Stephen Coonts - Jake Grafton 5 - Red Horseman

by Red Horseman (lit)

  Stephen Coonts - Jake Grafton 5 - The Red Horseman

  TOAD TARKINGTON FIRST NOTICED HER DURING THE IN-TERMISSION after the first act. His wife, Rita Moravia, had gone to the ladies" and he was stretching his legs, casually inspecting the audience, when he saw her.

  Three rows back, four seats in from the other aisle.

  She was seated, talking to her male companion, gesturing lightly, now listening to what her friend had to say. Now she glanced at the program, then raised her gaze and spoke casually.

  Toad Tarkington stared. In a few seconds he caught himself and turned his back.

  How long had it been? Four years? No, five. But it couldn't be her, not here. Not in Washington, D.c. Could it?

  He half-turned and casually glanced at her again.

  The hairstyle was different, but it's her. He would swear to it. Great figure, eyes set wide apart above prominent cheekbones, with a voice and a touch that would excite a mummy-no man ever forgets a woman like that.

  He sat and stared at the program in his hand without an I seeing it. He had last seen her five years ago, in Tel Aviv.

  And now she's here.

  Judith Farrell. No, that was only an alias. Her real name is Hannah something.

  Mermelstein. Hannah Mermelstein.

  Here!

  Good God!

  Suddenly he felt hot. He tugged at the knot in his tie and unfastened his collar button.

  "What's the matter? Are you catching a cold?" Rita slipped into her seat and gave him one of those looks that wives reserve for husbands whose social skills are showing signs of slackness. Before Toad could answer the house lights dimmed and the curtain opened for act two.

  He couldn't help himself. When the spotlight hit the actors, he looked left, trying to see her in the dim glow.

  Too many people in the way. Hannah Mermelstein, but he had promised to never tell anyone her real name. And he hadn't.

  "Is something wrong?" Rita whispered.

  "Uh-uh." "Then why are you rubbing your leg?" "Ah, it's aching a little." That leg had two steel pins in it, and just now it seemed to Toad that he could feel both of them. The Israeli doctors inserted the pins just a day or two before he saw Judith/hannah for the last time.

  She came to see him in the hospital.

  Toad Tarkington didn't want to remember.

  He folded his hands on his lap and tried to concentrate on the actors on the stage. Yet it came back as if it had just happened yesterday, raw and powerful-the night he made love to her, that Naples hotel lobby as the man with her gunned down a man in the elevator, the assault on the United States, the stench of the ship burning in the darkness... that F-14 flight with Jake Grafton. He found himself gripping the arms of the seat as all the emotions came flooding back.

  What is she doing here?

  Who has she come to kill?

  "Come on," he whispered to Rita. "I want to go home." "Now?" She was incredulous.

  "Yes. Now." He stood.

  Rita collected her purse and rose, then preceded him toward the aisle, muttering excuses as she clambered past knees and feet. In the aisle he took her elbow as she walked toward the lobby.

  He glanced toward where Judith Farrell was sitting, but couldn't spot her.

  "Are you feeling okay?" Rita asked.

  "I'll explain later." The lobby was empty. He led Rita to the cloakroom and fished in his shirt pocket for the claim check. The girl went to fetch the umbrella.

  He extracted two dollars from his wallet and dropped them into the tip jar, then wiped the perspiration from his forehead with his hand. The girl returned with the umbrella and handed it across the Dutch door counter.

  "Thanks." When he turned, Judith Farrell was standing there facing him.

  "Hello, Robert." He tried to think of something to say. She stood looking at him, her head cocked slightly to one side. Her male companion was against the far wall, facing them.

  "Rita," she said, "I'm Elizabeth Thorn. May I speak to your husband for a few minutes?" Rita looked at Toad with her eyebrows up.

  So Judith Farrell knew about his wife. It figured.

  "Where?" Toad asked. His voice was hoarse.

  "Your car." Toad cleared his throat. "I don't think-was "Robert, I came tonight to talk to you. I think you should hear what I have to say." "The CIA is open eight to five," Toad Tarkington said, "Monday through Friday. They're in the phone book." "This is important," Judith Farrell said.

  Toad cleared his throat again and considered.

  Rita's face was deadpan.

  "Okay." Toad took his wife's arm and turned toward the door. The man against the wall watched the three of them go and made no move to follow.

  They walked in silence across the parking lot. The rain had stopped but there were still puddles. Toad unlocked the car doors and told Farrell, "You sit up front. Rita, who was in the backseat, please." Once in the car he started the engine and turned on the defroster as the women seated themselves. Then he reached over and grabbed Judith Farrell's purse. Farrell didn't react, but Rita started. Still, she remained silent.

  No gun in the purse. That was his main concern.

  There was a wallet, so he opened it. Maryland driver's license for Elizabeth Thorn, born April 17, 1960. The address was in Silver Spring. Several credit cards, some cash, and nothing else. He put the wallet back into the purse and stirred through the contents. The usual female beauty paraphernalia, a box of tissues, a tube of lipstick. He examined the lipstick tube, took the cap off, ran the colored stick in and out, then replaced the cap and dropped the tube back into the purse. He put the purse back on Farrell's lap.

