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  Ryan didn’t miss the warning signals, but he was in too deeply now to back out. He chose his next words with care. “Not exactly, Mr. President. But we would be protecting our own interests, because short of sending direct military help to Prime Minister Kabatov there is very little of a substantive nature that we can do. If Kabatov’s government falls, not because of anything we’ve done or not done, and Tarankov takes over, we should be prepared for him.”

  The President sat back in his rocking chair. “I want to disagree with you, Mr. Ryan. But the hell of it is, I can’t.” He looked at Secor for help, but his National Security Adviser shook his head. “Do you have someone in mind for this … diplomatic mission?”

  “Not at the moment, Mr. President.”

  “How soon could you work up a proposal?”

  “Within twenty-four hours, sir.”

  “Very well, do it, Mr. Ryan,” the President said. “In the meantime I’ll telephone Prime Minister Kabatov and tell him that he has my complete support. If there’s anything we can do for him outside of Russia’s borders, we’ll do it. If possible Tarankov should be arrested and placed on trial.”

  “Yes, sir,” Ryan said.

  On the way out of the White House Murphy chuckled wryly. “I hope you know that you were had back there.”

  “What?” Ryan asked.

  “The President set you up, Howard. He has a habit of doing that. But you’ll learn.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “You’ve named your own poison, man. If the President goes for your proposal you’d better pack your long underwear, because you’ll be the envoy.”

  Ryan’s blood ran cold. “I’m a desk officer.”

  “You just graduated.”

  NINE

  Paris

  Traffic along the Boulevard Haussmann was intense as it was on every weekday except in summer.

  McGarvey sat in the shade beneath an umbrella at a sidewalk cafe across the street from the huge department store Printemps, waiting for Jacqueline to come out. The law offices where she worked were in the next block. He’d expected her to return to work after lunch, but instead she’d come here. To do some shopping, he hoped, though he doubted it.

  She’d been jumpy all weekend no doubt because of his own strange mood. Yemlin’s information about his parents had deeply disturbed him, and he’d been unable to hide it from her. Each time she’d asked what was wrong he told her that he always got this way in the spring in Paris.

  “Then let’s leave the city,” she said.

  “What about your job?”

  “I’ll cut my summer vacation short. We could go to Cannes, or St. Tropez. It would be nice, I promise you.”

  “No.”

  “Pourquoi pas?” she cried.

  “I have something to take care of, that’s why. I don’t ran away from my obligations.”

  She’d shaken her head. “You’re a strange American.”

  He’d laughed. “We all are.”

  Jacqueline emerged from the department store, and McGarvey was about to get up and pay his bill, when something struck him as wrong. She turned in the opposite direction from her office, and headed off in a rush. McGarvey sat down. She’d been inside for nearly an hour but she’d bought nothing. She carried no shopping bags.

  Ten minutes later he spotted another person he knew emerging with the crowds from the store, Colonel Guy de Galan, chief of the SDECE’s Division R7, in charge of gathering intelligence from and about America and the Western Hemisphere. McGarvey had had a brief run in with the man a couple of years ago.

  Galan stepped to the side, and pretended to look at the displays in one of the windows while he lit a cigarette.

  It was a standard tradecraft procedure, but it would be impossible for him to spot McGarvey here. The point was, however, that he was taking precautions. He expected someone might be watching him.

  After a few moments, Galan turned, scanned the traffic in the street and looked over in McGarvey’s direction. But then he tossed his cigarette aside, and headed in the same direction Jacqueline had gone.

  “How about that,” McGarvey said, even more depressed than before. He’d been ninety-nine percent sure that Jacqueline worked for the SDECE. But there’d been that tiny one percent that he’d been able to delude himself with. Gone now, and it saddened him.

  Time to get out, finally, like he’d been trying to do for any number of years. Each time he thought he had it made, though, someone came for him. Each time they came he jumped through the hoops.

