Last Call td-35

by Warren Murphy

  But before he could do anything, Doctor Rocco Giovanni raised the pistol to his own right temple and squeezed the trigger.

  The gun worked again.

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  CHAPTER FOUR

  When Admiral Wingate Stantington came through the private entrance to his office, his secretary intercepted him.

  "Here it is," she said, holding out her hand. There was a shiny brass key on it.

  "All right," he said. "And you've got the other one?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "You put it in a safe place?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "Better tell me where it is, in case I lose this one and something happens to you."

  "It is in my top left desk drawer, in the back, behind my box of Tootsie Rolls."

  "It'll be safe there?"

  "Yes, sir. Nobody goes in my desk."

  "Okay. Thank you." He took the key and dropped it into his jacket pocket.

  "And there's somebody waiting to see you, Admiral."

  "Oh? Who is it?"

  "He wouldn't give his name."

  "What's he look like?"

  "Like Roy Rogers," the secretary said.

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  "What?"

  "He does, Admiral. He's got on a ten-gallon hat and tooled boots with the pants tucked in and he's got a gabardine shirt with white piping all over the chest. If he was a woman, he'd look like Dolly Parton."

  "Send him in right away," Stantington said. "No, have him wait a minute. I want to test this bathroom key first."

  Stantington was sitting behind his desk when his visitor came in, looking like everybody in the Country Music Hall of Fame.

  "Well, well. Vassily Karbenko," Stantington said, as he rose, leaned across the desk, and extended his hand. The Russian was as tall as Stantington and his handshake was bony and firm. He kept on his carefully blocked cowboy hat.

  "Admiral," he said. Even his voice had a slight western coloration.

  "And how are things on the cultural attache front?" Stantington asked.

  The admiral smiled at his visitor as they stood, facing each other across the broad desk.

  "I haven't come to discuss culture, Admiral. Perhaps the lack of it instead." Karbenko had a small smile around his lips, but his eyes were cold and narrow, and his voice was frosty.

  "What do you mean, Colonel?" Stantington asked.

  "Have you been briefed this morning?" Karbenko asked.

  Stantington shook his head. "No. I just got here. You want to use my bathroom? I've got a key."

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  "No, I don't want to use your goddamn bathroom. I want to know why one of your spies assassinated our man in Rome today." He glared across the desk at Stantington, a look so intense it seemed to exert a physical pressure on the CIA director, who slowly sank back into his leather chair.

  "What? I don't understand."

  "Then I'll make it very clear. The Russian ambassador to Rome was assassinated this morning by an Italian doctor who was one of your men."

  "Our men?" Stantington shook his head. "It couldn't be. It can't be. I would know about it."

  "His name was Rocco Giovanni. Does that ring a bell?"

  "No. Is he in custody?"

  "No. He killed himself before we could get to him," Karbenko said.

  "Rocco Giovanni, you say?"

  Karbenko nodded.

  "Wait here a minute," Stantington said. He put his new brass key on the desk. "Use the bathroom if you want." He passed through his secretary's office and into the office of his chief of operations.

  "What the hell is going on here?" he asked.

  The operations chief looked up, startled.

  "What, Admiral?"

  "This Russian ambassador killed in Rome. Is that ours?"

  The operations chief shook his head. "No. Not ours. Some doctor, looks like he went crazy, shot the ambassador and himself. But he wasn't one of ours."

  "His name was Rocco Giovanni," Stantington

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  said. "Check that name out right away and call me inside. The goddamn top Russian spy in the United States is in my office and I'm catching hell."

  When Stantington returned to his office, Karbenko was sprawled in a chair in front of his desk, his legs extended before him, his hat pulled down over his face.

  "I'll have something in a moment," Stantington said.

  The two men sat in silence until the buzzer flashed. Stantington picked up the telephone and listened.

  After a few moments, he replaced the telephone and looked up with a smile. "Your information is wrong, Comrade. Rocco Giovanni was not one of ours. There is no record in our personnel listings of a Rocco Giovanni."

