Authors: David Hagberg

Countdown (19 page)

BOOK: Countdown

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“You were a mistake, Dieter,”
Kurshin said softly in German. He raised his gun and shot the East German in the face. Above the bed, the heart monitor went flat and began to whistle in a steady tone.

Turning, Kurshin walked back through the ICU and out into the corridor at the same moment Dr. Rabbinoux was emerging from his office.

“Who called you up here?” Rabbinoux started to ask.

Kurshin raised his pistol and shot the doctor in the face at a
range of less than twenty feet, the man's head snapping back, his eyes and nose filling with blood, and his body slamming backward against the wall.

McGarvey. He wanted McGarvey. It was the entire reason for coming here like this tonight. The bastard had sent up the signal: Here I am, come and get me. Dieter Schey, your little East German expert, is here. Bait. Come if you can.

“Well, I came,” Kurshin mumbled in frustration.

Reaching the stairwell he heard the first-floor door slam open and someone start up the steps. More than one person. At least two, perhaps more.

He wanted McGarvey, but he had another job to do. As much as it rankled, he was professional enough to realize that if he remained here to fight it out, he would lose. There was no way of going up against them all. At least not this time â¦ perhaps.

Kurshin turned and hurried noiselessly back up to the fifth floor, where he flashed the nurses another tired smile. The elevator was still on this floor. He punched the button, the doors opened, and he stepped aboard.

“Have a good evening,” he said pleasantly.

“You too, Doctor,” the nurse said.

McGarvey with the two Marines right behind him held up at the fourth-floor door, opening it carefully. “Potok,” he started to shout, the word dying on his lips as he spotted Dr. Rabbinoux's body lying in a pool of blood.

He slammed open the door and ran down the corridor, again holding up at the ICU door. The Marines were right behind him. McGarvey motioned for them to back him up, and he shoved his way into the room, sweeping his gun right to left, keeping low, moving fast.

Schey was dead, shot in the face at close range.

“Christ!” McGarvey swore.

“Sir,” one of the Marines shouted from the corridor. “Out here!”

McGarvey spun on his heel and raced back out of the ICU. Potok had just come through the east stairwell door. The Marine had a gun on him, Potok's hands raised above his head.

“Where the fuck did you go?” McGarvey shouted. “You bastard!”

Potok was shaking his head.

McGarvey turned on the Marine. “He's on the loose. Have this building sealed. Immediately!”

“Yes, sir!” the Marine snapped, but McGarvey had the feeling that they were too late. Once Kurshin was free, God only knew what would happen next.

THE FALMOUTH SAFEHOUSE

TROTTER HAD USED his car phone to call ahead twice. Each time FBI Agent Tom Sills had assured him that nothing had happened yet, but that they were keeping their eyes open.

Turning off the secondary highway he hurried up the narrow gravel road three-quarters of a mile to the house. His windows were down. The night was very dark under a slightly overcast sky, and the air smelled heavy. It would probably rain soon, he thought.

Fifty yards before the road opened into the clearing, his way was blocked by a battered blue pickup truck and he had to stop.
He reached beneath his coat and pulled out his pistol, thumbing the safety off.

“It's me,” he called out softly. “John Trotter.”

The beam of a powerful flashlight off to his left suddenly illuminated the interior of the car, blinding him.

“It's him,” a voice said from the darkness.

He heard the static and crackle of a walkie-talkie. A second later the flashlight was switched off, and Agent Sills approached the car.

“You made good time, sir,” he said. “Sorry about the light, but we had to make sure.”

“No problem,” Trotter said. “Everything is still okay here?”

“So far so good,” Sills said but he seemed a little embarrassed. “I'm sorry, sir, but I called for backup. It's very dark out here and there's no way the four of us will be able to cover every approach.”

They had wanted to keep this operation as quiet as possible, but the man did have a point, and Trotter conceded it. “You're right, but I want the extra hands kept away from Dr. Abbott. Officially she is just another body in the Witness Protection Program.”

“Yes, sir.”

“They don't even have to know she is a woman.”

“No.”

“Move your truck now and tell them I'm coming up to the house. I want to talk to her.”

“Will do,” Agent Sills said.

