The Red Horseman

1

Toad Tarkington first noticed her during the intermission after the first act. His wife, Rita Moravia, had gone to the ladies’ and he was stretching his legs, casually inspecting the audience, when he saw her. Three rows back, four seats in from the other aisle.

She was seated, talking to her male companion, gesturing lightly, now listening to what her friend had to say. Now she glanced at the program, then raised her gaze and spoke casually.

Toad Tarkington stared. In a few seconds he caught himself and turned his back.

How long had it been? Four years? No, five. But it couldn’t be her, not here. Not in Washington, D.C. Could it?

He half-turned and casually glanced at her again.

The hairstyle was different, but it’s her. He would swear to it. Great figure, eyes set wide apart above prominent cheekbones, with a voice and a touch that would excite a mummy — no man ever forgets a woman like that.

He sat and stared at the program in his hand without seeing it. He had last seen her five years ago, in Tel Aviv. And now she’s here.

Judith Farrell. No, that was only an alias. Her real name is Hannah something. Mermelstein. Hannah Mermelstein. Here!

Good God!

Suddenly he felt hot. He tugged at the knot in his tie and unfastened his collar button.

“What’s the matter? Are you catching a cold?” Rita slipped into her seat and gave him one of those looks that wives reserve for husbands whose social skills are showing signs of slackness. Before Toad could answer the house lights dimmed and the curtain opened for act two.

He couldn’t help himself. When the spotlight hit the actors, he looked left, trying to see her in the dim glow. Too many people in the way. Hannah Mermelstein, but he had promised to never tell anyone her real name. And he hadn’t.

“Is something wrong?” Rita whispered.

“Uh-uh.”

“Then why are you rubbing your leg?”

“Ah, it’s aching a little.”

That leg had two steel pins in it, and just now it seemed to Toad that he could feel both of them. The Israeli doctors inserted the pins just a day or two before he saw Judith/Hannah for the last time. She came to see him in the hospital.

Toad Tarkington didn’t want to remember. He folded his hands on his lap and tried to concentrate on the actors on the stage. Yet it came back as if it had just happened yesterday, raw and powerful — the night he made love to her, that Naples hotel lobby as the man with her gunned down a man in the elevator, the assault on the United States, the stench of the ship burning in the darkness…that F-14 flight with Jake Grafton. He found himself gripping the arms of the seat as all the emotions came flooding back.

What is she doing here?

Who has she come to kill?

“Come on,” he whispered to Rita. “I want to go home.”

“Now?” She was incredulous.

“Yes. Now.” He stood.

Rita collected her purse and rose, then preceded him toward the aisle, muttering excuses as she clambered past knees and feet. In the aisle he took her elbow as she walked toward the lobby. He glanced toward where Judith Farrell was sitting, but couldn’t spot her.

“Are you feeling okay?” Rita asked.

“I’ll explain later.”

The lobby was empty. He led Rita to the cloakroom and fished in his shirt pocket for the claim check. The girl went to fetch the umbrella. He extracted two dollars from his wallet and dropped them into the tip jar, then wiped the perspiration from his forehead with his hand. The girl returned with the umbrella and handed it across the Dutch door counter.

“Thanks.”

When he turned, Judith Farrell was standing there facing him.

“Hello, Robert.”

He tried to think of something to say. She stood looking at him, her head cocked slightly to one side. Her male companion was against the far wall, facing them.

“Rita,” she said, “I’m Elizabeth Thorn. May I speak to your husband for a few minutes?”

Rita looked at Toad with her eyebrows up. So Judith Farrell knew about his wife. It figured.

“Where?” Toad asked. His voice was hoarse.

“Your car.”

Toad cleared his throat. “I don’t think—”

“Robert, I came tonight to talk to you. I think you should hear what I have to say.”

“The CIA is open eight to five,” Toad Tarkington said, “Monday through Friday. They’re in the phone book.”

“This is important,” Judith Farrell said.

Toad cleared his throat again and considered. Rita’s face was deadpan.

“Okay.” Toad took his wife’s arm and turned toward the door. The man against the wall watched the three of them go and made no move to follow.

They walked in silence across the parking lot. The rain had stopped but there were still puddles. Toad unlocked the car doors and told Farrell, “You sit up front. Rita, hop in the backseat, please.”