  "Well, you can take your personnel listings and shove them," Karbenko said, sitting erect in the chair and dropping his tan hat on the thickly carpeted floor. "CIA money sent Giovanni to medical school. CIA money helped him open a clinic in Rome. For twenty years, he's been subsidized by CIA money."

  "Impossible," said Stantington. "But true," said Karbenko. "We've got the proof. We even know what code he was working under."

  "What was that?" asked Stantington. "Project Omega," Karbenko said. "Never heard of it," said Stantington. Then he paused. Project Omega. He had heard of it. When? Where? It came back to him. Yesterday.

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  He had heard of it and ordered it disbanded because no one knew what it was.

  "Project Omega, you say?"

  "That's right," said Karbenko.

  "And you know about it?"

  "All we know is its name. It's in our files from Khrushchev days. We know it was fronted by some foundation that spreads CIA money around."

  "You're not going to believe this," Stantington said.

  "Probably not."

  "But you know more about Project Omega than we do."

  "You're right, Admiral. I'm not going to believe that."

  "I'm serious. I cancelled Project Omega yesterday because nobody knew what it was."

  "Then you better find out quickly what it is," Karbenko said. "I think it goes without saying that my government responds a little more actively to this kind of provocation than yours does."

  "Now don't get upset, Vassily," Stantington said.

  "Don't get upset? One of our most important diplomats is murdered by one of your agents and you tell me not to get upset. This is, I take it, the new morality you have all brought to Washington."

  "Please."

  "My government will likely respond .in kind," Karbenko said.

  "Show some faith in us."

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  "Oh, yes. Faith. As in the Bible you are all so fond of quoting these days. Well, some of us can quote your Bible too."

  "I hope you're going to say 'love thy neighbor.'"

  "I was about to say 'an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.'"

  Stantington stood up. "Vassily," he said, "there's only one way I can convince you I'm telling the truth. I want you to come with me."

  Karbenko grabbed his cowboy hat and followed Stantington out of the room. They took an elevator to the basement of the building, transferred to another elevator which took them to a sub-basement and then into another elevator which took them even further into the ground.

  "America is a marvelous country," Karbenko said.

  "How so?" asked Stantington. "You people can never leave well enough alone. For years it was sufficient for an elevator to go up and down, from the bottom to the top. Not any longer. I have been in hotels in this country and if you want to ride from one floor to the next floor, you have to ride elevators up and down for fifty floors. Do you know, in the World Trade Center in New York you have to ride four elevators to get from the top to the lobby? I suppose this is taught in your engineering schools. Creative and Imaginative Elevator Design."

  Stantington saw nothing funny about this. He led Karbenko out into a hallway.

  "You are the first Russian ever to be here," the CIA director said.

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  "That you know o
f," the Russian agent said drily.

  "Yes. That's quite true."

  Stantington led Russia's top agent in the United States down a long maze of corridors, lined regularly and with steel reinforced doors. There were no names on the doors, only numbers.

  Behind door 136, they found a balding man sitting behind a desk, his head buried in his hands. He looked up as Admiral Stantington came in. His face wrinkled in disgust and he put his head back into his hands.

  "I'm Admiral Stantington," the director said.

  "I know," said the man, without looking up.

  "You're Norton, the head librarian?"

  "Yes."

  "I'm looking for a file."

  "Good luck," Norton said. He waved toward another door on the far side of the office.

  Stantington looked at the man whose eyes were still cast down toward the desk top, then he looked at Karbenko and shrugged.

  They walked to the far door. Stantington pulled it open. It led into a room almost a city-block square and twelve feet high. All the walls were lined, floor to ceiling, with file cabinets and there was an island of cabinets in the center of the room.

  But this room looked as if a gang of particularly mischievous elves had been at work in it for a hundred years. All the file drawers were open. Papers were strewn about, in some places piled into five-foot-high mounds. Manila folders were

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  tossed everywhere. Papers had been crumpled, others ripped and torn.

