by David Wind
O’Rourke shook her head. “I’ve watched those tapes until I was sick to my stomach. I can repeat everything verbatim.”
“It was at the end, after one of the bullets from the assault team cut the audio cable. The last few feet of video were without sound, but Emma had Jonah Graham’s audio tape. When Lacey got there, I had just smoked the two terrorists. He said, ‘It’s all over, Ray. You did a hell of a job.’ I looked at the dead pilot and then pointed to Anita Graham and said, ‘No, I didn’t.’ That was the reason why I was to be a victim.”
Alice McMahon looked at her watch, and stood.
“Lieutenant, it’s time. We have to go downstairs.”
Hyte drew in a slow breath. “I know.”
“You asked me for a favor once. Now it’s my turn.”
He stared at the deputy commissioner, trying to read her face. “If I can.”
She handed him a sheet of paper. There were twenty neatly written lines on it. “Just read the statement I prepared. Nothing more, nothing less. Then let me handle the media people. We don’t have to delve into your personal life.”
“They’ll find out about it eventually.”
“But not today, Lieutenant,” she said with finality, and started toward the door. Everyone except Mason stood.
“Give me a minute,” Mason said.
Alone, Mason walked over to his godson and put his hands on Hyte’s shoulders. “I’m very proud of you, Ray.”
Hyte swallowed. The numbness was fading and he didn’t trust his voice.
Mason released his shoulders. “I won’t pretend to know what you’re feeling, but I have a good idea of what this case cost you.”
“I’ve got a few weeks of vacation coming.”
“Take all the time you need,” Mason said. “You can start right after the press conference. I’ll have O’Rourke and Schwartz handle the clean-up details.”
“All right,” Hyte said, “except for one. I want to see Jonah Graham.”
Mason pursed his lips. “Is that wise? He’s already had one stroke. This may kill him.”
“He deserves to know what happened to Emma, and from me, not from the media.”
Mason nodded. “I want you to know that when you come back, there will be a promotion.”
Hyte gazed at Mason for several seconds. His thoughts were rife with disjointed images of Emma lying on the ground, staring sightlessly at him; of Carrie, crying as she had boarded the plane to leave New York on the day after the hijacking; and of his ex-wife telling him he loved being a cop more than being a husband and a father.
“I don’t know if I’ll be back.”
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THE SOKOVA CONVENTION
By: David Wind
This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
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Dedication
A novel, though it may spring from one person’s mind, cannot be completed without contributions from others. It is to those others—my others—that I say thank you”
To Leslie O’Gwin-Rivers, my unflagging researcher, and her husband Jim Rivers; Allan Suchman for brainstorming on this one; and, as always to Bonnie Marilyn.
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All rights reserved.
Copyright © by David Wind.
Prologue
Chaumont, France, 1947
The tall broad shouldered man stared through the thick lead glass window as the gathering purple haze of dusk settled firmly on the French countryside. The coming of night did nothing to ease the tension weighing on Michael Mathews.
His gaze followed the wall, nine feet of stone and vine, until the encroaching darkness, not the distance, swallowed it. From the left, a soldier in full uniform emerged from the darkness to walk his post along the inside of the wall. The soldier’s rifle was loaded and held at the ready. Mathews knew that at some point during the next forty seconds to four minutes another guard would follow. The time schedule was never the same: the guard rounds changed every quarter hour of each three-hour shift to avoid any patterns.
He looked at the wall again. His first sight of the wall had been in the last year of the war, when the chateau the wall surrounded was an OSS operations center, regulating the invasion of Germany.
Michael Mathews took a deep breath. “I shouldn’t be here. I should have left a year ago,” he said as he turned to face a man seated behind him.
Colonel Walter Hirshorne shifted in his seat. “That’s bullshit.”
“No, Walter, I should never have let you fast talk me into staying on after the war. Jesus, man, you’re the patriot. You’re the man whom this is meant for, not me.” Hirshorne shook his head. “If that were true, you wouldn’t have survived this long. Mike, you’re as natural to this as I am. More so.”
