The young woman’s smile tightened. “If you will give me just a moment, sir, I will see that Comrade Radvonska is given your message.”
“Do that.”
Tatiana left the conference room and when she was gone Spranger went over to the window. A fine mesh screen covered the opening, and he could see where a wire was connected to it in one corner. The lights overhead were fluorescent, there was no telephone, and the only door in or out of the room was thickly padded. The methods were old-fashioned, but the room was for the most part surveillance proof.
The young woman returned five minutes later with an angry Yegenni Radvonska. The resident was a barrel- chested man with thick, jet black hair. He was dressed in a warmup suit, CCCP stenciled on the left breast.
“Ernst,” he said, stiffly embracing Spranger. “It’s been too long since we last worked together.”
“We’re available any time you need us, Yegenni Sergeevich,” Spranger said. “You know this.”
“Yes, of course.” Radvonska motioned him to take a seat, and he and Tatiana sat across from him.
Spranger looked pointedly at her.
“Tatiana is my trusted and most valuable assistant,” the KGB chief of station said.
“You may speak freely.”
“I need use of KGB archives,” Spranger began. “My people and I are working on a… delicate project, and something has come up for which I must have some information that only you can provide.”
“Yes, and who is your client in this project?”
“I can’t say. But I give you my personal assurances that my client’s aims are in no way at cross purposes with the policies or well being of Russia.”
Radvonska studied him for a moment. “I will hold you to that assurance at a later date, Ernst. Please proceed.”
“My group was involved in the July Second destruction of the Swissair flight from Orly Field, Paris.”
Tatiana’s complexion paled slightly, but Radvonska showed no reaction other than mild curiosity.
“One of my people was killed by French police, but only after he’d been cornered by a man we took to be an outsider. Well-built, tall, dark hair, wearing a British-cut tweed sport coat. At the time we suspected he might have been either a British or an American police officer, or even an intelligence service officer.”
“Something you have subsequently learned has changed that opinion?”
“We now have reason to believe that he is a civilian. A man with whom we have done contract work in the past monitored a recent conversation in a Paris park between Thomas Lynch, who is the CIA chief of Paris station, and Phillipe Marquand, who is a high ranking officer in the SDECE’s Action Service.”
Spranger took a copy of an amended version of the transcript out of his jacket pocket and handed it across the table. He’d taken out Marquand’s references to the Japanese yen payments into their Bern account.
“This came to us less than twenty-four hours ago. There was a delay in getting it out of Paris…? Spranger stopped.
Radvonska had looked up from the transcript, a knowing smile on his face, his eyes bright. He almost licked his lips. “McGarvey,” he said.
“Yes, that was what Marquand called him. Do you know this name?”
Radvonska focused on Spranger. “Yes, my friend, and so should you. In fact I am very surprised that this man hasn’t already killed you and destroyed your organization.”
“What are you talking about?” Spranger demanded.
“Do the names General Valentin Baranov and Colonel Arkady Kurshin mean anything to you?”
“They were legends in their own time. But…?Again Spranger stopped in mid-sentence.
“He killed them. It was McGarvey?”
Radvonska nodded. “Kirk Cullough McGarvey. As I said, if he is involved and was inside Switzerland, you may count yourself a very lucky man to be alive. But if he has gone to Washington to accept the assignment from the CIA, then your luck may not have very long to run.”
“One man,” Spranger mused.
“Yes, one man, Ernst.”
Spranger looked up. “Then my people will kill him. Immediately.”
Radvonska placed a forefinger on the side of his nose. “Do not become so overconfident.
Under the present situation in Moscow the KGB will not be able to offer you much help. But some Russians have very long memories. I will supply you with the information you need.”
“Give me photographs so that he can be clearly identified, and tell me about his haunts in Washington, and I will take care of the rest.”
“A word of caution before you begin, Ernst. Unless McGarvey has involved himself directly in your operation, stay away from him.”
“Did you know him? Personally?”
“I was an aide to General Baranov. I saw what McGarvey did to Arady Kurshin the first time they met.”
“Then you have a personal interest.”
“Yes, I do. And you must listen to me. If you are going to go up against him, you better stack the deck heavily in your favor. Back him into a corner. Take away his will to fight. Hurt him, even cripple him. But until those things are achieved, be very careful, because he’ll not hesitate to kill you first.”
“I’d go one-on-one with him,” Spranger said. “There isn’t a man on this earth I fear.”
“You would lose,” Radvonska said, and the simple directness of his statement stopped Spranger cold.
Tatiana was watching him, a very faint smile on her lips. Spranger had the urge to reach across the table and slap it from her arrogant face.
“Then I will back him into a corner first, as you say.”
“Yes, and I will help you,” Radvonska said.
“How?”
“By telling you about his ex-wife in Washington, but more importantly about Elizabeth, his daughter, who is presently in residence at a private school outside of Bern, Switzerland.”
“Why haven’t you gone after him?”
“We don’t do things like that anymore,” Radvonska said. “But you do.”
“Yes, I do,” Spranger said, and he couldn’t keep the smile from his face.
Chapter 25
“The question comes back to exactly what he was working on that got him killed,”
Bill Neustadt, head of the CIA’s forensics team in Tokyo, told Ed Mowry. “It’s been more than three days and still we don’t have the answer.”
“It’s frustrating, Christ, don’t I know it,” Mowry said. “I was his assistant COS and he didn’t say a word to me.”
By contrast to Neustadt and most of the others Langley had sent over to help with the investigation, Mowry was a short, undistinguished man in his late forties. With a paunch, a receding hairline and a red, bulbous nose he was anything but athletic-looking.
But he was a competent administrator and a good field agent in the industrial and economic espionage arena, which Japan had become.
“No contact sheet, no references in any file, no note on his desk calendar, nothing in his apartment, no mention to anybody why he was going to the Roppongi Prince Hotel that night, not even to his wife, and yet he was wearing a wire.”
Mowry and Neustadt were meeting in the embassy’s screened room in the section of Tokyo called Minato-ku. The hotel where Jim Shirley had been murdered was barely a half-dozen blocks to the west. It was after eight Tuesday morning, and none of them had gotten much sleep since Friday.
“Unfortunately the recording equipment he had taped to his chest was completely destroyed,” Neustadt continued. “In the meantime the Tokyo Metropolitan Police are starting to ask some tough questions. For instance: Witnesses say that Shirley met with a man at the hotel bar. A Westerner. The Dunee imposter?”
