The Killing Ground

Ten

Despite the lateness of the hour, there were a number of people wandering around the base of the Eiffel Tower, including two lovers who sat down on one of the benches.

The tower itself was closed to the public for the night, and the restaurant on the first level was shut down, apparently for renovations.

Carter kept to one side of the broad promenade as he moved up to the base of the huge structure. He kept searching the shadows for a sign that Ganin was there, but he saw nothing. He looked up into the intricate latticework of the tower. Ganin wouldn’t be down there waiting, Carter mused; he would be up top somewhere. Hiding in the darkness. It was logical.

A gendarme came up from the Champs de Mars and passed under the tower. Carter nodded, and the cop touched the brim of his cap.

On the far side of the base, Carter waited until the cop was out of sight, and then he quickly angled over to the southwest leg, where if he remembered correctly there was access to the stairs.

A large iron gate blocked the way. Looking around to make sure no one was watching, Carter pulled out his stiletto and started to pick the massive iron lock, but the latch came open in his hands.

The gate swung open, and Carter looked up. Ganin! The Russian had come this way and had left the gate open as an invitation.

Carter slipped Hugo back into its chamois sheath on his forearm, withdrew Wilhelmina, checked to make sure there was a round in the chamber and the safety was off, then stepped through the gate, closed and locked it behind him, and started up slowly, one step at a time into the darkness and whatever awaited him above.

Although he understood that Ganin would probably not make a serious try to kill him that night, he could not afford to take any chances. Whatever else the Russian assassin was, he definitely was not a fool. If a clear opportunity presented itself, he would not pass it up, no matter what Kobelev might have to say about it later. Carter’s death, after all, was the entire reason for their elaborate scheme.

The huge structure angled inward toward the first level, mostly dark now that the restaurant was closed.

Near the head of the first run of iron stairs, Carter stopped. Below he could see the couples on the promenade, and on the river a bâteau mouche moved slowly under the bridge. He tried to pick out the gendarme but couldn’t. The cop was either in the shadows or had moved back to the other side of the base.

Far above, the tower was bathed in lights, which threw crazy patterns within patterns on the gridwork structure. There were ten thousand places for an assassin to hide in waiting. Ten thousand places for the perfect ambush.

The tall iron gate blocking the first-level deck from the stairwell was ajar, just as the lower gate had been. Ganin had come this way. Again, an open invitation.

Carter eased the gate the rest of the way open, the thick hinges well oiled and noiseless.

Gripping his Luger tightly, and keeping low, Carter burst up onto the deck and rolled right then left, diving for the deeper shadows at the side of the enclosed structure as a single, silenced shot ricocheted off the metal rail less than a foot from where he had emerged from the stairwell.

It had come from above. There was no doubt of it.

Carter crouched there in the darkness, his every sense straining for a sound... any noise that would betray Ganin’s location.

He heard it. Above. Far above. A chance scraping of shoe leather against an iron stair tread. Ganin was on the move. He was on his way up, which didn’t make sense. At the top he would be cornered, unless he figured on using the elevator to come down while Carter was moving up the stairs. If that were the case, Ganin would be a sitting duck, an easy target as he passed Carter on the stairs.

An apparent mistake. But as far as Carter knew, the Russian did not make mistakes.

He worked his way along the restaurant wall to the center, where again the gate to the stairwell had been left ajar.

For a long moment he stared at the open gate, but then he turned and went back toward the core of the tower. Around the corner he found the electrical panels behind a wire cage. Heavy cables ran to the elevator motors.

Holstering Wilhelmina, Carter withdrew Hugo, and within sixty seconds he had the cage open and was inside.

Signs in several languages were posted all over the place, warning of the high voltage.

In the semidarkness Carter studied the layout for a minute or so, finally opening one of the large panels. Inside were two massive switches marked elevator main power.

Carter gingerly reached out and pulled both switches to the off position. Then he closed the panel, stepped back out of the cage, and relocked the door.

He glanced up. Whatever happened now, Ganin would not be taking the elevator down. Carter could now be sure that the Russian would be stuck on top.

