I

Sunday Morning

WASHINGTON, D.C. (AP) … President Forsythe met today with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, capping off a three-day series of meetings concerning the tense Middle East situation.

Begin and Sadat are both scheduled to return to their respective homelands this evening.

In a brief announcement following the meeting, which was held in the Oval Office, President Forsythe confirmed that his conference on Thursday in Moscow with Soviet leaders had not been canceled.

He was aware of the downstairs door slamming and a moment later of someone climbing the rickety wooden stairs. He rolled over and looked at the clock on the small table next to the bed. It was barely 10:00 A.M.

At sixty-one, Wallace Mahoney had plenty of vices. He smoked too many cigars, drank too heavily at times, and he could not abide stupid people.

There he was, he had told himself once in a rare fit of self-analysis. At least the cigars were good ones—Cuban Gondoliers—that he bought from a tobacconist downtown.

His bourbon was, as far as he was concerned, among the best available anywhere, a nine-year-old Kentucky that came in on Fridays with the diplomatic pouch. He drank it neat. No water. No ice. None of the frills.

And stupid people. Well, stupid people were to be pitied perhaps, avoided if possible, but certainly never abided.

The only vice that he would ever admit to was his love of sleeping late on Sunday mornings. And he damned well hoped that this Sunday would not prove to be an exception.

He listened as the person on the steps passed the second floor landing, paused a moment, and then resumed his climb upward to the top floor where Mahoney’s apartment was located.

It was a man, probably young, a bit overweight, Mahoney guessed. He could hear the springiness and quickness of step that denoted youth, and the harsh slap of male shoe leather on the stairs.

The second man, if there was one, would be standing by the car parked out front, the building’s Soviet policeman watching him.

Mahoney pushed the covers back and got out of bed. For the first couple of moments, as always every morning, the varicose vein in his right leg throbbed, the pain shooting up to his hip.

Mahoney’s wife Marge, a loving, devoted, and dutiful woman, rolled over in her sleep, her right arm searching for her husband. She was awake instantly.

Mahoney put his finger to his lips, and shook his head. He could hear the steps on the third floor landing now, pausing a moment, and then they came toward their back apartment.

Marge had heard the noises, too, and she looked up at her husband with a questioning expression.

Mahoney made a mental note to speak to her about the rollers in her hair. He hated it when she went to bed with the things on, which was about twice a week. But she called them their little joke.

“Without them you might think you were in bed with a strange woman,” Marge had said once in a rare joking mood.

“It’s been so long, I wouldn’t know what to do with another woman,” Mahoney had said, and they had both laughed about it.

The steps stopped at their door as Mahoney picked up the telephone on the night table. A moment later the dial tone began its low, steady, reassuring hum.

“Have the embassy standing by,” Mahoney said softly to Marge, handing her the phone.

Six months ago a junior diplomat from the American embassy whom the Russians had apparently taken a dislike to had answered his apartment door one Saturday night. A man handed him a sheaf of papers that the bewildered diplomat took. A moment later two KGB agents grabbed the man and took him to jail, as a spy. The evidence was the papers they had found on him. State secrets.

It had taken the American embassy two months to find out where the man had disappeared to, and by that time it was too late; he had been shot as a spy.

As he heard the knocking on the door, Mahoney pulled on his robe that was laying across the foot of the bed, took his military .45 automatic that was holstered and slung over a chair and went to the door.

The pounding on the door was repeated this time more heavily. In the background Mahoney could hear his wife speaking on the phone.

“Who is it?” Mahoney asked.

“Mr. Mahoney? It’s the embassy, sir.” It was a man’s voice.

Mahoney cautiously opened the door and peered out. A young, heavyset man, in a suit and impossibly colored tie, his raincoat open, stood in the dimly lit, narrow corridor. The ever present stench of cooked cabbage was particularly strong this morning.

“Who the hell are you?” Mahoney growled.

“Siverson … sir. Day clerk,” the young man said, and then he looked over his shoulder and lowered his voice. “The O.D. sent me, sir. Said for you to come immediately.”

Mahoney nodded. He had seen the young man around the embassy at one time or another. “Tell Finch I’ll be there in a couple of hours.”

Siverson started to protest, but Mahoney cut him off. “How’s the weather out there, son?”

The young man looked confused. “Weather, sir?”

“Yes, goddammit, the weather. What’s it doing out there?”

“Ah … raining … sir.”

“A couple of hours,” Mahoney said, and he started to close the door, but Siverson moved closer so that his nose was almost sticking through the opening.

“May I come in, sir? Just for a moment?”