Once in the car he started the engine and turned on the defroster as the women seated themselves. Then he reached over and grabbed Judith Farrell’s purse. Farrell didn’t react, but Rita started. Still, she remained silent.

No gun in the purse. That was his main concern. There was a wallet, so he opened it. Maryland driver’s license for Elizabeth Thorn, born April 17, 1960. The address was in Silver Spring. Several credit cards, some cash, and nothing else. He put the wallet back into the purse and stirred through the contents. The usual female beauty paraphernalia, a box of tissues, a tube of lipstick. He examined the lipstick tube, took the cap off, ran the colored stick in and out, then replaced the cap and dropped the tube back into the purse. He put the purse back on Farrell’s lap.

“Okay, Ms. Thorn. You have your audience.”

“I want you to give Jake Grafton a message.”

“Call the Defense Intelligence Agency and make an appointment.”

“Obviously I don’t want anyone to know that I talked to him, Robert. So I came to you. I want you to pass the message along, to him and no one else.”

Toad Tarkington looked that over and accepted it, reluctantly. Rear Admiral Grafton was the deputy director at the DIA and Toad was his aide. Both facts were widely known, public knowledge. At the office every call was logged, every visitor positively identified. Admiral Grafton lived in general officers’ quarters at the Washington Navy Yard and was guarded by the federal protective service. While it would be easy enough for a professional to slip through the protective cordon, doing so would require the admiral either to report the conversation to his superiors or violate the security regulations. Presumably this way it would be up to the admiral to decide if this conversation had to be reported, a faint distinction that didn’t seem all that clear to Toad.

“Rita and I will know.”

“You won’t tell anyone. You’re both naval officers.” That was also true. Rita was an instructor at the navy’s Test Pilot School at NAS Patuxent River. Both of them held the rank of lieutenant commander, both had top secret clearances, both had seen reams of classified material that they couldn’t even talk about to each other.

Toad turned and looked at Rita, who was staring at the back of Elizabeth Thorn’s head and frowning.

Toad Tarkington gazed out the window at the empty parked cars as he considered it. “Why tonight? When I’m out with Rita?”

“If I had walked up to you when you were alone, you would have brushed me off.”

That comment irritated him. “Pretty damn sure of yourself, aren’t you?”

Farrell didn’t reply.

Toad again glanced over his shoulder at his wife, who met his eyes. She was going to be full of questions as soon as they were alone. Now she opened her door and stepped out of the car. She walked around to the front of the vehicle where she could watch the other woman’s face.

“This better be good,” Toad said. “Let’s hear it.”

It took less than sixty seconds. Toad made her repeat it and asked several questions, none of which Elizabeth Thorn answered. From her coat pocket she took a plain white unsealed envelope, which she passed to Toad. He opened it. It contained a photo and a negative. The photo was a three-by-five snap of a middle-aged white man seated at a table, apparently at an outdoor restaurant, reading a newspaper. There was a plate on the table. His face registered just a trace of a frown.

“Want to tell me who this is?”

“You find out.”

“Any hints?”

“CIA. You’ll talk to Grafton?”

“Maybe, if you’ll help me with the caption.” He wiggled the photograph. “Like when and where.”

“Jake Grafton can figure it out. I have a great deal of faith in him.”

“But not much in me.” Toad sighed. “How about this: just before he took his first — and last — bite of eggs Benedict injected full of arsenic trioxide by beautiful spy Hannah Mermelstein, Special Agent Sixty-Nine realized that the Sauce Hollandaise had a pinch too much salt?”

Her face showed no reaction whatever.

Toad Tarkington shrugged. He put the photo back in the envelope and placed the envelope in an inside jacket pocket. “So how did you know Rita and I were coming to this play tonight?”

Judith Farrell opened the car door and stepped out. “Thank you for your time, Robert.” She closed the door and walked away. Toad watched her go as Rita came around the car and climbed into the front passenger seat.

“Who is she?”

“Mossad.” The Israeli intelligence service.

“You were in love with her once, weren’t you?”

Trust a woman to glom onto that angle. Toad sighed and pulled the transmission lever into reverse.

When the car was out on the street, Rita asked, “When did you know her?”

“Five years ago. In the Med.”

“Her real name isn’t Elizabeth Thorn, is it?”

“No. She got out that name right up front, so I wouldn’t call her anything else.”

