The voice interrupted, as it should. “That’s quite all right, Mr. Bryant. I’m sure we have it on file. Is this a party?”
“A surprise party. Well be bringing a special cake.” “Wonderful. We’ll expect you Wednesday then. Goodbye, Mr. Bryant.”
Helman hung up but kept his hand on the receiver. It had been the most urgent message he had ever placed into the system. If the situation in Miami was normal, Telford would be informed of who called, the urgency, and the phone and room number that Helman had given in the reservation information, within minutes. The return call should be immediate.
Two minutes later, Helman lifted the receiver in the middle of the phone’s first ring. The situation in Miami was normal. Or was arranged to appear normal. Telford’s rasping voice was on the other end.
“So what’s the big ‘surprise’, Granger? You coming out of retirement?” His voice was friendly, perhaps even happy. But Telford was a professional, too. Feelings, as well as appearances, were the same.
Telford had also called Helman by name. That meant the call was being routed through at least two other phone lines in the Florida system. One of them would hold a scrambler system. Helman could not be sure if his hotel phone was secure, but no one would be able to trace or tap a thing from Telford’s end. Telford would assume that since Helman had given his number, the line was safe.
“I’ve been forced out, Max.” Helman paused. Letting the seriousness sink in, provided Telford wasn’t the man behind it in the first place.
“Go on.” Telford’s voice had changed. A clinical edge had crept in. He understood the implications. It was the reaction Helman had expected, and hoped for.
“It appears my insurance was cashed. I’m hoping it was a policy I didn’t know about.”
“Screw it, Granger. You retired. I put the lid on your file. Are you being pressured? You think I’ve sold you out?” Telford was clearly agitated. Some of it was because Helman seemed to think Telford had betrayed him. Most of it because, if Helman did believe Telford had turned on him, Helman would have no option but to release his own insurance on Telford. Things could get messy. Telford had had to do it before, but he hated to assign a closing on one of his own crew.
“I hope not, Max. I’m going to give you some details and I want you to tell me where I’ve gone wrong. Because if it’s not me, it’s got to be someone else.” It’s got to be you, Max, he thought.
Telford stayed quiet on the other end. His whole operation depended on what Helman said in the next few minutes. If some of his other crew ever turned on him the way Helman was threatening to, it would cause trouble. But Helman he knew, could, and would, destroy him.
In coded words, Helman quickly told his story: the insurance in the package, the offer to purchase in New York, and the closing in Toronto. When he had finished, Telford jumped in immediately.
“Think it through. Granger. You never told me how you got the Delvecchio woman out of the house. I never even knew you did get her out of the house. I thought you probably decoyed her while she was driving some moody place or another. How could I know about the fish or the milk?”
Telford could have arranged surveillance of Helman during the Delvecchio closing. If it had been carried out by the New York people who met him in Times Square, Helman knew he would never have been aware of it. But the desperation in Telford’s voice was convincing him that his ex-broker had nothing to do with it. At least knowingly. At some point, Helman knew, he was going to have to take a chance to get out of this. He decided to follow his instincts.
“You’re right, Max. I knew that. But I had to hear you say it.”
The relief in the old man’s voice was evident.
“So what can I do for you, Granger? How can I help?”
“I need information on the group in New York.”
“Mafia?”
“That’s what I thought at first. They seem too sophisticated. Possibly a European organisation. Remember, they want a ritual killing. See if you can get anything on that. And Max, I need someone to check out my sister and her kids. I’m sure they’re being watched. I think they’re the guarantee on the closing.”
“Jesus, Granger. What’s it coming to? Getting family involved?” In many ways, Max Telford was a very old man, belonging to a simpler time, when there were rules. “I’ll get someone out there to check around right away. And I will get that information. Count on it.”
“I will, Max. When will you get back to me?”
“Later on this morning, Granger. I’ll get this stuff started right away. Then I have to take care of some of my own business.” Telford laughed. “Hey, Granger. I’m a solid member of the business community down here. I’ve got three restaurants. City politicians want to meet with me. Can you believe it? The guys I have to see this morning are two priests or something. Want me to support a day-care centre. Help the kiddies.”
Granger smiled at that. Every sign of normalcy strengthened his belief in Telford’s innocence.
“Good for you, Max. Good luck then. I’ll be waiting for your call.”
“I won’t let you down, Granger. Face it. You’re one of the special ones, okay?”
“Thanks, Max.”
Helman felt relief. The last of the night terror had left him now that he knew he was no longer in this alone.
He ordered breakfast through room service and read the morning papers, disappointed that only one had a worthwhile crossword. Then he lay back on the bed and waited for the phone to ring.
The housekeeping maids woke him just after one. They were knocking on the door, asking if they could make up the room.
Helman sent them away. He phoned the desk, but there were no messages.
Telford had said he would phone back in the morning. It was the afternoon. The tenseness returned.
Helman phoned the special reservation line in Miami again. It rang five times. It rang ten times. Then he heard a metallic click and the phone began to ring again, sounding farther off, as though the circuit had been forwarded.
