The Berlin Target

Two

The bus ride was just under two hours. They both checked into the Soucha Workers' Recreation Center at a little past noon. Carter into the men's section, Ludmilla into the women's.

Carter thought there was some degree of irony in that, considering the very passionate lovemaking they had shared the night before. He thought it, but made a mental note to say nothing. That morning, before they had left separately for the bus that would take them south, Ludmilla had been cool and businesslike.

"When we arrive, do nothing out of the ordinary. Check in, unpack, and go about having a good time on the beach."

"Do you suppose it's all right if we have a chance meeting on the beach?"

She thought for a moment, and then nodded. "I should think so. This time of the year it will probably be a rather wild and drunken crowd. No one will remember seeing us together."

The bachelor cubicle he was assigned was spare but clean and contained all the essentials, and he shared a bath with only three other men. It wasn't exactly Club Med, he thought drily.

Doing as he was instructed, Carter unpacked and headed for the dining room. It was the lunch hour, and everyone else had the same idea. He got a plate of sandwiches and a large mug of beer, and escaped the screaming children by moving into the communal lounge.

Modem sofas and chairs were grouped around glass-and-chrome tables under a large chandelier with small bright bulbs of clear glass. Along one wall a glistening Telefunken console blared a mixture of sad Russian music, rock'n'roll, and American pop songs from the 1940s and 50s.

Ludmilla sat with two women on one of the sofas, picking at food from a lap tray. The two women, one at each of her ears, chattered incessantly. One was a dumpy, matronly sort of about fifty, with a sharp expression in hard eyes glinting behind unflattering glasses. She shoveled food from the tray into her mouth as if she hadn't eaten since childhood. The other was tall, with a reed-thin body, pinched features, and severely cut hair.

Carter started to move toward them, but a warning look from Ludmilla's eyes stopped him. He moved away and found a window table for one.

When she got up to leave, her lips silently formed the words Beach, one hour.

Carter killed a half hour reading propaganda like a good party worker, then returned to his cubicle. He donned trunks, pulled on a sweat shirt to cover his scarred upper torso, took one of the issue towels, and hit the beach.

He baked, wiling away another half hour without looking for her. He figured she would find him. And she did.

She was working her way down the beach in a state of constant flirtation. And she had a lot to flirt with in the process.

She wore a scarlet cloth twisted around her head, turban fashion, and a scarlet knit top so tight-fitting that every hint of a curve on her sleek figure was shown to maximum effect. The sweater was high at the neck, and the sleeves stopped just above the elbows. She had slender, browned arms, her delicately shaped hands tipped with scarlet nail polish. The bikini bottom barely covered the essentials and left her long, tapering legs nicely bare to ogle.

It was a good gimmick. Every twenty-or-so yards, a single man jumped up to walk a few feet with her. None of them scored, but it fit for Carter to do the same when she hit his space.

"May I buy you a drink, comrade?"

"Nyet, comrade, but I would like a cigarette," she said with fluttering eyelashes and glossy lips.

He shook one from his pack, and they both cupped their hands over the match and her lips.

"We go early," she whispered.

"Why?"

"One of Kokolev's people got a message to me. They are checking out of the dacha at midnight. They have ordered a car.

"Then the woman has the information she wants."

"It would seem so. Eight o'clock, same place."

"Did Kokolev find out who the woman is?"

"Yes. The name isn't familiar to me… it's Anna Palmitkov." Her eyes darted up long enough to see the startled and then grim look on Carter's face. "You know her?"

"I know her."

"Eight o'clock," Ludmilla said, and walked away without questioning his sudden change of mood.

Carter flopped back on his towel and shielded the sun from his eyes with dark glasses and a forearm.

Ah, yes, he knew Anna Palmitkov. She was good, very good, a specialist on Germany. She had gone deep cover into Berlin several times. One of those times, Carter had gone up against her and her agent lover of the moment.

Carter had gotten the agent lover, but not Anna Palmitkov. In fact, the jagged, purplish scar that ran from his breastbone down to his right hip had been Anna's gift to him that time in Berlin.

No, he would never forget Anna Palmitkov.

A slight smile curved his lips as he relaxed and let the sun warm him.

It promised to be an interesting and exciting evening.

They checked out bicycles from the recreation pool fifteen minutes apart, and left the camp in separate directions. At precisely seven, they met again several miles down the beach.

"Anyone following?"

"No, I'm positive," Carter growled.

"Very well. I will lead."

Ludmilla led the way down to a lane that ran along the beach between the sand and the cliffs. Another two miles and she stopped. They hid the bicycles among the rocks and began to climb. Halfway up, she slipped into the mouth of a cave that Carter would have missed had he been alone.

"Back here!" came a guttural voice.

Carter stumbled after her, and then a hand grasped his. He was pulled into a low, cell-like stone room, and a candle was lit.