Yuri Deryugin and Mikhail Lakomsky lay on the floor of the dark woods a few meters down from where the blue pickup truck was parked. They were dressed in black night fighter coveralls, their faces blackened. Each of them was armed with an AK74 assault rifle equipped with infrared spotting scope. In addition they each carried a suppressed .22 caliber automatic pistol, a razor-sharp stiletto, and a wire garrote capable, in the right hands, of completely severing a man's head from his body.

They were both experts, KGB Department Viktor graduates, whom Baranov had handpicked for advancement.

For the past hour since penetrating the property's outer fence,
they had reconnoitered all the approaches to the house, spotting the three FBI agents, one by the pickup truck, one just within the woods down from the clearing, and the other on the east side of the house. They assumed there would be at least one other agent within the house, in addition to the man who'd just shown up.

They had been close enough to overhear most of the conversation between Sills and Trotter, so they knew that they would have to get in and out soon, before the reinforcements arrived.

Deryugin motioned for Lakomsky to hold up. The other man nodded and took aim on Agent Sills's back with his rifle.

It was very quiet. Even so, Lakomsky could hear absolutely no noise as Deryugin crept forward toward where Agent Sills was backing the pickup truck into place.

Sills got out of the truck. He was dressed in a blue windbreaker and dark blue baseball cap. He carried an M16 rifle, which he slung, barrel down, over his shoulder as he stepped off the road, and hid himself behind the bole of a larger tree, barely one meter from where Deryugin lay perfectly still.

Slowly, the Russian rose up from the darkness behind Sills. He held the garrote loosely in his two hands, and as he took a single step forward he raised it up over his head.

Sills never really knew what happened. One instant he was standing behind the tree looking toward the driveway, and in the next something incredibly sharp was around his neck, and his world began immediately to grow gray and soft.

“We think there may be some trouble coming our way,” Trotter told Lorraine Abbott. They sat in the pleasantly furnished living room across from each other. Agent Bert Langerford had stepped out into the stairhall to let them talk.

“Is it the Russians?” she asked. She hadn't gotten much rest in the past few days, and it was beginning to show in her eyes, which were red and puffy.

“We think so,” Trotter said. “I'm not going to lie to you. But I think you will be safe here for the moment. We have some more people coming in to help out tonight. And in the morning we'll be moving you to another place.”

She was watching him, her nostrils flared. “You
think
there may be some trouble. You
think
they may be Russians. You
think
I'll be safe here for the moment. What, Mr. Trotter, do you
know
?”

“That you are a very important woman, Dr. Abbott,” Trotter said tiredly. “And that the Russians want you dead.”

“Why, in God's name? What have I done to them?”

“You got in their way.”

“How?”

“By helping Kirk McGarvey.”

“Damn,” Lorraine spat in frustration. She jumped up and went across to the heavily draped window, hugging herself as if she were cold.

“Please don't open the curtains,” Trotter said.

She spun on him. “Are they here now?”

“It's possible.”

“Then what?” she demanded.

Trotter didn't understand the question. “Doctor?”

“If they come here tonight and try â¦ and fail. Then what happens to me?”

“As I said, we'll be moving you to a new safehouse.”

“I mean afterward. How long is this going to keep up?”

“I don't know,” Trotter admitted. “But not very long.”

“It's already been too long,” Lorraine snapped. “Far too long.”

BETHESDA NAVAL HOSPITAL

“IT WAS KURSHIN on the telephone,” Potok said. He and McGarvey stood back as the FBI's forensics crew worked with two computer experts from the CIA's Technical Services Division, going over Rand's van.

There were police and military security people everywhere, and more were coming. They could hear sirens in the distance.

“Yeah,” McGarvey said. “And now the sonofabitch is gone.” It rankled, and it was all he could do to hold his anger in check.
The man was good. Almost too good, as if he had gotten information from another source.

“If I had stayed â¦”

McGarvey shook his head. “He would have found another way in, or he would have killed you.”

An APB had been put out, and police in a twenty-five-mile radius were looking for Kurshin. But no one had actually seen him leave the hospital or seen what kind of a car he was driving.

