The Windchime Legacy

by A. W. Mykel

  He waited, tapping the end of his pen against the desk pad.

  Call! Call! Damn it, call!

  Bzzz! Bzzzz! The soft tones startled him. He leaped for the drawer containing the phone.

  Bzzzz! Bzz—

  “Yes, Irv. How’d it go?”

  Honeycut was momentarily stopped by the way the President had answered the phone. The usual, “This is the President,” was missing, replaced by the nervous rush of words.

  “We have him, Mr. President.” Honeycut could hear the long sigh of relief at the other end. “It didn’t come out as cleanly as we had hoped, but we got him.”

  “Where are they now?” the President asked.

  “They’re forty-five thousand feet over the Atlantic, speeding home. Chakhovsky will be eating apple pie for his dessert tonight, sir,” Honeycut said, with a graveled chuckle.

  “And the CIA? Was anyone…did anyone get hurt?” the President asked apprehensively. He knew the answer almost immediately by the pause in Honeycut’s response. He had learned long ago that something unpleasant would follow the silence.

  “I’m afraid so, Mr. President. Morsand had taken measures not outlined in his plan. There was only one way to handle the unexpected situation they found themselves in. It was only the good instincts and skills of the team that saved the day for us. It was regrettable, but the alternative was failure,” Honeycut assured him.

  “How bad?” the President asked.

  Honeycut took a breath and let it out into the phone, another admonition of unpleasant tidings.

  “Four CIA dead, one badly injured. His condition is unknown at the present time. He was struck by one of their own chase cars. We think he’s alive. There were also three KGB agents killed, and we think possibly one pedestrian may have been killed during the chase.”

  The President gasped. “My god, Irv. Eight dead, possibly nine? It was a bloodbath.”

  “It was necessary, Mr. President. The KGB was there ahead of Morsand. The prettiest setup you could want to see. They came about two seconds away from icing Chakhovsky. Who knows how many of Morsand’s men would have been killed if it weren’t for Pilgrim. He turned it all around for us, Mr. President.

  “We could have lost a lot more and still come away empty. It was handled well, in the only way possible, sir,” Honeycut assured him again.

  “Yes, I…I’m sure that it was, Irv. It just bothers me that American lives had to be taken in the process. What now? Where do we go from here?” he asked.

  “Well, sir, two small complications have come up. The first is that Chakhovsky has a heart condition that we were unaware of. We won’t know how serious it is until we can examine him. The second is that our objective of leaving both sides thinking that the other has him has been shot to hell. If it could have stopped after the first two KGB agents, there might have been a chance. But there are too many bodies from both sides. I’m certain that we can weather it okay. We’ll just have to take some extra steps to keep our tracks covered,” Honeycut explained.

  “And what about Chakhovsky?” the President asked.

  “He’ll be taken to one of our special security installations, one equipped to handle his potential heart condition. After a very thorough checkup, he’ll be debriefed and treated medically to take care of his problem. Then we’ll begin the slow process of Americanization. We’ll essentially create a new life for him here. He’ll be given a new identity, a new appearance through plastic surgery and other cosmetic aids, and then he’ll be taught to think, act, and talk like a born American. When he’s ready, he’ll go out and become a part of our citizenry, so different from his former self that even his mother wouldn’t recognize him,” Honeycut outlined.

  “Once he’s let out into our society, will there be any chance of his discovery?”

  “Virtually none. But, to be on the safe side, we’ll implant him. It will be explosive, just as a precaution against the worst of possible eventualities. I’d bet on his living out a normal life, though, Mr. President. We can really change him. The hard part is done. The rest just takes time and patience, and we have plenty of both.”

  The President nodded in approval as he listened.

  “Good work, Irv. I don’t have to tell you how important all of this has been. I think you’re the one who told me. Thank you, Irv.”

  “Don’t thank me, Mr. President. You can thank the boys who got it done. I told you they were good. They got it done against some pretty tough odds,” Honeycut said.

