Last Call td-35 Read online

  It must be mind control, Stantington thought. This Remo, whoever he was, must have some kind of power to hypnotize. Otherwise his secretary would never be so lax with security procedures.

  "You can count on it," Remo said. "This will be my prized possession." Stantington shifted slightly. Apparently Remo was taking the pass from the woman. He felt himself leaning forward inside the bag, then heard Remo drop a kiss on his secretary's cheek.

  Then he was lifted high up again and felt himself moving. A strange thought passed through his mind. He would have expected riding in a bag on someone's shoulder to be bumpy as the per-

  68

  son's body dipped with each step he took. But he felt like he was floating. There was no jarring, no real sense of movement.

  He heard his secretary's voice behind him. "Hey, what's in the bag?" she asked.

  "Government secrets," Remo said.

  "Come on, kidder. Really. What's in the bag?"

  "The admiral," Remo said.

  The secretary giggled and then her voice faded as the door to the outside office closed behind them.

  "You're doing good, Admiral," Remo said. "Just behave and you'll be out of there before you know it."

  No one challenged them in the halls or the elevators and then they were outside, because Stantington heard the plastic of the bag rip slightly and he breathed the sweet fresh air of the Virginia countryside. He gulped deeply, then wondered to himself if this Remo didn't ever get tired. Stantington was a big man, over 200 pounds, and Remo just kept walking along carrying him on his shoulder with no more effort than if he had been an epaulette on a military uniform.

  Then there was an automobile and then an airplane, and then a helicopter. Through the three rides, the white man and the Oriental kept bickering. Something about starring in a movie. The Oriental quoted Variety to prove that the white man could not expect more than three points of the gross and 1 percent of 100 percent of the wholesale price on commercial products. He talked a lot about bringing it all home for under five mill and Remo would get his money pari

  69

  passu and that was the best he could do. Remo said he could have lived with Burt Reynolds or Clint Eastwood, but Ernest Borgnine was an insult.

  Stantington was beginning to believe he was in the hands of lunatics.

  Then he was dumped onto a hard floor and the top of the bag was ripped open.

  He heard a voice that dripped acid ask, "What is this? What are you two doing here?"

  "Don't go blaming me," came Remo's voice. "Ruby told me to do it. It was all Ruby's idea."

  "That is right, Emperor," Chiun said. Emperor? What Emperor, Stantington wondered. "I heard her tell him," Chiun said. "I was away across the room and I could still hear her over the telephone, telling him to do it. Her voice was so loud, it ruined my writing for the day."

  "That's right," a woman's voice said. "I told him to do it."

  "Do what?" asked the acid voice. Stantington stood up. His legs were wobbly and weak from the hours of being cramped into the bag.

  The acid voice came from a thin balding man sitting behind a large desk, in an office surrounded by windows tinted smoky brown. Stantington recognized them as one-way glass. From the inside, they were windows. From the outside, they were mirrors. Stantington looked through them and saw the waters of the Long Island Sound, down a long embankment from the upper-story office he was in.

  The balding man's eyes widened when he saw the CIA director.

  70

  "Stantington," he said. Stantington opened his mouth to speak. "Ga, ga, ga, ga, ga," he said. "Chiun," said Remo.

  The tiny Oriental, not even coming up to Stantington's shoulder, stepped forward and gently pressed a spot under the admiral's jawbone. There was no sense of pain, no feeling of anything internal having been tampered with. But one moment he could not talk and the next moment he knew his voice had returned.

  "Doctor Smith, I presume," Stantington said. He looked around the office. Remo and Chiun were standing behind him, along with a tall, light-skinned black woman. Her hair was wrapped in a red bandana. She was wearing a black pants suit and her face was more actively intelligent than beautiful.

  Smith nodded. He looked to Ruby. "Suppose you tell me what this is all about," he said.

  "He wanted to talk to you. I told him you was too busy," Ruby said, "so I sent these two to go get him."

