Overture to Disaster (Post Cold War Political Thriller Trilogy Book 3)

by Chester D. Campbell

When involved in an operation, Jerry could make up cover stories with the best of them. But Burke knew when it came to personal matters, he was a lousy liar.

  "Aw, Burke, he said not to tell you."

  "I don't doubt that. But what did he say?"

  "You know you're going to get me in trouble."

  "Had you rather be in trouble with him or me?"

  "Come on, Burke, I'm fond of both of you. I don't know what the problem is between you two, but I wish you'd get it settled and leave me out."

  "What did he say?" Burke was adamant.

  "Nate said he was worried about you. You had been acting strange toward him lately. He thought it might be good to get you away from Washington for a week or two. He's faxing me some financial information to put in the files, stuff for you to work on. He said to 'be creative' and come up with some things to keep you occupied."

  Burke arrived home to the usual wet kisses and boisterous leg-pulling of Cam and Liz. He was hardly inside the door when his son Cliff called from Philadelphia.

  "Hi, Dad. You'll never believe what happened today."

  After what had happened so far, Burke was ready to believe almost anything. "Try me."

  "Before I get to the good part, I'll give you a follow-up on Adam Stern. I got to thinking about it this morning and decided, just for kicks, to call the State Department. Talked to the man, himself, the Senior Undersecretary. At first he acted like he didn't know what I was talking about. Then he wanted to know what my interest was in Adam Stern."

  "What did you tell him?"

  "I said it involved a confidential investigation. I couldn't reveal any of the details. But I let him know I knew Stern was no longer employed by the government."

  "What did he say to that?"

  Cliff laughed. "He got very serious. He said the nature of the assignments of certain former government employees was such that their backgrounds required continued confidentiality. He said I sounded like a nice young man. I’m sure you're proud to hear that. But if I required further information on Adam Stern, I should talk to Director Pickens. Actually, I had a chance to ask the Director about it later, but decided I had best not."

  "Wise choice. Apparently that was the interesting part of your day. What was the good part?"

  "Remember my telling you about getting the citation from the Attorney General for my handling of that Medicare fraud case?"

  "Yeah."

  "Well, who should call this afternoon but Bradford Pickens himself. He said that case had earned me a special award, five days and four nights at a resort in the mountains of Idaho."

  "Hey, congratulations! When do you go?"

  "That's the funny part. He apologized for the mix-up in not informing me sooner, but said the date had been set and couldn't be changed."

  "When?"

  "I leave in the morning. Fly to Boise, where a small plane picks me up and flies me back into the mountains. It's one of those places you can hardly get to from here. The Director said he had already cleared it with my SAC."

  Special Agent in Charge, head of the Philadelphia Field Office. Cliff obviously had made no connection between the two incidents he had related, but Burke began to wonder. Had the call to the Senior Assistant Secretary of State that morning triggered the sudden revelation of the "special award" this afternoon? It seemed an odd circumstance that he was being dispatched to Seoul at the same time his son was being shipped off to the boonies in Idaho. Everybody with any interest in Adam Stern was suddenly being taken out of circulation.

  When Burke told Lori about his suspicions, she gave him a questioning frown. "Aren't you beginning to get a little paranoid about this?"

  "Maybe," he said. "But not without cause."

  Then he related what he had learned from Jerry Chan regarding Nate's decision to send him to Seoul.

  "He told Jerry to make up something to keep you busy over there?"

  "That's about the size of it."

  "What have you decided to do?"

  He told her what he planned.

  Dinner was sometimes a test of wills between parent and twin. Cam's high chair sat beside Burke, Liz's beside Lori. The trick was to keep the food on the tray and heading for the mouth. Tonight Burke was managing fairly well. It was Liz's turn to act up.

  When the phone rang, Burke answered it.

  "This is Roddy. We're at a motel in Little Rock. The Major and his crew appear to be bedded down for the night. Did you work out anything on the rental car?"

  "Everything's arranged. I'll give you the guy's name and phone number. Make sure you do the swap where the Major won't see you."