Yet even as Carter thought it, and as he moved silently back to the stairs and started up, he wondered if the solution hadn’t been too simple. Would a man such as Ganin have overlooked the obvious? Or did he mean to force the issue, despite his protestations on the telephone to the contrary? Perhaps this was the killing ground after all. Perhaps only one of them would be coming down...

The stairs zigzagged their way up the center of the tower in tight little patterns. At each switchback, Carter stopped to search the gridwork above and to listen for any further chance sounds, but all was quiet.

As he climbed, all of Paris began to spread out beneath him. In the far distance across the river he could see the Sacré Coeur, lit up on its hill, looking lovely and peaceful.

Another silenced shot whined off the iron rail near where Carter stood, this time so close it sent paint chips flying into his face.

Moments later Carter could hear the distinctive ring of shoe leather on the metal treads, moving upward.

He was less than a hundred feet from the top. He raced up the next few flights relying on his speed of motion, rather than the darkness and his stealth, for safety.

Two more shots ricocheted off the metalwork, until within thirty or forty feet of the top he spotted a figure moving on the cat walk.

Carter snapped off a shot, his unsilenced Luger extremely loud in the night air, and the figure disappeared.

The stairs were covered from above. There was no way he would be able to make it the rest of the way...

Again Carter holstered Wilhelmina, then he climbed up onto the rail and swung out over to the gridwork of the tower, the sheer drop more than eight hundred feet to the deck of the first level.

The metal was slippery with night dew, the corners rounded and at odd, oblique angles, making any kind of grip or foothold extremely difficult.

Carter worked his way around to the outside of the tower, the place Ganin would least expect him to be, and started up, the wind at that height moaning through the gridwork, threatening to dislodge his grip and send him plunging far below to the pavement.

He concentrated on each handhold, on each step upward, a few inches at a time, his world reduced for the moment to hanging on.

Within ten feet of the top, Carter stopped a moment to rest, to gather his strength. His wounded leg was starting to give him some trouble again. He had put too much strain on it during the past few days, but there was no going back now, so he put it out of his mind.

A few feet farther up he heard the clinking of what sounded like thin metal tubing hitting the tower’s metalwork, and then a soft slapping sound... almost like a sail.

Suddenly it was clear to him. Ganin had not made a mistake after all.

Redoubling his efforts, Carter scrambled recklessly the last few feet to the base of the observation room, then climbed through the gridwork to the stairs.

He pulled out his Luger, thumbed the safety off, and cautiously came up through the doorway.

Arkadi Ganin, a large hang glider, its nylon wing black, strapped to his back, stood perched in precarious balance above on the observation room’s roof.

Carter fired a shot through the open trapdoor just as the Russian launched himself and was gone.

A large satchel stood in the middle of the observation room. Carter started up to the roof, when he noticed it out of the corner of his eye. His stomach flopped over, and he scrambled back down.

The satchel was locked, but from within Carter was certain he could smell the distinctive odor of vinegar. It was an acid fuse. Activated. There was a bomb inside!

He whipped out his stiletto and, working with extreme care, slit open the leather side of the squat briefcase. It was possible the lock was tied to an override switch.

Easing open the flap he had cut, he looked inside. Through a tubular fuse the size of a pencil, wires connected two batteries to a thick lump of pastique. Enough to blow the entire tower.

Sweat pouring down his chest beneath his shirt, Carter reached inside the case with his right hand, grabbed the slender fuse between his thumb and forefinger, took a deep breath, and yanked the device out of the plastique. A split second later the fuse sputtered, and a long, deadly-looking spark emerged from the business end.

Carter fell back on his haunches and breathed a deep sigh of relief. Ganin had cut it very close. To within a few seconds. Had Carter gone up on the roof for another shot, he would not have survived.

Yet he didn’t think the Russian really wanted him dead. Not yet. This had been just another test to see how good he was.

Carter was certain now of one crucial fact: Ganin was very good. A hell of a lot better than any of them had given him credit for being.

A minute or so later Carter got to his feet and climbed up to the roof of the observation room. He looked out over the city. There was no sign of Ganin with the hang glider, of course, but he found what he was looking for on the roof. Blood. Not much of it, but he didn’t need much to know. He had hit Ganin. It would make the Russian think twice about playing his little games.

