The Matarese Countdown

by Robert Ludlum

  "I'm getting out of here!

  Tell Squinty I'll call collect from a pay phone, it's safer than the cell.

  That's his signal to go on scrambler. Wish me luck, old girl!"

  Scofield ran out of the office, closing the door behind him, and raced down the hallway to the staircase exit on the left. He pressed the crash bar, opening the thick fireproof panel, and quickly closed it while reaching down and picking up the small rubber doorstop. Suddenly, he heard the shouts of the guards on the floor inside. Apparently there was some kind of heated argument, and Bray immediately understood. No one had a passkey to the CEO's office. Every other door could probably be unlocked, but not McDowell's, and in all likelihood not Karastos's, the chief financial officer's, which had a door leading to his superior's suite. Goddamn it! thought Brandon, he hadn't the time to inspect the latter's room or rooms, much less the safe in the bookshelf. There was no point in dwelling over missed opportunities, he had to get out and reach Shields. Montrose's kid! Jesus!

  Then he heard the orders yelled by someone who either had the authority or assumed it.

  "Check the staircases! I'll call the Big Mac and tell the son of a bitch to give us the combination to get his fuckin' key! Suppose there was a fire? Would that asshole rather have his joint burn down than let us get in?"

  "Kick the fuckin' door down!"

  "It's layered steel, for God's sake. Besides, he'd take it out of my pay, the bastard!"

  There was not only turmoil in the house of McDowell, but also in McDowell's fiefdom. The staircases. There were two others in this Tshaped section of the building. How many guards were there, and which of the three staircases would be checked first? Christ, probably all at once! Brandon plunged down the concrete steps as fast as he could, literally swinging around each landing as he held on to the railing. Breathless, his face drenched with sweat, his legs throbbing, he reached the bottom floor where he had entered. He paused, gasping for air, and trying to smooth out his Army-issue combat fatigues.

  Footsteps! Several floors above on the staircase, perhaps four or five, and descending rapidly. He had no choice; he had to simply walk out, knowing that the guards were undoubtedly running around throughout the building. No time to think!

  The guards were, at least one guard was. The blue uniform saw him emerge from the staircase, and ran forward.

  "Hey, you!" shouted the heavy, middle-aged man, pulling his pistol from its holster.

  "Not hey me, fella!" roared Beowulf Agate in a voice that echoed off the walls like a marching cadence.

  "It's hey you! .. . I'm Colonel Chaucer, National Guard, Special Forces Security, and this company is a max-fax contractor for the government. We're wired into your alarm system."

  "You're what-who?" asked the perplexed, overwhelmed patrol.

  "You heard me, fella. We're wired because AC is developing some top-secret chemicals."

  "The alarms just went off less than five minutes ago-" "Our vehicles patrol around the clock. We're never far away."

  "Oh, my God-" "My men are scrambling around the whole complex. Now, hurry!

  Check the northeast staircase, this one's clean. I'll rendezvous with my men." Scofield dashed to the exit door, turning at the last second.

  "Tell everyone to stay inside! My people might shoot."

  "Oh, my God!"

  Brandon sped out of Wichita over back-country roads until he reached Route 96, the main highway, where he hoped to find a public telephone on the long, nearly deserted stretch of darkness. He found one, a dimly lit plastic shell covered with obscene graffiti. He inserted a coin and dialed an operator, which took what seemed to Bray time enough to fly to Washington, and placed a collect call to Frank Shields's secure home phone.

  "Where are you, Brandon?"

  "Where no wheat grows nor buffalo roam, Squinty. It's four something in the morning and all I can see is Kansas flat."

  "All right, I'm on scrambler and it's hardly likely you could be intercepted."

  "I'd say impossible."

  "Still, don't mention names, only I will."

  "Gotcha."

  "First, did you get anything?"

  "What are you talking about?"

  "Antonia told me you were 'hunting," and I didn't have to ask any more, you lying bastard!"

  "To answer your question, sir, I think I did find something. Now what's this about the missing item?"