  "Shouldn't be any problem. I suspect he sticks close by to keep an eye on his charges."

  "Don't blame him."

  "Maybe by the time we call you tomorrow, we'll have some idea about where they're going."

  "There's been a change of plan, Roddy. You'll be calling my wife, Lori, tomorrow."

  He told Rodman about the decision to send him to Seoul, then related how he planned to deal with it.

  New York City

  61

  Adam Stern lived in a crusty looking old apartment building that faced Central Park to the east. It sat on the opposite side of the park from the Foreign Affairs Roundtable. Although the structure wasn't much to look at on the outside, it was maintained with meticulous care on the inside. The owner, who occupied the entire top floor, ran an import-export business and was a longtime Roundtable member. His decorator, a middle-aged French-Canadian who had no difficulty sizing up the no-nonsense tenant after the first meeting, had furnished Stern's two-bedroom, ground floor apartment with heavy, masculine furniture, and carpets and draperies in cool, dark earth tones. It was perfectly suited to his style of moving stealthily in the background.

  Stern sat before a large screen TV tuned to the baseball game between the New York Yankees and Cleveland Indians. The score was two to two in the top of the third inning. But Stern's mind was elsewhere. He felt like a forest ranger putting out brush fires. He had received a call from the State Department that morning, advising that Special Agent Clifford Walters had followed up on his request for the file on Adam Stern. When he talked to FBI Director Pickens about it, he asked, strictly on a hunch, if there was any connection between Walters and Burke Hill. Damned if Walters wasn't the man's son. Pickens promised to see that the young agent was dispatched far away and out of touch.

  Bernard Whitehurst had called to report that Hill's boss, Nathaniel Highsmith, who would become the new FAR director, was sending the potential troublemaker to Seoul, South Korea in the morning. Stern had obtained Hill's flight and intended to see that he was on the plane out of Dulles.

  Then Nikolai Romashchuk had phoned from Little Rock. He had spotted the same blue Ford Taurus on several occasions during the day. There appeared to be two men in the car, but he had been unable to maneuver close enough to get a look at their faces. It could be a simple case of two vehicles playing tag on the interstate, but at this critical point in the operation, nothing could be left to chance. Stern suggested if the car was still around in the morning, Romashchuk should create a circumstance that would permit an identification.

  After being momentarily distracted by a Yankee grand slam home run smashed high into the left field stands, Stern returned to his concerns over the day's events. Deciding it was time to make preparations to eliminate the most pressing problem, he dialed his Washington partner in Advanced Security Systems.

  Haskell Feldhaus was, strictly speaking, a figment of Stern's imagination. Neither the face he wore nor the name he used was the one he had started out with. As a young Special Forces lieutenant in Vietnam, he was captured and held prisoner, suffering several years of torture and deprivation. Back home in New Mexico, he had problems adjusting and his hero status soon dissipated. He was fired from a succession of jobs, got into trouble and wound up killing a man. He was in prison when Stern heard about him through a friend. By then Stern was working for the Roundtable and saw some inter
esting possibilities in the case. The convicted murderer had a sharp mind and had improved himself through correspondence study while in prison. Though eager to resume his place in society, he was prepared to make use of all the prison smarts he had learned over the past few years. After paying him a visit, Stern had made arrangements for a prominent attorney with connections in the governor's office to work on getting him paroled.

  Adam Stern's next move was to set up his protege's "death" in an accident. He then created the new identity as Haskell Feldhaus, providing all the necessary documentation for his "legend." He arranged for a new face at a highly discreet plastic surgery clinic in Sweden, and set him up in business with Advanced Security Systems, a firm that would hire other misfits, people unafraid of stretching the bounds of the law, people who could be disposed of and would be missed about like a wart that suddenly disappeared from the back of your hand.

  Feldhaus had learned to speak Vietnamese while a captive. In the New Mexico prison, he had made the acquaintance of a former South Vietnamese soldier who was a leader in the Asian "mafia" that was beginning to spread its influence across America. The man had given him the identity of a contact he could use if an occasion should arise where he needed help.

