Sacrifice

by Graham Masterton

  He was still shaking when he put down the receiver. He knew that it was time to go. There was nothing he could do for Esther, they had butchered her too savagely. He couldn’t even make her look as if she were at peace. He could only hope that there really was a life after death, and that she was enjoying it. The trouble was, he didn’t believe that there was; and as he went down in the elevator, he couldn’t stop the tears that started to roll down his cheeks.

  He was still wiping his eyes with his handkerchief when the elevator reached the lobby. He left the building as quickly as he could, and walked northwards to the middle of town, leaving his car parked where it was. He crossed the street, and walked eastwards to Macy’s. There were payphones there, on the first floor, which nobody would be able to tap or trace. He realized as he walked that his life was going to be like this every day and every night from now on; talking to his friends from obscure telephones, staying in untraceable motels. His only hope was to break the story of GRINGO wide open in the media; and even then he knew that he would remain a target.

  He went to the first payphone and pushed in his dime. He dialled, and as he waited for an answer, he glanced around him apprehensively. He didn’t even know who was after him. It could be that mild-looking man with the bald head, trying on a pair of gloves that were still tied together; or that black woman in the flowery dress and upswept spectacles. He knew that if he were organizing a hit, he would choose the most unlikely killer imaginable.

  The phone was answered. A suspicious-sounding voice said, ‘Yeah? Who is this?’

  ‘Ray? This is David Daniels.’

  ‘Oh, well, hi David. How are you doing?’ Ray Molloy was the only CIA executive that David knew at all well. They had met in Paris three years ago, during David’s investigations into intelligence service budgets, and when Ray had returned to Langley, Virginia, as senior finance officer, he and David had kept in touch. Occasional drinks together; one or two fishing trips; and a couple of dinner parties.

  David said, ‘I’m in trouble, Ray.’

  ‘Oh, really?’

  ‘Well, I seem to have upset somebody heavy, that’s all I can say.’

  ‘In connection with what?’

  ‘Ray, I’m in trouble, that’s all I can say. I don’t even know for sure why I’m in trouble. I just want one favour.’

  ‘Boy, you are in trouble, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes, Ray, I’m in trouble. Now please could you do this one thing for me? Do you remember we were talking a few months ago about those people in Canada, the ones who went across the border to hide from the FBI? That’s right. Well, do you think you could please tell me how to get in touch with them?’

  ‘Well, that could be tricky. It might take some money, too.’

  ‘Listen, I’ve got plenty of money. Just tell me how to get in touch.’

  ‘Okay, then. Hold on for a moment, I’ll look it up in my notebook.’

  Tense, shivering, sweating, David waited while Ray went to check the number. What if Ray were in with the people who were looking for him, too? What if he were only making him hold on so that they could get a trace on his number? He kept thinking about Esther, about the way in which they had ripped her open, and he knew without any doubt at all that they would do the same to him. A warning to anybody else who might be interested in GRINGO.

  At last, however, Ray came, back to the phone. ‘It’s a Vancouver number. That’s where they hang out, as far as I know, Vancouver. You call this number arid they tell you to meet them someplace. That’s all I know 604-531 2299. And don’t ever tell anybody I told you, you got it? And until you’re clean, please don’t call me again. That’s nothing personal. It’s just that I’m engaged to be married now, and I’d quite like to make it through to my wedding-day.’

  David said, ‘Thanks, Ray. I’ll be in touch.’

  There was no reply. Ray Molloy had hung up, with a loud click.

  David used two more dimes. One to call his accountant, Lenny Stein, and have $50,000 transferred to Barclays Bank in Vancouver, under the name Walter Ross. The other to call his housekeeper, Cora, and ask her to close up the Connecticut house for the rest of the summer; drawing the drapes so that the furnishings wouldn’t fade. Cora said, ‘You are all right, senator?’

  ‘I’m okay,’ he told her. He wished he didn’t have to lie.

  He left Macy’s, and crossed the street to the Avis office. He used his Wizard card to rent an LTD; and asked the girl behind the desk if he could leave the car in Orlando, Florida. If anybody checked his rental, which they certainly would, they would be waiting for him at the Avis office in Orlando; and he hoped they enjoyed their suntan.