  "Okay, Miss. Thorn. You have your audience." "I want you to give Jake Grafton a message." "Call the Defense Intelligence Agency and make an appointment." "Obviously I don't want anyone to know that I talked to him, Robert. So I came to you. I want you to pass the message along, to him and no one else." Toad Tarkington looked that over and accepted it, reluctantly. Rear Admiral Grafton was the deputy director at the DIA and Toad was his aide. Both facts were widely known, public knowledge.

  At the office every call was logged, every visitor positively identified. Admiral Grafton lived in general officers' quarters at the Washington Navy Yard and was guarded by the federal protective service.

  While it would be easy enough for a professional to slip through the protective cordon, doing so would require the admiral either to report the conversation to his superiors or violate the security regulations.

  Presumably this way it would be up to the admiral to decide if this conversation had to be reported, a faint distinction that didn't seem all that clear to Toad.

  "Rita and I will know." "You won't tell anyone. You're both naval officers." That was also true. Rita was an instructor at the navy's Test Pilot School at NAS Patuxent River. Both of them held the rank of lieutenant commander, both had top secret clearances, both had seen reams of classified material that they couldn't even talk about to each other.

  Toad turned and looked at Rita, who was staring at the back of Elizabeth Thorn's head and frowning.

  Toad Tarkington gazed out the window at the empty parked cars as he considered it. "Why tonight?

  When I'm out with Rita?" "If I had walked up to you when you were alone, you would have brushed me off." That comment irritated him. "Pretty damn sure of yourself, aren't you?" Farrell didn't reply.

  Toad again glanced over his shoulder at his wife, who met his eyes. She was going to be full of questions as soon as they were alone. Now she opened her door and stepped out of the car. She walked around to the front of the vehicle where she could watch the other woman's face.
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  "This better be good," Toad said. "Let's hear it." It took less than sixty seconds. Toad made her repeat it and asked several questions,, none of which Elizabeth Thorn answered. From her coat pocket she took a plain white unsealed envelope, which she passed to Toad. He opened it.

  It contained a photo and a negative. The photo was a three-by-five snap of a middle-aged white man seated at a table, apparently at an outdoor restaurant, reading. a newspaper. There was a plate on the table. His face registered just a trace of a frown.

  "Want to tell me who this is?" "You find out." "Any hints?" "CIA. You'll talk to Grafton?" "Maybe, if you'll help me with the captiom" He wiggled the photograph.

  "Like when and where." "Jake Grafton can figure it out. I have a great deal of faith in him." "But not much in me." Toad sighed. "How about this: just before he took his first-and last-bite of eggs Benedict injected full of arsenic trioxide by beautiful spy Hannah Mermelstein, Special Agent Sixty-Nine realized that the Sauce Hollandaise had a pinch too much salt?" Her face showed no reaction whatever.

  Toad Tarkington shrugged. He put the photo back in the envelope and placed the envelope in an inside jacket pocket. "So how did you know Rita and I were coming to this play tonight?" Judith Farrell opened the car door and stepped out "Thank you for your time, Robert." She closed the door' and walked away. Toad watched her go as Rita came around the car and climbed into the front passenger seat.

  "Who is she?" "Mossad." The Israeli intelligence service.

  "You were in love with her once, weren't you?" Trust a woman to glom onto that angle.

  Toad sighed and pulled the transmission lever into reverse.

  When the car was out on the street, Rita asked, "When did you know her?" "Five years ago. In the Med. "Her real name isn't Elizabeth Thorn, is it?" "No. She got out that name right up front, so I wouldn't call her anything else." Rita waited for him to tell her more, but when it became obvious he wasn't going to, she remarked, "She's very pretty." Toad merely grunted.

  "Are YOU going to tell me what she said?" "No.

  Rita seemed to accept that with good grace. And she had gotten out of the car without being asked. She was a player, Toad told himself, a class act, every inch the professional Judith Farrell was. Perhaps he should have been nicer to Farrell.

  This thought was still tripping across the synapses when Rita remarked, "I think You're still in love with her. Not like you love me, but you care for her a lot.

  That was obvious to her, too. If you didn't care you would have been nic-was "Shut up!" Toad snarled.

  "Listen, husband of mine. In three years of marriage neither one of us has told the other to shut up. I don't think-was "I'm sorry. I retract that." "I feel like I'm trapped in a soap opera," Rita said. After a pause she added, "And I don't like it." No fool, Toad Tarkington decided to let her have the last word.

  Later, as they waited for a traffic light, Rita asked in a normal tone of voice, "So what does Elizabeth Thorn do for the Mossad?" Toad considered before answering. He decided maybe the truth was best.

