"Only a vacation," he said. "I was hoping to get a good night's sleep and be out fishing tomorrow before dawn."
She took him in with an appraising gaze.
"Hard to believe you ever take a vacation," she said.
He rubbed his new beard and thought briefly of the trout he would miss in the morning.
"Hard for me to believe, too." He smiled ruefully. "Maybe it's time you told me what's going on."
"What about the American flyer?" she asked.
"You know as much as I do. Nothing."
She drove silently, thinking.
"It's been a long time since we were on the same assignment," he said helpfully. "But our governments are allies, remember?"
She nodded slowly.
"It's quite a stink," she admitted. "Wellington's in an uproar. I don't even know where to begin." She tapped her fingers on the steering wheel, then gripped it to round a curve. "And I don't know that it has anything to do with your American flyer. But it does involve the Russians and that tattoo."
"Serebryanyi Golub. The Silver Dove."
"That's it." She looked at him. "As always, your Russian is impeccable."
He laughed.
She allowed herself a smile but kept her gaze on the dark road.
"It started at the Soviet embassy," she continued. "A week ago the embassy called to ask for medical assistance. That in itself was remarkable. They have their own doctors, not as advanced as ours, but they art a stubborn people. Can't admit ever that someone else's technology is better. So there we are, being asked to help. We ask them what kind of doctor do they need. Internist? Surgeon? Cancer specialist? Maybe obstetrics? They hem and haw. One bureaucrat after another talks to our people, finally the head of the embassy himself comes on the line, very calm, of course. Bland is maybe a better word. Anyway, he says he needs someone who is a specialist in tropical diseases and poisons. Well, that's not one doctor, that's two."
"Tropical disease in New Zealand?" Carter murmured. "Interesting."
"Not exactly the night climate here, is it? We're moist and temperate. Marine," Mike agreed. "So I'm sent over as the medical assistant of these two doctors that afternoon. No one questioned my credentials. The stuff just whisked us up to this private bedroom. All the Soviets' faces are extremely grim. The kind of grim that comes when you're so scared you can't even spit. We find a man in a coma. An attaché is how they described him. They said he'd been on a business trip and had returned ill. When I asked where, they stared right through me. Obviously the wrong question to ask. So our doctors confer with their doctor. He tells them he can't identify the disease… looks like a poison, maybe… he's not sure, never seen anything like it. Apparently, the attaché had arrived at the embassy that morning at daybreak, sat down with a cup of coffee, and passed out. So I stay there while our boys run all kinds of tests. The attaché has an incredibly high fever, and he's still in the coma. Our doctors work on him, and I watch. What I see is a very sick man, and he has a tattoo on his thigh, just like our friends who attacked the jail. And underneath is written in Russian 'Silver Dove. »
"The man died?"
"How did you know?"
"An educated guess. If he hadn't, you'd have wangled a way to stay with him, and you'd know a lot more than you do now. Probably be working on the case instead of coming after me."
Mike nodded soberly.
"Right. He was sick only that one day, in the coma the whole time. Never came out of it."
"And the medical tests?"
"The Soviets ran them in their own lab and kept the results. Our doctors saw some of them, but the information was inconclusive. Pointed to any number of diseases, all of them fatal. They did rule out poisons."
"So the Russian with the tattoo died of an unknown disease," Carter said reflectively. "And the ones at the jail were probably also Russians, considering the tattoos and Soviet-made weapons. You came to find me, and instead you find a Russian invasion. It's not an accident. What do you know that you're not telling me?"
"You're the accident," she said and grinned. "I couldn't let you get out of New Zealand without seeing you." She squeezed his leg. "Sorry?"
"Only sorry I didn't call you first."
"That's what I like to hear." She grinned happily. "Now, the big news is that the embassy sent back to Moscow for their own medical experts to do an autopsy and check the lab results. Bet you can't guess who the Kremlin sent."
"I don't know anything about their medical community," Carter admitted.
"You don't have to. Look at this."
With one hand, Mike dug into her purse, unzipped an inner pocket, and pulled out a photograph of two men and a beautiful young blond woman.
Carter tipped it at his window to catch the moon's light.
"Blenkochev!"
"You've got it," Mike said, pleased. "The head of the great K-GOL, the most secret and feared agency in the KGB. The agency that runs all the KGB public operations, and the secret ones that even the Politburo will never know anything about."
Carter held the photo.
"How'd you get it?" he asked quietly.
"It was taken secretly at the Wellington airport when they arrived," she said proudly. "Their security is good, but it's our airport."
Carter studied the photo. The only pictures AXE had of Blenkochev were five years old and hazy, taken by a mole at Blenkochev's dacha outside Moscow. This photo was good and showed a clear likeness Blenkochev was a stout man, about five-nine, with thick black hair greased back slick and neat. He'd be sixty-eight now, but he looked a good ten years younger. Desk work agreed with him. His features were coarse. Slavic, bumpy. The hooded eyes looked over the shoulder of his companion as if he could see straight back to Moscow. There was something fierce and aggressive about his thickness, as if he were an old bull, a survivor seasoned by the ring. No mere mortal could ever touch him. And no photograph could do him justice. It couldn't show the immense power he wielded. The men and women he'd condemned to death. Those he'd needed and saved for the moment. The network of highly trained spies for whom he was an earthly god in a godless land.
"I've never known him to leave Russia," Carter said thoughtfully.
"Me neither," Mike said.
They drove in silence, thinking of the powerful, deadly Blenkochev. What had been so important to get him out of the motherland where he'd be a target for any number of international agents who'd lost friends due to his orders? The New Zealand road wound down the side of the mountain toward the sparkling lights of a small town. The car purred, well tuned. They watched the lights grow larger and brighter.
"What were they after?" Mike said, suddenly worried.
"The men at the jail? You, maybe."
"But…" She turned to him, her eyes wide.
"They've probably been following you since the embassy. This was the first time you did something different, unusual to your routine."
"That's right. There's been a car that could have been following me… But I've mostly been pushing papers lately. Didn't think anything of it. Waiting for a development, orders, you know."
"And then there was the killing of Mackenzie. You go, apparently to investigate."
"You think Mackenzie is connected to the Silver Dove business?"
"It might be wise to find out."
Four
The airport was small, just two buildings — a one-room terminal and a hangar sitting squat on a flat, dry area that had once been a mountain meadow. The terminal's windows were glowing rectangles of light.
The night was crisp and clear. Here the wind was a deep breath through the mountains. The single hangar was near the terminal. Small, light aircraft were staked around it, wings gently rocking with the wind.