She stared at him with anger in her eyes. "But it shouldn't work that way."
"Agreed. And I should never have been court-martialed in the first place."
"What do you plan to do?" she asked. "Could this Stern cause you trouble?"
During the ride over in the taxi, Roddy had debated whether to tell her the whole story about what had taken place in Guadalajara. He knew he couldn't admit what had happened between Elena and himself. But now that Karen had confronted him with the question of Adam Stern, he decided to tell all. Or at least a slightly sanitized version.
"You're damned right, Karen," he admitted in a slow, deliberate voice. "Adam Stern scares the hell out of me."
By the time he had related the details about Janney and Stern, Karen was wide-eyed. "He came to the airport looking for you?"
"Right. He even talked to my next-door neighbors. I got the hell out of town. Spent a couple of days at Morelia visiting an old colonel who's retired."
"Do you really think he would have—"
"I don't just think, I know. His buddy Romashchuk tried to do it yesterday. That part of the story began when I got back from Morelia. There was a message on my answering machine from General Wackenhut, Dutch's father-in-law."
It was nearly noon when he finished his story. Karen sat there looking limp, leaning her forehead against one hand, propped up on her elbow. "I can't believe the police think you killed that woman."
"They knew I was there. They knew I took her Mercedes. I appeared to be on the run, getting Pablo to fly me to Mexico City."
"This Burke Hill, the former FBI man, what does he think?"
"He said he had some friends looking into Romashchuk's activities. He's to call me back sometime today. My only hope is that we can get enough evidence on Romashchuk and Stern to have them arrested. Then maybe we can tie the Major into Elena's death and Stern into General Patton's alibi."
After giving Lori an abbreviated version of the events reported by Colonel Rodman and Investigator Shumakov, Burke called Nate Highsmith to let him know the twins were no worse, that nothing definite would be known until the test reports were in. Then he stretched out on the bed for a short nap.
Lori woke him around eleven.
"The exterminators called," she said. "They're on the way over."
He sat up on the side of the bed, feeling groggy and slightly disoriented. That's what age does to you, he thought. In the "old days," he could go for twenty-four hours, take a quick nap and bounce up ready to roll again.
"The exterminators are coming?"
She nodded. "That's what I said."
The "exterminators" came around monthly, wearing white suits and driving a van painted with the name "Bugs Be Gone!" They were actually Amber Group employees of Worldwide Communications. The "bugs" they looked for were of the electronic kind rather than crawling or flying varieties. Homes of the top executives were swept regularly. Most of the wives, unlike Lori, were not aware of their husbands' double lives and accepted the "exterminators" at face value.
When they arrived and began their probing, Burke got a nasty shock. The highly sensitive equipment showed a transmitter in the family room telephone. They disconnected the phone and took it out to their van, where they carefully dissembled it to the accompaniment of loud music and located the offending transmitter. After disabling the device, they brought it back in to show Burke.
"Looks state-of-the-art," said a technician named Anderson. "It would pick up conversations in the room as well as both phone lines."
"Damn." Burke shook his head, frowning darkly. "Don't guess there's any way to tell how long it's been there?"
"We were here four weeks ago. Other than that, there's no way to tell."
"What kind of range would it have?"
"Probably about a mile. Could be monitored live. Could be a static post with a tape recorder."
"Any way you could locate the monitor?" Burke inquired.
"Not likely."
"Okay. Thanks, guys. I'd better get down to the office and tell Nate about this. I can't think of anything compromising it might have picked up, but just being here is damned serious."
After the "exterminators" had left, Lori asked, "Who could have put it there? And when?"
Burke rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "The alarm system hasn't indicated any intrusions." It was an expensive, highly sophisticated system installed by company technicians. "But how the hell could it have been done while we were home? We haven't had any strange—"
"The party!" Lori blurted. "The caterer used our kitchen as a command post."
"But Brenda was in there the whole time, wasn't she?"
"True. I'll call and see if she remembers anything unusual. Anybody using the family room phone."
Ten minutes later, Lori had the answer. Brenda recalled one of the white-jacketed waiters using the phone. A sharp observer, she also remembered the man had just come in to get a new badge made and the woman in charge, a blonde named Dolly, didn't seem to be familiar with his name.
"Call the caterer," Burke suggested. "Tell her you just discovered something missing and Brenda remembered this guy going in there. See what she knows about him."
Lori looked up the number and dialed, then asked for Dolly.
"Sorry, ma'am. Dolly's working a barbecue dinner tonight. She won't be in until just before time to leave. Around 4:30, I'd say. Be glad to have her call when she gets in."
"Okay, thanks," Lori said and left her number.
49
The Foreign Affairs Roundtable was located in a plain-looking gray stone building on Manhattan's Upper East Side near the Rockefeller Institute. Adam Stern occupied a modest office on the third floor looking toward Roosevelt Island. Besides a dark wood desk that was kept virtually bare, the room contained two drab gray four-drawer safes with combination locks, a bookcase filled mostly with assorted reference works and two odd chairs that faced the desk.
Stern had just returned from lunch with a former Mossad officer now working for the UN when he received a call from the Washington area on his private line.
"Is this Mr. Bowe?" a voice inquired.
"That's correct," Stern said. He liked the symmetry of the pseudonym, bow being the reverse of stern.
"This is Sarge in Falls Church. We've been sending you the tapes by Fed Ex the last couple of days."
"Yes, thanks. I've received them." They had turned up nothing of interest. Not that he had really expected anything, but Laurence Coyne had insisted on thoroughly vetting Burke Hill. After what Hill had done a few years ago to a couple of prominent FAR members, Stern was in full agreement. Never mind that the two multinational tycoons had stupidly been caught bankrolling radical CIA and KGB elements in a plot to assassinate the Soviet and American presidents. The point was that Hill had proved himself quite adept at working outside of and, indeed, against "the system."
"You asked us to call if we picked up anything suspicious, out of the ordinary. Well, we just went through the tapes from last night and this morning. Came across some stuff you might be interested in. Hill called his wife late last night from Mexico City. Asked her to dream up something about the kids being sick. Seems he wanted an excuse that would justify asking his boss to send the company plane to pick him up. Said he would explain when he got back this morning."
Stern's interest perked up. Mexico City? No, he assured himself. There couldn't be any connection. But why was Hill in such a rush to get back to Washington that he couldn't wait a few hours for a commercial flight? And why not explain to his wife on the phone? Those were the kinds of questions that made an old spy's antennae bristle.