Mahoney hesitated. Goddammit, he thought. Not Sunday. But then he sighed and backed away from the door, admitting the young man who quickly entered the apartment and shut the door behind him.

Marge was at the bedroom door clutching her robe tightly around her neck. “It’s all right,” she said, and she looked beyond her husband to Siverson. “Shall I make some coffee?”

“Ah … not for me, ma’am,” Siverson said, and then his eyes went wide as he saw the .45 in Mahoney’s hand.

Mahoney chuckled inwardly, but he kept his face and voice stern. “What the hell has Finch got up his ass this early on a Sunday morning?”

“It wasn’t … ah … Finch, sir,” the young man said, stumbling over his words.

“Carlisle?”

Siverson nodded. “Yessir. Everyone is coming in.”

Mahoney looked sharply at the messenger. Farley Carlisle was his boss. He was a hard man, almost Oriental in his inscrutability. Carlisle’s eyes proved, so the office scuttlebutt went, that the man was really Haitian. Or at least had spent time in Haiti where some mad Voodoo doctor had turned him into a zombie, the living dead.

Mahoney had a great respect for the man, but the kind of respect one has for a cobra or a cornered lion. You never turned your back on the man.

“Fifteen minutes,” Mahoney finally said, and the young man interrupted him again, an almost apologetic look on his face.

“Mr. Carlisle said I was not to let you walk to the embassy this morning. That I was supposed to take you in the car, and if necessary—”

Mahoney started to laugh, and Siverson looked hurt. “You win,” Mahoney said, and he turned and went into his bedroom to get dressed. “Give me a couple of minutes,” he said over his shoulder, closing the door.

Marge had already begun to lay out Mahoney’s clothes, and he crossed the room to where she was bent over the bottom drawer of the dresser and patted her on the rear.

“If you’re not back by three, I’ll put your dinner in the oven,” she said without looking up.

Mahoney smiled, and a wave of love for his wife of thirty-nine years passed over him like a soft summer’s wind rippling a wheatfield. He decided not to say anything about her rollers.

Whatever Carlisle wanted this morning must be damned important, Mahoney thought as he took off his robe, threw it on the bed and began dressing. Probably had something to do with the shit the Jews and the Arabs were getting themselves into again.

The Kremlin had been totally silent about the situation, which was in itself not surprising except for the fact that the president of the Unites States would be in Moscow within five days. The last time an American president had come to Moscow, both Izvestia and Tass had made a circus out of it for the month preceeding and the month following. This time, nothing.

He went into the bathroom, ran the hot water in the sink, lathered up his face and began shaving.

Sixty-one years old, he thought. And he damned well looked it and felt it. Twenty years ago he had still been in pretty good shape. But in that time his six-foot frame had shrunk to five-ten-and-a-half. His 190 pounds had inflated to 220, and that was cheating the bathroom scale by a couple of pounds. His face and paunch had suffered the ravages of gravity yet somehow his legs had turned spindly. And his eyes at times seemed to him to be a century old.

When he finished shaving he turned around and took his shirt and tie off the door where Marge had hung them for him, and put them on. Then he brushed his thick, silvery hair.

He had not gotten a single gray hair until his fiftieth birthday, and then for the next few years it had seemed as if a veritable blizzard had enveloped his head, turning him totally silver within five years.

“Gray is beautiful,” the stateside gray liberation groups were spouting.

“When there’s snow on the roof, there’s a fire in the furnace,” his mother used to tell his father in Minnesota.

But that was all bullshit as far as Mahoney was concerned. “When the hair turns gray, the paunch begins to drop, and you’d rather sleep with a Len Deighton novel than Playboy, you’re over the goddamned hill,” he had told a friend of his in Berlin last year before he had been handed the Moscow assignment.

“We’re just as bad as the women,” his friend, who was only a couple of years younger, had replied. “When we hit forty-five we stop wearing bathing suits in public, and when he hit fifty-five we stop looking at ourselves in the mirror.”

They had laughed about it at the time, but this morning Mahoney felt a little used up around the edges. Eight and ten hours of sleep a night were becoming a necessity, not a luxury. And getting up in the morning had almost become a living hell.

He shook his head, went into the bedroom, strapped on his shoulder holster and stuffed the heavy .45 automatic in the thick, black leather pouch.

Marge had turned away, as she did every morning when he strapped on his gun, and did not turn around until he had put on his coat and buttoned it.

“All set,” Mahoney said, and she came across the room to him and pecked him on the cheek.

“Don’t work too hard, Wallace,” she said, a smile on her lips.

