12
DRUMMERS
DRUMMING
A N O V E L O F S U S P E N S E
DIANA DEVERELL
AVON BOOKS NEW YORK
12 DRUMMERS DRUMMING. Copyright © 1998 by Diana Deverell. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
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ISBN: 978-0-7595-2005-9
A hardcover edition of this book was published in 1998 by Avon Books, Inc.
First eBook Edition: March 2001
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Contents
Acknowledgments
Author’s Note
Acronyms, Leaders and Organizations
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
A Very Specific Target
“Somebody had a personal motive for blowing up two hundred and twenty-seven people?”
Harry shook his head again. “For blowing up one person. The other two hundred twenty-six were for free.”
I went over to stand in front of the sliding door. The glass was cool against my forehead. While I stood there, another airliner swooped from the sky and roared down the river toward National.
Harry stood beside me, not touching. When he spoke, his voice was scarcely audible. “He was on it, wasn’t he?”
“Seems pretty likely.” My throat was closing and my words came out thick.
“I’m sorry.” When he spoke again, the consoling tone was gone from his voice. “If he was the target,” Harry said, “they’ll be coming after you next.”
“Here’s a title to add to your short list of espionage stories with female protagonists. . . the action speeds along.”
Booklist
“12 Drummers Drumming is a dynamite action thriller. . .I could not put it down. . .
Her tale of adventure is gripping. . .
The Foreign Service’s loss of Diana Deverell is a great gain for readers.”
Deane R. Hinton, Career Ambassador (Ret.)
Other Avon Books by
Diana Deverell
Coming Soon in Hardcover
NIGHT ON FIRE
FOR MOGENS PEDERSEN
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am boundlessly grateful to the New Writers of the Purple Page—Lynn Daniels Anderson, Benjamin Chambers, Nancy Carol Moody, Amedee Smith, and Don Stahl. Better critics, coaches, and friends do not exist.
I am also indebted to the Warsaw Attaché Reunion for much of the Belgian and German material that found its way into this book. I particularly want to thank Cyriel and Rachel Moelans for sharing their experiences in Antwerp and Africa and for reviewing an early draft. Thanks also to John and Sheila Pugh, who guided me to Potsdam and Meissen.
A special thank-you to Zofia Rostkowska-Menasria, who helped me with my Polish.
These fine people gave me correct information. Any mistakes are mine alone.
Without the kindness and generosity of the following women this book could not have been written: Candace Berra, Molly Brann, Patricia Butenis, Marilyn Curtis, Elizabeth Engstrom, Casey Gardner, Valerie Huebner, Susan Kolander, Kathryn Marzano, Jenny Smith, and Marian Kingsley Smith.
Nancy Yost is a literary agent to die for. At Avon Books, Trish Lande Grader and Jennifer Sawyer Fisher brought the book to life. All first-time novelists should be so lucky.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
When I was a Foreign Service Officer, I always traveled by air. On my way to spend Christmas of 1988 with family in Denmark, I crossed the Atlantic one day before the Lockerbie airline disaster. I was flying east, not west, and was never in danger of being a passenger on Pan Am Flight 103. Yet I felt imperiled. The bomb wasn’t on my plane—but it could have been placed there easily. I’d been lucky. Nearly a decade later, whenever I board an international flight I find myself hoping my luck will hold.
The people and terrorist incidents in this novel spring from my imagination. But underlying the fictional events are historical facts. Sad facts, some of them. Two agents of Libyan intelligence were charged with blowing up Pan Am 103. As of this writing, they haven’t been brought to trial.
Preventing terrorist acts is difficult work. This story was inspired by my admiration for the people who take on that job.
—Diana Deverell
February 20, 1997
ACRONYMS, LEADERS AND ORGANIZATIONS
Abu Nidal Organization (ANO)—terrorist group headed by Abu Nidal; ANO’s campaign against Western targets in the mid-1980s included massacres in Vienna and Rome airports and the LaBelle Disco bombing in West Berlin. The collapse of the Berlin Wall at the end of the decade deprived ANO of “safe” terroritories from which it could launch its attacks in Europe. Now based in Libya, ANO has concentrated its violent assaults on targets in Israel and moderate Palestinian organizations
CIA—U.S. Central Intelligence Agency
DDIS—Danish Defense Intelligence Service
DIA—U.S. Department of Defense, Defense Intelligence Agency
EUR—State Department’s Bureau of European and Canadian Affairs
GDR—German Democratic Republic, formerly East Germany
GSG-9, Grenz Schutz Gruppe—German counterterrorism unit
HVA, Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung—the now-defunct foreign intelligence branch of the old East German Stasi
INR—State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research
Mossad—Israeli intelligence
NATO—North Atlantic Treaty Organization
NTSB—National Transportation and Safety Board, charged with investigation of airline disasters
PFLP-GC—Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine—General Command, terrorist group headed by Ahmed Jibril
Colonel Muammar Qadhafi—leader of Libya; supporter of Abu Nidal and his organization
SB, Sluzba Bezpieczenstwa—intelligence service of Communist Poland
S/CT—State Department’s Coordinator for Counterterrorism
Stasi—Ministry of State Security in the former East Germany
Warsaw Pact—East Bloc counterpart of NATO
12
DRUMMERS
DRUMMING
1
Only two o’clock in the afternoon, but it was the twenty-seventh of December and dusk had fallen in Denmark. The corner tower of Kronborg Castle was stark against the bruised sky. Slivers of icy wind pierced my down jacket. A strand of blond hair pulled free from my knitted cap, whipped across my eyes, forced out tears. A sob escaped me, too. The wind snatched the sound away, silencing my fear but not dulling the ache in my heart. I shoved my hair under the cap and stumbled on. I had to. Up ahead waited the only person who could tell me that Stefan Krajewski was still alive.
