Torpedo!

CHAPTER 5

Vice Admiral Mike Brannon sat at his desk contemplating the lunch tray that had been brought in to him. A dish of cottage cheese topped by a half a peach, two squares of dry toast, and coffee. He made a face and began to eat. There were times, he thought, when the Navy intruded itself too much into a man’s personal business. When you passed the age of sixty eating should be a pleasure, not a duty. But the doctors at Bethesda had impressed on Gloria Brannon that the Admiral was carrying too much weight and had to lose twenty-five pounds. Her orders to the Admiral’s staff had been clear; the Admiral was on a diet. The staff obeyed orders.

He pushed the tray away as his office door opened. “Priority message from the Medusa, Admiral. I cleared the office area of personnel before I ran it through the decoding machine, sir.” The Chief Yeoman laid the message on the desk and picked up the tray. “I called Admiral Olsen’s office, sir. He’s on his way here.”

“Thank you, Chief,” Brannon said. He read the message through. He was reading it for the second time when John Olsen walked in and closed the door behind him.

“They’ve found the Sharkfin, John.” Brannon’s face was grim. “She’s on the bottom, right on her course line. Captain Lutz of the Medusa says they’ve got excellent pictures, lots of them.”

Olsen looked at Brannon’s harsh face. “What do the pictures show, does he say, Mike?”

“Her screw’s twisted off to the port side and there’s a big hole in her stern. She’s on an even keel. Lutz says there’s no mistake about the hole. It’s there, in her stern. He made four camera runs. The hole shows up clearly.” He glared at Olsen. “Just what in the hell could have twisted her screw off to one side and holed her in the stern?”

“It couldn’t be anything she hit running submerged,” Olsen said.

“I think she was hit by a weapon,” Brannon grated. “Lutz says in his message that he’s ordered a chopper out of Rota to meet him and pick up the pictures. Medusa has a chopper landing pad. But he hasn’t got any authority to order the pictures sent here by special courier plane. See the Chief and get that order off in my name at once and find out when the plane will be here.

“I want you to meet the plane and pick up the pictures and bring them here. I want to see Captain Steel now, right now.” He picked up the message and read it again as Olsen went into the outer office. He was at his wall chart when Olsen came back into the office, trailed by Captain Steel.

“The Medusa has found the Sharkfin, Captain,” Brannon said. “I need your engineering opinion. We’ll have pictures by tomorrow but Medusa has told us what the pictures show. Sharkfin is on the bottom on an even keel. Her screw is twisted or bent off to the port side. There’s a hole in her stern area.”

“Is he sure it’s the Sharkfin?” Steel asked.

“He’s got pictures of her number. No doubt. What I’d like to know is, would it be possible for the propeller shaft to burst its bearings or something and run wild and tear up the stern, twist the propeller off to one side?”

“No.” Captain Steel said.

“My thought also,” Brannon said. “The only other thing that comes to mind is that Sharkfin was hit by a weapon that destroyed her screw and blew a hole in her stern.”

“You may be right.” Steel’s tone was grudging. “I told you it wasn’t a failure in her nuclear power plant. We need the pictures to make a reasonably accurate analysis. If the pictures bear out your supposition, Admiral, then you’ve got a very serious problem facing you. You’d better solve it quickly. I won’t have my nuclear submarines interfered with by anyone or anything.”

Mike Brannon came out of his chair, his face darkening with rage. “Now you get one thing straight, damn it! The nuclear submarines are not your Goddamned submarines! They belong to the Navy. And you hear this; I care a hell of a lot more about the hundred and twenty or so sailors who were on the Sharkfin than I do about the ship. Is that clear, sir?”

Captain Steel stared at Mike Brannon. “You make it perfectly clear, Admiral. But the problem remains. Someone destroyed the Sharkfin. And its crew. And that someone has got to be stopped. I’d rather not say any more until I have seen the pictures.”

“Tell your office to notify my Chief Yeoman of your schedule tomorrow. I expect to have pictures then. I’ll notify you as soon as they arrive.” Brannon turned to John Olsen as Steel left the office.

“You get the message off to Rota?”

Olsen nodded. “Good Chief you’ve got out there. He had them on the line, waiting, when I went out there. They’ve got a plane available. It will land at Andrews tomorrow at zero six hundred. I’ll be there.” He picked up the message and read it.

“The way this reads, Mike, it had to be a weapon. Probably a sound-seeking torpedo fired at her screw. Think it could have been that Soviet attack submarine that tracked her out of the Strait of Gibraltar?”

