Critical Mass

by David Hagberg

  Lana Toy, a bottle of vodka in one hand and two glasses in the other, came back from the kitchen. She stopped short. “You are in trouble,” she said, her face serious.

  “I’m going to need your help, Lana. But I don’t want you to ask me any questions. Please. It’s for your own sake.”

  The other woman nodded her reluctant agreement, then came the rest of the way into the small but nicely furnished living room and set the bottle and glasses on the coffee table.

  “I need to use your phone.”

  “Sure,” Lana Toy said, pouring the drinks as Kelley went to the phone and dialed a number.

  It was answered on the first ring, by a man who simply repeated the number.

  “This is Yaeko Hataya,” Kelley said softly. “I’m here in Washington.”

  “We’ve been worried. Can we come for you?”

  “No,” Kelley said sharply. She glanced at Lana Toy, who was watching her. “I’ll call back in … five minutes.”

  “Are you safe?”

  “For the moment,” Kelley said. “Five minutes.” She hung up. “Now I’ll take that drink,” she told her friend.

  Phil Carrara was one of four men in the small third-floor briefing room listening to Sargent Anders, the director of Technical Services, explain what they had learned from Tokyo. Actually, he thought, they had nothing concrete yet, and the way things were going they might never find Shirley’s killers or their actual motives.

  Within three hours of the attack a team of four forensics people from Technical Services had been sent over, along with two of the best covert operations muscle currently in house and not on some field assignment somewhere.

  During the thirteen-plus hours it took to get to Japan (they’d gone via commercial carrier to attract less attention) Tokyo Station had all but closed down. The Japanese were extremely sensitive about spies in their midst.

  Shirley’s cover had been as a special economic affairs adviser to the ambassador, the actual day-to-day work of which fell naturally to his staff. The Japanese Federal Police accepted this ruse so long as there was no trouble. With this incident, everyone over there was keeping a low profile, and would continue to do so for at least the next few days.

  The other three men with Carrara were his Assistant Deputy Director of Operations, Ned Tyllia, the Chief of the Far East Desk, Nicholas Wuori, and the Chief of Operations Covert Action Staff, Don Ziegler.

  “The delivery truck has been found abandoned in a parking area near the Ikebukuro train station in northeast Tokyo. About five miles, as the crow flies, north of the Roppongi Prince,” Anders was saying.

  It was something new. Carrara sat forward. “Who discovered the truck, Sargent, certainly not one of our people?”

  “No, sir, it was Tokyo Police. The call came from a local koban after one of their officers stumbled across the truck. Its license tag had been removed. A mistake on their part, I’d say. Naturally we monitored the call, as we do all police and military calls, and once the truck had been picked up and brought to the impound yard, one of my people got in for a quick look.”

  Anders looked more like a bookkeeper than a cop, which is what he’d been with the New York City Police Department for eleven years before coming to the CIA. He was a precise little man, who sometimes affected a British accent because he thought it made him sound like James Bond. (Ian Fleming had been and still was the most widely read author by CIA employees.)

  “Did we get anything?”

  “Unknown yet, but there’s the possibility. According to eyewitnesses, the two bad guys wore hard hats and paper air filters. We recovered two used filters and one plastic hard hat from the truck. The items are enroute to our lab in Yokosuka where we should be able to come up with a DNA profile from hair out of the hat and from saliva off the filters. Won’t give us a name or names, but we’ll have something to match if they’re eventually bagged.”

  “Fingerprints, anything like that?” Carrara asked.

  “No time, it was a quick in-out. But we managed to get a sample of the gasoline they used. It was normal unleaded, but it was laced with hydrochloric acid. Ten percent.”

  Everyone was shaken.

  “Even if the fire hadn’t killed Jim, the fumes would have burned out his lungs,” Anders said.

  “Determined bastards,” Tyllia commented.

  “And ruthless,” Anders agreed.

  The telephone at Carrara’s elbow buzzed softly and he picked it up. “Carrara.”