Rita waited for him to tell her more, but when it became obvious he wasn’t going to, she remarked, “She’s very pretty.”

Toad merely grunted.

“Are you going to tell me what she said?”

“No.”

Rita seemed to accept that with good grace. And she had gotten out of the car without being asked. She was a player. Toad told himself, a class act, every inch the professional Judith Farrell was. Perhaps he should have been nicer to Farrell.

This thought was still tripping across the synapses when Rita remarked, “I think you’re still in love with her. Not like you love me, but you care for her a lot. That was obvious to her, too. If you didn’t care you would have been nic—”

“Shut up!” Toad snarled.

“Listen, husband of mine. In three years of marriage neither one of us has told the other to shut up. I don’t think—”

“I’m sorry. I retract that.”

“I feel like I’m trapped in a soap opera,” Rita said. After a pause she added, “And I don’t like it.”

No fool, Toad Tarkington decided to let her have the last word.

Later, as they waited for a traffic light, Rita asked in a normal tone of voice, “So what does Elizabeth Thorn do for the Mossad?”

Toad considered before answering. He decided maybe the truth was best. “Five years ago she was running a hit squad. Maybe she still is. She’s a professional killer. An assassin.”

Toad awoke at dawn on Saturday and took his clothes into the kitchen to dress so he wouldn’t wake Rita. After enough coffee had dripped through to make a cup, he poured himself some and went out into the backyard of the little tract home he and Rita had purchased last year near Andrews Air Force Base. The morning was expectant, still, with the diffused sunlight hinting of the heat to come in a few hours. Not even the sound of jet engines of planes from the base. Too early yet. Someone somewhere was burning last fall’s leaves, even though it was against the law, and the faint smell seemed to make the coffee more pungent.

Judith Farrell. Here.

Although he would never admit it to Rita, seeing Judith had been a jolt. And Rita knew anyway. Blast women! All that crap about body language and nonverbal speech that they expected men to sweat bullets acquiring was just the latest nasty turn in the eternal war between the sexes. And if by some miracle you got it they would think of something else you needed to know to meet tomorrow’s sensitivity standards. If you suffered from the curse of the Y chromosome. Aagh!

He sat sipping coffee and pondering the male dilemma.

After a bit his mind turned to Judith Farrell’s message for Jake Grafton. Probably Farrell hadn’t tried to contact him when he was home alone because even he and Rita never knew when that would be. This was his first free Saturday this month. That crap about brushing her off… Well, it was true, he would have.

Someone told Farrell — told the Mossad — that he and Rita had tickets to that play last night. Who?

He tried to recall just when and to whom at the office he might have mentioned that he and Rita were going last night. It was hazy, but he seemed to recall that the play had been discussed several times by different people, and he may have said he had tickets.

He purchased the tickets over a month ago by calling a commercial ticket outlet and ordering them. And there was no telling to whom Rita might have mentioned the planned evening out. It was certainly no secret.

So that was a dead end. Frustrated, he went inside and poured himself another cup of coffee.

He got out the envelope and looked again at the photo. A very ordinary photo of a very ordinary man. He held the negative up to the light. It was the negative of the photo, apparently. Given to prove the genuineness of the photo. Okay, so what was there about the photograph that made it significant? Toad studied it at a distance of twelve inches. The guy’s sitting in front of a restaurant. Where? No way to tell. When? Nothing there either.

Well, Jake Grafton would know what to do with it. Grafton always knew how to handle hot potatoes, a quality that Toad had long ago concluded was instinctive. The guy could be tossed blindfolded into a snake pit and still avoid the poisonous ones.

The water began running in the bathroom. Rita must be taking a shower. He replaced the photo and negative in the envelope and put it into his shirt pocket.

Toad was outside trimming weeds along the fence when Rita appeared in the door wearing a flight suit, her hair braided into a bun that was pinned to the back of her head. “I’m leaving, Toad.”

He paused and leaned on the fence. “Back for supper?”

“Yes. Are you going to call Admiral Grafton?”

“I dunno. Haven’t decided.”

“You are, then.”

Toad resumed the chore of cutting weeds, trying not to let his temper show.

Rita laughed. He tossed the hedge shears down and turned his back on her.

In a few seconds she appeared in front of him. “I love you, Toad-man.”

