Last Call td-35

by Warren Murphy

  Last Call

  ( The Destroyer - 35 )

  Warren Murphy

  Richard Sapir

  During a CIA budget war, a group of assassins mistakenly triggers an ingenious CIA plot originally planned in the 1950s - and a worldwide killing spree of top-level Russian officials begins . . . Only the Destroyer, with the all-wise Chiun and the ever-wild Ruby, can stop them from reaching their primary target - the Russian premier! However, in the midst of all this carnage, Chiun still wants Remo and Ruby to create a super baby as heir to Sinanju, before the government's budget cuts wipe out welfare funds! How will The Destroyer cope with life and death, love and procreation, all at once?

  DESTROYER #35: LAST CALL

  Copyright (c) 1978 by Richard Sapir and Warren Murphy.

  CHAPTER ONE

  It would have seemed like a crime against nature if Admiral Wingate Stantington (USN Retired) had not risen to a position of great prominence in the United States. The new head of the Central Intelligence Agency was the sturdy, clean-faced epitome of the best of all his schools. He had gotten his character from Annapolis, his computer efficiency from Harvard Business School, his culture from Oxford. He had been a Rhodes scholar and a second-string ail-American halfback for the Navy.

  His ice blue eyes twinkled with wit and strength, exuding a certain happy courage that had shown America over its television screens that brains and pluck and a new broom were now sweeping our intelligence agencies into a lean, clean top-flight group that not only America but the whole world could be proud of.

  Sixty minutes before he was to make an offhand decision that could trigger World War III, Admiral Stantington was arguing with a man who obviously had not read the New York Times Sunday magazine article about Stantington's ir-

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  resistible "he gets what he wants but always with a smile" charm.

  "Shove it, Stantington," the man said. He was sitting in a hard-backed wooden chair in the middle of a bare room in a federal detention center outside Washington, D.C. The man wore light, plastic-framed, round eyeglasses that were too small for his face, the big sturdy round open face of an Iowa farmer.

  Stantington walked in circles around the man, his tall, trim athletic body moving as briskly as if he were on a parade ground. He wore a light blue shadow-striped suit that accentuated his height and whose color went well with his eyes and his impeccably styled sandy hair with the faint touch of gray distinction over each temple.

  "That's not really the tack to take," Stantington said in his soft Southern accent. "A little cooperation now might help you in the future."

  The prisoner looked up at Stantington and his eyes narrowed behind the thick-lensed glasses.

  "A little cooperation?" he said. "A little cooperation? You've got thirty-five years of my cooperation and what did I get for it? A jail sentence." He turned his face away and crossed his arms stubbornly, covering the printed number on his chest. He wore twill prisoner's fatigues.

  Stantington walked around him again until he was in front of the prisoner and the man could see the new CIA director's winning smile.

  "That's all water under the bridge," Stantington said. "Come on. Why don't you just tell me where it is?"

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  "Go to hell. You and that peckerhead you work for."

  "Dammit, man. I want that key."

  "Will you please tell me why a forty-nine-cent key is so important to you ?" the prisoner asked.

  "Because it is," Stantington said. He, wanted to grab the man by the throat and wring the truth out of him. Or call in a CIA goon squad and have them apply electrodes to his testicles and shock the answer out of him. But there was no more of that. That was the old CIA, the discredited CIA, and it was probably knowing that the CIA had changed that made this prisoner so truculent and unreasonable.

  "I threw it in a sewer so you couldn't get your manicured hands on it," the prisoner said. "No. No, I didn't. I had a hundred copies made and I gave them away to everybody and when you're not looking they're going to sneak into your office and go into your private bathroom and piss in your sink."

  Admiral Wingate Stantington took a deep breath and clenched his hands behind his back.

  "If that's the way you want it," he said to the prisoner. "But I just want you to know I won't forget this. If I have anything to say about it, you can kiss your pension goodbye. If I have anything to say about it, you'll serve out every goddamn last day of your term. And if I have anything to say about it, people like you will never again have anything to do with this country's intelligence apparatus."

  "Go piss up a rope," the prisoner said.

  Stantington walked briskly toward the door of

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  the bare room. His pedometer, which measured how many miles he walked each day, clicked against his right hip. At the door, the prisoner called his name. Stantington turned around and looked back into his eyes.

  "It's going to happen to you too, Stantington," the man said. "Even as dumb as you are, you're going to try to do your best and one day they'll change the rules in the middle of the game and your ass'll be grass, just like mine. I'll save you a spot in the prison chow line."

  And the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency smiled at Stantington, who walked out of the room without comment, a deep sense of disquiet and irritation flooding his mind.

