The Day Before Midnight (24 page)

“All right.”

Their eyes remained abstracted, unfocused, lacking that primal spark of inspiration. They still didn’t quite see it.

“Look, if you were going to force a man to perform a job for you, how would you get him to do it? Think of a bank president robbers take in order to get him to open the safe. How do they do it? Well, they find hostages. They leave somebody at his house with his wife and kids, right? Now, maybe that’s what they’ve done here, maybe there’s a wife and some kids and some very bad baby-sitters not too far from where we stand. And suppose—”

“Prisoners!”
said Skazy, getting to it first. “Yes, prisoners. We get prisoners, we find out what and who we’re up against.”

But Dick Puller was already on the move. He hurried into the command post and quickly located his young assistant from the FBI, James Uckley, who for the past several hours had been ripping teletype info and filing reports himself to the Bureau on the operation and feeling sorry for himself for incurring Puller’s wrath.

It didn’t take Puller long to explain what he wanted, and from then it didn’t take Uckley long to find what they were looking for. He began with the Yellow Pages and started calling welding services. At the fifth entry—Jackson Hummel, 19 Main Street, Burkittsville, 555–2219—there was no answer. He then called the Burkittsville police station, talked to
a sergeant and had a request; the sergeant returned the call almost immediately. No, it did not appear that Jack Hummel had opened his service for business that day. The cop had asked on both sides and found that Jack was expected in Boonsboro that day at the Chalmers plant. Uckley called Chalmers, to discover that no, goddammit, the welder had not showed up, nobody knew where he’d gone, maybe he was sick. He called the cop back and asked if Jack could be sick. The cop didn’t know but said he could stop by Jack’s house which was just up the road. It would be real easy, the cop said.

No, said Uckley. They’d handle it themselves, but please stand by in case further help was needed. His next phone call was to the elementary school, where it only took him a few minutes to learn from the principal that Jack Hummel did have two daughters, Elizabeth called Bean and Phyllis called Poo, and that indeed both of them were unexpectedly absent today.

Uckley thanked her and got off the phone.

“I think we’ve got a Condition Red,” he told Dick Puller. “It looks like they’ve got this guy Hummel in the mountain—
he’s
their cutter—and his wife and kids in his house.”

Puller nodded.

“All right,” he said. “Major Skazy, I want four of your best operators.”

“Yes, sir, I can—”

“Just go get them, Major. Get them now.”

“Yes, sir,” said Skazy, clearly irked at how summarily he was being dismissed.

Puller pulled Uckley aside, out of the hearing range of the others.

“I think you’ll have to handle this one. He’ll get you those Delta specialists and you ought to have police backup, but don’t let the police get too close. They might mess things up. You never know how well these little country-town cops are going to handle heavy business. Besides, you’ll do better with fewer rather than more people. But we need to take that house down and we need to talk to those people.”

He looked at his watch.

“And we need to do it fast.”

“Yes, sir,” said Uckley, swallowing.

He looked hard at Uckley. The young man returned the stare, but seemed scattered, his thoughts not quite together.

“You’ve had SWAT training, I assume?”

“Yes,” Uckley said, barely remembering the frenzied week four years earlier at Quantico.

“All right, good. You’re clear? I mean, absolutely clear? There’s a mother and two little girls in that house. I’m sure they are lovely people. But you must understand what’s important, you and the men you take into that house.”

Uckley looked away, through the window. The mountain gleamed.

“The men in that house are important. The mother, the two girls—” Dick hesitated a second, then plunged ahead in full adult awareness of the ruthless thing he was about to do. Did he have
to say
it, actually put it in words? Uckley shot a squirrely look back at him. Dick could tell from the hurt and confusion lurking in his eyes that yes, he
did
have to say it.

“Look, I have two daughters myself. There’s nothing more precious to me in the world than the two of them, and certainly that’s true for this Hummel too. But you’ve got to think hard here, Uckley. You have to see through to what’s important. You have to weigh the potential immediate loss against the other, far greater, far more devastating loss. That’s what we’re paid to do.”

Like an idiot, the young federal agent simply looked at him.

