The Vulcan Disaster

Chapter Fifteen

The airport cab, coming in from Dulles, pulled up on Connecticut Avenue just above Bialek’s bookstore, “Hey,” I said. “What are you doing?”

“You said Dupont Circle,” the driver said. “If you’ve gone and changed your mind all you’ve gotta do is tell me about it. Meanwhile, while you’re sittin’ there dreamin’, I got a livin’ to make, buddy. I don’t mind lettin’ this meter run, but...” He let it hang. His eyes in the rear view mirror were bored and skeptical.

“Sorry about that,” I said. I’d had a lot of things on my mind on the way back, and I hadn’t had much sleep in the past week. I must have just popped it out, Dupont Circle, force of habit. Well, I thought, as good one place as another. My digs were within walking distance, and it made a convenient reference point. “Here,” I said, and slipped him three bills. Getting out of the car, I wished there were some way of bending over, when you had a couple of cracked ribs, without feeling like a Tinkertoy figure who’d been run over by a truck.

“Nick.”

That wasn’t all the voice was saying, coming toward me. It was just all that I could pick out of a constant mutter with its own built-in static. The red-bearded face and the slightly potty body, stuffed into a suit so disreputable even David Hawk wouldn’t have worn it, were nothing particularly distinctive, but I’d have known that lurching gait and nonstop chatter anywhere. It had to be Robert Franks.

Well, listen to a little of it:

“...got a message for you the other day, and whoever she was, she sounded interesting. I stuck the note under the door of your office, anyhow, after hours. I wonder if she’s got a friend. Like to snag the lady and perhaps some little thing she might be pals with and come on out this weekend? Boy, You’re looking rocky today. Want to go grab a cup of coffee? I’ve got a minute or two. On my way over to Interior. Big hassle over Indian fishing rights. Tell you all about it later. Sure I can’t interest you, huh? They...”

“Bob,” I said, “slow down, huh? What was it you said just now?”

“When? Uh... well, the Indians want...”

“No,” I said. “The part about sticking a message under the door. The door of my office.”

“Hmmm? Oh, yes. Well, you know, Ed Quinlan’s out of town this month, and I’ve been using his office and phone... well, until they turned it off. My base of operations, you know. When he gets back I’ve got a consultancy job...”

“Who’s Ed Quinlan?”

“He’s got the office three doors down from yours. No, I guess it’s two now, isn’t it? Almost forgot about that. Anyhow, Ed’s place is the office next to the john. Better Beekeeping magazine, it says on the door, only there aren’t any magazines there and the typewriter doesn’t work. I’ve been wondering just what the place is a front for. Ed never comes to work, and his wife is always calling... well, she used to and...”

“Say, Bob, hang on, would you? I’ve got to go find out something. Look, I’ll call you, soon, okay?”

He smiled his lopsided smile. “Won’t do any good. I haven’t paid that phone bill either.” But he waved me off in his cordial, offhand manner, and was doing the speed limit by the time he hit the crosswalk, muttering to himself, lips pursed, his red eyebrows going up and down.

I was moving too: opening the door of the old building and pounding up the stairs, one hand on that achey rib cage. It wouldn’t be the first time Bob had inadvertently slipped me something important. He had this way of getting around Washington and keeping his eyes and ears open, and I’d have bet he had enough odd information stashed away in that brilliantly disorganized head of his to make or break half of the bigwigs on the Hill. But this? If only he knew what he was talking about this time. I reached the right landing, pushed through the door, chugged down the hall, and tried the fourth knob.

Nothing. The sign on the door said Joel Eigen, Custom Jewelry. Mr. Eigen wasn’t in.

I stood there for a minute, thinking about what Bob Franks had said. Three doors down from yours. No, it’s two now, isn’t it? Almost forgot about that... Of course, the question was, forgot about what? I stepped back and checked the doors: the men’s loo, the Better Beekeeping thing he’d mentioned, the storage room, and the office of...

Of Maytag Corp.: Regional Sales Office...

I let my breath out. Then I moved over one door and tried the knob.

