Her forehead tensing with concern, the movie star spoke, or anyway her blood-red lipsticked mouth was moving… but no sound came out.
Harrigan leaned closer still. “What are you saying?” he demanded.
Lovely eyes tightened in fear. And the moist red, luscious lips moved again… silently.
Frustrated, the spy shook his head, saying, “I’m not hearing you….”
Suddenly Marilyn reached out and grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him—shook him with unusual strength. As her lips moved again, Harrigan finally could make out what she was saying, but she sounded… strange.
“Wake up!” she demanded, her voice deep and husky.
Harrigan—the slumbering State Department agent, not the fantasy CIA spy—now realized he was dreaming, and fought to wake up, to climb out of the dream world, but Marilyn would not let go of him, and it was as if his eyelids were glued shut.
After what seemed an eternity, Harrigan forced his sleep-crusted eyes open, and Sam Krueger’s round face floated over him like a moon with features stuck on, Mr. Potato Head–style.
“Wake the fuck up!” Krueger was shouting, shaking Harrigan by the shoulders. “K is gone!”
“Gone?” The groggy, disoriented Harrigan tried to make sense of the words. “Gone how? Gone where?”
The normally affable Krueger was scowling. “Khrushchev has gone missing, Sleeping Beauty! And our asses are grass.”
All these words Harrigan understood, and—as awake now as if he’d just dived into an icy lake—he bolted upright in bed. The clock on the nightstand reported two-oh-six a.m.—and immediately reminded him of Marilyn’s prediction…
… and a promise that had been forgotten in the aftermath of the Hungarian’s assassination attempt at the Ambassador.
But the dream—still vivid in his mind, not fading as so many of his dreams immediately did—indicated that somewhere in his subconscious mind he had taken her seriously. Harrigan only wished his conscious mind had done the same.
As Harrigan threw off the bedcovers, Krueger was at his side, adding gravely, “One of the bodyguards is dead.”
“One of Khrushchev’s KGB ones,” Harrigan said, on the move, smoothing the rumpled suit that had doubled as pajamas.
Krueger was frowning in surprise. “Yeah—how did you know—”
“I didn’t—Marilyn Monroe did.”
“Marilyn Mon… Are you dreaming?”
With Krueger on his heels, Harrigan raced down the hotel corridor toward the Presidential Suite, cursing under his breath. There’d be plenty of time to fill the FBI agent in on the actress’s now largely moot information.
Still, all Harrigan could think of was that he’d let the woman down—and the premier. After the attempt on Khrushchev’s life at the Ambassador Hotel, and the fuss that had followed, he’d been bone tired. He knew he never should have gone to bed, he should have babysat K all night and followed up MM’s lead, but fuck! He’d been bushed, goddamnit—how much could one man withstand? He wasn’t superhuman.
Rushing toward Khrushchev’s room, Harrigan asked Krueger if any of the extra security he’d requested had shown up.
“After you hit the sack, you mean?”
Harrigan glared at him. “Yes—after I hit the sack.”
“Nope,” Krueger said, shaking his head. “Nobody. Not federal, not local. Not even a Campfire Girl.”
Even doing advance work in Des Moines-fucking-Iowa—not exactly a hot-bed of agitators—Harrigan had been able to round up at least five thousand officers to protect Khrushchev. Here, only a few hundred men had stood between the dictator and disaster. They’d been lulled by the finality of the junket, seduced by the California climate…
… and, once again, Jack Harrigan had been caught with his pants down around his ankles.
Harrigan entered the outer room of Khrushchev’s opulent suite; right in his path was the sprawled body of the uniformed KGB agent who’d been guarding the premier’s bedroom door.
“Get on your walkie-talkie and get some more bodies up here,” Harrigan told Krueger. “Live ones.”
Harrigan knelt briefly over the KGB officer, who lay on his back, arms casual at his side. The right lens of the man’s wire-framed Coke-bottle glasses was spiderwebbed and blood-spattered, but enough visibility remained through the lens to make out the black gore-ringed hole where his eye should have been. The Russian’s gun was still holstered. The man had not expected this—either he was one of the conspirators himself… tied off as a loose end by a fellow conspirator… or he’d been caught off-guard by someone he trusted.