“The mother and the two girls aren’t important. You may have to lose them. If it comes to it, you’ll
have
to lose them rather than risk losing the prisoners. The Delta people are very good; they’ve been trained to take down a building and set free the hostages. But they’ll shoot for the head, and you’ve got to stop them. You’ve got to take prisoners, Jim. Do you understand that?”

Uckley said he did.

The answer to all problems is vodka, Gregor Arbatov had decided. It was Russia’s main contribution to the culture of
the world, more important than Tolstoi, more passionate than Dostoevski, more lasting than world communism.

He now sat with a glass of it in a dark bar called Jake’s on Route 1 in the seedy little Maryland town of Laurel, not far from Columbia. He was exceedingly happy. A beautiful American lady of perhaps sixty with perhaps half her own teeth and none of her own hair and a tattoo had just brought him a refill, with a golden smile and a hearty laugh. He loved her. She was a saint. Saint Teresa of the Order of the Vodka. She reminded him of his wife, whom he hadn’t seen in years.

But what he loved most was what the vodka did to him. It blurred his terrors, it mellowed his brain. It seemed to leak straight through his skull and penetrate to the very center of the organ itself, mollifying, subjectifying, calming, soothing, as it went.

“Ah, Miss. Another, please.”

“Sure, hon. You surely do sop it up.”

He smiled. His teeth were not terribly impressive either. Her eyes were merry.

“You kinda cute,” she said, handing the glass down to him. “Bartender’s a close personal friend of mine. He said this one’s on the house.”

Gregor smiled. Somewhere under the bulge of his gut that hung down over his lap his dick stirred.

But then he thought of young Klimov. Trying to kill him. And his dick withered.

Clouds came across his wide face; fear flashed in his little eyes. The waitress was gone. The only thing that was there was the whisper of the blade as it darted by him, and the thrum of its vibration as it plunged into the car roof.

Gregor blinked, came out of it, and dived into the vodka.

Yes, so much better.

Gregor sat back. He had figured it out.

It was Klimov. Really, he could almost sympathize with the younger man. He wished to move his least productive agent out. He could not simply fire him, the time had passed for that, he had fired too many others, if he fires him then it reflects poorly on Klimov. Therefore, with a little ingenuity, perhaps aided by the intercession of his powerful uncle Arkady
Pashin of GRU, he penetrates the Pork Chop security arrangements, sets up a phony meet, and then arranges for his rotten apple to die.

The results are interesting and beneficial to everyone except poor Gregor, who in theory
is
now dead, six inches of Spetsnaz blade cleaving his fat chest. But Klimov has eliminated his bad apple in a dramatic way, with a minimum of personal embarrassment. He can be protected
in
this maneuver by the importunings of Pashin, watching over his little nephew, wielding his great power and influence like a sword. At the same time, Pork Chop has been discredited. To what purpose? Perhaps whoever controls Pork Chop has accumulated too much power in the higher ranks and must therefore be destroyed by a rival. Surely the rival in question would be, again, Pashin.

Good God, realized poor Gregor, he had been targeted for execution by a senior general in the GRU, one of the most powerful men in the Soviet Union.

There was only one answer: vodka.

“Miss. Another one.”

Gregor swallowed the liquid. It dashed down his throat. He felt his face burning red. He looked at the empty glass in his fat hand.

Lumbering with agility that might have surprised his many enemies in this world, Gregor made it to the men’s room, pulled out a pocketful of change, and with studied labor and enormous effort called the one person in the world he felt he could trust, Magda Goshgarian.

The phone rang time and time again. Finally, her groggy voice came on.

“Magda!”

“Tata! I am stunned. What on—”

“Magda, listen please. I need a favor. I will be continually in your service if you can help me. Please, I cannot begin to tell you how—”

“Stop sniveling, Tata. Are you drunk? You sound pathetic.”

“Magda, something is going on.”

“Yes, it is. Young Klimov wants to bite your head off.”

“No, something else. Magda, I am—indisposed.”

“Is it a woman, Tata? Some American bitch with a baby in her belly that came from your tiny dick?”

“No, no. It has nothing to do with women. It has to do with the fact that I must stay clear of the embassy for a few days now while I sort some matters out.”

