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Authors: David Hagberg

BOOK: Critical Mass
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IT TOOK ERNST SPRANGER A FULL FIVE MINUTES TO WORK HIS way in the near-darkness up through the woods from the road to a position where he could see the Design Polytechnic's main administration building, and beyond it the Picasso Residence Hall. Nothing moved below, but there were lights in most windows; late classes in some of the buildings, and students settling down to their studies in others.
He keyed the burst walkie-talkie. “I'm in position. Everything looks quiet from here.” He hit the TRANSMIT button.
A moment later Liese came back. “We're starting up the driveway.”
Spranger wore a black jumpsuit which made him practically invisible. He would guard the west flank of the school property, while Bruno Lessing, who'd taken up position on the other side of the long driveway, would guard the east flank.
“Are you ready, Bruno?” he radioed.
“All set here.” Lessing's voice came softly from the walkie-talkie speaker.
“Peter?” Spranger radioed.
“ETA at our rendezvous point in about ten minutes,” a third voice answered.
“Stand by,” Spranger acknowledged, and he raised his binoculars as Otto Scherchen and Liese, driving a four-door blue Peugeot sedan, appeared below, passing the administration building and parking at the side of the Picasso Residence Hall. They were posing as Swiss Federal Police Officers.
Scherchen would remain in the car as a backup in case of trouble, while Liese went inside to talk to the girl.
Radvonska's warning in Rome that McGarvey was something special had been very specific. “If you can trust the man to do anything, trust him always to do the unexpected,” the KGB
rezident
had warned.
“With him it's not likely you would get a second chance. For instance: It might even be possible that he's assigned someone to watch his daughter. Be careful that you do not walk into a trap.”
Herr and Frau Schey, posing as the parents of a prospective student, had come to the school and had a long chat with the dean of admissions. Afterwards they'd been taken on a tour of the campus, including the Picasso Residence Hall.
They had actually been inside Elizabeth McGarvey's room, and they had tramped all over the campus, even having tea with the faculty afterwards. They had returned with detailed sketches of everything.
“The only sign we saw that anyone was paying special attention to the girl was a young man identified for us as one of the staff. An instructor by the name of Armand Armonde.”
“Do you think it's possible he's on staff as a cover for a job as bodyguard to the girl?” Spranger had asked.
The Scheys exchanged glances. “I would say no,” Dieter Schey said. “But anything is possible.”
Liese climbed out of the car, straightened the skirt of her conservatively cut blue suit, and entered the building without looking back.
“She's inside, everybody stay alert,” Spranger radioed.
“Just over seven minutes to rendezvous,” Dürenmatt came back. He was at the wheel of a semi tractor-trailer rig, northbound on the Bern-Lausanne highway. The rendezvous point was a turnaround just north of the intersection with the Estavayer-le-lac road.
The timing was tight, but so far everything was going exactly according to schedule.
Spranger tightened his grip on the binoculars as he studied
the side and back of the residence hall, and the area between it and the administration building.
If there was to be any trouble it would happen in the next minute or so. If the girl put up a fight, and Liese had to use force to subdue her, and that action was witnessed by someone who decided to interfere, the entire operation could fall apart.
“What do you want me to do in that case?” Liese had asked him.
Spranger shrugged. “She will have seen your face,” he said. “If it comes to that you will have no other choice but to kill her and anyone else who could recognize you.”
Liese grinned, the expression feral. “Mr. Endo would not be happy.”
“Perhaps, but it would probably lure McGarvey out of Japan just the same.”
 
The dormitory corridor smelled of a combination of liquor, cigarette smoke, and a dozen too-strong colognes and aftershave lotions. Liese hesitated in a stairwell, testing the air and listening to the distant but pervasive hum of conversations, radios and stereos and television sets, of clacking typewriters and hair dryers and electric shavers.
Like Dresden, she had the fleeting thought. But not so much like her college days when she'd transferred to Moscow University.
The sounds and smells were normal here. Nothing bad was happening, and no one expected anything bad to happen.
If it came to a kill, she told herself starting upstairs, it would be easy. No one would interfere.
At the third-floor landing she felt in her shoulder bag for her silenced Bernadelli .32 caliber automatic, checking to make sure that the safety catch was in the on position as she looked through the window into the corridor.
A young man, a towel around his neck, was leaning against an open doorway talking to someone in one of the rooms. At the far end of the corridor two girls dressed in shorts and T-shirts, their legs well-tanned, were engaged in
conversation. Just across from them, two women, one of them older, both of them dressed for the street, came out of one of the rooms and started up the corridor.
