Rockets' Red Glare

Chapter One

On a cool day in February, Theodor Scoville Churcher rode the grounds of his Chappell Hill estate on horseback, as he did every morning. His reined hands punched the air as he let the black Arabian full-out in a grove of aspen.

Soon, the big horse exploded from the trees.

Churcher leaned back exhilarated.

The hard-breathing animal settled into a slower cadence, and pranced toward an early Napoleonic era mansion that presided over acres of lawns and formal gardens where fountains splashed.

Churcher had purchased the structure years ago from a bankrupt French nobleman. He had it dismantled, crated, shipped, and reassembled here—40 miles northwest of Houston — as a wedding present for his wife, Cordelia. The headstone that marked her grave stood beneath an immense live oak on a line between the mansion and his private museum.

As the pick of the prizewinning Arabians he raised cantered beneath him, Churcher thought about the latest addition to his vast art collection. By the time he returned to the stables, he’d become especially anxious to spend the half hour prior to departing for his corporate headquarters with the masterpiece.

Churcher swung down from the saddle and handed the reins to his son, Andrew.

“Hell of a ride! Hell of an animal!” Churcher enthused. “Double our GNP when he gets to stud. Packs the wallop of a twister.”

“Be a good name for his first foal,” Andrew said.

Andrew Churcher was slim and rangy, with reddish hair, glinting eyes, and a love of animals and open spaces — a cowboy in the most noble sense of the word. He was as approachable as his father was intimidating. His preference for saddle over desk chair, chaps over business suit, bedroll over four-poster-that he found the whole of his father’s activities an anathema, and told him so — had once ended communication between Churcher and his only son for almost a year.

Churcher nodded enthusiastically at the name Andrew suggested. “Yeah, I like that!” he bellowed, slapping Andrew across the back. “You got it, boy. That’s what we’ll call him — GNP.”

Andrew scowled.

“What’s that mean?”

“I said, Twister’d be a good name.”

“The hell you did,” Churcher said, his expression softening as he mused, considering it. “Not bad, though.”

“Well, that’s what I meant,” Andrew said, surprised at the admission. He had no doubt it would be short-lived. It was the thing that irritated him most about his father. He would keep coming at you until he found a way to turn things his way. Theodor Churcher was never wrong.

“But, not what you said,” Churcher went on. “Word never came out of your mouth, right?”

Andrew nodded grudgingly.

“You have to articulate, boy. Articulate. Never assume someone’s going to read your mind. And to make sure you don’t forget it, first foal’s going to be named GNP.” He snapped his head, turned, and strode off.

Churcher smiled the instant his back was to Andrew. He was pleased at the exchange; pleased that once bridged, the chasm had continued to narrow, thanks to the Arabians. The spirited animals had provided a common focus, and brought them together. Andrew raised them with the love and dedication he had neither family nor career to absorb. And Churcher reveled at millions they generated in sales and tax write-offs.

Andrew’s eyes had too many lines for his twenty-eight years. They crinkled with admiration as he watched his father leave the stables in that aggressive, jut-jawed strut. The old coot was right, he thought. He swung an apologetic glance to the horse.

“Sorry about that, old buddy,” he whispered.

He polished the glistening coat on the animal’s neck with his palm.

“We’ll name the second foal Twister, okay?”

The Arabian snorted as if it understood.

Andrew grinned. Despite the friction, the newly burgeoning relationship was important to him, too.

After showering and exchanging riding clothes for a Saville Row three-piece, Theodor Churcher crossed the grounds to the entrance to his private art museum.

The stone entrance kiosk perched atop a rolling hillside, and was the only part of the museum above ground. The twelve galleries and immense storage rooms were buried beneath tons of hard packed earth.

Inside the kiosk, Churcher used an electronic card key to summon the elevator and descend to the sanctum below. Then, for the next thirty minutes, at which time his preprogrammed Rolex would interrupt, he sat in communion with a turbulent work.

The pigments were deposited in broad, impulsive strokes that hurried across the canvas evoking the all too swift passage of time. They delineated the baleful “Portrait of Dr. Felix Rey.” The hard-edged figure stood against a frenzied background that was in sharp contrast to the subject’s cool, incisive stare. The signature in the lower right corner read simply—“Vincent.”

Churcher was awestruck by his newest acquisition. The power of it consumed him, and assured him of his own. Indeed his collecting went beyond appreciation. The act of possession, of exclusivity, of having what no other man would have, had always been the wellspring of his ambition and confidence. He stepped closer, until the edges of the rectangle blurred and the texture of the strokes sharpened.

Suddenly, something disturbing caught his eye. The spell rudely broken, he scrutinized the suspect area, and found it — a single brush stroke on the doctor’s large, fleshy mouth out of sync with the others; an overworked splash of alizarin crimson where a smaller brush with much finer bristles than used elsewhere had carefully pushed the thick paint into the proper shape.

Finding it was equivalent to noticing one frame missing from an entire movie. But details were Churcher’s strength. This unique acuity, combined with imagination, ambition, and hard work, had redefined the meaning of success in business.

Churcher was deep in concentration when the Rolex beeped, directing his attention to a round of meetings. He flinched and clicked it off. An unnerving hollowness came over him, as if a monumental indiscretion had been threatened with exposure — and one had. He wasn’t concerned someone might discover his museum was a concrete bunker built to withstand a nuclear holocaust. No, it wasn’t exposure of his paranoia that frightened him, but exposure of its genesis.

Churcher felt the strong pull of his business engagements and knew he had to leave. He glanced once more at the Van Gogh, lifted it from the wall, zipped it in a leather portfolio, and took it with him.

He had no doubt it was a fake.

That same afternoon in Dunbarton, New Hampshire, a lakeside hamlet just south of Concord, a swirling wind blew snow against the facade of a stone cottage. The modest dwelling stood on a rise at the end of a long, unplowed drive.

The door hadn’t been opened since the doctor, who visited weekly, closed it when he left five days ago. A glistening drift curved up the weathered cedar to a knocker that hung from the mouth of a brass lion’s head. The cat’s-eyes kept watch over acres of bare maples and snow-laden evergreens.

In a dormered bedroom on the second floor, Sarah Winslow lay under an old quilt. Her eyes — once clear blue and sparkling with mischievous appeal, but now dulled, the whites glazed yellow — stared out the window into the haze she had come to associate with February, the month of death.

In the Northeast, people died in February. Sarah’s father died in February; her husband, Zachary; an aunt; and half sister, too. And Sarah was quite certain when it was her time, it would be in February. Therefore, every year since the diagnosis, this being the fourth, the first of March was the most important day of the year for Sarah Winslow. But today, and every day for the last week, the pain came from deeper inside than ever before, and she knew this February would be her’s.

She dreaded it. Not because she was afraid of death — she’d long since come to grips with the idea, lately even welcomed it — but because of a nagging awareness that not all her affairs were in order. One in particular, long ignored but never forgotten, demanded her attention.

Sarah turned her head from the window. Her eyes swept the room, taking in each item: the eyelet lace curtain, blown by warm air that came from a grille in the floor; the delicately flowered wallpaper she’d hung one spring in a redecorating frenzy; the bentwood clothes rack, heavy with coats and sweaters and topped by her collection of hats; and the stained mirror, silent witness to her patient taming of Zachary during the first months of their marriage forty-five years ago.

Finally, as they had many times each day in recent weeks, Sarah’s eyes came to rest on a framed black-and-white photograph.

She looked at it sort of sideways, with the annoyed expression she managed to affect whenever the pictured beckoned. The very same one she used to level at Zachary whenever he reminded her to do something she had been purposely avoiding.

Sarah rolled onto her right side and pushed up shakily on an elbow. She squinted hard at the picture, staring it down like an old adversary.

“Be sure. Be certain,” she told herself. “Got the rest of your life to make up your mind.” She managed a sarcastic chuckle and grimaced at the pain it sent through her, then settled back onto the pillows.

She lay there unmoving for a few moments.

Then she slipped a hand between the buttons of her nightgown moving it down across the warmth of her stomach until it touched the softness below.

She left it there until the twilight came over her and the pain went away.

Chapter Two

“Romance her if you have to, Phil,” said the President of the United States.

“No way. Not for all the Porsches in Stuttgart,” Keating replied in a tone born of their many years together in the military and government.

“For your country,” the President chided. “I’m your Commander-in-Chief, old buddy, and I just gave you a direct order.”

President James Hilliard winked, wrinkling his strong Gallic face, then smoothed his auburn beard. The first President since Benjamin Harrison in 1893 to sport one, he was fastidious about it.

“I can just see Will’s column now,” he said. “How does the President expect to tame the Russians when he can’t tame his own facial hair?”

Keating responded with an obligatory chuckle.

A short time earlier, Philip Taylor Keating, chief U.S. disarmament negotiator, had crossed the snow-dappled grounds of Camp David to the presidential cottage to discuss upcoming talks in Geneva. During the next few days, Keating would be briefing NATO representatives — assuring them the United States could go toe-to-toe with the Russians and come away with a draw, without jeopardizing any member countries.

The two men sat in shirtsleeves across the table in the library. The President leaned back and centered his tie between heavily starched collar points.

“We need her, Phil,” he said sternly. “Support from Bonn is the key. Whatever it takes. I don’t want Gisela Pomerantz screwing this up. And according to Jake,” he went on, referring to Jake Boulton, director of Central Intelligence, “neither does Premier Kaparov. Despite official denials, his health is deteriorating rapidly, and it’s no secret he sees disarmament as his legacy. You with me?”

Keating nodded automatically. He heard the words, but he was thinking about Gisela Pomerantz, West Germany’s deputy minister for strategic deployment. They were young diplomats when they first met twelve years ago at the NATO Defense College in Rome. And Keating could still hear the ringing voice of the orientation officer that first day.

“As NATO’s most promising diplomatic and military personnel,” the instructor intoned, “you’ll be called on to manage crises on a global scale — and we’re going to teach you how. Now, it’s very important you make fast friendships here. These personal alliances will pay off down the line when you contact someone you actually know to get action in a crisis situation. Also important is the need for consensus, which, as you know, is always NATO’s biggest problem.”

Keating recalled how one afternoon while walking Via Condotti with a group from the college, Gisela had impulsively taken his hand and pulled him to a gelati vendor in Piazza de Spagna. She purchased a cone of the rich Italian ice cream and insisted he have some.

Keating was head-turningly handsome, with the black curly hair and ruddy complexion of the Irish seamen who were his ancestors. He looked right into her eyes and licked at the chocolate-flavored gelati.

“I think we should forge our alliance gradually—” Gisela said. She noticed the soft gelati was running down the waffled cone onto her fingers, slipped one between her bowed lips, and slowly sucked it clean. “We’ll share simple pleasures — first,” she went on suggestively, offering Keating an ice-creamed fingertip — which he seriously considered, then declined.

Keating almost smiled at the recollection — the friendship she had suggested was indeed a fast one. But she had blown the consensus; very tempted by her, he was also very married.

When he returned to Washington, Keating told the story of Pomerantz’s advance, and his wobbly retreat to his best friend, Jim Hilliard, who was, at that time, the junior senator from Illinois. They had been classmates at the University of Chicago Law School, and Keating served as best man when Hilliard married Janet Davidson, his childhood sweetheart. He cried with him at her funeral.

Now, in the Presidential Library at Camp David, Keating was meeting with the man whom he had helped win the presidency. “Never forget, do you?” he asked.

“Not when history’s on the line,” Hilliard replied. “Pomerantz is a screaming hawk, Phil; the potential stumbling block to the smooth progression of the talks. And nothing, nothing’s going to endanger the capstone of this presidency.”

Hilliard stood, circled his chair, and came around the table to Keating.

“One day, Phil, schoolchildren, when asked who’s responsible for nuclear disarmament — for leading the world from the brink of atomic annihilation to days of peaceful coexistence — are going to—”

“Are going to answer, President James Hilliard,” Keating interjected, completing the President’s sentence. “I wrote that speech. Remember?”

Hilliard smiled and nodded.

“Damn good one, too,” he replied.

The President settled for a moment, then leveled a forthright look at Keating.

“I may have blown the economy, Phil,” he said, “and God knows Central America’s far from licked, but I’m going to pull off arms control. And if it means you shacking up with Gisela Pomerantz, so be it.”

Keating nodded tight-lipped and, with a straight face, said, “Promise me one thing, Jim—” Despite their long friendship, he called the President by his first name infrequently, and only when alone.

“If it’s in my power,” the President said, equally serious.

“Promise me,” Keating went on, “that no classroom full of kids will ever be asked, ‘Who shacked up with Germany’s deputy minister for strategic deployment?’”

Hilliard broke into hearty laughter.

Keating laughed along with him, thinking that he’d said it jokingly but he really meant it.

It was evening in Moscow, and cold. Twenty-five degrees below zero cold.

Three men who shared a very different view of President James Hilliard’s place in history were meeting in the office of the Soviet Premier in the green-domed Council of Ministers Building, the eighteenth-century headquarters of the Soviet government inside the walls of the Kremlin.

Premier Dmitri Kaparov, a stooped, wizened man with a puffy face and jaundiced skin, sat at his leather-topped desk, turning the pages of a maroon briefing book. Chief Disarmament Negotiator Mikhail Pykonen and Cultural Minister Aleksei Deschin sat opposite him; Vasily Moskvin, the Premier’s longtime aide, off to one side taking notes.

The room was stifling hot, kept that way due to the Soviet Premier’s failing health. On a pedestal next to his chair, and centered beneath the vigilant portrait of Lenin, stood a portable dialysis machine. Two blood-filled, clear plastic cannulas snaked from ports on the machine to a shunt that had been surgically implanted in the underside of the Premier’s left forearm. The plastic loop protruded through a slit made in the seam of his jacket sleeve.

The highly sophisticated machine that had taken over the work the Premier’s shriveled kidneys could no longer perform hissed softly while the three men spoke.

“Well done, Mikhail,” Kaparov said, closing the large volume. “Your usual inventiveness and thorough preparation are clearly in evidence.”

Pykonen dabbed at the space between his upswept brows with a handkerchief, wondering why the cultural minister had been included in an arms control briefing. “Thank you, sir. I’m confident we’ll attain an equitable position by the time the talks in Geneva are completed.”

Kaparov shifted the weight of his disease-riddled body, and smiled with a radiance he rarely exhibited since becoming ill. “Good,” he replied. “Because Minister Deschin and I have a way to guarantee it will be even more than equitable my friend — much more.”

The Premier often made such inflated statements, Pykonen thought; a device to create the impression an assignment was of vital importance, even when it wasn’t. But disarmament was the dying Premier’s obsession; so Pykonen knew this wasn’t one of those times.

Kaparov placed a hand atop Pykonen’s shoulder. “You’d think by now, Mikhail, there’d be nothing about your government you wouldn’t know, hmmm?”

Pykonen let a thin smile tighten his lips.

“Even my wife still surprises me once in a while,” he said with a mischievous twinkle.

Deschin and Kaparov chuckled heartily.

“Well,” Deschin said, taking over, “let’s begin with something you do know. It’s been over twenty years since Comrade Khrushchev placed the highest priority on establishing a missile base in the Western Hemisphere.”

“Cuba,” Pykonen grunted solemnly. “That I know.”

“It was sound thinking, Mikhail,” Deschin went on. “We had enormous psychological and strategic pressures created by American missiles in Europe to overcome, as well as the limited accuracy of our own. Our guidance system technology was terribly primitive at the time.”

“It still leaves something to be desired,” Premier Kaparov added, shaking his head in dismay.

“I recall those days very well,” Pykonen replied. “The U-2s were driving the Defense Ministry crazy. The minute we shot that one down over Sverdlovsk in sixty, we knew that our missiles would be detected no matter where we deployed them—as we deployed them.” He paused, considering the propriety of what he was going to say next. “If I may,” Pykonen resumed gently. “We knew deployment in Cuba was doomed from the start. I never could fathom why we went ahead with it.”

“Because your Premier came up with a brilliant idea,” Deschin replied. “And I happened to know an agent of influence whom we induced to cooperate. With typical Soviet ingenuity, we turned adversity to asset.”

Pykonen’s eyes were wide with curiosity, now. He leaned forward in his chair, hanging on every word.

“You see, Mikhail,” Kaparov explained, “we deployed knowing goddamn well we were going to get caught. In fact, we counted on it.”

Pykonen looked at them with disbelief. “You mean, the missiles, the warheads, the launching complexes, the maintenance equipment, they were all — a ploy?” he asked, amazed by the concept.

Kaparov nodded emphatically. “The ultimate triumph of disinformation, my friend,” he replied. “We fooled the Americans and their U-2s. Fooled them into thinking they had forced the Soviet might to withdraw and promise to never do such naughty things again.”

“And,” Deschin chimed in, “that act of contrition kicked off a plan that has gone like clockwork.”

“In other words, that proval the Americans called the Cuban missile crisis was actually a victory?” Pykonen asked, almost afraid to say it.

“Indeed, the celebration rocked the walls of the Kremlin for days,” Kaparov replied devilishly. “Of course, no one outside heard the cheering, and few inside. Premier Khrushchev confided only in those involved directly with its implementation. To this day, many Politburo members and military leaders have never been briefed.”

Pykonen shook his head as if clearing it, and took a moment to collect his thoughts.

The hiss of the dialysis machine filled the silence.

“But what about Penkovskiy?” he finally asked, referring to Colonel Oleg Penkovskiy, the high-ranking Soviet officer inside the Kremlin who was spying for the West at the time. “He kept Washington informed of our every move. The Americans knew everything. How could they not know it was a deception?”

A look flicked between Kaparov and Deschin.

“True, my friend. Penkovskiy told them everything,” Kaparov replied with feigned solemnity, before adding, “everything Premier Khrushchev wanted them to know.”

“He was part of it?” Pykonen asked, awestruck.

“The best part,” the Premier said, adding with a facetious smile, “Imagine how shocked we were when we found out what that nasty traitor had been up to?”

“But Penkovskiy was shot,” Pykonen protested.

“There’s an elderly gentleman living quite comfortably in a dacha in Zhukovka who would find it very hard to agree,” Kaparov replied puckishly.

Pykonen’s jaw dropped. “I had no idea,” he said, feeling left out. “This plan — it’s nearing completion now?”

“Yes, Mikhasha,” the Premier replied, with paternal fondness. “And you are the key to it.”

“Incredible,” Pykonen muttered.

“More so than you think,” Deschin said. “We now have what the world believes the U-2s forever denied us.”

The bushy upswept ends of Pykonen’s brows twitched as if electrified. “We have a missile base in the Western Hemisphere?” he asked in an amazed whisper.

Deschin nodded slowly. “Far superior to Cuba. Similar strategic advantages of course; but, as you might imagine, much more impervious to detection.”

“An astounding scheme,” Pykonen said.

“Indeed. We had spirit in the KGB in those days, Mikhail,” Kaparov said, laughing at a recollection. “We nicknamed the project—MEDZHECH.”

Pykonen looked at him puzzled. “An acronym?”

“Precisely,” the Premier said. “A combination of MEDLYENNIY and ABZHECH.”

“Ah,” Pykonen said, pausing appreciatively at the implication. “A very SLOW BURN, indeed. Slow and most painful to the Americans,” he went on, realizing that now he could negotiate for virtual elimination of American and Soviet nuclear arsenals, and still retain a first strike capability which no one knew existed.

“Indeed,” Kaparov said. “You see, the defections we’ve nurtured, the codes we’ve broken, the double agents we’ve compromised over the years — they were all merely inconveniences that forced the Americans to work harder. This—this, once strategically revealed, will force them to make concessions. We’ll be able to lean on them, the way they think they leaned on us in Cuba.” Kaparov raised his brows speculatively, then swiveled to the green telephone and pushed a button.

A woman doctor with bunned hair, a white lab smock over her dress, immediately entered the office and crossed to the Premier.

“Is there a problem?” she asked anxiously.

“Yes,” Kaparov replied. He gestured impatiently to the tubes coming from the shunt in his forearm.

“Untie me from this hissing leech.”

The doctor frowned admonishingly. She stepped to the dialysis machine and studied the gauges, checking the levels of blood gasses and toxins, then silenced the air-driven pumps. She took Kaparov’s arm and quickly disconnected the red-stained cannulas from the shunt, wiped the connectors clean, and tucked the plastic loop into the opening in his sleeve.

The Premier stood and stretched his atrophied muscles. Then, leaning on Pykonen and Deschin for support, he directed them to a window that overlooked Red Square and Lenin’s mausoleum directly below.

“The Kremlin Wall will soon have another resident, my friends,” Kaparov said.

Pykonen’s eyes protested.

“Within three months, I’m told,” the Premier went on. “But when that day comes, because of SLOW BURN I will rest in peace. Come, Mikhail, we’ll show you the details. I know you’ll appreciate the sheer ingenuity of this installation.”

They turned from the window and left the office.

The heavy doors closed slowly, as if exhausted by the centuries of turbulent history. The halves of the latch came together with a metallic clang that echoed in the domed space.

The life-prolonging dialysis machine waited silently to resume its futile task. The label on the stainless steel fascia read, “Churchco Medical Products.”

Chapter Three

The men with whom Theodor Churcher did business had names like Boone, Clint, Ross, Bunker, and Tex. And some, despite lengthy separation from public office, were still called congressman, governor, or senator.

The talk was always of oil, natural gas, ranching, real estate, communications, space exploration, and defense, of mergers and takeovers — of investing. Not in dollars, but in what they called units.

In most parts of the country, talk of units conjured up images of real estate deals. In Houston, ever since Churcher coined it some three decades ago, a unit was a measure of wealth. At the time, Churcher wanted a clever phrase to symbolize what he had accumulated and indicate his intention to acquire more. Having estimated his holdings to be worth one hundred million dollars, he promptly declared he had — one unit. At last count, he had well over ten.

The incident with the Van Gogh that morning, not the growth of his billion-dollar empire, had been foremost on his mind, distracting him all that day and into the early evening.

Now, he restlessly prowled his suite of offices atop the sixty-five-story Churchco Tower, evaluating countermoves. He went to the arched window that framed the shimmering Mexican Gulf thirty miles to the south, and gazed at the lights of the drilling platforms twinkling on the horizon.

Those sons-a-bitches! he thought. Then, realizing he was alone, the last to leave, as always, he shouted, “Those dirty sons-a-bitches!”

He turned from the vista and crossed the black carpet to an immense slab of glass which seemed to float in the center of the room.

There, on the neatly ordered desk lay the leather portfolio, and next to it, taunting him, the Van Gogh.