He snorted. “I’m gonna ditch you and run off with ol’ Lizzie Thorn. Won’t be nothing here tonight when you get home except my dirty underwear and busted tennis racket.”

She stretched on tiptoe and kissed his cheek. “See you this evening, lover.”

The numbers…the numbers appalled him, shocked him, mesmerized him. He wrote them on the back of an old envelope that he used as a bookmark. The stupendous, incomprehensible quantity of human misery represented by the numbers numbed him, made it impossible to pick up the book again and continue reading.

Jake Grafton stared out the window at the swaying trees in the yard without seeing them, played with his mechanical pencil, ran his fingers yet again through his thinning hair.

And he looked again at the envelope. Fifteen million Russians died fighting the Germans during World War I. Fifteen million! Dead! No wonder the nation came apart at the seams. No wonder they dragged the czar from his palace and put him and his family against the wall. Fifteen million!

The new republic was doomed. The Bolsheviks plunged the land into a five-year civil war, a hell of violence, famine and disease that cost another fifteen million lives. Another fifteen million!

Then came Josef Stalin and the forced collectivization of Soviet agriculture. Here the number was nebulous, an educated guess. One historian estimated six million families were murdered or starved to death — another believed at least ten million men, women, and children perished; young and old, vigorous and infirm, those struggling to live and those waiting to die. The Red Army had gone through thousands of square miles robbing the peasants of every crumb, every animal, every potato and cabbage and edible kernel, then sealed the districts and waited for every last human to starve.

Ten million! A conservative estimate, Jake thought.

Then came the purges. Under Josef Stalin — and they had called the fourth Ivan “the Terrible!”—Soviet citizens were worked as slave labor until they died or were shot in wholesale lots because they might not be loyal to their Communist masters. The secret police murder squads had quotas. And they filled them. Through the use of show trials and extorted confessions, the soul-numbing terror was injected into every nook and cranny of Soviet life. Citizens in all walks of life denounced one another in a paranoid hysteria that fed on human sacrifice. Those who survived the horror had a word for it: liquidation.

Over twenty million human beings were liquidated, possibly as many as forty million. Only God knew the real number and He had kept the secret.

World War II — the raging furnace of war, famine and disease consumed another twenty-five million Soviet citizens. Twenty-five million!

The numbers totaled eighty-five million minimum. Jake Grafton added the numbers three times. It was too much. The human mind could not grasp the significance of the numerals on the back of the tattered envelope.

Eighty-five million human lives.

It was like trying to comprehend how many stars were in a galaxy, how many galaxies were in the universe.

“Jake?” His wife stood in the doorway. “Amy and I are going to the Crystal City mall. Won’t you come with us?”

He stared at her. She was of medium height, with traces of gray in her dark hair. She had her purse in her hand.

“The mall…”

“Amy wants to drive.” The youngster had just received her learner’s permit and was now driving the family car, but only when Jake was in the front seat with her. Callie had announced that her nerves were not up to that challenge and refused the honor.

Jake Grafton rose to his feet and glanced out the window. Outside the sun shone weakly from a high, hazy sky. On this June Saturday all over America baseball games were in progress, people were riding bicycles, shopping, buying groceries, mowing yards, enjoying the balmy temperatures of June and contemplating the prospect of the whole summer ahead.

The envelope and its numbers seemed as far away from this reality as casualty figures from the Spanish Inquisition.

“Okay,” Jake Grafton told his wife.

He eyed the envelope one last time, then slid it between the pages of the book. With the book closed the numbers were hidden; only the top half inch of the envelope was visible.

Eighty-five million people.

But they were all long dead, as dead as the pharaohs. The earth soaked up their tears and blood and recycled their corpses. Only the numbers survived.

He turned off the light as he left the room.

Toad Tarkington called after the Graftons returned from the mall. Callie invited him to dinner. Five minutes later she answered the phone again.

“Jack Yocke, Mrs. Grafton. I’m leaving for an overseas assignment on Monday and I wondered if I could stop by and chat with your husband this evening.”

“Why don’t you come to dinner, Jack? Around six-thirty.”

“I don’t want to put you to any trouble.”