“I think so,” Brannon said. He went to his office door and opened it. “Chief, please notify Admiral Benson and Mr. Wilson of the CIA that I would appreciate it if they could be here in my office at zero eight hundred. We have information of great importance for them. Notify Captain Steel’s office that I expect him here at ten hundred tomorrow. I want you here by zero seven hundred at the latest. I expect to be here at zero six thirty.”

The Agency limousine eased out of the Pentagon parking area and began the long trip back to the CIA headquarters. Wilson pushed a button that slid a glass partition between the driver’s area and the rear seat and turned to Admiral Benson.

“Those pictures were scary,” Wilson said. “They don’t leave much doubt about what happened to that submarine. What I’d like to know is, how well do you know Admiral Brannon? He’s Irish and like a lot of the Irish he’s keeping his feelings to himself but he’s boiling inside. What’s he likely to do?”

“He’s submarine, I was aviation,” Admiral Benson said slowly. “I don’t know him that well. I know his record, his reputation. He’s tough. He’s direct. He’s a decent man, a hard worker. But what will he do? I think that’s pretty clear, Bob. He’s got to take this to the President.”

“Maybe,” Wilson said. He lit a cigarette and watched the smoke swirl away in the car’s ventilation system.

“What else can he do?” Benson said. “The pictures are excellent. Sharkfin was hit by a weapon fired by a ship from an unknown nation. He’s only got one course of action to take, to go to the President.”

“Then why did he order an attack submarine to leave Scotland at the same time he ordered that Medusa ship to start searching for the Sharkfin? Why did he order that attack submarine to go to the area where the Sharkfin was sunk and to obey only orders that came from him, from Brannon?”

“Who said he did?”

“We monitor every radio circuit going, you know that,” Wilson grunted. “He gave those orders. You give me your guess and I’ll give you mine about why he did it. I think he’s going to go after that Soviet submarine and sink it.”

“He couldn’t!” Admiral Benson protested. “His whole career would go down the drain. It’s unthinkable!”

“So?” Wilson said. He pushed a button that lowered the window on his side of the car and flipped his cigarette butt through the opening. He raised the window and looked at Benson.

“Admiral Brannon’s been in Washington for about three years. He knows the score, as you Navy people say.”

“What’s that supposed to mean, Wilson?” The CIA Director’s voice was suddenly sharp. “I’ve kept it to myself but you sometimes annoy the hell out of me when you put on that old Washington hand attitude. I know I’m relatively new to Washington but I’m not a complete idiot.”

“I apologize, Admiral,” Wilson said. “I didn’t mean it that way. What I mean is that we’ve lived in different worlds. In your world, the Navy, you expect people to be loyal, to do a good day’s work, to respect rank, that sort of thing. You assume that people can be trusted, especially if they’ve got rank. In my world, I expect people to be shitheads, if you’ll excuse the word.

“What I meant was that Admiral Brannon’s been in Washington in a damned tough job long enough to have been stabbed in the back, lied to, and he’s learned the score. He knows, I know, that if he takes this to the President — and he may do that, I’m not saying he won’t — but if he takes this to the President he knows what will happen.

“What will happen is there will be meetings, a lot of crisis meetings. You can’t keep crisis meetings secret in this town. The press will begin to snoop around and you can bet your last dollar that some son of a bitch who spends a lot of his time kissing the President’s ass will leak the story to some reporter. And within a few days the whole damned world will know we lost the Sharkfin.

“Once the story gets out we won’t be able to do a damned thing. The Russians will offer their sympathy and deny everything. We’ll be left with egg on our chin, a submarine on the bottom of the ocean, and a lot of good American sailors dead.” He lit another cigarette.

“Uncle Sam, the patsy,” he growled.

“You believe that?” Benson said.

“I’ve seen it happen before. The Cuban invasion project is a good example. That was supposed to be absolutely secret. But there were too many meetings, too many people in the damned project. Little things began to leak out. James Reston of the New York Times got the whole story weeks before the invasion.

“Happens that Reston is an honorable man. He went to his editors and told them they shouldn’t print the story. Might have been better for all of us if he had gone ahead and printed it. That might have killed the damned project.” He hunched down in the upholstered seat.

“Brannon knows his way around this town. I have to assume that he knows a little about how the Soviet mind works. If he did order that Soviet submarine wiped out — well, that would be about the best message you could send to the Kremlin. They’d understand that sort of action because that’s how they work.”