  "Five years ago she was running a hit squad. Maybe she still is. She's a professional killer. An assassin." Toad awoke at dawn on Saturday and took his clothes into the kitchen to dress so he wouldn't wake Rita. After enough coffee had dripped through to make a cup, he poured himself some and went out into the backyard of the little tract home he and Rita had purchased last year near Andrews Air Force Base. The morning was expectant, still, with the diffused sunlight hinting of the heat to come in a few hours. Not even the sound of jet engines of planes from the base. Too early yet. Someone somewhere was burning last fall's leaves, even though it was against the law, and the faint smell seemed to make the coffee more pungent.

  Judith Farrell. Here.

  Although he would never admit it to Rita, seeing Judith had been a jolt.

  And Rita knew anyway. Blast women! All that crap about body language and nonverbal speech that they expected men to sweat bullets acquiring was just the latest nasty turn in the eternal war between the sexes. And if by some miracle you got it they would think of something else you needed to know to meet tomorrow's sensitivity standards. If you suffered from the curse of the y chromosome. Aagh!

  He sat sipping coffee and pondering the male dilemma.

  After a bit his mind turned to Judith Farrell's message for Jake Grafton.

  Probably Farrell hadn't tried to contact him when he was home alone because even he and Rita never knew when that would be. This was his first free Saturday this month. That crap about brushing her off.

  Well, it was true, he would have.

  Someone told Farrell-told the Mossad--that he and Rita had tickets to that play last night.

  Who?

  He tried to recall just when and to whom at the office he might have mentioned that he and Rita were going last night. It was hazy, but he seemed to recall that the play had been discussed several times by different people, and he may have said he had tickets.

  He purchased the tickets over a month ago by calling a commercial ticket outlet and ordering them. And there was no telling to whom Rita might have mentioned the planned evening out. It was certainly no secret.

  So that was a dead end. Frustrated, he went inside and poured himself another cup of coffee.

  He got out the envelope and looked again at the photo.

  A very ordinary photo of a very ordinary man.

  He held the negative up to the light. It was the negative of the photo, apparently. Given to prove the genuineness of the photo.

  Okay, so what was there about the photograph that made it significant?

  Toad studied it at a distance of twelve inches' The guy's sitting in front of a restaurant.

  Where? No way to tell. When? Nothing there either.

  Well, Jake Grafton would know what to do with it.

  Grafton always knew how to handle hot potatoes, a quality that Toad had long ago concluded was instinctive. The guy could be tossed blindfolded into a snake pit and still avoid the poisonous ones.

  The water began running in the bathroom. Rita must be taking a shower.

  He replaced the photo and negative in the envelope and put it into his shirt pocket.

  Toad was outside trimming weeds along the fence when Rita appeared in the door wearing a flight suit, her hair braided into a bun that was pinned to the back of her head.

  "I'm leaving, Toad." He paused and leaned on the fence. "Back for supper?" "Yes. Are you going to call Admiral Grafton?" "I dunno. Haven't decided." "You are, then." Toad resumed the chore of cutting weeds, trying not to let his temper show.

  Rita laughed. He tossed the hedge shears down and turned his back on her.

  In a few seconds she appeared in front of him. "I love you, Toad-man." He snorted. comI'm gonna ditch you and run off with ol' Lizzie Thorn.

  Won't be nothing here tonight when you get home except my dirty underwear and busted tennis racket." She stretched on tiptoe and kissed his cheek.

  "See you this evening, lover." The numbers... the numbers appalled him, shocked him, mesmerized him.

  He wrote them on the back of an old envelope that he used as a bookmark.

  The stupendous, incomprehensible quantity of human misery represented by the numbers numbed him, made it impossible to pick up the book again and continue reading.

  Jake Grafton stared out the window at the swaying trees in the yard without seeing them, played with his mechanical pencil, ran his fingers yet again through his thinning hair.

  And he looked again at the envelope. Fifteen million Russians died fighting the Germans during World War 1. Fifteen million! Dead!

  No wonder the nation came apart at the seams. No wonder they dragged the czar from his palace and put him and his family against the wall.

  Fifteen million!

  The new republic was doomed. The Bolsheviks plunged the land into a five-year civil war, a hell of violence, famine and disease that cost another fifteen million lives. Another fifteen million!

&nbs
p; Then came Josef Stalin and the forced collectivization of Soviet agriculture. Here the number was nebulous, an educated guess. One historian estimated six million families were murdered or starved to death-another believed at least ten million men, women, and children perished; young and old, vigorous and infirm, those struggling to live and those waiting to die.

  The Red Army had gone through thousands of square miles robbing the peasants of every crumb, every animal, every Potato and cabbage and edible kernel, then scaled the districts and waited for every last human to starve.

  Ten million! A conservative estimate, Jake thought.

  Then came the purges. Under Josef Stalin-and they had called the fourth Ivan "the Terrible!"-Soviet citizens were worked as slave labor until they died or were shot in wholesale lots because they might not be loyal to their Communist masters. The secret police murder squads had quotas.