October's Ghost

by Ryne Douglas Pearson

  George felt the hit but didn’t know what had happened. Just a bright flash and the crashing of metal. It was his chance, maybe his last one. He pulled the latch on the right rear passenger door and rolled into the street, his survival instinct propelling his legs faster than he’d run in years east on Santa Monica Boulevard. A few seconds later he was nowhere to be seen.

  * * *

  Sergeant Burns saw the crash ahead too late to brake and maneuver around the second car. He hit it almost broadside, pushing it into the light pole at the southwest corner of La Brea and Santa Monica. He could see the suspect car a hundred feet down on La Brea and someone rolling out of the backseat, but couldn’t get out of his patrol car to do anything about it. Looking down, he saw the telltale signs of a compound fracture of his right femur, the bright white bone protruding grotesquely through his dark blue uniform pants.

  He reached for the microphone just as the blue Chevy started to move again. “Six L Fifty. TC at Santa Monica and La Brea. Officer down.” He glanced into his side mirror and started to cry, but not from the pain. “Air Twenty is down. Jesus.”

  * * *

  Tomás got the Lumina moving again, his head searching for other cops as Jorge reached back for Su—

  “He’s gone! Dammit!” He raised his head, feeling a sharp soreness in the back of his neck, and looked out the...open door. Fuck! He moved as much as he could as the vehicle’s motion closed the rear door, his eyes sweeping the area. Nothing. Sullivan was nowhere.

  “What now?” Tomás yelled, blood spattering from a cut in his mouth as he talked.

  “Get us out of here. Fast!”

  * * *

  Art laid down over a hundred feet of skid marks, the Chevy coming to a stop fifty feet from the inferno that had fallen from the sky. A second glowing column of smoke was rising into the dark sky about a block to the east. He threw the car into reverse as soon as it stopped and backed another hundred feet away, blocking traffic coming south on La Brea. The relay that the pursuing LAPD car had crashed came a second later.

  “Call it in,” Art directed. He stepped from the car, the heat from the blaze half a football field away causing his cheeks to flush. He slammed the door and went to the trunk, pulling flares out and setting a barrier of small, bright fires across the wide boulevard.

  Frankie reported to the communications center that which she was certain LAPD already knew of. More death. Dead cops. She got out of the car and walked a few yards toward the hot wall of orange that completely blocked La Brea. Her right hand came up and snapped the thumb-break strap shut. They’re on the other side of that. Just through the fire.

  Art saw his partner standing alone fifty feet away, just staring into the flames. She was statue-like, unfazed by the heat or the thought of what had... Of course.

  “Frankie,” Art said as he walked up from behind. “Frankie.”

  A portion of the white-and-blue tail of the helicopter was protruding from the inferno, but it was soon consumed, changing from a once-beautiful craft to a blackened hunk of metal. Changed. Frankie watched it, her partner’s words eliciting no immediate response.

  “You okay?”

  Frankie turned around, facing her partner as the pulsating blaze silhouetted her from behind. “Fine.”

  Art watched her walk past toward the car, knowing a lie when he heard it.

  * * *

  The DDI made some half-funny joke about burning the candle at both ends that Healy found no humor in. The mere possibility of a leak in Drummond’s directorate necessitated that he and the DDO do the grunt work on the new situation involving Cuba. CANDLE would have to wait.

  “Our illustrious leader on his way down?” the DDO asked.

  “In the air,” Drummond affirmed.

  “Better than here.” Healy had even less respect for the DCI than Drummond did. That came more from his gut than from any overt knowledge. He was an Agency lifer with enough experience in the field that his ability to read people had picked up on Merriweather’s real makeup long before he was ever confirmed for the position. The man had been a nemesis on the Hill when he chaired the Oversight Committee, and now he was a more potent nemesis within the ranks. His trust of his subordinates was low, Healy had recognized, giving few of those “underlings” reason to reciprocate with acceptance. The DDO, five years older than his Intelligence counterpart, had seen a lot of changes and personalities in his years at Langley, but nothing on par with this. He had even found himself hoping that the President, if he didn’t come to his senses, would fall short in the election just two years off. It wasn’t a pleasant thing to contemplate, or very professional, but Mike Healy, like many at the Agency, was at the end of his rope.

  And now, he hoped, so would be Anthony Merriweather’s career.

  “Did Moscow acknowledge everything okay?”

  “Yep,” Healy said. “Hopefully we’ll have something today. God, I hope it’s today.”

  So did the DDI. All the coincidental data—the tape, Vishkov’s presence, disappearance of key Cubans—was leading directly to the conclusion that none of them truly wanted to accept, much less deal with. But that they would, regardless of their boss’s read on the situation.

  “Now it’s back to desk days,” Drummond said, referring to his time as a “desk” in the Intelligence Directorate’s Soviet section. “You and me.”

  Healy took one of the doughnuts from the box that had been picked up on a junk-food run by one of his night-watch people. He knew he didn’t need it. Neither did his waist. “So we’re assuming that it’s real.”

  “Have to.” Drummond ignored the pastries and took a sip from his Diet Coke. “Now, two things to be done. Response is one, but that’s not ours to worry about right now.” He knew Bud would be doing enough of that. “Our thing is to find it.”