Admiral Benson fiddled with the snaps of the briefcase he held in his lap. “If we suspect he might go after that Soviet submarine, and I don’t for one minute think he will do that, but if we did suspect he might we’d be honor bound to go to the President and tell him.”

Wilson glanced at Admiral Benson out of the corner of his eye. “And if we did that and Brannon didn’t do anything his name would be shit with the President and the Joint Chiefs.”

“But if we just sit here and do nothing we’re right in the middle!”

“Comes with the territory,” Wilson said. “There might be a way around this whole thing, though.”

“How?”

“If we assume the Soviets did sink our submarine, and I’m damned sure they did, they had to have a reason because they don’t do things that serious without some reason. Maybe I can find out the reason. I’d need several days to do that, if I can even do it. You’d have to stall Brannon, convince him not to throw the baby out with the bath water while I try.”

“I don’t know how you expect to do that. We haven’t got a single good agent inside of the Soviet Union who is far enough inside the system to know that.”

“We don’t, sir, but Israel does. Dr. Saul, he’s the head of the Mossad, he might know. He’s got the best penetration into the Soviet Union of any of us and he’s a friend.”

“I didn’t think of Israel,” Benson said slowly. “But if he knows he should have told us by now. We’re his best ally.”

“That isn’t the way the game is played,” Wilson grunted. “If it’s okay with you I’ll go to Tel Aviv and see him. He owes me a few favors. If he knows he’ll tell me. I’d like a couple of those pictures Admiral Brannon gave you of the Shark-fin to take with me.”

Admiral Benson sat quietly, looking out the window, turning the problem over in his mind. He opened and closed a snap on the briefcase and the sharp metallic sound hung in the air.

“I’d better send you an interoffice memo telling you to go to New York, to the United Nations for some talks. That would account for your absence from the office.” He looked out the window at the wind-scarred countryside. “I’ll get back to Mike Brannon, tell him to stand pat for a few days.” He drew a deep breath and let it out slowly. “You know, running a carrier division was a hell of a lot more fun than this job.”

Seated in his office with a cup of coffee Wilson looked at his watch. Ten in the morning, Washington time. Five in the afternoon in Tel Aviv. Isser Bernstein, a.k.a. Dr. Saul, would be in his office. No chief of Israel’s Mossad, its famed intelligence service, ever went home early. He reached for the scrambler phone and asked to be connected with Dr. Saul’s office.

“How’s your health, my friend?” Dr. Saul’s hearty voice boomed through the mechanical artificiality of the scrambler.

“Not so good, Doctor. Bad attack of nostalgia, I think. I desperately need to see someone.”

Wilson sat back in his chair, visualizing the man at the other end of the telephone connection. A short man with a tanned bald head ringed with a fringe of gray hair that matched his small goatee and precisely trimmed mustache. Isser Bernstein was a former Irgun terrorist who had helped form the Mossad in 1945. In the years since he had risen to be its chief and had become a legend in the world’s intelligence circles.

“Nostalgia can sometimes be difficult to treat.” Bernstein’s voice was solemn.

“I know,” Wilson said. “I think you’re the only doctor who can help me. Do you remember our mutual friend, the one who smokes Kools and who went to a university in New York?”

“Ah, yes. Not a person to help sick people.”

“I know but I have to see him if I am to be cured of what ails me. I’d like to do that in your consulting room. Soon. Very soon, Doctor.”

“So you suffer also from anxiety. Be calm. Don’t drink too much coffee. I will see what I can do.”

The call came the next morning from the Israeli Embassy in Washington. A man’s voice instructed Wilson to be in New York that afternoon, that a seat had been reserved in his name on El Al Airlines. The man hesitated a moment and then said, “Dr. Saul advises you eat a light lunch, sir. The cuisine on the airline is famed for its excellence. You will be met upon arrival.”

When Wilson walked into the terminal at the Lydda Airport the next day he saw Isser Bernstein’s secretary waiting for him at the Customs barrier. They smiled at each other and she nodded at the Customs agent who bowed slightly to Wilson. “Nice to see you again, Naomi,” Wilson said. “You get more beautiful every time I see you.”

“And you flatter without reason just as much as you always did. It’s been more than two years since that weekend in Athens and you never wrote me, not once.”

“People in our business don’t write letters, you know that. You broke my heart when you told me you wouldn’t marry me.