This time it rang three times. Then a flat computer voice said, “The number you have dialled is not in service. Please check your directory and dial again.”
Helman was certain he hadn’t misdialled, but he tried once more. It happened again.
He called the restaurant through a regular line. It rang fifteen times before it was answered. Helman recognised the man who answered as the same one who had answered the special line earlier that morning. But his voice had changed. There was panic.
“I want to speak with Max Telford,” Helman said.
There was a pause. It sounded as if the receiver had been covered and people were talking. Something was happening in Miami, Helman felt it the same way he had when he had seen the van pull away from his sister’s farm in New Hampshire.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Telford is not in the office this morning. May I take—”
“I’ve already talked to Telford this morning. I—”
The man on the other end turned his head away from his receiver and shouted out to someone else.
“This may be one of them. Get the extension.”
“The line clicked. A second voice began.
“Who is this?”
“I want to talk to Max Telford. I’ve already talked to him once today and…”
“That’s impossible.” The voice was abrupt. Final. “Telford’s dead.”
Helman froze. Just hours ago Telford had offered him help. Telford had made him not be alone.
“Who is this?” the voice repeated.
“I’m Bryant,” Helman said, using his code name. “Mr. Bryant. The first man to answer the phone took a reservation from me today. This morning. Max called me back. He was fine. What’s happening there?”
The receivers were covered again. More muffled voices. Helman felt helpless, a pawn of the tenuous link of the phone wire. A new voice came on the line.
“Talk fast, Helman, or you’re going to be closed so fast you won’t see tomorrow. The number’
s been traced and we’ve got the alert on right now.”
Madness. “Who are you? What are you talking about?”
“I’m the last person you may ever meet in your life, Helman. Telford gave me some bullshit story about checking up on an organisation commissioning ritual closings. He said you told him about it. Decapitation he said.”
“What’s going on there?”
“So after he talks to you he goes into his office and we find him half an hour later. Jesus Christ. The fuckers took off his head with a wire, Helman. A fucking wire!”
“Who? The priests?” It was preposterous, but it was the only thing he could think to say.
“That’s it, Helman. Who told you about the priests? Why’d you turn on him, Helman? What could he have done to you to deserve this?”
“Believe me. I don’t know. I asked for information. The same people are after me—”
“That’s not all who’s going to be after you, Helman. Telford’s been murdered. When his insurance goes public you’re going to have—”
Helman heard another voice shout out in the distance. He heard the receiver fall to the floor. More scuffling sounds and shouts. Orders. Then he was sure he heard the deadly whisper of silenced guns, followed by heavy thuds. He was listening to insanity.
He heard the Miami receiver being lifted. A new voice.
“Mr. Helman? Nothing to worry about on this end.”
The phone went dead.
Helman trembled.
He had placed one phone call to an old friend, and now that man was dead. His head squeezed off by a garrotte used by men disguised as priests. Another phone call, and he had heard at least three others shot to death.
The madness snared him, twisting him around. He had reached out for help and found himself deeper in the maelstrom with still no bearings; no way out except to continue with the St. Clair closing.
The most brutal shock hit him then, as he realised with horror that all this had already happened, but the closing had not yet even begun.
Impassively he put on his heavy coat and boots and left the hotel to check the conditions around Dr. Leung’s townhouse. He ignored all his training and did not anticipate the results of his planned moves. He had nothing sane to base his conjectures upon. He could not imagine how things could be worse.
He felt positive, however, that they would be.
Chapter Eleven
MAJOR WESTON WAS cramped and cold in the back of the surveillance van. But he was happier to be there than in a warm Washington office. It was the same as the feeling he had about flying and driving. There was a far greater chance of being in a car crash than a plane crash, yet driving always felt safer. In an airplane, he was just along for the ride, a victim of happenstance. In the car, he felt the semblance of control over the situation, however insecure that control might be. He felt the same way now. The van was parked across the street and three houses down from the townhouse of Dr. Christopher Leung. Across the street and three houses down from Adrienne St. Clair. He felt a semblance of control.
A second van was parked twenty feet away from Weston’s van. It was one of the decoys. Both vans were orange and white, the colours of the local cable television company. The owner had been most co-operative when the situation had been explained to him.
A master circuit had been taken out of line at the cable company’s main switching board. A six-block grid, which included Leung’s townhouse, lost cable television reception. It was a Friday night. “Dallas” was interrupted. The office was flooded with calls within minutes. Eight installer/repair vans were dispatched immediately. The drivers were instructed to check every connection in the affected area; a three-day job if necessary. No one in the area would think anything of the cable vans being in the neighbourhood while the service was interrupted. The vans would be invisible.
With that accomplished, a ninth van was prepared as a surveillance station. Again the owner had been co-operative. Cable companies were monopolies. They needed as much favourable publicity as they could get. The ninth van had been stripped of equipment cupboards and installer’s gear and completely reoutfitted by Weston’s advance team. Microtelevision cameras peered at small mirrors angled in concealed holes in the van body as well as the corners of the windows in the driver’s section. The cameras were equipped with Startron intensifier CRTs and presented clear images in almost total darkness.