  “This is Tony. Kelley Fuller just called.”

  Carrara raised his hand for Anders to hold up. “Where is she?”

  “Apparently here in Washington. But she used her workname, and she sounded strung out, though she says she’s safe. She’ll call back at 8:32.”

  Carrara glanced up at the wall clock. Four minutes. “Did you get a trace?”

  “I brought it up, but she was too fast. I’ll get her when she calls back. I offered to send someone for her, sir, but she refused.”

  “We’ll keep her at arm’s length for the moment. I don’t want her contaminated.”

  “Yes, sir,” the communications man downstairs said, and Carrara hung up.

  The Resource and Evaluation Committee for most deep-cover operations in which a blind asset (an agent unknown to the local station) was used included the men in this room along with the Director of Central Intelligence and his deputy, and sometimes the Deputy Director of Intelligence and his assistant.

  “Kelley Fuller has surfaced,” Carrara told the others.

  “Where?” Wuori, the Far East Desk chief, asked sharply. He’d known Kelley since she was a little girl growing up in Honolulu, his home town.

  “Here in Washington. She’s made initial contact and her next call comes in a few minutes.” Carrara picked up the phone and punched the number for the DCI’s locator service. It was Saturday. Murphy had left his office at noon.

  “She’s on the run, then. Must have seen something.”

  “Presumably,” Carrara said, waiting for his call to be patched through.

  “How’d she sound? What’d Tony say?” For a time Wuori had been like a father to Kelley. It hurt now that she was in Washington, apparently in trouble, and had not called him.

  “Shook up, but safe.” Carrara’s call was going through. It rang, and Murphy’s bodyguard answered gruffly.

  “Yes.

  “This is a yellow light for the general.”

  A moment later Murphy was on the line. “Murphy.”

  “She’s surfaced here in Washington,” Carrara said without preamble. Murphy would recognize his voice, and there was no doubt who he was talking about. “She’ll be calling again in a couple of minutes.”

  “Is she all right?”

  “Tony said she sounded strung out, but she was safe.”

  “Any sign that she’s been compromised in Tokyo?”

  “We’ve seen or heard nothing,” Carrara said, knowing what was coming next.

  “Then send her back, Phil. The bastards hit Jim, there’s no telling if they’ll be content to stop at that.”

  “It’s a warning …”

  “You’re damned right it is,” Murphy growled. “Considering the billions in foreign trade that’s at stake, you and I both know they won’t stop.”

  “I’ll meet her tonight.”

  “Don’t queer it by being spotted with her,” Murphy said. The instruction stung a little because Carrara was enough of a professional to know as much.

  “Sure thing.”

  “Listen, Phil, there’s more than just money at stake here. Tokyo Station, among its other troubles, leaks like a sieve. Everytime we sneeze, the Japanese have the handkerchief out even before we start.”

  “But this is something new.” Carrara said. Murphy disagreed.

  “You’re wrong. Murder is one of the oldest of crimes. Read your Bible.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Carrara hung up, thought for a moment, then looked at the others. “If she’s not blo
wn her cover by running, we’re to send her back.”

  “For God’s sake, Phil, we’d be signing her death warrant,” Wuori argued.

  “We have no evidence that whoever hit Jim was also after her, have we?” Carrara asked.

  Anders shook his head.

  The phone at Carrara’s elbow buzzed.

  “We’ll do what we can to insure her safety, but she goes back,” Carrara said, and he picked up the phone.

  “She’s in an apartment on the north side, leased by Lana Toy,” Tony said. “A friend of hers.”

  “Right,” Carrara said. “Put her on.” A moment later the incoming call was transferred to the briefing room. “Is that you?” he asked.

  “Phil?” Kelley Fuller asked, her voice small and shaky.

  “Yes, it is, but listen to me, don’t use names now. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, listen carefully. I want you to stay right where you are for one hour, let’s say until 9:30 sharp. Then I want you to leave the apartment and take the first right.”