“People in our business don’t marry,” she said primly. He followed her through the crowded terminal, his trained eye picking out the unobtrusive men who were ahead of them and back of them as they moved through the crowd. Naomi led him to a battered Fiat parked in a No Parking zone. He cramped himself into the bucket seat beside her and reached for his cigarettes.

“How’s the good doctor, and do you mind if I smoke?”

“He’s fine and I do mind. Cigarettes give you cancer, don’t you know that?” She pulled the car out into the traffic behind a Mercedes with four men in it. “There’s another car behind us,” she said. “Even here at home Dr. Saul takes no chances.”

Twenty minutes later the Fiat pulled up in front of a house surrounded by a high whitewashed wall with sharp spikes studding its top. Two men opened a heavy iron gate and came trotting out to the car. One of the men opened the car door on Wilson’s side and extended a hand to assist him out of the car.

“Welcome home, Mr. Wilson,” he said, his teeth gleaming in his dark face. “The doctor is inside the gate.”

“My old friend from the wars!” Isser Bernstein wrapped his arms around Wilson in a hug. “How is it you grow old and ugly with the years while I get ever more handsome and youthful?” He stepped back, his eyes shrewd. “And how is life for you these days with that airplane jockey your president put at the head of your company?”

“He’s a good guy, very bright,” Wilson said. “He’s hung up on things like loyalty and trust and honesty.”

Bernstein shook his head as he led Wilson into the house. “None of those are qualifications for our work. One must be a thief and a liar and have no sense of shame. Which is why we two are such a great success. Come into the kitchen, I must talk with you before Shevenko gets here. We’ve got a few minutes.

“I have to impose a condition, my friend. This is a very delicate thing you have asked me to do and I have done it. Now I must insist that I sit in on your talk with Shevenko. Moise, you remember Moise Shemanski, he’s still my right hand man, he’ll sit with me.”

Wilson shook his head. “I’d rather not, Isser.”

“So I’ll leave you alone with Shevenko. Do you know if the room is bugged? No. But you might suspect so you go for a walk in the garden to talk. I can listen to you with a Big Ear. You gave us our first Big Ear and we have made many since then. So what do you want to do? Better to have Moise close by in case that Russian bear decides to give you a hug.”

“You’ve got a point,” Wilson said. “We’ll do it your way. But don’t interrupt unless I ask you to do so.”

“Who interrupts? I don’t like talking to that bastard.”

The meeting was held in the kitchen. Wilson and Shevenko sat across from each other at the kitchen table with cups of steaming coffee in front of them. Isser Bernstein and Moise Shemanski, a burly, taciturn Pole who had escaped from a Nazi concentration camp in 1944 and made his way to Israel, sat in wooden chairs against one wall of the kitchen.

Shevenko raised his coffee cup as if offering a toast. “We meet again, Bob. It was worth the long trip just to see you.” He sipped at his coffee. “I might say also that it is almost worth the trip to taste this coffee. You would not believe the coffee we get in our building at home. It must be the water, not even the best American instant coffee tastes very good.”

“You know why I want to see you,” Wilson said.

“I am not good at guessing games, my friend. Tell me.”

“One of our ballistic missile submarines was attacked and sunk by one of your submarines. The attack took place in the Atlantic, west of the Strait of Gibraltar. That was a deliberate act of war, Shevenko.”

“A very serious charge, Bob,” Shevenko said slowly. “More serious because it is made in the presence of our mutual friends. What is the basis for such a charge?”

Wilson opened his attaché case and pulled out several eight by ten black and white photographs. He spread them out on the table in front of Shevenko.

“You can have two of these to take home with you. Take your pick. It’s not conjecture, Shevenko.”

The Russian studied the pictures. “What astounding clarity!” he said in a low voice. “At that depth!” He looked at Wilson and slowly slid two of the pictures over to one side. “I may have these? Thank you. I know of an admiral or two who are going to come down with a bad case of diarrhea when they see these pictures.” He raised his coffee cup and sipped slowly, his eyes steady on Wilson.

“Give me a reason for this insanity,” Wilson said.

“Between sane men there can be no reason, no rationale,” Shevenko answered. “I was against the operation from the beginning. I argued against it as long as it was politic for me to do so. We have as many fools in our Politburo and our military as you do in your Congress and Pentagon. Maybe more.”

“That’s no answer,” Wilson said.

“Because there is no answer,” Shevenko said. “No answer that will satisfy you or would satisfy me if I were sitting in your chair.” He shrugged his heavy shoulders.

