Labyrinth

by Jon Land

  The drizzle had given way to a steady rain. Locke might have been the only person walking without an umbrella. That made him stand out. He swung onto a smaller, less crowded street and aimed for the Dorchester. He reached it in fifteen minutes, being as sure as he could that no one had followed him.

  He stood under the marquee to the right of the hotel’s entrance for a few minutes, getting a fix on the lobby.

  Two men stood just inside the revolving doors, surveying every man who came through. Just the men. Locke couldn’t make out their features but their intentions were clear enough: They were looking for someone and it was probably he.

  Wasting no time, Locke followed the arrows to the hotel’s parking garage and walked down the ramp, ignoring the old sign prohibiting entry on foot. A car screeched up at him, headlights shimmering and tires screaming. Chris spun out of the way and pressed hard against the wall. The attendant behind the wheel shouted something at him. Locke started down the ramp again.

  A minute later he had found the elevator and was inside. Forty seconds after that he was stepping out watchfully on the eighth floor.

  The hallways were vacant. Locke started for his room, flinching each time he reached a break in the wall or a partition sufficient to hide the frame of a man. Finally he was at his room, pushing a now-steady hand into his pocket in search of his key. He jammed it into the lock and turned the knob without hesitating.

  His suite was a shambles. Clothes were scattered everywhere, the mattress from the bedroom was upturned and torn, drawers had been ripped out and emptied of whatever contents he had managed to unpack. His suitcase was torn to shreds, all the lining ripped out in search of hidden compartments.

  What had they been looking for?

  Locke swung the door closed, pulled his hand away from the light switch just before he hit it. Terror gripped him as he stepped about the room, kicking aside remnants of his clothes and possessions. They had spared nothing. Even the bathroom had been ripped apart. In the corner of the living room, the desk had been pushed on its side. Chris rushed toward it.

  His passport and extra money were gone!

  Outside the drenching rain battered the windows. Night descended on London. Locke pressed his shoulders against the wall, afraid someone might be watching him through the glass, someone with a rifle perhaps.

  The phone rang, maddeningly loud, insistently repeating its double ring.

  Locke lowered himself and crept toward it, again pulling his fingers back at the last instant. Charney had told him not to answer it. But what if something had gone wrong and Brian was trying to call to alert him? No way to be sure. The original instructions had to be observed, the limits adhered to.

  The phone stopped ringing.

  Locke stayed huddled on the floor, lost in panic. His muscles cramped up and he stretched them out slowly, as if any sudden motion might betray him to whoever had ransacked his suite. The men in the lobby watching the entrance perhaps, or their fellows.

  Who were they?

  Animals! … ¡Carniceros!

  Accusing words screamed at him by Alvaradejo fluttered through Chris’s mind. What did the Colombian think he had done?

  The souls of San Sebastian will be avenged!

  What was the connection?

  Locke stayed frozen. Minutes passed. Time ceased to have meaning.

  Brian, where are you?

  Outside the window, night was firmly settled in the London sky. The darkness of the room was broken only by lights from the city’s skyline dancing madly across the walls.

  There was a barely audible knock on the door. Locke crept across the carpet, his movements painfully slow. He raised his eye to the peephole.

  Brian Charney stood outside, body pressed against the door frame. His knock came again. Locke opened the door.

  Charney collapsed against him, breathing in heaves. Locke eased his friend down and managed to get the door closed.

  Then he saw the blood. It was all over him, all over Charney. His friend had been shot, several times by the look of it. His lips were parched, trembling. Blood dribbled from the sides of his mouth. His face was ghastly pale, his eyes were darting. Charney was dying.

  Locke took his friend’s head in his lap.

  “I’m sorry, Chris” came the raspy mutter. “Oh, God, I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t talk.” Locke could think of nothing else to say.

  “I know how … bad I’m hurt. There are more important things now. Lubeck knew. It’s why they killed him.” Suddenly Charney grabbed Locke’s lapel. His eyes blazed. “They must be stopped!”

  “Who?”