Mahoney reached out and gently caressed her cheek with the back of his hand. “Love,” he said, and then he turned and went back into the living room where Siverson was waiting for him.

“I have a car waiting for us, Mr. Mahoney,” the young man said, obviously relieved that Mahoney was apparently not going to give him any further trouble.

Mahoney nodded, then the two of them left the apartment together, passing the Soviet policeman in his guardbox by the front door, and climbed in the back seat of the black Ford Cortina embassy car. The driver took them the four blocks to the United States Embassy on Tchaikovsky Street around the corner from the Moscow Zoo.

*   *   *

The American embassy was always a surprise to anyone who saw it for the first time. Housed in a run-down yellow stucco structure that had once been used as an apartment building, it looked more like a slum tenement than anything else. When Mahoney had arrived in Moscow a year ago he had been told that a new, modern embassy building was being constructed a few blocks away on Kalinin Prospekt, near the western bend of the Moscow River.

During that year, however, the only thing that had happened on the site was that a few buildings had been leveled. And it looked as if the present embassy building would have to do for a while longer.

Siverson dropped Mahoney off at the front door, then rode with the driver around back to the garage. The older man mounted the three stairs and entered the embassy through the thick glass front door.

The marine guard on duty at his desk in the foyer looked up and nodded pleasantly. “Good morning sir,” he said.

Mahoney signed in, quickly scanning the previous signatures and time-ins. Siverson had been correct. Since eight this morning the embassy had been busy, and the register looked like a who’s who of the staff.

“Where is everyone?” Mahoney asked, straightening up.

“Third floor conference room, sir,” the marine said, and Mahoney nodded and went down one of the narrow corridors toward the back of the building. The young guard picked up the phone and spoke softly into it.

Farley Carlisle, Chief of Station for Central Intelligence Agency activities in Moscow, was waiting for Mahoney when the ancient, creaky elevator stopped on the third floor and the iron gates slid open.

“Sorry to get you out on a Sunday, Wallace,” the man said, and Mahoney was certain he could detect a note of genuine concern in the man’s expression. Odd.

“I’ll bet,” he said dryly as he followed the man down the narrow corridor and into the conference room.

Not many people in the embassy knew much about Carlisle, but from what Mahoney had been able to piece together, the man had first proved himself in Chile, and then had been sent to Portugal where he had converted three men at high levels of government.

That operation had gone on for almost three years until the entire network began to crumble. Whether Carlisle’s assignment to the Moscow embassy two years ago was a promotion for work well done, or a slap on the wrist for not maintaining his network longer than he had, was a subject of speculation among the junior staffers.

Mahoney did not care one way or the other. Carlisle was good at his job, was obviously angling his way upward, and until or unless the Russians openly tumbled to him, he would remain.

Carlisle’s conference room was electronically clean and was often used for discussions of sensitive subjects even by the ambassador himself.

Six men were seated around the long, low, mahogany table, and they all looked up as Carlisle took his place at the head chair, indicating a spot at the opposite end for Mahoney.

“You should know everyone here,” Carlisle began, and Mahoney quickly catalogued the faces, his interest rising.

To Carlisle’s left was Colonel Howard McCann, chief U.S. military attaché to the embassy. The man was fresh from a Pentagon assignment, and had seen no action since Korea. It was his bitter plight, he told everyone, to sit out the Vietnam war as a logistics officer. He had come to Moscow eleven months earlier, a bitter man, and his attitude had gotten steadily worse.

“Patton was right, goddammit,” he would tell anyone who would listen. “When we were in Berlin with the men and materiel, we should have kept going all the hell the way to Moscow. Wiped the sonsabitches off the face of the earth. Now look at us, kissing ass and sucking hind tit to the bunch of squarenecks.”

Next to McCann was Stewart Anderson, a man whose quick, brilliant mind was successfully hidden beneath a mousy exterior. He worked as the chargé d’affaires during the ambassador’s frequent absences from the Soviet Union. But unlike most embassy staffers, he was not isolated from the Soviet population in general. Anderson had several Soviet friends, he attended many Soviet dinner parties, ate in Soviet restaurants, and generally was a highly visible American.

Next to him, directly to Mahoney’s right, was Walter Munson, whose presence at this meeting this morning was a surprise to Mahoney. As chief embassy cipher communications man, Munson was more of a technician than an analyst or policy planner. He was the electronic whiz kid, if such a term could be used to describe a fifty-eight-year-old, stoop-shouldered man.

If there was one person in the embassy who looked, acted, and seemed older than Mahoney, it was Munson. And during the year Mahoney had been here, he supposed the two of them had not exchanged more than half a dozen words.

