“I had this friend in Washington. Her name was Lana Toy. We used to work together at the State Department. We were roommates too. Even fought over the same boyfriend a couple years ago.”
McGarvey thought he knew what was coming.
“She’s dead. Burned up in a car accident. But it was no accident, you know. That’s how they killed Jim and Ed Mowry… with fire.”
“Who told you about it?”
She looked up. “Phil Carrara,” she said. “How else did you think I’d find out?”
Chapter 66
Hermann Becker was running late, and he was getting the feeling that someone was following him, though he’d been unable to detect any signs of it. He parked his rental car in the Cointrin Airport Holiday Inn parking lot, and walked directly from it, stopping a hundred yards away in the shadows to look back. No one was there.
It was coming up on 2300 hours, and his Swissair flight to Tokyo was due to take off at midnight. He couldn’t miss the plane because there was no other flight out until tomorrow afternoon, and he had to be in Japan by evening, Tokyo time. But he was worried about more than time.
Liese Egk had sounded strained on the telephone, but Spranger had sounded worse; so bad in fact that Becker had hardly recognized his voice. But the general’s orders had been clear and concise. The time was now.
“You must make delivery as planned. There can be no delays for any reason whatsoever.
Are you perfectly clear in this?”
“Yes, of course,” Becker had replied, his mind already racing ahead to the various steps he would have to take to insure his unimpeded arrival in Tokyo and then Nagasaki.
But the scenario had been worked out in beautiful detail months ago. They’d even made several dry runs with absolutely no difficulties. This time would be no different.
Except that Becker was worried about how Spranger had sounded on the telephone, and he had become jumpy.
Carrying his leather purse under his left arm, Becker, a small, dark-complected intense-looking man, entered the hotel, crossed the lobby and took the elevator up to the eleventh floor. His room looked out toward the airport terminal a little over a mile away.
He was assured that the hotel shuttle would run until the last flights arrived and departed.
It would take ten minutes to get downstairs and check out. Another ten minutes for the shuttle ride over to the terminal and another ten minutes to check in, which gave him something under twenty minutes to finish here if he wanted to be five or ten minutes early for his flight.
He threw the deadbolt on his door and slipped the security chain into its slot, then telephoned the front desk.
“This is Becker in eleven-oh-seven. I’ll be checking out in time to catch a midnight flight. Please have my bill ready.”
“Yes, mein Hen. Will there be any further room service charges this evening?”
“No,” Becker said irritably, and he hung up, turning his attention next to the Grundig all-band portable radio receiver.
With a small Phillips head screwdriver he removed the six fasteners holding the radio’s backplate in place. It unsnapped out of three slots at the top, slid down a fraction of an inch and then pulled directly off, exposing the outermost printed circuit boards.
Selecting a small nut driver, he loosened four fasteners holding the power supply board in place, and carefully eased it outward to the limit of its soldered wires.
Using a tiny propane torch about half the size of a ballpoint pen, he unsoldered three of the wires, and swung the power supply board completely out of the way, exposing the circuit board containing the first and second IF stages, and a series of low-and high-pass filters.
Working again with the torch, Becker unsoldered fourteen of the filters and removed them. The tiny devices were each housed in a pale gray metal container a little less than a quarter-inch long, and half that in thickness and width.
These he took into the bathroom, wrapped them in tissue paper and flushed them down the toilet.
Back at his work table he took a small plastic box out of his purse, opened it and from within drew out a tiny device to which a pair of wires were attached. Oblong in shape, the triggering device, which had been designed and manufactured by the Swiss firm of ModTec, was not much larger than the filters he’d removed from the radio.
Working with extreme care he soldered the glass-encased trigger into one of the slots that had held a filter, making certain he did not allow the device to get too hot, or for any solder to splatter the board.
Providing the selector switch was not turned to the shortwave band, the radio would work normally.
When he was finished with the first trigger, he soldered in the remaining thirteen devices, then resoldered the power supply wires to the proper connections, refastened the power supply board, and closed the back cover, replacing all six screws.
He was sweating lightly by the time he had cleaned up his tools and equipment and finished packing his single bag.
Making sure he had his airplane tickets and passport, and that he was leaving nothing incriminating behind, he left his room and took the elevator down to the lobby.
The time was just 2332.
Wind was gusting to forty miles per hour, sending spray a hundred yards inland from the waves crashing on the rugged rocky shoreline, and snatching away most sounds except for the wind itself.
A panel truck, its headlights out, materialized out of the darkness on a narrow dirt track that ran down toward the water and disappeared on the stoney beach. A long time ago local fishermen had maintained a cooperative dock here. A few years after the revolution, however, government forces had occupied the nearby town of Dalnyaya on Cape Krilon at the extreme southern tip of Sakhalin Island. Japan was barely thirty miles south, across the Soya Strait, and this area had been abandoned.
The beat-up, dark gray truck stopped twenty feet off the beach, and Franz Hoffmann switched off the engine. He was a huge, rough-featured man with a pockmarked face and a thick barrel chest. His eyes, however, were small and close set.
He glanced over his shoulder at the four animal cages in the back. Now that they were this close he was becoming nervous.
“Let’s get the little bastards down to the beach,” Otto Eichendorf said.
Hoffman looked at the other East German. Spranger had ordered them to take refuge inside Krasnoyarsk three months ago. Neither of them had liked the assignment, and he could see that Eichendorf was just as nervous and just as anxious to get away as he was.
“Take the light and make the landing signal first, Otto. I don’t want to get caught here.”
Eichendorf nodded, and got out of the truck. Hoffman watched as the man trudged down to the beach and raised his flashlight.
They were a half hour early, but if the boat was out there waiting for them as planned, they would see the light and signal back.
Again Hoffmann glanced into the back of the truck. Two of the cages contained a pair of wild sables, and the other two each held a pair of wild Siberian mink.
They were vicious animals, and any border patrol prick or naval rating they might encounter would certainly think twice about sticking his hand in those cages. But if he did, and if he survived with his hand intact, he would find eighty pounds of refined plutonium 239 encased in lead containers beneath the false bottoms in each cage.
They had brought it overland from the nuclear facility at Khabarovsk, where, incredibly, they had purchased it in small lots from a local black marketeer who boasted (and rightly so) that he could get them anything for the right price. On the coast they’d hired a fishing boat to take them across the Tatar Strait onto Sakhalin Island … simple fur animal smugglers that everyone was happy to deal with for a few hundred rubles.