  “They’re everywhere, everything. Lubeck saw. Lubeck knew. The world will be theirs if they’re not stopped.”

  “Who?”

  Charney’s eyes drifted. His grasp slipped from Locke’s coat, his fingers dangled in the air. “I set you up, old buddy, and then someone else did. Alvaradejo had to die, the other … links too.” Charney coughed up a stream of blood. “Oh, God, my kids! What about my kids?”

  “I’ll go the American Embassy and tell them everything. I’ll tell them everything!” Locke promised.

  But Charney’s eyes flashed alive and his grasp tugged tight again. “No. Mustn’t. Trust no one. Don’t … know … how deep this goes. They murdered a whole town so no one would know.”

  “Know what?”

  It was obvious Charney was incoherent and rambling. What was giving him the strength to go on, Locke couldn’t imagine.

  “Liechtenstein,” he muttered, breath failing. “Felderberg was Lubeck’s next stop, Felderberg the broker. Find him, find him!” Charney shifted slightly. “My pocket …”

  Locke pulled a bloodstained sheet of paper from his dying friend’s jacket. He could make out writing.

  “Go to Cornwall. Find Burgess. He’ll … get … you—”

  That was it. Charney died. The last of his breath poured out in a wisp, as if a vacuum had sucked him dry. His eyes locked open and sightless. Locke eased his head onto the carpet. He wanted to collapse and cry for himself as well as his friend, give up and just sit for a while. But he couldn’t. Whoever had killed Charney was close, in the hotel by now almost surely, coming to the room perhaps. Locke had to act fast but his mind wouldn’t cooperate.

  It was too much. Memories of the horrible accident twenty-two years before filled his head, of watching helplessly as the doctors lifted an unconscious Lubeck onto a stretcher and tore away the field dressing to reveal the mangled remains of his hand. It was a nightmare he couldn’t wake from and now the nightmare had returned. He had seen one friend crippled and another killed. Both were dead, and he was so goddamn alone… .

  But he had to act! Survival called out to him, Brian Charney called out to him, the training from long before called out to him.

  They‘re everywhere, everything… .

  Who had Charney been talking about?

  Locke’s mind craved release. He focused on escape, on survival. He had no passport, little money. All he had was an address.

  He looked at the tattered, bloodied sheet of paper Charney had given him and read it quickly: Colin Burgess, Bruggar House, Cadgwith Cove, Cornwall.

  Chris struggled to recall his knowledge of English geography. Cadgwith Cove was located on a stretch of land called the Lizard at England’s southwesternmost tip. Accessible easily by train. First he would need a cab to get him to the station.

  He was getting ahead of himself, though. His clothes were bloodied and demanded changing before he set out. He stripped off the ruined ones he had on, grabbed a fresh set from the floor and changed quickly, tucking all his remaining money in a pocket along with Charney’s paper. He started for the door, glancing at his friend’s corpse one last time. There should have been something else he could do for him. Letting him lie there didn’t seem right, but he had no choice.

  Locke stepped into the corridor and advanced slowly. He reached an intersection and stopped, wary of proceeding. He could turn rig
ht or keep straight. Which way? He hesitated, but not for long because up ahead two men had just turned onto the hallway. The men from the lobby! Locke ducked to the right and starting running down the adjacent hallway. He had no idea if the men had seen him. Either way, there would be others around.

  A diversion, he needed a diversion. Confusion had to be created into which he could disappear. But how?

  The answer lay before him at eye level on the wall. Locke hit the lever hard and yanked.

  The fire alarm began to blare instantly. At this relatively early hour of the evening, most guests were in their rooms preparing for dinner. In seconds the corridor was lined with milling bodies moving unsurely but rapidly, searching for someone to follow as they tested the air for smoke.

  The elevators had shut off automatically. Eight flights of stairs had to be descended, and the unnerved guests clustered toward the nearest exit. Locke let himself be swept up in their momentum, slowed at each descending level as they caught up with more figures and more clutter. By the fifth floor he realized there was no one shoving toward him from the rear. He was breathing easier when he reached the lobby to find people gathered everywhere, the overflow spilling into the street.