On the opposite side of the table, on Carlisle’s right, was Darrel Switt, the CIA’s chief case officer (the James Bond of the operation) who worked very capably as the embassy’s cultural affairs officer. He was a young man: long hair, drooping mustache, blue jeans, tennis shoes, corduroy sportcoats.

Next to him was Paul Bennet, Soviet historian for the embassy, in reality a CIA junior analyst, whom Mahoney hated with a passion. The twenty-seven-year-old kid, to hear him talk, had been everywhere, had known everyone, had thought every original thought, and could not be told a thing. He was good at his work, however, knew when to kiss ass, and, Mahoney mused now, would undoubtedly become the director of the CIA one day.

Finally, on Mahoney’s immediate left, was George Congdon, the only man in the entire embassy with any sense, and with any hint of humanity.

Congdon, who was the CIA’s chief political observer, and who worked in Mahoney’s department under the guise of a trade mission specialist, was forty-two, had lost his wife the previous year to cancer, and had subsequently thrown himself into his work.

Despite his tragedy, the man still retained his sense of humor, and was forever poking fun at Mahoney, who was considered by most embassy staffers to be a hardass.

“Blood’n’guts Mahoney doesn’t take shit from anyone except for Congdon,” the embassy juniors said. And they were correct.

Congdon was smiling now at Mahoney, and half under his breath whispered, “Did the bad man disturb your beddy-bye, Wallace?”

Carlisle, however, began the meeting before Mahoney could reply.

“Lights have been shining at Two Dzerzhinsky Square since late last night. Looks like a convention over there,” Carlisle began. “We confirm that the heads of at least three of their four Chief Directorates and five of the seven minor Directorates, have been called in. About three hours ago the individual staffs began showing up as well.”

“You had no advance tickles on this one, Carlisle?” Mahoney heard himself asking.

Carlisle looked his way and shook his head. “None whatsoever. It just suddenly began happening last night. At first we sat on it, but as the activity increased we decided on this meeting.”

“What the hell did you call me for?” McCann broke in. He looked angry.

Carlisle did not like the military man and it was obvious. “The heads of all five Soviet military services have also shown up,” he said tonelessly. And he stared at McCann who, after a moment, fidgeted uncomfortably.

“How about the Kremlin?” Mahoney spoke up, but Carlisle continued staring at McCann a second longer as if to solidify his point.

“Business as usual,” he finally replied, turning to Mahoney, and they all could almost hear the sigh escaping from McCann.

“Their foreign operations headquarters outside Moscow?” Mahoney continued.

“The same. Nothing unusual,” Carlisle said.

“Tass? Izvestia? Pravda?”

“Nothing in the morning editions,” Carlisle said somewhat peevishly. “Did you expect anything?”

Mahoney shrugged. As the chief CIA analyst for all Soviet operations, it was Mahoney’s job to ask the surprising questions. His was a particular talent of coming up with connections where none seemed to exist. And he was very good at his job.

Munson spoke up after a short silence, directing his comments to Mahoney. “Mr. Carlisle called me in a few hours ago to look over the situation. Our sweeps of Lubyanka have come up with nothing. No unusual electronic activity.”

Mahoney smiled at the naiveté. “Everyone is over there. Who the hell would they call?”

There were a few chuckles around the table, and Munson seemed offended, so Mahoney quickly added, “Maybe the fact their communications network is silent is in itself significant. Send the logs up to me after we finish here.”

Munson, somewhat mollified, nodded and sat back, and Carlisle continued.

“One of three possibilities exist as I see it,” he said, and everyone turned his way. “Number one, the most likely possibility, is something is happening or is about to happen in the Middle East situation. This is possibly a policy planning-session.”

Mahoney shook his head. “The military chiefs of staff and perhaps some members of the Politburo would get together for that, not the entire KGB. You’re talking about everyone all the way from personnel to covert affairs. External and internal security.”

Carlisle ignored the interruption. “The second possibility has to do with the president’s scheduled conference here in Moscow on Thursday.”

Stewart Anderson sat forward at this, shaking his head. “We’ve been instructed to keep hands off that one,” he snapped.

Technically, Carlisle worked for the ambassador and in his absence, Anderson. In actuality the CIA worked nearly independently of the politicos.

Carlisle turned to him. “Perhaps they are planning his assassination.”

“That’s insane,” Anderson nearly shouted.

“Yes it is, isn’t it,” Carlisle said, and everyone around the table suddenly became very uncomfortable.

After another long silence, Carlisle again continued.

