“Who is it?” Clark asked.
“He didn’t say, sir.”
“Okay,” John grumbled. He switched buttons and said, “This is John Clark.”
“Good morning, Mr. Clark,” the anonymous voice said in greeting.
“Who is this?” John asked.
“We have a mutual acquaintance. His name is Sean Grady.”
“Yes?” Clark’s hand tightened on the instrument, and he punched the RECORD button for the attached taping system.
“You may know my name, therefore, as Iosef Andrevevich Serov. We should meet, Mr. Clark.”
“Yes,” John replied evenly, “I’d like that. How do we do it?”
“Today, I think, in New York. Take the British Airways Concorde Flight 1 into JFK, and I will meet you at one in the afternoon at the entrance to the Central Park Zoo. The redbrick building that looks like a castle. I shall be there at eleven o’clock exactly. Any questions?”
“I suppose not. Okay, eleven A.M. in New York.”
“Thank you. Good-bye.” The line went dead, and Clark switched buttons again.”Alice, could you have Bill and Alistair join me, please?”
They came in less than three minutes later. “Listen to this one, guys,” John said, hitting the PLAY button on the tape machine.
“Bloody hell,” Bill Tawney observed, a second before Al Stanley could do the same. “He wants to meet you? I wonder why.”
“Only one way to find out. I have to catch the Concorde for New York. Al, could you get Malloy awake so he can chopper me to Heathrow?”
“You’re going?” Stanley asked. The answer was obvious.
“Why not? Hell”-John grinned-“it gets me out of the fucking budget meeting.”
“Quite so. There could be dangers involved.”
“I’ll have the FBI send some people to look after me, and I’ll have a friend with me,” Clark pointed out, meaning his .45 Beretta. “We’re dealing with a professional spook here. There’s more danger to him than there is to me, unless he’s got a very elaborate operation set up at the other end, and we should be able to spot that. He wants to meet with me. He’s a pro, and that means he wants to tell me something-or maybe ask mesomething, but I’d lean the other way, right?”
“I’d have to agree with that,” Tawney said.
“Objections?” Clark asked his principal subordinates. There were none. They were just as curious as he was, though they’d want good security in New York for the meeting. But that would not be a problem.
Clark checked his watch. “It’s short of four in the morning there-and he wants the meet to be today. Pretty fast for this sort of thing. Why the hurry? Any ideas?”
“He could want to tell you that he had no connection with the hospital incident. Aside from that?. . .” Tawney just shook his head.
“Timing’s a problem. That’s a ten-thirty flight, John,” Stanley pointed out. “It’s now three-thirty on your East Coast. No one important will be at work yet.”
“We’ll just have to wake them up.” Clark looked at his phone and hit the speed-dial button for FBI headquarters.
“FBI,” another anonymous voice said.
“I need to talk to Assistant Director Chuck Baker.”
“I don’t think Mr. Baker will be in now.”
“I know. Call him at home. Tell him that John Clark is calling.” He could almost hearthe oh, shit at the other end of the call, but an order had been given by a voice that sounded serious, and it would have to be followed.
“Hello,” another voice said somewhat groggily a minute later.
“Chuck, this is John Clark. Something’s turned on the Serov case.”
“What’s that?” And why the hell can’t it wait four hours? the voice didn’t go on.
John explained. He could hear the man waking up at the other end.
“Okay,” Baker said. “I’ll have some guys from New York meet you at the terminal, John.”
“Thanks, Chuck. Sorry to shake you loose at this hour.”
“Yeah, John. Bye.”
The rest was easy. Malloy came into his office after his own morning workout, and called to get his helicopter readied for a hop. It didn’t take long. The only headache was having to filter through the in- and outbound airliner traffic, but the chopper landed at the general-aviation terminal, and an airport security car took John to the proper terminal, where Clark was able to walk into the Speedway Lounge twenty minutes before the flight to collect his ticket. Thisway, he also bypassed security, and was thus spared the embarrassment of having to explain that he carried a pistol, which in the United Kingdom was the equivalent of announcing that he had a case of highly infectious leprosy. The service was British-lavish, and he had to decline the offer of champagne before boarding the aircraft. Then the flight was called, and Clark walked down the jetway and into the world’s fastest airliner for Flight I to New York’s JFK International. The pilot gave the usual preflight brief, and a tractor pushed the oversized fighter aircraft away from its gate. In less than four hours, John thought, he’d be back in the States. Wasn’t air travel wonderful? But better yet, he had in his lap the package that had just been couriered in. It was the personnel package for one Popov, Dmitriy Arkadeyevich. It had been heavily edited, he was sure, but even so it made for interesting reading, as the Concorde leaped into the air and turned west for America. Thank you, Sergey Nikolayevich, John thought, flipping through the pages. It had to be the real KGB file, John saw. Some of the photocopied pages showed pinholes in the upper-left corners, which meant that they dated back to when KGB had used pins to keep pages together instead of staples, thathaving been copied from the British MI-6 back in the 1920s. It was a piece of trivia that only insiders really knew.
Clark was about halfway across the North Atlantic when Popov awoke on his own again at seven-fifteen. He ordered breakfast sent up and got himself clean in preparation for a busy day. By eightfifteen, he was walking out the front door, and looked first of all for a men’s store that was open for business. That proved to be frustrating, until finally he found one whose doors opened promptly at nine. Thirty minutes later, he had an expensive but somewhat ill-fitting gray suit, plus shirts and ties that he took back to his hotel room and into which he changed at once. Then it was time for him to walk to Central Park.
The building that guarded the Central Park Zoo was strange to behold. It was made of brick, and had battlements on the roof as though to defend the area against armed attack, but the same walls were dotted with windows, and the entire building sat in a depression rather than atop a hill, as a proper castle did. Well, American architects had their own ideas, Popov decided. Hecirculated about the area, looking for the FBI agents (or perhaps CIA field officers? he wondered) who were certain to be there to cover this meeting-and possibly to arrest him? Well, there was nothing to be done about that. He would now learn if this John Clark were truly an intelligence officer. That business had rules, and Clark should follow them as a matter of professional courtesy.
The gamble was a huge one on his part, and Clark had to respect it for that very reason, but he couldn’t be sure. Well, one couldn’t be sure of much in this world.
Dr. Killgore came to the cafeteria at his accustomed hour, but surprisingly didn’t find his Russian friend, or Foster Hunnicutt, there. Well, maybe they’d both slept late. He lingered over breakfast twenty minutes more than usual before deciding, the hell with it, and drove to the horse barn. There he found another surprise. Both Buttermilk and Jeremiah were in the corral, neither of them saddled or bridled. There was no way for him to know that both horses had walked back to their home on their own last night. Curious, he walked both back to their stalls before saddling up his own usual mount. He waitedoutside in the corral for another fifteen minutes, wondering if his friends would show up, but they didn’t, and he and Kirk Maclean rode off west for their morning tour of the countryside.
The covert side of the business could be fun, Sullivan thought. Here he was driving what appeared to be a Consolidated Edison van, and wearing the blue coveralls that announced the same employment. The clothing was baggy enough to allow him to carry a dozen weapons inside the ugly garment, but better yet it made him effectively invisible. There were enough of these uniforms on the streets of New York that no one ever noticed them. This discreet surveillance mission had been laid on in one big hurry, with no fewer than eight agents already at the rendezvous site, all carrying the passport photo of this Serov subject, for what good it was. They lacked height and weight estimates, and that meant they were looking for an OWG, an ordinary white guy, of which New York City had at least three million.