  Locke joined the spillover, staying among the crowd as he searched for a cab, breaking away only when he was certain the chaos had him totally shielded.

  Trust no one… .

  Locke wanted to go straight to the American Embassy and dump his story on the ambassador’s desk, but Charney’s command prevented him. Who knew how deep this mess went? In Washington, Charney had said there was an army supporting him, reinforcements only a phone call away. Then where were they when he had needed them? Why hadn’t then responded? No, his friend had encountered forces he had not expected and was ill equipped to deal with. And if that were so, what chance would Locke stand against them?

  Trembling, he walked further into the night.

  Chapter 9

  DOGAN HAD BEEN EXPECTING a call from the Commander all day, so when it came he was more relieved than surprised. Best to get things over with. Operatives of Division Six seldom fucked up, and when they did there was hell to pay. And Dogan had fucked up big time.

  The Commander requested a nine P.M. meeting at his favorite outdoor café on the Champs-Élysées. Dogan was ready for a typical chewing-out session. He would grit his teeth and nod his way through it.

  The Commander was waiting for him at an isolated table for two in the sidewalk café’s rear corner. He looked more French than American with thinning hair, rimless glasses, and a thick mustache sliced off well before it reached the edges of his mouth. As always he was reading a newspaper. His tone would be indifferent; his eyes would seldom leave the print. Funny thing about the Commander, he could chastise you without ever meeting your stare, as if you didn’t even merit the recognition. How he had risen to the position of chief of Division Six’s affairs in Europe was beyond Dogan. Then again, much had been beyond him lately.

  “Good evening, Grendel,” the Commander said, not looking up from his newspaper. “Please sit down.” Dogan did as he was told. “A most unfortunate day.”

  “I’ve had better.”

  “And not many worse, I should hope. I’ve just received the medical report on Keyes. He’ll be manning a desk for the balance of his career, thanks to his wrist.”

  “It’s the best place for him.”

  “We invested a lot of money believing otherwise.”

  “You were wrong.”

  “A report would have more than sufficed. An assault was totally uncalled for.”

  Dogan felt his anger rising. “I gave him a direct order. He disobeyed it.”

  “Yes, Grendel,” the Commander responded. “I’ve read the boy’s report on that. You ordered him to let Vaslov go, correct?”

  “Correct.”

  “The most wanted number from the KGB and you ordered him let go. Keyes claims he had the Russian dead on target.”

  “The shot wasn’t clear. People were everywhere. If I had let that kid start blasting, innocent bystanders would have been dropping everywhere.”

  “Along with Vaslov perhaps?”

  “Possibly, but the risk was not acceptable,” Dogan explained, trying to justify his actions, though the truth was much simpler: Vaslov had beaten him and deserved to walk. “Shootouts are a thing of the past, Commander, you’ve told me that yourself on more than one occasion.”

  The Commander glanced up briefly. “That’s not the point and please don’t talk to me about procedure. You didn’t just stop Keyes from firing into a crowd, you shattered his wrist and made holding a telephone painful for him for the rest of his life. He’s not happy and neither is the department.”

  “You’re not expecting me to deny this, I hope.”

  “There would be no sense in that. You violated a major rule of the field this morning: You let anger get the better of you.”

  “Not anger, Commander, frustration. You gave me a bunch of wet-eared kids who couldn’t follow orders on a simple pickup operation.”

  “The operation was yours, Grendel. So is the responsibility for bungling it.”

  “And I’m not trying to pass that off. Except the operation wasn’t bungled. It was clean and well conceived.”

  “The results seem to indicate otherwise… .”

  “Because Vaslov and the Russians beat us. They played a better game. They’re superior to us because their agents know nothing about ego gratifications. They have a job to do and it gets done. Simple.”

  “So they planted a fake defector and you took the bait.”

  “Yes, Vaslov planted a fake defector but he also planted a half-dozen other diversions to throw us off the track. A stalled car, a pair of baby carriages, a blind man—all his work.”