  Stantington stepped into the room. He kicked aside papers that stacked up around his feet and ankles like autumn leaves after a windstorm.

  "Norton," he bellowed.

  The thin bald man came up behind him.

  "Yes, sir?" he said.

  "What's going on here?"

  "Maybe you'll tell me," Norton said bitterly.

  "That will be just about enough of your surliness," Stantington said. "What happened in here?"

  "Don't you recognize it, Admiral? It's part of your new open door policy. Remember? You were going to show how open and aboveboard the new CIA was operating so you announced you were going to honor the new freedom of information law. The public was invited. They came at me like locusts. They all had your statement in their hands. They tore everything apart."

  "Didn't you try to stop them?"

  "I tried to," Norton said. "I called the legal department but they said we'd need a court order to stop them."

  "Why didn't you get it?"

  "I asked the lawyers to. They drew straws to see who would go to court."

  "Why?" Stantington asked.

  "Because they said whoever handled the case would probably have his balls cut off. By you. Probably be indicted."

  "AH right, all right. So who lost?" Stantington asked.

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  "Nobody," Norton said. "They all used the same size straws."

  "What are you going to do?" asked Stantington. "How long have you been here anyway?"

  "Since the CIA started right after World War II," Norton said. "And what I'm going to do is wait till garbage day and then throw all this out in Hefty bags. And then I'm going to sweep the floor one last time and then I'm .going to take my retirement and then, hopefully, I'm going to have the nerve to tell you to shove the CIA, your open door policy^ and the freedom of information law up your ass. Will that be all ?"

  "Not quite. I'm looking for a specific file," said Stantington.

  "Tell me what it is and I'll have the garbage men keep an eye out for it."

  Norton was moaning as he walked back to his desk.

  "Freedom of Information," Karbenko said softly. "I can't believe you did this. Do you know how we handle our secret information in Russia?"

  "I can guess."

  "I doubt if you can even guess," the Russian spy said. "We keep it all in one building. It is surrounded by a high, thick stone wall. The stone wall is surrounded itself by a high electrified fence. If, somehow, you get to the fence and touch it without being electrocuted, you get shot. If you get over the fence, vicious dogs will tear you apart, if you don't get shot. You get shot if you touch the wall. You get shot if you climb the wall. You get shot if you come near the building. If you

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  get inside the building, you get tortured and shot. We shoot the members of your family for good measure. Also any friends we can think of. And here . . . you hold open house." He whistled his amazement. "Tell me, Admiral, are you really running the CIA or is this the "Gong Show'?"

  "I truly appreciate you telling me how to do my job ..." Stantington said.

  "Somebody better," Karbenko interrupted. "You keep firing agents and weakening this agency and before you know it, somebody in the world is going to get adventuresome because they'll think the United States is a toothless tiger."

  "Somebody like Russia?"

  "Perhaps," said Karbenko. "And that would be a tragedy for all of us," he said thoughtfully.

  "Come on," said Stantington, leading Karbenko out. On his way, he growled at Norton, "Don't you touch a piece of paper inside there. I'm sending some men down here to work on something."

  Back upstairs, Stantington told his chief of operations to get everybody in the building down to the record room to find anything they could about Project Omega.

  "Only those people with top secret security clearances, you mean?" the operations chief said.

  Stantington shook his head. "I said everybody and I meant everybody. Just because some poor employee of ours isn't cleared for top secret, why should he be the only one in the country who doesn't know what's in our secret files ? Hurry it up. We'll be waiting."

  Stantington and Karbenko sat silently in the

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  admiral's office for thirty minutes. There was a knock on the door and Stantington buzzed in the chief of operations. The man's eyebrows raised when he saw Vassily Karbenko sitting across from the director's desk.

  "I can come back," he said.