Callie was amused. She enjoyed entertaining, and Jack Yocke, a reporter for the Washington Post, was a frequent guest. Jake habitually avoided reporters, but Yocke had become a family friend through an unusual set of circumstances. And he had never yet turned down a dinner invitation. Friends or not, he had the most important commodity in Washington — access — and he knew precisely what that was worth. Callie undoubtedly knew too, Yocke thought: she was perfectly capable of slamming the door in his face if she ever thought he had taken advantage of her hospitality.

“No trouble, Jack,” she told him now. “Where are you going?”

“Moscow! It’s my first overseas assignment.” The enthusiasm in his voice was tangible.

Callie stifled a laugh. Yocke had been maneuvering desperately for two years to get an overseas assignment. Other than a short jaunt to Cuba, he had spent most of his five years at the Post on the metro beat covering police and local politics. “Good things come to those who wait,” she told him.

“Actually,” Yocke said, lowering his voice conspiratorially, “I got the nod because our number two man over there had a family emergency and had to come home. My biggest asset is that I’m single.”

“And you’ve been asking for an overseas assignment.”

“Begging might be a better word.”

“Moscow? He’s going to Moscow?” Jake Grafton repeated when his wife went into the study to give him the news.

Callie nodded. “Moscow. It’s dangerous over there, I know, but this is a big break for him professionally.” She left the room to see about dinner.

“He’ll certainly have plenty to write about,” Jake Grafton remarked to himself as he surveyed the piles of books, newspapers and magazines strewn over the desk and credenza.

He was reading everything he could lay hands on these days about the Soviet Union, the superpower that had collapsed less than two years ago and was now racked by turmoil. Like a ramshackle old house that had withstood the winds and storms long past its time, the Communist empire fell suddenly, imploded, shattered like old crystal, all in a heap. Now ethnic feuds, runaway inflation, famine and a gradual disintegration of the social order were fueling the expanding flames.

“Plenty,” Grafton muttered listlessly.

Yocke’s enthusiasm for his new adventure set the tone at dinner. Almost thirty, tall and lean, he regarded his new assignment as a great challenge. “I can’t stand to go into that District Building one more time. This is my chance to get out of metro once and for all.”

His chance to get famous, Jake Grafton thought, but he didn’t say it. The young reporter oozed ambition, and the admiral didn’t hold that against him. Ambition seemed to be one of the essential ingredients to a life of great accomplishments. Lincoln had it, and Churchill, Roosevelt…Hitler. Josef Stalin.

Grafton played with his food as Jack Yocke talked about Russia. Toad Tarkington seemed preoccupied and quieter than usual. Tonight he listened to Yocke without comment.

“It’s hard to imagine the Russian empire without a powerful bureaucracy. The bureaucracy was firmly entrenched by 1650 and became indispensable under Peter the Great. It was the tool the czars used to administer the empire, to run the state. The Bolsheviks just adopted it pen and paper clips when they took over. The problem at the end was that the bureaucracy lost the capability of providing. The infernal machine just ground to a halt and nothing on this earth could get it started again without the direct application of force.”

“Not force,” Jake Grafton said. “Terror.”

“Terror,” Yocke agreed, “which the leadership was no longer in a position to supply.”

“Where did they go wrong?” Callie asked. “After the collapse of communism and the dissolution of the Soviet state, everyone was so hopeful. Where did they go wrong?”

Everyone at the table had an opinion about that, even Amy. “No one over there likes anyone else,” she stated. “All the ethnic groups hate each other. That isn’t right. People shouldn’t hate.”

Toad Tarkington winked at her. Amy was growing up, and he liked her very much. “How’s the driving going?” he asked when there was a break in the conversation.

“Great,” Amy said, and grinned. “Except for Mom, who sits there gritting her teeth, waiting for the crash.”

“Now, Amy…,” Callie began.

“She knows it’s going to be bad — teeth, hair and eyeballs all over the dashboard.” Amy sighed plaintively. “I’ve decided to become a race car driver. I’m going to start in stock cars. I figure in a couple of years I’ll be ready for formula one.”

“Amy Carol,” her mother said with mock severity. “You are not—”

“Talent,” Amy told Toad. “Some people have it and some don’t. You should see my throttle work and the way I handle the wheel.”

After dinner Jack Yocke asked to speak with the admiral alone, so Jake took him into the study and closed the door. “Looks like you’ve been doing some reading,” the reporter remarked as both men settled into chairs.

“Ummm.”

“This is my big break,” Yocke said.