  “Maybe it’s what you are, Gompar,” an old friend had told him once. They’d been drinking, and saying anything that came into their heads. “Maybe the leopard doesn’t like its spots, but tough shit. They’re his and he’s got to live with them.”

  “Gee, thanks, Phil, that helps a lot,” McGarvey said. They’d just been bullshitting each other. But sometimes the truth came out like that. And sometimes it wasn’t so pleasant to face.

  McGarvey paid for his coffee and went in search of an imported food shop and then a car rental agency, not yet certain what he was going to do, but at least sure what his next move would be.

  Bonnieres

  The thirty-five-mile drive out of Paris on the N13, which for short stretches followed the banks of the Seine, was quite pleasant in the afternoon sun. He’d taken a direct route not bothering to watch for a tail until he was clear of the heaviest traffic. Twice he’d turned off the main highway, and once he stopped at a service station to check his oil, so by the time he reached the small town on the Seine he was sure that he was clean.

  On the other side of the town he got off the main highway again, and followed a series of increasingly narrower roads that wound their way through the farmlands along the river, until he came to an old farm cottage in a valley at the edge of a woods overlooking the Seine. He parked in the protection of the trees five hundred yards from the house, and went to the edge of the field on foot.

  The farm seemed to be deserted except that he could make out the faint sounds of machinery running, and the area immediately to the south of the house contained a compact array of solar electric panels that looked new.

  McGarvey had been thinking about Otto Rencke a lot over the past few weeks, a sort of summing up, he supposed. It was something he’d been doing lately, dredging up old memories, old places and friends as well as enemies. Put them all in perspective. Writing the Voltaire book had got him started on that line of thinking, as history always did.

  The last time McGarvey had used him, Rencke had been living in an ancient brick house that had been the caretaker’s quarters for Holy Rood Cemetery in Georgetown. Rencke was working on a freelance basis as a computer systems consultant for the Pentagon and the National Security Agency. He had the almost superhuman ability to visualize entire complex networks of systems — supercomputers, satellite links, data encryption devices and all the peripheral equipment that tied them together.

  Trained as a Jesuit priest, he’d been at twenty-one one of the youngest professors of mathematics ever to teach at Georgetown University. But he’d been defrocked and fired on the day they’d caught him in the computer lab having sex with the dean’s secretary.

  He’d enlisted in the army as a computer specialist but was kicked out nine months later for having sex with a young staff sergeant — a male. It didn’t make any difference to Otto, he was satisfied with whatever came his way.

  A year later he’d shown up on the CIA’s payroll, his past record wiped completely clean.

  McGarvey had first run into him when Rencke was revamping the Company’s archival section, bringing it into the computer age. They’d worked together from time to time after that in Germany, South America and a few other places where Rencke had been sent to straighten out computer systems, sometimes for the Company, at other times for a friendly government.

  McGarvey and he had formed a loose friendship, each admiring the other man for his intelligence, dedication and sometimes e
asy humor.

  During his tenure at Langley Rencke had updated the CIA’s entire communications system, standardized their spy satellite input and analysis systems so that Agency machines could crosstalk, thus share information with the National Security Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office on a realtime basis. He’d also devised a field officer’s briefing system whereby up to date information could be funneled directly to the officer on assignment by satellite when and as he needed it.

  But his past had finally caught up with him, and like McGarvey he’d been dumped. He’d moved to France a couple of years ago, and McGarvey came out from time to time to have lunch and a few drinks.

  McGarvey went back to the car and drove the rest of the way down to the farmhouse, parking in the shade of a big tree in the front yard. He took the package from the imported food shop and went around back where Rencke was sitting cross-legged on a table in the courtyard.

  “Hi ya, Mac,” Rencke said brightly. He still looked like a twenty-year-old kid, with long out-of-control frizzy red hair, wild eyebrows and a gaunt frame, though at forty-one he’d finally begun to develop a potbelly.

  McGarvey tossed bin the package. “I thought you might be getting hungry out here all by yourself.”

