They had to carry her a hundred yards. She seemed to weigh a ton and several times Yocke thought he might drop her. She was limp, unconscious. Somehow his savage grip on her bare, shaved legs seemed obscene, an invasion of her womanhood that added embarrassment to the stew of emotions surging through the reporter.
“What happened?” Yocke asked Toad between breaths as they stumbled along.
“Two men. I got one with the first shot and the other charged and exchanged shots with Judith. I think they shot each other or else Grafton or somebody drilled him. Hell, maybe I got him too, not that it matters a damn. I got a look at their bodies. Both CIA guys from the embassy.”
CIA? Jesus, Yocke swore under his breath, he thought that story this Shirley or Judith or whatever her name is had told was all crap!
“What did you say?” Toad demanded.
“Jesus!”
She groaned once, just before they maneuvered her into the backseat. Toad jumped in back. “You drive, Jack. Keys are under the floormat.”
Yocke got behind the wheel and fumbled with the keys.
“Come on, Yocke! Let’s get her to the embassy before she bleeds to death.”
Somehow Yocke got the right key into the ignition and the engine started. He pulled the lever into drive and tried to resist the urge to floor the accelerator.
In the backseat Toad was trying to see where she was hit. Three bullet holes, as near as he could tell, all into the left lung area. He had his arm around her and could feel the warm, sticky wetness. Damn! One of them must have punched into her heart.
She whispered something. He put his ear almost against her lips. “Hello, Robert.”
“We’ll get you to the doc at the embassy, Hannah.” Without thinking, he had used her real name. He almost bit his tongue.
Her pulse was fluttering, her muscles slack.
And Toad knew. She was dying. Fury welled in him, all the frustrated bitterness accumulated through the years from loving a woman when the love wasn’t returned, couldn’t be returned — now it washed over him as a wave of pure rage, then as suddenly dissipated, leaving an emptiness in its place.
“Judith Farrell,” he whispered, his lips right next to her ear. “I have loved two women in my life. You were the first.”
Whether or not she heard him he didn’t know. A moment later he realized she had no pulse. He hugged her tighter and sat watching the buildings as the car sped through empty streets.
15
Somebody sold us out.” Toad Tarkington was in a fine fury, his face dark, his eyes narrowed to slits. Unconsciously Jack Yocke took a step backward.
Senior Chief Holley and Spiro Dalworth took the full brunt of Tarkington’s anger. They stood their ground as Toad continued in a low, intense voice: “Someone here in this room told the CIA where the meet was, who was going to be there. They didn’t get it over the phone, they didn’t get it from a wiretap, they didn’t follow anybody there. Someone talked, whispered into a spook’s ear, and because of that, Judith Farrell died.”
Spiro Dalworth’s face was a study as he tried to keep it under control. Toad Tarkington zeroed in, put his face inches from that of the lieutenant. “Somebody broke the faith.” He said the words slowly, like an Old Testament prophet pronouncing the doom of a king. “Somebody betrayed his shipmates, sold out to the spook fucks playing power politics. Why don’t you tell us about it, Dalworth.”
“Commander, I—”
“You shit!”
“Listen, we’re on the same team. I—”
The back of Toad’s hand flicked across Dalworth’s face with a whiplike smack. Dalworth staggered and almost fell.
“That’s enough, Toad,” Jake Grafton said.
Tarkington stepped back and stood glowering at Dalworth, who rubbed the side of his face and looked at the admiral. “Sir, I’m sorry!” the lieutenant said. “I thought—” His voice broke. He was near tears.
“Who’d you tell?” the admiral asked in a tired voice.
“Herb Tenney. We’ve talked before about an agency job when I get out. My naval career—”
“When did you tell him?”
“Before we left to go to the park.”
Jake Grafton looked out the window at the fountain in front of the complex cafeteria. On the other side of the square was the empty new embassy riddled with electronic listening devices. KGB bugs, CIA bugs, maybe Mossad, MI-5, German bugs, you name it. Was there anybody anywhere in this uncertain world who was willing to sleep in blissful ignorance of what the U.S. ambassador said to his aides? Or his assistant? Or his wife?
“Admiral, I—”
“No.” Jake Grafton thought he knew what Tarkington was going to say. Toad would desperately love to go find Herb Tenney and shoot him dead.
Let’s assume Judith was telling the gospel truth. The CIA learned of the Nigel Keren operation through the KGB. And the KGB has just blown up the Serdobsk power plant, contaminating thousands of square miles and killing thousands of people, thereby triggering a leadership crisis that might result in a new dictatorship of the Old Guard, some of whom lead the KGB. Assume also that this development would not be frowned upon by the rogue clique in the CIA that controlled Herb Tenney. In some crazy way it fit. Jake Grafton got that hollow feeling in the pit of his stomach again.
The Middle East, eastern Europe, the horn of Africa, southeast Asia… Every major event effects every person in this interdependent world. The collapse of communism in the Soviet Union upset the equilibrium. No, the collapse of the shah in pro-Western Iran was the triggering event. Like shock waves radiating from the epicenter of an earthquake, these events triggered other events, upset the balance of power that kept a world with too few resources and too many greedy men from coming apart at the seams. And now the seams were ripping.
He turned from the window. “Toad, you and Jack take Farrell’s body back to the park.”
“Why not the Israeli embassy, sir? She ought to have a decent funeral and burial. She deserves that.”
Jake Grafton thought the white-collar crowd at the Israeli embassy would be extremely embarrassed if they received the body of a covert soldier killed in an operation that the government of Israel would deny all knowledge of. He merely repeated his order: “Take her to the park.”
“Aye aye, sir. Come on, Yocke.”
“Senior Chief, go to bed.”
Jake Grafton and Spiro Dalworth were standing alone in the room when Toad Tarkington closed the door.
Out in the car Judith Farrell’s body lay under a pile of jackets on the backseat. Toad got behind the wheel and Jack Yocke got in beside him.
The sky was just beginning to gray when Toad turned the corner and sped south on the wide, empty boulevard that ran toward the river.
Jack Yocke was still trying to fit together all the pieces. “How well did you know her?” he asked Toad.
Toad didn’t answer immediately. “Pretty well,” he said finally.
“Shirley Ross, Judith Farrell…aliases?”
“Yep. And she had others.”
“Do you know her real name?”
“She told it to me once.”
“To die like that…”
“In her line of work it was bound to happen sooner or later.”
As they crossed the Moskva bridge, Jack Yocke asked, “Do you think her team really killed Kolokoltsev in Soviet Square?”
Toad said, “You told me that one of the gunmen held the door to the limo open and one stood there cool as a cucumber squirting bullets into the people inside? Well, the shooter for the coup de grace was undoubtedly Judith Farrell. That was the payoff — those people were putting their lives on the line to kill that anti-Jewish hate merchant. You can bet your last kopek that Judith Farrell was right there at the trigger to make damn sure there was no slipup. That was the way she operated.”