  “You’re right.

  “They’ve done their country a great service. They’ve been through a lot during the past week. Why don’t you give them both a nice vacation. First class all the way. It’s on the White House, Irv. They’ve earned it.”

  Honeycut laughed. “I’d be glad to, Mr. President. Thank you, and I’ll keep you informed of any further developments.”

  “Good, Irv. Thank you, again,” the President said as he put down his phone. He closed the drawer and locked it with a special key that armed an intruder device in the drawer.

  His stomach growled. He hadn’t eaten yet. He knew that, before the morning was over, Shyleur Platt would be in the Oval Office coughing out alternating alibis and fits of rage over the deal. He was a hard man to take, sometimes. Especially on an empty stomach.

  The President went to breakfast.

  Bud Kodek stood in front of a very irate Robert Morsand. His initial rage had subsided somewhat, and he was now digesting what Kodek had told him of the incident. It hadn’t been much.

  “Well, one thing is for certain, the KGB didn’t get him,” Morsand said. “They wouldn’t have taken such great care to get him alive. It would have been a quick one in the head and then out of there as easily as they got in. Somebody wanted him alive. But who?”

  “The only ones who got a look at him are dead,” Kodek began. “I got a glimpse of him, but it was from a distance, and all I could see was the back of him. He was tall and fast as hell. He had Chakhovsky over his shoulder and still ran like a deer. He took Rucker and Tonelli coming through the door, then somehow got Cash before he could nail him from the roof. Must have got him on the run. Then he took out Malory. The car that picked him up blew in from the rear of the perimeter too fast for us to stop him. I guess we were too loose in the back there.”

  “I don’t think that the man that got Chakhovsky also got Cash and Malory,” Morsand said. “Both Malory and Cash were a mess. They were taken out with explosive bullets. Rucker and Tonelli weren’t. Cash was an impossible shot from the ground. On the run, with a man on his shoulders, an angle that was almost straight up—I don’t think it could be done. He had help, probably from outside the perimeter. It was well planned. Whoever it was had good information. They knew our plan.

  “What about the woman and the girl?” he asked.

  “Well, after the cars tore off, I figured it was KGB. I recognized one of them in the blue Mercedes. Then we went back up to the third floor to begin a room by room search. The first room we searched after coming up the back stairway had the bodies.

  “It was odd at first. The older one was made up to look a lot older than she was. A good job of makeup, too. The other one looked like a girl at first glance. Fourteen, maybe. But I don’t think she was that young. The older one was armed with an automatic. There was another one just like it in the dresser near where the girl was found. We’ve taken what we need to make an ID. If they’re in our files, we’ll have it soon.

  “They were both killed with single head shots. Nonexplosive. We got a few slugs, but they were pretty torn up. We should still be able to get some sort of ballistics picture from them, though. My guess is that both females were KGB.

  “Another known KGB agent was killed at the intersection during the chase. He apparently tried to approach on foot. Shots were exchanged, and he took a chestful. Again, nonexplosive.”

  Morsand nodded. “The only explosive loads used were the ones to take out the rooftop agents. I’m sure I was right. Som
eone from outside the perimeter fired those shots. And the KGB doesn’t run around blowing away its own people, either. It wasn’t KGB. Someone else got him. And that brings us back to the same question. Who?”

  Kodek just looked at his boss.

  Morsand rubbed his cheek. “It could have been any one of the Western European countries. They would all have a lot to gain from the information he could give them. Maybe the British, or the French. They’d stand to gain the most. West Germany, too. Or even Israel. Too many maybes at this point.”

  Morsand shut off the tape recorder. He pressed the button on his intercom.

  “Yes, Mr. Morsand,” his secretary answered.

  “Could you come in here for a moment, Linda?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  A second later, a young, attractive woman walked into his office. Kodek always liked looking at her. Small tits, but great ass and legs. Normally his mind would have been in her panties, but the events of the day had totally dulled any happy fantasies.