  "In a Hefty bag?" Smith said. "Why not?" said Ruby. "Nobody notice just one more bag of garbage coming out of that CIA. That CIA be all garbage." She looked challengingly at the admiral.

  Remo said to her, "Why are you wearing that hanky on your head ?"

  "Because I like it," Ruby said. "I like to wear a hanky on my head. You think I fix my hair up for you? No. I fix my hair up for me. Today I felt like wearing it like this. You don't like it?"

  71

  Stantington noticed her voice had started at shrill and escalated rapidly to ear-piercing, without ever having paused at human. Remo covered his ears with his hand.

  "Stop," he said. "I surrender. Stop."

  Ruby took a deep breath. She was ready to deliver the second fusillade when Smith called her name sharply.

  "Ruby,"

  She stopped.

  Smith glanced at Stantington. "I imagine you would feel better speaking to me alone."

  Stantington nodded.

  "Would you all mind waiting outside?" Smith said.

  When the office had cleared, Dr. Smith motioned Admiral Stantington to a seat on the sofa. There were no chairs in the office but the one behind Smith's desk.

  Stantington said, "Suppose you begin by telling me what this is all about."

  Smith looked at him coolly, then shook his head. "You seem to have forgotten, Admiral. You wanted to talk to me."

  "And you had me brought here in a plastic bag," Stantington said. "That merits me an explanation."

  "Chalk it up to employee overexuberance," Smith said, "and it merits you absolutely nothing. Please state your business,"

  "I've been kidnaped, you know," Stantington persisted. "That isn't exactly a laughing matter."

  72

  "No," Smith agreed slowly. "But you would be if you ever mentioned it. Being taken out of your office in a Hefty bag. Your business, please?"

  Stantington stared hard at Smith who sat, ceramic-still. Finally, the CIA director sighed.

  "I ran across your name in our files," he said.

  "That's right. I was once with the company," Smith said.

  "This was in connection with something called Project Omega."

  Smith moved forward onto the edge of his seat.

  "What about Project Omega ?" he asked.

  "That's what I want to know. What in the hell is it?"

  "It really doesn't concern you," Smith said.

  "It costs me almost five million a year out of my budget and it doesn't concern me? Agents sitting around three hundred sixty-five days a year playing cards and it doesn't concern me? One telephone call a day to a little old lady in Atlanta, Georgia, and it doesn't concern me?"

  "Have you been tampering with Project Omega?" Smith asked. His eyes were narrowed and his voice was frozen.

  "I've done more than tamper," Stantington said hotly. "I put those slackers out of business."

  "You did what?"

  "I cancelled the project. Fired the agents. Closed it down."

  "You imbecile," Smith said. "You arrogant, cement-headed imbecile."

  "Just a minute, Doctor," Stantington began.

  "We may not have a minute, thanks to your

  73

  bumbling," Smith said. "Did the President authorize closing- down Project Omega?"

  "Not exactly."

  "Weren't you aware that there is a notation in the CIA's permanent records that Project Omega can be closed down only on the specific written authoriziation of the President of the United States?"

  Stantington thought about the CIA file room, the shambles of papers and record
s strewn about the floor.

  "But that's right," Smith said in disgust. "You couldn't find anything in your files, could you? Not after you decided to make the CIA into some kind of exercise in participatory democracy and your record system was destroyed."

  "How did you know about that?" Stantington asked.

  "That's immaterial," Smith said, "and not germane to this conversation which involves your other most recent lunacy in dealing with Project Omega."

  "Since it's been closed down," Stantington said, "two Russian diplomats have been killed. The Russians are blaming it on us. They say that both assassins were on our payroll."

  "That's right," said Smith. "They were." He spun around in his chair and looked out the oneway windows toward the Sound. "And that's not the worst of it. The Russian premier is on the hit list, too."

  "Oh, my god," Stantington said. He slumped back in the couch. "How can we stop it?"

  74

  Smith turned back. His face still showed no emotion.

  "We can't," he said. "Once Project Omega has been set in motion, it can't be stopped."