"Congratulations, you have arrived," Kokolev said, attempting the first bit of humor Carter had seen evidenced by the man.

"Where are we?" Carter asked.

"Three kilometers west of the compound line, and we will have to swim at least two kilometers out to sea in order to avoid the security nets. Here!"

Before pulling on the wet suit. Carter passed his papers to Ludmilla. She would change the photos, and Kokolev himself would ride the second bicycle back to the workers' compound and spend the night there as Mikhail Assalov.

Kokolev had already donned his own wet suit, the one that Boris Simonov would evidently wear. He had a silenced 9mm Makarov PM in a watertight oilskin holster strapped around him.

He handed its twin to Carter.

"Are your two men set?"

Kokolev nodded. "The party has already started in the guard room. As soon as the depressant takes effect, my two men, in uniform, will become the two-man roving patrol."

"How did they get in?"

"Earlier this afternoon in the garbage truck. Let us be off."

Kokolev extinguished the candle and moved into the night, with Carter behind him and Ludmilla bringing up the rear. At the mouth of the cave, she grasped his elbow. He turned, and she moved into his arms.

The kiss bespoke genuine warmth rather than passion. It was also short and to the point.

"Good-bye," she murmured, and moved away to climb an outcropping of rocks.

Carter watched her until she was gone. She was quite a lady, he thought, and moved on down to the beach.

"We go in here," Kokolev whispered.

Carter pulled on a set of flippers, adjusted his mask, and slipped into the water right behind the man.

They swam straight out for what seemed like an eternity before Kokolev made a left turn. Then they swam parallel to the shore for another fifteen minutes, until the man called a halt.

"We wait here!"

They treaded water for another fifteen minutes, and then a tiny flash from a penlight ashore told them that their own set of roving guards was in place.

As they started to swim ashore. Carter was thankful they had chosen the plan. A rock shelf lay beneath the water where they swam, making a calm mirror out of the bay.

A lone, unfriendly man on the beach with an AK-47 could spot them surfacing from a good distance. Add to it thirty yards of pure white, moonlit sand ashore, and they would be cut down in ten feet.

The moonlight knifing through the clear water created an eerie, ominous aura around them as they crawled out onto the sand.

They sprinted across the beach, thankful once again that no AK rifles were pointed their way. At a low stone wall they practically crashed into a uniformed man lounging against the stone, a rifle over his shoulder.

"It is a beautiful night," he grunted.

"They are still there?" Kokolev asked.

The man nodded. "The woman is in the dacha. The man has gone to the administration building, I would guess to sign the departure forms."

Carter slid the flippers from his feet, unzipped the holster, and vaulted over the wall. As he did so, he saw out of the corner of his eye Kokolev already climbing out of his wet suit and the uniform moving down the beach on the guards' usual rounds.

Bending low. Carter duck walked the width of two beach houses and dropped into the rear garden of the only one with lights glowing.

The air was sweet with blooming flowers and buzzing with insects. The only other sound as he wound his way through scrub and low citrus trees was a radio playing something maudlin from one of the nearby rooms.

He headed in that direction and carefully brought his eyes up over the window ledge.

He was just in time. It was the bedroom of the dacha, and Anna was just emerging from the bathroom, stark naked. He watched her pull on a pair of sheer panties and encase her voluptuous breasts in a lacy, very unproletariat bra.

Over that went a tight sweater and slim skirt, an outfit that should have made the hair on the back of his neck and inner thighs tingle.

It didn't.

It made the scar across his chest itch and ache.

He scanned the room. A half-packed suitcase lay open on the bed. Two closed cases sat by the door. He couldn't see a phone, and there was no sign of a weapon.

Anna went to work on her dark hair, and Carter took a turn around the whole house. He ended up back at the sliding glass doors that led from the garden into a large sitting room.

The room and its decor was about as far removed from the hovel where he and Ludmilla had spent the night as Washington was from Moscow.

The party elite and their favored people didn't suffer.

The room was done well, in soft tones, and the furniture was modern and expensive. Chrome-framed prints and antique tapestries somehow worked together on the walls. The prints were French Impressionist paintings and, strangely enough, were mostly Renoir nudes.

The sliding doors opened easily, and he moved into the room. He finally located the phone and cut the cord. When the intercom on the wall was jammed, he moved to a well-stocked portable bar.

It was foolish, he thought, but something deep inside him made him want to handle it this way.

He sloshed vodka into a glass, unholstered the Makarov, and sat down to wait.

It wasn't long. She glided into the room, still brushing her hair, and came up short with a gasp six feet from where he sat.

She was even more beautiful and arresting from the front than she had been from the rear. And, up close, the tight-fitting clothes left little to the imagination.

"You! How…?"

