Sarah was still naked under the sheets — hung over from the drugs — when he threw his toothbrush and shaving gear into his bag and zipped it closed. There was nothing compromising in the apartment, so he didn't need to worry about that.
Tommy kissed her, wished that they. . kissed her again, then rushed for the door. 'Friday evening. London. I'll call you. Lock the door on your way out.'
She blew him a kiss.
Down on the street he legged it toward Columbus Avenue. He would catch a southbound cab there, although he wasn't going to the airport. He was going to Penn Station to catch a train to Washington, and he had all day to get there. The trains ran practically every hour. On Columbus he slowed to a walk, ambled along thinking about things.
He had plenty of time. What the heck, why not stroll over to Fifth Avenue and look in jewelry store windows?
Two FBI agents met the plane in Connecticut. 'Two cars,' Jake Grafton told them. He rode with the agent in charge, Tom Kraut-kramer, while Toad Tarkington and Janos Ilin piled in the second car. Krautkramer was a large man of about forty, with a frank, open face and huge, meaty hands.
'Ilin may be wired for sound,' Jake said after a look at Kraut-kramer's credentials. He told him about the incident this morning in the street outside Jake's house. 'I doubt it, but I want you guys to check him out without letting him know he's being swept. Can you do that?'
'You bet,' Krautkramer said. 'However, the better way is a thorough, quick search.'
'Okay, doctor. Do it.' Jake thought about all the things that had been discussed within Ilin's hearing since he reported to the SuperAegis project. There was nothing there that couldn't be shared — indeed, by disclosing it to the foreign liaison officers the American government was indeed sharing the information — but Ilin didn't seem to want to wait to get back to the embassy. He was passing along everything he heard as quickly as he heard it. One assumed that he was passing along only the information that Jake and Toad provided. If he had other sources…
'If he's wired,' Jake said, 'there is a van somewhere with an antenna that picks up his transmissions. Maybe he isn't wired and they use a directional mike that picks up what he says when he goes outside for smoke breaks. He's probably been doing that since he got to the States. Left to himself Ilin is a three-pack-a-day man. He spends more time outside than a beach lifeguard. Find the van, if there is one.'
'Do you want us to stop it? Arrest the occupants?'
'Not yet. What I would really like is for Ilin to chatter away through this sub base visit, then after we leave for Washington, you bust the van and listen to what he had to say.'
'That's feasible. We're going to need more people, a lot more. We're already bringing in people to dig into the submarine hijacking; sounds like we may be facing a major counterespionage investigation.'
'I don't know what is going on,' Jake replied. 'Let's get some idea of what Ilin is up to before we go to general quarters.'
'It'll take a little time to bring in the right people and equipment.'
'Check with Washington. They'll have to assign the priority.'
'They already did. General Le Beau has been on the telephone this morning with the director, who called me.' Krautkramer glanced at Jake, who was wearing civilian slacks and a sports coat. 'That was the first time I ever talked to the director. Who are you, anyway?'
'Just a naval officer.'
'Yeah, right!'
'A stolen warship attracts a lot of attention. The next time your telephone rings, the president may be on the other end.'
'I hear you. Let me tell you where we are. There were fifteen men in that CIA team; they stayed in one wing of the BOQ while they were here for training, kept pretty much to themselves. Both the CIA and the navy had people with them every minute, and we are talking to those escorts.
'Yet when the CIA dropped the Russian project, they left the team in the BOQ for almost a week while they made up their mind what they wanted to do with them. During that week, indications are that no one paid much attention to them. The stewards say many of the crewmen played pool in the rec room, they watched television, whatever. It is entirely possible they sneaked out. One of them was supposedly seen at the base exchange buying junk food.
'Then the team left the BOQ. The CIA supposedly knows where they went, but we don't. We're talking to the CIA, but apparently they don't want to tell us much. Yet Saturday they were in the harbor on a tugboat, so they had to be nearby on Friday night. We're trying to find where they spent that night, who they talked to, how they got to the tug pier Saturday morning, find witnesses who saw these people, saw the vehicles that delivered them. The surviving sailors from the sub said there were seventeen people in the hijack crew, so we have an apparent discrepancy. They could also be wrong about that number.'
'Okay,' Jake said. He glanced in the mirror to see that the other car was still following faithfully.
The day looked like another normal fall Sunday afternoon in New England, families out in cars, people jogging, kids on skateboards and bicycles.
'I assume that the National Security Agency is looking at all communications.'
'That's a safe assumption,' Jake replied.
'The CIA supplied dossiers on the team that trained here.' He patted an attache case that lay on the seat between them. 'I thought you might like to look at it.'
Jake opened the case, took out the top file. Vladimir Kolnikov.
'We've got a crime artist working with the surviving crew members. He's trying to put together facial sketches of the two men who aren't in the dossiers as a first step to identifying them.'
Vladimir Kolnikov. Ex — Russian naval officer, captain first rank. Twenty-five years' service, almost all of it in submarines based on the Kola peninsula. Was driving an illegal taxi in Paris when recruited by the CIA.
Jake looked at Kolnikov's photo. About two hundred pounds, if the rest of him matched the head-and- shoulders shot. Partially balding, with a short haircut, unsmiling, wearing civilian clothes.
He flipped through the other files, scanned them: Turchak, Steeckt, Eck, Gordin, Eisenberg, Boldt…
'There's gotta be more paper than this,' Jake said, tossing the files back into the attache case. 'There should be security evaluations, background investigations of some sort, reports, all that stuff. Someone decided these men could be trusted, that they weren't SVR agents. Who made that decision? What was it based on?'
'You'll have to talk to the CIA, Admiral. They aren't in the business of sharing information like that with FBI field types.'
'I suppose not.'
'What questions should we be asking?'
Jake took his time replying. 'Who are these people? How did they steal a submarine? If you can figure out what they did, we can analyze our security plans and figure out what we need to do to prevent another theft.'
'And kick ass.'
'I guarantee you, if people haven't obeyed orders or have used bad judgment, they are going to be in deep trouble. An armed, state-of-the-art capital ship worth two billion dollars just slipped out of Uncle Sam's grasp.'
'I understand, sir,' Krautkramer said contritely.
'There are specific questions that must also be investigated carefully,' Jake continued. 'When they realized that
At the naval base, Jake, Toad, and Ilin were met by a captain in uniform, Piechowski, and a chief petty officer, Hyer. They led the visitors into the simulator building.
After the introductions, the captain spoke directly to Jake. 'You wanted to see an
