Jake Grafton took a while to process it. It had been years since he’d heard that name. “Judith Farrell, the Mossad agent?”
“That’s right, sir. Judith Farrell. Now she calls herself Elizabeth Thorn. She had a Maryland driver’s license.”
“Better tell me about it.”
Toad did so. In due course he got to the message. “You remember Nigel Keren, the British billionaire publisher who fell off his yacht a year or two ago while it was cruising in the Canaries?”
Jake nodded. “Found floating naked in the ocean.”
“Stone cold dead. That’s the guy, Nigel Keren. Then his publishing empire went tits up amid claims of financial shenanigans. But nobody could ever figure out how Keren got from his stateroom aboard the yacht over a chest-high rail into the water while wearing nothing but his birthday suit.”
Jake sipped coffee. “He was a Lebanese Jew, wasn’t he? Naturalized in Britain?”
“Yessir. Anyway, ol’ Judith Farrell says the CIA killed him.”
“What?”
“That’s the message she wanted you to have, Admiral. The CIA killed Nigel Keren. Oh, and this photo.” Toad took the envelope from his pocket and passed it to the admiral, who went to his desk and turned on the desk lamp to examine it.
“I know who this is,” he told Toad.
“Yessir. I recognized him too. Herb Tenney, the CIA officer who is going to Russia with us. If we go.”
Jake got a magnifying glass from his desk drawer and examined the photo carefully as he tried to recall what he had read of Keren’s death. The financier had been alone on the yacht with its crew until he turned up missing one morning. Several days later his nude body was fished from the ocean. All twelve crewmen claimed ignorance. The Spanish pathologist had been unable to establish the cause of death but ruled out drowning, due to an absence of water in the lungs. So Keren had been dead when his body went overboard. How he died was an unsolved mystery.
Finally Jake laid the glass and the photo on the desk and regarded it with a frown. “Herb Tenney reading a newspaper.” He sighed. “Okay, what’s the rest of the message?”
“You got it all, Admiral. ‘Tell Admiral Grafton that the CIA killed Nigel Keren and here’s a photo and negative. Bye.’ That’s all she said.”
Jake used the magnifying glass to examine the negative. It appeared to be the one from which the print was made. Finally he put both print and negative back in the envelope and passed the envelope back to Toad. “Take these to the computer center on Monday morning and have them examined. I want to know where and when the photo was taken and I want to know if the negative has been altered or enhanced by computer processing.” He doubted if the negative had been altered, but Farrell had offered it as evidence, so it wouldn’t hurt to check.
“Yessir. But what if word of this gets back to Tenney?”
“What if it does? Maybe he can tell us about the photograph.”
“If the CIA killed Keren and Tenney was in on it, maybe they won’t want anyone to see this picture.”
“Toad, you’ve been reading too many spy stories. We’ll probably have to ask Tenney about that picture. Farrell knew that. She probably wants us to question Tenney.”
“Then we shouldn’t,” Toad said. “At least not until we know what this is all about.”
Jake Grafton snorted. He had been on the fringes of the intelligence business long enough to distrust everyone associated with it. The truth, he believed, wasn’t in them. They didn’t know it. Worse, they never expected to learn it, nor did they care. “Take the print and negative to the computer guys,” he repeated. “Stick a classification on it. Top secret. That should keep the technician quiet.”
“What about Farrell?” Toad demanded.
“What about her?”
“We could get her address from the Maryland department of motor vehicles and try to find her.”
“She was told what to say and she said it. She doesn’t know anything.”
Toad Tarkington flicked the envelope with his forefinger, then placed it in an inside pocket. He drained the last of his coffee. “If you don’t mind my asking, what did Yocke want?”
“He’s heard a rumor that some tactical nukes are for sale in Russia to the highest bidder.”
“Shee-it!”
“I know the feeling,” Jake Grafton said. “The most sensitive, important, dangerous item on the griddle at the National Security Council and Jack Yocke picked it up on the street. Now he’s charging off to scribble himself famous. Makes you want to blow lunch.”
2
Richard Harper was a priest of the high-tech goddess. He spent his off-hours reading computer magazines and technical works and browsing at gadget stores. He thought about computers most of his waking hours. There was something spiritual about a computer, he believed. It was almost as if it had a soul of its own, an existence independent of the plastic and wire and silicon of which it was constructed.
So he habitually talked to his computer as his fingers danced across the keyboard. His comments were low, lilting and almost unintelligible, but it was obvious to Toad Tarkington that Harper was in direct communication with whoever or whatever it was that made the machine go. That didn’t bother Toad — he had spent years listening to naval aviators whisper to their lusty jet-fueled mistresses: he didn’t even classify Richard Harper as more than average dingy.
Just now he tried to make sense of Harper’s incantations. He got a word or two here and there. “…time for a hundred indecisions, a hundred visions and revisions…. Do I dare, do I dare?” After a few minutes he tuned out Harper and scanned the posters, cartoons, and newspaper articles taped to the wall. All over the wall. On every square inch. Computer stuff. Yeck!
Tarkington regarded computers as just another tool, more expensive than a screwdriver or hammer but no more inherently interesting. Of necessity he periodically applied himself to making one work, and when required could even give a fairly comprehensive technical explanation of what went on down deep inside. But a computer had no pizzazz, no romance, no appeal to his inner being. This Monday morning he leaned idly on the counter and without a twinge of curiosity watched Harper and his computer do their thing.
But he had a restless mind that had to be mulling something; once again his thoughts went back to Elizabeth Thorn, alias Judith Farrell. He had loved her once. One of the male’s biological defects, he decided, was his inability to stop loving a woman. Oh, you can dump her, avoid her, hate her, love someone else, but once love has struck it cannot be completely eradicated. The wound may scar over nicely, yet some shards of the arrowhead will remain permanently embedded to remind you where you were hit. If you are a man.
Women, Toad well knew, didn’t suffer from this biological infirmity. Once a woman ditches you her libidinal landscape is wiped clean by Mama Nature, clean as a sand beach swept by the tide, ready for the next victim to leave his tracks like Robinson Crusoe. And like that sucker, he’ll conclude that he is the very first, the one and only. Amazingly, for her he will be.
Biology, you old devil.
Ah, me.
Then Toad’s thoughts moved from theoretical musings to the specific. He poked around the edges of the emotions that the sight and sound and smell of Elizabeth Thorn created in him and concluded, again, that it would be unwise to explore further. Yet he couldn’t leave it. So he circled it and looked from different angles.
He felt a chill and shuddered involuntarily.
“Commander Tarkington?”
It was Harper. This was the second time he had said Toad’s name.
“Yeah.”