One of Weston’s team, arriving in a legitimate repair van, had climbed a telephone pole near the front of Leung’s townhouse, ostensibly to check the cable line, and had wired in an inductance phone tap with an FM transmitter.
Every call into or out of the townhouse was narrowcast to the receiver in Weston’s van.
A green telephone truck, also a closed van, had been street parked since Weston’s arrival. The cable installers had, at their foreman’s request, asked the cable customers whose homes they entered if they were also experiencing problems with their phones. No one was. The telephone truck was a second surveillance unit. Weston had run up against the Watcher Section, Section I, of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police; Canada’s equivalent of the FBI. Weston knew their presence could only mean the Jesuits had discovered St. Clair’s whereabouts.
Weston’s team had told the owner of the cable company a totally fictional story about needing his company’s co-operation to crack an international drug smuggling ring. Weston wondered what story the Jesuits had told the Mounties. Whatever it was, Weston knew they could no more have told the truth than he could have.
Four other RCMP Watchers had been identified so far today. There were definitely others which Weston had been unable to spot. The Watcher Section was notoriously good. It was comprised of people who, for some reason or another, had been unable to qualify as regular Mounties. Sometimes because they didn’t match the physical requirements; sometimes because of a criminal past. No matter, at some point in the rejection process they were earmarked for Watcher Section. Their divergent physical appearance meant they were never immediately identifiable as law enforcement officers, and the knowledge that their assignment was the only way they could serve the Mounties made their dedication border on the fanatical.
The intelligence community in the United States had long used ‘deviant’ surveillance agents as they were known, but had never systemised the practice the way the Mounties had. Partly because there was a resistance to change in American intelligence groups that became particularly strong when faced with suggested alterations from foreign countries. Mostly because it was common knowledge among American intelligence officials that two of the top-ranking Mountie officers were KGB moles. Americans would never accept an operational change that originated, as they perceived it, from the Soviets. As a result, the Canadian Mounties were never seen as a legitimate ally by the United States. They were simply a funnel for feeding misinformation to the Kremlin. All the Americans had to do was allow the Mounties to participate in a few border drug seizures from time to time to keep them in line.
That was the real problem with the American intelligence organisations, thought Weston. They felt, justifiably, so powerful, and so assured of their purpose, that everyone else, Canadian Mounties, British MI-6, or even American citizens, were contemptible in comparison. The image of Washington shattering like thin ice came back to him. This time the ice grew and he saw it as a glacier breaking up: giant, crushing icebergs drifting ponderously in their courses, blindly, inexorably pushing forward until the all-encompassing sea had consumed them, leaving no trace.
Weston didn’t want his fragment, the most important fragment, consumed. The Nevada Project must survive for anything else to survive. The only possible answer lay three doors down, in a townhouse basement.
“There’s another one.” Davis, sitting on the small bench beside Weston, pointed to a walking figure on one of the four television screens on the camera surveillance console. “Let me get him on zoom.” The image expanded. The man’s face filled the screen. His eyes moved ceaselessly between the va
ns and the townhouse, but his gait was relaxed and his posture indicated disinterest.
“Look at his eyes go. He’s taking it all in. Pretty slick.”
Weston studied the man’s face. He didn’t look familiar.
“How do you know he’s with I Section?”
“He was by about an hour ago in a taxi.” Davis scanned a log book on the console’s desk ledge. “There it is,” he said, reading from his notes. “14:27: red and orange taxi, Volaré, Metro Cab, licence Delta Young Baker three three zero, southbound, approximately 5 miles per hour. Driver female, Caucasian, short dark hair. Both hands on wheel. One passenger. Male, Caucasian. Light hair, blue parka. Appeared to be checking house numbers. Reference number two two five nine seven.”
Davis ran the video recorder deck back to the log number. The image on a second screen broke up and then solidified as the shot from earlier in the day when the cab appeared on the streets came on. Davis held it on fast forward until the passenger’s face came into close-up view. He froze the image.
“See? Same guy.” Both faces on the two screens were identical.
Weston said, “Okay, that’s number five. Cook, you want to get a look at this one?”
The third man in the van turned away from his bank of monitoring equipment at the front of the compartment. He leaned over and looked at the faces on the screen.
“Jesus, The Mounties have brought in a mechanic.”
“What do you mean, a contract man?” Weston was concerned. The Jesuits of the Seventh Grade used others unmercifully to gather information, but generally they kept the killing to themselves. The involvement of soldiers at Heathrow was, so far, the one bloody exception.
The third man squeezed his eyes shut. Concentrating on the past.
“I’m sure of it. At Langley. He was in the system. ‘Domestic Operations’.”
Davis reacted for them all. “That’s crazy. You’ve confused the file code. Or his face.” Langley meant CIA headquarters in Langley, West Virginia. The CIA were forbidden to operate domestically but no one in the van doubted for a moment that they did. What was crazy about Cook’s statement was that the CIA would maintain a file—evidence—that was in a position to be seen by an operative of another agency.
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