Churcher returned “Dr. Felix Rey’s” penetrating glare for a long moment before two quick thrusts of his forefinger turned on his speakerphone and initiated an automatic dialing sequence.

The East Coast was in the frigid grasp of the worst winter in over half a century. Week after week, the nation’s capital had been battered by blizzards, freezing rain, and subzero temperatures.

Churcher imagined what it would be like on the streets of Washington, D.C., that night, and shivered.

A click signaled the phone connection had been made. Two rings followed, but no electronic beep to indicate the call was being taped, though Churcher knew it was. A woman’s voice came on the line.

“Good evening,” she answered in a proper British accent. “This is the Embassy of the Soviet Socialist Republics. How may I help you?”

About an hour later in Havana, GRU agent Valery Gorodin was in his office in the Soviet Embassy on Calle Guevara doing paperwork. Perspiration rolled down his neck and filled the creases of his brow. The stifling hot room had once been a Castro torture chamber, and Gorodin had no doubt information was literally sweated out of the victims.

Gorodin had been an outstanding foreign language student at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations in the late fifties, before it became an elitist institution. While at MIGMO, Gorodin, the son of a train yard worker from Kazan, fraternized with the privileged off-spring of those in nomenklatura, and developed a driving ambition to join the elite class, comprised of those who hold important positions in party and government. Indeed, doctors, lawyers, scientists, engineers, and architects are excluded by the Politburo and Central Committee who confer membership. Those so blessed enjoy pampered life-styles: choice apartments, country dachas, chauffeured cars, gourmet foodstuffs, freedom to travel, and VIP accommodations.

Gorodin knew that his gift — rapid fluency in any tongue: Arabic, English, French, German, Spanish, among them — was his entrée. Recruitment by the KGB upon graduation from MIGMO, the first step. He was excited at the prospect of joining the “Service” and about to accept their offer when Colonel Yuri Pashkov, the GRU recruiter, caused him to reconsider.

“GRU is the main intelligence branch of the Soviet General Staff,” Pashkov explained as they dined on hearty Russian fare at Lastochka, a restaurant on a barge moored in the Moskva near the Krimsky bridge, opposite Gorky Park. “Our mandate comes from the military. Strategic intelligence, the key to the Supreme Soviet’s future, is our focus. You see,” Pashkov went on with a quiet confidence that appealed to Gorodin, “despite appearances, KGB are essentially — policemen. Their primary role is internal security, not foreign intelligence. Oh, they get headlines, but the most meaningful global tasks are charged to us, to GRU. And an agent so assigned has international mobility unlike KGB, who, if fortunate enough to be posted abroad, is restricted to his assigned country. GRU is a grand tradition, Valery,” Pashkov concluded, “an elite coterie of the motherland’s best and brightest. Strength of character is our trademark. Pride in anonymity our reward.”

Gorodin was eager and conscientious when GRU assigned him to Cuba. It was the cutting edge of Soviet foreign policy, the place where SLOW BURN had just been initiated; and during installation of the “missile base,” on-site security — assuring that the grand deception wasn’t compromised — was his task. But that was many years ago, and the once promising career path had proved a dead end. Lately, he spent his time forwarding payments from the Kremlin to a SLOW BURN collaborator, and filing sektor memoranda with GRU Headquarters — Military Department 44388.

He was at his desk preparing the monthly report when his KGB assistant entered. Aleksandr Beyalev — or the schpick, as Gorodin called him, using derogatory terminology for novice — was delivering a cable.

“From Washington, comrade,” he announced a little too crisply. “Top secret.”

Gorodin read the cable, and winced. “Churcher wants a meeting?” he wondered aloud. “We just had a meeting.” Then feigning further confusion, he held the cable out to Beyalev, indicating the paragraph. “What do you make of this part here — about Deschin?”

Beyalev’s narrow face soured as Gorodin knew it would. The zealous fellow made no effort to hide his contempt. Soon he would outshine his paunchy burned-out boss, and take charge. He had no idea he was the key to Gorodin’s plan to get out of Cuba.

Indeed, thoughts of nomenklatura had dimmed, but not died. Though the two agencies were unfriendly rivals, and separate Embassy rezidenturas the rule, facilities and personnel were often shared in smaller embassies such as Cuba. And Gorodin had slyly feigned a willingness to collaborate, and petitioned the KGB rezident, the ranking intelligence officer, for an assistant who would “show him up,” and be mercifully ordered to take over. The ire of his superiors and the harsh Soviet winters were worth chancing, Gorodin thought. Nothing could be worse than spending the rest of his career with soaking wet armpits; his ass stuck to the vinyl cushion of his desk chair.

“I’d say the part about Deschin means exactly what it says,” Beyalev responded dryly. “Churcher is insisting Comrade Deschin attend the meeting.”

Gorodin pulled a crinkled cigar from a box on his desk. He pushed it between his lips, and lit it, all the while eyeing the standard issue 9mm Kalishnikov in Beyalev’s sweat-stained shoulder holster. Gorodin inhaled deeply, trying to remember in which desk drawer was his own. “I can’t tell the minister of culture he must be here in eight hours for a meeting, the reason for which I haven’t the slightest clue,” he said.

Smoke came in a steady stream from his nose and mouth as he spoke, creating a hazy cloud between them.

Beyalev waved it away impatiently. “He couldn’t make it in time, anyway,” he said in a tone that implied he was enumerating the obvious. “It’s six fifteen A.M. in Moscow. Next flight departs at noon. Flight time twelve and one quarter hours. ETA Havana four thirty P.M. tomorrow afternoon. That means—”

“Forget Aeroflot,” Gorodin interrupted. He abhorred the staccato parroting of data at which Beyalev was expert. “The minister of culture doesn’t fly Aeroflot. He has all the aircraft of the Supreme Soviet at his disposal. Supersonic fighters. SSTs! I’d think I wouldn’t have to remind you of that.”

Beyalev emitted two scratchy sounds that were intended to be an emphatic rejoinder. He cleared his throat and started over in a stronger voice. “Well, if the minister departed within the next two hours on an SST, he could make it in time — if need be.”

“Well, perhaps you’d be big enough to let him decide that,” Gorodin cracked with a wiley smile.

Beyalev nodded blankly, wondering how he had lost the offensive.

“You do think this should be decided in Moscow, comrade?” Gorodin prodded.

Beyalev swallowed in embarrassment; his pronounced Adam’s apple was still bobbing when Gorodin fired the coup de grace.

“You do recall how to contact Moscow?”

Beyalev nodded and hurried from the office.

Gorodin’s smile broadened and gave birth to a chuckle that ended suddenly. Deschin — what does Churcher want with him? he wondered.

Sarah Winslow had slept through the afternoon, awakening after night-fall. The photograph had come slowly into focus when her eyes opened, and she had been staring at it for a while now.

A group of young men and women, most in U.S. Army fatigues, smiled back at her. They stood in front of a World War II jeep. The Red Cross emblem painted on the side was repeated on their arm bands and on the tents in rows behind them. Sarah, second from the right, appeared to be leaning against a crease where the picture had once been folded, cracking the emulsion. Her sleeves were rolled up to her elbows. A stethoscope hung from her neck. Her face glowed with goodness and clearness of purpose; the face that greeted many wounded GIs whose eyes flickered to life in the field hospital near San Gimignano, an ancient walled city just south of Florence in central Italy.

Next to Sarah, on the other side of the puckered crease, stood a uniquely attractive man. He projected a quiet intelligence and an air of intense pride that made him stand out. Unlike the others, his attire was civilian: a cracked leather vest, plaid shirt, baggy wool pants, and mud-caked rubber boots. One of his hands was bandaged. The other hugged Sarah’s waist in a possessive gesture which she clearly welcomed.

The photograph stood at an angle, in a wooden frame, on a dresser across from Sarah’s bed.

A few years ago, after Zachary died, Sarah removed the photograph from a trunk in the attic, from beneath the books which concealed it, and put it next to the snapshot of she and Zachary and Melanie on the canopied lawn glider. Zachary was a good husband, a loving one, but a man of rigid discipline and conservative principles who would never have understood.

Sarah’s eyes became distant, her concentration so intense she took on the unseeing stare of the blind — a signal to those who knew her that she was making up her mind about something. Then she sat up decisively, and swung her stiffened legs over the side of the bed. Her shawl slipped from her shoulders. She paused briefly to retrieve it, and marshall her strength. The dresser, once a few quick steps away, was an arduous journey now. She struggled to a standing position, and shuffled toward it. The room began whirling around her. Lately, every movement, no matter how measured, made her dizzy, and she despised being so feeble.

“Dammit, Zack,” she complained aloud in a dry, little-used voice, “I hadn’t planned on dying angry — let alone angry at myself.”

Sarah steadied herself against the dresser, grasped the photograph, and turned it facedown. It had a brown paper backing that was glued to the edges of the frame. She pierced it with a nail, and hooked her finger in the opening, ripping a jagged line to a corner. Her fingers slipped between the backing and the photograph, searching for what she had hidden there half a lifetime ago.

Her heart pounded with anticipation and the fear of uncertainty. Maybe it wasn’t there? Maybe Zachary had found it and couldn’t bring himself to confront her? Maybe she had underestimated him, and he could have handled it? God, the thought of being married to someone all those years and not knowing him terrified her now. Sarah’s pulse rate soared. Her face flushed vermilion, warmer than in summer when she sat close to the window, her head thrown back, taking the sun.

She removed the backing completely, revealing an aged white envelope. The flap was sealed. The stamps cancelled and postmarked, Concord, New Hampshire, January 17, 1946. The letter was addressed to:

Gillette Blue was the code name assigned to an OSS operative by the American Military Command during WWII. And Sarah knew, so addressed, the letter had the best chance of reaching the right person. Surely, Army personnel — who in tribute to his cool, finely honed intelligence had referred to him as “that guy with the mind like a razor” and code-named him accordingly — would see it properly delivered. Yet, stamped in red across Sarah’s precise, flowing script were the words:

At the time Sarah wrote the letter, she and Zachary, a carpenter by trade, had been married almost four years. They’d spent the first in a trailer while Zachary built their house. The second and third they had been apart — he in the Pacific with the Marines, she in Europe with the Red Cross. They had completed their service tours and returned to Dunbarton within weeks of each other, and those days in the spring of 1945 were the happiest of their lives. Shortly before Christmas of that year, Sarah gave birth to Melanie.

One morning, early in the New Year, Sarah sat in her bedroom nursing her month-old daughter. When the infant dozed at her breast, Sarah placed her in a cradle, and went to the desk next to the window. She placed a blank sheet on the blotter and began writing. The pen moved swiftly across the onionskin, for she had written the words in her mind many times.

On this winter evening, over four decades later, Sarah backed to the edge of the bed, clutching the envelope, and sat down. She lifted the phone on the night table, and painfully worked the rotary dial.

The phone rang once.

Sarah heard a recorded voice say, “Hi, this is Melanie. I can’t come to the phone right now, but if you’ll leave your name and number—”

Sarah sagged against the pillows as her daughter’s voice continued. A profound loneliness came over her. She pulled the quilt to her chin and waited for the beep.

Outside, the wind howled.

Sarah’s fingers tightened reflexively around the envelope, as if making certain it wouldn’t be blown away.

The polar gusts had pushed south into New York City that night. Manhattan’s litter spiraled in the corridors of dark stone. In a top floor apartment on East Twenty-First Street, loose-fitting windows rattled against their frames.

The tiny ad in the New York Times had proclaimed:

Within an hour of spotting it, Melanie Winslow had won a footrace to a taxi; survived the crosstown gridlock; climbed four flights to a decrepit, trash-filled studio apartment; and — without a moment’s hesitation — had written a check for $3750, the first and last month’s rent and one month’s security.

Despite it’s condition, the apartment was a real find. Gramercy Park, long one of Manhattan’s prime areas, was an urban oasis enclosed by a cast-iron fence whose gates were always locked. The circa 1870 buildings on its perimeter stood on a parcel of land controlled by a century-old trusteeship, and only their residents had keys to the well-maintained park.

Now, six months and countless gallons of paint later, Melanie was in her bed on the balcony that was reached by the circular staircase when her telephone rang and the click of the answering machine cut it short. Her momentary reaction caused her muscles to tighten and rhythm to quicken, both to the liking of the young man beneath her, who let out a soft moan.

He caressed her thighs, moving his hands up toward her rolling hips, and pulled her down further onto him.

Melanie whimpered, and segued into a slow rocking motion. Familiar words began running through her mind.

Funny, she thought, how her mother’s favorite saying always came to her when she was with a lover. She’d never heard her use it in this context, of course, only in reference to chores or schoolwork — when Melanie had procrastinated and Sarah had caught her, and warned, “Either you’re on top of it, or it’s on top of you, kiddo.” It must have registered, Melanie figured. She liked being in control.

The young man lifted his blond curls from the pillow. His moist lips began delicately kissing the points of Melanie’s breasts that quivered in a taunting rhythm above him. He ran his tongue across them, across their smooth opalescence.

He did it repeatedly, slowly, unendingly.

Melanie began whimpering, “God, oh god, oh god,” then shifted to a patter of anxious squeaks.

Her movements quickened. Her head snapped from side to side, long brown hair whipping in constant motion. Her hands on his shoulders, pinning him beneath her, nails cat-scratching across his chest.

“Ohhhh, yessss,” she moaned, drawing the word out, then repeating it at closer intervals and with increasing volume, “Yessss, yesss, yess, yes, yes!” The last was an exuberant shriek that reverberated off the skylights and echoed through the cavernous space. Then a sudden rush radiated from her center across her trembling flesh, attending to every pore.

She tumbled onto the pillow satiated, and let out a lusty growl. “Tom, ohhhh, Tom,” she purred.

“Tim,” he corrected, a tremor in his voice.

Melanie looked at him out of the corner of her eye and grinned mischievously, like a child.

He raised a brow and grinned back.

They tangled their glistening bodies like knotted snakes and laughed out loud.

He first caught Melanie’s attention earlier that evening in the Hotel Dorset Bar, an elegant watering hole on West Fifty-Fourth Street, a short walk from the City Center Theater where she worked as a modern dance choreographer. The Dorset catered to a professional clientele, and Melanie often went there on nights she needed to be with someone — preferably someone from out of town.

As it turned out, Tim-Tom was a local brat, and Melanie decided to wait until morning to tell him she wouldn’t be seeing him again, and why.

Chapter Four

Ten hours had passed since Churcher’s call to the Soviet Embassy in Washington triggered the cable to Gorodin in Cuba. The exchange of coded communications between Havana and Moscow that had followed got the Houston business magnate the meeting he wanted.

In preparation, Churcher had spent most of the night scrutinizing paintings in his underground museum. He moved from Renaissance Masters to Dutch Realists, to French Impressionists, to canvases that spanned the history of great art. He skipped right past some, and went directly to others, knowing which, if any, might bear the same stigma as the Van Gogh. Though not an expert, once alerted, he had enough knowledge to make cogent evaluations. To his anger and disappointment, his efforts confirmed his suspicions rather than eliminating them, as he had hoped.

He left the museum well before the beep of the Rolex. The elevator door hadn’t finished opening before he was out of it, and dashing through the kiosk toward a limousine.

A uniformed chauffeur opened the rear door with an economy of movement, and nodded.

“Stand on it, son,” Churcher barked.

Without breaking stride, he jackknifed at the waist, and propelled his taut six-foot-three frame into the big car. His attire blended with the gray velvet interior, where tinted glass concealed the face but not the identity of its well-known passenger.

Many of Churcher’s wealthy friends and associates had long ceased using personalized license plates for security reasons. His still read CHURCHCO. It was, he proudly boasted, a conscious measure of his arrogance.

The antenna-studded limousine rocketed down the drive and through the electrically operated gates. The wrought iron tour de force had once greeted the major film stars of the thirties and forties at the studio now owned by Churchco Communications.

The stretched Lincoln accelerated east onto the 290 Freeway, and in less than thirty minutes was hard into the curving interchange where Texas 610—the heavily trafficked ribbon that rings the Houston suburbs — meets the Katy Freeway to downtown.

Characteristically, Churcher was evaluating the problem at hand and the men with whom he would soon meet: Gorodin, a pleasant, accommodating fellow, but cunning; Beyalev, cold, ambitious, and inexperienced, therefore dangerous and not to be trusted; Deschin, an old friend who had the power to make things right — if he wanted to. Churcher hadn’t seen Deschin in almost six years. Not since the last problem with their arrangement. Not since the Nugent report.

He slouched in the backseat of the limousine, and shuddered at the memory. Overdone, heavy-handed, he thought. Typically Russian. He felt sickened whenever that rainy night in Deschin’s Moscow apartment came to mind, sickened by the fear and confusion that he imagined on Dick Nugent’s face the night of his death.

The limousine was on the Katy Freeway where it swings across Texas 45, and fast approaching the North Main off-ramp, the major street-level artery that cuts through the heart of downtown.

The Rolex started chirping and brought Churcher back. The repetitious beeping reminded him, over and over again, how he’d been manipulated and used. He let it continue a long time before he clicked it off.

Andrew Churcher flipped a stirrup over the saddle horn and reached beneath the horse’s heaving belly. He pulled hard on the cinch loosening it, and slid the hand-tooled saddle from the white Arabian’s back. The momentum carried the saddle in a wide arc onto the rail of a weathered fence. A whistle sent the animal romping off into the pasture.

His father’s horse had been watered, saddled, and ready to go at 7:15 A.M. sharp, as always. A half hour later when Churcher still hadn’t shown up at the stables, Andrew took the Arabian for a run himself.

He was squaring the saddle on the fence when he spotted a rooster tail kicking into the air behind a car in the distance. Andrew ducked between the whitewashed rails and ambled through the mesquite to the road that split thousands of acres of fenced pasture.

Ed McKendrick’s car approached at high speed, and nosed to a stop in a dust cloud.

“Good news, Drew!” he boomed, unfolding from behind the wheel of the red Corvette. “Contracts for European distribution just came through.”

Andrew jammed his gloves in the back pocket of his jeans, and latched onto the hand McKendrick offered. “That’s great,” he replied.

“Sure is, kid,” McKendrick rumbled. “The old man did a hell of a job convincing the commies that he could sell their Arabians to Wops, Squareheads, and Micks, not to mention the Limeys and Frogs. Didn’t leave anybody out, did I?”

McKendrick was Churchco’s ramrod. A good-looking iron pumper, and all-American linebacker with a PhD in economics from Notre Dame. Five years ago, Churcher pirated him from the Rand Corporation, the Los Angeles based think tank, as a replacement for Dick Nugent.

Andrew disliked McKendrick’s style but knew that beneath the locker-room bluster hummed the most disciplined mind he’d ever encountered next to his father’s.

“Geezus, Ed, you’re the worst,” he said in response to McKendrick’s ethnic shorthand.

“Shit,” snorted McKendrick, gesturing to the expanse of uninhabited land. “Who the hell’s going to hear me out here? Besides, I love ’em all. You know that. Got some great numbers for you, too.”

“Numbers?” queried Andrew.

“Yeah. Before you go to Russia, you’re going to have to swing through Rome,” McKendrick explained. “And yours truly can recommend some flesh-crazed madonnas you can slip right into.”

Andrew shook his head from side to side in mock despair.

“When you’re not screwing your brains out, you can sell Arabians,” McKendrick went on. “There’ll be buyers up the ying-yang at the International Horse Show. And we have a direct line to the guy who organizes it every year. His name’s Borsa, Giancarlo Borsa. He’s a government honcho, runs the Defense Ministry when he isn’t breeding Arabians. He’ll be expecting your call. He and your old man go way back.”

“I know. Dad introduced me when we were there last year,” Andrew replied. “I’ll look him up as soon as I get in.”

McKendrick pulled a bulging file folder from the Corvette and dropped it on the hood with a thud. “Everything you need’s in there,” he said.

Andrew hefted the file as though he were weighing it. “That’s a lot of numbers,” he shot back, teasing.

“Bet your ass,” McKendrick said deadly earnest. “Get familiar with ’em.” He had completely missed the entendre. His computerlike mind had reset, and he was all business. “This is your shot, kid. Don’t blow it.”

Andrew felt frivolous in the face of serious matters. I’ll get it one of these days, he thought. He had made similar efforts of camaraderie with McKendrick in the past, but the timing was never right.

“You’re leaving in two weeks,” McKendrick went on. “Use the time to bone up on each account. Know the individuals you’ll be dealing with. Memorize their backgrounds, business interests, the profile of their breeding stock. What they have. What they need. Am I coming through?”

Andrew nodded earnestly. “Does Dad know?”

“No. I haven’t been able to reach him yet today.”

“Me neither,” Andrew said curiously. “He didn’t ride this morning. Didn’t call to let me know he wasn’t, either. Not like him. Something’s going on, Ed. I thought, maybe, these contracts were it.”

McKendrick shrugged, then his mind reset again. “Probably did too much galloping on some little filly last night and took the morning off!” he cackled.

He turned from Andrew, crossed to the Corvette, and slid his large body behind the wheel.

“Remind me to give you those numbers!” he shouted as he slammed the car in gear. Then he popped the clutch, kicking up a shower of dirt and gravel, and roared off down the dry road.

Andrew tucked the thick file under his arm.

Twice he had flown with his father to Moscow, and then on to Tersk in the foothills of the northern Caucasus, where some of the finest Arabian horses in the world are raised. Both times Churcher had slipped away to “meetings” and had returned ebullient and satisfied, the way he always did after closing one of his deals.

That his father had gone to see a woman didn’t occur to Andrew at the time. But, now, he recalled that day at the breeding farm in Tersk — the rapid guttural sound of the Russian auctioneers exhorting the bidding higher and higher; the babble of interpreters keeping clients in the competition for sales that averaged over $150,000; the barrel-chested horses prancing obediently to clipped Russian commands; the stink of hay and animal waste filling his head; the evaporating ammonia, so powerful it burned his eyes, making them water; then, the delicate aroma of perfume cutting through the stench like the scent of Texas lavender that blew through his rooms above the stables when the wind shifted direction — and the woman, willowy, white-skinned, jet black hair, red lips, soulful eyes, and the look — the fleeting current that passed between her and his father when she nodded to the auctioneer and outbid Theodor Churcher for an animal he wanted badly.

That his father had allowed it should have been proof enough, Andrew thought, but the sexually charged glance left no doubt. It had the hallmarks of smoldering intimacy, of nights spent passionately.

Andrew swept his eyes across the pastures that rolled to every horizon, trying to recall her face; but he couldn’t.

Chapter Five

Each week the airports that serve the Washington, D.C., area handle a revolving door blur of traffic as over three hundred thousand people arrive and depart the nation’s capital.