  “Forget the old haystack comparison,” the DDO said, taking a big bite of the soft, sugary maple bar. “We’ve got forty-four thousand square miles to play with.”

  Too true. Also too self-defeating to ponder for any length of time, Drummond reasoned. They had to go with what they could do. “What about Vishkov?”

  “What about him? I agree that it’s a good bet he’s somewhere near the thing, but where is he?” The Agency had been unable to pinpoint the location of the apparently imprisoned physicist, mostly because to do such had not been a high priority until now.

  There was a gentle knock at the door, which opened a second later. “Sir.”

  “Hi, Sam. Late night,” Drummond said. “You can skip my office tonight.”

  “Okay,” Garrity acknowledged. “What about Director Merriweather?”

  Drummond looked down to the left of his desk to see if the security detail had come through already to take the burn bags. His basket was empty. “Yeah, you can do his.”

  “Fine.” Great!

  Healy waited for the soundproof door to close completely. “He sure isn’t old Harry,” he observed, passing judgment on the new man’s somewhat aloof demeanor. “Heard anything about him?”

  “Enjoying retirement, I hear,” the DDI answered, recalling Langley’s former janitor of the seventh floor. King of it, some had said. The old guy had come with the building in ‘63, making him the longest continuously employed person on staff. That said something about longevity in a town where jobs were passed out and taken away depending on which way the political winds were blowing. “Just running his boat around.”

  “That’s me in a few,” Healy said. He had done just a short stint in the Navy in the sixties, though he would say that was too long. The confinement of sea duty hadn’t agreed with him, but the open ocean did. A sixty-foot sloop had caught his eye a year back, and he was well on his way to procuring it for the day when he hung up his cloak and dagger.

  “So where is Vishkov?” Drummond asked the air, bringing the conversation back on course.

  “The only thing we have on the prison population comes from our exile contacts, and their folks on the island can’t be contacte
d now.”

  Drummond frowned crookedly at that. “I don’t know if that would help anyway. Vishkov can’t be with a general prison population, even in one of the gulags.” The Communist regime, despite attempts to deny its existence, had operated several political prisons for decades. Only the media seemed to fall for the denials completely, particularly after Fidel himself gave a guided tour of what he said had once been a political reeducation facility. The Agency knew better. Soon the world would also, the DDI hoped.

  “What about Paredes?” Healy asked and suggested at the same time.

  “I don’t know. I thought of that, too, but the security...”

  “If anyone knows, at least anyone we have access to, it would have to be Ojeda and his staff.”

  The DDI rubbed his chin, a single finger reaching up to massage the stubble above his lip. “I chewed Anthony out about the reality of secure com links. This would push what he did into the minor infraction box on the scorecard.” It was part Murphy’s Law and part realization that the least opportune time for the worst to happen was likely the time it would. “But it may be our only way.”

  Healy nodded. “I’ll get in touch with him. You going over to the White House?”

  “Yep. Leaving in a few.”

  “See you back here.”

  The DDO left quickly. Time might be critical, or it might not. The problem really was that they had no idea what sort of schedule they were on to resolve this. It was still a possibility, even though they thought it probable, and that was somehow removing a sense of immediacy from the situation. A man standing with a loaded pistol in front of you got much more attention if you knew the gun was loaded. Is this one? the DDI wondered, almost afraid to accept it. Nukes were passé these days, at least to the press and the public. The Cold War was over. Pantex was taking bombs apart now, he knew, referring to the Department of Energy’s former weapons-fabrication plant in Texas. One weapon? Just one? Was one stray nuke, though potentially devastating, a real threat? Ask the people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

  He wondered if they really were taking this much too lightly. He wondered that, and he suddenly felt very much the way he had at the height of some of the more recent periods of tension between the former Soviet Union and his country. At those times he had decided that, knowing he’d never make it home to his wife and little boy if a first strike was launched from halfway around the world, he’d simply join the Agency’s bank of communications antennae on the roof and watch as man-made suns came to life in the heavens. Of course, he would never have time to register the visual images. He would simply not be. It was actually a very agreeable way to go, if one had to, akin to being shot in the back of the head. You never hear it coming, the DDI thought, afraid that the same reality on a grander scale might be but a breath away.

  He pondered that all the way to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, even though, just after entering the GW Parkway, the musing began to scare him half to death.

  * * *

  FBI Director Gordon Jones slipped his glasses off and tossed them haphazardly on his desk, letting his head fall back against his chair. Twenty hours, eighteen of those on the job, had been his day so far—and his night. Things were supposed to slow down once you reached fifty, he thought. Weren’t old people supposed to need less sleep? Now would be the perfect time for that benefit of aging to manifest itself.

  It had been a bad couple of days in a generally bad year. The agent killed the previous day—Or was it two days ago?—had brought to three the number of his people killed so far that year. He hated himself for thinking of it in terms of “so far.” It was sheer lunacy. Good people dying for doing their job. The stress of that reality, combined with what was now partially on his plate, was pushing his endurance to the limit.