The poor dead bastard wasn’t the only one who’d been caught off-guard tonight. As Krueger used the walkie-talkie out in the hallway, Harrigan stepped over the corpse and crossed the outer area of the suite and entered the bedroom through its door, which yawned open, the wood around the lock splintered by the “key” of a bullet.
Quickly the State Department agent surveyed the sleeping quarters.
Feathers littered the mattress, the pillows shot to hell, several bullet holes on the bedcovers as well.
He yanked back the blankets and sheets, and found no sign of blood anywhere. Harrigan read the scene—in the darkness, the assassin had approached the bed and just started shooting, not realizing that the premier was no longer there.
Krueger approached. “We have men on the way, but Jack—there’s another dead guard out in the bushes.”
“Another Russian? KGB?”
Again mildly surprised that Harrigan knew this without being told, the FBI man nodded. “The guard who was supposed to be watching the fire escape…. We got a coup on our hands?”
He placed a hand on the FBI agent’s shoulders. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, Sam. We have to search these grounds and the whole goddamn hotel, to see if we have any more dead Russians layin’ around.”
“I already have that in motion.”
“Our people only—not K’s!”
Krueger nodded. “Strictly Secret Service…. But so far, two dead Rooskies is all we got.”
“Isn’t that enough?”
Krueger’s face was pale as milk—spilt milk. “What if a certain other Russian stiff turns up?”
Harrigan’s laugh was devoid of humor. “Then, Sam, you and I may be the first Americans ever sent to Siberia.”
Harrigan was staring at the open window onto the fire escape, the heavy velvet curtains billowing gently from the autumn night breeze.
“If it weren’t for the bullet-riddled bed,” he said to Krueger, “I’d make this a kidnapping.”
“But it isn’t—it’s an assassination attempt gone… please God… awry.”
“I agree. But then… where’s Khrushchev?”
Krueger shrugged. “If I were him, and thought my own people were after me, I’d run and hide. You try under the bed, Jack?”
Harrigan just looked at Krueger, who’d been kidding of course… but then the FBI man did check under there….
Oleg Troyanovsky rushed into the bedroom just as Harrigan was turning away from the window. The previously unflappable translator—wearing only hastily thrown-on trousers and a blue silk pajama top—had unruly hair and wild eyes.
“What have you done?” the translator demanded.
Harrigan let out a breath. “We haven’t done anything—your people, your KGB guards, got themselves killed.”
“Your incompetence has cost us dearly!”
“Our incompetence? If you people hadn’t insisted on using your own staff—”
Troyanovsky got right in Harrigan’s face. “You try to shift blame at a time like this! Don’t you know what this means?”
“Not yet I don’t. Before you came in, I was starting to conduct an investigation. This is a crime scene, and I’d like you to move out into the hall. We’ll be setting up some kind of task force HQ, and—”
“Well, I know what it means!”
Harrigan raised his eyebrows; if the man had a theory, he’d like to h
ear it.
But all the translator had to offer was more frenzy: “It means war between our countries! And that means annihilation for us both!”
Harrigan grabbed the frantic man firmly by the forearm.
“Pull yourself together, goddamnit,” Harrigan said. “Stop and consider—maybe whoever is behind this wants us at each other’s throats!”
The translator blinked, looking somewhat embarrassed, and his composure began to return.
Harrigan took command. “We’ve got to contain this,” he said to Krueger and Troyanovsky. “The Secret Service will continue to handle the search of the grounds and this facility. I want the KGB to stay put.”
The translator’s eyes tightened. “Why would you close us out of this? It is our man who is missing….”
“I’m not at liberty to disclose everything I know, Mr. Troyanovsky… but those two dead KGB agents may have been part of an assassination conspiracy. We don’t know who, among your people, can be trusted.”
Troyanovsky brooded on that for a second, then said, “This will go down hard.”