  When Feldhaus came on the line, Stern asked, "Have you ever exercised your Vietnamese option?"

  "I really haven't had occasion to," Feldhaus admitted. "Why?"

  "I think it may be about time."

  The first day of July dawned late in Washington, the result of a thick tier of clouds that had moved in overnight. Most of the capital's workers were thankful it was Saturday so they could sleep late, but Burke Hill was up before daylight, moving methodically at a stepped-up pace. He wolfed down a bowl of raisin bran mixed with granola, washed down a blueberry muffin with coffee, kissed the twins good-bye, had a few last minute words with Lori, and headed off for Dulles in his small tan Buick.

  In another suburb of the capital, Haskell Feldhaus was also getting an early start, telephoning a man in Chicago named Hoa Thi Thach. He identified himself in Thach's native tongue, explained the problem and inquired if a few troops might be available for hire. The Vietnamese said all he needed to know was when and where.

  At the J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building on Pennsylvania Avenue, Deputy Assistant Director Jack McNaughton sat at his desk going over documents he would use during testimony before a congressional committee on Monday. It was a matter of considerable importance to the Bureau, otherwise he would not have been in his office on a Saturday morning. McNaughton was an old hand who had worked under every director from Hoover on down. He found Bradford Pickens more in the mold of crusty old Hoover than the ex-judges who had succeeded him. He was aware that Pickens had some powerful cronies whose suggestions for starting, stopping or re-directing investigations were usually followed. McNaughton questioned the propriety of such manipulations, but he was only a year away from retirement and he wasn't about to stir any waves.

  Around nine o'clock, a weekend duty officer knocked on the door, walked in and laid a message on McNaughton's desk.

  "The Mexican police want our help in finding a couple of fugitives," he said. "I thought you might want to decide how to handle it."

  McNaughton nodded. "Thanks. I'll take a look."

  As soon as he read the message, he called Director Pickens at his home. "You asked me to keep an eye out for anything on Warren Rodman and Yuri Shumakov," he reminded the Director. "The Mexicans have asked us to help find them. It seems they flew to the U.S. on a private plane early Wednesday."

  "Fax it to me," Pickens said. "I'll call you right back."

  The Director took the message from his fax machine, read it with considerable interest and immediately called McNaughton. "This Worldwide Communications Consultants. Isn't that Burke Hill's firm?"

  "Right." Hill's FBI record had been rehabilitated at direction of the President after the Jabberwock affair. He was well known among the Bureau brass. "How should we handle it?"

  "Quietly, for the moment. It has some ramifications I need to look into. It is not to be sent out to the field offices."

  "Shall I follow up on it personally?"

  "Good idea. Call and see if Hill is in today. If not, get him at home. See what he knows. If they flew here in his company's airplane, he should be able to tell us how they managed it, and what happened to them."

  As soon as he got McNaughton off the line, Pickens dialed Adam Stern's private number at the Roundtable.

  Along Interstate 40

  62

  Nikolai Romashchuk and his Shining Path crew left Little Rock at seven a.m. He headed east on I-40, keeping a close watch on the large outside mirror for a blue Ford Taurus. When he failed to spot it after forty-five minutes, he began to relax and turned to chat with Pepe, who sat beside him in the front of the van.

  "I was concerned about a blue car I saw yesterday," he told the young Peruvian. "But I haven't seen anything of it today. Hopefully it was a false alarm."

  "Did you have a feeling it was someone following us?"

  "A feeling? Yes, I suppose you could call it that."

  "My instructor in the movement spoke often of feelings. He said 'listen to your inner voice.'"

  Romashchuk grinned. "My mentor was hardly that poetic. He told me to pay heed to my instincts."

  Pepe nodded. "Instinct or inner voice, it tells me that we must be careful."

  "You can count on that, Pepe. But let's hope all that caution turns up a blank."

