They were face-to-face again at last. Margo had been begging for information about Agatha’s fate since the night they were separated in Varna. Now they stood on opposite sides of the butcher-block counter, circling like wary pugilists, although Margo knew perfectly well that Agatha could kill her in half a second. That’s why, even as they backed and shuffled, the counter always between them, a part of her concentration was on the gun in her purse, and the rest was on knives, frying pans, anything that could be wielded or thrown.
“Don’t be afraid,” said Agatha. “I’m here to bring you in.”
But Margo said nothing. She was staring, fascinated, at Agatha’s strong hands, the way she held those fingers half curled. She forced herself not to stare at what lay on the floor.
“This wasn’t me,” the older woman continued. “I got here a few minutes before you did. I found her like this.” A stifled sound. Her face was very red. “I loved her more than you did, Margo.”
Still Margo stayed silent. There was the door to the foyer, and there was the door to the yard, and she wondered whether she would have time to make either.
“I’m sure Jerry Ainsley told you lots of things about me,” Agatha said. “And maybe some of them are even true. But believe this, Margo. I’m not your enemy. They sent me to look for you. They figured I’d know your habits best.”
“How did you find me?”
“I staked out a couple of places you were likely go to. This was one of them. A lot of it was luck, Margo.”
“Bring me in where?”
“My orders are to deliver you to a townhouse on East Capitol Street. I’m told you know where it is.”
Margo had chosen where to make her stand. She slowed to a halt. Behind her was the arch leading to the foyer. She could make a break, pulling the Beretta on the way, and run through the front door, which was conveniently open. The cast would surely slow Agatha down.
“Suppose I don’t believe you.”
“I bring you in anyway.” Agatha’s eyes flicked to the purse, then back to Margo, as if to say she knew the plan. Agatha herself was displaying no weapon of any kind, but that meant nothing. “We don’t have a lot of time. They’ll be here soon.”
“Who will?”
“A lot of people. The dead man in the blue car and the dead men in the back of the van played for different teams. Both teams will send people to find out why their watchers aren’t reporting in.”
“How do you know they’re not together?”
“Because,” Agatha began—
And Margo was gone, flying down the hall, gun in hand, heading for the foyer and the relative safety of the foggy street beyond.
But only in her mind.
Because no sooner did she start her turn than Agatha somehow was around the counter and sitting atop her, holding both her wrists easily with her one good hand. The gun had disappeared.
“Will you please just listen now? I said I’m here to help you, and I am.” She leaned close. “Whatever you might believe about me, you know I’d never hurt Dr. Harrington.”
“You would if you were ordered to!”
“Possibly. I don’t know. But not like that. Not like what they did to her.”
“Does it matter what I say?” Margo gasped, because the pressure of the smaller woman’s knees was getting to be a problem.
“Not really. You’re coming with me, one way or the other. Conscious is easier, but we can do it the hard way if you insist.”
In the car, Margo had a question. “Would you really have knocked me unconscious?”
Agatha took her time answering. “Understand something. This isn’t about you. And it isn’t about the missiles. Not for me.”
“Then what’s it about?”
The onetime minder said nothing. She continued to steer smoothly along dark, empty avenues with her good hand. But Margo saw the pain in the bland schoolmarm face, and knew.
Jericho Ainsley was crouching in the shadows on the second-floor fire escape of a flophouse on V Street not far from Florida Avenue. The city had worse neighborhoods, but this wasn’t one of the better ones. And, unlike many of the whiter parts of town, this one seemed not to have received the crisis memo, for although it was almost midnight, there was a considerable boister on the sidewalks below.
But Ainsley’s focus was on the decrepit brownstone across the way.
After Margo’s disappearance, he had followed the man in the gold-rimmed glasses, who had spoken to another man, who had led him here. Jerry didn’t know all the players in the game, but he did know that whoever was represented by the man who’d tried to get Margo into the taxi was very well organized indeed. Though he had been at the brownstone only a few minutes, he had already counted three different men and one woman departing in two separate cars, presumably to monitor sites where GREENHILL might show up.
There couldn’t be many left in the house: possibly just two or three. In any event, he needed a closer reconnaissance.
Ainsley wasn’t in the hard end of the business. He’d had the courses in hand-to-hand combat and small arms, of course, but his scores had been only adequate. Still, although he might not be an Agatha Milner or a Jack Ziegler, he knew how to take care of himself.
He began the climb down.
Bundy stood with the attorney general on the portico outside the Oval Office. The Rose Garden greenery was dewy in the night mist.
“Nothing,” Bobby said, arms folded as he stifled his anger. “We even brought in Hoover, and he’s got nothing for us. No idea.”
“She’ll surface,” said Bundy. He stifled a yawn. The President was taking a much-needed catnap, but Bundy had no time for rest. “She’ll make contact.”
“We don’t even know if she’s alive.”
“Don’t be melodramatic.”
“I’m serious, Mac. Whoever is out there trying to stop her, they’re some very serious people. Are they out of their minds?”
Bundy hid a frown. Emotion was not conducive to rational thinking. Besides, if either one of them was to be upset, it should be Bundy himself, for it was he who had persuaded the head of the presidential detail to send GREENHILL’s embarrassed driver to report whether she had successfully made the rendezvous with Fomin. The idea was simply to observe; nobody had imagined that the man might be walking into a trap. But Bundy managed to put that guilt aside; now he needed Bobby Kennedy to put his own fury aside.