“That’s what you said when the Post let you write a column during the ’92 presidential primary campaign.”

“Well, that didn’t work out. And it wasn’t a column — it was just a signed opinion article once a week.”

Jake reached for a scrapbook on a bookshelf and flipped through it. “Callie saved most of them. I thought some of your stuff was pretty good.”

Yocke shrugged modestly, a gesture that Grafton missed. The admiral adjusted his glasses on his nose and said, “Let’s see — this was written in January, before the New Hampshire primary. You said, ‘Now Bush admits that he didn’t know the country was in a recession. He’s the only man in America who hadn’t heard the news. The man’s a groundhog who only comes out of his hole every four years to campaign.’ ”

“Acceptable hyperbole,” Yocke said and squirmed in his seat. “A columnist is supposed to be interesting.”

“ ‘If George Bush had been president during World War II, allied troops would have stopped at the Rhine and the Nazis would still be running Germany.’ ”

“Well…”

Grafton flipped pages. He cleared his throat. “ ‘The American people don’t want George Bush and Clarence “Coke can” Thomas deciding whether their daughters can have abortions.’ ” Grafton glanced over his glasses at Yocke. “Coke can?”

“There was a mix-up on that. That comment should not have gotten into the paper. I wrote that as a joke to give the editor something to shout at me about and somehow he missed it. He and I almost got canned.”

Grafton sighed and flipped more pages. “Ahh, here’s my favorite: ‘Even if Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton is absolutely innocent, as he claims, of having an adulterous affair with bimbo Gennifer Flowers, that by itself would not disqualify him to be president. America has had two presidents this century, perhaps even three, who were faithful to their wives. A fourth would not rend the social fabric beyond repair. It’s an indisputable fact that such dull clods rarely seek public office in our fair land and almost never achieve it, so if one does squeak in occasionally, once a generation, how much harm could he do?’ ”

“A parody of David Broder,” Yocke muttered with a touch of defiance. “A satire.”

“Everything written in our age is satire,” the admiral said as he closed the scrapbook and slid it back into the bookshelf. When he looked at Yocke he grinned. “You should be writing for Rolling Stone.”

“The Post pays better,” Jack Yocke said. “Y’know, I’ve written a lot of stuff through the years, yet I still have to spell my name for the guy at the laundry whenever I drop off my shirts. And he’s seen me twice a week for five years, speaks English, can even read a little.”

Still wearing a grin, Grafton took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Your stuff’s too subtle. You should try to give it more punch.”

“Words to live by. I’ll remember that advice. But we have a hot tip that I’m going to try to chase down when I get to Russia. The story is that some tactical nukes are on the open market. For sale to the highest bidder.”

“You don’t say?” Jake Grafton said. He pushed his eyebrows aloft. “Where’d you hear that?”

Yocke crossed his legs and settled in. “I know you won’t confirm or deny anything, and you won’t breathe a word of classified information, but I thought I’d run this rumor by you. Just for the heck of it.”

Jake Grafton ran his fingers through his hair, pinched his nose, and regarded his guest without enthusiasm. “Thanks. We’ll look into it. Be a help if we knew the source of this hot tip, though.”

“I can’t give you that. It’s more of a rumor than a tip. Still, if it’s true it’s a hell of a story.”

“A story to make you famous,” Jake agreed. “And to think we knew you when. All you have to do is live long enough to file it.”

“There’s that, of course.”

Jake stood and held out his hand. “If worse comes to worst, it’s been nice knowing you.”

Jack Yocke looked at the outstretched hand a moment, then shook it. He got out of his chair and smiled. “One of your most charming characteristics, Admiral, is that deep streak of maudlin sentiment under the professional exterior. You’re just an old softie.”

“Drop us a postcard from time to time and tell us how you’re doing.”

“Yeah. Sure.”

Jack Yocke opened the door and went out, and Amy Carol came in. She carefully closed the door behind her. “Dad, I have a question.” She dropped into the chair just vacated by the reporter.

“Okay.”

“It’s about sex.”

Jake opened his mouth, then closed it again. Amy was growing up, no question about that. She had filled out nicely in all the womanly places and presumably had consulted with Callie about plumbing, morals and all that. Under his scrutiny she squirmed slightly in her seat.

“Why don’t you ask your mom?”

