by Dean Ing
Every deep-cover intelligence agent has a spooker. It's his escape hatch - a stash that contains false identification, keys to a hidden car or boat or plane, weapons, and money - lots of money.
It took U.S. intelligence a long time to figure out that someone was stalking and killing agents for their spookers. It was the perfect crime, almost. Agents are killed every day by the people they are spying on. And these killers were good - invisible, quick, leaving no trace behind.
But finally the killers made one mistake.
“Dean Ing's new book, SPOOKER, really lives up to its title .... Ing cheerfully rummages into some seriously depraved recesses in search of evil incarnate, and comes up with a winner. You won't want to read-this-one by yourself in a dark and quiet room."
- Ken Goddard SPOOKER
Andrew was halfway through the front room before his glance at the clock stopped him in midstride. He checked his watch: one hour off. It had to be an electrical glitch but No, it doesn't either, he thought, a hot wave of apprehension climbing the nape of his neck. He went into the mode he had been trained for, a mode of deadly control. You didn't give yourself away with fear, you kept on doing normal things but always strengthening your position, all senses hyperacute, waiting for your opponent to reveal himself.
And when he did, you'd better be ready. Hesitation had killed more people than bad aim ever did. The derringer slid into his hand, half-hidden in his palm. And now, with the safety off, this was his home again, and he was master in it.
But a soft footfall warned him of someone filling the bedroom hallway. As he moved sideways, he saw a face, impassive and shockingly familiar, and he came within a heartbeat of pulling the trigger.
"Very good," said Mom as he lowered the double-barreled weapon. "Almost perfect, Andrew."
Also by Dean Ing
The Big Lifters
Blood of Eagles
Butcher Bird
The Nemesis Mission
The Ransom of Black Stealth One
Silent Thunder
Single Combat
Systemic Shock
Wild Country
Spooker
TOR®
A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK NEW YORK
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.
SPOOKER
Copyright © 1995 by Dean Ing
All rights reserved, including, the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.
Cover art by Shelley Eshkar
A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
Tor Books on the World Wide Web: http://www.tor.com
Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.
ISBN: 0-812-54842-6
Library of Congress Card Catalog Number: 95-34737
First edition: November 1995
First mass market edition: January 1997
Printed in the United States of America 098765432 1
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
One of these days I may learn to plow arcane fields without the likes of Dr. Jay Mullen, Al Reiss, Ken Goddard, Dr. Tom Ewald, Dr. Leik Myrabo, Dr. Marvin Coffey, Dr. David Natharius, Dr. Carl Carmichael and several others, but I didn't manage that in this book. If I have run amok with their wise counsel, they have no one to blame but me. Federal agents, some retired, some active, added tidbits to my narrative as indulgently as other folks will feed a strutting park pigeon. To the latter: my sincere thanks, gentlemen; for the record, "I have no recollection of. . ." your names.
As for the Chamois: At least the model flies, thanks to the expert help of the EAA's David Guerriero.
For Walt Buckner, who is, after all, the best man.
1
OCTOBER 1968
Because Skander Masaryk was the victim of earliest date in what Langley insiders call the Spooker File, both East and West needed a long time to unravel its tangles. Royston, a CIA handler, observed at the time that their prized Czech defector was in no condition to explain, and a corpse carbonized as badly as that could yield very little forensics data with the technology of 1968.
The record shows that they applied to their other star Czech defector, Ladislav Bittman, for more.
Bittman, once a major in the Soviet-backed STB, the Czech secret police, was little help. The "uncles," as KGB handlers were called in Prague, had taken quite a few promising young Czechs to Moscow, and only the failures showed up again in Prague. Masaryk might have been many things, but a failure was not one of them.
The Langley dossier on Masaryk lacked a couple of extremely salient points the KGB could have furnished, but that was to be expected of a defecting Soviet-bloc spook in the late 1960s. What nobody could have expected was that Masaryk would become a spook of the sort to make men tremble, the sort that even when terminated, does not stay dead.