For an instant Liese disregarded them. But then she realized with a start that one of the women was Elizabeth McGarvey, and she stepped back.
They were obviously going out. Dinner perhaps, or a show in town. They definitely were not dressed for campus.
She checked the window again. They were barely five yards away, Elizabeth talking, saying something to the older woman.
Liese turned and hurried halfway down to the second-floor landing, then turned and calmly started back up, as the third-floor door opened and the two women entered the stairwell.
They started down, moving over so that they could pass, when Liese stopped short.
“Are you Elizabeth McGarvey?” she asked, feigning surprise.
Elizabeth and Kathleen stopped, a wary look on Kathleen's face.
“Yes, I am,” Elizabeth said.
Liese dug in her shoulder bag and brought out her blue leather identification booklet. She flipped it open and held it up so that both women could see her picture ID and gold shield. “My name is Liese Egk. Federal Police. I've been sent from Bern to fetch you.”
Elizabeth was instantly concerned. “What is it? What's happened?”
“It's about your father,” Liese said, watching the older woman. There was something familiar about her. Something from a file folder. From photographs. “I'm afraid there's been an accident.”
“Oh, my God,” Kathleen said. “Is Kirk here, in Switzerland?”
Suddenly Liese had it, and she could hardly hold back a broad grin. “I'm sorry, madam, but this is a personal matter.”
“You don't understand,” Elizabeth said. “She's my mother. Now what has happened? God, tell us.”
 
Armonde was just coming across the driveway from the Fine Arts Building as the Peugeot headed down to the driveway. Elizabeth looked out at him, and he half-raised his hand, startled, as they passed.
“Is it serious?” Kathleen was asking the policewoman and her driver. “Has he been injured?”
Liese glanced back. “I'm sorry, Mrs. McGarvey, but I don't have any further information. I was simply ordered to pick up your daughter.”
“Then someone must be trying to reach me in Washington.”
“I wouldn't know, ma'am.”
Elizabeth was having a hard time keeping her thoughts straight. She kept envisioning her father lying on the floor or on the ground somewhere, blood pouring from the back of his head. She had the distinct feeling that she was seeing him moments before his death. Something very dreadful had happened, and she felt so terribly helpless, ineffective, useless.
At the end of the driveway, they turned left toward the Bern-Lausanne highway, and their taciturn driver sped up, the night suddenly and ominously dark.
“What about my car?” Kathleen asked. “It's a rental from the Bern airport.”
“We'll have someone pick it up, ma'am,” Liese said.
“My luggage is in the trunk.”
“Yes, ma'am, we'll take care of that as well.”
Last year when he'd come home briefly, Elizabeth had thought he'd looked tired. Completely worn out, and above all lonely … alone.
“Where exactly is it we're going?” Kathleen asked. “Police Headquarters in Bern? A hospital? The American consulate?”
Liese didn't answer, and Elizabeth looked up out of her
thoughts, then looked at her mother who was clearly becoming alarmed.
“May I see your identification again?” Kathleen asked.
Liese reached for something on the seat next to her, and when she turned around she was holding a gun in her hand. She cocked the hammer. “No more questions.”
“You're kidnapping us,” Kathleen said. “My, God, you're actually kidnapping us.”
“Yes, we are.”
“Then my father hasn't been hurt?” Elizabeth asked, relief suddenly washing over her.
“Not yet,” Liese said. “But you'll be there when it happens.” She laughed.
Elizabeth grinned. “I'll be there, all right,” she said. “But you've got to know that you fucked up this time.”
Liese looked at her, surprised. “Yes?”
“Yes,” Elizabeth said confidently. “My father is going to tear you a new asshole.”
IT WAS ONLY TWO-THIRTY IN THE AFTERNOON, BUT CARRARA had been going steadily for the past four days and he was seriously considering throwing in the towel and going home for some much-needed rest. There'd been nothing out of Tokyo since yesterday. McGarvey and Kelley had simply disappeared, and Tokyo Station was completely closed down.
His secretary buzzed him. “Sargent Anders from Technical Services is here. He says it's urgent.”
“All right, I'll see him.”
Moments later the Technical Services director came in. He seemed out of breath, and extremely agitated. “We've just got a break in this operation, but you're not going to like it.”
Carrara motioned for him to take a chair. “Are you talking about Tokyo?”
“Yes, and Switzerland.”
Something clutched at Carrara's gut. “You've made a bridge?”