“Too bad. Leave it at this: we already have two dead Russians; we don’t need any more…. Mr. Troyanovsky, has Mrs. Khrushchev been informed?”
The translator shook his head. “She is still asleep… the children, too. How is it you say? Ignorance is bliss.”
Harrigan thrust a finger at the man’s silk-pajamaed chest. “Who among the entourage knows what’s happened?”
Troyanovsky shrugged. “Only me.”
“Fine—and we’ve got to keep it that way…. If anyone asks, the premier couldn’t sleep, and is out on a moonlight stroll with his two bodyguards.”
Troyanovsky considered this for a while; finally, he nodded solemnly. “You are right. To protect the premier, we must… as you say… contain.”
“Thank you, Mr. Troyanovsky.”
A thin smile allowed itself to appear on the Russian’s handsome face. “You might be interested to know, Mr. Harrigan, that the premier has a liking for you. He respects you.”
“I appreciate that.” Harrigan found a small smile of his own. “I’m not sure I deserve it, but I appreciate it.”
Krueger, who had stepped to one side to answer a walkie-talkie call, now sidled up next to Harrigan.
“You’ve got to come with me,” Krueger told him.
“Now?” Harrigan asked irritably. “Sam, I have just a few things to do here, in light of this situation—can’t this wait?”
“No,” Krueger said, in a manner that conveyed Harrigan’s single option in the matter.
Out in the corridor, when an elevator arrived and Harrigan began to step on, Krueger fell back.
“Are you coming, Sam? I mean, it’s your party, isn’t it?”
“Not hardly,” Krueger said, planted firmly on the other side of the elevator doors. “He’ll be waiting for you in the basement.”
“Who will?”
“Company man.”
“Jesus Christ,” Harrigan muttered as the doors swooshed shut. That was all he needed—CIA intervention; or maybe his dream was about to come true, and Allen Dulles was waiting down there to transform him from goat into hero. Somehow that seemed just a little unlikely, and the rapid descent of the elevator only added to the sick feeling in his stomach.
The elevator doors slid open in the basement of the Beverly Hills Hotel to reveal a man leaning against the opposite wall smoking a cigarette in a holder, smoke curling upward in a near question mark.
Harrigan didn’t know the man—and yet he did.
Lanky, at least ten years older than Harrigan, the spook looked like a high-rent undertaker in his black Brooks Brothers suit with the crisp white button-down shirt and thin black tie, his dark Brylcreemed hair parted on the side. His eyes were china blue and almost pretty, an anomaly in a once handsome face ravaged by time and dirty jobs that somebody had had to do.
As Harrigan stepped out of the elevator, the man switched the affectation of the cigarette-in-holder to his left hand, extending his right.
“John Munson,” the man said. “Would you like to see my I.D.?”
“You show me yours,” Harrigan said, shaking the clammy hand, “and I’ll show you mine.”
They held up their respective I.D. wallets—this was no situation in which to cut corners—and Harrigan said, “I figured you guys’d be lurking around.”
“Our accommodations aren’t as nice as yours,” Munson said, taking a draw from the cigarette-in-holder, ironic amusement seemingly etched permanently in his features. He gestured and showed Harrigan the way, down a narrow hallway past doors marked LAUNDRY and HOUSEKEEPING, where the pink decor of the fabled hotel continued even in its bowels. In the narrow, windowless, claustrophobic confines of the basement, however, the color reminded Harrigan of Pepto-Bismol—some of which the queasy agent could have used about now.
The two men approached a final door, STORAGE, which Munson opened, Harrigan following him inside.
Bigger than a broom closet, though not by much, the room had walls lined with metal racks, loaded with cleaning supplies and hand tools; a few mops and brooms leaned casually against a wall, disinterested bystanders.
A card table took up the rest of the room, where sat a chubby man in white shirtsleeves and another thin black tie, headphones straddling his bald head like a bad comb-over. On the table, next to a sweating bottle of Coke and a half-eaten corned-beef on rye dripping with hot mustard, a large tape recorder whirred, in the process right now of being rewound.
