The Bannerman Solution (The Bannerman Series) (33 page)

So it begins.

Anton Zivic's reflective mood stayed with him as he
wound through the wooded residential streets of
Westport. Three years since he had joined Paul here.
Almost
nine years before that when he had first set eyes
on Paul, looking down at him from a hovering helicop
ter, Paul looking back over the sights of a grenade
launcher. It was a face he'd known only from the photo
graphs in a dossier that was astonishingly thick for one
so young.

Mama's Boy.

Paul had been in Iran for less than two months then,
operating under a diplomatic cover, although Colonel
Zivic knew that diplomacy was the last thing the Ameri
cans had in mind when they brought him in from Ger
many. Iran was in chaos. The Shah had departed. Repri
sals against Savak and many foreigners had begun.
Then, as the American Embassy was being taken in
Tehran, Paul found himself stranded in the Talish
Mountains north of Tabriz where he and his guides had
been negotiating with Kurdish tribesmen to establish a
secure evacuation corridor into Turkey. The Soviets,
whose border was less than twenty kilometers away and
who realized he was now trapped there, saw an oppor
tunity to take an important American operative. He
would simply disappear, missing and presumed mur
dered by either the Kurds or the Shiites. Someday, per
haps, he might resurface as part of a prisoner exchange,
broken and wrung dry in the meantime. The Soviets
had no particular plan for Paul, as far as Zivic knew. Only that he was a bird in the hand and he was close enough to their border for it to be argued that he had
crossed it for the purpose of espionage.

Molly Farrell was in Tehran as well and had been for
more than a year. Billy McHugh had come with Paul
but was not with him on this mission. Zivic had dossiers on both of them as well. Molly FarrelTs twin specialties
were electronic surveillance and the construction of
explosive devices in miniature. The latter skill always
struck Zivic as unseemly for a proper young lady from Radcliffe who had also been a nationally ranked tennis
player while in college. The American privileged
classes were a well-known breeding ground for shrill
feminists and unkempt radicals but hardly of amiable
and athletic female assassins.

In the midst of the chaos, Molly had remained
calmly on station, where she intercepted a coded direc
tive from Moscow to the Soviet Embassy in Tehran.
Although she could not decipher it without access to the
Cray-1 system in the now-captured American Embassy,
she was sufficiently familiar with Russian traffic to recog
nize the Mama's Boy designation and a set of hyphen
ated digits that appeared to be map coordinates. Since
the message originated in Moscow and not Tehran, she
reasoned that it could not simply be information on
Mama's Boy's activities. She had to assume they were
planning some action against him, at the very least to
thwart his mission.

With her own chain of command in a state of col
lapse, and not trusting it to act quickly enough in any
case, she called Colonel Zivic and asked for an immedi
ate meeting to discuss “the man in the Talish Moun
tains.” When Zivic agreed to the meeting, she felt sure
her interpretation was correct. It told her that Zivic had
to be aware of Paul's activities. Molly had met Zivic on several occasions and considered that their relationship
was respectful. But she had no reason to expect his help,
or anything resembling professional courtesy, without
offering a specific incentive. The incentive Molly of
fered was that she would take out five KGB and GRU
officers at random if anything whatsoever happened to
Paul Bannerman.

“
All that for a contract agent? You hardly know the man.”

“He's my friend.”

“In two months' time he has become such a friend? This is a man to be envied.” Zivic cared nothing about
Bannerman. The plan to kidnap him, though in his opin
ion pointless, was a matter of indifference to him. Miss
Farrell, however, was something else entirely. A most
interesting young lady. “Is it permitted to ask if there is
a romantic attachment?”

Molly didn't answer. Zivic presumed it to be so.
More's the pity. He wondered if this Bannerman appre
ciated her. As for himself, he did not appreciate being
threatened. Not even by a young lady he rather liked.

“My dear Miss Farrell,” he asked patiently, “what
would have been wrong with asking a simple favor?”