  He drove north-west, crossing the Hudson shortly after two o’clock that afternoon, and heading for Binghamton on route 17. His plan was to cross into Canada at Niagara, as quickly as possible, since he guessed that his pursuers would find it more difficult to operate quite so openly north of the border. It was possible that he was wrong, in which case he might be getting himself into even deeper trouble, because his route through Canada from Niagara would take him on a wide northern circuit of Georgian Bay and Lake Superior, through Barrie and Sault Sainte-Marie, and all the way through Wawa and Marathon to Thunder Bay. He would lose well over half a day, driving around that Way, but he preferred to get out of the United States by nightfall.

  On the car radio, as he turned on to route 17, into the glare of the late afternoon sun, he heard that Cal Lewis, the new publisher of the Washington Post, had been found by the police floating in the Potomac close to the Thompson Water Sport Centre. He had been shot in the back of the head. The news reporter said, ‘This follows the bombing yesterday of a car belonging to Post reporter Jack Levy, which killed him instantly. Police are treating the two deaths as a possible vendetta against the newspaper, possibly sparked off by its recent campaign against organized crime.’

  David had to pull in to the side of the highway for a while. He gripped the car’s steering-wheel tight, and twisted it in guilt and frustration. If he hadn’t sent Esther in search of the secret of GRINGO; if he hadn’t talked to Jack Levy or Cal Lewis; then most likely they would all be alive today. And he himself wouldn’t be driving towards Niagara Falls in a cheap rented car, with no luggage, no possessions, no friends, and nowhere to turn but some hideaway community of exiles in Vancouver.

  At last, he started up the engine, and pulled away. On the radio, they were playing Days of Grace.

  ‘We lived like friends

  Through all those days

  We lived like earthbound angels dancing through that summer haze

  And even now, I see your face

  And I recall, with smiling tears, those days of grace.’

  It was dark by the time he reached Niagara. In Europe, it was already one o’clock on Sunday morning. There were only two hours and ten minutes to go before the launch of Operation Byliny.

  Twenty-One

  He called ‘Hans’ for the fifth time and at last he got through. He was sitting in a little wooden beach-house not far north of Rundsted, overlooking Øre Sund. The house was hidden from the main road by rows of pines; and from the nearest neighbouring beach-house by a tangle of bushes and undergrowth and flowering shrubs. Beyond the shrubs, the ground dropped sharply to the shoreline, and there in the evening dusk was the sea, speaking in a stage whisper to the greyish sand. The beach-house belonged to some old friends of Agneta’s, the Holmens. It hadn’t taken Charles long to knock open the padlock on the front door with a heavy stone.

  ‘Hans’ said, ‘Where are you calling from? You sound far away.’

  ‘I’m in hiding,’ Charles told him. He blew out smoke. ‘That Russian bastard Novikov was waiting for me when I went around to Peder Skrams Gade to see Agneta. He—’

  Charles found to his surprise that he couldn’t speak. His throat was snarled up with emotion. He took a deep breath, and said, ‘hah,’ and then at last he was able to say, ‘He killed her, Hans. And my friend Roger, too. It was
quite a miracle that he didn’t manage to kill me, too.’

  ‘Hans’ said, ‘I’m sorry. Is there anything that I can do?’

  ‘No, well. I’m going to have to come to terms with it, aren’t I? Other people have lost their friends; I’m no different. I just wish to hell that the people who own this place had left a bottle of Jack Daniel’s around.’

  ‘Don’t get drunk,’ said ‘Hans’. ‘We’re going to need you.’

  ‘I don’t think I’m much good to anybody at the moment.’

  ‘Listen to me, Charles. Things are starting to happen. We have had a call from our colleagues in Germany. Where are you speaking from? Not from a hotel, or anything like that? Not through a switchboard?’

  ‘Unh-hunh. Private line.’

  ‘Well, that’s good. Because our colleagues in Germany have managed to persuade Marshal Golovanov to talk.’