“Stop it,” Mathews snapped. “You talked me into coming with you when they folded the OSS and merged everything with Army Counterintelligence. Even when I got married, I let you talk me into staying on for another year.
“My God, Walter,” Mathews said, anguish thickening his voice. “I’ve spent more time in Greece and Berlin than I’ve spent with my wife. And...”
Mathews wiped a hand across his brow and fixed Hirshorne with a hard stare. “Anne shouldn’t be in this damned place. She should be in a real hospital, with real doctors, doctors who know about childbirth, not army surgeons.”
“Is that what this is all about? Mike, Anne will be fine.”
“For now, perhaps.” Mathews turned back to the window and the creeping darkness. “But as long as we stay in Europe, I’ll have to worry about her and the baby. Walter, I’ve got a death sentence hanging over me because of what happened in Greece. It would never have happened if I’d left when I wanted to.”
“Hindsight—”
“Hindsight, my ass. Stupidity. Mine and the jackasses in Army Intelligence who think good security is watching their subject from a bar stool.”
“That’s unfair,” Hirshorne said.
Mathews spun; his eyes hard and unyielding. “Unfair? What the hell kind of security lets a man walk around carrying the theoretical design and prototype manufacturing plans for a fusion bomb in his suitcase?”
“Was it fair for me to have had to take a team into Greece, hunt down seven communist terrorists, and kill each of them because they’d seen the designs?”
He drew himself taller. “Was it fair to murder those seven just to make sure that none of them might possibly have been able to memorize every bit of scientific information they’d read?”
“That’s not the point!” Standing, Hirshorne took three steps forward, stopping inches short of Mathews. His chin jutted forward, his teeth clamped tightly together. “What you did, fair or not, was to make certain the future balance of power does not leave us with our thumbs up our asses, the way we were when the Japs hit Pearl Harbor.
“The Soviets would have given anything, killed any number of people, to keep Tucker’s papers. And for God’s sake, stop this self-pitying hypocrisy.” Hirshorne took a step back and looked around the room. “We aren’t in the middle of a war, Michael: We’re waiting for your child to be born.”
Mathews started to say something but changed his mind. He exhaled sharply, and nodded.
“Good. Now, try to relax, cesarean sections aren’t that uncommon any longer,” Hirshorne added, giving his friend’s arm a reassuring pat and then moving on to the window.
Michael Mathews was no less anxious with Hirshorne’s words. His friend’s wife wasn’t lying on the operating table; his was.
He tried not to castigate himself further. There had been choices, and he held himself partly to blame as well. He could have forced Anne to return to the States when he learned she was pregnant. She would have had the advantage of a real hospital instead of a c
ountry retreat for worn out intelligence officers.
As usual, he’d been involved on a mission. To leave it would jeopardize the entire operation; Anne had refused to return home when she learned she was pregnant. Those were the reasons why, instead of being in a stateside hospital, his first child would be born in the French countryside, in a former OSS hospital now under the control of the Army Counter Intelligence Corps—the CIC. And, he added in his silent dialogue, Walter Hirshorne had needed him. He couldn’t let his friend down, not even when it came to childbirth.
Mathews inhaled the almost toxic fumes of disinfectants and cigarette smoke. He slipped a cigarette between his lips and, lighting it, gazed at Hirshorne’s semi-profile.
Mathews studied his friend’s strong face. He tried to see beyond the taut lines of tension that Hirshorne wore like battle armor. He tried to read his friend’s expression and failed. There was no one in the world like Walter Hirshorne. The man was the most dedicated person he had ever known, and he’d known Hirshorne almost all his life.
Walter Hirshorne, former assistant director of the disbanded European section of the OSS, and second in charge of the OSS under General ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, was now in charge of the Western European CIC, and had been since the end of the war. Hirshorne ran the operation as he had run everything else in his life, with all-out purpose and dedication to his country and his job.
