"Who is she?" Reid asked.
"Maria Schimmer, an Argentinian treasure hunter, if you can believe that," Hoehner said.
"What?" Gavalet asked, amused. "Schimmer. Is she of German extraction?"
"Her grandfather supposedly was an Abwehr general. Went to Argentina with his wife and his son, a navy lieutenant."
"Were you after them?"
"No. They were merely soldiers, no better or no worse than most."
"What does she want with you?" Reid asked.
"Wait for just a moment, and unless I can drive her away, she will tell you. Believe me, she will tell you."
"Guten Abend, Herr Hoehner" the woman said, her voice deep, almost masculine, her accent definitely South American.
"In English, please," Hoehner said. "It is the common language at this table. What do you want of me, Miss Schimmer?"
The woman glanced at Gavalet and Reid. "Your help, sir. The same as before. I thought perhaps that once you were away from your stuffy offices in Vienna you might change your mind."
"I have not. There is nothing I can or should do for you ..."
"I don't give up so easily, you know," she said, a faint smile at the corners of her sensuous mouth. She had taken off her scarf. Her dark hair, a brown so deep it was almost black, was very long and pinned into a knot at the nape of her neck. Her cheekbones were high and well defined as were her eyebrows, giving her an aristocratic look. But it was obvious that she had spent a lot of time in the warm sun recently. Her color was high, and becoming.
"I'm sure you don't," Hoehner said. "But you are wasting your time ... and mine."
"Then help me, and I will be out of your hair—" She caught herself too late. "Sorry."
"Help with what, exactly, Ms. Schimmer?" Reid asked.
She looked at him. "I'm trying to find a submarine."
Reid's mouth opened but nothing came out.
"Allow me to introduce my companions," Hoehner said gra-
ciously. "Miss Maria Schimmer. Carleton Reid, chief of security at the American embassy here in Paris. And Maurice Gavalet, a French police officer whom I have known for some years."
Both Reid and Gavalet rose and shook her hand.
"I'm intrigued, mademoiselle," Gavalet said. "Won't you join us?"
'Tes, do," Reid said. He was obviously curious about her.
She glanced at Hoehner, who nodded wryly. "Perhaps I can offer you no help, young lady, but we won't send you away hungry."
"Gracias" she said, smiling warmly as Reid took her coat and Gavalet summoned the waiter to take it, and to bring her a wineglass and a place setting.
When they were settled, Hoehner poured her a glass of wine. "Miss Schimmer wishes to find a German submarine which she claims was captained by her grandfather when it disappeared on a secret mission to Argentina at the war's end. She believes that my influence in certain circles might help in her search."
"I have reason to believe that he made it across the Atlantic and was sunk in Argentinian waters either by an American patrol or perhaps by a mine," Maria said. "I would like to find his boat and ... his body."
"All those records would be on microfilm at the National Archives in Washington," Reid said.
Hoehner held back a slight smile. "Miss Schimmer is not a scholar. And that pile of microfilm is daunting to say the least."
"The information might not be in those records anyway," Maria said. "But they'll be down in Freiburg in interviews with naval staff."
"I thought Nazi records were stored at the Berlin Documents Center," Gavalet said.
"Not the naval documents," Maria said. "They are stored at Freiburg."
"You have been to see them?" Hoehner asked.
"It was worth a try," she admitted. "But those records are open only to scholars. To a man such as yourself. So, you see, you are my last hope now."
"I have been to Freiburg," Hoehner said. "Just after you left Vienna. Your grandfather, as it turns out, was in reality Abwehr General Hermann Schimmer. He escaped to Argentina with his son, your father, Naval Lieutenant Joachim Schimmer, in the
spring of 1945. Neither of them were in the German submarine service."
Maria looked at the wineglass cradled in her hands.
'Tes."
"I lied to you," she said after a long hesitation.
"So it would seem," Hoehner said, not unkindly.
She looked up, defiance in her eyes. "Joachim was my stepfather. He adopted me in Buenos Aires six months after my real father was killed in an auto accident."
"What was your real father's name?" Reid asked.
"Rolph Reiker. He came with my grandmother to Argentina after the war was over. They were supposed to meet my grandfather there."
"The submarine captain?" Hoehner asked.
She nodded. "Ernst Reiker. But he never showed up. My grandmother died of influenza two years after that, and my father married an Argentinian woman who died giving birth to me."
"And your father died when?" Reid asked.
"In 1970. I was sixteen years old."
Hoehner was staring at her, an odd expression on his face. "Why did you not tell me this at our first meeting?"
Maria closed her eyes for a long moment, and when she opened them, they were glistening. "Because you would have thrown me out of your office."
"Why is this?" Hoehner asked softly.
"My grandfather, I was told, was a good man. But my father was not. He was a murderer. A paid killer."
"For whom?" Hoehner asked, his voice barely a whisper now.
"Ex-Nazis."
"Who did he kill for these ... monsters?"
"Jews," Maria said.
Hoehner looked away. "He was a very bad man, your father. I knew the name, but it took me a moment to realize that it could be the same man."
"So you see why I need your help."