  ‘They have? Well, if it isn’t all lies, I congratulate them. What did he have to say for himself?’

  ‘Hans’ spoke slowly and seriously. ‘He said that the recent Russian manoeuvres were only a prelude; a way of bringing the Soviet Army up to full strength and combat preparedness without alarming the West Germans. He said that the Soviet Army is about to invade the Federal Republic of Germany. He couldn’t clearly say when. Perhaps the date has not yet been finally fixed. But he did say that it will be done with the agreement and the assistance of Great Britain and the United States. In other words, as the Soviet Army advances, the British and the Americans will systematically withdraw. For the sake of stability in the world as a whole. West Germany will be offered to the Soviet Union as a sacrifice.’

  ‘I don’t believe what I’m hearing.’

  ‘Well, it came from Marshal T.K. Golovanov himself, a man not given to fantasy. And he was interrogated by Inge Schultz, who is one of the most skilful agents, when it comes to questioning.’

  ‘I’d like to meet her. Anybody who can get Golovanov to talk must be quite something.’

  ‘You probably will,’ said ‘Hans’. ‘She is bringing Marshal Golovanov to Copenhagen with her; mainly to get him out of West Germany, in the event that a Russian invasion actually takes place; but also to help us interpret whatever we manage to elicit from the computer at Klarlund & Christensen.’

  Charles reached over and coaxed another cigarette out of the pack. Only three left. He was going to have to get some more soon; and a bottle of whiskey. He wasn’t going to be able to survive through the night on apfelsaft and long-life milk, which was all that the Holmens had left in their tiny icebox.

  ‘This is the other good news,’ ‘Hans’ explained. ‘One of our Russian agents has brought out of Russia two Englishmen, both computer experts. They are in Helsinki just at the moment, but he is going to have them flown to Copenhagen in about an hour, as soon as all the necessary formalities have been completed.’

  ‘He got them out of Russia? What were they doing in Russia in the first place?’

  ‘They were showing some of their computers at the Toy Fair, apparently. But the Russians were attempting to coerce them into staying and working in the Soviet Union. It appears that several computer experts and well-qualified engineers have been lent to the Soviet Union recently by Britain and the United States, against their individual will. All of which tends to confirm Marshal Golovanov’s story that there is a conspiracy here to sacrifice Germany.’

  ‘Listen,’ said Charles, ‘I’ll come back to Copenhagen, but for God’s sake let me have a bodyguard this time, and get me a gun. Can you get me a gun?’

  ‘Of course. What do you want?’

  ‘Nothing stupid. Novikov’s a 200-pound berserker, and that’s putting it mildly.’

  ‘We have one or two UZIs here, if you’re interested.’

  ‘I’ll take two. I’ll take three, if you’ve got them. Where do you want me to meet you?’

  ‘Hans’ said, ‘Come to Set Hans Gade, Nr. 17, down at the Sortedams end. Ring the bell marked Rasmussen, and wait. How long will it take you to get here?’

  ‘I’m at Rundsted. Give me an hour.’

  ‘Hans’ said, ‘Okay,’ then paused for. a moment, and said, ‘Agneta was your girlfriend, wasn’t she?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Are you sure you can manage, after what’s happened?’

  Charles said, ‘I can manage. If I get drunk, all I’ll be able to do is forget about it for an hour or two. If I come and help you, well, maybe I’ll be able to do something about it. Maybe I’ll be able to catch up with that Novikov bastard and twist his head off.’

  ‘Would you like us to have somebody clear up for you, round at your friend’s apartment?’ asked ‘Hans’, soberly. ‘We have an undertaker we use. Blower, he’s very discreet.’

  ‘Will it cost much?’

  ‘I think this is one service we can let you have for free.’

  ‘All right, then,’ said Charles. ‘I appreciate it. But do you think she could possibly be buried? She didn’t want to be cremated, I don’t know why.’

  ‘Blower does very tasteful burials. I’m sorry to say that we’ve had to use him quite a few times.’

  ‘Okay,’ Charles told him, dryly. He felt as if his brain had been sand-blasted.