It wasn’t a work day. It shouldn’t have opened.

It did open.

There behind the desk sat David Hawk in his usual grizzly-bear-at-bay attitude in his usual dog’s-blanket suit, savaging one of those ghastly cigars with those strong back teeth of his. He was looking up at me with eyes that held neither irritation nor surprise. He jerked his head at the open door. “Nick. Come on in. Where’ve you been?”

I sat down, a little uneasily... and I told him.

He listened, asking a question now and then in monosyllables and grunts, with a poker face Nick the Greek would have been proud of. When Will Lockwood came on the scene, he betrayed surprise. Just once. One eyebrow went up a millimeter, no more. That was a big reaction. The cigar took one hell of a beating, though.

At the end of my story, Hawk finally realized the stogie had had it. He took it out of his mouth, still unlit, gave it a dirty look for letting him down, and dumped it in the wastebasket. Then he looked at me, the poker face in place again.

“You know there’s going to be a stink,” he said. “About Morse.”

“Uh... yes, sir,” I said. I was preparing a defense. Apologize? No way, sir.

Hawk scowled. “Well, that’s all right. Come to think of it, if you hadn’t creamed him you’d be in worse trouble with me. I’d have put you out to pasture for losing your punch.” His smile, now, was more like anyone else’s idea of a frown, but I could tell the difference. “As it is, you could use a few weeks off...”

“Hey,” I said. “No, sir. No vacations. I’ll wear some elastic around my ribs and I’ll watch my step, but I’m not taking any time off. The only reason I came back when I did was to get more information, and to get plugged back into AXE, and to set things up so I can bust those...”

Hawk put up one broad palm. I slowed down, then stopped dead. “I didn’t say anything about a few weeks in a rest home. You’re going to be working your rear end off, all right; don’t worry about that.”

I sat back and relaxed a little — but only a little.

“Actually,” Hawk continued, “you did pretty well out there, Nick. Matter of fact, I don’t think I know how you could have done better. You...”

“I did lousy,” I said. “I screwed up gloriously. That’s why...”

He waved me to a halt again. “No, no. I know you were flying by the seat of your pants. That’s all right. That’s my fault if it’s anybody’s. I feel bad about that. I’ll never send you out cold like that again, and if I hadn’t been thinking about six other things at the same time I wouldn’t have done it this time. There were complications here. We...”

“I’d been meaning to ask about that. What happened?”

“There was a major compromise, Nick. Here in the capital. Some fool on the staff of a Congressman — we know who, but it won’t do us any good — got hold of a batch of papers he shouldn’t have and leaked it out to one of the papers. We’re right in the middle of a big internal-affairs fight just now, trying to block publication and we may succeed. This time the material is so sensitive even the Washington Post is having qualms about printing it.” Hawk looked at me hard. “Meanwhile, since it impinges on one small corner of our own activity, and comes within an ace of blowing AXE’s own cover, we went underground for the time being. Sorry about that. I had no idea it’d tie your hands at a ticklish time. I thought of taking out a new address altogether, but moving would have telegraphed things completely. I settled on a move next door. Regular movements to and fro, that sort of thing.”

“Oh,” I said. “I thought I’d better mention something.” I told him about Bob Franks, and Bob’s knowing where I worked, which had surprised me. We’d only met at press functions before.

“He’s okay,” Hawk said. “We’ve checked him out. Somebody talked to him a while back. He’s just one of these Washington types, cutting across one agency or discipline after another. He used to have quite a high security clearance back between Korea and Vietnam: a consultancy. He knows the score, and when to clam up.”

“Oh,” I said. I should have assumed he’d have given everybody on the floor the once-over before moving in. “Anyhow...”

“Anyhow, you did pretty well out there, all in all. You lost the film, maybe, but it led to a couple of discoveries. Never mind the film. I said it couldn’t be replaced, but maybe it can. Matter of fact, that’s precisely what you’re going to be doing on your little vacation, among other things.”

“I don’t understand.”

Hawk held that palm up again. “All in good time. Anyhow, everything seems to have worked out all right...”

