but where? Somehow it seemed to ring a faint warning bell far back in his mind. He shook his head impatiently. He had more immediate concerns. “What are the Czech police doing now?”
“Dragging the river.”
“For the briefcase?”
“No,” Prague One replied. “We have an informant inside the police headquarters. They’re only looking for Petrenko’s corpse right now. For some reason the American is keeping his mouth shut about what he was told.”
The blond-haired man stared back out the window. “Will they find either one?”
“The body will turn up sooner or later,” the other man admitted. “But I am confident that the briefcase is gone forever. The Vltava is wide and its current is swift.”
“For your sake, I sincerely hope you are right,” the blond man said quietly.
“What about this man Smith?” Prague One asked after a moment’s uncomfortable silence. “He could become a serious problem.”
The blond-haired man frowned again. That was true enough. The American doctor might not yet have told the Czech authorities what he had learned, but eventually he would report Petrenko’s claims and the news of his murder to his nation’s intelligence services. If so, the CIA and others were likely to begin paying entirely too much attention to new reports of other mysterious illnesses. And that was something he and his employers could not risk.
Not yet anyway.
The man code-named Moscow One nodded to himself. So be it. Acting openly against this man Smith would be dangerous. If he disappeared or died, the Prague police would certainly begin asking even more awkward questions about the Petrenko murder, and passing those questions on to Washington.
But letting him live was potentially more dangerous. “Eliminate the American if at all possible,” he ordered coldly. “But do it carefully?and leave no one alive this time.”
Chapter Three
The tiny interrogation room near the back of the main Prague police station at Konviktska 14 was sparsely furnished. There were just two bartered plastic chairs and an old wood table covered with dents, gouges, and the scorch marks left by countless cigarettes carelessly ground out on its surface. Jon Smith sat stiffly in one of the chairs wearing borrowed slacks and a sweatshirt.
Even the slightest movement made him uncomfortably aware of his own aching cuts and bruises.
He frowned. How much longer were the Czech authorities going to hold him here? There was no clock in this little room, and his wristwatch had been ruined by its immersion in the icy waters of the Vltava. He glanced up. The faint light leaking in through a tiny window high on one wall showed that it was already past dawn.
Smith fought down a yawn. After they rescued him from the riverbank, the Czech police had taken down his account of the vicious attack that had killed Valentin Petrenko and brought in a medic to patch up the bullet crease across his shoulder. In the process, his belongings, including his wallet, passport, and hotel room key, had been hustled away for “safekeeping.” By that time, it had been very nearly midnight and, after bringing him a late supper of soup, they had “suggested” that he use a cot in one of their empty holding cells. He smiled wryly, remembering the long, cold, and mostly sleepless night. At least they had left the door unlocked, making it clear that he was not exactly under arrest, only “helping the authorities with necessary inquiries.”
Bells tolled somewhere close by, probably those of the Church of St. Ur-sula, calling the devout to early morning mass and voung children to classes at the adjoining convent school. As if on cue, the door opened and a lean, pale-eyed police officer, immaculate in a neatly pressed uniform, came in. His light gray slacks, blue shirt, carefully knotted black tie, and darker gray jacket marked him as a member of the Prague Municipal Police ?the more powerful of the two rival law enforcement agencies operating in the Czech capital.
The ID badge clipped to his jacket identified him as Inspector Tomas Karasek. He dropped easily into the chair directly across from Smith.
“Good morning, Colonel,” the police officer said casually in clear, comprehensible English. He slid a pair of police artist sketches across the table.
“Please tell me what you think of these drawings. The) are based on the statement you gave my colleagues last night. Do they match what you remember of the man who you claim killed Dr. Petrenko?”
Smith took the drawings and examined them closelv. The first showed the face of a man with long, tangled hair, dark, brooding eyes, and a small skull earring. The second was identical, except that the artist had added a bandage over what appeared to be a badly broken nose and sketched in bruising all around it. He nodded. “That’s him. No question about it.”
“Then he is one of the Romany,” Karasek said coolly. He tapped the pictures with one forefinger. “I believe you would call him a Gypsy in your country.”
Smith looked up in surprise. “You’ve already identified this guy7”
“By name, no,” the Czech police officer admitted. “No one matching his precise description appears in our files. But the earring, the hair, the clothing … these are all signs which tell me that he is one of their people.”
He grimaced. “By their very nature, the Romany are criminals. Even their youngest children are raised to be petty thieves, pickpockets, and beggars.
They are nothing but troublemakers, scum, and vermin.”
With an effort. Smith concealed his distaste for this expression of unthinking bigotry. For all their very real faults, the Romany, a poverty-stricken and rootless people, were commonly used as scapegoats by the richer, more settled societies in which they roamed. It was an old game and all too often a deadly one.
“Dr. Petrenko’s death was not exactly an act of petty theft,” he said care-fullv, reining in his temper. “More like cold-blooded murder. These guys knew his name, remember? That’s prettv goddamned personal for a simple bunch of muggers.”
Karasek shrugged. “They may have followed him to the Charles Bridge from his hotel. These Romany street gangs often prey on tourists, especially if they scent rich pickings.”
Something in the way he said it sounded false to Smith. He shook his head. “You don’t really believe any of that crap, do you?”
“I don’t? Then what should I believe?” the other man asked quietly. The pale-eyed Czech policeman looked narrowly across the tabic. “Do you have some theory of your own. Colonel? One that you would like to share with me, perhaps?”
Smith stayed quiet. This was dangerous ground. There were limits to what he could safely tell this man. He was sure that Petrenko had been killed to stop him from handing over the medical files and samples he had smuggled out of Moscow, but there was no real evidence left to back that up. Both the briefcase and the Russian had vanished in the Vltava. In the meantime, pushing the idea that this was a political murder was too likely to entangle him in an investigation that could drag on for weeks, and risk revealing skills and connections he had sworn to keep secret forever.
“I’ve read your statement over quite carefully,” Karasek went on. “Frankly, it seems curiously incomplete in several important respects.”
“In what way?”
“This rendezvous of yours with Dr. Petrenko on the bridge, for example,”
the Czech police inspector said. “It seems rather an odd place and time for an American military officer and a Russian scientist to be meeting. You see my point, I hope?”
“My work for the U.S. Army is purely medical and scientific in nature,”
Smith reminded him stiffly. “I’m a doctor, not a combat soldier.”
“Naturally.” Karasek’s thin-lipped smile stopped well short of his pale blue eyes. “But I envy you your American medical training, Colonel. It must have been exceptionally thorough. I’ve met very few doctors who could survive hand-to-hand combat with three armed men.”
“I was lucky.”