“Presumably, they’re the same people who waylaid her last night,” said Bundy. “They failed to do whatever they were trying to get her to do—to persuade her to stop, one imagines—and so they’re trying again. The violence this time is a mark of their desperation. It teaches us that they think they’re losing.”
The attorney general was unimpressed. “That’s awfully clinical of you, Mac.”
“Is it? Perhaps. What I’m trying to say is, they’re desperate. Desperate men make mistakes. With Hoover in the hunt now, they’ll be more desperate. They’re on the run, Bobby. Don’t worry. Whoever they are, they’re done.”
“And GREENHILL?”
“She’s resourceful,” said Bundy. “She’ll get us Fomin’s message.”
“I’ll believe it when I see it.”
An aide came along the walkway and whispered to the attorney general. When Bobby turned around, his chalky expression made Bundy’s blood run cold.
“Is it GREENHILL?”
“It’s Dr. Harrington. She’s dead, Mac. So is the aide you sent to bring her to the White House. Now do you see what I mean?”
The brownstone abutted another building on one side. On the other was an alley, and it was the alley Jerry Ainsley selected. He stumbled noisily, walking slowly and circuitously, wanting to be taken for drunk. But nobody seemed to be on guard duty.
From the alley he had his choice of three basement windows and four on the main floor. The basement was dark. The main-floor windows were curtained, but along the edges were cracks of light.
Caution to the winds.
He got up on his toes and peered through the first window. Two men were smoking and drinking and playing cards. A shotgun leaned against the wall. The next window gave on a small room with maps on the walls. A man sat wearing earphones, tuning a wireless. Last of all was the empty kitchen—
“Hey! What are you doing?”
He swung around. A heavy-fisted man was rushing toward him. Ainsley saw at once that he could never best him in a fair fight. So he allowed himself to fall to his knees, muttering nonsense syllables, and when the guard grabbed his collar to yank him to his feet, Ainsley hit him hard in the groin and, as he doubled over, harder in the chin.
The guard folded up, but his twitching fingers tried to get to his gun. Ainsley stamped hard on his hand. He grabbed the gun, then slid the guard’s wallet from his pocket and raced away, leaving him for his friends to find. Let them guess whether he’d tangled with a fellow professional or just been mugged and robbed.
Several blocks away, he stopped and opened the wallet. The man was a State Department diplomatic security officer, but somehow Ainsley suspected that he wasn’t guarding a consulate.
Jerry threw the gun down a sewer but kept the wallet. He was searching for a phone booth. As he had told Margo, he believed in making friends everywhere. It was time to call one in particular.
“Tell me what happened,” said Margo. They were passing the White House, and she wondered what would happen if she hopped out and went to the front gate and asked to see the President.
“Does that mean you’ve decided to believe me?”
“I guess so. But I believed Jerry Ainsley, too, and he tried to kill me. What’s so funny?”
“The idea that Jerry Ainsley would try to kill you.”
“Why? Because he’s such a nice guy?”
“Because he knows as much about killing as I know about differential calculus. Nobody who wanted you dead would go to a guy like him. He’s more a thinker than a doer. That’s not a bad thing,” she added hastily. “It’s just that he doesn’t have the right set of skills.”
Margo looked at her. “And you do? Is that why they sent you after me?”
“I was told that it’s because I spent all that time with you. I’d know your habits, guess where you’d show up.”
“Told by whom?”
“Chain of command.”
That seemed wrong. Bundy had said the operation was limited to a handful of people. The chain of command sounded dangerously official.
“Who exactly—”
But Agatha was on to the next topic. “Did you see the knife?”
“I—yes.” Shudder.
“It’s an unusual knife. It’s Finnish. Known as a puukko. It’s the basic model for the fancier Soviet combat knife, the NR-40. You don’t see many puukkos these days, especially not on this side of the ocean.” A hard swallow. “That knife is the trademark of a Soviet assassin who uses the cover name Viktor Vaganian. We don’t know his real name. The point is, nobody else in the trade uses a puukko. The Soviets killed Dr. Harrington.”
Margo remembered Fomin’s warning about the war party on his side. But, even granting their existence …
“Why?” she asked. “What would they want with Dr. Harrington?”
“I’m not sure. Bulgaria was her operation. Maybe they wanted to know who else was in on it.” She made a hard turn, rocking Margo against the door. “Maybe they thought she knew who was working with Smyslov. She didn’t, but that wouldn’t stop them asking. And asking.”
A thick unhealthy silence fell in the car.
“Dr. Harrington knew the risks of the business,” Agatha finally said, but it wasn’t clear which of them she was trying to persuade.
Margo’s analytical half was troubled. “Does this sort of thing happen often? Soviet agents killing our people right here at home?”
“Not often.” Agatha’s forehead creased in thought, and for just an instant she was the librarian again. “Not ever, that I can remember, as a matter of fact. They must be desperate.”
“Or you’re wrong.”
“I know a puukko when I see one,” said the minder, her voice warm with warning.
But Margo wasn’t ready to give up. “It still doesn’t make any sense. If Dr. Harrington was in it from the start, then why would she—”
“Get down,” said Agatha, casually, and turned the wheel sharply to the right. The car skidded, the rear end flailing wildly, and then they were headed in the other direction, the onetime minder driving hard.
“What—”
“I said stay down!”
But Margo put her head up all the same. The car jolted to a stop. She looked around. They were on the Mall, near the red towers of the Arts and Industries Building. There was a car ahead of them and another behind. Escape was blocked. Men were fanning out from the vehicles, guns trained.
“What is it?” asked Margo. “What is this?”
“I don’t know,” Agatha admitted. “But I think we should get out.”