“It worked out lousy,” I said bitterly. “Will and Tatiana are dead. And Fred. And the trail’s cold. All I have to go on is...”

“You have plenty to go on. You’ll see. And don’t take it to heart so much. The only way you could have saved Fredericks would have been to rub out Shimon and Zvy, the Israelis, back in the warehouse the first time. And much as I hate to hear about Fredericks — he was a good man, and both we and the British will miss him — I’m glad those two are still alive. Alive, they may lead us to something. Frankly, they’re a new wrinkle, and as soon as I’m done talking to you I’m alerting Tel Aviv. They need to know — if they don’t already — that there’s a new pair of wild cards in the deck.”

“You don’t know who they are?”

“No. But I will, and so will you. By the time we’re done with this little operation we’re going to know everything anybody needs to know. Including what happened to that shipment of arms, and where it’s gone, and who, right now, is going around thinking he’ll be getting a chance to use it. And how, too. Nick, if we can head the stuff off — well, I don’t need to tell you how much damage that much in the way of new firepower can do to the world balance-of-power situation, whether or not it’s used in the Middle East...”

“Excuse me, sir. Is that the place you’re expecting it to wind up? For sure?”

“I was going to get to that. Yes, that’s a distinct possibility, and one we didn’t know about until you turned up with our friends Mr. Zvy and Mr. Shimon. There’s another possibility, another powder keg around the world just waiting for the spark to touch it off — and a whole damned shipload of arms, dropped into a seller’s market, might turn out to be just the kind of spark we’re talking about.”

“Where’s that?”

“Angola. With Portugal getting out, we can expect another Congo all over again. This time, if our information is correct, with Russian fingerprints all over one side of the conflict — and, we suspect with some kind of intervention from Cuba as well.”

“But... why Angola?”

“Why the Russians? Well, we’re on the brink of a new colonial era in southern Africa. Only this time better than half the world — three quarters of the U.N. — is going to be calling the colonialism of the Soviet bloc ‘self-determination.’ ”

“Black is white, huh? ‘War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength?’ ” I said, quoting 1984.

“You’ve got it. And Angola’s in a nice strategic position in the new oil-oriented geopolitical picture, Nick. It will also make a nice hiding place for guerrilla raids across the South African border and for eventual invasion of the Cape. And our friendship with our Boer friends may be strained at times, but they are our allies. Well, you see the problem.”

“Okay,” I said. “In the meantime...”

“In the meantime you’re going to work on the middle men in these wildcat arms deals that have been going on. You...”

“Middle men?” I said. “You mean the two Israelis? Or the guys Will broke in on?”

“Will...” Hawk sighed. The sides of his mouth turned down. “I don’t feel any too good about that, either. I... well, he told you. We were pretty close once. I thought he was dead.”

“Yes,” I said. “He wanted it that way. He was a real trouper.” I didn’t want to talk about Will or Tatiana. I didn’t want to think about them. Not until all this was over. “Anyhow...”

“Anyhow,” David Hawk said, catching my mood, “it isn’t Shimon and Zvy you’re going after. You forgot that all-important name, Nick.” He decided to light that cigar. He had it going, spewing billows of smoke, before he spoke again. “Komaroff,” he said, dropping that other shoe at last.

“I’d been meaning to ask. Who the devil is Komaroff?”

“If I’d told you in the first place... But no matter. Spilled milk. Here. I had the staff file digested for you while you were gone. Read it, get some sleep, and come back in tomorrow. All right?” He handed me a legal-size file with one stubby-fingered hand and dismissed me with the other. “And dig into the wardrobe for whatever they’re wearing at the beach this season. If they’re still wearing anything at the beach this season.”

“Beach?” I said. “Where?” I still hadn’t looked at the file. “Odessa? The Black Sea resorts? Sevastopol?”

“Nothing so fancy,” he said. “The Mediterranean. The Adriatic. The Aegean.” Hawk shuddered; he hated travel. He looked back up at me one more time, and the frown was almost a real one this time. “Damn it, Carter, aren’t you gone yet?”