  Charles pressed down the telephone cradle, waited for the dialling tone, then called TAXA-Ringbilen. ‘I’m at Rundsted. Yes. Can you send a car up to get me? Listen, I don’t care what it costs. Sure. Okay, as soon as you can.’

  Then he sat on the floral-cushioned bamboo sofa in the middle of the sitting-room, and smoked, and waited, watching himself in the dark glass of the French windows. After a while, tired of waiting, he switched on the radio. He had always known, somehow, that he would never be free of this business. Once you were involved, you could never escape. Because what could you do? Turn your back on the political connivance that you had especially been taught to recognize? Ignore the men in the grey suits when you saw them walking through the cities of the world, armed, lethal, and prepared to kill anybody who didn’t abide by their masters’ political ethics?

  Lamprey had grown up because so many intelligence agents had at last refused to believe that there was any difference between one side and another, not a difference worth dying for. The enemy as far as Lamprey was concerned were the bureaucrats, whose political and financial survival depended on international hostility; the great machineries of unfought war. The enemy was human aggression, and human fear.

  Since 1945, sufficient conventional arms had been produced by both East and West to fight four hundred wars of the size and scale of World War Two; and that wasn’t counting the immense nuclear arsenals produced on both sides. Only Lamprey had seen the true absurdity of it; and the full scale of the tragedy it represented. Security was nothing but another word for fright; and hundreds of billions had been spent by Washington and Moscow in guarding themselves against shadows and illusions.

  Charles was not idealistic about arms control; nor hopeful about it, either. And ‘Hans’ seemed to be equally cynical. But what could you do? Pretend that it didn’t matter? Pretend that it was nothing to do with you, and carry on working in intelligence with no more conscience about it than a white rat running through a laboratory maze?

  He didn’t allow himself the luxury of thinking about his life very often; but he thought about it tonight, and the more he thought about it, the more certain he was that he had to go back to Copenhagen and try to stay sober.

  Almost 45 minutes had passed before a faint triangle of light swivelled across the ceiling of the beach-house, signifying the approach of a car. Charles switched off the radio, and went through to the bathroom to wash his face in cold water. He stared at his face in the mirror over the basin. Grey, exhausted, emotionally beaten; but with eyes that still retained that old professional hardness. Not too bad, he supposed, not for my age.

  He suddenly realized that he hadn’t heard the car approaching the beach-house. The driver hadn’t come to knock at the door, either. He stood up straig
ht, listening, and watching himself listening in the mirror. No sound at all, except for the fussing of the sea, and the occasional rattling of one of the kitchen shutters.

  He glanced towards the bathroom window. To his horror, through the frosted glass, he could see the distorted shape of a huge dark figure, and a face like raw meat.

  He wrenched off the bathroom light, snapping the cord out of its socket. Then he lunged out into the sitting-room, and hit the light-switches there, too, plunging the beach-house into darkness. His mind raced: weapon, what can I use as a weapon? He thought of the Russian automatic he had so contemptuously left behind at Agneta’s apartment, and wished to God he hadn’t been so ridiculously arrogant about it.

  Bending low, he made his way crabwise across the thin rumpled tapestry rug, until he reached the stove. He felt among the logs, tumbling two or three of them over, until his hand closed on what he had been searching for: a hooked fire-poker, used for picking up firewood and raking the ashes. It was heavy, with a large brass knob at the end of the handle.

  Still crouching, he waited. He heard footsteps slowly circling the beach-house; the measured steps of a man who believes that he is invulnerable; a man who is frightened of nobody and nothing at all. Charles desperately wanted to pee: it was a nervous reaction which most of his CIA and counterintelligence friends had attested to, in times of fear. It was no use applying for a job as a field agent if you had a weak bladder.

  There was a moment of utter stillness. Even the sea seemed to be holding its breath. Then, like a controlled explosion, the verandah doors of the beach-house came bursting in, in a blizzard of shattered glass and splinters of timber, and the red and white gingham curtains blew apart as if they had been caught in an instant hundred-mile-an-hour hurricane.