  “On foot?”

  “Yes. I’ll pick you up as soon as I’m sure it’s safe. Do you have that?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right, I’ll see you in a bit.”

  Kelley Fuller had put a light sweater over her shoulders, and Carrara spotted her walking alone north on Second Street toward McMillan Park and the reservoir. He passed her, and swung around the block to come up from behind her again.

  So far as he was able to tell, no one was watching her. It had been a few years since he’d been in the field, but some skills were never lost.

  He pulled over to the curb before the corner, reached across and opened the passenger door as she was passing. “It’s me,” he called out.

  She came immediately over to the car, and got in. “I saw you pass the first time,” she said.

  Carrara pulled away, and turned the corner on W Street toward the hospital. “Do you think you were spotted in Tokyo?” he asked.

  “It was horrible, Phil. He never had a chance. By the time he knew what was happening it was too late.”

  “Were you spotted?”

  “If they were watching him they had to know we were seeing each other,” she said. She was very frightened. It was obvious by the way she held herself and by the shakiness in her voice.

  “They were pros, Kelley. If they’d thought you were significant, they would have killed you before you had a chance to run.”

  “What are you telling me, Phil?”

  “We want you to go back to Tokyo, to your job at the embassy.”

  Kelley reared back, a horrified expression coming to her face.

  “The problem is not going to go away,” Carrara said. “It was a warning to us, and one that’ll probably be repeated. He was playing on their turf, and evidently he got out of hand.”

  “Me next.”

  “Not you. But there’s a good chance they’ll go after Ed, if they believe he was involved with Shirley’s … extracurricular activities.” Edward Mowry had been the assistant chief of Tokyo Station. For the moment he was acting COS, his cover now the same as Shirley’s had been, as special economic affairs adviser to the ambassador.

  “Then we have to warn him.”

  “We’d lose everything we worked for, Kelley. Think it out.” Carrara had fought the entire project, but it had the personal blessing of the entire seventh floor: Murphy, Danielle and Ryan—the unholy trinity.

  “He’s a sitting duck,” Kelley cried in anguish.

  “I sent a team over to watch out for him, but they’re going to stick out like sore thumbs.”

  “What can I do?”

  “Keep your eyes and ears open, just as you have been doing. You’re still the unknown quantity.”

  Kelley looked at him with disgust. “I can’t believe you’re saying that to me. Now, of all times.”

  Carrara concentrated on his driving for the moment. No one in operations had liked what they’d sent Kelley to do. Some of them had daughters nearly her age. But she had been recruited for the project without much persuasion. It was being called PLUTUS … after the god of wealth, and greed.

  “I want you to keep your eyes and ears open, just as you have been doing.”

  “You want me to go to bed with Mowry to find out if he’s been bought by the Japanese,” she shouted.

  “I want you to watch him.”

  “I didn’t see anything that would have helped Jim.”

  “Yes you did, we just didn’t listen. You spotted Dunée and warned us, but we took too long to find out that the real Armand Dunée was not the man who made contact with Jim.”

  Kelley closed her eyes. “At first I thought it would be interesting,” she said. “Necessary. But I’m in over my head here.”

  “We all are.”

  She reopened her eyes. “It’s only money, Phil. We’re only talking about balancing foreign trade, or buying out Rockefeller Center, or MCA, or Disney World. Nothing earth-shattering.”

  “That’s what we were talking about. But now we’re discussing murder. A horribly brutal murder, with the possibility that there’s more to come.”

  “Not me,” Kelley cried.

  “We want you to go back to Tokyo, back to your work with the USIA. If you spot something—anything, no matter what it is—that looks wrong, let us know immediately.”

  “And then what?”

  “We’ll pull you out.”

  “What if I’m the target?”

  “You won’t be.”

  “What if I am?” Kelley insisted, her voice rising with anger.

  “Then we’d have to protect you …”

  “Like you protected Jim Shirley,” she said disparagingly.