  “I’m always hungry, you know that,” Rencke said. He tore open the bundle, which contained a half-dozen packets of Twinkies, which in the States were cheap, but in Paris cost six dollars each. Rencke was a self-admitted Twinkie freak, and McGarvey had never seen him eat anything else. “Oh boy, but you’ve got the look on you again,” he said, opening one of the packets and stuffing his mouth. “Good. Bad for me, but good.”

  McGarvey pulled a chair over and sat down. “Are you staying out of trouble?”

  Rencke shrugged and spread his hands out, scattering crumbs. He was dressed in filthy cutoffs and a tattered, gray T-shirt. “I try, honest I do. But this is a land of farmers’ daughters. What can I say? But you’re in trouble. It’s a mile wide on your sour mug. Bad guys coming out of the woodwork again. That it? Thinking about tossing your hat back in the ring. Oiling your peashooter? Going hunting, Mac?”

  “Those farmers’ daughters have fathers.” McGarvey smiled. “And one of these days you’re going to get your ass shot off.”

  “The big question would be answered.”

  “What question is that, Otto?”

  Rencke’s face lit up. “The God thing, you know Jesu Cristo, Mohammed, and Harry Krishnakov. All that stuff. Aren’t you just dying to know?” Rencke laughed out loud.

  “You’re nuts,” McGarvey said laughing.

  “Exactamundo, Mac. But I’m the best friggin’ genius in town. Like a willing virgin, I’m ready and able.”

  “Troubles…” ‘

  “The Russian thing, isn’t it,” Rencke bubbled, and when McGarvey tried to speak, Rencke held him off. “Don’t tell me yet. The Russians are up and at it. The Tarantula knocks out a nuke plant. Did them all a favor, if you ask me. Next thing you know old Boris gets himself popped off. His guys don’t carry bombs in their cars. Maybe a shock grenade or two, but not the muscle to blow a car apart. So Tarankov did it because Boris wanted to take him down. Am I right, or what?”

  McGarvey nodded.

  “Oh, boy, I still have the magic!” Rencke opened another packet of Twinkies and stuffed them in his mouth. “So Tarankov means to take over, probably before the June elections. He’s got the balls. From what I read, half the country is behind him. Sorta like a cross between Willie Sutton and Marie Antoinette. If they don’t have bread let ‘em cut cake they can buy with money heisted from the banks! But Kabatov’s people think the way to go is arresting the bugger and putting him on trial. Right? Right?”

  “That’s what I was told.”

  Rencke jumped down from the table, and hopped from one foot to the other, his face lit up like a kid’s at Christmas. “They do that… If they could pull it off, the whole country would go down the dumper. Be a two flusher at least. But if they keep their mitts off he’ll take over anyway, and maybe the whole world will take a crap.” Rencke stopped, his face suddenly serious. “He’s a bad man, Mac. The worse. If he gets into power he’ll make Stalin and old Adolph look like pikers. Amateurs, know what I mean?”

  “It’s their problem, Otto. I’m not shedding any tears. They did everything in their power over the past seventy-five years to get to this point.”

  “Bzzz. Wrong answer recruit. He gets in and it becomes our problem,” Rencke said. A sad, wistful expression came over his face, and he smiled. “The only solution is for someone to assassinate the bastard before it’s too late. Someone has come to ask you to do it. Friend or foe?”

  “Former foe.”

  “Yemlin. As in Viktor Pavlovich. He did you a favor with his Tokyo Abunai network, and now he’s calling in the chips. He’s a born again democratic reformer, is that it?”

  “I’m out of the business,” McGarvey said for his own benefit as well as Rencke’s.

  “How’d you manage to sidestep your little Spock?”

  “You’re a bastard.”

  “You called me that once before, Mac. Just not true. My mother was a good woman. But I am a real shit, and I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings. But the question is valid.”

  “I managed.”

  “Does she suspect?”

  “Probably.”

  “Not so good to have the French on your back,” Rencke said, looking away momentarily. “What’d you tell him, Mac?” he asked dreamily.

  “I told him no.”