During the war, Hirshorne had lived for the OSS. He’d made his division the most potent intelligence apparatus on the Allied side. When the war had ended and Truman had given in to the fears of the OSS growing into a “super intelligence agency,” he’d ordered the OSS dismantled.
Army Intelligence swept up the ashes of the OSS and incorporated the remaining apparatuses into the Counter Intelligence Corps. Picking through the remains of the OSS personnel, the powers-who-had-been asked Hirshorne to stay on and guide the CIC.
Hirshorne agreed, because he’d known the importance of information gathering and of counter intelligence was not something that ended with the war. Rather, as he had explained many times to Mathews, he envisioned the intelligence apparatuses of the major powers becoming the most important and significant part of their long-term ability to survive. More so, Hirshorne believed, than even the armed services.
Such was the future according to Walter Hirshorne; but it was Walter Hirshorne’s future, not his.
“Did you put my papers through?”
Hirshorne’s back stiffened. It was answer enough for Mathews.
“I’m finished. No more, Walter. I’m out of it.”
“A desk job,” Hirshorne implored. “A transfer back to the States and a promotion. You can’t give it all up—not when they’ve already started to set up the new agency.”
“Yes, I can. When Anne, I, and the baby leave this hospital, we’re going home. I’m going to become part of the real world.”
Hirshorne waved his hand in the air. “It’s not that simple.”
Mathews stiffened. “The hell it isn’t. I’ve been playing spy since the third year of the war. I’ve been shot twice, and I’ve killed more people than I want to contemplate. However, I have a family now. I’ve made my decision. I’m out and I’m staying out.”
Hirshorne shook his head. “Michael, you’ve spent the last four years doing things that most people back home couldn’t even bring themselves to imagine, much less do. How can you think you can go back to what you were before the war? My God, you’ve got more enemies around the world than most people have friends.”
“Don’t play those games with me, Walter. You know better. And, Walter, after this last operation, I won’t give myself six months of life if I stay in.”
Mathews fell silent. Then his features shifted. “It’s not for me. I don’t care about me; but I have a wife, and in a few minutes, I’ll have a child. Try to understand the responsibility I feel for them. Walter, I owe it to them to stay alive, to be there for them when they need me.”
Hirshorne turned fully to Mathews. “Let’s talk about it after the baby.”
“No.” Riveting Hirshorne with a long stare, Mathews said, “We’ll do it now. We’ve known each other for over twenty years. Five more minutes isn’t going to change my mind. I want out of CIC, out of the army, and out of Europe!”
Hirshorne held Mathews’ determined gaze before reluctantly nodding. “I’ll make the arrangements as soon as Anne and the baby can travel.”
“I want one more thing. I want protection. Not for me, but for Anne and the baby.”
Hirshorne shook his head sadly. “You’re letting that death thing get to you. That’s not the way to play the game, and you know it. It was an operation. Not even the Soviets turn failed clandestine operations into personal vendettas.”
“The threat is from SMERSH, not from anything else. You heard what Serkovich said before he died. The Madman put a price on my head. I have no reason to doubt him. No reason at all.”
“I would never let anything happen to you, or to Anne and the baby. It’s a godfather’s responsibility; you know that.”
“Then, you’ll arrange for protection for a while after we return home?”
“Of course,” Hirshorne said.
Mathews drew in a deep breath. He knew he was overreacting, and tried to make himself calm down. He looked at his watch. “How much longer?”
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The operating room was quiet. Anne Mathews lay on the table. Her body was draped with operating sheets except for her swollen abdomen. Her eyes were closed, her breathing monitored carefully.
Two army doctors, Captain Joe Markham and Colonel Steven Ginsberg, with a team of three nurses had begun the cesarean section eleven minutes ago—seven minutes after Anne Mathews had succumbed to the anesthesia.