On this morning, the continuing arrival of representatives from fifteen NATO countries and their retinues packed the terminals, along with welcoming committees, security personnel, and ubiquitous media correspondents.

In the Lufthansa section of Dulles International, West Germany’s Deputy Minister for Strategic Deployment Gisela Pomerantz, fashionably attired in a long raccoon coat, and carrying an alligator attaché, strode through the arrival gate.

Her aquiline face, the impact heightened by the blond hair pulled back severely, remained composed and assured despite the microphones, tape recorders, and camera lenses that thrust toward her.

The questions came rapid-fire, in an overlap of English and German: “Do you think the Russians really mean business this time?” “What are the chances for disarmament?” “As an avowed hard-liner, can you support a nuclear pullback of the magnitude suggested?” “Do you have specific concerns with regard to negotiating points?”

Pomerantz held up her hands defensively.

“Please,” she pleaded, “we hawks can’t handle more than four questions at once. It ruffles our feathers,” she added with a disarming smile.

Laughter rippled through the crowd of reporters, who appreciated the self-deprecating inference.

“I hope so. — Better than even. — That’s what I’m here to decide. — Definite concerns,” she said, placing crisp pauses between answers and pointing to the reporter who had asked the question to which she was replying.

Her entourage closed around her and began walking through the terminal. The reporters surged after them. One of the more tenacious correspondents thrust her microphone between the jostling bodies.

“Can you be specific about your concerns?” the young woman prodded.

Pomerantz eyed her coolly, and continued walking.

“No,” she replied with finality. “I can’t discuss them at this time, I’m sorry.”

The group pushed through the automatic doors. A protocol officer came forward and directed Pomerantz to a limousine. She took one step into the rear of the vehicle, and paused suddenly.

“Hello, Gisela,” Phil Keating said with a warm smile. The chief U.S. disarmament negotiator was tucked into the far corner of the backseat, smoking a cigarette.

“Philip?” Pomerantz mouthed with momentary uncertainty. Keating still had the craggy good looks; but his hair had grayed, and gold-rimmed bifocals bridged his nose. She settled next to him and kissed his cheek. “Good to see you, Philip,” she said brightly. “Thanks for coming.”

“Good to see you, too,” Keating replied, studying her face. He was thinking it was as beautiful as he’d remembered when she flared the fur onto the seat, revealing a black knit dress that hugged her long, shapely torso. His eyes swept over it appreciatively.

Pomerantz noticed and broke into a comely smile. “The last time you looked at me like that Keating, I recall you disappointed me — terribly.”

“It was the gelati,” he said with the boyish charm that first attracted her to him. “I mean, there’s just something about chocolate gelati — no woman has ever been able to compete with it.”

“Oh, I know,” she said, pausing for effect before adding, “that’s why I voted against holding this conference in Italy.”

They were both laughing as the big car left the Dulles access road and swung onto the Beltway heading for Camp David in the bare-treed forests of the Appalachian foothills.

Snow started to fall.

“You know,” Pomerantz said with a mischievous twinkle, “a spicy sex scandal might give the media something to pick on besides my ‘political baggage filled with hawk droppings,’ as they refer to my policies.”

“Don’t count on it,” Keating replied. “Indiscretions outnumber lobbyists in Washington these days.” He grinned, took a drag of his cigarette, then pressed it into an ashtray, and snapped the lid closed. “To tell you the truth,” he resumed more seriously, “I was hoping you’d brought other bags on this trip.”

“I brought the only ones I have, Philip. Whether or not I unpack them is up to you,” she replied softly, taking his hand much more gently than on that day nine years ago.

“I’ll do everything in my power to stop you,” he countered, leaving his hand in hers.

They studied each other’s face for a moment before their eyes met in silent confirmation of their intense attraction.

On the rear window of their limousine, large flakes of snow were sticking, then slowly fading away, melted by the radiating heat of the electric defroster.

Chapter Six

The drive to the Churchco Tower on Fannin Street took less than the usual twenty-five minutes.

Theodor Churcher rode one of the glass elevators high into the open core of the building to the tower-level executive suites.

Elspeth, his longtime administrative assistant, saw his preoccupation and sensed what was coming.

“Clear the deck, Els,” Churcher said without breaking stride. And that was all he had to say. They had their own special shorthand, and this meant he’d be unavailable and incommunicado for the rest of the day.

“Jake called,” Elspeth said, knowing that despite Churcher’s order he’d want to be told.

Churcher paused thoughtfully, lips tightening as he decided, then nodded. “But nobody else,” he said. He crossed to his office, inserted his card key into the electronic reader, and entered. The Van Gogh was waiting on the glass desk.

The intercom buzzed.

Churcher flicked a look to the painting, then pressed the blinking light on the phone and scooped up the receiver. “Jake!” Churcher said, forcing it. “What’s going on in Foggy Bottom?”

“Geneva. Current scenario has genuine potential,” Boulton replied rapid-fire. At five-six, and a hundred-thirty-two pounds, the director of Central Intelligence had the metabolism of a hummingbird. “Nature of my call is related. Specific interest — your ETA Rome.”

“I’m not going,” Churcher replied. “Andrew’s handling the auctions alone this year. Churchco Equestrian’s his division now.”

Boulton’s eyes widened pleasantly in surprise. “Celebration definitely in order.”

“You know it. I never thought I’d see the day. What did you have in mind anyway? The Italians getting out of hand?”

“Negative. Italian Defense Ministry has displayed exemplary toughness despite severe internal pressures. Advent of arms control negotiations prompts Company to ascertain IDM’s needs, and affirm our support. Informal conduit to Minister Borsa deemed appropriate.”

“Hell, I’d have been tickled to pull things together with Giancarlo for you. Can I help out with anything else?”

“Affirmative. Evaluate capability of newly appointed chief Churchco Equestrian to assume role.”

“Sorry. I can’t recommend that, Jake. The boy’s got the smarts, but he’s going to have his hands full trading horses over there. This is his first crack out of the box. I’d hate to see him screw it up.”

“Agreed.”

“I’ve got some offshore problems snapping at my heels,” Churcher said, glancing anxiously to the Van Gogh. “I’m going to have to drop off.”

“Seven-fifteen tee-off, opening day, Eagle Rock?”

“I’ll be there.”

Churcher hung up. He slipped the fraudulent painting into the portfolio, and zipped it closed with an angry motion. There was an element of danger in what he was about to do. It gave him pause. Not for his own safety, but that of someone for whom he cared deeply. He scooped up the phone again, called Moscow, and alerted her. Then he crossed to a door in the wall of arched windows and exited to an expanse of roof where a helicopter waited.

The high-speed amphibious craft was painted Churchco’s corporate black and silver. It was a customized version of the CC-65 Viper, the two-seat attack helicopter Churchco Aero-Space manufactured for the military. The weapons and munitions bays had been gutted, and fitted with auxiliary fuel tanks that greatly extended its range.

Churcher set the portfolio on the vacant copilot’s seat, donned safety harness and headphones, and threw a number of switches on the console.

The turbine whined to life, the slack rotors quickly becoming a whirling blur.

Churcher gently pulled back on the joystick.

The chopper lifted off in the familiar forward tilt, revealing the concentric rings of a huge Churchco logotype painted on the roof as a landing target.

In seconds, Churcher was gliding above the Republic Bank Center, and on over One Shell Plaza, Penzoil Place, and the other curtain-walled shafts that stabbed into the morning sun.

Churcher clicked on the radio.

“This is Churchco N653WD to Hobby Field. Request clearance to heading three five zero.”

“Cleared to three five zero. Fifteen hundred.”

“Fifteen hundred,” Churcher echoed.

“Roger,” the controller said, then shifting to familiar tone, “This here’s Jordy Banks. That you, Mr. Churcher?”

“Sure is. How’re you doing, son?”

“Just fine, sir,” he drawled. “Churchco’s already up three and a half.”

Churcher had been so preoccupied that morning he hadn’t checked the stock activity as he always did.

“Three and five-eighths,” he bluffed. “And don’t sound so surprised.”

Churcher clicked off, punched the throttle, and headed southeast toward the Gulf of Mexico. In twenty minutes he’d covered the distance to a cluster of oil drilling platforms. Each sported the concentric Cs of the Churchco logotype.

Below, on Churchco 47, bare-chested men in hard hats wrestled with the drilling pipe.

The whomp of spinning rotors signaled the helicopter’s approach. It came at an angle toward a landing pad that cantilevered over the sea.

Churcher hovered momentarily, as if he was going to land, then punched the throttle, lifting off again.

The men below shouted and waved as Churcher headed out toward open sea. One of the youngsters turned to the leather-skinned crew chief next to him. “What’s that all about?” he shouted.

“That was the boss,” the chief hooted. He whipped chain around pipe and pulled hard. “Just his way of letting us know he’s out there. Buzzes us all the time.”

The new fellow looked after the helicopter, now a distant gull on the horizon. “Son of a bitch—” he said admiringly, punching the air with a gloved fist.

Churcher knew his employees. And he knew they got a kick out of the chairman of the board piloting his own helicopter. And, so did he.

Aircraft had always captivated him. At age twelve, to the consternation of his parents, he skipped farm chores to catch rides in a rickety crop duster. The old bi-wing’s pilot was a former World War I flier who filled the teenager’s mind with tales of bravery and derring-do. And each time they soared above the endless acres of blight-ravaged crops, Churcher fantasized that they would land in another world far from the dust-bowl poverty in which he lived. And each time the plane touched down on the drought-hardened field behind his family’s tiny farm house, he cursed the bitter reality and vowed that no matter what it took, he would one day have unlimited wealth — and he soon realized that the symbol could become the means. Obsessed with learning to fly, but not having the money for formal instruction, he talked the crop duster into giving him lessons in exchange for gasoline — siphoned from the family’s farm vehicles. He soloed at sixteen and, a year later, won a scholarship to Houston’s Rice University, where he majored in engineering and designed his first airframes. As an OSS operative during World War II, he flew gliders to night landings behind enemy lines and discovered that he thrived on the risks; and now, he was not only a pilot but also a manufacturer of aircraft, including assemblies of the Space Shuttle, and Apollo moon rocket before that; and a lifetime of risk-taking had paid off.

The helicopter left the last drilling rig behind.

Churcher engaged the computerized navigation system, locking the chopper onto a preprogrammed heading — the precise intersection of latitude and longitude which he had passed on during his call to the Soviet Embassy in Washington the night before.

The data transfer had been accomplished by concealing the numerical coordinates in Churchco contract numbers. Churcher’s extensive business dealings in the Soviet Union generated many bona fide calls during which contracts were discussed. And for years, both sides had used this method to arrange meetings and specify locations without raising the suspicion of national security eavesdroppers.

The chopper was below any radar now, skimming the surface of the Gulf. Anyone monitoring it would have assumed Churcher had landed on the drilling platform; and of course, the roughnecks assumed its destination another of the Churchco platforms sprinkled over the thousands of square miles of ocean. Churcher counted on that whenever he made this run.

The previous afternoon in Moscow, a TU-144 supersonic jetliner — a civilian version of the Soviet mach 2.3, 9,600-mile-range Blackjack bomber — left Ogarkhov Air Force Base. Six hours later, at 3:35 A.M. EST, it touched down at Castro International in Havana, and taxied to a secured area away from the terminal.

Soviet Minister of Culture Aleksei Deschin and Vladimir Uzykin, his KGB bodyguard, were the only passengers. They hurried down a mobile boarding ramp to a Russian-made limousine parked on the tarmac.

The chauffeur-driven Chaika took the two men to the Soviet Naval Base at Cienfuegos on Cuba’s southern shore. They boarded a Soviet Foxtrot class submarine, and went directly to the officer’s mess, where Gorodin and Beyalev were waiting.

At precisely 5 A.M., as scheduled, while the four men breakfasted, the Foxtrot slipped from its berth into the main ship channel.

The captain ordered his executive officer to set a southwest course into the Caribbean.

Almost immediately, two hundred and fifty miles out in space, a United States intelligence gathering satellite detected the sub’s movement. The KH-11 Ferret was the cutting edge of surveillance technology. Circling the planet in Polar orbit, the Ferret took advantage of the earth’s rotation, and scrutinized the surface twice every twenty-four hours, performing heretofore unimaginable feats of surveillance; its sensitive electronic interceptors monitored up to a hundred telephone conversations simultaneously; its high-resolution camera read the numbers on the license plates of moving vehicles; and its lightning-fast central processor recorded and/or transmited the ferreted data to ground stations — the top-secret, mission-control-like rooms where technicians and analysts sat at consoles monitoring space-, land-, and sea-based surveillance devices.

The photographic data on the Soviet submarine was instantly transmitted to Anti-Submarine Warfare Headquarters at the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Florida. ASW intelligence personnel evaluated the information, identified the ship as an enemy vessel, and initiated an alert.

Chapter Seven

The digital clock in Pensacola’s ASW Duty Room read 05:23 hours.

Navy First Lieutenant Jon Lowell was the airborne tactical coordination officer on duty. The tall sandy-haired Californian was leaning over the pool table about to put away a game of eight ball when the alert sounded. The other members of the crew scrambled immediately. Lowell coolly stroked the winning shot before hurrying after them.

Last to leave, last to arrive, never pressured, Lowell had a patient, methodical nature that made him well suited to ASW. His resting pulse of forty-eight came from running the equivalent of a 10-K each morning in under thirty minutes. He’d grown up in a rambling Santa Barbara beach house, and inherited his exceptional hand-eye coordination from his mother — a talented graphic artist — and honed it in the video arcade on State Street, where, as a teenager, he spent after-school hours destroying alien starships that flew across his video screen.

Within minutes of the alert, Lowell and his crew had collected mission data, and were sprinting across the tarmac to their Lockheed Viking S-3A. The two-engine plane — pilot and copilot side by side on the flight deck, TACCO and sensor operator in aft cabin — was designed to locate and track submarines, and equipped with armaments to destroy them. Primarily carrier based, the Viking’s small crew, and maneuverability enabled it to respond quickly to ASW alerts from land bases as well.

The Viking’s pilot, Navy Lt. Commander Keith Arnsbarger, was a tall red-faced Georgian. The first thing he put on each morning was the mirror-lensed sunglasses he claimed to be wearing at birth. He had done two carrier-based tours in Nam piloting reconnaissance aircraft, and assignment to ASW was a natural.

Arnsbarger had gone straight from Annapolis to war, and had been living in the fast lane ever since. The endless chain of one-night stands and hangovers ended the day he started dating Cissy Tate, the widow of a fellow pilot whose F-14 vanished during a training mission over the Gulf. Arnsbarger had been living with Cissy and her eleven-year-old son for three years now. Lately, he’d been thinking of the boy more and more as his own, and though he hadn’t told anyone yet, for the first time in his life he was considering marriage.

He was imagining what Cissy’s reaction to the idea might be, imagining her gentle face coming to life when he got a priority ASW clearance from Pensacola Tower and started the Viking down the north/south runway. Twenty seconds later, the silver and sky-blue bird rose from the tarmac and, wheels still retracting, headed due south over the Gulf of Mexico.

When the Soviet submarine left Cienfuegos harbor, she remained on the surface and headed for open sea. The sounds of her screws pushing water were picked up by SOSUS.

The Sound Surveillance System was a global network of hydrophones anchored to the ocean floor. These submerged listening posts ringed Soviet Naval bases and shipping channels throughout the world. The Caribbean net that covered Central American and Cuban ports detected the sounds of the Foxtrot’s cavitation.

This noise — the whine of a spinning propeller creating a vortex, a whirling mass of water with a vacuum at its center — was transmitted by cable to ASW Headquarters in Pensacola.

Within minutes, these sounds were recorded, computer analyzed, and matched against a library of previously recorded acoustic signatures of the Soviet fleet. The submarine’s “ac-sig” identified the target vessel as a Soviet Foxtrot.

This data — along with location coordinates, also determined from the hydrophone contact — was immediately transmitted to the Viking in flight.

In the compartment aft of the cockpit, Lieutenant Lowell sat at the plane’s electronics-packed surveillance console. The unit is folded vertically about the TACCO’s center of vision, presenting him with three equidistant data planes: flashing banks of SOSUS status indicators above, combination radarscope and graphic tracking monitor with attendant controls in the center, computer and communications apparatus below.

Lowell entered the newly transmitted positional coordinates for the submarine.

The computerized tracking system reconciled the data from the satellite and hydrophone contacts, and recalculated the Fly To Point, the estimated position of the Soviet submarine, which had been previously determined from the satellite data only. Lowell had just initiated a process of refinement that would continue automatically.

The blip of the Soviet Foxtrot started pinging across the radarscope.

Lowell’s pulse quickened; his eyes narrowed; he straightened in the chair.

“Target up,” he announced while encoding again.

Three rows of numbers flashed across the screen.

“Range — three point six five miles. Heading — six zero five five. Speed — twenty-five knots,” Lowell reported in crisp cadence.

The first light was just bending over the horizon as Arnsbarger repeated the data and dipped a wing, adjusting the Viking’s course to the new FTP. The Soviet submarine was still on the surface when Arnsbarger leaned forward in the cockpit and spotted it. A plume of water arched behind the conning tower as it sliced upright through the sea.

“There she blows, bucko,” he called out. He increased airspeed, put the Viking into a shallow dive, and started closing.

Below, atop the Foxtrot’s conning tower, her captain pulled the stem of an English briar from his mouth and leaned into his binoculars, observing the Viking’s approach. “Clear the bridge! Dive! Dive!” he shouted, his voice blaring from loudspeakers in every compartment in the submarine.

The Klaxons wailed their call to action.

The crew scrambled to battle stations in response.

The captain and executive officer came down the ladder from the bridge into the control room, joining Gorodin, Beyalev, Deschin, and Uzykin, who had assembled in response to the alarm.

“What is it?” Deschin asked. “Something wrong?”

The captain shook his head. “Right on schedule as a matter of fact,” he replied without taking the pipe from his mouth. He slipped out of his parka, and dropped it onto a hook welded to the bulkhead. “We’re just playing the game,” he went on as he passed them. “We play it every time we make this run.” He smiled, took up his position at the chart table, and addressed the diving officer. “Negative trim. Take her to two hundred feet,” he ordered. “All ahead full.”

“The game?” Deschin inquired impatiently, turning to the men around him.

“The Americans expect us to dive and run,” Gorodin replied. “So”—he paused, inhaling deeply on one of the little wrinkled cigars he favored.

“So we dive and run,” Beyalev interjected, taking advantage of Gorodin’s hesitation. “We don’t want to break the pattern we’ve established and arouse their curiosity beyond the normal.”

“What would make them curious about this, this—” Deschin paused, gesturing to the interior of the sub as he searched for an appropriately derogatory word “—this rust bucket of obsolete technology?” he continued, finding it. Though a reliable workhorse, the diesel-powered Foxtrot class was designed in the fifties and was far from the cutting edge of Soviet naval power.

“Nothing,” Gorodin answered simply, smiling to indicate that that was the point.

“Precisely,” Beyalev snapped, launching into one of his self-aggrandizing tirades. “Once identified as such — and not a Viktor Class III whose superior speed, range, and armaments intimidate them — they will lose interest as they always do. Then”—he made a sharp turn in the air with his hand accompanied by a whistling noise—“back to base for the Viking.”

Deschin let an amused smile indicate no more explanation was required.

Beyalev nodded and reddened slightly, sensing he may have overdone it.

Uzykin, the KGB man, had said nothing throughout. He stole a glance at Beyalev, clearly pleased with his enthusiasm if not his penchant for verbosity.

On the surface, the sea rolled over the decks and conning tower of the Foxtrot as it submerged.

The Viking, jet engines whining, made a low strafing run. Doors in the underside of the fuselage yawned open, dropping sonobuoys into the Caribbean a thousand feet below. Hydrophones within the canister-shaped units began transmitting data that pinpointed the submarine’s course beneath the sea up to the Viking.

The tracking-monitor in Lowell’s console came alive with a series of green lines: each represented data from one of the sonobouys; each moved in a staccato rhythm across the screen; all intersected to reveal the position and course of the Foxtrot below.

Lowell tracked the sub for approximately half an hour. He ascertained its course was away from the United States mainland, verified its acoustic signature as that of a Soviet Foxtrot, and transmitted this data to ASW Forces Command.

As the Russians anticipated, once satisfied the vessel was an over-the-hill Foxtrot, and not a missile-carrying Viktor Class III, ASW Command called off the alert, ordering the Viking back to base.

Arnsbarger put the two-engine jet into a looping right turn.

Lowell sat staring pensively at his console. After a few moments, he leaned into the cockpit.

“Where do you think they go?” he asked.

Arnsbarger shrugged. “Search me,” he replied. “Probably Castro’s weekly nose candy junket to Bogota.”

Lowell laughed. “No kidding. This is what? The fourth, fifth time that we’ve tracked ’em. Same sub. Same course. Like every three, four months, right?”

Arnsbarger nodded, swung onto a heading for Pensacola, and pushed the throttles home.

The plane vibrated, then just hummed.

Lowell was deep in thought.

“I think I know,” he said.

“Know what?” Arnsbarger asked.

“I think I know how to find out where they go.”

Below, the captain of the Soviet Foxtrot waited until he was certain the Viking had broken contact, then changed to a northwesterly course. For the next six hours the Foxtrot headed at top speed into the waters of the Mexican Gulf.

Churcher’s helicopter had been cruising at wide open throttle for exactly two hours and thirty-eight minutes. He was thinking about how he would approach Deschin when the ever-changing graphic on the computerized navigation monitor indicated the Viper was directly over the rendezvous spot. Churcher put the chopper into a sweeping turn, and spiraled to a landing on the gently rolling sea.

A thousand yards due east, the Foxtrot’s periscope broke the surface and cut through the waters toward the helicopter.

Churcher shut down the turbine and released his harness, preparing to transfer to the submarine.

The black steel hull punched through the surface into a blazing mid-day sun. The Red Star on the conning tower glowed like an illuminated beacon.

Chapter Eight

A maroon-and-black hearse came through the big curve in Pembroke Street, skid chains drumming on the plowed road in a rhythmic dirge. It slowed at the bottom of a rise and turned into a drive lined with pines. The antenna flicked a low hanging bough, and snow crystals sparkled in the cold light. The hearse pulled next to a car at the far end of the drive, and crosshatched the snow until the rear door was aligned with the entrance to Sarah Winslow’s cottage.

Two men, bundled against the cold, got out and went inside. The walls of the tiny house shook as they clambered up the stairs and entered the bedroom.

The driver removed his visored hat. “How goes it, Doc?” he inquired a little too avidly.