What CIA-Langley knew about Skander Roman Masaryk covered some forty pages, but some of that was palpable bullshit; the main points could have been crammed into a small envelope. In brief, Masaryk was born in 1934 to Ludwig and Maria Masaryk in the city of Brno at a moment when Czechoslovakia could still hope for better times. An engineer and pilot who believed in socialism, the elder Masaryk moved his wife and infant to Canada with the Czech trade mission shortly before Nazi Germany began to demand her piece of Masaryk's homeland. While trying to sell the Czech-built Aero A204 transport aircraft in Ottawa, the leftist engineer polished his English and listened to his radio with increasing dread.
Canadians spoke English and French, which colored the views of Ludwig Masaryk and thus of his wife and child; it was the Englishman, Chamberlain, and the Frenchman, Daladier, who appeased Adolf Hitler in 1938 by allowing him to gobble pieces of Czechoslovakia unhindered. To all patriotic Czechs, this amounted to a flat betrayal by the Western democracies. In March 1939, with the Nazi takeover of the Skoda arms factories, Ludwig Masaryk abandoned any idea of going home and placed his faith in Moscow. When Germany attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941, Masaryk searched his conscience and then went to war.
With careful consideration for his wife and their precocious gypsy-featured child who adored him, Ludwig Masaryk signed on with one of the three Czech squadrons in Britain's Royal Air Force instead of volunteering directly with the Soviets. The records from this period suggest that eight-year-old Skander, already building model airplanes in Ottawa, was by nature a secretive child. Masaryk knew that Canada would protect his little family while he fought for socialism; and besides, as a pilot, he fancied his chances were better in a Spitfire than flying a lumbering dead-slow Russian bomber.
To say that his chances were better is not to say that they were good. Lieutenant Ludwig Masaryk's fighter disintegrated over the English Channel in 1942. Perhaps with more patriotism than good sense, the young widow emigrated back to a ravaged Czechoslovakia after the war with a strange and stateless teenager who was already cynical about the West. Young Skander had been tutored at home in Ottawa, and the dossier claims that his English was better than his Czech. As a confirmed socialist, and aware that Prague's technical colleges had been virtually destroyed, Maria Masaryk permitted the Soviet Union to take her fourteen-year-old for higher education.
All of this information, of course, was put together long after the events. The CIA dossier on young Skander Masaryk did not actually exist until, in August 1968, Soviet tanks rumbled through Czech cities to quell the revolt there. Days after the Prague revolt was crushed, an attractively lithe, swarthy fellow strode into the Central Los Angeles FBI office speaking perfect idiomatic American, carrying a Samsonite two-suiter and a story that filled the SAC, the special agent in charge, wit
h mixed emotions.
On the one hand, a youngish walk-in with a technical degree from Leningrad State Institute and a decade of KGB experience was a plum the size of a cantaloupe. On the other hand, if Skander Masaryk's story was all true, this Czech had been living in the United States illegally, ferreting out secrets from American aerospace firms for almost a decade, without causing the merest ripple in FBI caseloads.
Masaryk recited details about our experimental aircraft composites, jet-fuel additives, and welding of titanium alloys that only a technical spook could know. He had obviously been moving about with practiced ease under the noses of FBI spycatchers for years, a heartworm at the core of our aerospace industry, with impunity; but in crushing Prague, the Soviets had crushed the last vestige of Masaryk's idealism. It was the best of news. And the worst.
The Spooker File does not explain how J. Edgar Hoover, who hated the CIA enough to have bulldozed the entire acreage of Langley if given half a chance, was persuaded to turn Masaryk over. Old hands speculate that Hoover was persuaded by a photograph held by the CIA's James Jesus Angleton of Mr.
Hoover engaged in homosexual activity. It is clear that CIA director James Schlesinger and his deputy, Rufus Taylor, wanted to cash in on that bad Czech and, in retrospect, could have learned more to aid Western spying than the FBI could in plugging U.S. aerospace leaks.