  "It's crazy, Bray. The boy's with an officer, a pilot assigned to our fleet base in Bahrain."

  "And he won't talk to anyone but our Army lady, Toni explained that to me. What's your problem?"

  "If I put them in touch, I could be signing both their death warrants.

  Bahrain is one of the most progressive high-tech places on earth. Its mechanics can pull things from the ether as fast as we can. How can I take the chance of revealing where they both are?"

  "Don't do anything until I get back, Squinty, I've got a couple of ideas. Send a military jet for me."

  "Where, for Christ's sake?"

  "How the hell do I know? I'm on a highway about ten miles from Wichita."

  "Get back to the Wichita airport and call me. I'll tell you whom to contact."

  Julian Guiderone, the son of the Shepherd Boy, sat at a table in Rome's Via Veneto, enjoying his morning caffe latte when his cellular phone beeped in his breast pocket. He pulled it out and spoke.

  "The Shepherd," he said.

  "Wichita has been compromised," reported the recognizable voice from Amsterdam.

  "To what extent we do not know."

  "Survivors?"

  "Our two people. They weren't on the scene."

  "McDowell and Karastos?"

  "They were both at home. They were not involved."

  "Yes, they were. Kill them, and sweep their offices."

  The aircraft carrier U.S.S. Ticonderoga was immense, a virtual city within itself, with the military equivalents of various stores, pharmacies, restaurants (mess halls), gymnasiums, offices, and rooms-single, double, and dormitory-style. And there were more corridors, alleyways, and abrupt corners than could be found in a Star Trek version of San Francisco's Chinatown. The farther one went below-decks, the less peopled were the drab steel hallways, albeit with more turns and hatchways and cargo holds than those above the waterline. At the moment, two figures were running up a low-ceilinged corridor, both rather conspicuous. One was a tall black officer who had to continually bend his frame so as not to collide with a lateral pipe, the other a young white male, a muscular teenager, his hands bound in fresh surgical gauze.

  "Hurry up!" cried Lieutenant Luther Considine, his summer uniform unpressed and in need of cleaning.

  "Where are we going?" asked an excited Jamie Montrose.

  "Where I hope the officer of the watch and his bloodhounds won't find you!"

  They came to a heavy metal door marked Authorized Personnel Only. Considine took out a key, unlocked it, and shoved it open. They walked into a small white-walled room with a long Formica table around which were brown-cushioned swivel chairs and a large screen on the right, a mounted slide projector on the left.

  "What is this?" said Montrose junior.

  "It's a debriefing room for pilots on top-secret runs."

  "How'd you get the key, Lieutenant?"

  "The security officer was my wing commander until the brass figured he was too smart or too blind to fly. He's still my roommate and thinks I'm having a tete-a-tete with a dark angel of mercy."

  "That was very nice of him."

  "Nice, schmice. I bailed him out of the casino on Rhodes. Take a chair and relax. I flip on this switch and the red letters outside say Do Not Enter."

  "I don't know how to thank you, sir."

  "You don't have to, Jamie. Just fill me in more, and remember, I could be busted to a swab-jockey if you shuffle me."

  "Everything I've told you is the truth-" "I believe you!" interrupted Luther Considine, his black eyes glaring.

  "I believe you because it's so nuts
and you're so young and you're the son of a fighter pilot we considered the best in the business, so why would you lie? But the captain, the four-striper driving this floating metropolis, thinks you ran out of my quarters and I can't find you because our intelligence officer ordered you to talk to Washington."

  "No way!" insisted Montrose junior.

  "You talk about shuffling, I've been shuffled enough!"

  "Okay, okay. Let's go back. What exactly did the two government spook-jocks say to you at Kennedy International?"

  "Not very much.. .. Basically that my mother had been assigned to an undercover operation and in case there were any leaks, they wanted me 'out of the loop."

  " "What about their ID's? .. . Forget it, they could easily get fakes.

  And you accepted what they told you?"