Joe Markham stood on Anne’s left, watching Steven Ginsberg make the final incision that bared the woman’s uterus, admiring the field surgeon’s precision.
“Nice,” Markham said as Ginsberg began the delicate maneuver of lifting the uterus. When that task was completed, Ginsberg smiled beneath his surgical mask and slipped his hand into the uterus to ease the infant out.
A few seconds later, Markham’s gaze went farther up the uterus. “Steven, look.”
Ginsberg paused to glance at Markham. “I see it,” he said as the baby’s head emerged.
“C’mon, Joe, let’s move.”
Markham edged closer to Ginsberg and prepared to take the baby. A quarter of a minute later, Ginsberg pulled the baby completely out of the uterus and handed it to Markham.
Joe Markham put one gloved hand under the newborn’s chest, and placed the other on its back. He lifted the baby and turned to the nurse. She was in position, ready to receive the baby, and hold it so that the doctor could cut the cord.
When the doctor placed the child in the nurse’s grasp, it opened its eyes and stared up at the doctor. He quickly and neatly tied and cut the umbilical cord. “Welcome to the world.”
“Let’s move it, Joe. I need some help,” called Ginsberg.
“Clear his breathing passages,” Markham ordered the nurse holding a stainless steel tray of utensils and instruments.
When Markham turned back to the operating table, he noticed the third nurse was backing toward the door. Her eyes were frightened. Her face was pale. He chalked up her reaction to inexperience. Dismissing the young nurse from his mind, he went to assist the other doctor in finishing the operation.
Behind him, unnoticed, the chalky-faced nurse reached the door and tapped it three times with her heel before stepping away.
The door burst open. The nurse clearing the infant’s throat turned and froze. Five feet away stood two men wearing army uniforms with CIC insignias. Both men held weapons at the ready.
Startled, Colonel Steven Ginsberg looked up from Anne Mathews’ abdomen. “Get the hell out of here.”
“The baby,” said the man holding a Colt .45 automatic. “Give me the child!”
Joe Markham moved protectively toward t
he nurse and infant.
The man with the Colt fired once. The bullet entered the doctor’s forehead and exited the back of his head, spraying Steven Ginsberg and Anne Mathews with gray matter and blood. The force of the bullet knocked the doctor’s body back. Joe Markham’s body hit the operating table and fell across Anne Mathews’ open abdomen.
“Don’t anyone move,” said the man, his voice thick with the accent of Eastern Europe.
The nurse who had signaled the men took the infant from the second nurse, wrapped it in a receiving blanket, and started toward the door.
Suddenly, the operating door burst open as Michael Mathews and Walter Hirshorne charged inside.
The lead gunman turned and fired. Mathews grunted off a cry of pain as he fell, clutching a shattered knee. He stared at the man who had shot him, his mind strangely sluggish.
The second man jumped Hirshorne, pinning him to the wall and pressing the barrel of his pistol to the underside of Hirshorne’s chin. His finger tightened on the trigger.
“No,” ordered the leader. “I have what I came for.”
The gunman eased the pressure on the trigger, but did not move the weapon away.
The leader stared down at Mathews, his face alive with unbridled rage and hatred.
“I am Vladim Koshenski! You remember my son, do you not… four months ago, outside of Athens?”
Mathews recognized the pale blue and crazed eyes almost before the man had spoken. The man’s eyes were duplicates of another man’s. And, staring into those eyes, Michael Mathews knew that his worst nightmare had come true. The head of European operations for SMERSH had come for him.
Mathews ignored the pain burning through his leg. He ignored the man who had shot him and looked across the room to the table where his wife lay.
“Look at me!” Koshenski screamed. “I know you remember him. His name was Serge Koshenski! You murdered him for a few scraps of paper!”
Mathews tried to stand, but his ruined knee would not hold him.
“I know you remember him, as I know you killed him. Now you pay. I take your son to replace mine. I want you to know, before you die, I will become his father!”