And he had to be! Stefan, my lover, had to be alive.
Just four months before, he’d said too many people knew that he was doing contract work for Danish intelligence. He’d spent close to twenty years in covert operations and his time was up. Soon, he’d told me at the beginning of August, he’d move inside.
And he’d move in with me. We’d been in the Allegheny Mountains when he said that. I’d saved up my annual leave, rented a cabin near Clifton Forge for the month of August. The two of us, one bed, no phone for an unheard-of thirty-one consecutive days. And I must have thought thirty-one times—at least once a day—This is what it will be like. Coffee-drenched mornings, sharing a newspaper. Late-afternoon beers, talking over the minutiae of daily life. Evening strolls down to the lake to see if the beavers were having a moonlight swim.
With my body and my soul, I’d loved Stefan for more than a decade, my passion for him never wavering even though we were often separated by the work he did. When we were together, we had everything we needed for happiness—except time. Finally, we’d have that, too. The urgency gone, so many hours stretching out before us, we could squander them. That was how I wanted things to be. My cherished fantasy, shattered now by reality.
Six days ago, a plane had exploded over Scotland. Another plane over Scotland! Global Flight 500 had departed Heathrow on December 21, bound for New York’s Kennedy Airport. It came apart a half hour later over the Inner Hebrides Islands. And Stefan had disappeared.
I neared the corner of the castle and a row of ancient cannons took shape. The fortress hulked beside me, Denmark’s easternmost defense for six centuries. Through the gloom I made out the tall figure of Holger Sorensen, cloaked in a Danish Army parka, standing with his back to the sea. I walked faster, scattering frozen pebbles beneath my boots.
I stopped a yard from him. He was a head taller than my five feet nine and I had to tilt my chin up to see his face. The lines along his cheekbones had deepened since our last meeting. His eyes had faded from blue to gray. And the smile was gone from them, replaced by the consoling expression of a priest prepared to mourn the dead.
I stepped past him, stared unseeing across the water toward the Swedish coastline.
Holger’s gloved hand was heavy on my shoulder. In a voice weighted with sorrow, he said, “Kathryn.”
I’d forgotten Holger always addressed me by my Christian name. These days my friends and colleagues called me by my initials, K.C., and I wrote it as “Casey.” The only other person who still used “Kathryn” was my father. And only when he was going to give me bad news.
To stop Holger’s next words, I said quickly, “I’ve seen the passenger list.” I took a breath, pushed on. “Stefan’s name wasn’t on it. He knew Monday was the anniversary of Lockerbie. He wouldn’t have flown an American carrier on Monday.” I was breathing hard, as if I’d been running. My fingertips moved jerkily along the frost-rimed barrel of a cannon.
Holger didn’t speak.
I said, “We warned everyone in the Department not to fly American carriers out of Europe last week.”
Holger’s voice was soft. “Did you tell Stefan that?”
“I couldn’t.” Anguish raised my voice still higher. I took another breath. “I didn’t have a chance.”
He said, “Nor did I.”
The mournful cry of an air horn cut through the darkness. The ferryboat was visible a hundred yards offshore, its white hull wallowing toward the docks at Helsingør. A lone seabird rose from the stony beach below us.
Holger said, “It was some time ago you and Stefan made plans that he would join you in Washington for Christmas?”
“October.” And stingy fate had doled out only eighteen hours that time.
“You made definite plans?”
“Tentative, of course. Two weeks ago, he sent word to expect him on the twenty-second.”
“But you haven’t spoken with him since October?”
“He never used phones.”
“And when he didn’t show up?” Holger asked.
“I knew his trip to the U.S. was no vacation. A lot of things might have delayed him a day. Even two days.”
“So at first you didn’t blame his absence on the explosion?”
“At first? No.” I’d started my Christmas vacation on December 21, on leave from my job at the State Department. When the news started coming in about Global Flight 500, I was sticking bows on a gift for Stefan, a pair of cowboy boots I’d bought from a Western outfitter who sold to real ranch hands. I’d kept an eye on the TV while I struggled to wrap the matching Stetson. Polish by birth, Stefan was smitten with Western regalia.