  It was a futile hope. By the time they passed the dog track at West Memphis, Arkansas, around 9:30, the Major had begun to notice a white Chevrolet Caprice popping up occasionally in the mirror. He kept a steady pace across the long span of the Mississippi River bridge, then headed around the northern by-pass in Memphis, Tennessee. The traffic was moderately heavy but moving at a fast clip. He thought about Adam Stern's suggestion, and when they reached the eastern side of the city, he saw just what he needed, signs indicating an exit ahead crowded with fast food outlets. He had learned all about such places over the past few days. Flipping the turn signal, he eased into the exit lane.

  He could see the outlandishly tall signs beyond the underpass, soaring above their surroundings like strange mutations growing out of control. That was the way he viewed America, a country with strange, alien ideas it was attempting to grow in his own backyard. Obviously they didn't work in his part of the world. As he rolled to a stop at the cross street, he checked the mirror and saw the white Chevy coming down the ramp behind him. Ideally, he would simply double back on the car, but the trailing U-Haul wouldn't permit that kind of maneuverability. Instead, he drove beneath the interstate, then turned in at a McDonald's. He steered quickly around the curving driveway behind the building. Fortunately, it wasn't crowded at this time of morning, and he hardly slowed as he rolled back toward the street.

  As he had guessed, the white car's driver had hesitated on reaching the entrance to the restaurant. It sat no more than a few yards away as the van paused before re-entering the street. The Major stared across and got a jolt as shocking as if he had grabbed a bare electric wire. Colonel Rodman and Yuri Shumakov. He was certain of it. But how could they...? They should still be in Mexico. And even if they weren't, how could they possibly have known where to find him?

  Now he looked for a real stopping place with something else in mind, a place where he could make a phone call to New York.

  When Deputy Assistant Director McNaughton finally got someone on the line at Worldwide Communications Consultants, he was told that Burke Hill was out of town. It was suggested that he contact the president of the company, Nathaniel Highsmith. He found Highsmith at his home in Georgetown and stressed that he needed to see him right away.

  McNaughton was impressed by the historic home as soon as he drove up. The abundance of flowers was striking. Highsmith met him at the door, dressed in a casual seersucker suit but looking very stylish for someone at home on a Saturday morning. The gray-haired PR execut
ive carefully checked his FBI identification.

  "My office called and advised that you were looking for Burke Hill," Highsmith said.

  "That is correct, sir. I understand he's out of town."

  "Will be out of the country very soon. He's on his way to Seoul, South Korea. What can I help you with?"

  "Are you familiar with a flight your company plane made to Mexico City a few days ago?"

  "Of course. It was sent there from New Orleans to pick up Mr. Hill, who was visiting our Mexico City office."

  "What do you know about two passengers who came back on the flight, an Ivan Netto and a Warren Rodman?"

  Highsmith frowned, a puzzled look on his face. "They picked up three people from our Technology Group in New Orleans. I've never heard those names before."

  McNaughton knew the Mexicans had been positive of their information about the two fugitives departing on Worldwide's Learjet. Shumakov had traveled under the name Netto. Three men had boarded in Mexico City. Evidently Hill was the third man. It appeared he was the key to learning what had happened. "You indicated Mr. Hill hadn't left the country yet. Does his flight make a stop somewhere?"

  "San Francisco. He's due in there just before nine, their time."

  McNaughton glanced at his watch and made a quick calculation. "I'd better get back to the office and arrange for someone to meet his plane."

  Adam Stern had been highly disturbed by the news from Bradford Pickens. When Major Romashchuk called from Memphis to report he had identified Rodman and Shumakov, Stern knew it was time to move. He called Haskell Feldhaus immediately. Feldhaus got in touch with his Vietnamese contact, Hoa Thi Thach, and told him where and when. Thach promptly consulted one of his lieutenants, a wiry, black-haired young man named Vuong, who directed a fleet of narcotics couriers and the watchdogs who provided protection for them. Vuong quickly came up with a team familiar with the route and competent to handle the situation.