un zippered her belt pouch and took out her wallet. He removed her CIA identification card, driver’s license, and two credit cards under her real name and pocketed them. The ski patrol was coming on quickly, but they were still too far away to make out what he was doing. He took a small, plastic-wrapped package from a back compartment in Elizabeth’s wallet and extracted a Minnesota driver’s license, social security card, bank debit card, and University of Minnesota student ID and medical insurance card all in the name of Doris Sampson, and distributed them in her wallet.
Somebody had tried to kill her. It was important that he and Liz drop out of public view right now until he could call for help. His cell phone was at the hotel.
Van Buren replaced Elizabeth’s wallet in her pouch. “It’s going to be okay, sweetheart. I promise, nobody’s going to hurt you again.” Van Buren stood up, glanced at the ski patrol rescuers, then scanned the ridgelines. Either the plastique had been set on a fuse, possibly by someone back at the chalet, or it had been remotely detonated by someone up here. Someone who was watching them, someone who had followed them. But there was no one around. The bowl was empty. The ski patrol arrived, secured the sled and stepped out of their skis.
“What happened, sir?” one of them asked. His name tag read LARSEN.
“She hit a tree,” Todd said. It was difficult to keep on track. He wanted to fight back. The second ski patrol volunteer whose name tag read WILLET, brought a big first-aid kit over to Elizabeth, took off his gloves and knelt beside her to start his preliminary examination.
“What’s her name?” “Doris,” Todd told him. “Okay, Doris, how are we doing this afternoon?” Willet said, taking her pulse at the side of her neck. Larsen pulled out a neck brace and backboard, which he brought over to where Elizabeth was crumpled. “Breathing is labored, but breath sounds are equal and symmetrical. Her heartbeat is fast, but strong,” Willet said. “Some trauma to the forehead and right temple, some bleeding but not heavy.”
They’d worked as a team before. Their moves were quick and professional. They knew what they were doing; they’d been here many times before. Larsen took out a wireless comms unit a little larger than an average cell phone. “Base, this is Ranger Three in Pete’s Bowl beneath Earl’s Express.” “Stand by, Ranger Three.” “Are you the husband, sir?” he asked Todd. “No. I’m her brother. She’s four months pregnant.” Larsen’s lips compressed, and he nodded. “How old is she?” “Twenty-five.” “General health?” “Very good-” “Ranger Three, go ahead.” “We have a white female, twenty-five, with blunt trauma to the head, chest and abdomen. Some blood loss, but she’s wearing a helmet.” “Okay, pulse is one fifteen; regular and strong.”
Willet called out. “BP one hundred over fifty. Patient is unresponsive, but her pupils are equal and reactive to light.” Larsen relayed the information to the clinic at the base of the slopes down in Vail Village. “The patient’s brother is with her. He says that she is four months pregnant. There is evidence of some bleeding around the perineum of her ski suit.” “Stand by,” the on-call doctor ordered. “Is she going to make it?” Van Buren asked. He had to keep it together, but it was hard. Larsen nodded. “She was wearing a helmet. Probably saved her life.” He glanced over at Elizabeth. Willet was taking off her helmet, careful not to move her head. “Where’s her husband?”
“She’s a widow,” Todd said. “That’s why she wanted me to come skiing with her.” “Tough luck. She’s a good-looking girl.” “She is,” Todd said, his nerves jumping. “Ranger Three, give her 500 ccs of normal saline and start her on O2. The medevac chopper is en route. We’ll transport her to Denver General when you have her ready to move.”
“Hang in there, Doris,” Larsen said. He and Willet attached the neck brace, their movements very gentle, very precise. Todd could only stand by and watch. But already he was working out the steps he would have to take in the next twenty-four hours to protect his wife and child. They were priority one; everything else was secondary.
SUNDAY
TWENTY-ONE
IF THE CIA HAD DEFINED (McGARVEY’S) CAREER, THEN KGB GENERAL VALENTIN IL LEN BARANOV HAD DEFINED (HIS) LIFE WITHIN THE COMPANY.
If it hadn’t been for Elizabeth’s hero worship of her father, Rencke would not have begun his quest, as he thought of it. He stood on one leg just inside his office in the computer center, staring at his monitors. The lavender displayed as wallpaper on the screens had darkened since the last time he’d checked. His programs were chewing on data, and what they were finding was being evaluated as ominous.
The swing shift operators knew that he was here, but no one had stopped by to say hello. He had no friends here. Only the McGarveys. “A friend of mine. His name is Otto Rencke. You haven’t seen him, have you?” Mac had said that to him, and Otto could feel his presence. He wished that Mac were here now. He wished that he could talk to Mac, tell him what was so bothersome. But Otto didn’t know what the problem was himself, except that the walls seemed to be closing in on all of them. It was lavender, and the color was getting stronger. He took off his jacket and sat down at one of his monitors. Louise hadn’t wanted him to leave. But she understood the necessity for him. One step at a time. Ten months ago Elizabeth had begun a biography of her father.
It was obvious even then that he would be named DCI. She and Otto both thought that an accouting was important. She decided to begin with his career in the CIA because it was the definition of his life. She would go back later and find out about his life in Kansas, and about her grandparents, whom she’d never known, and about her aunt and nephews in Utah, whom she hadn’t seen since she was a little girl. If the CIA had defined her father’s career, then KGB general Valentin Illen Baranov had defined her father’s life within the Company. It was at Otto’s suggestion that she had begun there. He had showed her how to enter the CIA’s computerized archives, and then how to get into the underground caverns at Fort A.P. Hill, south of Washington in the Virginia countryside, where the old paper records were stored. He showed her how to read between the lines by paying special attention to the promulgation pages and budget lines in each classified file. The first was a list of everybody who had a need-to- know in the operation, and the second was a detailed summary of where the money to pay for it came. He who holds the purse strings as well as the operational strings is the actual power to be reckoned with. He showed her how to cross-reference personnel files with operational files to look for the anomalies. John Lyman Trotter, Jr.” for instance. He’d become DDO and a friend to Mac. But he turned out to be a traitor, lured into General Baranov’s circle. In hindsight the signs had been there.
Trotter had spent more money than he’d earned. His name was on more promulgation pages than his early positions should have allowed for. As an operations officer this was before he’d become DDO he had personally signed off on too many budgetary requests. But the old KGB general had been a master of the game. Starting in the days after Korea and through the Bay of Pigs and Cuban Missile Crises, he had developed and run CESTA and Banco del Sur, the most fabulously successful intellgence networks anywhere at anytime in history. They’d been administered from the Soviet Union’s embassy in Mexico City, which was cover for the largest KGB operational unit in the world outside of Moscow. Through a vast network of field agents and governmental connections, General Baranov knew just about everything that went on in the entire western hemisphere during those years. From Buenos Aires to Toronto, and from Santiago to Washington, he had his ear to the most important doors.
Insiders like Trotter were the frosting on the very rich cake. By feeding Trotter accurate information that sometimes was actually damaging to the Soviet Union, in exchange for even more important details about the inner workings of America’s intelligence establishment, Baranov made his prize mole a hero on the Beltway. By making sure that key operations Trotter had backed succeeded as if they were planned by angels, his mole’s stock rose to astronomical levels.
All that could have been seen, should have been seen, from the almost reckless abandon with which Trotter flitted from one desk to the next; from one super success to another. Never mind the occasional star agent who