Langley had scant weeks to debrief their new defector. They could not know this, and took their time while giving Masaryk a sense of new, Western-style comradeship at Camp Peary near Williamsburg, Virginia. There he was befriended by an old-timer, Dennis Royston, who often walked the Czech around the Peary acreage on brisk fall mornings, enjoying the autumn palette of crimson, yellow, and brown colorbursts in nearby maples. Peary's red-brick complex of small buildings resembled an Ivy League college more than a safe house, and it was here that the CIA lavished its best treatment on Masaryk. When Masaryk declined offers of a complete physical and insisted on the freedom to leave the tree-lined grounds of The Farm as he pleased, his controllers balked.
Whereupon, Masaryk balked too. The Czech was already known to be a long-distance runner with that odd breed's stubborn traits. The mild disarming voice and those chiseled gypsyish features masked a will of carbide resolve, and because some of his information was timely, handler Royston argued that the Czech's demands were not all that unreasonable. They did, however, put an armed tail on their errant spook. Though Masaryk felt that the Soviets could not yet know of his defection, Langley spymasters thought it possible. In this they were correct: it was more than possible. The agency was to learn very soon that the existence and location of the Peary "Farm" was not a secret from the Soviets.
Masaryk drove different agency cars on short trips into Williamsburg, chiefly during the evenings. His tail reported that on most evenings, Masaryk, something of a freak for academic surroundings, parked the car and jogged innocently through the nearby William and Mary campus. The CIA man, who soon grew tired of running in Masaryk's wake, would frequently stop near the campus library and inhale the lingering scent of burnt fallen leaves while waiting for his ward's next pass. The days were spent on debriefing, usually with Royston in attendance. One measure of their growing friendship was Masaryk's divulging of a little secret to the CIA man: in some unspecified place, certainly not in his personal effects, Masaryk had secured enough valuables to let him live comfortably for years. Much of Masaryk's spying - but not all - had employed illegal wireless bugs; within a week, U.S. intelligence agencies were running new wiretaps in the Los Angeles area: two on aerospace engineers, one on a secretary in Glendale, and several electronic bugs in a Burbank ginmill which Masaryk had used in the same fashion. The results were almost immediate; stock in Masaryk ran high at Peary.
The KGB's Directorate S, which controlled illegals of Masaryk's stripe, had divulged one of its Los Angeles safe houses to the Czech. It was safe no more, but the place was not raided immediately because, it was thought, the raid would give the Czech's defection away too soon. Only decades later, upon the opening of old KGB files after the Soviet collapse, did we learn that the safe house was a KGB trip wire for Masaryk alone. The moment the place came under surveillance, the KGB - constantly alert for just such a hazard - realized that Masaryk had been turned.
In those days, newly turned defectors were almost always sent to The Farm. The Soviets knew this, too. That knowledge might have been of little use against Masaryk if the Czech had stayed safely on the grounds. KGB records on the kidnap attempt are sparse because the Czech's defection was counted as a KGB failure and the recovery job was given to their Soviet military intelligence brethren, the GRU. The rivalry between those agencies had always been hot; the GRU claimed the KGB was sluggish, incompetent. The KGB retorted that GRU men were given to violent excess. Both views were correct.
We may never learn exactly what ruse the GRU team used to spirit Masaryk from a college campus into a four-door Ford bound for distant parts; quite a few GRU thugs are fluent in idiomatic English, and it is reasonable to suppose that they carried forged IDs, perhaps identifying them as CIA. In any case, one William and Mary student reported a furious - yet subdued - argument on campus that evening between a jogger and two insistent gentlemen near a dark four-door sedan. The jogger entered the car without a scuffle; whether influenced by a handgun is unknown. What is known, is that no Company men were dispatched to pick up the Czech on that deadly evening. Whoever they were, neither of those insistent gentlemen was ever tracked down, and GRU files are, to this day, still secret.
