The Ransom of Black Stealth One

ONE

Weston, who was not a light sleeper, at first sensed only a dull impact through his bedroom floor to the mattress. It did not shake him fully awake and he was unable, later, to testify how long it took him to become aware of the door buzzer. Too long, at any rate. He did recall that the digital clock downstairs in the living room read “02:51” when, conservative as always, he slipped a raincoat over his pajamas, his old .45 service automatic heavy as a curbstone in the right-hand pocket.

Although he had been a full-fledged member of the intelligence community for over forty years, the first thing that popped into Weston’s head as he squinted through the peeper was: some damn kid’s prank. He opened the door anyway. The rounded dark mass slumped against his alcove brickwork seemed about the size of those huge plastic mulch bags to a man whose sixty-three-year-old eyes were still full of sleep. The position of his alcove light and Potomac’s country-lane street lamps in his face at three o’clock in the morning, for God’s sake, didn’t help. James Darlington Weston, a patient man, resisted the urge to kick that bag of mulch, sighed, took his right hand from the overcoat pocket and snapped the alcove light off.

Nothing had ever startled him more in his life than when the bag of mulch mumbled, “Thank you, Halcyon.”

Dar Weston was suddenly, vibrantly, awake. He did not snap the light on again because as his awareness dilated, it included the sedan abandoned across his front walk and the fact that the car must have shaken him half awake as it slammed into the low brick pilaster flanking his carport. It included some faint familiarity with that voice, too, which had thanked him for plunging the alcove into darkness again, and used a code name he hadn’t answered to since 1953. Weston had not even run agents as a case officer for many years, but nobody who’d been in that part of the business ever forgot as much of it as he would like to, and Weston’s response was immediate.

He snapped off the living room valance light, then stepped out onto chill cement and squatted, sensing that the huddled figure needed help. By the time he got the man into the guest room, carrying more than guiding him, the man’s attaché case banging shins at random, Weston knew the man needed that help very, very badly. His own hands were sticky, and blood does have a special smell when there is enough of it, and civilized men do not void their bladders or bowels while fully clothed except in the greatest physical extremity.

He swore as the reading lamp flooded the room, and lifted the man’s legs onto the bed to save the carpet. The left trouser leg was already stiff with blood, which seemed to be coming from the man’s lower left abdomen. The attaché case, with three feet of cable linking it to the man’s wrist manacle, could wait. As Weston tugged at the man’s windbreaker and sportshirt, he traded calm gazes with the stranger who did not seem to be in much pain. The face was sixtyish, clean-shaven, with the pallor of gray milk, and like the voice it was distantly familiar. Weston, hoping to find a knife wound, said, “Forgive me, but I don’t recognize you.” Then he saw the hole in the man’s abdomen, slowly pulsing as fresh blood pumped out, and swore again. Inside that man was a metal slug.

“I was ‘Sparrow’ in the old days,” the man said, sounding very tired. “You knew me well enough then.” A pause, and a cough that must have hurt. “You were the only one whose address I knew tonight. Sorry.”

Weston studied the gray face, seeing the strong, chiseled tawny face of the young hellion beneath thirty-six more years of disenchantment, and nodded. It was Sparrow, he was certain. Goddamn an agency that sends old men to do boys’ work! Weston snatched at the telephone he had knocked askew near the lamp table, and began to dial with brisk, furious strokes. “I’m calling Company paramedics. You’re filling up with blood, Sparrow.”

The manacled wrist levitated as if by some outside power. “You will know who gets this,” Sparrow said softly, his eyes closed now. “I was intercepted in Bethesda. Not your man’s fault.” He waited for Weston’s rapid-fire telephoned instructions to cease, then added, “First combination: three one five. Second combination: seven four zero. Make certain—” A long pause, long enough for Weston to begin probing the free wrist for a pulse. Then, “—that you don’t press the stud with any other combination.”

The pulse was thready. Dar Weston had seen good men die before, and in the silence of his lonely house he felt that sense of loss again. “Hang on. We’ll get you fixed up,” he said, and squatted, frowning, his face near Sparrow’s. “Is absolutely everybody else in your section on fucking vacation?” That famous note of command, which had stiffened the postures of two generations of intelligence people, seemed to wake Sparrow from light sleep.

“I asked for this courier job, Mr.—Weston. This”—again the jerk of that right wrist—“is from the Israelis. Open it.”

“I didn’t know of anything incoming from there,” said Weston. “That means I haven’t the need to know, yet. It can wait.”

Struggling up, eyes blinking wide, Sparrow fell back to the coverlet with a sigh of mortal exhaustion. “You will have. It’s the Red Book.”

“My God,” Weston said, glancing at the attaché case. The poor bastard was bleeding out on him right before his eyes, and Langley was a full twenty-five-minute drive from Potomac, and that damned Company paramedic van was probably still ten minutes away, even with an expert driving like Mark Donohue two laps down. But—the Red Book? Well, even that could wait. He and Sparrow had been close, once upon a time.

“Yes, the new Soviet shopping list.” Sparrow was watching him now, licking gray lips with a gray tongue. “Take it. Let me see you take it,” he begged. “Three one five. Seven four zero. Be careful.”

Shaking his head, Weston said the numbers aloud, setting the two combinations on the metal case. A sudden wild thought struck him that all this was window dressing, that some bright Sov case officer was waiting for him to press that stud and blow himself through the roof. Paranoia. Which doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you, he finished the old gibe silently, and pressed the stud.

There must have been over a thousand pages in that stack, cunningly bound between the covers of a Sears catalog by some Flaps and Seals man—or more likely, woman. The Company had got its hands on an old one, back in ‘eighty-five. The list of what the Soviet Union wanted its agents to steal had been a wonderful treatise on what they didn’t yet have. Letting the pages fan beneath his thumb, Weston saw that this was a photocopy of a new list, which the other side might not know had been compromised. “Sparrow: do the Sovs know you have this?”

He had to lean nearer to hear Sparrow say, “… five. Seven four zero. Careful, Halcyon.”

“I have it,” Weston said gently, patting the bloody forearm, holding up the most valuable Sears catalog in existence. “See?”

Sparrow did not see, though his eyes were open. Sparrow was fading from 1989 back into the world of 1952 when all good things seemed possible, when Sparrow could drink to the future, when a man loosely connected to the U.S. State Department was buying every other round and answering to the name of Halcyon. Good days; days to remember as Sparrow lay dying.