"No, I do not," Hoehner whispered, turning back to her, his eyes blinking furiously. "Leave sleeping monsters lie, Miss Schimmer ... and you are Schimmer, not Reiker. Remember that. It may save your life one day. Now, go."
the man who had identified himself as McGarvey had divided the plastique explosive into two large masses. He set one aside, and then pulled the small metal desk into the corner next to the single window and climbed up on it.
Working quickly but precisely, he molded the plastique tightly against the ceiling and the corner where the outer wall of the building met an inner wall. The puttylike material was very pliable because it had had several hours to absorb heat from his body. The blueprints he'd studied had revealed that this was one of the spots where a major structural column ran up from the basement all the way to the roof. It was one of the main supports for the floors above, including the communications center. The explosion would not only blast a huge hole
in the floor, but would also cut the main column, causing much of the rear face of the building to collapse into the courtyard. The floors above would likely come down as well, sandwiching everything and everybody between them.
It was the same principle that had brought down the Marine barracks in Beirut. He'd been there. The operation had been crude, but it had been extremely effective.
The destruction of the communications center and the deaths of the CIA's chief of station and his assistant would give him a certain amount of pleasure, as would the operations he'd planned against Rome and Bonn and Lisbon. And General Di-denko's plan was as brilliant and audacious as it was necessary. He'd seen very clearly why a diversion was needed to keep all Western eyes pointed this way.
But he had developed another, even more satisfying aspect to this mission. One that he'd naturally not revealed to Didenko, but one that no force on earth could stop him from carrying out.
It was owed to him.
McGarvey. The name had crystallized so rigidly in him that it had finally etched a very deep canyon in his mind.
The man would die. But the method of his execution, the date and place of
it, and the finger or fingers that would pull the trigger would provide the final solution to a problem that Arkady Aleksandrovich Kurshin had lived with for nearly sixteen months.
The irony, he had decided, would be lost on no one. In the very end he would make certain of it.
When the plastique was in place, he took the camera from his briefcase and in two practiced moves removed two parts that had been designed to look like ordinary batteries. In fact they were batteries, but they also served as miniature radio receivers and detonating devices.
He embedded one of the detonators into the plastique, then hurriedly got dressed, stuffing the second lump of plastique into his briefcase and pocketing the second detonator.
Ignoring the body on the floor, he eased the door open and peeked out into the corridor. No one had come to find out what had happened to the old man. But they would be coming soon.
Kurshin looked at his wristwatch. He'd been in the building
less than ten minutes. He'd given himself twelve minutes to finish and get clear.
A bit more than two minutes remained.
Closing the office door behind him, he hurried to the far end of the corridor on the east side of the building. He had to pick the lock of the much larger office here. This one belonged to the chief of the embassy's Commercial Section, and was divided into a secretary's area and an inner room.
He went into the inner office, pulled the desk into the corner, and, as in the first office, molded the plastique into the corner between the outer and inner walls, up against the ceiling. The main corner column rose at this point from the basement. So did the gas main for heating and for the kitchen on the fourth floor. Directly above was the chief of station's office. Next door was his assistant's.
Inserting the radio-controlled detonator into the explosive, he got down off the desk and again checked his watch. Less than a minute had passed.
Reaching around to the back of his head with both hands, he dug his fingernails into the skin at the nape of his neck and ripped open a large, bloodless gash. The latex mask pulled away from his skin with a sucking noise, and when it was off he tossed it aside.
Next, he took a small square of tissue paper from his pocket and gently opened it on the desk. From inside he withdrew a small vial and unstoppered it. It was filled with a few drops of blood, unfrozen. He dribbled the blood over his right hand and three fingertips, then touched the desk, the wall next to the light switch, and finally the doorknob.
Before he left, he glanced back up at the plastique in the corner, and grinned.
The corridor was still empty. He pulled on his overcoat and gloves, and, briefcase in hand, hurried to the stairs and down to the ground floor. He paused for a second or two on the landing, then went the rest of the way down into the basement, where the service areas for the embassy's general population were located.
The kitchen was lit but deserted, as he knew it would be. Meals were rarely served from this kitchen unless there was a major reception going on.
He went back to the service and loading elevator on the
east side of the building, where he picked the old lock. With a few seconds to spare, he found himself outside on a side street, and he walked off into the dark, rainy evening, his head bent into the icy wind, merely another pedestrian on his way home.
allan berringer, second assistant to the Paris station's chief analyst, Sam Vaughan, rang the buzzer at the steel security door that led into the third-floor communications center. He was a younger man, still in his late twenties, fresh out of a four-year stint in the air force after college, and he had yet to learn any patience.
He rang the buzzer a second and then a third time. "Come on," he said, half under his breath. He was carrying a thin file folder marked top secret.
The light behind the eye-level peephole was blanked out, and a moment later the electric latch clicked. Entry to the center was by personal recognition only.
"You're going to be an old man before you're thirty, Allan," Susan Steiner told him with a smile. One of the cipher clerks,
she was exactly one year older than he was, and had her two children with her in Paris. Her divorce had become final eight months earlier, and she had a slight thing for Berringer.