From the campus in Williamsburg to the verge of a Chesapeake salt marsh near the village of Poquoson, Virginia, some thirty miles distant, we have no useful record. Several hours elapsed, however, before York County volunteer firemen were summoned to the end of a gravel road and to a blaze that engulfed a four-door Ford, spreading to involve scrub pines near the water's edge. No victim was found until someone jimmied the trunk lid.
By this time, Dennis Royston knew that Masaryk had vanished across the campus from his bodyguard.
On a hunch, Royston checked out the torched sedan near Poquoson. By noon the next day, the CIA had enough data from Forensics to identify the remains, chiefly from charred clothing and a wristwatch. Even if The Farm had created a dental chart on Masaryk - which it had not got around to - that might have helped very little; the victim had been beaten so savagely that the facial bones were crushed and almost all the teeth were missing. But then, violent excess was a GRU trademark. . . .
"Poor sonofabitch!" Royston gloomed, trying to infer all that had happened. "They must've had perfect Company ID if he went without a fight. He probably thought it was our men picking him up until the lead pipe hit him. I blame myself, mostly."
After that, procedures at The Farm were tightened, and Royston was reassigned to the West Coast. It would be another two years before Dennis Royston himself disappeared without immediate trace; many more years before Royston's name was added to the Spooker File.
And when KGB files were opened after the Soviet debacle, one of those salient details was almost missed. It suggested a good reason why the Czech had refused a physical exam back in 1968. According to the KGB, Masaryk was not, strictly speaking, a man.
2
MAY 1969 TO PRESENT
The Spooker File was only a dark surmise in a zealot's brain when, in late spring of the following year, the Iranian consulate made discreet inquiries from its Embarcadero office in San Francisco.
We were still on good terms with Iran and listened politely. One Ghavam Razmara, a low-level diplomat, had disappeared from the Embarcadero without a trace. Would the Americans know anything about it?
We knew, of course, that the beefy, fortyish Razmara was a veteran of SAWK, the Shah's American-trained intelligence bureau. From his life-style, including a forbidden blonde bimbette in Redwood City and a Porsche Carrera with diplomatic DM prefix license plates which he often drove to Oakland, we deduced that Razmara was using diplomatic-mail pouche
s to line his pockets, probably beginning with heroin transshipped from Iran. Our spymasters replied truthfully that they had no idea where Razmara had gone.
Privately we hoped his disappearance was permanent, but paid a courtesy call on the Redwood City blonde anyway. Razmara had cleaned out the little apartment wall safe ten days before, said Blondie, and laid down a strip of Pirelli when he left in his little German bathtub. And by the way, did anybody know if he intended to pay the rent?
Our man was patient in asking for details: known associates, documents, other, apartments. Razmara had left no papers that she could find. If he had another apartment, she knew nothing about it, not that she didn't have her suspicions about the skirt-chasing bastard. His callers were always by telephone, she said, and conversations were brief. But he'd talked longer on a couple of his last incomings, making her leave the room, and afterward he was definitely not himself for a while. In what way? He had no interest in his usual smoked fish and caviar, Blondie replied, and not much in her - and his palms felt unaccountably clammy.
And what about the rent on the apartment?
It would help, said our man, if she could remember what he packed when he left.
Pack, Blondie echoed, as if the idea were extravagant. After that last call, Razmara had put down the phone, fumbled his way through the safe combination, and crammed his pockets full of little wrapped packages, paying no attention to her repeated questions. There had been a gun, too, one of those little James Bond gizmos with a short pipe stuck on the muzzle.
A silencer? Could be, she guessed; he sure didn't pop it off for her, just stuck it inside his suede jacket and split - no suitcase, no jammies, no toothbrush. And how was she expected to pay the rent?
Our man sighed and counted out eight fifties - highway robbery for three rooms in those days. And now that we were subletting the apartment for one more month, so to speak, if her Iranian showed up again would she mind calling a certain number without telling Razmara?