurprised by any of this. “And why do you think she is dead?” he asked.

  “Sir, we had a little trouble last Monday night. Coupla hoods broke into one of the tenants’ cars, brand-new Lincoln out back. It happened just after Jane arrived back, like I said, around 11:30 P.M., maybe a little after that.

  “Anyway, I saw her come in, and then I had to go and check out th
e break-in. I came back in, maybe five minutes later, contacted the tenant whose car windshield had been smashed, and told him to call the police. Then I logged Miss Jane in on the computer, and no one’s seen her since. Brad — he’s the daytime doorman — has not logged her out since then, and I have certainly not logged her in.”

  “Can we go take a look at her apartment?”

  “Sure we can. I got keys to all the apartments here. But I sure ain’t looking forward to this. Nossir.”

  “You think she’s died?”

  “Well, I don’t know what else to think. No one can get in or out of this building without one of the doormen seeing ’em go.”

  “How about she has a boyfriend in this building and moved in with him for a few days?” offered Joe Segel. “Just gone AWOL. That’s absent without leave.”

  Fred grinned. “I know all about that, sir. I did fifteen years in the Green Berets. I wouldn’t say there was any chance of that, sir. Right here, we got mostly married couples.”

  “Well, if we don’t find her, my men will have to interview the residents.”

  “I understand, sir,” said Fred, as the elevator came to a halt on the twenty-first floor. The four men turned to the left and walked along the corridor, led by the doorman. At the second door, Fred inserted his key and pushed open the door, tentatively. Inside, there was nothing much to see. The apartment had been abandoned in a major hurry.

  In the bedroom, the wardrobe and drawers were still wide open and there was nothing left, not even bed linens. The bathroom yielded not so much as a spare toothbrush. The kitchen was bereft, the refrigerator empty, nothing whatsoever in the cupboards. There was one clean plate, one knife, one fork, one glass, two coffee mugs. All in the dishwasher, all thoroughly cleansed in scalding-hot water. There was not one single trace of either Jane Camaro or Carla Martin.

  There was not much else to do except to leave. And Fred was relieved that Jane Camaro was not dead. “Wouldn’t look good on the résumé, right?”

  But on the way down in the elevator, Detective Segel asked him one specific question: “How do you know that no one left the building while you were away from the desk, for maybe ten minutes?”

  Fred beamed. “We got closed-circuit television right here, sir. One small camera right above the door, another at the far end of the foyer. When you gentlemen have left, I rewind the film, right there at the desk, and check out if anyone entered or left. The film displays the correct time.”

  “How about someone you cannot identify?” asked Joe Segel.

  “Nothing’s perfect, and that’s a flaw. But I sure as hell could identify Miss Jane Camaro. That was one great-looking chick.”

  “Did you check the film after the break-in, you know, maybe catch a glimpse of her leaving?”

  “No, I didn’t bother. I was only out at the side of the building for three or four minutes, and I’d have known if anyone came in or left. Headlights, car engines, and all.”

  “How long would it take to run the film back right now so we could take a look?”

  “Maybe coupla hours. There’s a lot of film in that system.”

  “Okay. Perhaps you’d do it when you got some time and let me know?”

  “No problem, sir.”

  “Did Jane have a car?”

  “Well, she never filled out the vehicle identification form for a reserved space in the parking lot. But she must have had a car. Ain’t no other way to get out here in the country. I guess she must have forgot.”

  “Is the management strict about these procedures?”

  “Hell, no. This parking lot’s half empty most of the time. Ain’t something we take very seriously. But since you mention it, I never saw her behind the wheel of a vehicle. But that don’t mean she didn’t have one.”

  Joe thanked Fred for his help and said they’d be in touch, with regard to police interviews with the residents. When he arrived back at the precinct, he picked up the telephone and dialed the personal number of Lieutenant Commander Jimmy Ramshawe at Fort Meade.

  1530 Same Day National Security Agency

  The call from Detective Segel, in Jimmy’s mind, caused more questions than answers. How long after “Jane” came home did the break-in occur in the parking lot? Who told Fred it had happened? Precisely what was on that film during the few minutes Fred was out? And what the hell was someone doing smashing the windshield of the Lincoln? No one breaks into a car like that, especially one with an alarm system.

  In fact, these days, very few people break into cars at all because the systems are so good. Whoever broke into that Lincoln certainly did not want to steal it and then drive around with no windshield. And through the windshield was no way to get inside the car.

  No, pondered Jimmy, that made no sense, unless it was pure vandalism. And who the hell would want to do something that stupid, knowing they might get caught when the alarm went off?

  There’s only one person who logically might have broken that windshield, and that was someone who wanted Fred away from his station for a few minutes. Time either to get into, or get away from, Chesapeake Heights.