As I waited for him to contact me, my mind slowly recorded every piece of film from the Hebrides. Long-lens shots of the motley rescue flotilla that had set out from every harbor on the island of Islay. A terse interview with an exhausted diver, his wet suit glistening like black ice. A somber view of the distillery warehouse serving as a makeshift morgue, aged oak barrels stacked against a stone wall. And above it all—again—the ashgray sky of Scotland in December.
The explosion hadn’t occurred over Scottish soil. The Boeing 747 and all two hundred and twenty-seven aboard submerged in the Firth of Lorne, one hundred and fifty miles northwest of the original disaster. But the words spoken by every newscaster were the same: Lockerbie Two.
Holger’s voice prodded me. “But you got no message from Stefan and you feared the worst.”
I turned, still avoiding Holger’s eyes, studying Kronborg Castle. The weathered bricks were topped by a roof the color of new grass, eerily bright against the murk. I repeated the last word he’d spoken. “The worst. Yes.”
On the twenty-third, I called the airline but they wouldn’t release information to me. Frantic, I phoned my contact in TIP-OFF, the Department’s terrorist lookout program, and she faxed me the passenger list for Global 500. Half the names were of men traveling alone. Any one of them might have been Stefan, working under cover. Too upset to face my co-workers in the office of State’s Coordinator for Counterterrorism, I waited until after hours to go to the Department and log on to Intelink, the intelligence community’s private Internet. I spent four hours searching electronically. I found only speculation. There was too little data to determine yet if Stefan had been on the plane. I knew I should stay by my phone, wait for his call.
I drifted around my three rooms, carefully evading the packages still sitting on my desk. Christmas Eve came. I moved Stefan’s gifts to my bedroom. Then to the back of my closet, out of sight. But, awake before dawn on Christmas morning, I saw that white hat. Saw Stefan, grinning from under it, flamboyant attire no hazard in the life we should have been living.
I met Holger’s gaze. “As you said. I feared the worst. I figured you and I needed to talk.”
“You traveled to me.”
He’d been my teacher once. I answered his unspoken question, my voice flat, parroting a lecture on evasive maneuvers. “Christmas morning I went to Dulles and got an Air France flight to Paris. Changed planes three times between Paris and Gøteborg. Rented a car, drove south and crossed to Denmark on the ferry yesterday. Went through that whole business to get you out here today.”
Holger’s compassionate look was gone, the sudden clarity like a tempered steel gate, clanging shut. The Major—the part of him that served as a reserve officer in the Danish Army—had pushed aside the Father—the side of Holger that made it possible for him to also serve as a Lutheran priest. He said, “Go home. There’s nothing you can do here.”
“I’m staying. Till we find out what’s become of Stefan.”
“We can’t pursue this further. Stefan was checking on another development, one also related to the Lockerbie anniversary. That investigation is at a critical point. We must proceed delicately. My arrangement with Stefan required that he work autonomously. I don’t know yet what identity he assumed. Nor do I know the names of his contacts, or his destination. Were it not for you, I would not be certain he had head
ed for the U.S.”
“Maybe he suddenly went someplace else.”
“Without advising you? Not likely.”
I looked down, my boots a darker shade of black than the stony ground. Stefan and I had secure ways to communicate. He knew how much I’d worry. If he were alive, he’d have found a way to tell me.
Holger gripped my upper arms. “We cannot alert anyone to the direction in which our interests lie. My people will keep their distance from the wreckage of Global Flight 500. So must you. You must return at once to Washington.”
“Not until I know—”
“When was the last time you slept? The last time you ate?” His voice was harsh and he tightened his grip. “I feel only bones.”
“I’ve always been lanky,” I said.
“Slender, yes. But not this. Your face is so thin, you must have lost five kilos since I saw you last.”
“So I’ll eat something. I’m fine, Holger. I can help—”
“You can’t. You left a trail easily read by anyone who wishes to know where you’ve been.”
I pulled away from him, turned toward the sea. Only the whitecaps were visible. The cold enveloped me completely. I smelled nothing and didn’t taste the salt coating my lips. “I had to see you—”
“And I put a great deal at risk so that you could. But it is unfortunate that your journey ends only kilometers from my own parish.”
“Stefan was on his way to me. If he’s dead . . .” I swallowed, tried again. “I hunt terrorists. That’s my job. What I do. If they’ve killed Stefan . . .” I took a deep breath, made my voice hard as Holger’s. “I have to stay. Have to work with you.”
His face was marble. Unyielding. “You can’t remain in Europe. You’re not safe here.” His eyes took on that steely expression again and he said, “You leave first. Drive to Kastrup and fly back to Washington.”
Rage welled up in me and its heat seemed to warm the air between us. “I’ll go back to D.C. But I’m not through with this. I can’t be. I have to find out who did this.” I started away from him, pebbles skittering under my heels.
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