  Admiral Wingate Stantington brooded in the back of his limousine, all the way back to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, just a few miles from Washington, D.C. He had wanted that key to the private bathroom in his office. Time magazine was coming the next week, probably to do a cover story on him, and he had already written the lead of the story in his mind:

  Admiral Wingate Stantington, the man chosen to lead the beleagured Central Intelligence Agency, is both brilliant and budget-minded. In case anyone doubts that last point, when Stantington was installed in his new office last week, he found the door to his private washroom locked. The only key, he was told, was in the possession of the former director of the CIA, now serving a five-year jail term. Rather than call a locksmith and

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  put in a new lock ($23.65 by current Washington prices), Admiral Stantington drove by the prison on his way to work the next day and got the key from his predecessor. 'That's the way we're running things around here from now on,' Stantington said when he reluctantly confirmed the story. 'A tight ship is one that doesn't leak and that includes not leaking money,' he said."

  To hell with it, Stantington thought. Time magazine would have to think of some other lead for its story. He couldn't be expected to do everybody's job for them.

  The admiral was in his office at 9 A.M. He called his secretary on the intercom and told her to get a locksmith tout de suite and get a new lock for his bathroom door.

  "And get two keys," he said. "And you keep one."

  "Yes, sir," the young woman said, slightly surprised, because she hadn't thought it took a CIA command decision to get two keys for a new lock.

  When he clicked off his intercom, Stantington checked his pedometer and found that he had already walked one and a half miles of his ten-mile daily quota. It gave him his first warm feeling of the day.

  The second warm feeling came twenty minutes later when he met with his director of operations and chief of personnel and signed an order terminating the employment of 250 field agents and, thus, with a stroke of the pen, accomplishing the kind of decimation of the CIA's field forces that

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  the Russians had lusted after for years but had always been unable to accomplish.

  "Have to show them up on the Hill that we mean business," the CIA director said. "Anything else?"

  He looked at the two men. His chief of ope
rations, a round man who sweated a lot and had yellow teeth, said "Here's something you'll like, Admiral. It's called Project Omega and it's ours."

  "I've never heard of it. What's its function?"

  "That's just it. It doesn't have any function. The biggest damned no-show job I've ever seen." The operations director spoke in a crackly Southern accent. He was a lifelong friend of Stantington's and had formerly headed the highway system of a Southern state. He got the CIA job, out-of a large group of other close political friends, because he was the only one who had never been indicted for taking construction kickbacks.

  "They don't do a damn thing," the operations director said. "They sit around and play cards and the only thing even vaguely worklike they do is make a phone call once a day. Six agents. Nothing but one phone call a day."

  Stantington was pacing the perimeter of his office, making neat 90-degree turns at each corner.

  "Who do they call?" he asked.

  "Somebody's aunt, I think. A little old lady in Atlanta."

  "And their budget is how much?"

  "Four million nine hundred thousand. But it's not all salaries of course. Some of it gets hard to trace."

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  Stantington whistled, a small sip of noise. "Four million nine hundred thousand," he said aloud. "Fire them. Imagine if Time magazine found that one out."

  "Time magazine?" said the director of operations.

  "Forget it," Stantington said.

  "Should I check the old lady out?"

  "No, dammit. Check her out and that'll cost money. Everything around here costs money. You can't even go to the toilet without it costing you twenty-three dollars and sixty-five cents. No. We check her out and that pushes the cost of this Omega whatever-it-is up to five million. And that's a bad number. Nobody's going to remember four million nine hundred thousand, but give them five million and they'll notice that. And then they'll start, five million here and ten million there and they'll nickel and dime us to death. Let that happen and we'll be crapping in the hallways."

  The director of operations and the chief of personnel looked at each other quizzically. Neither understood the admiral's obsession with bathrooms, but both nodded at the Omega decision. The project, whatever it was, had no linkage to any program anywhere. The group was connected to nothing but the old lady in Atlanta and she was nothing. Without notifying anyone, the personnel director had checked. She was nothing and knew nothing or nobody. He had checked because he thought she might be related to the President. Everybody in that part of the country

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  seemed to be. But she wasn't. It was agreed wholeheartedly. Fire them. Toss them overboard.

  At 10 A.M., the six Project Omega agents were notified that they were separated from the service as of that minute.

  None of them complained. None of them knew what he was supposed to be doing anyway.

  Admiral Wingate Stantington continued to pace around his room when the two men left. He was composing a new lead for the Time cover story.

  Between 9 and 9:20 A.M. last Tuesday morning, Admiral Wingate Stantington, the new director of the Central Intelligence Agency, fired 256 agents, saving America's taxpayers almost ten million dollars. It was just the start of a good day's work.

  Not bad, Stantington thought. He smiled. It was just the start of a good day's work.

  In a small frame house just off Paces Ferry Road on the outskirts of Atlanta, Mrs. Amelia Sinkings stood at her kitchen sink, peeling apples with stiff arthritic fingers. She glanced at the clock over the sink. It was 10:54 A.M. Her telephone call would come in a minute. They came at different times each morning and she had a plastic laminated chart that told her what time to expect the call on each day. But after twenty years of getting the telephone calls, she had the chart memorized, so she'd put it in the closet under her good dishes. Ten fifty-five A.M. That's when the

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  call would come. There was no question about it, so she turned off the faucet and dried her hands on the ironed cotton towel she kept on a rack over the sink. She walked slowly over to the kitchen table and sat there, waiting for the phone to ring.