  He picked up the phone and called Fred, who jumped right to attention at the contact from a Navy lieutenant commander at the National Security Agency. He promised to call back in two hours with some answers. And, when they arrived, every one of those answers was precisely what Jimmy guessed they would be.

  The break-in occurred eighteen minutes after Jane Camaro returned home. Fred did not hear the alarm because he was watching television. He was alerted by a chauffeur who rushed in through the front door and said he saw a couple of hoodlums running away from a big Lincoln automobile with a smashed windshield and an alarm blaring.

  Fred saw the chauffeur fleetingly, and identified him as a guy who could have been Italian or Puerto Rican. And yes, he had studied a rerun of the film and identified a figure leaving the building who could have been Jane. But she had turned away from the camera as she walked through the foyer, covering her face with a magazine. It may not have been Jane, because she was walking kind of funny. But it could have been. Anyway, she was carrying a medium-sized suitcase.

  Carla Martin, you are one very professional lady. Jimmy Ramshawe’s admiration was sincere.

  Right now, he had about three hundred coincidences. And in Jimmy’s mind, they added up to one large warning light. Someone was most certainly determined to eliminate Admiral Morgan. But he doubted Arnold would believe him.

  He was right about that too. “I guess it’s possible,” the great man grunted. “But I’m not running my life around the antics of some goddamned barmaid. I got a lot of security, and it’ll be as good in London as it is here. Jesus Christ, Jimmy, leave it alone. Why don’t you check out that Iranian submarine at the eastern end of the Med? I see it’s only about two hundred miles from a U.S. carrier. That’s too close. Call me.”

  The phone went down with a crash. Arnold, of course, never said good-bye to anyone. Not even the president. Jimmy usually chuckled at this gruff eccentricity. But he found nothing amusing today. Absolutely nothing.

  0400 Saturday 7 July In the Mediterranean Sea

  The Russian-built Type 877 Kilo-class submarine, owned by the Iranian Navy, slid through clear ocean waters five hundred miles south of Italy’s Gulf of Taranto. Her captain was Mohammed Abad, who had twelve officers, fifty-three crew, and one guest under his command. The guest, General Ravi Rashood, C-in-C Hamas, had come aboard off the coast of Lebanon, delivered by a Syrian Army helicopter.

  These were strange seas for the Iranians, who normally patrolled only the Gulf and the Arabian Sea. But this particular submarine had just emerged from refit conducted in her birthplace, the Admiralty Yards in St. Petersburg, on the shores of the Baltic. It had been commissioned back in November 1996, and it had not been necessary to return to Russia since then. The engineers at Iran’s submarine base, Chah Bahar on the northwest shores of the Gulf of Oman, had been more than competent.

  However, Hull Number 901
had experienced some major mechanical difficulties eighteen months previously and had missed an Indian Naval Review. With her propulsion system on the blink, the Kilo had been towed behind a Russian frigate all the way back to the Baltic. Now, restored to pristine fighting condition, she had spent three months at the eastern end of the Med, patrolling the waters off Beirut and generally making the Americans very jumpy.

  There were certain admirals in the Pentagon, and one in Chevy Chase, who thought she should have been sunk, forthwith, in deep water. There could, after all, be only one possible reason why the Islamic Republic of Iran should deploy one of her four diesel-electric inshore submarines in the Eastern Med. And that reason was all-purpose — to assist the terrorist organizations Iran had financed and supplied for so long.

  According to U.S. Naval Intelligence, that could mean anything from supplying missiles to Hezbollah in Lebanon to opening fire on Israeli warships — the Russian Kilos carried 18 torpedoes — or perhaps even sinking a U.S. warship, since there is often an American fleet patrolling these volatile seas. This latter course of action would almost certainly turn into a suicide mission for the Iranians, but with Allah awaiting the crew in Paradise on the other side of the bridge, and sounding the three trumpets, this is not considered a bad fate for Muslim extremists. At least it’s never deterred them before.

  The Type 877 Kilo is a formidable opponent for even the most modern surface ship, because she bristles with state-of-the-art radar surface-search systems. Underwater, she is even more dangerous, equipped with the highly efficient Russian Shark’s Teeth sonar.

  She’s silent under five knots and can dive to seven hundred feet. Her range is six thousand miles cruising at seven knots. However, her single shaft and 3,650-hp electronic engine can drive her through the depths of the ocean at greater speeds. If she struck hard, however, underwater against an opposing warship, she would be damn near impossible to find if the CO cut her speed.

  The Russians have long gloried in the potential of this export-only submarine. Indeed, they have a big four-color trade advertisement which reads “THE KILO CLASS SUBMARINE — the only soundless creature in the sea.” And when they wrote that ad, they had Hull 901 in mind. The address in St. Petersburg, complete with phone, fax, and E-mail, is that of RUBIN, Russia’s central design bureau for marine engineering.