The doctor, a boyish fellow with glasses, had made the call that brought them. “It’ll be a minute,” he replied in a curt tone that dulled the man’s fervor.

Sarah lay under the quilt in a fetal curl. The doctor was with her when she died early that morning, her hands clutching the envelope, her head filled with the smell of it — a mixture of ink and onionskin, and time. They triggered a flood of memories, enriching her last moments. Her life ended with a brilliant flash of light and rolling thunderclap — the same bolt of lightning she thought had ended it early in the spring of 1945, in Italy, during the war. The same one that gave rise to the events culminating in the letter.

The doctor gently pulled the envelope from between Sarah’s hands, slipped it into a pocket, and went downstairs to use the phone.

The men from the funeral home unfolded the large polypropylene bag with the broad zipper and sturdy handgrips they’d brought, and crossed to Sarah’s bed to take her.

Melanie Winslow’s loft was a bright, cheerful place in the mornings. Light streamed through the skylights, bathing a jungle of plants and illuminating the numerous dance posters on the walls.

She sat cross-legged on the bed, holding a cup of coffee, the sheet over her shoulders like a collapsed tent. “One-nighters,” she said coolly, “are how I make sure I don’t become dependent on someone.”

Tim propped himself against the headboard, and nodded. “There are — devices, you know,” he said facetiously.

Melanie chuckled. “After a couple of bad marriages, a ton of guilt, and too much therapy, they start looking pretty good,” she said, adjusting her position on the bed. “Seriously, I got my act together and decided, never again. I don’t date. I don’t get involved. I don’t see anyone more than once. It’s that simple.”

“Must’ve been a couple of real losers—”

“Not really. I was as responsible as they were. Selfish. Focused on my career, and my body. They wanted kids, which I thought would destroy both. Don’t get me wrong, they had their faults, but”—she paused and took a sip of the coffee—“yours truly was no angel. First time, I was nineteen and didn’t know anything. The second, I was twenty-eight and thought I knew it all. Funny,” she said poignantly, “they both hurt as much.”

Tim didn’t reply, nor did his expression change to indicate he empathized. He was too intent on studying her face — obliquely, the way men do the next morning.

Melanie had seen the distant uncertainty many times and knew what he was thinking. “I’ll save you the heavy math,” she said. “I’m forty-two.”

She slipped from beneath the sheet, stepped to the floor unclothed, and did a lovely jeté en tourant across the sleeping balcony. She held the last position, articulating it, a current flowing through her in the diffused light.

Tim swept his eyes over her elegantly arched figure, easily that of a woman ten years younger.

“You’re very beautiful,” he said desirously.

“An illusion,” she replied, moving back to first position. “The lighting. It’s all in the—”

The single clipped ring of the telephone interrupted her.

The answering machine clicked on.

Melanie tilted her head thoughtfully, deciding, and did a little brise ferme to the phone. She turned up the volume on the answering machine, heard the end of her recorded message and the electronic beep, then monitored a man’s voice.

“Miss Winslow? This is Doctor Sloan. I’m calling about your mother. Give me a call as—”

Melanie snatched up the receiver. “Doc? Hi, it’s Melanie,” she said rapid-fire. “How’s she doing?”

Melanie’s highly tuned posture slackened at the reply. “Yes, thank you,” she said softly. “I’ll come this afternoon.” She hung up slowly, and glanced to the skylight in reflection. Her eyes filled.

“You okay?” Tim asked, seeing the change in her.

Melanie nodded unconvincingly and slipped back under the covers next to him. She buried her face in the curve of his neck and cried softly. Her feelings were complex and difficult to sort out. She had never been this aware of her own mortality before. She burrowed in closer to him, and lay there thinking about it for a while. Then, in a small, vulnerable voice, she said, “Make love to me.”

Chapter Nine

President Hilliard stood with his back to the huge stone fireplace in the sitting room of the presidential cottage at Camp David, and raised his glass to Phil Keating and Gisela Pomerantz.

“To the birth of a new era — and to those who will inherit the torch of peace.”

“And to you, Mr. President,” Pomerantz added, holding her glass up to him.

The trio clinked glasses, and sipped the bittersweet vermouth-cassis-and-soda that was the President’s favorite aperitif. They had gathered, at his request, prior to a luncheon for diplomats who would represent NATO countries at the upcoming disarmament talks.

“Gisela,” Hilliard said, getting to business. “I had a lengthy and frank transatlantic powwow with Chancellor Liebler this afternoon. And I assured him that we were fully aware of your country’s special interest in the success of the talks.”

“I’m certain he was most appreciative,” Pomerantz replied. “As the only country on the border between East and West, Germany has been, as you’ve often said, the linchpin of deployment. Naturally, she should command the same position with regard to disarmament.”

Hilliard nodded emphatically.

“The Chancellor and I covered that ground quite thoroughly,” he said, going on to enumerate. “We specifically discussed the suspicion long held by some NATO members that the United States had secretly developed defense initiatives designed to confine a nuclear conflict to Europe; Germany’s strategic position as the point of attack by Warsaw Pact forces in a conventional war; her need to continue selling industrial products to the Soviets and Eastern block; and, as a divided nation, Germany’s desire to maintain cordial relations with the East, thereby keeping borders open and separated families in contact.”

“You’ve articulated our concerns very well, Mr. President,” Pomerantz replied.

“Phil’s a good tutor,” Hilliard said with a smile. “Now,” he resumed, “Chancellor Liebler agreed that what we’re proposing in Geneva is very responsive to those concerns, and in light of recent displays of good faith by our side and the Soviets, I asked him—” He paused to clear his throat, and sipped some of the aperitif.

“The President’s referring to our indefinitely postponing deployment of Pershing IIs in Norway and Belgium,” Keating said, taking over. “And the Soviet’s subsequent dismantling of their SS-20s along the Polish Border in response.”

“Yes,” Pomerantz replied, brightening. “We were quite pleased that the disarmed system was one targeted on Europe rather than one targeted on the United States.”

“Which brings me to my point, Gisela,” Hilliard said. “In light of all this, I asked the Chancellor, ‘Why is the German government so — for lack of a better word — uptight?’ And he—”

“If I may, Mr. President,” Pomerantz interrupted. “Why did he send me to represent Germany, and not someone who is more aligned with your position? Wasn’t that your question?”

“Gisela,” Keating counseled, “I think it’s a mistake to take the President’s comments personally.”

“No, no, she’s right, Phil,” Hilliard corrected. “And the Chancellor gave me a damn good answer. He said, he wanted to be certain our negotiating strength is what we claim. And if we can convince his resident hard-liner here—” He let the sentence trail off, and gestured to Pomerantz. Then he turned back to Keating with a veiled look that said — I know what you’re thinking and God help you if you say it. “And I agree with him, Phil,” the President resumed, with a bold lie. “Nothing wrong with taking a good hard look at what we’re doing before we commit.”

Keating, who was thinking—Bullshit! I don’t need anybody to assess the strength of my position—caught the look and pretended to concur. “That’s a very prudent attitude, sir,” he said, forcing a smile.

Hilliard nodded. He had wanted Pomerantz to feel comfortable and wholly accommodated, and was thinking he’d succeeded, when the protocol officer informed them luncheon had commenced.

“Precisely, I am all in favor of prudence,” Pomerantz replied as they followed the protocol officer to the door. “You see, after studying the NATO Report, all nine-hundred-fifty-four pages of it, I asked Chancellor Liebler and Defense Minister Schumann a question neither could answer. And that question was—‘What ever happened to the Heron?’ ”

“Heron?” the President echoed, looking back at Keating. “Phil, I recall we monitored the testing of that system in the mid-seventies. Right?”

“That’s correct, sir,” Keating replied smartly. “Soviets never deployed it.”

“As best we can determine,” Pomerantz corrected sharply, enunciating each word, and neatly tacking the phrase onto Keating’s reply. Then she turned to the President and, softening her tone, said, “That’s a quote from the NATO Report, Mr. President. I’m sure you’ll agree, it’s not the kind of wording that inspires confidence.”

Hilliard burned Keating with a look. “Is that what it says, Phil?” he asked through clenched teeth.

They were moving into the dining hall now.

The President laid back to enter alone. “We’ll talk,” he barked before Keating could reply.

Keating nodded. He leveled an apprehensive look at Pomerantz as they separated, and went about mixing with the other representatives in the dining hall.

The President paused and, with effort, transformed his pained expression into an ebullient smile and entered to spontaneous applause.

Chapter Ten

The swell had rolled hundreds of miles across the Gulf before it slapped against the starboard pontoon of Churcher’s helicopter. The unoccupied craft rode the crest, settling onto the flat catenary of sea beyond.

Two hundred feet beneath the surface, the prow of the Soviet submarine cut through the black water.

The interior of the Foxtrot always reminded Churcher of Moscow before the snows — cold, gray, and depressing. Portfolio in hand, he was waiting in the wardroom with Gorodin and Beyalev when the door in the bulkhead swung open and Deschin’s bodyguard entered.

Uzykin had the head of an eagle. The tip of his broad nose descended almost to the centerline of his lips. He surveyed the compartment and, satisfied all was in order, motioned Deschin inside.

Deschin wore a dark blue suit, square shaped and buttoned over a slight bulge in his waistline, white shirt, and subdued striped tie.

He had put on a few, thought Churcher, but the hollows below his cheeks were still there.

Four medals — Hero of the Soviet Union, the Order of Victory, Marshall of the Soviet Union, and Order of Lenin — hung above Deschin’s breast pocket.

He smiled at Churcher and extended a hand. “Ah Theo,” he rumbled in his heavily accented English. “You’ll forgive an old friend for keeping you waiting?”

Churcher’s eyes twinkled, as they always did when he held the cards. He shook Deschin’s hand firmly, causing the medals to dance.

“Please, Aleksei, no need to apologize,” he replied, pushing the left lapel of his suit jacket forward with his thumb. “See, you outrank me.”

Deschin leaned forward, squinting to see the tiny emblem pinned in the notch. He knew that the gold and enameled insignia meant Churcher had been awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for his heroic piloting of gliders during World War II. “By a margin of four to one!” he roared heartily.

As the soviet minister settled, Churcher unzipped the portfolio, removed the painting, and placed it on the table in front of Deschin.

In the cramped, somber compartment, the impact of the vibrant colors and powerful structure of the canvas was overwhelming — as Churcher knew it would be. For a moment, the four Russians stood blinking and stunned.

Churcher set the portfolio aside, and gestured magnanimously to Deschin. “You have the floor, Aleksei,” he said. “I’m quite certain as minister of culture you can explain this.”

Deschin took a long moment to think it through, deciding to force Churcher to keep the ball. “We have assembled at your request, The-odor — and at great inconvenience. The first explanation should be yours.” He paused locking his anthracite pupils onto Churcher’s and added pointedly, “My government doesn’t take kindly to being threatened.”

“I assume you’re referring to my conversation with your people in Washington?” Churcher asked rhetorically. Then nodding compassionately, added, “I can see how it would be upsetting coming so close to the talks.”

“I’d say your timing was particularly unnerving,” Deschin snapped. “Yes.”

“You mean, your people aren’t going to put all their missiles on the table?” Churcher asked facetiously.

“Nuclear disarmament isn’t my area,” Deschin bluffed. “I’m not privy to the strategy, nor will I speculate what they—”

“Then allow me,” Churcher interrupted. “Sometime last night, you got a call from — Kaparov? Pykonen? Whoever. And he said, ‘What the fuck is going on here, Aleksei? I thought we owned this guy? If Churcher does as he’s threatening, we’ll lose our edge. The very thing that has prompted us to go to Geneva; that will allow us to trade system for system, missile for missile, warhead for warhead, and still come out ahead will be kaputnick!’ ”

Churcher let it sink in for a few seconds.

“How am I doing?” he asked almost mischievously.

“Very well, I’m afraid,” Deschin replied.

“Right,” Churcher snapped. “The bottom line is—the United States representative can’t ask to negotiate for something he doesn’t know exists.”

He spread his arms in a magnanimous gesture.

“So, here we are,” he concluded. “My apologies for my tactics, my friend; but had I not used that leverage, Aleksei, would you be here now?” Churcher didn’t expect an answer. He matched Deschin’s contemptuous glare with one of his own, and continued. “Now I don’t take kindly to being taken,” he said, stabbing the painting with a forefinger. “The currency used to make your last payment and, as best I can determine, to make most of the others over the years" — he paused to emphasize the scope and premeditated nature of the deception—"is counterfeit. All brilliant works, no doubt of that. Works of genius. But, nonetheless, fakes, forgeries.”

Deschin stared at Churcher blankly.

“Come on, Aleksei,” Churcher prodded. “You don’t expect me to believe you didn’t know?”

Churcher had him and knew it. Many times in his forty years of dealing at the top, his adversaries tried to put things over on him. A few had succeeded; but sooner or later, he found them out.

Deschin pulled a cigarette from a pack.

Uzykin stepped forward and lit it.

Deschin inhaled deeply, his mind searching for a way to avert this disaster. Finally, he exhaled, and more than credibly, replied. “You couldn’t be more wrong, Theodor. I vouch for their authenticity myself.”

Churcher shook his head no emphatically. “There’s no disputing that this one’s a fake,” he challenged.

Deschin wondered how Churcher could be so positive. His face darkened at the possibility that crossed his mind. He decided to be direct because he had to know. “You didn’t go to someone?” he asked, uneasily. “You didn’t have it authenticated by a professional?”

Churcher scowled, insulted by the suggestion. “Of course not,” he replied, his drawl thickening as it always did when he lost patience. “We’ve both known that’d never be possible. And the whole world knows your people have these paintings under lock and key, and won’t sell any of ’em. How could I take one to an expert? Where would I say I got it? You took advantage of that, Aleksei. Took advantage of me.”

Deschin was relieved by the answer, but didn’t let it show. “Then what makes you so sure?”

“That,” Churcher replied, placing the nail of his forefinger beneath the telltale area of crimson pigment. “Right there,” he went on. “The Dutchman would’ve never done that. He wasn’t a fusser. Never would’ve touched it up like that.”

Deschin slipped on his glasses, and leaned close to the painting, examining the spot where Churcher’s fingernail was now digging into the paint.

“Very, very astute,” he said, his face still close to the textured surface. He straightened, and peered over the tops of his glasses with a professorial air. “You’re overreacting, Theo. Really. In spite of what we’d all like to believe, Van Gogh was human. He made mistakes, and he fixed them. We all do.”

“Fine,” Churcher retorted. “How do you propose to fix this one?”

Deschin inhaled deeply on his cigarette, then filled the compartment with smoke. “I’m afraid you’re forgetting a most famous American proverb, Theodor. Now how does it go?” he wondered, feigning an effort to recall it. “Ah, yes,” he resumed. “ ‘Don’t fix something that isn’t broken.’ You’re familiar with it. No?”

Churcher seethed, lifted the painting with both hands, and smashed it over the back of a chair. The canvas shredded. The frame splintered.

The four Russians flinched.

Deschin ducked to avoid a piece of the gilded wood that rocketed past his ear.

Churcher’s cold look said, It’s broken now!

Deschin settled and brushed flecks of paint and gold leaf from his jacket. “What do you want?” he asked in a tone intended to signify he’d had enough.

“The originals, of course,” Churcher replied. “All of them. As we agreed a long time ago.”

“Or?” Deschin prodded.

“Or — like I said, I’ll be forced to take steps to even out the ante in Geneva,” Churcher replied. “Of course, should I meet a sudden and suspicious end, the director of Central Intelligence will receive, under anonymous cover, a complete set of drawings and specifications for the Kira conversion. He should be able to figure out the rest from that. I know he will. We play golf. Jake Boulton’s a very bright fellow.”

“How?” Deschin asked coolly. “How did you get the package of drawings, Theo?”

“I spend a lot of time in your country, Aleksei,” he replied, thinking if Deschin was shaken he was hiding it well. “I have friends there.”

“The paintings will be a problem for me,” Deschin said flatly. “Though many works from the Hermitage and Pushkin have been shown in your country recently, I’ve managed to withold ‘your’s’ from those exhibitions. But eventually I’ll be forced to include them; and they’ll be exposed to scrutiny by international experts. So you see, Theo, we can’t very well give you the originals and send fakes. There’s no other way to resolve this?” he concluded, his tone now more pleading than demanding.

“The paintings were the only reason I got into this. You know that. There’s nothing else you people have that I want or can’t buy,” Churcher replied. “I mean, we have an agreement. And for years, more than twenty of them, I’ve kept up my end.” He’d become too hard, too emotional, he thought, and consciously shifted gears. “Look, I’m not here to rub your nose in it, Aleksei,” he said, his voice pained, that of a man not wanting to hurt a friend. “You have some problems? Take all the time you want, okay? Weeks, months, whatever. Long as when it’s all done, I come away with what I’ve been promised, just like you. Now, that’s fair, wouldn’t you say?”

Deschin nodded contritely. “More than fair,” he admitted. A section of torn canvas had come to rest on the table in front of him. He stubbed out his cigarette in the pigment, and shook his head in dismay. “I’m sorry, Theodor,” he said.

Gorodin knew what was coming now. They had discussed this over breakfast during the voyage from Cienfuegos. He tensed, preparing to move quickly when the signal was given, though what he was about to do was no longer to his taste. To his surprise, Uzykin signaled Beyalev instead. At that very instant, and by that simple gesture, Gorodin knew, to his delight, his days in Cuba would be over soon.

On the flick of Uzykin’s eye, Beyalev stepped forward, pulled the 9mm Kalishnikov from his shoulder holster, and brought the steel spine of the grip down hard onto the side of Churcher’s head, just above his left ear — all in one smooth, swift motion.

Textbook, Gorodin thought. His mind drifted back to his last kill — a puzzled young fellow in a hotel room six years ago. It was a covert assassination; what those in the trade, on the Soviet side, call a Mokrie Dela, literally, a “Wet Affair.” It had soured him terribly, and he was more than pleased to keep it his last. Often, in his sleep, Gorodin still heard the muffled crunch of Dick Nugent’s body when it landed on the concrete decking around the pool of the Americana Hotel that night in Miami.

Churcher remained conscious just long enough for his eyes to snap open in astonishment. Then, the expression fell from his face, and the chairman of the board of Churchco Industries slumped in Beyalev’s arms.

Deschin grimaced. Then nodded.

Gorodin took Churcher’s wallet and removed the electronic card key.

Beyalev lowered Churcher to the floor, and pressed the muzzle of the Kalishnikov to his temple.

“No!” Deschin exclaimed.

He and the captain moved with lightning speed. The captain got to Beyalev first and jammed his thumb behind the trigger, preventing him from pulling it.

“We agreed I would seek confirmation from Moscow should a kill appear necessary!” Deschin said to Uzykin sternly. As the bodyguard of a Politburo member, Uzykin clearly outranked his KGB colleague. “Call him off!” Deschin went on. “This decision must be made at the highest level — and with the Premier’s concurrence.”

Beyalev and the captain were still crouched over Churcher’s unconscious body, glaring at each other, hands locked about the Kalishnikov’s trigger assembly.

Uzykin nodded to Beyalev, indicating he had deferred to Deschin.

The captain eased somewhat, slowly removed his thumb from behind the trigger, and stood.

Beyalev holstered the weapon.

“Carry him forward,” the captain ordered. “We have procedures to efficiently dispose of him if Moscow so decides.”

The others moved to take Churcher’s body.

Deschin winced, averting his eyes, and headed down a passageway toward the communications bay.

Chapter Eleven

A wind-driven sleet slashed across Red Square into the unflinching faces of the elite Red Army Guard at sentry post no. 1—the entrance to Lenin’s Tomb.

Premier Kaparov had been on an emotional high since he and Deschin had revealed the existence of a Soviet missile base in the Western Hemisphere to his chief negotiator. Churcher’s threat to forward drawings of the Kira to the Americans, thereby alerting them to SLOW BURN, had plunged him to the depths of depression.

“He can’t be allowed to do this,” the Premier said bitterly.

Pykonen, Anatoly Chagin head of GRU, Sergei Tvardovskiy head of KGB, and two Politburo members representing the military — who were gathered around the table in the Premier’s office — nodded dutifully.

“Decades of hard work and excruciating tests of patience will be wasted,” Kaparov went on. “When I think of our efforts in Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Central America—” He paused, and shook his head despairingly. “For over twenty years those ventures have kept the enemies of the Soviet state chasing the elusive carrot of détente while the threat of cold war alternatives snapped at their heels, kept them busy while we established our position of nuclear superiority — and now, all for naught.”

“And needlessly so,” Tvardovskiy said. He was a loud, repulsive fellow with capped teeth. He knew the flecks of gold atop the worn incisors reinforced his ruthless image, and left them that way. “These eventualities should have been foreseen, and safeguards developed to deal with them,” he went on. He didn’t have to say GRU, and not KGB, had been entrusted with SLOW BURN’s security. “Who knows if the situation is even salvageable now?”

“I do,” Chagin said, with the icy stare of a paranoid stoic whose work fed his neuroses. GRU headquarters was its tabernacle. Vicious guard dogs patrolled the grounds. Attaché cases were prohibited inside. Chagin rarely left the windowless fortress.

While the Churchco dialysis machine cleansed Kaparov’s toxic blood, the group assessed the impact Churcher’s threat would have on the upcoming arms control negotiations if carried out. They groped desperately for a plan to counter it. But, as Kaparov feared, they found only one. The Premier left the meeting exhausted, clinging to the hope that Deschin’s rendezvous at sea with Churcher would be successful.

That evening, in the bedroom of an apartment a short walk down a corridor from his office in the Council of Ministers building, Premier Dmitri Kaparov lay next to his wife of fifty-three years.

The events of the previous twenty-four hours had severely drained him, but he couldn’t sleep. For hours, he had been staring at the shadows thrown across the ceiling from the lights in Red Square, thinking about SLOW BURN, and reflecting on its beginning, on those days when he and Aleksei Deschin were rising stars in the Intelligence and Cultural ministries — agencies that rarely interacted, save for the KGB’s chaperoning of creatively frustrated ballet stars.

However, early in the spring of 1960, the two young lions were unexpectedly drawn together. An American business entrepreneur with a passion for collecting art was the catalyst.

Theodor Churcher was in the Soviet Union on a business trip when he noticed the name Aleksei Deschin on a list of government appointments. They had worked together in the OSS during the war, and Churcher sought out the new deputy cultural minister. During a vodka-embellished reunion, replete with the telling of wartime stories, Churcher queried Deschin about the mother lode of Western art long exiled to the basements of Soviet museums. He expressed interest in quietly acquiring the masterpieces, and he would pay dearly for them — in hard American dollars. A currency which, both men knew, was highly prized by the Soviet government.