“The Golden Gate,” Anders said, his eyes shining. “Have we had any word from McGarvey or Kelley Fuller?”
“Nothing yet. But what have you got?”
“Remember the encrypted burst-transmission walkie-talkie the French found at Orly? The one Boorsch had used?”
Carrara nodded. “Have we got an ID on the manufacturer?”
“Depending on your point of view something even better. A duplicate was found by the Tokyo Police in a red Mercedes parked near the Imperial Palace Outer Gardens.”
“The red Mercedes from the attack on Mowry?”
Anders nodded. “And a third duplicate, charred but recognizable, was found in the burned-out remains of the bogus Tokyo Police van in front of the safehouse.”
The implications were overwhelming. Carrara sat back wearily in his chair and closed his eyes for a moment. If the Japanese were supplying Spranger's group of ex-STASI thugs with advanced communications equipment, and if K-1 were after nuclear weapons technology, what was there to look forward to?
“A DNA trace from what we found in the truck used in Shirley's assassination matched with one of the bodies in the Outer Gardens. Same people killed Shirley and Mowry and my two people over there.”
“And presumably it was the same people who shot down the Airbus … or ordered it destroyed.”
“Yes, sir,” Anders said. “It looks like the Japanese are in this up to their ears.”
“It's not the government.”
Anders shrugged. “That's not for me to say. But whoever it is—a political or military faction, a corporation or an individual—they've got big bucks. This sort of thing doesn't come cheap.”
“Nor does capitalizing on the technology Spranger and his people are stealing for them.”
“I'm not sure it's that complicated,” the Technical Services director said. He took off his glasses and polished the lenses with his handkerchief.
“What do you mean?”
“We don't know yet if that's what K-1 was after in Switzerland.”
“The triggers …” Carrara objected, but Anders held him off.
“Excuse me, sir, but the impression I get is that they weren't necessarily after the technology so much as they were trying to buy the specific item. They wanted the actual working triggers. The devices themselves.”
“Same thing.”
“I don't think so. If they were after the technology as such,
then I would tend to believe that the Japanese, or someone in Japan, wanted to learn how to build nuclear weapons.”
“The Japanese are developing a credible rocket program. They'd have the delivery system.”
“Nasty thought, isn't it?” Anders said. “But if someone over there was simply interested in purchasing the triggers and an initiator and seventy or eighty pounds of plutonium, then I'd say their aim was to build an actual weapon.”
Carrara sat back. “Terrorists.”
“They didn't hesitate to shoot down that Airbus loaded with innocent people,” Anders said.
“No. The question is, how far along are they? How close have they come to gathering everything they need to make such a device?”
“And once they've got the bomb, what's the target?”
“The answers are in Tokyo,” Carrara said, picking up his telephone. “I don't care what it takes, Sargent, but we must find McGarvey. Immediately.”
“I've got an idea on that score as well,” Anders said.
“Just a minute,” Carrara said to his secretary on the phone, and he put his hand over the mouthpiece. “Go on.”
“We think someone is hacking in our computers. And considering the nature of the files the intruder has been trying to pry open, we think the hacker may be working for McGarvey.” Ander smiled ruefully. “The son of a bitch has got friends everywhere.”
Carrara nodded. “You think we can get a message to McGarvey via this intruder?”
“It's worth a try.”
“Do it,” Carrara said, and he removed his hand from the telephone mouthpiece. “Tell the general I want to see him immediately.” He smiled grimly. “No,
tell
him.”
 
To the east the sky seemed to be getting brighter with the false dawn as McGarvey sat smoking a cigarette by the window. Behind him, Kelley Fuller rolled over on her tatami mat and sighed. They'd both spent another restless night.
It was the confinement, he thought. But just now Tokyo
was a dangerous city for them. Until Rencke could supply him with a name they could only stumble around in the dark. Sooner or later they would end up like Shirley and Mowry. There'd be no defense against such an attack.
“What is it?” Kelley asked softly from the darkness.
“I'm waiting for my call to go through.”
“To your friend?”
“Yes. Can't you sleep?” McGarvey turned from the window. Kelley was sitting up. She wore one of his shirts as a nightgown. It was very big on her, and made her look even smaller and more vulnerable than she was.
“How long must we wait?” she asked.
“Until we get some answers …”
“Which could be never!”
“There are a lot of powerful people working on this,” McGarvey said patiently. They'd gone over this several times already. “Sooner or later at least some of the answers will be forced. It's inevitable.”
“In the meantime we hide and do absolutely nothing. I'm going crazy.”