"Good evening, Anna," Carter said, saluting her with the glass and the long snout of the Makarov's silencer.

It hit her hard, but it took only seconds for her to regain composure.

She was a cool cookie, he thought, like ice, as she tossed her hair from her face and took in the pistol and wet suit at a glance. The hard, dark eyes finally settled on his. They spoke challenge, and he answered it.

"Submarine?" she growled.

"In the Black Sea? Of course not. This is your turf. That would be far too dangerous. But I did emerge from the sea like a nymph."

She started to turn toward the bedroom, her strong thighs moving steadily, lushly visible under the skirt. They stopped moving when Carter put a slug into the doorjamb two inches from her shoulder.

If she was unnerved when she turned back to face him, she didn't show it. But her mind was obviously working, and her eyes were darting from Carter to the glass doors.

"Go ahead," he said. "But I wouldn't advise it. Your guards aren't there. Mine are."

She shrugged, then moved to the bar. "I should have made sure you were dead in Berlin."

"Yes, you should have."

"You are a clever, dangerous, and resourceful man."

"Yes, I am."

She poured a drink and walked past him to the opposite sofa. She rolled her long legs under her like a cat. When she spoke again, she also purred like one.

"You've come for Boris."

Carter nodded. "Why go through all this to get what he knows? Why not just use a needle?"

"Two reasons," she replied in a bored voice, "and you should know both of them. We routinely, daily, take antidotes to combat truth chemicals… yours. Unfortunately, they also contradict our own drugs. There wasn't time to hospitalize Boris until the chemicals would work."

"And the second reason?"

"We were not positive that he had turned." She sipped her drink and smiled. The smile was far from warm and friendly, but it did fantastic things to the fine bones of her face. "We are now."

"Touché," Carter replied, smiling himself.

"Boris is a spineless jackass, but he works well in the West. He also has a genius for organization."

"An organization that you are now completely aware of."

"Perhaps." Her eyes came up, mirroring the vacant coldness of his own. "You managed somehow to get in here, but you'll never get out, not two of you. And, besides, I'm not so sure Boris will go with you… now."

"I think he will. You're very beautiful, Anna, but not beautiful enough to die for."

The door opened, slammed, and Boris Simonov emerged from the alcove and walked into the room behind Anna. He was tall and spare, with a weak chin. His dishwater-gray eyes grew wide with shock when he saw the tableau before him.

"Who…"

"Hello, Boris. Or I imagine I should call you Peter, since I've come to get you out."

"How did you…"

Anna slid off the sofa and slithered to his side. Possessively, she curled her arms around one of his.

"His name is Nicholas Carter," she said. "He's a one-man American assassination team, and he's probably come to kill you."

Simonov went even paler and shifted his eyes from Carter to the woman and back again.

"Let me give it to you straight, Boris," Carter growled, getting to his feet and making sure the barrel of the Makarov was trained solely on the woman. "They found out that we turned you. That's why you were called back. This 'wife' you were supposed to acquire was only meant to get what's in your head so that another deep-cover agent could go in and take up where you left off."

"Preposterous!" Anna said, and tugged harder, trying to keep him against her.

It didn't work. Simonov was already backing away from her, his face a chalky white and his body shaking in fright.

"It's true, Boris. Anna was supposed to get everything out of you she could, and then you were on your way back to Moscow. Where were you headed when you left here tonight, Boris?"

"Moscow," he stammered.

"And from there it was a gulag, at best. At the worst…"Carter shrugged, leaving Simonov to fill in the inevitable.

"It's true, isn't it?" the frightened man said, staring at the woman he had probably been making love to the past two nights. "Isn't it?"

Anna knew she'd been unmasked. The Killmaster could see it in her eyes.

Carter thought, wrongly, that she would go for him. Anna was too much the trained agent. Instead of Carter, she went for Simonov. If the Russians couldn't retain what he had accomplished in the West, then the Americans wouldn't have it either.

She was like a panther, fast and sharp. In a split second she had the narrow chain belt from her waist around Simonov's throat. Her hands were trained, skilled in killing.

Simonov was no match for her, and Carter couldn't get in a shot without hitting him. The belt became a garrote, and her knee in the small of his back was doing the rest of the work.

Carter had only seconds, and he used them.

It was useless to try and flank her. Everywhere the Killmaster approached, she turned Simonov's body to head him off.

Finally he gave up and plowed into both of them. His shoulder hit Simonov in the gut, driving the wind from him and slamming Anna into the wall.

The long barrel of the Makarov cracking across one of her wrists brought enough slack in the belt to allow Carter's fingers to get between it and the man's neck.

When Carter pulled it away, Simonov fell to the floor gagging. Anna recovered instantly, even though it was obvious that her right wrist was broken. With the fingers of her left hand curled, she went for Carter's throat.