  “If they want to kill you, they won’t stop trying simply because you return to Hawaii, or here to us,” Carrara said harshly, hating himself for what he was doing to the woman. Yet he didn’t think that she was anyone’s prime target. Whoever was gunning for the Company’s Tokyo operation wouldn’t be interested in a USIA translator and sometime companion of the chief of station. They were after bigger fish than she.

  Jim Shirley had been a good man, though over the past few years his loyalties had gotten slightly muddled. He didn’t deserve to die that way. And Carrara was going to do everything within his considerable power to catch his murderers.

  15

  THE LIGHTS OF MONACO WERE BRILLIANT AGAINST A BLACK velvet backdrop as Ernst Spranger, a tall, ruggedly built, handsome man, pointed the bow of the powerful speedboat toward the ship just visible in silhouette on the horizon to the south. The night was gentle and warm, the sea almost flat calm.

  Spranger was impeccably dressed in evening clothes, as was the beautiful woman seated beside him, indifferently humming the melody from the opera they’d just left. Like the others who’d come at Spranger’s command three years ago, Liese Egk had worked for the East German STASI as an assassin, a job at which she was an expert. She was a complete sociopath, totally without conscience. Combined with her intelligence, training and aristocratic good looks, she was lethal.

  “I think I will miss Boorsch,” Spranger said, not bothering to raise his voice over the roar of the engines.

  Liese was looking at him, a contemptuous expression forcing her full, sensuous lips into a pout. “He was a good shot with the Stinger, but he was an idiot. He would have caused us considerable trouble.”

  Spranger couldn’t hear her voice, but he got most of what she’d said. They spoke in German, which was much easier to lip-read than English because of its regular pronunciations.

  “Maybe you will cause us trouble in the end,” he told her, and she laughed.

  “Then you better watch your back.” She glanced toward the ship on the horizon. “At least we’re not going out as failures.”

  “No,” Spranger said to himself. Yet he still wasn’t clear in his mind exactly what had happened at Orly. The Airbus was down, everyone aboard dead, including Jean-Luc D
uVerlie. But something had gone wrong at the last moment.

  Bruno Lessing, who’d remained in front of the terminal for just such a contingency, reported that Boorsch had shown up in a big hurry, and moments later he’d been followed by a thickly built man dressed in what had appeared to be a British-cut tweed sportcoat. Directly after both men had entered the terminal a French police helicopter had touched down, and Lessing had of necessity driven back into Paris.

  The police were understandable. But who the hell was the man in the tweed jacket?

  And why had they been summoned again, unless it was bad news? It was possible, he thought, that somehow British intelligence had gotten onto them, though it was unlikely unless the CIA had asked for help.

  But there was no reason for such a thing to have occurred. If the Americans had requested help from anyone it would have been from the Swiss, who still hadn’t discovered the first engineer’s body.

  DuVerlie had come as a surprise. And except for the fact that they’d already gotten what they’d needed from ModTec, no one wanted the Swiss or the Americans to suspect they had.

  Question was, how much had the Swiss engineer told the CIA, and exactly why was it they were returning to Lausanne?

  Puzzles within puzzles. But it was a part of the business that Spranger had one way or the other lived with for all of his life. His father before him had been an agent (though not a particularly good one) for the RSHA—the Nazi intelligence service—before and during the war.

  Spranger and his mother had hidden themselves in Switzerland for eight years before returning to West Germany. Within one year she was dead, and he had slipped into East Germany offering his services to the STASI. The Russians, not as squeamish about former Nazis as they led the world to believe, accepted the young man with open arms, and his real training had begun.

  He slowed the speedboat as they approached the 243-foot cruiser Grande Dame out of Monaco. The sleek, white-hulled pleasure vessel lay still in the water, all her lights ablaze, her portside boarding ladder down. There were no movements, the only sounds from the ship’s generators. Except for the lights the ship could have been abandoned, or everyone aboard dead. It had been the same each time they’d been called for a rendezvous.