“You’re going over. Tata, don’t you implicate me, they are watching
me
too. I swear, Tata, if you go, you’ll leave such a mess—”

“No, I swear. I swear on my father’s grave and the great Marx’s image that I’ll remain true. It’s just that for technical reasons, I am indisposed tonight. Alas, I have cipher clerk duty in the Wine Cellar tonight. I—”

“Tata, I—”

“I know you did it last night. But since you have therefore rested today, you are therefore automatically my replacement. I call merely to ask you to take the duty for me. You can tell Klimov I called you from my afternoon pickup and that it was going very slowly for me and that I was afraid therefore I would not be back in time and that I therefore asked you to take the watch. And that you have not heard from me since. I think you’ll find him surprisingly agreeable.”

“Tata, I—”

“Please, darling. I’ll buy you a dinner. I’ll buy you the most extraordinary dinner in some ridiculously expensive Georgetown restaurant. I have a little squirrel fund hidden away, that’s all, and I can afford it, I promise.”

“Tata—”

“Magda, you know you cannot deny me one single thing. It is not your nature to deny me.”

“You are such a sniveling, craven fool.”

“Magda, you have no idea how desperately I need the help. You’ll help?”

At last she surrendered.

“All right.”

“I love you, darling.”

“It means I’ll have to do double duty tomorrow. My system will be upset for weeks.”

“Pick your restaurant, Magda, and you shall have whatever you want.”

Gregor hung up. Now, if he could call the other woman in his life, Molly Shroyer, and if she had found anything for him, then maybe, maybe he could make himself seem so important to Klimov that the young killer would desist.

Gregor dialed the second number. Molly answered curtly and he unlimbered the Sears code, then hung up and waited. And waited. And waited. He hung around the bathroom so long he thought he might be arrested for perversions, or beaten up by truck drivers or some such—

It rang.

Gregor picked it up.

“Gregor, I’ve got only a second,” she said.

“Darling, I—”

“Gregor, shut up! Something big is happening out in Maryland, so big they won’t tell even us. All the senators on the committee and the senior staff have been to the White House and there’s some kind of news blackout, but nobody’s talking. The only thing is that it’s very, very serious.”

“Out in Maryland?” Gregor said. Then he remembered the airplanes roaring over the Columbia Mall.

“But what could—”

“Gregor, as soon as I know, I’ll let you know. I have to run now, love. Really, it’s serious.”

“Yes, I—”

The phone clicked dead.

Damn!
he thought. I need vodka.

Phuong loved the darkness, the stillness, the sense of being totally alone. She felt whole in darkness.

The narrow walls of the mining shaft seemed to be leaning in, and she could feel the man beside her breathing hard. She could sense his fear.

Yet for Phuong the tunnels meant one thing. They meant safety. Up above, her child had been turned to ashes and shards by napalm. Up above, her father had died, her mother had died, her brother had been maimed. Her sunny village was blasted into nothingness by terror bombers. Hard men in helicopters came to kill them, and to poison the jungle. So she faced the darkness with something close to peace. She
knew no fear. Her feet found the way. She sensed the walls and the low ceiling and the rough transit of the floor. The darkness was everywhere.

Teagarden, the American, fought against it. His beam was a desperate protest against it, a plea for mercy almost. His beam flashed nervously. In the tunnels in her homeland, one never used light. Light was an American invention; it was the invention of men who feared the dark. But Phuong and the men and women who fought with her over the long years never used light; they learned, instead, to feel their way with their hands. They learned to sense, from variations in the atmosphere and gradations in odor, the approach of strangers.

Mother, can you smell him, her daughter asked from her heart. He’s terrified. His body stinks with fear.

I smell him, too, she replied.

Ahead, the tunnel narrowed even further.

“Sister Phuong, one moment please,” the American said in Vietnamese. “I have to report.”

He knelt, turned his beam off. The darkness was complete. She heard him fumbling.

“Rat Six, this is Team Alpha, we’re about seven hundred yards in, no sign of this tunnel Alice yet. Do you copy, Six?”

“Alpha, that’s an affirmative, good and clear.”