The Soviet Embassy was being watched, but it wasn't likely he would go back there. He'd had this all worked out in the beginning. Rand's meeting him here like this was nothing more than a convenience for him. All of his ducks had been lined up in a neat little row.

“What I can't figure out is what happened here. The shots you heard were fired from Rand's pistol.”

“He was on Trotter's short list, and he was smart enough to figure that we were on to him. He probably came here demanding that Kurshin get him out of Washington. When Kurshin refused he pulled out a gun.”

“The poor bastard never had a chance,” Potok said.

McGarvey looked at him. He was starting to come down, and a deep tiredness seemed to be closing in. But there was something else. He was missing something. Kurshin had known what the setup was on the fourth floor. How? Who knew besides Trotter?

Don Lillianthal, one of the CIA technicians, broke away from the others searching Rand's van and came over to where McGarvey and Potok were standing. He was young, in his early twenties, but he looked like he was thirteen or fourteen.

“It's all there,” he said. “Hell of a setup. State of the art. The man definitely knew his shit.”

“What have you got for us?” McGarvey asked.

“It's hard to say, Mr. McGarvey. What he's got in there is an IBM XT, but jazzed up with some of his own circuitry, and wired directly into a cellular telephone. Which means he could tap into his own home system, which I'm sure is a doozy, and in turn tap into any computer network in the country â¦ hell, probably the entire world.”

“Any physical evidence that he turned something over to the Russians?”

“Only in a negative sense, sir,” Lillianthal said. “One of his disk readers was empty.”

“Which means?”

“It might mean nothing. But for a man like Dr. Rand, he'd almost always be running one program or another. We found plenty of disks in the van.”

“Anything classified?”

“Almost certainly,” Lillianthal said. “That'll be up to the Pentagon to decide, they know their own shit better than I do. But the point I'm trying to make, sir, is that it's possible that whatever information he'd wanted to pass over to the Russians was contained on the disk he took out of the reader. He just bought the farm before he had a chance to reload.”

“How much information is on one of those things?” McGarvey asked.

“A lot.”

“Enough, let's say, to reprogram an intercontinental ballistic missile?” Potok asked.

Lillianthal grinned. “Hell, sir, there's enough room on that type of disk to
build
an ICBM.”

Potok turned away, his jaw tight. McGarvey knew what the man was thinking. June thirtieth was less than two weeks away, and almost certainly Kurshin had the data he needed for the second attack. But what data? Rand was an expert on virtually every weapons system within the U.S. and NATO arsenals. That was a lot of dangerous territory.

“Thanks,” McGarvey told the kid. “We'll get out of your hair now.”

“No sweat. We'll have something put together for you first thing in the A.M. We're heading over to his house now.”

“That's it for us now,” Potok said when Lillianthal had gone. “Truly, I am sorry that this did not work out.”

“It's not over with yet.”

Potok shrugged. “It is for me. Now I must call my embassy, and in the morning I will return home. We have much work to do.”

“I'll see what I can do from this end,” McGarvey said. “It may not be much.”

“I think you will go after Kurshin. I think that you will not let that go so easily, but it has nothing to do with Israel. It has only to do with you.”

“If I come up with something â¦”

“Then you will contact me, or you will not. We'll see.”

A Montgomery County patrol car pulled up, and the cop called to them from the open window. “Mr. McGarvey?”

McGarvey turned around. “Yes?”

“Been trying to find you for the last half hour, sir. You're supposed to call two-eight-seven on the double. Sounded urgent.”

It was the extension Trotter had given him. “Hold on,” he told Potok. “Can I call out on your radio?” he asked the cop.

“Yes, sir,” the cop said.

McGarvey went around the car and got in on the passenger side as the cop contacted his central dispatch. He handed the microphone to McGarvey, who radioed the telephone number.

It was answered on the first ring. “Good evening, the White House.”

The cop's eyes widened.

“Two-eight-seven,” McGarvey said.

The connection was made a second later. “Yes.”

“McGarvey.”

“There may be a developing situation at Falmouth. Trotter is on his way there now.”

McGarvey's grip tightened on the microphone. “How long ago?”

“Sixty-five minutes.”

“Call him and say that we're on our way.”

“Yes,” the man said and the connection was broken.