He barely avoided a death blow to his windpipe by spinning and taking the blow on his ear. Bells rang and he was staggered, but he managed to continue the spin and drive his knee into her belly.

As she doubled over, he brought the long-barreled silencer down across the back of her neck.

She had scarcely crumpled to the floor before Carter was on her, the tip of the Makarov nuzzled just behind her left ear.

He was just squeezing, when Simonov lurched and dragged Carter's arm to the side. The powerful gun popped, but the slug dug harmlessly into the carpet.

"Damn you!" Carter hissed, backing the man across the room with a shoulder to Simonov's belly.

"No!" Simonov gasped, holding his aching gut with both hands and looking as though all he wanted to do in the world was vomit. "No, don't kill her!"

"Why not!" Carter moved the Makarov back to the woman's skull.

"No!" Boris shouted in the loudest voice he could muster, and staggered again toward the Killmaster.

"You damned fool! She almost killed me once, and she would have had you killed within the next three or four days!"

"No… please. I'll go with you, do anything your people want me to, but don't kill her…"

Carter looked at the pain in the man's contorted face, then down at the beautiful woman on the floor.

Obviously Boris Simonov was a normal man, subject to the emotions and passions of a normal man.

"How much have you told her?"

"Nothing of consequence, I swear it!" Simonov replied, jabbering wildly. "I swear it! I guessed what they were doing. I told her that I put everything in a report and that it was in my Moscow apartment. That was why we were leaving tonight. It was my insurance."

"What were you going to do once you got to Moscow?"

His eyes fell. "I hadn't figured that out yet."

"Figures," Carter growled. "If you're lying, Simonov, you know you're of little use to us. If she knows what you know, we'll give you right back to them."

"She doesn't, I swear it! She knows a little, yes. Bits and pieces I told her to bring her on, get her trust… but only a few things. Don't kill her, Carter, please."

You poor fool. Carter thought, but he hauled the woman to her feet. Then he slid his arm under her shapely rear end, lifted her high in the air, and started for the bedroom.

"What… what are you doing?"

"I've got to do something with her — I can't just leave her lying in here. She's already waking up. Simonov…"

"Yes?"

"Get back up to the administration office. Explain that you and she have changed your minds. Got that?"

"Yes… yes."

"Have them change the order for your car to seven in the morning. Have them change your reservations to Moscow accordingly. Understand?"

"Yes."

"When you return, don't even bother coming in here. Go to the beach, over the wall. There's a man there with a wet suit. Get it on and be ready to go when I get there."

"I'll do it."

"You'd better."

Simonov started walking to the door, then paused and turned. "Carter…"

"Yeah?"

"You promise?"

"I promise."

"As a gentleman?"

"Look, Boris. I'm a long way from being a fucking gentleman, but you've got my word that she'll be alive when I leave here."

The Russian scooted out the door, and Carter continued on into the bedroom. Unceremoniously he dumped Anna on the bed and searched in the open suitcase for panty hose. By the time her eyes were blinking and she was shaking herself awake, both of her arms and her legs were tied securely to the four-poster.

"Bastard, you've broken my neck!" she groaned.

"You're lucky that's all," Carter said.

A string of Russian curses that even Carter didn't know erupted from her mouth as he rummaged again in the bag.

"You had better kill me, bastard, because if we ever meet again, I'll kill you… and as slowly as I can."

"You know something?" he said, pausing in his search. "I believe you. The only reason I'm not putting a needle in your arm is to keep Simonov happy."

She started to scream another series of oaths at him, but it ended abruptly when Carter rolled a pair of panties into a ball and stuffed them into her mouth.

Using a scarf from the bag, he secured the gag in her mouth and then stood staring down at her. "Stay over here. Anna. Don't come to the West again. If you do, I'll hunt you down like the viper you are."

Her eyes flashed pure hatred in reply as Carter went around the room closing drapes and shutting off lights. He did the same in the living room, then let himself out into the garden.

Kokolev waited with Simonov and the two phony Russian guards. Both of them had already shed their uniform tunics and (heir rifles for the swim. Simonov had pulled on the wet suit.

"All right, let's go!"

"Carter," Simonov stammered, "is she…"

"She's alive," Carter growled. "But she won't be if I ever see her again."

The four of them slid into the water. They retraced the swim that Carter and Kokolev had made earlier.

Ludmilla was waiting. She had dragged the powered sleds down to the beach.

Just before pushing off, Carter turned to Kokolev. "If you, or she… or any of you people ever want out…"

Kokolev interrupted him with a raised hand. "We won't."

The Killmaster nodded in understanding. He shook the big man's hand and glanced at Ludmilla. "Good luck," he said gently. Then he turned to the Russian. "C'mon, Boris!"

Two hours later they abandoned the sleds and hoisted themselves over the rail of the Rosa.