"I'm already old," he said, handing her the file. "Bob sent this over. It has to be included."
"Hold on and I'll give you a time stamp," she said. It was a receipt for the classified documents he had delivered to her accountability.
Berringer stepped out of the entry alcove and on tiptoe looked over the opaque glass partition into the operations room.
"Here you go," Susan said.
He turned back to her and took the receipt. "Where's Sam? I thought he was here."
She glanced up at the big clock on the back wall. "He left a few minutes ago. Said he'd be right back."
"That's odd. Did he say where he was going?"
"Downstairs to his office, I think. Said he needed something."
"Have him call Hizzoner as soon as he gets back," Berringer said. It was the chief of station's nickname.
"Maybe you'd better go down and fetch him. You know how he gets sometimes."
"He should have retired ten years ago," Berringer said, shaking his head.
"Except he's smarter than the rest of us put together."
"Ain't that the truth."
Berringer left the communications center and started back to the briefing room but then thought better of it. "What the hell," he muttered, and he turned and went back to the stairs.
Sam Vaughan's age was a secret to everyone on the embassy staff except for Personnel, and they refused to talk. The current best bet was that the "old man," as he was called, had to be pushing seventy. Berringer guessed seventy-five was more like it.
It was said that Vaughan had been one of the old cronies of Allen Dulles, the headmaster of the World War II OSS and kingpin of the early Agency days, and had, along with the legendary Wallace Mahoney, helped create the CIA's Analytical Section that eventually was renamed Intelligence.
"Look for the anomalies, kid," Vaughan was fond of saying, "the glitches in the fabric of what you perceive to be the real
world around you, and you'll be well on your way to bagging the bad guys."
Easier said than done, Berringer had learned on his first day out. On paper it was easy to pick out the odd lot in the series: apples, oranges, hammers, pears, bananas. But in reality it was much more difficult to pick out the one improper motivation for one of your madmen who was making waves that would peg him as the plant, the double, the agent, or the source gone bad.
Bonn and Berlin stations were having a hell of a time keeping track of the action in the new Germany. No one knew which side was up. It was a situation that would likely last for years.
Here in Paris things were no easier. "We're the final arbiters," Vaughan had once told him. "The European buck stops here on its way to Langley."
But in the months that Berringer had been in Paris, two things had begun to happen to him. The first was that he was beginning to see some sanity in his work after all. The proverbial light at the end of the tunnel. And secondly, he had developed a deep respect and an abiding fondness for the "old man."
There was no light showing beneath Vaughan's door, but it was unlocked, so Berringer went in and flipped on the light.
"Sam ... ?" he started to say, but the name died in his throat.
Vaughan lay on his back just within the doorway, a puddle of blood and cranial fluid under his left ear.
"Oh, Christ, oh, Christ Almighty," Berringer whispered, suddenly too much spit in his mouth and throat.
It was hard to think straight. He wasn't a field officer. Those Joes called his type the "eggheads." Well, eggheads bleed just like everybody else, he wanted to scream, but he was having a rough time talking or moving or doing anything else. It was impossible to believe. Yet this was one of the realities that Sam had always talked about.
"Don't just stand there, kid,"
he would have said. "Get the lead out of your ass."
Gingerly, Berringer leaned over Vaughan's body and felt for a pulse at the side of his neck, knowing full well he wouldn't find one. He didn't.
Careful not to step in the blood, he picked up the telephone, realizing that he might be destroying evidence by touching
anything, but it was already too late. And the desk seemed to be out of place.
He got through to the chief of station upstairs in the briefing room at the same moment he saw the plastique high in the corner.
"Christ," he breathed. "Sir, I'm downstairs in Sam's office. Sam is dead, and there's a bomb stuck to the ceiling. At least I think it's plastique ..."
Before he could hear what Lord was shouting to him, he dropped the phone and climbed up on the desk.
Up close he could see the detonating device jutting out of the amorphous mass of plastique.
He reached up for it, his hands shaking, and he hesitated a moment longer. The thing could be on a timer, or it could be on a contact switch.
"Christ," he swore again, and he yanked the detonator free, bringing with it an ounce of the explosive.
Kurshin stood in the darkness just off the rue du Faubourg Saint Honore less than a block from the embassy, understanding full well the significance of what he was seeing.
He could just make out the side and back corner of the embassy. The office window just below the communications center was lit. Someone had already discovered the body, and no doubt the explosive.
The rain had changed to snow, and although the winters here were much milder than in his native Yakutsk, his cheeks still stung with the cold. Traffic had not slowed down, despite the weather. And even more people were out on foot.
It was all meaningless to him now. He had miscalculated. His timing had been off, and he was seething inside. He set the tiny transmitter in his pocket to the number one position and switched on the arming circuit.
An instant later he pressed the fire button, but nothing happened. His eyes narrowed. He pushed the fire button again. But there was no explosion, no thunderclap and rush of flames and debris from the rear of the building. Only the traffic sounds, muffled by the falling snow, penetrated the fog that seemed to be enveloping him. He could feel his rage and frustration mounting.
Crossfire (Kirk McGarvey 3) Page 3