Apparently because of the height above the ground, no one below had heard either of Carter’s two shots. It was already a few minutes after two by the time he made it painfully back down to the gate in the southwest leg, unlocked it, and stepped away from the tower.

The strolling couples were gone, as were the lovers on the bench. Carter hurried up the Quai Branly, past where the tour boats landed and departed, to the Quai d’Orsay where he hoped Lydia would be making her second swing in the next few minutes.

As he walked he continued to scan possible places of ambush. While Ganin had him occupied, he suspected that someone had gone to the hotel in an effort to get Lydia. When they found her gone, they’d have to figure she was somewhere near Carter.

A lot depended, of course, on whether or not they knew about the Jaguar yet, and whether or not Lydia had kept her head during the past two hours. If she had been spotted, they might have managed to stop her.

Carter got to the Quai Branly where it intersected with the Avenue Bosquet at the Pont de l’Alma just before two-thirty, and he sat down on one of the benches that faced the Seine.

An occasional car passed, then a truck, before the Jaguar came roaring across the bridge, its headlights flashing on Carter.

He jumped up as the car screeched around the corner and pulled up to the curb.

Lydia slid over to the passenger side as Carter jumped in behind the wheel, slammed the car in gear, and took off, the tires squealing on the dry pavement.

Lydia was frightened out of her mind. Even in the dark interior of the car, Carter could see that she was pale, her eyes wide and moist.

As he drove he kept glancing up into the rearview mirror to make sure they weren’t being followed.

“They’re after you, Nick,” Lydia sputtered as they crossed the river near the French Naitonal Assembly Building.

“Yes, Ganin and Kobelev,” Carter snapped.

“No, listen to me!” she cried. “The French police are after you. It was on the radio.”

They had picked up a tail, the headlights coming around the corner from the bridge, following them up to the Place de la Concorde.

“What are you talking about?” Carter asked, concentrating more on his driving. He hauled the car around a tight corner, and a block later swung left, nearly running up on the curb.

Lydia looked back. “They’re following us?”

“Hang on tight,” Carter said as they squealed around still another corner.

For the next few minutes Carter put the powerful Jag through its paces, running an intricate random pattern through the early-morning streets until, way out on the Rue de Flandre heading for the E2 highway east to Reims, he was satisfied they had lost their tail.

He turned back to Lydia. “Now, what did you say about the French police?”

“Listen to me — they have your description. They say you murdered a French maintenance man in Borodin’s building, as well as Borodin himself, whom they’re describing as an important Soviet journalist.”

Carter managed a slight smile. It was Kobelev’s signal again. But there had to be more.

“What in God’s name are you laughing about?” Lydia shrieked. “If the French arrest you, and put you in jail, Ganin will be able to get to you with no problem! You’ll be as good as dead if you’re arrested!”

“What else?” he asked.

“What are you talking about?”

“What else?” Carter repeated. “There was something else in the news story. You listened to the entire thing?”

Lydia nodded. “They said you entered the building, killed the Frenchman, and then went upstairs and broke Borodin’s neck. The Soviet government has launched a protest — naturally — and called you a capitalist hoodlum of the worst kind. They want immediate justice.”

“There’s more,” Carter insisted.

Lydia shook her head in frustration. “There’s nothing—” she started, but then she stopped in mid-sentence. “But—”

“What is it?”

“It’s Bonn, West Germany. Kobelev wants you to go there.”

“How do you know that?”

“It was on the radio. They said Borodin was to have gone to Bonn next week. A new assignment.”

Was the killing ground to be in Bonn? Carter wondered. They were coming much closer now to the Iron Curtain. It was only a few hours by car from Bonn — much less by helicopter — to East Germany and complete safety for Kobelev.

For some inexplicable reason, though, Carter did not think Bonn was the final destination. There would be more; he was willing to bet on it. Paris was a close call. Kobelev would want him to squirm some more, especially since Ganin, his star pupil, had been wounded. And because Lydia was still on the loose.

The tolerances in Bonn would be much closer. Bonn was going to be a dangerous experience for them all. Kobelev was angry about Lydia. Ganin would be angry that he had allowed himself to be wounded. The French police, and therefore Interpol, would be after Carter. And Lydia was desperately frightened. Bonn would be difficult.