“What would you want in return?”

“Another favor, naturally.”

The notion that it might be a physical favor never
crossed her mind. “I won't double for you, Colonel.”

“Will you sleep with me?”

“Yes.”

No hesitation. No qualifiers. Just yes. Zivic was at
once excited and disappointed. “As much as this may
surprise you, Miss Farrell, I do not regard the temporary
use of your body as a personal favor. Nor do I regard treason as a favor.” He reached for a phone. “I will see
to Paul Bannerman. And I will consider that each of you
is in my debt. This is fair?”

“This is fair,” she answered.

Within that hour, to Molly's even greater surprise,
Colonel Anton Zivic was accompanying her in a civilian
Aeroflot helicopter en route to the Talish Mountains
and the spot designated by the map coordinates that Zivic plotted for the pilot. Using a loud hailer, Molly
announced her presence on board, repeating her mes
sage until one of Paul's guides flashed a recognition signal and waved her in. Paul and the rest of his team
approached the hovering craft cautiously, then, satis
fied that there were no armed men aboard, clambered
into the helicopter, which took off immediately and
headed into the setting sun. An hour later, flying at treetop level, it landed in a barley field several miles
inside the Turkish border. Zivic offered Paul and Molly
cognac from a flask he carried. Paul, who had been
chatting cordially with Zivic, accepted. Molly hesitated.

“Merely a civilized gesture,” he told her. “It is not
drugged, I promise you.”

Paul nodded encouragement. She took the small
enameled cup and sipped from it.

”A thirty-minute walk to the southeast,” he told
Paul, “you have an airstrip. I would have taken you
closer but it is a secret installation and to show such
knowledge of it would have been a rudeness.”

“I understand.” Paul offered his hand. “Thank you,
Colonel.”

Zivic clasped it, then extended his own hand to
Molly. When her hand rose, he kissed it.

“To friendship,” he said.

Three months later, at Roger Clew's request, Paul
set up a station in Rome. His diplomatic cover was an
R-2 rating as a Foreign Service Reserve Officer with the
United States Information Agency. His R-l was a legiti
mate career diplomat who ignored Paul entirely. Paul's
specific charge included all paramilitary and counter-terrorist activities from Rome, north. South of Rome, particularly around Naples, the Mafia performed his
function with even greater efficiency.

Molly Farrell came with him, as did Carla Benedict,
who came down from Germany, and Billy McHugh,
who wandered in several weeks after that. McHugh had
made his own way out of Iran, doing nearly as much
damage to the revolutionaries as Iraqi minefields would
do later. Dr. Gary Russo, John Waldo, Harry Bauer and
Janet Herzog all joined Paul in Rome. A few months
after Paul's arrival, Colonel Anton Zivic showed up un
der a similarly transparent diplomatic cover. He was,
legitimately enough, a Soviet Military
Attaché
, al
though he was GRU and not regular Army, and his pur
pose was neither espionage nor subversion, since these
were strictly the province of the
KGB, an organization
Zivic was
known
to detest. What he seemed to be, based
on the organization he was building and the contacts he
was cultivating, was something approximating Paul's
opposite number.

“You don't think it's awfully strange that he's here?”
Molly asked Paul. “It has to be more than coincidence.”

“It's not coincidence at all,” Paul told her. “Zivic
would have promptly reported to Moscow that he
helped us and that we now owe him. They know that if they put him in Rome I'll probably cooperate with him
wherever I can. They're right.”

Molly understood, though with reservations. She re
alized that the popular view of rival intelligence organi
zations was a holdover from the Cold War era. A world
of shadowy figures, implacably antagonistic, forever lurking about and hatching plots against each other. In
actual fact, they frequently cooperated in situations
where their interests coincided. Most knew each other
by sight and by name because they attended the same
parties. They were on the same guest lists because they
all tried to cultivate the same influential friends.

“I promised him a favor.” Molly had told Paul every
thing. “What do you think he'll ask me to do?”