  "Well, they seemed like really nice guys, you know? I mean, they were concerned, genuinely sorry about everything, and even got me on board the plane without any hassle over tickets and my passport and that sort of thing."

  "Didn't you ask any questions?"

  "I asked a lot of questions, but they didn't know much more than I did."

  "What did they tell you?" said Considine, studying the youngster.

  "Well, they told me the plane was going to Paris, which, of course, I could read on the signs, but they said I'd be going on, only they didn't know where to. Just that I'd be met at Orly Airport by another two guys who would take over."

  "They didn't say anything more about your mother or the operation?"

  "They didn't know anything. They were really sincere about that.

  Then I told them I had to make a couple of phone calls and they said go ahead. I called home and there was no answer, not even the machine.

  Then I called a close friend and fellow officer who often worked with Mom; the operator broke in saying the number was changed, the new one unlisted. That's when I figured whatever they were doing was really undercover. But I've told you all this, Lieutenant."

  "Not everything, you left out the phone calls before. Anyway, I may want to hear it again and again. I could be flying over something I can't see yet."

  "There's nothing to miss, Lieutenant."

  "Drop the "Lieutenant," Jamie. It's Luther. The next time you see me I may be Seaman No Class. From a black top gun to a swab with a mop. . Colin Powell will whip my ass, and I'm a big fella, but he could do it."

  "I don't think race enters into any of this .. . Luther."

  "Oh, I love you white liberals. Why couldn't you have picked a nice, white naval officer to tell your tale to? There's a prick in my squadron who hates anyone that isn't all spit-and-polish. He'd turn a cook in for having grease on his apron."

  "Then he'd turn me in, too."

  "You've got a point. So tell me about the phone calls. Specifically the one where the number was changed."

  "It was to Colonel Everett Bracket. He was at the Point with Mom, and he and his wife were friends of Mother and Dad. He frequently asked for Mom on certain assignments."

  "What's the nature of his assignments?"

  "He's an elite hog in Army intelligence. My mother was trained in high technology, like computers and stuff. It's a subdivision of G-Two, and Uncle Ev called upon her a lot, I guess."

  "Why did he pick her for a supposedly dangerous undercover operation?"

  "Darned if I know. After Dad died he was kind of a surrogate father to me, and the last thing I think he'd ask her to do was to go into a dangerous situation. It doesn't make sense!"

  "Now, listen to me carefully, Jamie, and try to remember. When, exactly, did you get the word from Washington-through the head of your school-that you were to leave and go to Kennedy Airport in New York?"

  "It was a Friday, I don't remember the exact date, but it was before the weekend."

  "Now, again, as precisely as you can recall, prior to that Friday, when did you last talk to your mother?"

  "A few days before, maybe three or four. Just a regular call, about how my classes were going and stuff like that."

  "And you didn't talk to her after that?"

  "No, there wasn't any reason to."

  "Then can we assume she didn't try to reach you during those three or four days?"

  "I know she didn't."

  "How so?"

  "In Paris, at the airport, I told the two men who met me that I had to call a cousin of mine who lives there because Mom told me to. It kind of threw them, but I got the impression that they didn't want to rock the boat, so they let me, practically breathing down my neck by the phone."

  "So?"

  "I have one of those phone cards, you know, the kind you can use anywhere, and I sure know the numbers to reach the States and the school-" "You do?" interrupted Considine.

  "Hey, Lieutenant-Luther, I spent a few years as a traveling Army brat, remember? But most of my friends, even when I was a kid, are in Virginia, which is our real home."

  "So you were on the phone, and I presume you called your school, not any nonexistent cousin."

  "Oh, Kevin exists all right. He's a lot older than me and he goes to graduate school at the Sorbonne."

  "A very impressive family. But you did reach your school."

  "Sure did. Olivia was on the switchboard; she's a scholarship student and we've got kind of a thing going, if you know what I mean."

  "I'll try to remember.. .. And?"

  "Well, she knew it was me, and I asked her if my mother had tried to call me-the switchboard keeps records. She said Mom hadn't, so I pretended I was talking to Cousin Kevin and hung up. I'll have to apologize to Livvie for that."