  But he had to keep going. The tape from L.A. would be there within the hour, and there was a Bureau translator waiting to give it a close scrutiny. From there it would go to Technical Services for further analysis. Both written and verbal transcripts would then be given to the director so that he could deliver the same to the President in the morning.

  Morning. That was just hours away. Jones had a spare change of clothes for occasions just like this, though he had only needed them once in his two years at the helm of the Bureau. They were definitely going to get a second use before the sun was fully up.

  His head was swimming now. There’s no way. He had to get some rest. It would look great if the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation collapsed while briefing the President. Jones’s office had no place to he down; he had removed the couches to make room for some fine chairs given to the Bureau by Scotland Yard as a gesture of appreciation for assistance in a multiple-murder investigation some months before. There was a long, soft couch in the lounge a floor below. Great! The director sleeping in the coffee room!

  But first he had to check on the status of the tape.

  “Operations.” There would only be two agents on duty in the Bureau’s operations center at this time of the morning.

  “This is the director. Any word on the delivery from L.A.?”

  There was a delay while the agent checked his log. “Not yet. There is an OpRep from Miami.”

  That would have to be the first operations report from the wiretap team. “Any flag on it?”

  “No, sir.” A flag—nothing more than a UID (Urgent-Immediate Delivery) stamp on the report’s cover sheet—would indicate that the OpRep needed the director’s quick attention. Such a flag would also tell Jones that the tap team had gotten information directly related to the CIA leak they were hoping to identify. Without such, and considering that the tap was less than a day old, it was probably no more than an initial report of the operation’s beginning.

  “I’ll grab that in the morning,” Jones said. “Secure it until then. I’ll be in the lounge.”

  The director hung up and fiddled with the array of buttons on his watch, setting the alarm to go off in three-and-a-half hours. A full night for some old geezer, he thought, amused at the fact that his state of tiredness might somehow be indicative of his hidden youth.

  * * *

  His memory made him special.

  At the age of six, he memorized the capital cities of all fifty states, and ten years later earned his summer money performing “mind magic” at the county fair in the rural Oklahoma town he grew up in. For Patrick Tunney it was second nature. People said things; he remembered them. People did things; he remembered what. People committed things to paper; he stored visual images for later recall.

  The last aspect of his amazing talent had helped him get into the University of Oklahoma, and later the Central Intelligence Agency.

  He had already burned the twenty-eight names into his brain, in both English and Cyrillic characters, though he was certain if he found them, they would be in the latter. After that simple exercise, which he accomplished using an indescribable form of numerical pneumonics he had somehow stumbled upon as a child, he joined his fellow archivists for the short trip from the embassy to the Defense Ministry annex north of the Moscow Ring Road.

  It was a beautiful morning, the sun low in the southeastern sky, and the few wisps of clouds high enough to catch the light and turn it into shades of the rainbow only God could have imagined. Truly beautiful, Tunney observed, knowing he would remember this sight forever.

  * * *

  He closed the door behind as always. There was little need for obvious security. Anything of importance in the Director of Central Intelligence’s Office was alarmed. To accidentally trip one of the sensors would bring a contingent of armed security officers, and would result in a night of explaining and paperwork.

  But Sam Garrity knew from the minute he entered the office that this time would be as simple as all the others. It was sitting right there, after all. For the taking. No effort at all. The spy in Garrity smiled at the simplicity of it. The criminal in him proceeded to do it.

  He walked to the director’s desk, a generally neat workspace that w
as not his responsibility, and laid his clipboard down. Next he picked up the blank legal pad sitting square in the middle and tore the top three sheets off, which he then clipped under the stack of cleaning requests on his clipboard. With that, it was done, except for that which he would do later.

  That and, of course, the spit-and-polish shine he would give the director’s office.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  MASTERS

  “Son of a bitch,” Antonelli commented.

  “Maj, I’m gettin’ tired of this nuke shit,” Quimpo commented. “I signed on to smoke bad guys, not play H-bomb.”

  It was true, Sean thought. Delta’s mission, aside from having changed in the last ten minutes, had evolved over the previous years to one beyond the mere rescuing of hostages. They had to adapt. They had to excel. The rescue aboard the 747 a year earlier had been familiar in one respect and alien in many others. This thing was beyond even that.

  “So what’s the plan?” Captain Buxton inquired.

  “First we clear away from these boneheads,” Sean responded, motioning with his eyes to the trailer accommodations where the Cubans had finally gone to sleep. “Their Air Force’s problem again. Then we run some contingencies through.”

  “Mission?” Buxton probed. He was a leader of men and, therefore, wanted to know what the goals of any action were before thinking on the operational details.

  Sean gave a quick rundown of the scenario as envisioned by the desk jockeys. “Simple, boys.”

  The collective stares were not accepting of the mock analysis. “And nebulous,” Goldfarb added.

  Sean couldn’t argue with that characterization with little to go on at the moment. It was akin to knowing you were going to fire at a target, but no one had yet revealed what the target looked like or where it was. Or even if it was. “First the spooks have to do some digging to give us an aim point,” Graber said. “Can’t very well go around grabbing just anybody’s nuke.”