  “Could you please have this tape transcribed? It’s urgent. I want a top priority on it,” Morsand said.

  “Yes, sir. I’ll take it right down,” she said and left the office.

  “I’m going down to communications,” Morsand began. “I’ll get Platt on the scrambler. There’s no use in putting this off, I have the feeling that we’re going to be out of answers on this for a while.”

  He started to walk out of his office, then turned back to Kodek. He looked at the big hulking man, handsome in his rugged way. It hadn’t been Kodek’s fault. They had been just plain outclassed today. “How’s Charlie doing?” he asked, referring to the agent who had been struck by mobile two.

  Kodek nodded his head. “He’s gonna make it. Both legs and hip broke up real bad, but he’s alive. I wish I could say the same for the rest of them.”

  “Yeah, so do I.”

  Morsand could see that Kodek felt responsible for what had happened. “I guess I could have made a better plan,” he began for Kodek’s sake. “It’s always easy to see where you went wrong or where the weak spots were when you have the facility of hindsight to help.

  “Well, Platt’s going to want answers, and fast. And so do I. Get every available ass out there digging. Everybody makes mistakes. Let’s find theirs, and then we’re going to get Chakhovsky back. Somebody went to a lot of trouble to get him alive. There might be more to this than we’re aware of. I want to know who he was so important to. We owe them a few after today.”

  A few minutes later, he was on the scrambler with Shyleur Platt, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. This was Platt’s first news of the developments in the Chakhovsky affairs. He was expecting to hear that the most important defection of the decade had gone routinely.

  “Well?” was all he asked.

  Morsand mentally grabbed his nuts to protect them from the asschewing he was about to get. It was the first one in a long time, but he had a sick feeling inside that told him it was only the beginning.

  “Well?” Platt asked again, impatiently.

  “We lost him.”

  SIXTEEN

  As the end drew nearer, our efforts picked up. We had a deadline to meet.

  We killed all of the “enemy” that we could get our hands on. The death camps operated round the clock. Every one that died today would be one less to fight tomorrow, in our eternal war against die Untermenschen.

  And so, in the ending of the Third Reich, we were beginning our preparations for the Fourth, when we would rise again, to reclaim our destiny.

  We did not care what the world thought. Our ultimate success would justify everything.

  Entry No. 27 from the partially

  recovered Wolf Journal

  Friday morning came to Chicago filled with the chill of early April. Dr. Edward Bridges shivered all the way to work, despite the belching warmth of his car heater. His feet and hands would not warm up; the cold ate right through him. It was his last day.

  It was not the way he had imagined it would be. There had been no dramatic countdown of days, ticking away one by one. This was too fast—one call, one day to prepare, then go. It wasn’t as satisfying as his fantasies had allowed. He could not savor it.

  He walked into his office the usual thirty minutes early and closed his door. This would tell Pat that he was in and was not to be disturbed.

  He sat behind the desk and removed the blank report forms for the last time. When he went out tonight, it would be for real. The schematics would be around his legs, and there would be no coming back. But he was ready for what had to be done. It would be just one more trip, as easy as the rest. All the practice was now going to pay off. It would be a cakewalk. So why was he so nervous about it?

  He put his security plate into the slot, to activate the sliding door to his inner office, and went in. The door swished closed behind him. He looked at the thick volumes of schematics, wishing he could take them all. But he knew which ones he needed and began going through the volumes, removing them carefully. Just as he had planned, there were twenty-four.

  It didn’t seem like so little could contain so much, but, with the information contained on those sheets, another SENTINEL could be built for anyone with the means and the talent to make it possible.

  He shook his head and tried to imagine two of them in the world. Two Babels. That’s what they should have named it, he thought. Babel. That’s what it really was, after all. Only this one was completed. Man’s greatest achievement, approaching the wonder of creation itself. God had taken seven days to enact that miracle; man had taken seven years. Perhaps, even as God confounded the tongues of the first architects of Babel, He had known that they would attempt one after the other until one day they would reach the mysterious heavens of their dreams. They had, in fact, been made in His own image and likeness. Too much so, for man had the habit of playing God with his environment and his world. SENTINEL now put him very close.