  "Don't worry about it," Stantington said. "Vassily knows all our secrets. What'd you find out about Project Omega?"

  "In that whole room, there's only one piece of paper that mentions any Project Omega. It's a personnel file."

  "And what does it say?"

  "All it says is that Project Omega was an action plan, designed for use in the event America lost an atomic war. That's all it is.

  "Whose personnel file is it in?" the admiral asked.

  The chief of operations looked at Stantington and rolled his eyes toward Karbenko. "Should I say that, sir?"

  "Go ahead," Stantington said.

  "It was a former employee who's retired now. He apparently had something to do with the plan."

  "And who is this former employee?"

  "His name was Smith. Dr. Harold W. Smith. He lives now in Rye, New York, and runs a mental health sanitarium named Folcroft."

  "Thank you," said Stantington. When the chief had left the room, the admiral looked at Karbenko and held his hands open in front of him.

  "Vassily, see? We don't know any more about it than you do."

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  "But Project Omega killed our ambassador nevertheless," Karbenko said. "That could be considered an act of war. You are, or course, going to contact that Doctor Smith?"

  "Of course."

  The telephone buzzed on Stantington's desk. He picked it up, then handed it to the Russian.

  "For you."

  "Karbenko here." The Russian listened and Stantington saw his ruddy tan complexion seem to pale. "I see. Thank you."

  He handed the telephone back to the CIA director.

  "That was my office," he said quietly. "Our ambassador in Paris was just stabbed to death. By a baker. He is one of yours. Project Omega again."

  Stantington dropped the telephone onto the floor.

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  CHAPTER FIVE

  After Vassily Karbenko left his office, Admiral Stantington had his secretary track down the telephone number of Folcroft Sanitarium in Rye, New York. She buzzed him
on the intercom to tell him she had gotten through to Doctor Smith's office.

  Stantington picked up the telephone.

  "Hello," he said.

  A woman's voice answered "Hello."

  "Is Doctor Smith there?"

  "Not to just anybody what calls," the woman said. "Who is this?"

  "My name is Admiral Wingate Stantington. I am the ..."

  "What do you want?"

  "What I don't want is to waste time talking to a secretary. Please put Doctor Smith on the line."

  "He's not here."

  "Where is he?" Stantington asked. "This is important."

  "I made him go out and play golf. That's important, too."

  "Hardly," said Stantington. "I want him to re-

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  turn my call immediately and then come to see me," the CIA director said.

  "He gonna be busy. You come and see him," Ruby said.

  "Really. Miss, I am the director of the Central Intelligence Agency."

  "That's all right. He'll see you anyway. That's figuring you can get here without getting lost. When I was with the CIA, I didn't notice anybody who could get anywheres without getting lost."

  "You? Worked for the CIA?"

  "Yes," said Ruby Gonzalez. "And I was the best you had. When should I tell the doctor that you be coming?"

  "I'm not coming. He's coming here."

  "You're coming," said Ruby as she hung up. She waited for a moment, then picked up the telephone and dialed Westport, Connecticut, whistling softly under her breath.

  It would be a simple matter, Stantington knew. He could just send a few agents over to Folcroft or to the golf course or wherever this Doctor Smith was hanging out and pick him up and bring him to Washington. And if he didn't want to come willingly, well, that could be arranged too.

  Except...

  Except that it was extra-legal, outside the law, and not quite in keeping with the new CIA that Stantington was dedicated to creating.

  He decided that he needed guidance on the subject and it had better come directly from the top.

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  If he was going to be breaking any laws, the orders to do it should come from the President. Stantington was new to Washington, but he had spent a lifetime in the Navy and had learned all the secrets of grabbing glory, when glory was being distributed, and making sure someone else's ass was in the sling when it was ass-in-the-sling time. Now some deep-remembered instinct was telling him that the one way to make sure the President didn't saw off a limb with you on it was to make sure that the President was out on the same limb. Even if he had been your old school chum and your old service buddy.