  75

  CHAPTER SIX

  A faint buzz seemed to come from under Smith's desk. As Stantington watched, the thin man reached under his desk to press a button. A desk drawer opened and Smith reached into it and lifted out a telephone receiver.

  "Yes, sir," he said.

  He listened for a moment, then said, "Yes, sir. He's here right now."

  He listened again and then shook his head. "It is very serious trouble. Very serious."

  He paused.

  "If you wish, sir," he said. "Project Omega was started in the late 1950's when Mister Eisenhower was President. It was after our U-2 spy plane had been shot down. Russia was getting edgy and there was a serious possibility that it might launch a first-strike nuclear attack against the United States. You must remember, sir, that this was a time when Russia had no world enemy but us."

  As he spoke, Smith looked at Stantington with displeasure.

  "The President and Khrushchev met privately on a yacht off the Florida coast. Yes, sir, I was at

  77

  the meeting. That was necessary because President Eisenhower had assigned me to implement Project Omega.

  "At that time, the Russians had been developing some new types of voice analyzers to determine when a person was lying and President Eisenhower had asked Mister Khrushchev to bring one aboard. He asked the Russians to turn it on and then he told the premier that America understood the possibility of a first-strike attack by Russia on our country.

  "The President reminisced. He said that when he was a victorious general, he still feared for his life. He lived in dread of a random bullet just passing his way that might kill him. No matter how powerful a man became, he said, dying was never easy. 'Some day,' he told Mister Khrushchev, 'you might decide to launch an attack on America. You might even defeat us. That is possible,' he said. 'But what is not possible is that you will live to enjoy it.' Mister Eisenhower said that he was not talking about some doomsday device to destroy the world. 'We do not want to kill the human race,' he said. 'But Russia's top leaders will die. You may win a first-strike war,' he told Khrushchev, 'but it will mean personal suicide to you or your successor and your top people.' Mister Eisenhower hoped that this kind of threat might help to avoid atomic war just a little longer, and that time might bring peace."

  Smith listened and nodded again. "Yes, sir. Khrushchev accused Eisenhower of bluffing but the lie analyzer showed that the President was telling the truth."

  78

  Stantington listened in disbelief as Smith continued talking.

  "The sole purpose of Project Omega in the CIA was to launch the killers in the event of our losing an atomic war. No, sir, the program wasn't meant to be perpetual. It was designed to last exactly twenty years. By my calendar, sir, it would have ended next month and no one would ever have known. But Admiral Stantington's budget cuts have now done what atomic war didn't do. It has turned loose killers on the Russian leadership."

  Stantington felt his stomach drop into his groin. Suddenly, the air-conditioned air in the office smelled bitter to his nostrils.

  "There are four targets, sir. The ambassadors to Paris and Rome. They have already been disposed of, as you know. The Russian ambassador in London and the Russian premier himself remain."

  Smith shook his head.

  "No one knows, sir. The assassins were recruited by another CIA man, long since dead. Yes. His name was Conrad MacCleary. He died almost ten years ago. He was the recruiter and the only one who knew who the assassins were."

  Smith listened for long minutes as the CIA chief fidgeted on the cheap, Scotchgard-treated sofa.

  "No," Smith finally said. "It is a matter of the utmost gravity. I would recommend that we immediately notify the USSR of the danger to the two remaining men." He paused. "Yes, sir. We can handle that. I don't think anyone else has the

  79

  capability." He looked at Stantington. "Most especially the CIA."

  The admiral flushed.

  Smith said, "Yes, sir." He extended the telephone toward Stantington. "It's for you," he said.

  Stantington rose and walked across the office. He could feel his pedometer clicking against his hip as he strode. He took the telephone.

  "Hello."

  The familiar Southern voice bit into his ears like an electric drill.

  "You know who this is," the voice said.

  "Yes, Mister President," Stantington said.