  She had often wondered about the men who called her. Over the years she had gotten to recognize six separate voices. For a long time, she had tried to engage them in conversation. But they never said anything more than "Hi, honey. All's well." And then they hung up.

  Sometimes she wondered if what she was doing was . . . well, was proper. It seemed like very little to do for fifteen thousand a year. She had expressed this concern to the dry little man from Washington who had recruited her almost twenty years earlier.

  He had tried to reassure her. "Don't worry, Mrs. Sinkings," he had said. "What you're doing is very, very important." It was during the atomic bomb scares of the 1950's and Mrs. Sinkings had giggled nervously and asked, "What if the Russians bomb us ? What then,"

  And the man had looked very serious and said simply, "Then everything will take care of itself and none of us have to worry about it."

  He had double-checked again with her. Her mother had lived to be ninety-five and her father ninety-four. Both sets of grandparents had lived into their nineties.

  Amelia Sinkings had been sixty when she took the job. She was almost eighty now.

  She watched as the second hand finished its sweep around the clock and the time neared

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  10:55. She reached her hand for the telephone, anticipating the ring.

  Fifty-nine seconds. Sixty. Her hand touched the telephone.

  One second after 10:55. Two seconds. Three seconds.

  The telephone had not rung. She waited another thirty seconds before she realized that her hand was still on the telephone and it was beginning to ache from being held over her head that way. She lowered her hand to the table and sat there watching the clock.

  She waited until the time went past 10:59 A.M. She sighed and, with difficulty, rose to her feet. She removed her gold Elgin wristwatch and placed it carefully on the table, then opened the back door and tottered down the steps into her backyard.

  It was a bright spring morning and magnolias filled the air with their honeyed scent. The backyard was small and its little pathway was bordered with flowers, which Mrs. Binkings had to admit to herself were not as neatly trimmed as they should be, but it was so hard these days to bend down and work.

  In the far corner of the small yard was a round slab of concrete, surrounded by a low metal fence. In the center of the slab was a twelve-foot-high flagpole. The flagpole had been built by the strange dry man from Washington with a crew that had worked all through one night to finish the job. It had never flown a flag.

  Mrs. Binkings started down the narrow path toward the flagpole, but stopped when a voice

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  called out, "Hi, Mrs. Sinkings. How you all feelin' today?"

  She went back to chat across the picket fence with her neighbor, who was a nice young woman even if she had lived in the neighborhood for only ten years.

  They talked about arthritis and tomatoes and how no one was raising children properly anymore and finally her neighbor went back inside and Mrs. Sinkings walked to the flagpole, pleased that after all these years she had remembered to take off her wristwatch as the man from Washington had told her.

  She pushed open the small metal gate in the fence and stepped to the pole. She untied the cord from the metal bracket on the side of the pole. Her fingers hurt from the effort of loosening the dry, tired old knots.

  She gave the cleat a ISO-degree turn. She felt it click. For a moment, she seemed to feel the concrete whir under her feet. She paused for a moment, but felt nothing more.

  Mrs. Sinkings retied the flag rope and closed the small metal gate. Then, with a sigh and a lingering twinge of worry about whether what she was doing was all right, she went back inside. She hoped that the apples she had been peeling in the sink had not already turned brown. It made them look so unappetizing.

  In the kitchen, she decided t
o sit at the table and rest for a moment. She felt very tired. Mrs. Sinkings put her head down on her forearms to rest. She felt her breath coming harder and harder, until she realized that she was gasping.

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  Something was very wrong. She reached out her hand for the telephone over the table but before she could reach it, there was a piercing pain in the center of her chest. Her left arm froze in position, then dropped back onto the table. The pain felt like a spear had been stuck into her. Almost clinically, Mrs. Sinkings could feel the pain of her heart attack radiating outward from her chest to her shoulders and stomach and then into her extremities. And then it became very difficult to breathe and, because she was a very old lady, she stopped trying. And died.

  Mrs. Amelia Binkings had been right. When she had turned the flagpole bracket, the concrete had whirred under her feet. A powerful, solar-fed generator had kicked into life after twenty years and begun sending powerful radio signals into the air, using the flagpole as an antenna.

  In Europe, red lights went on. In a garage in Rome, in the backrooms of a Paris bakery, in the cellar of a plush London home, and in the laundry room of a small country house.

  And all over Europe, men saw the red lights go on.

  And prepared to lull.

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  CHAPTER TWO

  His name was Remo and his ears hurt. He would have hung up the telephone but that would probably prompt a personal visit and while Ruby Jackson Gonzalez could cause him unbearable pain by shouting at him over the telephone, in person her voice brought him unbelievable agony.

  Carefully, so she would not hear, Remo set the receiver of the telephone on the ledge in the booth and walked back out into the luncheonette where an aged Oriental in a powder blue robe stood looking at the covers of magazines on the rack.

  "I can still hear her," the Oriental said, in a voice that seemed to have disapproval built in.

  "I know, Chiun. So can I," Remo said. He went back and closed the door of the telephone booth, gently so it would not squeak. He rejoined Chiun, who shook his head.