“If you want to go home I'll arrange it for you,” McGarvey said. When the time came he would need her as a guide through Tokyo's labyrinths. But if she folded she would be less than useless.
“You didn't see him on fire in front of the Roppongi Prince,” she said softly. “You didn't hear his screams, his pleas for someone to help him.” She hesitated. “You didn't … smell the odor of burning flesh.”
The telephone rang, and McGarvey stubbed out his cigarette and picked it up. “Yes?”
“I have your party on the line, sir,” the operator said.
“Thank you,” he said. “It's me, anything new?”
“Let me tell you, I'm either going to have to get out soon or I'll be forced into setting Ralph loose on them.”
“Are they on to you?”
“Looks that way. Are you keeping your socks dry?”
“Trying to,” McGarvey said. “Have you anything for me? A name?”
“No names yet, but apparently you're in the right place. Seems like the local cops found a pair of highly unusual and very sophisticated communications devices that match the one the cops at Orly came up with.”
“Are the Japanese authorities cooperating with us now?”
“I'm not clear on that point, but hang on to your suspenders. Looks like Phil or somebody over there has put out a call for you. They want, in a most urgent manner, for you to make immediate contact.”
“Put out the call how?”
“Well, that's just it, you see. They know that someone is dallying in their valley, and the smart buggers figure it's your doing. Get a message to the intruder and ergo, the message is got to you.”
A Tokyo police van passed on the street below and disappeared around the corner at the end of the block.
“They're making the connection across the river,” Rencke was saying. “And it's got them shakin' in their boots.”
“But it's not the government over here?”
“I'm getting no indications. But whoever it is has got to be a well-heeled dude. And just now there's oodles if not googols of them.”
Another police van pulled up at the end of the block. “Hold on a second,” he told Rencke, and he motioned for Kelley to get up. “Get dressed, we're leaving,” he whispered urgently, and he turned back to the phone.
“Mac?” Rencke asked. “Is everything okay?”
“No,” McGarvey said. “But listen, you may be going about this from the wrong direction. Granted it may have to be a wealthy Japanese, but it's more than that. We're looking for a wealthy man or group, who would have a motive to assemble the parts for such a device.”
Rencke sucked his breath. “Revenge,” he said.
“I'll call you soon,” McGarvey said, and he hung up. The first police van returned and stopped at the opposite end of the street. Two police cars passed it and slowly approached the hotel.
“It's the police,” McGarvey said to Kelley, who was hurriedly dressing in slacks and a sweatshirt.
“They're looking for us,” she said.
McGarvey slipped on his shoes and threw his things into his overnight bag. Under no circumstances did he want to get into a gun battle with the legitimate police. But there was no way of telling for certain who was legitimate and who wasn't until after the fact.
A minute later he and Kelley stepped out into the narrow corridor. Their room was on the fourth floor, and already they could hear some sort of a commotion going on in the lobby.
“We'll go out the back, so long as they haven't blocked the alley,” McGarvey said as he led the way to the fire escape he'd discovered a half hour after they'd checked in.
Nothing moved below in the dark, crowded alley. During the day the narrow, winding pathway was crammed with tiny shops, stalls and vendors selling everything from American video tapes to bolts of silk, electronic games, potency potions and powders, live eels and traditional kimonos. At this hour, the permanent shops were tightly shuttered, and the vendors had taken their stalls away.
They reached the alley, and hurried off into the darker shadows as four uniformed police officers showed up from the opposite way and rushed to the back of the hotel.
Well clear of the hotel, they ducked into a subway station and took the escalator down. The first trickle of workers on the way to their jobs was beginning. Within an hour the city's entire mass transit system would be mobbed.
“Did your friend come up with something yet?” Kelley asked on the way down.
“He's close. We're going to need to stay hidden for a little while longer, though. Is there someplace?”
Kelley looked up at him, the expression in her eyes hard to read. She was frightened, that was reasonably clear, but she was also determined. He had no idea what motivated her.
“The trouble is that you're a foreigner. You stick out.”
“There must be tens of thousands of Westerners in Tokyo at any given moment.”
“The police are very efficient.”
“Then we'll have to get out of the city for a day or so.”
Kelley was shaking her head. “It's not necessary,” she said. “We will go into Shinjuku's Kabukicho.”
“What is that?”
“A district of the city where anything might happen, for a price.”
“Is there a place there we can hide?”
“Yes,” Kelley replied, smiling faintly. “Several places where no questions will be asked of anyone, providing the money lasts.” She smiled again. “They are called ‘love hotels.' You will see.”

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