“The only thing I can offer you is the truth, a rare commodity in our business but often useful. Your nuclear ballistic submarines, which you call a nuclear deterrent, are to us a nuclear threat. Our cities could be subjected to holocaust, a word our hosts know very well.”

“Doesn’t wash, Shevenko. Your side has nuclear ballistic missile submarines.”

“Of course,” Shevenko said. “But you don’t see through our eyes. We have the longest border in the world and most of it is landlocked, not available for submarine ports. We have only two major submarine ports, one in the north on the Kola Peninsula. In order to get to the Atlantic our submarines have to pass between Britain and Greenland.” He leaned back in his chair and smiled his thanks as Moise brought a hot pot of coffee from the sideboard.

“We know, my friend, that you have sown the bottom of the sea with listening devices so that you will know when one of our submarines makes the passage to the Atlantic and we know, as well, that you have mines laid so that if you wished you could blow our submarines up before they ever got to the open waters of the Atlantic.” His hands closed tightly around the heavy coffee mug.

“Over to the east we have our only other nuclear submarine base, at Petropavlovsk. There again, we know that as soon as one of our submarines heads for the open Pacific it must run the gauntlet of your listening devices and mines.

“You can understand, I think, that this has made our admirals paranoiac. Your nuclear missile submarines can roam the seas of the world without our knowledge of where they are. Ours cannot.”

“The weak point in that argument, Igor, is that you know damned well that we are never going to launch a nuclear attack against anyone.”

Shevenko shrugged. “I know that. I even believe it. But that is not the only thing that concerns our military leaders and our Politburo.

“Your president has started on a course that will lead to friendship between the United States and Mainland China.”

“Communist China,” Wilson interrupted.

“Mainland China. Those bastards are not Communists. But let’s not argue about semantics. Mainland China is not only dangerous to us but also to the rest of the world, a point that your president cannot seem to recognize.

“Some of the fools in our Navy developed a new torpedo. If you don’t know all about it I am sure our friends here do and will tell you if you ask. Like too many military men, yours and ours, they could not rest until they had tested this new torpedo under actual conditions.

“That is the truth of this madness, the only truth. I give you my word, which is good no matter what you happen to think.”

“Why did you argue against the operation. Don’t you share the same fears?”

“I am a realist, Bob. You know that. I argued against it because I can see the long range consequences. You might attack in retaliation. One for one and then two for two and then the nuclear holocaust we all fear if we are sane. We, you, would be burnt toast with no marmalade because if you strike first you cannot stop our counterstrike any more than we can stop your counterstrike if we were to attack first.” The eyelids over the hard blue eyes opened wide as Shevenko stared at Wilson.

“Our admirals have gambled that you would not respond. I am not so sure. Not even now, although when our good friend the doctor asked me to come here at once I reasoned that you wanted to talk instead of starting a war.”

“Don’t be too confident,” Wilson said.

“If you are foolish,” Shevenko said, “if a nuclear war does start who stands to gain? Peking. Only Peking. They would love to see us at each other’s throats with nuclear weapons. They would rule the world when the fires were out, as they will anyway in fifty years or less.

“So how do we avoid this? You would not have asked to meet me if you did not have some plan.”

“The people I am speaking for want Brezhnev to get on the hot line to the President,” Wilson said. “If he will do that and tell the President that a horrible tragedy has happened and that it was a terrible mistake maybe we can get out of this mess by covering up the cause of our submarine’s loss.”

“Does your president want Brezhnev to do this?”

“He doesn’t know anything about this, yet.”

“Leonid Brezhnev is a proud man, Bob. Your people are asking for a lot. I don’t know if I can do what you ask. You must have considered this angle and you must have an alternative.”

“Your submarine will be destroyed,” Wilson said.

“Tit for tat,” Shevenko murmured. “Once that happens there will be no easy way to stop it. I can try. But I may not be able to even see Leonid let alone sit down and talk about this matter.”

“You were able to talk to Khrushchev in Sixty-two,” Wilson said. “If I recall you had more to do with stopping that Cuban missile crisis than anyone.”

“Nikita was a shrewd peasant, a poker player. He knew when to throw in his hand. I don’t think Brezhnev plays poker. He is stubborn, very proud. You are asking him to humble himself.”

“Better to be humble than to be burnt toast.”

“And if he does listen to me, what sort of reparations will your president demand?”

“I don’t know if he will demand anything. Let them work that out.”

Shevenko sighed. “I will try, old friend. I will do my best. I will give you my word on that on the grave of my mother whose soul is now with God.”

