The man on the other end of the line waited patiently. Vasily knew he didn’t care what was in the letter, it was not his job to care what was in the letter. His job was to carry out Vasily’s instructions, thus his words were irrelevant until they contained those instructions. “You are stationed in Boston, correct?”
“Yes.”
“And you have two comrades also stationed in Boston, correct?”
“Yes.”
“And what is the distance from Boston to Bangor, Maine?” Kopalev leaned back in his chair and consulted a map of the United States posted behind his desk. The map was enormous and took up one entire wall. Vasily did the calculations along with the agent. He knew the answer before the man spoke.
“It is roughly a three-hour drive in normal traffic conditions.”
“Very good. Take your two comrades and get up there immediately. Recover that letter. The agent was involved in a plane crash. Even if she escaped, she must have suffered injuries. She probably wandered away from the wreckage and is even now lying dead somewhere. If that is the case, find her body and relieve it of that letter before someone else does. It is not enough to keep the communique from President Reagan. It must be kept from anyone who would have the ability to publicize its contents.”
“And if she somehow survived?”
“Your mission remains unchanged. Get that letter. Whether the CIA operative lives or dies is of no concern.”
21
The ringing of the telephone worked its way into Shane’s consciousness gradually, pulling him out of a deep sleep. He had been dreaming about a young red-haired woman, mysterious and sexy. In his dream they were sharing his bed, and he was doing things with her he had not done since the break-up of his marriage over a year ago.
He burst into wakefulness like a swimmer surfacing, the dream already fading, Shane reluctant to let it go. He glanced at the clock on the living room wall as he crossed to the kitchen. Seven thirty. He had gotten barely five hours of sleep and still felt exhausted and weak. His entire body ached, leg muscles complaining, back stiff, joints popping. And he needed coffee.
He picked up the phone. “What?” he barked into the receiver. It came out harsher than he had intended, but he didn’t much care.
“Shane, this is Marty Hall. I understand you had quite an adventure last night.” Marty was the FAA Air Traffic Manager at Bangor Tower, an older man with a mop of thick white hair and a heavily lined face who had spent his entire adult life working his way up the FAA ladder. Shane barely knew Marty because they rarely had the opportunity for interaction beyond the occasional nod and smile as they passed in the hallway of the facility’s base building stationed next to the control tower.
“Hi, Marty. Yeah, you could say that.” Shane remembered Chuck McNally’s statement that he would have to come in and talk to the NTSB accident investigators and cursed under his breath. He wanted nothing more than to lie back down on his couch and sleep for another couple of hours. Or days.
“Listen, Shane, I know you’re supposed to be off for the next couple of days, but the crash team is going to be here at nine and would like to talk with you as soon as possible. Think you can get in here by then?”
He sighed. It’s not like this was unexpected. “I’ll be there,” he said, then hung up the phone and this time cursed out loud. There would be no going back to sleep today.
He padded past his bedroom on the way to the shower and saw the bedroom door ajar, as he’d left it. He eased it open and peeked in at his injured guest. She was lying on her side in a fetal position. He took two steps into the room and saw her breathing deeply and steadily. She looked impossibly small and helpless.
Her back was to him, so it was difficult to see how the bandage on her leg was holding up. Shane thought for a moment about trying to take a quick look at it while she slept, then imagined her waking up to see him bent down over the bed, looking at her bare legs. He remembered the feeling of staring into a gun barrel last night and decided the bandage was probably holding just fine. He eased the door closed and continued to the shower.
22
The early-morning air was cool and crisp, and the slanting sunlight reflected off the windshields of dozens of vehicles parked in the truck-stop lot. Anatoli Simonov stepped out of the rented Chevy Caprice and shaded his eyes against the glare. The relative warmth reminded Anatoli how far he had come from his childhood in Siberia, where the bitter cold was so complete it was like being stabbed in the lungs if you tried to breathe too deeply.
But the desolation felt familiar. Dysart’s Truck Stop was located south of Bangor, Maine on Interstate 95, and apart from the truck stop buildings and the big paved parking lot, he was surrounded by a massive expanse of mostly unpopulated landscape, thousands of square miles of rolling terrain filled with millions of evergreen trees, the city of Bangor just a rumor to the north.
“Come on,” Bogdan Fedorov urged, climbing out of the back seat along with a second KGB operative. “We have much to do, and standing around is accomplishing nothing.” The three men hurried across the tarmac and into the truck stop for breakfast.
They ate mostly in silence, preferring to interact with the locals as little as possible. It was easy to blend in with the Americans visually, much more difficult when you spoke in heavily Russian-accented English, as Anatoli’s two companions did. Anatoli had long ago achieved a certain familiarity with the language, so he ordered for everyone, and their conversation ground to a halt whenever the waitress — a heavy-set middle-aged woman with rust-colored hair and an aggrieved demeanor — approached to refill their coffee.
An ancient black-and-white television suspended in one corner of the dining room was tuned to a local channel, the volume cranked to a decibel level roughly equivalent to that of an air raid siren. Local programming had been pre-empted to carry continuous coverage of a breaking news story — last night’s crash of an Air Force B-52 jet.
The men ate their omelets, drank their coffee, and paid close attention as a female reporter gazed solemnly into the camera and said, “It appears as though there was at least one survivor of last night’s fiery airplane crash in a heavily wooded area north of Bangor International Airport. Sources close to the investigation have confirmed that a passing motorist witnessed the crash and braved an out-of-control fire to pull a young woman from the wreckage.”
Anatoli lowered his coffee cup to the table, unable to believe his good fortune as a graphic was superimposed on the lower right hand corner of the screen, depicting a head-shot photo of a youngish man, perhaps in his late twenties. The television’s distance from their table and the small size of the picture made it impossible to distinguish any details of the man’s facial features.
The reporter continued: “Sources tell us this man, Shane Rowley, an air traffic controller living in Bangor, was on his way to work at the time of the crash and managed to rescue the as-yet unidentified woman. Her condition and whereabouts, as well as the whereabouts of Rowley, are at this time unknown, but we’ve learned Mr. Rowley is scheduled to meet with NTSB investigators as well as representatives of the Air Force at nine a.m. at the control tower building at BIA to assist in the investigation. More on this story as it develops. Jane Finneran, WBGR News 9.”
Anatoli tried to keep from smiling but just couldn’t do it. He tore his eyes from the television for the first time since the news report had begun and saw that his fellow operatives were smiling also.