  "You will do nothing about Project Omega, do you understand? Nothing. I will handle what has to be done diplomatically. What has to be done in the field will be done by others. The CIA will remain out of this. Totally and one hundred percent out of it. You have it, Cap ?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "Now I suggest you get back to Washington. Oh, another thing. You will forget, totally forget, the existence of Doctor Smith, Folcroft Sanitarium, and Rye, New York. Got it?"

  "Yes, sir," Stantington said. The telephone clicked off in his ear.

  Stantington handed the phone to Smith who put it back in the desk drawer, which closed with a heavy-locking click.

  Smith pressed the buzzer on his desk. Stantington did not hear anyone enter but Smith spoke.

  "You will escort the admiral back to the helicopter so he may return to Washington."

  80

  Stantington heard Remo's voice. "He doesn't have to go in the Hefty bag?"

  Smith shook his head.

  "Good. I don't like schlepping things around all the time. Not even for you, Smitty."

  Chiun's voice said, "Some people are suited only for the most meager forms of work."

  "Knock it off, Little Father," Remo said.

  "Get him out of here," came Ruby Gonzalez's voice. "These CIA people gives me a headache."

  81

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  But Admiral Wingate Stantington had already told someone of Doctor Harold Smith's existence.

  Vassily Karbenko sat on a bench on a footbridge over the Potomac River. The spires and domes and statuary of official Washington were behind him. His long legs were sprawled out in front of him and his ten-gallon hat was pulled down over his face. His thumbs were hooked into the tunnel belt loops of his blue cord trousers and he looked as if he would be altogether at home if he were sitting on a straight-backed wooden chair, leaning against the wall on a wooden porch in front of the Tombstone sheriff's office a hundred years earlier.

  From his early youth, Vassily Karbenko had been tagged for big things. He was the son of a physician and a genetic scientist and in his teens after World War II, he had been sent to study languages in England and France. While in England, he had seen his first American movies and had become an instant fan of the old American West. It seemed to be the life all men should have-being a cowboy, working the range, sleeping next to a campfire at night.

  83

  "If you like America so much, defect," his roommate told
him one night.

  "If it weren't for my parents, I might," said Karbenko. "But who said I liked America? I just like cowboys."

  He returned to Russia when his studies were completed, just in time to see his parents marched off to a workcamp in one of the Stalinist purges. Russian science at the time was securely in the hands of a fraud named Lysenko, whose approach to genetics and heredity was that there was no such thing as genetics and heredity. Believing that an organism could alter and perfect itself in its own lifetime might have made for good Communist politics, but it was awful science. It was twenty years before Russia's agriculture program began to recover from the hole Lysenkoism had dug for it.

  Still, while he was a zero as a scientist, Lysenko was a very astute politician and when Vassily Karbenko's father challenged his scientific know-nothingism, it was the senior Karbenko and his wife who were marched off to Siberia.

  Ordinarily, this kind of blot on the family record should have ruined whatever chance young Vassily had to move up in the Soviet system. But Stalin himself was soon gone, shot by some of his most trusted advisers, and almost as a reaction to that, Vassily Karbenko found himself riding a wave of promotions through the Soviet spy system, aided by his friendship for a minor party bureaucrat who had inexplicably risen to become the Soviet premier. Along the way, Vassily found out that his parents, like mil-

  84

  lions of others, had been executed in Russian slave camps.

  Karbenko had not yet adopted his cowboy style of dressing. That came when he was assigned to the United States in the early 1970's.

  It could have been one of the tragedies of his life to find, when he got to America, that there were very few real cowboys left and none of them were like those in the movies he had grown up with.

  But by this time, he had come to a new realization. In the 1970's, spies were the cowboys of the world. Working for a government, yes, but basically on their own, responsible in the end for what they did and not how they did it.

  Karbenko was a very good spy and a very dedicated Russian. But he still wore his cowboy suits, like a display of mourning clothes, for a world he had been born too late to enter.

  Karbenko heard footsteps coming along the footbridge toward him and he tilted up the corner of his hat to notice the Russian ambassador to the United States heavily puffing his fat way toward him.