For Deschin, it was an exciting prospect. Who would have thought that a bureaucrat in a nonstrategic agency would be able to make such a tangible contribution to his government?

For Kaparov, the KGB “handling agent” assigned to oversee covert exchanges of paintings for cash, it was humdrum at best. Humdrum until, in a brilliant stroke, he saw the potential to alter history and, with Deschin’s assistance, hatched a bold plan.

Kaparov audaciously proposed that the government forego the much sought-after cash, and request another form of payment. One that he knew only this American could pay. An American who, Kaparov rightly suspected, wanted the artworks badly enough to pay it. Along with Deschin and Vladimir Semichastny, KGB Chief at the time, Kaparov sold the unorthodox idea to Premier Nikita Khrushchev, and SLOW BURN was born.

The terminally ill Premier’s recollection was marred by bitterness. He had planned that the position of unchallenged nuclear superiority would be his legacy to the Soviet people. And now he felt as if a knife had been suddenly thrust into him, with the cruelest timing imaginable. The long thin blade he visualized was slowly piercing his flesh when he heard the footsteps, the knock, and then the slow chatter of the hinge as the door opened, and his aide Vasily entered.

“Excuse me, Mr. Premier,” he whispered.

“It’s all right, Vasily. I’m awake.”

“Minister Deschin is on satellite hookup, sir,” Vasily said. “Shall I bring the phone to the bed?”

“No, no,” Kaparov replied softly. He knew what the call was about, and had been hoping it wouldn’t come. That would have meant a satisfactory agreement had been struck with Churcher. “I’ll take it in my office,” he said, thinking some decisions are not for the ears of one’s mate. He leaned across the pillow and kissed his wife on the forehead. “I will be back shortly, Pushka,” he whispered.

“Your robe, Dmitri,” she said, awakening. “Don’t forget your robe.”

“No, I will go stark naked,” he teased.

He pulled his stiffened body from the bed and slipped into his robe with Vasily’s assistance. He knotted the waist tie and stepped into his slippers.

Then, Dmitri Kaparov, General Secretary of the Communist party, Premier of the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Socialist Republics, the most powerful man in all of Russia, shuffled feebly to his office to decide whether Theodor Churcher would live or die.

Chapter Twelve

The Satellite Surveillance Group at the Naval Air Station in Pensacola is housed in K Building, at the far end of the ASW Forces Command complex.

On returning from the Foxtrot alert, Lieutenant Jon Lowell completed his watch and went directly to the heavily guarded and fenced structure. He took the steps two at a time, entered the nondescript lobby, and returned the salute of the Marine guard.

“Corporal,” he said, in the laconic tone military officers seem to use with subordinates.

“Morning, sir. How’re you today?” the poised youth replied.

“Fine thanks,” Lowell said. “Heading for the TSZ.”

This meant that Lowell sought access to the Top Secret Zone, where Anti Submarine Warfare, Satellite Surveillance, and Sound Surveillance System headquarters were housed.

The guard examined the ID badge clipped to the right breast pocket of Lowell’s uniform. The plastic-laminated card displayed the tactical coordinator’s name, rank, serial number, squadron, and photograph. He made a notation on a clipboard, then stepped aside — giving Lowell access to a pedestal-mounted keypad and monitor linked to the base’s personnel access computer.

Lowell entered his security clearance code.

The screen came alive with confirming data.

Seconds later, the steel door behind them slid open automatically.

“Go get ’em, sir,” the guard exhorted. He was referring to the fact that all K building personnel were involved in a continuing hunt for the enemy.

“Do my best,” Lowell replied, stepping through the doorway into the TSZ.

Minutes later, Lowell was in the photographic library, assembling the materials he needed to pursue his hunch about the Soviet submarine’s destination.

The walls of the room where Lowell was working were papered with photomurals of incredibly detailed, high resolution KH-11 satellite photographs. A linear network, designating latitude and longitude, was superimposed over each sat-pix, as was a pattern of tiny camera registration marks that resembled plus signs. In the lower right-hand corner, a data block spelled out date, time, navigational coordinates, satellite position, and security classification. All photographs displayed in this decorative manner had long been declassified.

By the time Lt. Commander Arnsbarger, the Viking’s pilot, arrived, Lowell was standing at one of the long library tables. The half dozen 18” × 24” sat-pix enlargements that he had requisitioned were spread out on the white formica surface. Lowell hunched intently over an illuminated magnifier, moving it slowly over the surface of one of the photographs.

“Well?” Arnsbarger challenged, removing his sunglasses. “Where do these Ruskie bozos go?”

“Lowell looked up and shook his head. “Nowhere,” he said quizzically.

Arnsbarger questioned him with a look.

Lowell gestured to the magnifier. “Be my guest.”

The big pilot leaned to the eyepiece. A silvery oblong shape, heading into the main ship channel from the Soviet naval base, was centered in the cross hairs of the illuminated rectangle. The Soviet captain and his first officer were clearly visible on the bridge.

“That’s our sub,” Lowell said. “By the way, if you look real close, you can see the captain’s got a pipe jammed in his mouth.”

Arnsbarger looked up and nodded. “Yeah,” he said expectantly.

Lowell pointed to the data block on the sat-pix. “Sailed from port, twenty-eight January at five-thirty. Okay?”

“I’m with you.”

Lowell slid a second sat-pix next to the first. He set the magnifier on it and centered the cross hairs on a similar oblong shape that was entering one of the long submarine slips in the Soviet base.

Arnsbarger leaned to the eyepiece again. “Looks like Captain ‘Pipesmoker,’ ” he said, still looking into the magnifier.

“Right. Same sub,” Lowell replied. “Returned to port, twenty-eight January at twenty-three forty-five hours,” he added, indicating the data block.

“Elapsed time, round-trip, seventeen hours fifteen minutes,” Arnsbarger calculated, straightening from the eyepiece.

“Right again,” Lowell said. “Figuring an average speed of twenty-five to thirty knots — nine hours out, nine back, and no drift time, the outer mark is—”

“Highly unlikely in that tub,” Arnsbarger interjected.

“That’s my point,” Lowell resumed. “The outer mark is within a two-hundred-fifty-mile radius of port.”

“Which is nowhere,” Arnsbarger said.

“Damn near,” Lowell said thoughtfully.

He moved a few steps down the table to where he had unrolled a chart of Gulf and Caribbean waters. A navigator’s drafting compass lay next to it. Arnsbarger watched intently as Lowell placed the pinpoint of the instrument at zero on the scale of nautical miles. He spun the adjustment wheel until the graphite point reached the two-hundred-fifty-mile mark. Then he placed the point of the compass at Cienfuegos and drew a scaled two-hundred-fifty-mile radius circle. The line cut through the Florida peninsula at Palm Beach and barely ticked Mexico’s Yucatan.

“Well, we know they didn’t torpedo the Boom-Boom Room at the Fountainbleu,” Arnsbarger cracked. “What about Cotoche or Cozumel here?” he asked, indicating the Yucatan area.

Lowell shook no emphatically. “I checked every pertinent sat-pix,” he replied. “The sub never showed in either port. Besides, considering the elapsed time, that’d really be stretching its range.”

Arnsbarger shrugged and studied the map. “Maybe the guys with the white powder meet ol’ Pipesmoker halfway,” he said facetiously.

“That’s what I’ve been thinking. Some kind of meeting.”

“With who?”

“Beat’s me.”

“Could just be a training run.”

Lowell grunted with uncertainty. “That’s what I’ve been telling myself till today,” he replied. “Twelve days,” he said incriminatingly. “It’s only been twelve days since we last tracked ’em.”

“Good point. Not a whole lot of time between runs; breaks the pattern,” Arnsbarger admitted. “Something to think about.”

Lowell smiled. “I have another one for you.” He tapped a finger on another sat-pix in front of Arnsbarger. “What’s that?” he challenged.

Arnsbarger slid the illuminated magnifier to where Lowell indicated and leaned to the eyepiece. “Tanker? Containerized carrier? Hard to tell for sure.” He shrugged. “Not exactly our area, bucko.”

“Yeah, I know,” Lowell said. “Just that digging through this stuff, I noticed that every time our sub makes one of these circuits, that ship’s docked in Cienfuegos exactly one week later without fail.” He turned his palms up. “Probably nothing.”

“Probably,” Arnsbarger echoed. “We have an acoustic signature on it?”

“Dunno,” Lowell replied.

“Might be worth a look-see,” Arnsbarger said. “If we get an ac-sig match off the hydrotapes, maybe we could identify it.”

“Yeah,” Lowell said.

Chapter Thirteen

Churcher was still unconscious when he hit the water. The cold slap in the face, the chilling of his entire body to 39 degrees Fahrenheit, snapped him awake.

He clawed at the water, fighting to pull himself upward. Fighting the sea, and the darkness. Fighting to stay alive.

He hadn’t any idea how far it was to the surface; nor any recollection of the men carrying his limp body and sliding it head-first into the greased tube, the clang of the steel hatch, the mechanical engaging of the breechblock, or the captain’s order to “Fire one!”

Those bastards! Those dirty fucking bastards! he thought.

He opened his mouth to scream.

Dark brine rushed in, pulling the tail of his necktie with it.

He couldn’t believe they had done this to him. True, he’d caught them trying to screw him. Put it to them pretty hard. But he gave them every chance and sufficient time to make things right. Had they just ignored his remark about the Kira? About the package of incriminating drawings that would now go to Boulton? Hollow threats weren’t his style. Deschin knew that.

The tie and the bitter water choked him.

His voice wailed inside his head. Christ, thirty fucking years of doing business with them, and it had come to this!

Churcher had known most of the members of the postwar Soviet hierarchy: Malenkov, Khrushchev, Kosygin, Gromyko, Dobryin, Chernenko, Brezhnev. Like him, they were self-made men who had an earthy integrity, the sons of farmers and factory workers who doggedly, shrewdly, and, yes, ruthlessly made it to the top. They played by the rules, breaking them only for the good of all the players — as they defined it. None of them would have allowed this to happen. None of them would have given the order to terminate Theodor Churcher.

But Kaparov had. Was it not sophisticated equipment manufactured by Churchco’s Medical Products Division, and quietly exported at no cost, that kept the jaundiced Premier alive for the last six months? The irony of it! Churcher couldn’t help thinking it was his own fault. He should have known better. Kaparov was KGB.

Churcher finally got hold of the necktie and yanked it from his mouth.

Bubbles pulsed from between his lips, trailing behind him in a rapid stream.

He pulled at the water. And kicked at it. And cursed it. And propelled himself up through it. And was beaten by it. Beaten by pain. Excruciating pain. The death rattle of dying cells ripped through him like a bullet fired in a steel box. It tore at his muscles and paralyzed his limbs. But his oxygen-starved body screamed to no avail. The few molecules of the precious gas that remained in his blood were already racing to his brain to keep it alive.

He began to hallucinate, and envisioned a macabre ratchet-toothed monster erupting from within his chest in an explosion of tissue, bone, and blood — and then, blinding strobelike flashes followed by nothingness. An eternity passed before the sight of tiny figures running out of the milky haze heartened him; children giggling as they scampered across the broad lawn of his estate, calling out, “Grandpa! Grandpa!” And as the bright, smiling faces came closer and closer, Churcher filled with pride, and bent to scoop them into his arms — but they ran right through him.

He had one fleeting moment of consciousness. I’m going to make it! he thought. Son of a bitch, I’m going to make it! He looked desperately for the glow which would signal he was nearing the surface.

But darkness prevailed.

His body continued rocketing upward, gaining momentum like an air-filled drum. Finally, it exploded into the sunlight and splashed into the sea, settling facedown, arms and legs askew in the way dead men float, and was carried off by the current.

The captain had brought the Foxtrot to the surface. An ordnance specialist stood next to him on the bridge shouldering an RPG-7 ground to ground mobile rocket launcher.

“Fire when ready,” the captain ordered calmly.

The ordnance specialist pressed his face to the eyepiece and squeezed the trigger.

The RPG-7 rocket came from the launcher with a deadly whoosh, and darted into the fuselage of Churcher’s helicopter.

A violent explosion erupted.

For an instant, a brilliant flash, yellow-orange at the center and framed by a purple-green halo that came from the chopper’s fuel expanded above the sea in silence. Then came the sound as the thundering fireball completely incinerated what a millisecond earlier had been a twelve-thousand-pound helicopter.

Pieces of the chopper spiked through the air in every direction. Long trajectories arced over the sea. Chunks of flaming debris plunged into the water, emitting puffs of steam.

The captain nodded to the ordnance specialist, then turned to the first officer and said, “Take her down.”

Deschin and the others were waiting below in the Foxtrot’s control room.

“It’s done,” the captain reported evenly, as he came off the ladder from the bridge, pushing his pipe between his teeth in a self-satisfied gesture.

Deschin nodded thoughtfully. “Shame,” he said. “Churcher should have listened to his board of directors.”

The others looked at him quizzically, as Deschin knew they would.

“He once told me they didn’t like him flying to the drilling platforms,” Deschin explained. “They were concerned one day he would crash.”

He said it coldly, without emotion, a simple statement of fact, and of what he had calculated would be perceived should the wreckage of the helicopter or Churcher’s body — without a bullet in it — be found.

The men gathered round him nodded smugly.

Deschin swept their faces with disapproving eyes. “He was a son of a bitch,” he said. “But he was my friend.” He turned and walked slowly from the control room, lighting a cigarette.

The Foxtrot was well below the surface when Churcher’s hand bumped into the piece of floating wreckage. He was semiconscious but could feel the smooth aluminum and instinctively crawled onto the large section of paneling from the chopper’s belly. The foamed plastic core had enough buoyancy to keep him afloat. He began coughing violently, and returned a chestful of water to the sea.

Chapter Fourteen

In the cemetery on the hill overlooking Christ Episcopal Church, a few mourners stood, heads bowed above scarf-wrapped necks, while the minister recited final words over Sarah Winslow’s coffin.

Melanie lingered as the group dispersed, and watched as her mother was lowered into ground frozen harder and deeper than the diggers could remember. She stood alone between the side-by-side graves of her parents, hoping that the minister was right — that at this very moment their souls were being joyously reunited — though she found it difficult to believe in a Hereafter for herself.

The doctor also remained. He moved forward from behind the flower-covered grave where he had been standing unobtrusively.

“Give you a lift?” he offered in a friendly voice.

“Thanks, no,” Melanie replied. “I think I’ll walk. It’s such a beautiful morning, and I—” she paused, and shrugged halfheartedly.

He nodded that he understood.

“I was with your mother,” the doctor said. “It was peaceful. She just fell asleep. Before she did, she asked me to make sure you got this.” He removed the envelope from his pocket and handed it to Melanie, adding, “It was her last conscious thought.”

Melanie accepted the envelope without looking at it, and smiled appreciatively. “Thanks again,” she said. “Thank you for being with her.”

She turned, and meandered down the narrow road, between the headstones, out of the cemetery, and past the white clapboard church that nestled in the snow-blanketed hills.

Moments from her years in this wholesome place came to mind while she walked — fleeting glimpses of eating homemade ice cream on summer nights in the lawn glider, galloping on her chestnut colt through fields of wildflowers, her parents glowing with pride when she danced at a school recital, the rush of passion with her first lover, the train station on the day she left home to audition for a dance company in New York.

She was crossing a field when the chirp of a foraging wren pulled her out of it, and she looked with some surprise at the envelope in her hand. Intrigued, she opened it, and began reading the letter her mother had written so long ago.

Melanie was stunned by the revelation. The words rang like a bell clapper that wouldn’t stop. She sat on the trunk of a fallen tree and read it again, and then again. And then, again, after she resumed walking. She didn’t feel the cold. She didn’t feel anything except an overwhelming loneliness.

A vague recollection of her mother’s face came to her, and as it sharpened Melanie saw Sarah’s cheerful countenance replaced by a rather queer, unsettled look. Her father’s brother had been the cause of it, she recalled. Uncle Wallace often joined them for Sunday dinner, and on one such occasion he kept remarking how much his ten-year-old niece resembled her father. And each time he said it, Sarah’s face took on the strange expression. It made Melanie uncomfortable at the time, and she purposely didn’t dwell on it. But it had stayed with her all these years, and now, she understood why.

She had turned into the drive, and was walking through the glade of pines toward the cottage when a gust of wind caught the envelope and scooped it from her grasp. It inflated, and sailed through the air — then, swooping down, danced, pinwheeling across the frozen snow. Melanie chased after it, the pages of the letter fluttering in her hand, her boots crunching through the hard skin of white between the trees. Almost within reach, the envelope suddenly sailed upward and snagged amidst the twigs of a bare hawthorn. Melanie slipped her hand between the branches and carefully picked the envelope from the thorns. Then, she sensed a presence and looked up.

What she saw only intensified her feelings of abandonment — that she had lost both her parents on the same day, one for the second time, and one forever.

There, framed between two mature maples, stood the stone cottage — the cottage she had always been so proud to say had been built by her father.

She approached it slowly and, after walking around it, sat crestfallen on the top step of the porch and read the letter again.

But what she was searching for with each reading wasn’t there to be found. It was cruel, she thought. Cruel and tormenting that this staggering revelation was incomplete — that neither the envelope nor the letter itself revealed the identity of the man who had never received it.

It had been an unusually mild winter in the Southwest. March was still a week away and buds were already sprouting on the tips of oak and aspen.

A few wind-stretched clouds hung in the sky as the Piper two-seater came out of the southwest, and made a slow banking turn low over the Churcher estate.

The man next to the pilot pulled a motor-driven, 35 mm camera to his eye and began taking photographs. He trained the telephoto lens on the grounds, on the surrounding approach and service roads, on the high walls, and on the museum entrance kiosk.

Below, in the study of the Chappell Hill mansion, Andrew Churcher and Ed McKendrick sat in opposite chairs, dwarfed by towering walls of books.

Neither reacted to the drone of the plane.

Andrew stared glumly at the phone on the desk. His father had been missing for three days, and Andrew had slept little. An overall numbness and sense of detachment had gradually set in.

McKendrick fidgeted, his mind wrestling with a decision he’d been hoping he wouldn’t have to make. But the mystery of Theodor Churcher’s disappearance grew as each day passed. And for reasons known only to McKendrick, he was feeling pressured by it. The time had come. He arched his back against the chair, got up, and went to the oak wall behind the desk. A Cezanne still life hung in the center panel. He swung aside the hinged frame, revealing a wall safe. His thick fingers grasped the combination dial and began twirling it.

“What’re you doing?” Andrew asked halfheartedly.

“Getting something,” McKendrick mumbled.

He realized he had been so preoccupied, he had forgotten about Andrew. McKendrick decided to proceed despite his presence. He finished the combination and brought the dial to a precise stop.

The tumblers clicked into position.

McKendrick turned the lever and pulled open the safe. A flat, square metal box was on a shelf by itself. He removed something from it, and returned the box to the safe, which he immediately closed and locked. Then slapping at the frame with an elbow, he sent the Cezanne swinging back into place with a thud.

McKendrick’s brow furrowed in concentration. He turned and crossed the room, flicking a plastic card that he had taken from the safe against his thumbnail.

“What’s that?” Andrew asked.

“Card key.”

“Yeah?”

“Match to your father’s.”

“Office, museum—”

McKendrick nodded, and said, “Something I’m supposed to do—” He paused thoughtfully and added, “But I’m not sure.”

Uncertainty, particularly admitting to it, Andrew thought, wasn’t at all like McKendrick. Even in his numbed state he sensed the weight of his dilemma.

“Do what?” he asked, getting out of the chair and crossing toward McKendrick with more vitality.

“Something — has to be — forwarded,” McKendrick replied, picking his words. “But only under certain circumstances.”

“Did I miss something?” Andrew asked suspiciously, “Or didn’t you just answer my question without telling me anything?”

“Your father didn’t want you involved,” McKendrick replied flatly. He turned away from Andrew, and slowly crossed the room in thought.

Andrew pursued him. “Christ, he’s been missing for three days. He’s probably dead. And you’ve got something to do that I can’t know about!” he said emotionally, wondering why his father’s confiding in McKendrick had never bothered him until now.

McKendrick stopped walking and turned to face him. “Take it easy, kid,” he said calmly, having heard the resentment in Andrew’s voice. “I don’t know about it either. I’ve got orders, that’s what I know. And before I carry them out, I’ve got to be positive your father’s dead and know the circumstances.”

“Why?” Andrew asked. “You’re still not telling me what I want to know, Ed.”

“He didn’t say why,” McKendrick replied. “Hell, I don’t know what to tell you.”

Suddenly, Andrew could hear his father’s voice—“Articulate. Articulate. Never expect someone to read your mind.” He took a moment to compose himself, then stepped around McKendrick to face him. “I have two questions, Ed, and I expect you to answer them,” he said in a controlled, businesslike tone.

McKendrick studied Andrew for a moment, gauging the change in him. “Okay,” he said, “shoot.”

“First, what has to be forwarded?” Andrew asked. “Second, to whom does it go?”

McKendrick considered it for a moment. “There’s a package in the museum,” he replied. “I have no idea what’s in it.”

“Yeah?” Andrew prodded impatiently.

“It goes to Boulton,” McKendrick replied, half wishing he hadn’t.

“Boulton? My father’s golf crony?” Andrew blurted, feeling foolish the instant he said it. He could already hear the bite in McKendrick’s tone.

“No, Boulton the CIA honch,” McKendrick snapped facetiously, not disappointing him. “It goes to the company, Drew, not the country club.” He paused and added sharply, “ ‘To be sent under anonymous cover in the event I croak under suspicious circumstances.’ That’s a quote, and it’s all I know.”

“Geezus,” Andrew exclaimed. He hadn’t anticipated the second half of McKendrick’s reply.

“My sentiments, exactly,” McKendrick said. He winced, thinking Churcher would ream his ass if he wasn’t dead and ever found out McKendrick told Andrew about the package.

The two men held a look. Andrew broke it off.

McKendrick fell into a chair, flicking the card key against his thumbnail.

The exchange had shaken Andrew from his lethargy. He paced anxiously and circled to the desk where he straightened the phone — as if adjusting its position might cause it to ring.

Prior to closing the book on his years in Cuba, GRU agent Valery Gorodin had one last task to carry out. The assignment came directly from the office of the Soviet premier. And Gorodin knew it was undoubtedly the most important of his career — the one that could put him back on the road to membership in nomenklatura.

For years, direct travel between Cuba and the United States had been indefinitely suspended. Gorodin had been routed through Mexico City, arriving there just after midnight. He spent the evening at the Soviet Embassy on Calzada Tacubaya, securing his cover.