“Khrushchev’s room?” Harrigan asked, gesturing toward the machine.
Munson nodded. “We put the bug in right after his people swept it.”
The combination of smoke, cleaning fluid, and corned-beef on rye was not helping Harrigan’s stomach.
“We swept it, too,” the State Department man said.
“No, the guy working for you was really working for us. He was installing devices, actually, not just checking for them. Hope you don’t mind.”
“Anything to help a brother agency.”
The hand with the cigarette holder gestured, making abstract smoke patterns. “I think you’ll find this… of interest.”
“You mean, you’ve got everything on tape,” Harrigan said, perking, realizing what that spool might hold. “You know exactly what went down in that room!”
“Well, now,” Munson said slowly, sighing smoke, invoking an old radio catchphrase, “I wouldn’t say that….”
Harrigan waited for the CIA agent to continue.
“You see, we’ve been keeping an eye on a certain Chinese assassin for some time….”
Harrigan grunted. “China—should have known. That lead from Formosa….”
“Actually, not Nationalist China—Red.”
“Red!” Harrigan was stunned.
“… At any rate, this hitter is a freelancer named Lee Wong, but our operative lost track of him in Hong Kong last month. We considered him a good candidate for use in a K hit, and figured, if such an attempt were to be made on the trip, California with its ample Oriental population made sense for where he might surface.”
“Red China,” Harrigan said to himself, as if tasting the words, trying to get some recognizable flavor out of them. “They wouldn’t dare… would they?”
Another sigh of smoke. “Mao Tse-tung is reportedly furious over Khrushchev’s visit.” Munson made a melodramatic gesture with the cigarette holder. “Views it as a ‘sell-out’—the Russians consorting with the enemy, so to speak.”
Harrigan was frowning, shaking his head, damn near incredulous. “And that’s enough for Mao to start World War III over?”
Munson smiled wickedly. “It might be—if China were on the sidelines, waiting to come out on top.”
And now Harrigan had to nod—he could see the terrible “sense” of it….
“We have it on good authority,” Munson continued, “that relations between Russia and China have atrophied, although both countries make a concerted
effort to lead the free world to believe otherwise.”
But now Harrigan was shaking his head. “What in hell makes you think that, Agent Munson? I work the State Department beat, remember—and I’ve seen nothing but cooperation between Russia and China.”
“That’s because the State Department—at least on your level, Agent Harrigan—is unaware of Khrushchev’s refusal to give Mao the bomb.”
Harrigan’s eyebrows shot up. “The A-bomb? Mao wanted Russia to share atomic secrets with them… ?”
Munson shrugged. “They are supposedly allies. You can see how Mao might consider such a refusal… less than gracious.”
“Jesus, Joseph, and Mary…. Well thank God for that much. Maybe Khrushchev means it, all this disarmament talk.”
“Perhaps he does,” Munson said. “And the failure to share with China, shall we say, one from column A? That discourtesy isn’t the only breach between the Red giants—there’s also Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin… his determination to erase any memory of the former dictator—who is still revered in China, after all. That is seen by Mao as an outright act of betrayal.”
“That I can understand,” Harrigan said, half a smirk carving itself in his cheek. “Mao and ol’ Joe Stalin have a hell of a lot in common.”
“Aptly put,” Munson said, nodding; then he drew on the cigarette-in-holder and, as if suggesting a round of golf, said, “Let’s play the tape.”
The two men looked at the chubby technician, who during their discussion had returned his attention to his sandwich; he switched on the machine with a mustard-smeared finger.
As the tape began to play, Harrigan leaned closer to the machine, but for a few agonizingly long minutes, nothing but hum, mere room tone, could be made out.
Then, finally, came a faint murmur.
“He’s talking to himself,” Munson whispered.
Harrigan had heard it, too—the premier was talking, all right….
“The fat bastard knows English,” Harrigan said through tight teeth. “That son of a bitch!”
“He is a cute one,” Munson admitted, then held a “shush” finger to his lips, though another humming minute of silence followed. Then Munson cocked an ear.
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