There was very little traffic at this hour of the morning, mostly large transport trucks on the superhighway.

Carter lit a cigarette as he sped up, his mind working out the possibilities in Bonn. He was going to need a bit more information, as well as some help now from Hawk. He did not want a confrontation at the frontier with the French police. He would not allow himself to be arrested, of course, but if there was an incident at the border, it would be a clear signal to Kobelev and Ganin just where he was.

They passed through Reims at about four in the morning, then continued east through Verdun, and finally into Metz, about thirty miles from the West German border.

They got off the Al and went into the city, where Carter circled around the central railway station several times before he headed to the far side of the town.

“What is it?” Lydia asked. “What are you doing?”

Carter pulled up at a long-term parking area. The night shift attendant was getting set to go off duty, but he took Carter’s payment in advance, issued a card, and then took the car.

With their suitcases in hand, Carterand Lydia started away from the parking lot on foot, heading back into the city’s center.

“Ganin knows about the car now. As soon as we come into Bonn they’ll spot us,” Carter said.

Lydia stopped. Carter turned back.

“We’re going to Bonn? After Paris, you still want to go to Bonn? What about the police?”

“I’ll take care of it.”

She looked back. “What about the car?”

“Someone will be picking it up. For now, we’re going by train.”

Lydia shook her head. “What if I tell you I want to get off this merry-go-round right now?”

“That’s fine,” Carter said. “I’ll have you met at Dulles in Washington by someone you can trust.” He turned and continued walking downtown, spotting a cab just across the street.

He didn’t bother looking back as he crossed over to the taxi, but he knew that she was behind him, and he held the door for her.

She climbed in, a scowl on her face, but she said nothing.

“The train station,” Carter said.

A few minutes later they were deposited outside the ornate old station. Carter paid the driver, and he and Lydia went inside where they bought first-class tickets, with their own private compartment, on the train to Bonn, which went to Luxembourg first, then Koblenz before arriving in Bonn at about one in the afternoon, the trip made longer because of the two stops. It left at eight-thirty, which gave them plenty of time to have some breakfast in the station’s café. First Carter went to one of the telephone kiosks and placed a call to Hawk’s Washington number.

It was just a bit after one in the morning in Washington, but Hawk answered his phone on the first ring.

“I’m in Metz,” Carter said. He glanced up. Lydia had gone across the main hall to the newsstand where she was purchasing a newspaper.

“What happened in Paris?” Hawk demanded.

Quickly and succinctly, Carter went over everything that had happened from the moment he and Lydia had arrived at the Lancaster until they got to Metz, leaving nothing out, including the speculation that Bonn itself would probably not be his final destination.

“What are your plans for Bonn? Have you got another of Kobelev’s people picked out?”

“No, sir. I was hoping you would have some information. Something must be happening in Bonn at the moment. Kobelev sent me the signal... Bonn was where Borodin was supposedly being reassigned. What else is happening there now?”

“Not a thing, Nick,” Hawk said. “Nothing has been on the overnight report except that the French want you for questioning in Borodin’s murder.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course.”

It didn’t make sense. Kobelev was obviously luring him to Bonn, but for what purpose? Unless it was too soon? Unless they were waiting until he showed up...

Lydia came back to the phone kiosk with a newspaper. She held it up for Carter to see. His photograph was on the front page, under the headline this man wanted for murder.

“I made the front page,” Carter told Hawk.

“When does your train leave?” Hawk asked.

“Eight-thirty, local.”

“I’ll call Bradley at State. We’ll work something out with the French authorities before you reach the border this morning.”

“I don’t want to get into anything with the French police.”

“Of course not. Kobelev and Ganin would love for it to happen, though.”

“Yes, sir.”

“How is the woman holding up?”

“Reasonably well, although I don’t know how much longer it will last. They want her pretty badly.”

“Be careful, Nick,” Hawk said. “Whatever they’ve got planned for you in Bonn will not be very pleasant.”

“Yes, sir,” Carter said. “But I don’t think it’ll be very long now before the final confrontation will come.”