  "Do so," said Considine, his fingers massaging his forehead.

  "That's also another phone call you didn't tell me about."

  "I guess I forgot. But I told you all about that big house over the bridges, and the guards, and how I couldn't call anybody and how I was kept in a room with bars on the windows and everything."

  "And how you escaped," agreed the pilot, "which was remarkable in itself. You must be a tough kid; your hands were a mess but you kept going."

  "I don't know about tough, I just knew I had to get out of there. The things my warden, Amet-I called him a warden-kept repeating sounded like a broken record and about as convincing. After all those days nobody could figure out how to get my mother and me on the phone together. That's bullshit!"

  "And undoubtedly timed down to hours, if not minutes," mused Luther Considine, abruptly standing up.

  "What do you mean?"

  "If you're straight-arrow, and I'm pretty well convinced you are, the bad guys had to get you out of the country before your momma joined this undercover operation, said operation probably the only truthful thing your kidnappers told you."

  "I don't get it, Luther." Jamie frowned in bewilderment.

  "It's the only thing that does make sense," said the pilot, glancing at his watch.

  "Whatever your mother's involved in concerns the maggots who snatched you, and it's got to be mighty heavy."

  "Come again?"

  "Kidnapping's big-time anytime, and kidnapping the kid of an Army officer attached to government security is executioner's meat. They took you out of the loop and pulled you into another. Theirs."

  "But why?"

  "So they've got a hook into Mother Montrose." Considine walked toward the door.

  "I'll be back in a few hours. Get some rest, some sleep, if you can. I'll keep the red letters on, no one'll bother you."

  "Where are you going?"

  "You've described the place where they kept you in damn clear detail, and I've wandered all over the Bahrainian territory. I've got several ideas where it could be; there aren't too many areas where estates like that are built. I'll bring along a Polaroid with a dozen or so cartridges of film. Maybe we'll get lucky."

  Julian Guiderone was relaxing alone in his Lear 26 jet on the way to his home in Bahrain, in many ways the seat of his immense financial empire.

  He always enjoyed Bahrain, its comforts
and its lifestyle. Manama was hardly as enticing as Paris or as civilized as London, but if there was ever a place on earth where the term laissez-faire was purely applied, it was Bahrain. Noninterference was its credo, and went beyond economics and the marketplace to the soul of the individual, even more so, of course, if he was among the rich.

  Julian had friends there, though not close friends-he had no close friends; they were an impediment-and he considered having several small dinner parties, inviting a few royal pretenders, but mainly bankers and oil barons, the true royalty.

  His sky pager buzzed, cutting short his reverie. He pulled it out of his pocket, alarmed to see that the party calling him was in the area code 31, the Netherlands. The number itself was meaningless, for it was false.

  There was only one person who would call. From Amsterdam. Jan van der Meer Matareisen. He reached for the telephone cradled in the console of his air desk.

  "I'm afraid I have terrible news, sir."

  "Everything's relative. What's terrible one minute can be beneficial the next. What is it?"

  "The package we transferred via Paris to the Middle East has disappeared."

  "What?" Guiderone bolted forward with such force that the metal buckle on his seat belt dug painfully into his stomach.

  "You mean the parcel's lost?" he choked, wincing as he gripped the buckle, disengaging it.

  "Have you looked for it, really searched?"

  "We've got our best personnel on it. Not a trace."

  "Keep looking-everywhere!" The son of the Shepherd Boy gasped, trying to find some measure of control.

  "In the meantime," he began slowly, collecting his thoughts, "I've leased the boat, the big boat, so clean it out, completely out. Also, release the crew, the entire crew, and send them to our marina in Oman, to Muscat. The sheikh who's taking it has his own people."

  "I understand, sir. It will all be accomplished before the day is over."

  "But for God's sake, keep searching for the package!" Guiderone slammed down the phone and yelled out, "Pilot?"

  "Yes, signore?" came the voice from the flight deck only eight feet away.

  "How is our fuel?"