Amy shot out of the chair and bolted for the door. On her way down the hall he heard her call, “Toad, you owe me five bucks. I told you he’d duck it.”

After Yocke said his good-byes, Jake and Toad Tarkington took coffee into the study and carefully closed the door.

“You’re not going to believe this, Admiral, but last night at the Kennedy Center Judith Farrell walked up and said hi.”

Jake Grafton took a while to process it. It had been years since he’d heard that name. “Judith Farrell, the Mossad agent?”

“That’s right, sir. Judith Farrell. Now she calls herself Elizabeth Thorn. She had a Maryland driver’s license.”

“Better tell me about it.”

Toad did so. In due course he got to the message. “You remember Nigel Keren, the British billionaire publisher who fell off his yacht a year or two ago while it was cruising in the Canaries?”

Jake nodded. “Found floating naked in the ocean.”

“Stone cold dead. That’s the guy, Nigel Keren. Then his publishing empire went tits up amid claims of financial shenanigans. But nobody could ever figure out how Keren got from his stateroom aboard the yacht over a chest-high rail into the water while wearing nothing but his birthday suit.”

Jake sipped coffee. “He was a Lebanese Jew, wasn’t he? Naturalized in Britain?”

“Yessir. Anyway, ol’ Judith Farrell says the CIA killed him.”

“What?”

“That’s the message she wanted you to have, Admiral. The CIA killed Nigel Keren. Oh, and this photo.” Toad took the envelope from his pocket and passed it to the admiral, who went to his desk and turned on the desk lamp to examine it.

“I know who this is,” he told Toad.

“Yessir. I recognized him too. Herb Tenney, the CIA officer who is going to Russia with us. If we go.”

Jake got a magnifying glass from his desk drawer and examined the photo carefully as he tried to recall what he had read of Keren’s death. The financier had been alone on the yacht with its crew until he turned up missing one morning. Several days later his nude body was fished from the ocean. All twelve crewmen claimed ignorance. The Spanish pathologist had been unable to establish the cause of death but ruled out drowning, due to an absence of water in the lungs. So Keren had been dead when his body went overboard. How he died was an unsolved mystery.

Finally Jake laid the glass and the photo on the desk and regarded it with a frown. “Herb Tenney reading a newspaper.” He sighed. “Okay, what’s the rest of the message?”

“You got it all, Admiral. ‘Tell Admiral Grafton that the CIA killed Nigel Keren and here’s a photo and negative. Bye.’ That’s all she said.”

Jake used the magnifying glass to examine the negative. It appeared to be the one from which the print was made. Finally he put both print and negative back in the envelope and passed the envelope back to Toad. “Take these to the computer center on Monday morning and have them examined. I want to know where and when the photo was taken and I want to know if the negative has been altered or enhanced by computer processing.” He doubted if the negative had been altered, but Farrell had offered it as evidence, so it wouldn’t hurt to check.

“Yessir. But what if word of this gets back to Tenney?”

“What if it does? Maybe he can tell us about the photograph.”

“If the CIA killed Keren and Tenney was in on it, maybe they won’t want anyone to see this picture.”

“Toad, you’ve been reading too many spy stories. We’ll probably have to ask Tenney about that picture. Farrell knew that. She probably wants us to question Tenney.”

“Then we shouldn’t,” Toad said. “At least not until we know what this is all about.”

Jake Grafton snorted. He had been on the fringes of the intelligence business long enough to distrust everyone associated with it. The truth, he believed, wasn’t in them. They didn’t know it. Worse, they never expected to learn it, nor did they care. “Take the print and negative to the computer guys,” he repeated. “Stick a classification on it. Top secret. That should keep the technician quiet.”

“What about Farrell?” Toad demanded.

“What about her?”

“We could get her address from the Maryland department of motor vehicles and try to find her.”

“She was told what to say and she said it. She doesn’t know anything.”

Toad Tarkington flicked the envelope with his forefinger, then placed it in an inside pocket. He drained the last of his coffee. “If you don’t mind my asking, what did Yocke want?”

“He’s heard a rumor that some tactical nukes are for sale in Russia to the highest bidder.”

“Shee-it!”

“I know the feeling,” Jake Grafton said. “The most sensitive, important, dangerous item on the griddle at the National Security Council and Jack Yocke picked it up on the street. Now he’s charging off to scribble himself famous. Makes you want to blow lunch.”