This meant he had to become familiar with an elaborate new identity — personal history, career background, and reasons for travel — and he had barely eight hours to do it. Memorizing “the legend” was much like cramming for a final exam, and Gordin was a quick study; but using the cover biography, in the offhanded manner of a person who has lived it, was infinitely more difficult.

To sharpen Gorodin’s responses, GRU personnel who had been acting as his tutors became his interrogators. They grilled him for hours, asking the same questions repeatedly. They forced him into traps, discrepancies, and incriminating silences until the answers came automatically and seemed natural. It was the most intensive eight hours Gorodin had ever spent.

The following morning, a colleague led him into the bowels of the Embassy and introduced him to the “dry cleaner" — a network of tunnels that branches out from a basement storeroom, providing concealed access to surrounding streets and vice-versa.

“The Company keeps us under constant movements analysis,” the colleague warned. “They know about these tunnels, too; but the station chief doesn’t have the personnel to monitor each terminus round-the-clock. Let’s hope we picked one he’s not watching today.”

Gorodin hurried anxiously down the damp narrow passageway. It led to a rickety staircase that came up in an alley behind a bordello on Calle San Jacinta. Gorodin opened the door a crack and peered into the alley. An Embassy driver was waiting in a cab to take him to the airport. A bleary-eyed prostitute was leaning against the door, propositioning the driver. Hooker or CIA case officer? Gorodin wondered. He waited until the driver got rid of her, then pushed aside the sheet metal door and hurried to the taxi.

The second leg of his journey took Gorodin over the Mexican Gulf. The route reminded him that seven miles below, search and rescue teams were scouring the waters for Theodor Churcher and his helicopter.

The tires of Mexicana Airlines Flight 730 added their black stripes to runway 37N at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport twenty minutes ahead of schedule, and taxied to the terminal directly.

The time was 11:40 A.M. when the mechanized boarding ramp swung into position and bit into the side of the jet’s fuselage.

The passengers spilled into the customs area, gathering around baggage conveyors. A few with canyons proceeded directly to counters where uniformed United States customs agents waited.

Gorodin was in this group. Time was his adversary now, and he was pleased to have arrived early.

In sunglasses, white shirt, tie, and rumpled beige suit, he looked every bit the travel-weary businessman. But it had been years since he had operated in the field, alone and undercover.

A wave of apprehension broke over him as he approached the customs agent. His mouth turned to cotton. A wetness broke out behind his knees.

Gorodin fought to overcome his anxiety, and nonchalantly tossed his two-suiter onto the counter. He presented a bona fide French passport — one that had been surreptitiously procured, and then washed by GRU counterfeiters.

The customs agent, a skittish young woman with close-cropped hair, saw “Republique Francais” embossed in gold on the deep maroon cover. “Parlez vous, Anglaise, monsieur?” she asked haltingly.

“Mais oui, madame,” replied Gorodin. “When in Rome—” he added jovially in English. He was fully prepared to converse in fluent French but gladly accommodated her.

“Great,” she drawled, “because my French is—” she paused and waggled a hand, then opened his passport and matched face to photo.

“Where you coming from Mister — Coudray?” she asked, quickly adding, “I say that right?”

Gorodin nodded amiably, and leaned on the counter.

“Mexico City,” he replied.

“City of embarkation was Paris?”

Gorodin nodded again.

“And you’re going to?”

“Dallas, New York, Paris.”

“Business?”

“Oui, madame,” he replied, purposely slipping into French.

“Okay,” she drawled, tapping his bag. “Would you open that for me, please?”

Gorodin popped the latches of the two-suiter. His hands were sweaty, and his fingers left smudges on the chrome. He split the halves of the bag and dried his palms in his pockets.

The agent poked through the clothing, seemingly disinterested. But her eyes alertly recorded the labels of French manufacturers on most of the garments. She paused and fingered one curiously.

Gorodin’s heart quickened. His mind leapt to all the disastrous possibilities: Had the label been improperly sewn? Had he been given a shirt much too small for him? Had she spotted some silly oversight that had cast suspicion on him?

“Cardin. Great stuff,” she said. “Bought the same shirt for my husband. He loves it.” She smiled and flipped the bag closed.

Gorodin nodded, and felt somewhat relieved. He was thinking that the hours at the Embassy in Mexico City had been well spent when she made an offhanded observation that threatened to unnerve him. “Your accent, if you don’t mind me saying it,” she remarked, “sure doesn’t sound French.”

She’s right! Gorodin thought. Despite his language skills, the years in Cuba had imparted a decidedly Latin flavor to his English. Even his Russian had been slightly tainted.

“I am a Basque,” he replied proudly, as if he’d been saying it all his life. He snapped the latches on the suitcase closed, punctuating his reply.

The agent stamped his passport and returned it.

“Have a nice day, Mr. Coudray,” she said in a singsong cadence. Gorodin slipped the passport into a pocket, and forced a smile in response to her rhyme. Then, he slid his bag from the counter, and walked quickly into the long tunnel that led to the terminal.

There was a new confidence in Gorodin’s stride. Yes, yes, it was good to be back, he thought — back closer to the edge, thinking on his feet, winging it resourcefully. He was hurrying past a newsstand when he noticed headlines proclaiming—"CHURCHER STILL MISSING IN GULF.”

Outside, he threw his bag into a dusty Chevy wagon on the arrivals ramp and jumped in next to the GRU driver, a powerfully built young agent named Vanik.

The car pulled away immediately, heading south for U.S. 45, the arrow-straight freeway that connects Dallas, Houston, and Galveston.

The drive to Houston would take approximately four and one half hours. Gorodin would have preferred to fly. But no connecting flight meant no record of M. Coudray ever having gone to Houston. And Gorodin wanted this last task to be as clean as possible.

“Everything’s being arranged,” Vanik said.

“Good,” Gorodin replied. “We have to move fast.”

They spoke in Russian.

The long drive ended at an abandoned ranch in desolate country outside Houston. They immediately entered a ramshackle barn where a third man was painting a mobile cherry picker to resemble a Houston County Gas & Electric service truck. That evening Gorodin pored over the photographs of Churcher’s estate Vanik had taken from the Piper, and began solidifying the plan to break into the underground museum.

Chapter Fifteen

Dinh Tran Xuyen and his family lived in a steel Quonset hut, one of thousands of makeshift structures dotting the countless islands and estuaries along the Gulf coast of southeastern Louisiana where colonies of homesteaders had sprung up. Most were immigrant fishermen from Southeast Asia who found that the climate and ecological makeup of the area closely resembled the land they had left behind.

Dinh had come to the United States in the mid-seventies with the members of his family who’d survived the war. They started a fishing business and made a living netting menhaden — the yellow-finned members of the herring family which run in large schools in Gulf waters, and are more commonly known as bony fish.

But Dinh wasn’t fishing this night. The deck of his forty-two-foot trawler was piled high with discarded refrigerators, bathtubs, and assorted car parts as he headed out into the Gulf. Dinh, his brother-in-law, and their teenage sons ferried the junk into the Gulf and heaved it over the side, marking the spot with an inexpensive navigation device. The submerged Lorans unit emitted a radio signal that would guide them to precisely the same spot with their next load. Indeed, they weren’t scuttling junk, but rather building a reef on which vegetation and inert sea life that would attract fish would grow.

Dinh and his family were hoisting the dismantled carcass of a Volkswagen over the side when the fog bank suddenly shifted. The search-light of a cruising Coast Guard patrol boat pierced the darkness and found them.

“Shut down your engines and prepare to be boarded,” the captain barked over the loudspeaker.

Dinh flicked a look to the others and shook no sharply.

This had always been his fear, and he made a habit of working under the cover of darkness and fog to avoid it. Dumping wasn’t illegal — dumping without a permit was. And like most Gulf fisherman, Dinh didn’t file for one because the precise location of his reef would be marked on charts of local waters, an open invitation to poachers who’d rather fish someone else’s reef than build their own.

Dinh and the others quickly muscled the old VW over the side. The instant it hit the water, he punched the boat’s throttles home and headed for another fog bank about a mile away.

The cutter accelerated and pursued.

But Dinh’s boat disappeared in the dense haze before the cutter could catch it. The captain watched the blip on his radar screen, and decided the fog was too thick to continue pursuit safely.

Dinh kept his throttles to the wall to put as much water between the two vessels as possible. The boat had raced a few miles through the fog when Dinh spotted something dead ahead in the water. He turned the wheel hard, putting the boat into a sharp high-speed turn.

Thirty-six hours had passed since Churcher had climbed onto the piece of floating debris from his helicopter. He’d been carried northward by the South Equatorial current, finally catching the curling flow of the Mississippi River that spun him inland toward the Louisiana coast.

The sharply turning vessel sideswiped the piece of debris, knocking Churcher into the water. Then the stern whipped around right over him, and the propeller bit into his left arm, severing it just below the elbow. He was suffering from exposure and dehydration, and hovered on the edge of consciousness, but he let out a long, piercing scream nonetheless.

Dinh heard it and throttled back the engines, circling the boat while his brother-in-law panned a searchlight across the choppy surface. They quickly found Churcher and plucked him from the water.

Dinh reacted instinctively the instant he saw Churcher’s wound. After the bombings, booby traps, and napalm of the Vietnam War, this wasn’t the first severed limb he’d seen.

“Get the first-aid kit,” he shouted to one of his sons; then, turning to his brother-in-law, ordered, “Head for home, wide open!”

Dinh ripped open the plastic case his son brought from the cabin, removed a length of rubber tubing, tied it tightly around Churcher’s bicep, stemming the flow of blood; then went about bandaging the stump. All the while his brother-in-law had the boat at full throttle heading for the village where they lived.

It was close to midnight when the boat pulled up to a swaybacked dock built on angled stilts that marched into the placid Delta waters.

Dinh’s wife ran from the Quonset hut to greet them. She was stunned to see the two men lifting Churcher’s lifeless form out of the boat.

“What happened? Is he alive?” she asked as she helped them.

“Barely,” Dinh replied. “Propeller.”

“I’ll get the pickup,” she said, assuming they would take him to the hospital.

Apprehensive looks flicked between the two men. But there was no need for discussion. Neither wanted to deal with the authorities who would want to know where they were and what they were doing when the accident occurred.

“No!” Dinh shouted, grasping his wife’s arm to stop her. “Get Doctor Phan.”

Giang Phan had been a fully accredited physician in Vietnam, and served as a battlefield surgeon. The immigrant families trusted him. He knew their customs, spoke their language, and cared for them. But he had not yet been licensed to practice in Louisiana.

Churcher lay pale and unconscious on a mattress on the floor of the Quonset hut as Doctor Phan examined him.

“He’s lost a lot of blood,” the doctor said. “He needs a transfusion. He’ll die without it. And I don’t even have the equipment to type his blood, let alone access to supplies to replenish it.”

“We can’t take him to the hospital,” Dinh said forcefully. “We can’t. Besides, he might die there anyway. Just do your best.”

The doctor let out a weary breath. “I’ll need a dish or a plate,” he said to Dinh’s wife. “Line up over here,” he ordered the assembled group when she returned with it. Then, pricking the forefinger of each, he “field typed” Churcher’s blood — mixing samples from the potential donors with a drop of Churcher’s blood on the plate until he found one that blended smoothly and didn’t clump, which meant they were the same type.

A direct, donor-to-patient transfusion was made.

Then Dr. Phan turned his attention to Churcher’s crudely severed forearm. “I don’t know,” he said dismayed at the state of it. “I just don’t know.”

Chapter Sixteen

Four days had passed since Gisela Pomerantz rattled President Hilliard and Keating with her query about the Soviet Heron missile system.

Following the NATO luncheon, Keating and Hilliard discussed the subject in the limousine on the way to Capitol Hill. The President was scheduled to meet with auto industry leaders who had been pressing for import quotas, and he was in a testy mood. The three CEOs were averaging just under six million dollars a year, each, in compensation. For that kind of money, Hilliard thought, they should solve their own problems.

“Talk to me, Phil,” he ordered curtly.

“I don’t know what to say. According to the NIE, the Heron was tested, failed, and never deployed,” Keating replied, citing the National Intelligence Estimate, a top secret evaluation of the military and economic status of all foreign nations.

“When was all that?” the President shot back.

“Last test monitored — July of seventy-five. We’ve seen nothing of it since.”

“Not like the Russians to scrap an entire missile system, Phil,” Hilliard pressed. “I mean, I’ve waded through more NIEs than I can count. The bottom line is, they just can’t afford it.”

“Maybe they had no choice.”

“Come on, Phil,” Hilliard admonished.

“I know, I know. No maybes,” Keating responded defensively. “Where do we go from here?”

“Goose Jake,” Hilliard instructed. “It’s Langley’s responsibility. Set something up. Saturday. Oval office. Afternoon. Clear it with Cathleen.”

Now, President Hilliard and Chief Negotiator Keating sat in the Oval Office in the White House awaiting the arrival of Jake Boulton, director of Central Intelligence.

The President kicked back in his chair, put a foot against the desk, and propelled himself toward the window that overlooks the Rose Garden. When the chair stopped rolling, Hilliard swiveled, stood, and studied the bulletproof panes for a moment. The temperature outside was so cold that the inside surfaces of the five-and-one-half-inch-thick glass were lightly dusted with frost. Hilliard drew a face on one of the green-tinged panes with a fingertip — a circle for the head, three dots for the eyes and nose. He was about to draw the mouth when he took his finger from the glass and turned to Keating. “Before Jake gets here, run down the last couple of days for me, will you?”

“Well, it’s gone pretty much as we anticipated,” Keating replied. “All the NATO folks are eager as hell to get out of the deployment game, that’s for sure. But they want assurances. Thatcher still has daily antinuke marches in front of Ten Downing. Same for the Italian’s over the cruise installation in Sicily.”

“I know,” Hilliard said. “It’s been giving Minister Borsa grief since the day he approved it.”

“He’s been up against more than protestors lately.”

The President nodded knowingly. “I saw the antiterrorist memorandum. Far as I’m concerned, NATO can’t tighten the security screws enough. Anything else?”

“Well, the Belgians have been breathing easy since we’ve postponed. But they’re still terrified the talks’ll fail, and they’ll be forced to deploy. Ditto for the Norwegians, and Dutch who are both—”

“Pisses me off!” Hilliard exploded. “All these years, these damn heads of state have failed to sell the need for deployment to their people; the very people who put ’em in office to protect ’em! If we hadn’t been deploying all this time, where the hell would they be now?! I’ll tell you where — looking at a stockpile of Russian SS-20s planted throughout Eastern Europe with nothing in the West to force the Soviets to the table. No deterrent — no disarmament. Why is that so hard to understand?”

Keating shrugged.

The President shook his head from side to side despairingly and took a moment to settle himself. “Any problems?”

“A little wrinkle with the Swedes.”

“Oh?” Hilliard wondered, smoothing his beard.

“Seems they broke some KGB people who infiltrated their peace movement,” Keating responded. “Organizing rallies, pumping in money, the usual agit-prop stuff. The Swedish government wanted to declare ’em persona non grata, and boot ’em. But we convinced them this is not the time to embarrass Moscow.”

“Good going. Can’t say I blame them. They’ve had it with Russian subs plying their waters. What else?”

“Nicholson’s been kicking up a little dust. Nothing major.”

“Nicholson?” Hilliard responded, surprised. “Christ, sixty, sixty-five percent of his suggestions ended up in our disarmament package. Find me another former chief negotiator who’s had that kind of input in a succeeding administration. What’s his beef?” the President asked, feeling slighted.

“His book,” Keating replied, smiling.

“His book?”

Keating nodded. “I told him I’d mention it to you. Seems it was about to go to press and Boulton’s censors deleted half of it.” Keating let the sentence hang, heightening the President’s curiosity, then added, “For reasons of national security.”

Hilliard broke up with laughter. “Half of it?” he asked thoroughly amused.

Keating nodded again, and smiled.

“Those two have been banana peeling each other’s paths since Nixon was a choirboy,” Hilliard chortled. “Their battles on the golf course alone are—”

The intercom buzzed, interrupting him. He chuckled to himself and scooped up the phone.

“Yes? — Send him right in, Cathleen. Thanks.” Hilliard hung up, and said, “Jake.”

The door to the Oval Office swung open, and Jake Boulton, DCI, popped through it.

“Mr. President. Phil,” he said rapid-fire.

“Thanks for coming by, Jake,” Hilliard said. “What can you tell me about this damned Heron?”

“The SS-16A,” Boulton said crisply.

“Whatever the hell the numbers are,” the President said impatiently. “The one they supposedly tested and scrapped.”

“Right,” Boulton said, “the SS-16A. NATO code name Heron after the ornithological species of waterfowl. Initially developed for submarine launch. Design goal — solve chronic, unacceptable guidance system performance.” The data came from Boulton in clipped, high-pitched bursts.

“What was its problem?” Hilliard asked.

“Best we can determine—” Boulton began.

Hilliard and Keating exchanged glances.

“—the Heron took its namesake too seriously,” Boulton went on. “The bird is a patient, tenacious hunter. It waits unmoving for hours, locks onto prey the instant it appears, and — whammo — the target never gets away.”

“And the missile?” the President prodded.

“No powers of discretion,” Boulton replied. “It locked onto everything and anything. Tendency acutely manifested over water where distracting targets are isolated and clearly defined. Ships, rowboats, buoys, metallic debris, a floating beer can, in one instance, even a fellow missile, and whammo!” He made a diving motion with his hand. “Problem magnified as range increased.”

“So it was never deployed, right?” Hilliard asked.

“Right. NIE confirms,” Boulton replied smartly.

“Is that an — absolutely right? Or an — as best we can determine right?” the President jibed.

This stopped Boulton. He hesitated briefly, feeling suddenly unprepared. “The second, sir,” he replied with diminished fervor, anticipating the President’s reaction.

“Well, what the hell does that mean, Jake?” Hilliard pressed. “That we have doubts? I mean, how the hell can we start horse-trading with the Russians in Geneva next week if we aren’t positive we know about every system they’ve deployed?”

The President got up out of his chair, almost charged out of it.

“The concept of negotiating is based on total, total knowledge of the other side’s arsenal, dammit!” he continued heatedly. “YOU know that, Jake! Geezus, I’ve got Phil here massaging the hell out of the NATO people, convincing them we’re on solid ground; and before he even gets into it, the Germans drop the Heron right in our laps!”

“Fortunately,” Keating interjected, “it was handled privately, and Pomerantz has agreed to keep it that way until we can get a fix on the facts.”

“But if we can’t, Jake,” the President said, still charged up, “and she drops that tidbit on the other NATO representatives—” he let the sentence trail off, emphasizing the gravity of the situation. “And who would blame her?” he added. Then lowering his voice but maintaining his intensity, he said, “There’s no way we can back out of the talks now. None. Not after pushing so hard for them. Even a stall would be unacceptable. It’s tightrope time — no matter which way we fall we get screwed.”

He moved around the desk, and approached Boulton.

“I want this, Jake. I want it badly,” the President said with obsessive fervor.

“Yes, sir. I know,” Boulton replied contritely.

“Good,” Hilliard said. “Now, these talks are going to go on for months. Use the time. Juice your people. Fine tune your antenna. Wind up a couple of dozen more spooks and turn ’em loose. The Heron may be a dead duck, but — as best we can determine, just doesn’t cut it. I want to close the loop on this, Jake. Top of the shopping list!”

“Our prime KIQ, Mr. President,” Boulton said, smarting, but knowing Hilliard was right. This was a key intelligence requirement if ever there was one.

He did a crisp about-face and headed for the door.

“Jake?” Hilliard called out.

Boulton stopped on a dime and turned. “Sir?”

“Do me a favor, Jake,” the President said. “Ask your boys to back off Nicholson, will you?”

“Nicholson?” Boulton broke into a boyishly innocent smile. “I’m not aware of a problem there.”

“Glad to hear it,” the President said. He knew Boulton’s answer was his way of indicating he’d take care of it, without admitting it was necessary.

Boulton exited the Oval Office thinking about the round of golf he and Theodor Churcher had played at Eagle Rock a few months earlier. The solid thwack of driver against ball blasted thoughts of The Heron, and Nicholson, from his mind as he pictured his old friend’s perfect swing that the DCI had long envied.

Churcher had always been a hell of an athlete Boulton recalled — a physical fitness maniac forty years before it had become fashionable. They had run cross-country together at Rice in the late thirties. And it was Churcher who, though totally exhausted and near collapse, would dig down inside himself and prevail through sheer will and determination. They had been close all their adult lives, and Churcher’s disappearance at sea had unsettled the DCI. He blew past the President’s secretary without even a nod.

The President waited until the door had closed behind the DCI. “I’d say he got the message.”

Keating nodded.

“Brief Pomerantz,” the President said. He turned to the window. The face he had drawn earlier on the frosted pane was still visible. He put his fingertip to the glass, and drew a hard, straight line for a mouth. “And make sure she stays zipped.”

“You realize that directly contradicts your last order,” Keating said with a lascivious smile.

The President burned him with a look. “Dammit, Phil!” he replied. “This is no time for jokes. The whole thing could blow up in our faces. And there’s too much at stake to let that happen!”

Keating nodded contritely, and left.

The President angrily spun his chair and strode from the office. He had a half hour before a National Security meeting, and he knew just how he’d spend it.

“Arlington, sir?” Cathleen asked, sensing his mood.

Hilliard nodded tensely.

Cathleen called the White House garage.

The President had lost his temper, and it bothered him — not because he’d blasted Keating unjustly, but because whenever the frustrations became that overwhelming, Jim Hilliard knew he’d lost his perspective. A walk through the National Cemetery always helped him regain it.

A light rain was falling as the stretched Lincoln proceeded up Memorial Drive.

President Hilliard got out and, declining raincoat and umbrella, walked alone amidst the identical limestone slabs that marched over the undulating terrain to every horizon.

Secret Service personnel followed on foot, maintaining a respectful distance.

The President paused solemnly at one of the water-stained headstones, and bent to straighten the small bouquet of violets that lay beneath the inscription which read:

Janet Hilliard had never served in the military, but she had died in the service of her country.

And these were the times the President missed her most — when he needed to confide his fears and cope with his frustrations. And at these times, he would relive that tragic day in Chicago.

The Hilliards had just arrived in his hometown to kick off the campaign for his second term. Jim Hilliard was an extremely popular president. But the latest national polls had shown an unexpected surge for his opponent. And the President and his wife found the tumultuous crowds at O’Hare heartening.

They were acknowledging the cheers when the Secret Service agent saw the swift movement in the crowd, the sudden thrust of hands forward, and the deadly glint of blued metal. He dove at the President, knocking him to the ground an instant before the first sharp crack.