  He looked through the sheets one more time, to make sure that he had everything he needed. It was all there—more power than any man had ever held, more potential than any man would ever possess. And Edward Bridges was stealing it, as easily as a little boy stealing a pack of chewing gum from a busy supermarket.

  He piled the sheets neatly and left them on the corner of the desk in that office, then went back through the sliding door to his outer office. The nervousness was fading. He was confident and ready.

  He plopped down behind his huge desk and unwrapped a cigar. Lighting it with great ceremony, he puffed and filled the room with vile clouds of smoke. Tomorrow he’d be one of the most important men in the whole world. The future of that world was in his hands.

  After a few minutes, he walked to his office door and opened it. Dr. Warren Geisler was outside, talking to Pat.

  “Hi, Ed,” Geisler said, as the door opened fully. “I was just about to ask Pat to give you a message to call me when you got the chance. You got a few minutes now?” the young scientist asked.

  Warren Geisler was one of the new breed of computer scientists coming out of a very carefully and deliberately planned program initiated since the conception of SENTINEL. He was young and handsome and possessed enormous talent. He was the all-American stud, with a million-dollar brain. Warren Geisler was everything that Edward Bridges wasn’t, and wanted to be.

  “Sure, Warren. Come on in,” Bridges said, leaving a trail of smoke as he walked back to his desk. “Are you going to have everything ready for Monday’s meeting?” he asked.

  “Yeah, as long as engineering gets me the final figures before the end of the day,” Geisler replied.

  “Good. You’ve done a lot of excellent work on that project. What was it you wanted to talk to me about?” Bridges asked his young assistant before he could respond to the compliment. A huge cloud of smoke began drifting toward the open door. Geisler walked in and sat quickly, to get below it.

  “I just went to Elizabeth’s office to talk to her about Monday’s meetin
g to find out whether she wanted me to arrange for a demonstration of the oh-nineteen lab model. Gina said that she was out today and wouldn’t be back until Monday because of her laryngitis. Do you think she’s going to want to see it in action?” he asked Bridges.

  Bridges’s mind raced quickly. Ryerson was out. He’d never see the bitch again. That was too bad. He had been looking forward to that last eye contact with her. He nodded in answer to the question. “I’m almost certain she will, Warren. Probably not until the end of the meeting, though. Why don’t you go ahead and set it up for about fifteen thirty hours? I doubt we’ll be much later than that,” Bridges said. He puffed another vile cloud.

  “All right, Ed.” Geisler rose to beat his retreat to the door, ahead of the drifting cloud. He stopped and turned back to Bridges. “I almost forgot, Ed. Can I take out the oh-nineteen schematic after I get the figures from engineering? I’ll only need it for a few minutes,” he said.

  A sharp twinge knifed through Bridges. The 019 schematic was one of the twenty-four he had selected to take out with him. Calm down, he ordered himself. It had to be back in his hands before the end of the day, or no one was allowed out of the complex. Stay calm. Got to keep him out of the inner office. He might see the sheets all piled up and get suspicious.

  “Sure, Warren. But why don’t you give me a call when you need it and I’ll bring it over? I want to go over those final figures with you, anyway. I’ll save you the trip.”

  “Okay, Ed. I’ll call you later, then,” Geisler said, then left.

  So, Elizabeth was going to be out all day. That raised some interesting possibilities. Bridges was thinking about the secret files he knew she kept in her desk. He didn’t know what was in them, but he knew that they were for nobody’s eyes but Elizabeth’s and whomever it was that she saw when she went to Washington. This might be a good chance, his only chance, to see what was inside of them. It could even help him work out a better deal with the Russians. Who could tell? The only way was to check it out.