“You toss His name around pretty loosely for a Communist, don’t you think? Isser almost choked when you said that.”

“My mother taught me well. She taught me that God forgives all sins. In my work I have had to do some things that even our hosts might consider sinful.” Isser Bernstein rolled his eyes upward and shook his head. Shevenko saw the gesture and smiled.

“The package your people took from me when I got into your car, Isser, could I have it now? Your bomb people have had time to open it and see what is inside.”

Moise Shemanski left the room and returned with a brown paper package tied with cord.

“Cuban cigars,” Shevenko said to Wilson. “We know that your new boss likes a good cigar after dinner. These are the best. The paper and string are from New York. You could maybe tell him that a friend in the United Nations gave you the cigars. He would probably faint if he knew you got them from a KGB man.” He sat back in his chair and grinned at the other men.

“I can give you four or five days, no more,” Wilson said. “My people have to know by then if Brezhnev will make the phone call.”

“Of course,” Shevenko said. “Isser, could you do me a small favor in return for my coming here on such short notice? If I sent you a bottle of the water in our building could you have your chemists analyze it? Our chemists know nothing about coffee, they only know about tea. If it’s the water ruining my coffee I may have to get bottled water from West Germany.” He turned back to Wilson.

“One more thing, I was going to notify you through Dobrynin that I have asked Fidel to get me tickets to the Super Bowl game in Miami. I asked him to route me from Havana through Mexico City. I’ll keep you advised of my itinerary through the diplomatic pouch, if that’s all right with you.”

Wilson shrugged.

“I’ll call Isser every day; it’s easier for me to contact him than to get in touch with you.”

The door opened and two Mossad agents came in. Shevenko stood up and shook hands with the three men and left. Bernstein led Wilson into the living room and Naomi came in with a plate of sandwiches, crisp slices of cucumber between thin slices of whole wheat bread that had been spread with sour cream.

“You should have served him some of these sandwiches,” Wilson said. “He might have offered to buy up your whole cucumber crop.”

“I will watch him drink coffee but I will not eat with him,” Bernstein said. “You shook him badly with those pictures. He caved in, admitted the crime. I have known him a long time. I have never seen him so upset.”

“I didn’t see any sign of that,” Wilson said. He finished his sandwich and reached for a second one as Naomi poured fresh coffee.

“People in our business are schooled to show no emotion in their face or their hands,” Bernstein said. “I was watching his feet under the table. He was upset.”

“The important thing is that he got the message,” Wilson said. “All I have to worry about is whether he will contact Brezhnev and if he does, if Brezhnev will call the President.”

Bernstein chewed slowly. “I would say that Shevenko will try to carry out his part of the bargain. But there is a manic atmosphere in the Politburo. Brezhnev might not be able to take the political risk of backing down from a Politburo decision.

“How much do you know about that?” Wilson eyed the Mossad chief.

“I know the vote to test the torpedo was five to four. One member of the Politburo was sick and did not vote. Brezhnev could have cast the tie vote and that would have ended the matter for some time but he did not vote. So he might not feel strong enough to risk calling the President.” He looked at his wrist watch. “Time for you to go, my friend. Pray tonight, as I will, that this madness will go no further. I will be in touch with you after each of Shevenko’s calls to me.”

Sitting in the living room with Schemanski, who was finishing the last of the sandwiches, Bernstein turned to his aide. “Did you catch that reference Shevenko made to Bob, telling him to tell his boss that he got the cigars at the United Nations? Leah told us that his cover for being away from his office was an inter-office memo ordering him to go to New York to see some people at the UN. You’d better get word to Leah at once and warn her that Shevenko may have an agent inside the CIA who also reads inter-office memos.”

“I think you’d better warn Mr. Wilson, too,” Shemanski said.

“How can I do that? If we do he’d start searching for Leah. I don’t want her cover blown. It took a long while to get her in place.”

“We should find some way to tell him,” Shemanski insisted. “It’s not nice to keep that sort of thing from a friend who once saved the lives of your wife and daughter.”

“He saved my life too, more than once,” Bernstein said. “I owe him debts I can never repay. Let me think about it. I want you to take the tape reel off the recorder and get the film from the camera upstairs. I wonder if there was enough light in the kitchen to get good pictures of those photos Bob spread out on the table?”

“I’m sure there was,” Shemanski said.

“We’ll know soon enough,” Bernstein said. “Get the tape and the film and then we’ll go back to the office.”