Janet Hilliard was standing directly behind her husband. The action that saved his life exposed her to the assassin’s fire. Not for long. Perhaps an eyeblink or two passed before another Secret Service agent had bear hugged her to the ground. But the pistol had kept firing throughout that immeasurable interlude. And Janet Hilliard had been mortally wounded.

The President won the close election that followed.

And voices on the Hill soon began whispering that the tragedy, not his record, was his edge.

The President didn’t like it; but he was enough of a realist to acknowledge that maybe, just maybe, they were right. And he privately dedicated his second term to his wife’s memory, and made arms control his number one priority so that nations wouldn’t one day do to each other what a crazed American did to Janet Hilliard. Nuclear disarmament was to be her legacy, not his, and it was being endangered.

Chapter Seventeen

On an autopsy table in Forensic Center, the Harris County coroner’s offices on Old Spanish Trail near the Astrodome, a man’s hand, the skin bleached to an opalescent gray, stuck out from beneath a shroud. The highly reflective surfaces intensified the light, which placed an eerie, surrealistic emphasis on details.

The time was 11:22 A.M., Sunday.

Doctor Tom Almquist, M.E., observed as a Houston Police Department fingerprint specialist took the hand and rolled each of the swollen fingers first across an inked pad, then across a preprinted record card.

When finished, he studied the prints, and nodded to Almquist, pleased. “Better than I expected. A couple of them are real clean. Floaters can be a bitch.”

The officer packed his equipment and left, taking the prints with him.

Almquist, a rotund black man with a bushy moustache and patient eyes, thought for a moment, then pulled the green shroud from the table and set it aside. A lower left arm, severed just below the elbow, was all that lay on the cold stainless top. Almquist hovered above the limb, studying the ragged stump.

Shredded tissue, ligaments, tendons, muscle, and blood vessels mushroomed around the crudely snapped radius and ulna bones of the forearm.

Almquist tore the wrapper from a disposable scalpel and leaned to the table. He placed the laser-honed blade on the inside of the forearm and pulled it the entire length, continuing down the wrist, palm, and center of the middle finger to the tip, splaying the tissue. Then, carefully excising the flexor carpi and the extending sheath of muscles beneath, he revealed the radial artery, and went about removing it and the branching digital vessels of the hand and finger — a lengthy, tedious process.

Almquist spent the afternoon completing the procedure and running laboratory tests on the tissue sections and blood samples he’d prepared for analysis.

One result had surprised and baffled him. He ran the test again with the same result, which prompted him to call Houston Chief of Police Hedley Coughlan.

Now, Coughlan, a well-groomed man in a knife-creased suit, was rapping a knuckle on the glass partition to get Almquist’s attention.

Almquist pulled the green shroud over his work and, peeling off his surgical gloves, entered an anteroom joining Coughlan, Andrew Churcher, and Ed McKendrick.

While Coughlan made the introductions, Andrew fought a fast-rising nausea brought on by the odor of cold flesh, chemical disinfectant, and death that had followed Almquist into the room — an odor that Andrew Churcher would never forget.

Coughlan noticed, and wrapped an arm around the young man’s shoulders. “You all right, son?” he asked compassionately.

Andrew nodded and swallowed hard.

“I’m real sorry about this,” Coughlan continued in a paternal tone. “Your father and I — well, you know how close we were, Drew. What-ever I can do.”

“Thanks,” Andrew said, regaining his composure. “Do we know what happened, Hed?” he asked.

Coughlan lifted a shoulder in a half shrug.

“We do and we don’t,” he replied. “At first, we figured his chopper went into the drink, but now—”

“Wait a minute,” McKendrick interrupted. He was glad Andrew had asked the question; he didn’t want to appear overly concerned with how Churcher had died, but it was important he know. “You have Mr. Churcher’s corpse out there, but don’t know what happened to him?”

Almquist and Coughlan exchanged uneasy looks.

Coughlan sucked it up. “We have a—piece of him,” he said. “A small piece. Part of an arm.”

When he called Andrew earlier, Coughlan said there had been a development, but avoided the details. These weren’t the kind he covered on the phone.

McKendrick winced at Coughlan’s answer.

Andrew felt bile rising in the back of his throat.

Coughlan pressed on, to get past the moment. “Way it lays out,” he began in as professional a tone as he could muster, “yesterday afternoon, on a beach in Louisiana, some kids spotted an arm floating in the surf and notified authorities. The Louisiana State Police fished out that severed limb. There was a watch still in place on the wrist. Turned out to be a Rolex.”

Coughlan produced a plastic evidence bag, opened it, and removed the watch.

“As you may know,” he resumed, “Rolex watches are collector’s items. Each has a registration number with the name of the owner on file. The LSP contacted the Rolex corporation, and were informed" — Coughlan paused, and grasped an evidence tag affixed to the watch—“that number 28900371 was registered to one Theodor Scoville Churcher of Houston, Texas. That’s when they called us.”

Andrew stared at the precisely machined luxury timepiece Coughlan held. It was his father distilled to his essence, he thought.

“We had the limb and watch airfreighted in this morning,” Coughlan resumed. “Checked fingerprints first thing, just to be certain. A match beyond any doubt,” he added emphatically. “Then, Tom began his work-up. That’s when the flags started popping.”

“We’re looking at a number of confusing discoveries here,” Almquist said, taking over. “The dismemberment for one. It could’ve happened in a crash. That’s what we thought after talking to the LSP. But this isn’t the pathology we usually see. Impact dismemberment most often occurs at joints, not between them as in this case. Shark attack’s a possibility. Boat propeller’s a third. We think he might have been alive when it happened because very little blood remained in the limb. In a corpse, it would’ve been congealed, and not spilled from veins and arteries so readily. Nevertheless, the pressure of the watchband around the wrist trapped enough blood in the vessels of the hand for me to run some tests.”

Almquist paused, and turned to a table behind him to get something.

Andrew was feeling detached, almost as if he was standing outside himself watching through the glass of the anteroom. He had heard Almquist’s and Coughlan’s words, and had formed appropriately bizarre images in his mind. But the full force of their meaning had yet to register.

Almquist turned back to the three men with a printout he’d slipped from a file on the table.

“This is a computer-generated profile of blood gases,” he resumed. “This line here represents nitrogen — an unusually high percentage of nitrogen. And that’s what really puzzles me. The only way this happens is via—”

“Rapid underwater ascent from great depth,” McKendrick interjected. “I dive,” he added in explanation.

Almquist nodded. “Right. Commonly called ‘the bends.’ This percentage isn’t necessarily fatal, but there’s no other explanation for its presence. I treated a number of cases in the Navy during the war — mostly frogmen in trouble who came up too fast.”

“Doesn’t make sense,” McKendrick said.

“I agree,” Almquist replied. “I’m just telling you what I found.”

“We were hoping one of you might shed some light on it,” Chief Coughlan said. “Any idea what your father was doing out there that might have put him a couple of hundred feet beneath the surface?”

Andrew thought, shrugged, and shook his head in bafflement.

“Ed?” Coughlan prodded, turning to McKendrick.

“Beats me, Chief,” McKendrick replied.

“Not too many ways of getting down there,” Coughlan said, thinking out loud.

“What about the chopper?” Andrew inquired. “Maybe it crashed and sank, trapping my father inside. By the time he got out, he was a couple of hundred feet down.”

“We thought about that,” Coughlan replied, nodding. “It’s a possibility, but the chopper would’ve busted up pretty good on impact, and if not, flotation gear would’ve kept her afloat.” He paused thoughtfully, then resumed, “Which leaves deep-sea gear — scuba, submarine, and cement booties, so to speak.”

“What’re you getting at, Hed?” Andrew asked. “You’re confusing me.”

“Sorry, son, not my intention,” Coughlan replied. “Just exploring ideas. I mean, anything out of the ordinary happen lately? Anything of an unusual nature come to your attention. Anything? Anything at all?”

“I come up with a big zero on that one Chief,” McKendrick shrugged. “Nothing.”

Coughlan swung a look to Andrew, “Drew?”

Andrew shrugged.

“He didn’t go riding that morning,” he replied. “Usually does.”

Coughlan nodded, turned, and paced thoughtfully.

Almquist returned the printout to the file.

Andrew took advantage of their preoccupation to catch McKendrick’s eye, and mouthed — Boulton?

McKendrick’s eyes widened as if he’d been goosed with a cattle prod, and the vein in his neck was popping. He checked his outrage and shook no sharply.

Andrew shrugged, chastised.

Coughlan turned back to Andrew, took his hand, and placed the Rolex in his palm.

“Hang onto it, son,” he said.

Andrew stared at the watch forlornly. Then he raised his eyes apprehensively to the glass partition and the shroud-covered limb beyond. It all hit him at once: the odor, the place, the circumstances, the knowledge his father was dead, that under the shroud lay a piece of him — a piece of him! His father’s arm torn from his body!

He felt as if he’d been kicked in the groin. The indescribable hollowness spread excruciatingly through his bowels up into his abdomen. He swallowed hard, turned to a sink nearby, and vomited.

At approximately the same time in Chappell Hill, a maintenance truck with Harris County Gas and Electric markings was bouncing over ruts in the service road that ran outside the northeast wall of the Churcher estate. The truck came through a turn and slowed to a stop next to one of the power poles that marched in an unbroken line to the horizon.

The beam of a flashlight came from within the cab and found a marker on the pole that read, “NE263.”

Valery Gorodin clicked off the flashlight and got out of the truck.

Two fellow GRU operatives followed. Vanik, who had picked up Gorodin in Dallas, carried a metal toolbox.

Gorodin climbed up behind the cab and into the bucket of the cherry picker. He activated the hydraulic controls and swung the bucket off the spine of the truck, lowering it to the ground.

Vanik handed Gorodin the toolbox and climbed into the bucket with him. Both wore black jumpsuits and watch caps. The third — dressed in traditional lineman’s attire, hard hat, and equipment belt — went to another control panel on the truck. He would take over the operation of the bucket should it become necessary.

The stone wall was twelve feet high. Eight inches above the top of it, an electronic surveillance beam projected horizontally between abutments.

Gorodin maneuvered the bucket upward until it was hovering above the wall. Then he skillfully bent the arm of the cherry picker in an inverted V, maneuvering the bucket toward the ground on the opposite side. The trick was to keep the apex of the triangle — formed by the arms of the articulated boom — centered over the top of the wall. One jerky move, one over-correction and the ungainly apparatus would break the surveillance beam, sending an alarm to security central dispatch and triggering an armed response.

Finally, the bucket settled silently onto hard-packed soil on the estate side of the wall.

Gorodin and Vanik climbed out with their equipment. The museum entrance kiosk was far across the grounds. They moved cautiously in the darkness through a grove of aspen, and hurried toward it.

Gorodin’s stomach butterflied pleasantly as they reached the kiosk. He had the electronic card key that he’d taken from Churcher’s wallet on the Foxtrot. He inserted it into the reader next to the elevator.

The doors rolled open.

The alarm system in the museum deactivated.

Gorodin leaned into the elevator cautiously, looking for signs of surveillance devices. Satisfied the elevator was clean, as he had expected, he entered.

Vanik followed.

The elevator closed and descended, taking the two Soviet agents into the museum below.

McKendrick’s Corvette screeched up the ramp in the parking garage beneath Forensic Center.

McKendrick spun the wheel right and glanced sideways to Andrew next to him. “Feel better now?” he asked, in a sharp tone devoid of compassion.

Andrew slumped in the low seat of the Corvette and nodded automatically.

“Good,” McKendrick replied, “because I’m really pissed off.” The vein in his neck was popping again.

“What?” Andrew asked, baffled.

“You almost blew it in there!”

The car came up onto the street.

McKendrick flicked on the headlights, slammed the transmission into second, and turned west into Old Spanish Trail, heading for the South Loop.

“What’re you talking about?” Andrew snapped, pushing into a more upright position.

“Boulton? The package in the museum!” McKendrick taunted angrily. “I knew I should’ve never told you about them!”

“Back off me,” Andrew said. “I didn’t say anything. But I probably should have.” He felt like a child unjustly accused of snitching, and squirmed in the seat.

“No fucking way!” McKendrick exploded. “If your old man wanted anyone to know he was connected to that package, he would’ve said so! You think he told me, ‘under anonymous cover,’ just for the hell of it? He didn’t even want Boulton to know!”

“Okay, okay, you have a point,” Andrew said defensively. “But something’s not right here, dammit! I felt it the minute he didn’t show up at the stables that morning.”

“Shouldn’t have said that to Coughlan, either,” McKendrick shot back.

“Why not?” Andrew asked, without sounding argumentative.

“Cause I figure you’re right,” McKendrick replied less vociferously. “Something weird’s going on. If you’re smart, you’ll forget it. Your old man’s dead. Nothing’s going to change that.”

“Forget it?” Andrew exclaimed. “You heard Coughlan. You know my father didn’t do any diving. That leaves subs and cement booties, and I don’t like the sound of either!”

“Tough!” McKendrick snapped. “It was his life, he lived it his way. Whatever he was into, he knew it was hardball, that’s for sure.”

“Come on, Ed,” Andrew pleaded. “We’ve gotta do something. We just can’t—”

“No! I’ve gotta do something!” McKendrick interrupted angrily.

“The package—” Andrew said flatly.

McKendrick ignored him and downshifted.

“Ed,” Andrew pressed.

McKendrick tightened his lips, and stomped the gas pedal to the floor.

The Corvette laid down a patch of rubber and took off. Its taillights left a red smear in the darkness.

Andrew lurched backwards, pinned to the seat by the sudden acceleration.

The car rocketed into the on-ramp of the 610 Freeway. By the time it hit the traffic lanes it was doing well over a hundred.

In the underground museum on the Churcher estate, Vanik was crouching in front of a storage room door, positioning a device made of precisely machined stainless steel parts over the lock.

This door and five others — four of which Vanik had already opened — led to climate-controlled rooms where paintings not hung in the galleries were stored. The doors were arranged in a semicircle, and opened onto an atrium from which the galleries fanned out.

Gorodin exited the adjacent storage room.

Vanik questioned him with a look.

Gorodin shook no, disgusted. “Not in there, either,” he replied in Russian.

“Two more to go,” Vanik said, discouraged. “Maybe Comrade Deschin was wrong. Maybe the package is in the mansion or offices downtown?”

“No.” Gorodin said flatly. “Minister Deschin knew Churcher for over thirty years. They were very close. He was positive something this sensitive and important to Churcher would be kept here. Get on with it. We’re wasting time,” he added impatiently.

Vanik shrugged and returned his attention to the device that he had positioned on the door. He grasped the handle — a long, one-inch-diameter stainless dowel — and spun it. Three mechanical jaws tighted on the edges of the lock’s hardened steel faceplate. Additional turns of the handle drove a super-hardened steel drillbit into the keyhole, then gradually retracted it, tearing the lock assembly from the door.

Vanik removed the device and set it aside. Next, he inserted a machined crank-handle into the jagged opening. He engaged the now exposed inner locking mechanism, and rolled back the four dead bolts that penetrated two inches into the metal frame on both sides of the door.

Gorodin pulled it open, reached inside, flipped on the lights, and entered the storage room.

Like the other storage rooms, this one was lined with parallel racks filled with canvases. A long work table with large, flat steel file drawers beneath, took up the center of the space.

Gorodin went to the drawers, opening them bottom to top, searching as he went, and not taking the time to close them. Once certain the package of documents wasn’t in the drawers, he crossed to the racks of paintings, and began flipping through the canvases.

In one rack, The New York School — a Rothko, a Klein, a large Pollock, two Rauschenbergs, a Warhol, and three de Koonings. In the next, Impressionists — three prize Tahitian Gauguins, two Monets, Matisse’s “Chambre Rouge,” four Lautrec lithographs, Van Gogh’s “Prison Courtyard,” and a Degas. In the third rack, Renaissance masters — a da Vinci, a Raphael, a Titian, a Giorgione, two Botticellis, four Michelangelo drawings, and a Veronese. In the fourth, a massive Courbet by itself. The fifth was filled with over a dozen Picassos. The sixth contained, Russians — three Kandinskys, a Pevsner, three Malevich sketches, and a Chagall, and then, two more Chagalls. These last two canvases were exactly the same size, and stored back-to-back in a tight-fitting clear plastic sleeve — the only works stored in this manner.

Thus intrigued, Gorodin pulled them from the rack and carried them to the worktable.

The flamboyant oils were two of many Chagall had painted in Russia for the Jewish Theater in 1920. At the time, he had already spent four years in Paris, returning to his homeland just prior to the Bolshevik uprisings to court his long-time fiancée. He was made commisar of art for his home city of Vitebsk, where he founded an art school. Its students, like the master who taught them, produced works diametrically opposed to the state-approved Social Realism. And in 1923, Chagall’s style was challenged by the new regime.

“Don’t ask me why… a calf is visible in the cow’s belly. Let Marx, if he’s so wise, come to life and explain it to you,” Chagall replied. He and his bride left Russia soon after, never to return.

Now, sixty-three years after Chagall painted them, GRU agent Valery Gorodin held the two masterpieces that had never been exhibited in Russia or the West. He slipped the back-to-back canvases from the plastic sleeve, and in the space between them found what he was after.

The package was a sealed, nine-by-twelve-inch waterproof mailer. It contained six engineering drawings of the VLCC Kira. The thirty-by-forty-inch blueprints had been folded four times in each dimension and fit neatly into the mailer which was devoid of markings and return address. The typing on the plain white stick-on label read:

Gorodin wasn’t an aficionado, but he knew Chagall was an expatriat Russian Jew. He smiled appreciatively at Churcher’s selection of a hiding place, took the package, and quickly left the storage room.

The red Corvette swung into the short approach road that led to the Churcher estate.

McKendrick depressed the button of the remote control unit clipped to the car’s visor.

The ornate entrance gates rolled back.

The Corvette rocketed between them without slowing, and accelerated up the cobbled drive. In thirty seconds the car had circled the mansion, crossed to the far side of the grounds, and nosed to a fast stop in front of the stables.

Andrew opened the door and got out.

McKendrick leaned across the transmission hump. “Package can’t be shipped from Texas,” he said. “I’ll be gone at least a day. Don’t talk to anybody.”

Andrew grunted and slammed the door.

The Corvette rocketed off into the night.

Andrew watched for a moment. He felt isolated. The way he did as a teenager after he’d tangled with his father who would bring down a steel door in his mind, shutting him out. Andrew stuffed his hands into the pockets of his jacket, crossed to the stables, and climbed the outside staircase to his quarters above.

Across the grounds, the Corvette came over a rise and pulled to a stop adjacent to the museum kiosk.

McKendrick got out of the car, and walked briskly beneath the kiosk’s intricate steel-and-glass roof toward the elevator.

He took the duplicate electronic card key from his wallet, and was about to insert it into the reader. His eyes darted to the status light. It was red, not green, indicating the elevator was in the down position — someone was in the museum. Had to be. McKendrick was turning toward the security phone on the opposite side of the kiosk when he heard the elevator door rolling open.

Gorodin and Vanik appeared in front of him. They froze for an instant, startled by McKendrick’s presence, then bolted past him and ran into the darkness.

McKendrick took off after them. He had no idea who they were, but he’d seen the package under Gorodin’s arm, and knew he had to get it back.

The chase led toward the grove of aspen.

Gorodin was in the lead, already short of breath, and hanging onto the package. He was really back now, he thought. It was typical that the task had gone so well, only to be compromised at the last moment. He envisioned Beyalev smiling snidely on learning he’d been caught, and ran even faster.

Vanik was a few steps behind struggling with the toolbox, glancing back at their pursuer who was gaining.

McKendrick’s massive arms and legs were churning, his chest heaving. In a burst of speed, he launched his 240 pounds through the air, diving past Vanik for Gorodin who had the package. The ground came up fast and hard as McKendrick landed just short of his target. His hands clawed at Gorodin’s ankles as they slipped from his grasp. He had stopped many touchdowns in South Bend with that kind of tackle, but that was twenty years ago and he could see what he was doing.

Vanik got tangled in McKendrick’s legs and went down, the toolbox crashing to the ground with him.

Both men scrambled to their feet.

McKendrick marshalled all the power in his weight lifter’s body and fired a punch toward Vanik’s head, intending to take him out with a single devastating blow and go after Gorodin.

Vanik put the toolbox in front of his face.

McKendrick’s fist smashed into the steel surface. The bones in his hand shattered in a muffled crunch. He recoiled, howling in pain.

Vanik raised the toolbox overhead, and heaved it at McKendrick. It bashed him square in the chest, knocking him to the ground.

McKendrick shoved it aside to get up.

Vanik dove at him, slamming a forearm into his throat and a knee into his groin as he landed.

McKendrick gasped, his body arched against the pain. Vanik’s fingers clawed at his neck, and vise-locked around it, thumbs crushing his windpipe from both sides, brutally. McKendrick fought to tear them from his throat, but Vanik’s strong, expertly trained hands continued strangling him, and he knew he had only a few seconds of consciousness left. He expanded the powerful muscles in his neck and caught a breath, then brought his fists up explosively between Vanik’s arms, and slammed them into the underside of his jaw.

Vanik bellowed as the tandem blows landed. The force sent him reeling backwards off McKendrick onto the ground.

The impact on McKendrick’s broken hand sent shock waves rocketing up his arm. He got to his feet, despite the pain, and was searching the darkness for Gorodin when Vanik lunged into his legs from behind, knocking him to the ground again.

The two men rolled, and came up grappling at each other’s clothing, fighting, clawing to get a handhold, any advantage.

McKendrick’s right hand was useless. He exploded from down low, and blasted a left into Vanik’s stomach. The punch landed with such force, McKendrick’s fist penetrated the triangle beneath his adversary’s rib cage to the wrist.

Vanik made a disgusting, wretching sound and doubled over in agony.

McKendrick lunged forward, grabbed a handful of his hair, and brutally smashed a knee up into his face.

Vanik’s head snapped backward. Blood was spurting from his nostrils and mouth. He tumbled end over end, arms and legs flailing, and landed in a lifeless heap a distance away.

McKendrick turned to where he last saw Gorodin.

The sharp crack of a gunshot rang out.

McKendrick straightened suddenly, and spun to his left holding his shoulder. A burning sensation exploded across his chest. The searing pain shot up the side of his neck and out the top of his head. He staggered forward, realizing in his zeal to retrieve the package he had made a fatal error; he had never considered the men were armed, though to assume it had been drilled into him in the military and had paid off in Asian jungles. Wasn’t he the platoon leader who warned his men, “Unchecked emotion is an enemy sniper!” Hadn’t he once sternly lectured a friend who had chased a burglar instead of calling police? Didn’t he always caution others to—

Another sharp crack rocked the night.