  Rencke turned his wild eyes back to McGarvey. “Then what’re you doing out here? Looking for a conscience, because if, that all it is, forget it. Tarankov is a bad, bad dog. I could show you things, Mac. Real things that’d curl even your gray hair.”

  “That’s what I came out here for,” McGarvey said.

  “Research or justification?”

  “Just research …”

  Rencke wagged his finger at McGarvey. “As you’re fond of saying, Mac, don’t shit the troops. If you want my help you’ll have to level with me. Because if you’re going to do it I’ll have to backstop you, which’ll put my ass on the line. I’ve got a right to know.”

  “Just research for now, Otto. Because I honestly don’t know what I’m going to do. I want to stay retired.”

  Rencke shook his head, the sad expression back on his face. “We both wish that were true, my friend. But the fact is you’re getting bored again. I saw it the last time you came out here. And listen — to me, without you there would have been a lot more bad guys killing a lot of really good people. You have made a difference, Mac. In a lot of people’s lives. Don’t ever doubt it.”

  “I do every day,” McGarvey said.

  “Comes with the territory,” Rencke said. He turned abruptly and went into the house.

  McGarvey waited outside for ten minutes, smoking a cigarette, enjoying the warmth of the afternoon. His ex wife Kathleen had once called him the “last boy scout.” Now Rencke had called him the same thing.

  One thing was certain, he thought as he rose and went into the house, whoever agreed to kill Tarankov would have less than a one-in-a-thousand chance of pulling it off and escaping. It was an interesting problem.

  The windows in the main room were boarded up and the fireplace blocked. Fluorescent lights had been installed in the ceiling, and air-conditioning kept the house cool, almost cold. Computer equipment was scattered everywhere. A dozen monitors, one of them a forty-inch screen, were set up next to printers and CPUs around the room. In a corner what looked like a smaller version of a Cray supercomputer was processing something. The lights on its front panel flashed at a bewildering speed.

  “I built that one myself,” Rencke called from where he was seated at the big monitor, his fingers flying over the keyboard. “The lights are useless, but they impress the hell out of people.”

  “Who’s seen it?” McGarvey asked, walking over.

  “Nobody,” Rencke said. “Take a
look at this.”

  A map of Russia came up on the screen with all the major cities pinpointed in yellow. Starting with Yakutsk in Siberia and working its way west toward Moscow, the cities flashed red, and a number between ten and a hundred appeared beside each one.

  “I won’t bore you with details, but those are the cities Tarankov’s commandoes have hit in the past couple of years. The figures are the number of people he’s killed in each place.”

  Rencke erased the screen, and this time brought up a map of the entire old Soviet Union. “I designed a probability program from the basic premise that Tarankov succeeds in taking the Kremlin by force or by the ballot box. Either scenario made no difference.” He looked up. “Ready for this, Mac?”

  “Go ahead,” McGarvey said.

  Rencke hit a key. For a few moments nothing seemed to happen, until one after another, spreading outward from Moscow like some malignant growth, cities large and small began to glow red, numbers, some in the thousands, began to appear beside them. The figures next to Moscow and St. Petersburg showed the most growth, rising into the tens of thousands, but then Kiev and Nizhny Novgorod and Volgograd blossomed. The cancer spread next to Tallinn, Riga and Vilnius in the Baltics. Finally into Romania, and Bulgaria and Poland. The numbers were staggering, in the millions.

  “The people will have jobs, they’ll eat regularly, they’ll have free medical care and free education all the way up to the doctorate level,” Rencke said.

  “How accurate is this?” McGarvey asked.

  “Based on my primary premise, very,” Rencke said. “How about nuclear accident projections, because they’ll be reactivating their nuclear missile force, including their subs? Or, if you want to see something pitiful, how about projected NATO responses? Almost nil. How about the biggest one of all, Mac?” Rencke looked up, a maniacal glint in his eyes. “Thermonuclear war. Because if Tarankov takes power the nuclear countdown clock will start ticking again, a few seconds before midnight.”