  The Commander flipped the page of his newspaper. “Tell me about the setup.”

  “The defector reached us through his contact with the place and the time. He was impatient. He’d been holed up in Paris for almost two weeks waiting for his chance.”

  “Then I must assume Vaslov knew something of the plan himself.”

  “Probably only shadows but they proved enough. The defector’s contact must’ve had a big mouth. So Vaslov planted a fake defector to draw us off. When we lunged at the bait, his men were the only ones around to pick up the real defector. We got beat, just like I said before.”

  A cool night breeze ruffled the Commander’s paper. His eyes grasped Dogan’s for the first time. “I don’t see it as that simple. Perhaps, Grendel, you are becoming too predictable.”

  “Given the limitations of what I have to work with, I do the best I can. The men who beat us today were strictly professional.” A pause. “The way we used to be.”

  “I see,” the Commander noted, flipping to the back section.

  Dogan grasped him Firmly at the elbow. The older man flinched but didn’t bother trying to pull away. Annoyance swam in his eyes.

  “No, I don’t think you do, sir,” Dogan charged. “Let me try to explain. Men like Keyes can’t read between the lines, can’t estimate their opponent’s next move based on simple instinct. Everything has to be cut and dried for them. In the field, though, it’s anything but that, which means losing to the Russians is something we better get used to.”

  “An interesting depiction of your failure this morning.”

  “Call it whatever you want.”

  “Now I would kindly ask you to remove your hand from my arm.” Dogan complied. The Commander straightened his sleeve. “And as long as you’re explaining things, take as your next subject, Grendel, the reason why you chose to take out a fellow Division operative instead of Vaslov.”

  “We lost. There was no need to press the matter further. Besides, at least I know what I can expect from Vaslov. That’s not always true anymore about those on my own side.”

  The Commander lowered his newspaper, actually lowered it. “That’s one hell of an accusation.”

  “Take it for what it’s
worth. Just make sure you understand something else along with it. If I had let Keyes take Vaslov out today, the Russians would have replaced him and I’d have to deal with a new, unfamiliar network. Considering the bureaucratic overtones, Division would have been set back by such an action more than the KGB. I know Vaslov. Finding out the means and methods of some KGB replacement is a chore I can do without.”

  “Knowing Vaslov didn’t help you this morning.” The Commander sat motionless on the other side of the table, making no effort to still his newspaper in the breeze. “This morning’s fiasco has escalated far beyond an embarrassment. It’s won the qualification of incident. Congratulations, Grendel.”

  Dogan said nothing.

  “I’d like to say I’m bringing you up before the review board,” the Commander went on, cold eyes digging into Dogan and startling him with their stare. “But of course, we have no such board or any precise procedures to follow. You have accused the Company and the Division of losing their professionalism. Perhaps you have lost yours. Times have changed. The days of the lone wolf are over. You’re not a team player, Grendel. You just don’t fit anymore.” The Commander hesitated. “Pick a country, something warm and tropical perhaps.”

  “Carrying a gold watch in your hip pocket, Commander?”

  “You know the procedure, Grendel. A most generous one, I might add.”

  Dogan felt the rage building within him. The Commander’s right hand disappeared under the table, for a gun perhaps. No matter. Limits were everything and Dogan knew he could tear the man’s throat out before he could pull the trigger. The thought comforted him, and the knowledge was in his eyes. The Commander’s hand came back up and started to dog-ear the pages of his newspaper.

  “Uh-uh,” Dogan said simply. “I’m not ready for the country yet.”

  “I wasn’t offering you a choice.”

  “But you’ve left yourself one, haven’t you, Commander? How many men are watching us now? What weapons are they holding on me? They’re waiting for a signal from you, of course, which you’ll give if I don’t agree to your reassignment and go quietly.” Dogan leaned back. “Give the signal, Commander. You know there’s no way they can kill me before I kill you. Think of it, we’ll pass into eternity together, but in different directions, I suspect.”