McKendrick saw the blue-orange flash in the blackness at the very instant the bullet ripped into his flesh. He lurched with a yelp. His left leg buckled under him. He dropped where he stood. Blood gushed in spurts from a hole in his thigh.

Valery Gorodin holstered his weapon, a Smith and Wesson magnum supplied by the GRU in Houston, knowing he had waited much too long before using it. The movement of the combatants, the darkness, the difficulty of getting a clean shot would suffice to explain. But Gorodin knew the truth to be different as he hurried to his downed colleague. “Is it bad?” he asked in Russian, the extreme circumstances causing him to slip into his native tongue.

“Nyet, nyet.” Vanik lied, through a broken jaw. He pushed up into a sitting position with Gorodin’s help, and shook his head trying to clear it.

McKendrick was lying in the grass nearby, the blood draining out of him while his nostrils filled with the smell of cordite. The brief exchange in Russian between the two GRU operatives was the last thing he heard before losing consciousness.

Gorodin dragged Vanik to his feet and, hefting the toolbox and the valuable package, led his battered colleague across the grounds.

Andrew couldn’t hear the sounds of the fight in his quarters above the stables. But the sharp gunshots penetrated the stone walls. He was sitting on the bed pulling off a boot when the first crack made him flinch. The second confirmed what he thought he had just heard. He slammed his foot back into the scuffed leather and ran for the door, pausing to take a rifle from a rack next to it.

Andrew came onto the landing at the top of the outside staircase. It took a few moments for his eyes to adjust to the darkness and pick up the two figures running through the grove of aspen a distance across the grounds. He came down the steps, two, three at a time, ran past the stables, along the pasture fences in pursuit, and was cutting across the path that led from the mansion to the museum when his boot hit something slippery. His legs went out from under him. He fell to the ground, and slid through a patch of wet grass. The rifle flew out of his hand, vanishing in the darkness. He came to a stop, smeared head to toe with a viscous substance that tasted sweet on his lips. McKendrick was moaning nearby. Andrew scrambled to his feet, cleaning his face on his sleeve, and hurried toward the sound. McKendrick was lying facedown in the grass when he found him.

“Ed? Ed?” Andrew called out, shaking him a few times before accepting that he was unconscious.

McKendrick’s face was pale and battered. His right pants leg was soaked with blood. The crimson syrup poured out the cuff onto the ground in a steady stream, adding to a rapidly expanding pool.

To his horror, Andrew realized it was McKendrick’s blood seeping into the grass that had caused him to slip, and that now covered him. Shaken by the sheer volume of the spill, he grasped the bottom of McKendrick’s pants leg and ripped the seam to the hip.

Gorodin’s second shot had ricocheted off the thigh bone, nicked the femoral artery, and lodged in the mass of muscle and tissue directly behind it.

Andrew pressed his palm over the pulsing fountain that splattered him, temporarily stemming the flow. It was obvious McKendrick needed immediate paramedic attention. But, equally obvious, he would bleed to death while Andrew was summoning them. He quickly removed his belt, wrapped it around McKendrick’s thigh above the wound, and pulled it tight. The blood kept coming. He pulled tighter, and tighter still, and pushed the prong of the buckle through one of the holes in the leather to hold the pressure.

The flow subsided slightly. But the highly developed muscles of McKendrick’s thigh, which was the size of Andrew’s waist, were preventing the artery from compressing. It wasn’t nearly enough. At this rate, McKendrick would bleed to death in three minutes instead of two.

The thought of McKendrick dying with him right there, helpless to do anything, plunged Andrew into momentary panic. He fought off the sensation and forced himself to think. McKendrick’s left hand was underneath his torso. Andrew pulled it free, bent up the thumb, and jammed it into the bullet hole in his flesh like a cork.

The bleeding stopped.

But within seconds, Andrew could feel pressure building behind it. Lubricated with blood, McKendrick’s thumb would pop out soon after he left to seek help. Andrew forced it as far into the wound as it would go, held it there with his knee, and removed his belt from McKendrick’s thigh. He rebuckled it around both thigh and wrist, securing the makeshift plug.

Then, Andrew ran like hell to the stables where there was a phone.

Chapter Eighteen

After the funeral, Melanie had taken long walks through the New Hampshire countryside trying to sort things out, trying to cope with the knowledge that someone other than her father was her father — a man without a name, a name she sought desperately.

She spent hours in the cottage looking for it; she searched the attic, every room and closet, and she rummaged through boxes, trunks, suitcases, and drawers.

There had to be something, she thought — another letter, or a note, or a document — something that would provide a clue to the man’s identity and help her find him. Indeed, her mother’s death had made Melanie all the more aware of her own age. She was barely, but undeniably, on the wrong side of forty — bored with her work, afraid of emotional involvement, confused by her lack of direction, and she hoped that a relationship with her real father, getting to know what he was like, might give her a better understanding of herself and, perhaps, might also help explain her unstable relationships with men.

But Melanie’s obsessive search, and the various memorabilia it had unearthed, only drained and frustrated her. The name wasn’t there to be found.

The only other link to the past was in plain sight in her mother’s bedroom. Melanie was standing in the doorway looking at the desk by the window, imagining Sarah — young, vivacious, “glad to be alive”— sitting there writing the letter, when she saw the WWII photograph. She correctly assumed that the attractive man, possessively hugging her mother’s waist, was her real father, and she sat at the dresser studying his face. Her initial excitement gave way to a strange hesitancy. A few uneasy moments passed before she overcame it and stole a sideways glance at the mirror. Then, looking straight into it, she began comparing her face to his. Slowly, tentatively, she brought her hands to her forehead and ran the tips of her fingers over her expressively arched brows, across the bridge of her nose, down along the sides of it, then, tracing the upward cant of her eyes to the delicately emerging lines at the corners, moved out onto her pronounced cheekbones and into the hollows beyond, almost as if examining each feature to prove that what she saw in the picture, and in the mirror, was actually there. Indeed, the resemblance was strong and undeniable. The planes of her face were unquestionably his.

Though satisfying, the discovery only fueled her desire to know more, which made her angry. Angry at her mother. Angry that she hadn’t confided in her. Angry that she couldn’t! Angry at being denied the conversation that would have answered her questions. And finally, angry at herself on remembering the times her mother called wanting to chat, and she was too busy or uninterested and put her off; the times her mother urged her to come home for the weekend, and she had chosen to remain in the city. Maybe one of those times, she thought, maybe all of them, her mother had been searching for a way to utter that first sentence, after which the dam would have burst, and the rest would have come in a flood of unshared memories.

Melanie stared at her face in the stained mirror, watching her anger turn to regret. She removed the photograph from the frame and put it in her purse, along with the letter and envelope.

She spent the rest of the weekend in Dunbarton and, on Monday, took the afternoon train to Penn Station. It was 10:47 P.M. when she got out of a cab in front of her building on Gramercy Park in New York City. The glow of streetlights crept around the edges of the trees, and sent shadows from the cast-iron fence stretching across the pavement. A cold, blustery wind was blowing, as it was the morning she left, and she found the continuity reassuring. She put a hip into the taxi’s door to close it, and hurried toward her apartment, still coping with the emotional upheaval caused by her mother’s death and incredible letter.

She was physically and emotionally exhausted when she entered her loft. The air had a chill, and the windows were rattling in their frames. She flipped on the lights, dropped her suitcase to the floor, and locked the two deadbolts, affixing the safety chain automatically. The circular stair to the sleeping balcony seemed endless. She tossed her down-filled coat on the bed, kicked off her boots, and crossed toward the bathroom to shower.

The blinking red light on the answering machine, which indicated there were messages, caught her eye.

She stepped to the phone in her dancer’s duckwalk, rewound the tape, depressed the play button, and turned back toward the bathroom.

Her mother’s voice stopped her in her tracks like a gunshot. “Hello, hon, it’s me,” Sarah said from the answering machine in her feeble rasp. “I’m not feeling real well tonight. Actually, I’m feeling awful.”

Melanie was stunned. A chill ran through her, and for the briefest instant she reacted as if her mother were still alive, making a mental note to return the call. Then she realized that the morning the doctor called, she left for New Hampshire without checking messages from the previous night; the night she had spent with Tim? Tom? Whomever.

“I’m leaving you a letter honey,” Sarah’s voice went on. “You’ll be shocked when you read it. I apologize, and I hope you’ll forgive me.” The words came in hurried phrases separated by Sarah’s labored breathing. “Something else you should know,” she resumed. “Something that’s not in the letter. It won’t mean much to you now, but it will after you read it. There’s a lot more I want to say, but I’m very tired, Mel. So, just remember the name Deschin — Aleksei Deschin.” She repeated it, then spelled it out, adding, “And always remember I love you. Bye.”

Melanie’s heart pounded in her chest — pounded so hard she could hear it. She buzzed with elation. Then she thought to herself, I love you, too, Mother.

Chapter Nineteen

More than a week had passed.

In Geneva, Switzerland, U.S. Disarmament Negotiator Philip Keating and his staff had taken up residence at Maison de Saussure, just off Route de Lausanne on Lake Geneva. The eighteenth-century mansion was designed by French architect Francoise Blondel who, in the early seventeen hundreds, designed the ancillary buildings of Versailles. The magnificent estate was a short drive from the United Nations Palace in Ariana Park in the north end of the city where the talks would be held.

Keating checked in twice daily with President Hilliard — the question of the Soviet Heron missile still unresolved.

Most of the fifteen NATO representatives, Gisela Pomerantz among them, and their retinues had arrived.

An international pool of media correspondents had followed. They were headquartered just off Avenue De Ferney in the International Conference Center, from where official briefings would be issued.

Soviet Negotiator Mikhail Pykonen had arrived from Moscow fresh from a meeting with Premier Kaparov and Minister of Culture Aleksei Deschin. Pykonen was secure in the knowledge that Theodor Churcher’s threat to inform the Americans about SLOW BURN, the secret missile base, had been thwarted. And he was fully confident of leaving Geneva with a world-dominating, first strike nuclear advantage for his country.

The week had been filled with formal dinners, inaugural ceremonies, and an official meeting of the two superpower negotiators.

The trading off of nuclear hardware, the bargaining of warhead for warhead, the retreat from Armageddon, or so Phil Keating thought, was about to begin.

Six days ago, after the meeting in the Oval Office during which the President had caught him unprepared on the status of the Soviet Heron missile, Jake Boulton had gone directly to Langley. His hide was still smarting from the President’s lashing when he met with his DDO and DDI and other top members of his staff in the French Room, his private conference area, and did some lashing of his own. Soon after he had finished, the agency issued a KIQ directive which when decoded read:

In Pensacola, Florida, Navy Lieutenant Jon Lowell, along with all other ASW personnel with top secret security clearances, had signed off on the KIQ directive within twelve hours of it being issued. But none had any reason to think it significant.

Lowell spent his off-duty hours in K building’s TSZ organizing a data search for the tanker he had spotted on the sat-pix. The one that always appeared in Cienfuegos harbor a week after he and Arnsbarger tracked the Soviet Foxtrot in their Viking.

From the photos, Lowell established at what hour the ship had arrived in port, then worked backwards to determine approximately when it had sailed through the network of hydrophones ringing the Soviet Naval Base. This narrowed the search to eleven hydrophone tapes that covered the one-hour-forty-eight-minute window he had established.

Now he faced the task of determining which of the many acoustic signatures on the tapes was the target ship. He had no idea that the one he was after belonged to a tanker of Liberian registry named — the Kira.

In New York City, there was not a single Deschin, Aleksei or otherwise, listed in the massive telephone directory which was the first place Melanie Winslow had gone after hearing her mother’s voice on the answering machine.

She took the rest of the week off, and spent the time on the telephone and in the library.

In the Genealogy Department at the Main Branch of the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street she learned that the name Deschin probably had Eastern European roots. And that it was most likely an amalgamation of two other names which might have been “Desznev” and “Chinova.”

Her numerous calls to the Pentagon in search of information about a World War II special operative in Italy, code-named Gillette Blue, were met with paranoid evasiveness, bureaucratic buck-passing, and wisecracks. Even the name Aleksei Deschin elicited uncomprehending silences. Indeed, there are ninety members on the Soviet Council of Ministers and four hundred on the Central Committee. Their names are not the sort of information Pentagon clerks assigned to WWII archives commit to memory. Nor from the information Melanie supplied did the clerks have any reason to connect the name to the Soviet Union, or the upper echelons of its government. Indeed, as one said, “I’d love to help you lady, but for all I know Aleksei Deschin’s jockeying a cab in Newark.”

Driven by an inborn human force, an unquenchable need to know herself, to know those people who had given her life, the need that has seen fortunes and lifetimes spent searching, Melanie became determined to find her real father if at all possible.

Her only solid lead — that Aleksei Deschin had attended the University of Rome prior to the war — came from her mother’s letter.

It had been years since she had taken a vacation, and almost five since she had lived in Paris with the French journalist who had been her second husband. Obtaining a month’s leave from the dance company, she fetched her passport from a safety deposit box, turned a chunk of her savings into traveler’s checks, and started packing.

In Glen Cove, New York, a seaside community on Long Island’s North Shore about twenty-five miles east of Manhattan, Valery Gorodin had spent the week at the Soviet estate on Dosoris Lane.

The forty-nine-room Georgian-style mansion sits on thirty-six heavily treed and fenced acres. Built in 1912 by George Pratt — son of the founder of Pratt Institute, the world-famous art school—“Killenworth” was purchased in 1948 by the Soviets as a weekend retreat for their United Nations personnel.

But located dead center between the commercial and financial centers of Manhattan and the aerospace defense industries on Long Island, Killenworth quickly became a prime Soviet COMINT installation. The acronym stands for communications intelligence, and the space beneath the mansion’s slate roof that once quartered servants now concealed electronic surveillance gear and personnel dedicated to intercepting the high volume of sensitive, and often top secret, transmissions that traverse the corridor.

Upon arrival, Gorodin gave the package of Kira drawings to a waiting courier for immediate transfer via diplomatic pouch to Deschin in Moscow. Debriefing sessions followed, after which Gorodin swam and played gorodky, a popular Soviet club sport which colleagues teased bore his name. Many offered congratulations on his success in Houston. Nevertheless, between sets of gorodky, one GRU colleague who had been involved in the debriefing probed at a nerve he had sensed was exposed.

“Dangerous to leave a live witness, Valery,” he remarked.

“It was dark. They were struggling,” Gorodin replied nonchalantly, repeating the litany he had recited earlier. “I couldn’t get a clear shot.”

“Never known you to do that before,” the fellow said. He turned from Gorodin before he could reply, and began positioning the gorodkys — wooden cylinders the size of bowling pins — within a white outlined square. The object of the game is to clear the square of cylinders with a single throw of the bita, a striped stick the length of a cane. The colleague finished, handed the bita to Gorodin, and nodded challengingly.

Gorodin saw that the cylinders stood in a nearly impossible pattern. He sensed he had to clear them with one throw to end discussion of leaving a live witness. The throw-line was thirty feet from the “city,” as the square is called. He positioned his toe against it, reared back, and hurled the bita toward the cylinders.

It whistled through the air like a boomerang, the stripes blurring in concentric rings, and slammed into the three cylinders on the left. Then it kicked across clearing the center and headed for the wall beyond, leaving one standing. But, as Gorodin had intended, his throw had such force, the striped bita ricocheted off the wall and came back through the city, taking out the last cylinder with a loud thwack.

He swung a victorious steely-eyed look to his colleague. Despite the run-in with McKendrick which blemished the purity of it, Gorodin immensely enjoyed operating in the field again. He was eager for more, and wanted to remove any suspicion that he was unfit.

His evenings had been spent with young Russian women who staff Soviet installations around the world for such purposes. The Kremlin’s spymasters encouraged these liaisons to eliminate incidental social contacts. This lessened the chance that an agent might fall into a honey trap — a sexual relationship set by a rival intelligence group which then blackmails the target to do its bidding.

Gorodin found the State-supplied trysts to be sexually extreme, and satisfying. But they left him emotionally empty.

While at Killenworth, he speculated he would be posted to Moscow or perhaps his home city of Kazan, approximately eight hundred kilometers east of the capital on the Volga. He was pleasantly surprised by the nature of his next assignment. He’d never been to Rome, and looked forward to using his Italian.

In a Quonset hut in southeastern Louisiana, Theodor Churcher lay on his back in the dark. He had no idea where he was. For a moment, he thought he was dead. But the pain that wracked his body insisted otherwise. The fingers of his left hand tingled and itched incessantly, but he had no left hand. He stared panic-stricken at the bandaged stump, trying to reconcile the discrepancy, and prayed what he saw was part of an enduring nightmare.

Doctor Phan and Dinh’s family observed Churcher’s survival with trepidation, concerned he might make trouble for them upon recovering.

But even in his weakened state, once Churcher’s mind started working again, it started calculating, and he quickly dispelled their fears. He was pleased the authorities hadn’t been notified. The world, and more importantly the Russians, thought he was dead, and he’d keep it that way for now.

“You keep my secret,” Churcher said to Dinh, “and I’ll keep yours — under one condition. Soon as I’m well enough to leave here, I want you to go to Houston and fetch somebody for me.”

In Houston, Ed McKendrick had been barely alive when the paramedics arrived at the Churcher estate that night. But they had started pumping plasma into him immediately, and six hours of surgery later, his heart was still beating powerfully and his brain waves were peaking evenly; he had survived.

He had spent most of the time in intensive care at the city’s renowned Medical Center.

Andrew had been to see him a number of times, but today was the first day McKendrick felt strong enough to carry on a conversation of any duration. He was staring blankly at the television over his bed when Andrew entered.

“Hey, Drew,” he said, brightening. His face was bruised, fist encased in plaster, shoulder and thigh heavily bandaged; an IV stabbed into his forearm.

“Come to stick your thumb up my ass again?”

“That was your thumb,” Andrew replied. “You’re too big an asshole for mine.”

McKendrick laughed heartily.

Andrew was pleased that McKendrick was his raunchy self again.

“They’re torturing me, son,” he rumbled, gesturing to the TV. “That thing’s on twenty-four-hours-a-day. Christ, I’ve been sentenced to death by Phil Donahue.” McKendrick took the remote control and clicked off the television. “Thanks, kid,” he said, suddenly stone-faced serious. “Thanks a lot for what you did.”

Andrew nodded, and smiled self-consciously. Compliments and expressions of gratitude always embarrassed him. He never knew how to respond.

“I’ve been watching the boob tube all week,” McKendrick said. “Nothing new on your old man.”

Andrew nodded. “Coughlan called the other night,” Andrew said. “He told me some debris from the chopper had washed up east of Gal-veston. The FAA’s running tests. It sounds like it busted up pretty good. He had nothing new on my father either.”

Andrew’s eyes saddened and fell, momentarily.

“Bastards got away with the package,” McKendrick said, purposely breaking the silence.

Andrew nodded grimly, and said, “I looked for it.”

“But you didn’t—” McKendrick prompted, letting it die out when he saw Andrew understood.

“Not a word to anyone,” Andrew replied crisply. “If I’d found it, I would’ve sent it to Boulton.”

“Way to go,” McKendrick said.

“I told Coughlan the truth — we came back to the estate, spotted intruders on the grounds, and idiots that we were, we chased them,” Andrew explained. “I didn’t mention the museum. Couldn’t. I didn’t know about the break-in until I went looking for the package. Nobody’s been down there since that night but me.”

McKendrick pursed his lips, impressed. “Got it figured out yet?” he asked, teasing.

“Partly,” Andrew replied.

His tone left no doubt he was serious. McKendrick’s brows raised in curiosity. He inclined his head toward the door. Andrew reached back and closed it quietly.

“Talk to me,” McKendrick said.

“Well, I spent some time poking around the museum,” Andrew began. “Sure are a hell of a lot of paintings down there. The rest of the world thinks about half of them are in Russian museums,” he added suspiciously.

“No shit?” McKendrick snorted, intrigued.

“Yeah. Gauguin’s ‘Are You Jealous?’ was the tip-off,” he said. “It’s a beaut. Strong patterns, bright colors, two Tahitian girls, naked of course. Your kind of stuff. I saw it at the Pushkin when I was in Moscow with my father. A few hours of research in our library is all it took to confirm the rest were from there or the Hermitage. Any idea how he got hold of them?”

McKendrick lifted his good shoulder in a shrug. “Hell, he’s been doing business over there for years,” he replied. “Who knows?”

“After everything that’s happened,” Andrew said, “it’s the kind of business I’m wondering about.”

“Where’re you headed?”

“Well — Churchco’s into all kinds of high tech stuff. Stuff that’s illegal to export. And—”

“Stuff the Russians are working twenty-four-hours-a-day to get their hands on,” McKendrick interjected, warming to the idea. “Interesting theory.”

Andrew shrugged, feeling disloyal to his father for suggesting it. “It just occurred to me that the paintings could induce that kind of cooperation,” he replied defensively. “I mean, art’s always been my father’s passion. Money would be the last thing that would tempt him,” he explained, adding, “Just an idea.”

“You’ve got a wicked mind, son. I like it.”

“Hey, you’re the one who said something weird was going on,” Andrew retorted. “My father said, ‘send that package to Boulton, to the CIA if I croak mysteriously.’ The coroner said, ‘rapid ascent from a great depth, possibly a submarine.’ ” He shrugged and shifted gears, feeling the need to supply a more positive explanation. “Maybe he was working on something with Boulton. They were in the OSS together during the war. I don’t know. What’s it matter, anyway?” he asked, suddenly aware of the futility.

“What’re you going to do next?” McKendrick asked.

“Go to Rome — sell Arabians, I guess,” Andrew replied, unenthused and somewhat evasively.

“You guess?” McKendrick prodded.

“Nothing I can do here. You said it yourself, he’s gone. Besides, nothing would frost my father more than knowing I was moping around doing nothing.”

McKendrick nodded in agreement. “Going to Moscow and Tersk, too,” he asked slyly.

Andrew nodded resolutely.

“Horse-trading, huh?”

Andrew’s lips tightened in a thin smile. “Mostly.”

McKendrick grinned. “You’re okay, kid. But watch your ass,” he said sharply. “Those two pansies I beat the shit out of last week—?” His inflection rose, and he paused.

Andrew chuckled and nodded, deciding he actually liked the crude fellow.

McKendrick smiled cryptically. “They were Russians — professionals.”

Andrew looked at him squarely and said, “Figured that.”