“Can you get me a helicopter?” he asked the cop. “Now?”

“Yes, sir. On the hospital roof. Five minutes.”

“Do it,” McGarvey snapped and he jumped out of the car.

Potok had heard the entire exchange. “He made his contact, took care of Schey, and now he's after Dr. Abbott?”

“Looks like it,” McGarvey said. “We just might have the bastard after all.”

Arkady Kurshin lowered his police-band walkie-talkie, a thin smile coming to his lips. From where he stood on the roof of the hospital building he had a clear sight line down into the parking lot.

The game he was playing was dangerous, and he knew it. If he lost now, his life would be forfeit. Baranov would see to it. The entire project rested on his decision and his ability to carry it out.

But the timing was tight. It depended upon who would show up first, McGarvey or the helicopter.

Kurshin was still dressed in his blue hospital scrubs. He moved away from the roof edge and in the shadows pulled off the bloodstained clothes, bundled them up and stuffed them behind an air-conditioning vent. Beneath, he wore a short-sleeved khaki jacket, khaki trousers, and soft boots.

He had reloaded his automatic on the way up to the roof, and he checked its action as he moved directly across to the helicopter pad on the north side of the building, low red lights outlining the landing circle. From where he crouched in the darkness behind the main air-conditioning equipment house he could see the elevator door to his left, and the helicopter pad directly ahead.

Trotter was assistant deputy director of operations for the Agency, and a longtime friend of McGarvey's. Baranov had described him as a capable administrator and more than a fair cop. Something had spooked him into going out to Falmouth. Kurshin figured it was probably the helicopter overflight this afternoon. Antipov was probably right, the Americans had discovered the true nature of Xavier Enterprises.

Again, Kurshin had the thought that he was backing himself into a trap. He had the data they needed, so why hadn't he turned and left the hospital when he'd had the chance? By now he would have been long gone. On his way back to Rome where his team would be gathering.

McGarvey. He had eyes now only for that man. He could still
hear the American's voice clearly in his mind from the sewer tunnel beneath the streets of Kaiserslautern. He could still see McGarvey disarming the missile. And he could still feel the incredible surprise and anger that had overcome him at that moment. The bile then as now tasted bitter at the back of his throat.

He had been staring at the elevator indicatorâthe car was still on the ground floorâwhen he suddenly could hear the distant sound of an incoming helicopter. He looked up and searched the sky, finally finding it coming fast from the northeast. He glanced at the elevator indicator again; still the car remained downstairs.

Time. It always was just a matter of timing.

The helicopter, with police markings on its tail, quickly loomed large overhead as it slowly came in for a landing, centering on the pad and swinging around in a tight little circle before settling in.

Hiding his gun behind his right leg, Kurshin ran across to the helicopter, keeping low. The pilot was alone in his machine. As Kurshin approached he popped open the door.

“Mr. McGarvey?” he shouted over the noise of the rotors.

“No,” Kurshin said. He raised his pistol and shot the cop in the face, careful to aim above the microphone in front of his lips, and below the rim of his helmet. The cop's body was shoved to the side against his restraints, and then slumped forward.

Kurshin looked over his shoulder. The elevator indicator was on the second floor and starting up now!

Shoving his pistol in his belt, he quickly unharnessed the cop's body, manhandled it out of the helicopter, and dragged it across the roof, dumping it in the darkness behind the air-conditioning house. He unstrapped the helmet and pulled it off the cop's head. Only a small amount of blood had spattered the inside of the helmet which Kurshin quickly wiped off with his handkerchief, and as he raced back to the helicopter he pulled the helmet on.

He scrambled into the machine, strapped himself in, and plugged in his headset. A split second later the elevator door opened, and two men stepped out, one of them McGarvey.

They rushed across the roof to the helicopter as Kurshin reached over and popped open the rear door, then turned back to his instruments and control column.

This machine, he decided, wasn't much different from the larger Hind trainers he had learned on.

“We have to get down to Falmouth in a hurry,” McGarvey said, climbing into the rear seat.

“Yes, sir,” Kurshin replied. “Exactly where do you want to go?”

“I'll tell you on the run. Now get us out of here.”

BOOK: Countdown

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