“And the third possibility, the one we must turn to Mr. Mahoney for, is the least appealing since we have the least information.”

Mahoney smiled. “The KGB is mounting some kind of an operation. A major operation. Unknown at this point.”

“Exactly,” Carlisle said. “I’m turning this operation, which is coded LOOK SEE, over to Mahoney, and I want the need-to-know list kept at an absolute minimum. I don’t want to hear about this from the office scuttlebutt. If I do, heads will roll.”

Mahoney pulled out one of his cigars, took it out of its aromatic wooden sheath, and began wetting it down with his tongue as Carlisle continued.

“Colonel McCann will feed to Mahoney all current Soviet miliary assessments. You’d better include personnel dossiers as far down the line as you can go. Funnel it through my office so that we can indiate on the list which staffers are over at Lubyanka this morning.

“Mr. Anderson, if you would be so kind as to supply Mr. Mahoney with the president’s schedule and a list of who is coming along on this trip, I’d be most happy.”

Anderson got up in disgust, and as he headed past Mahoney he nodded. “It’ll be on your desk within the hour,” he said and left the room.

“Munson will continue monitoring all Soviet communications and funnel that information—or lack of it—to Mahoney on an hourly basis.” Munson nodded, and he, too, got up and left the room.

Congdon got to his feet a moment later and, completely ignoring Carlisle, held a light to Mahoney’s cigar as he spoke half under his breath. “It’s been quiet lately, but I’ll get something together for you by noon.”

Mahoney smiled and nodded. “Thanks. Maybe we can have lunch.”

Congdon laughed. “Not unless you get rid of that goddamned cigar,” he said and, without a glance at Carlisle, left the room.

Mahoney rose, cutting off Carlisle who was about to speak.

“Bennet, you and Switt can collate whatever data Carlisle’s operation comes up with. I want it concise and to the point. No editorializing.”

Bennet started to protest, but Mahoney had turned to Colonel McCann. “Colonel, if you and the others will leave us, I’d like to have a word with Mr. Carlisle.”

McCann got up and without a word strode out of the conference room, leaving the door open behind him. A moment later Switt and Bennet followed.

“Close the door, would you please?” Mahoney called to Bennet, then he sat back down, put his feet up on the table and drew deeply on the cigar, which already had created a thin, blue haze in the room.

Carlisle stared across the table, obviously waiting for Mahoney to speak.

If there was one thing Mahoney had learned in his year working for Carlisle, it was that the man was not a fool, although at times he acted like one.

Carlisle was bright. Unlike Switt who had obvious ambitions for higher rank within the company, Carlisle always seemed intent on merely doing whatever job he found himself confronted with. He was a man, in effect, with blinders on. He saw neither right nor left when he was working, only straight ahead toward whatever goal he had set for himself and his staff.

In that, Carlisle was the exact opposite of Mahoney. As a senior CIA analyst, Mahoney had to have what might be called stereoscopic vision, a finely tuned peripheral sight that allowed him to see and feel apparently disconnected concepts that could be germane to an issue.

Simply translated, that meant Mahoney was, by his very nature, a suspicious man. Distrustful of everyone and their motives. It was his specialty.

Always distrust the obvious. Even when it comes down to the wire, never lose a sense of wonder: Is this really the way it is, or is it only supposed to appear that way?

Mahoney wondered now.

“What have you got going here?” Mahoney finally asked. Although he respected the man, he neither liked nor disliked him. Those were meaningless terms.

“Nothing more than appears on the surface, Mahoney,” Carlisle said, his face straight, his dark gray eyes expressionless.

“Genuine concern?” Mahoney said, poking for a weakness.

“For the operation. Nothing more.”

“And the presidential visit?” Mahoney asked softly. “How does that fit in?”

“Despite the melodramatics which were needed to keep Bennet and Switt on the track, I’m sure the Man’s presence is a factor.”

Suddenly alarm bells were jangling stridently in Mahoney’s head. If a man acts uncharacteristically, look to see which of his values are being pressed to cause such an action, and you might find a clue to what he is thinking.

Carlisle continued, and Mahoney had the distinct impression that the man was like a poisonous snake, pressing close for the kill.

“Item,” Carlisle said dispassionately. “The president is coming to Moscow in five days for a series of conferences.

“Item: The situation in the Middle East is rapidly deteriorating. The Arabs are getting ready to gang up on the Jews, only this time there’s a rumble that Soviet-supplied nuclear weapons might be on the scene.

“Item: Tass, Izvestia, Pravda all had a field day when Nixon made the Moscow trip. Not so much as a one-line mention of President Forsythe’s trip.

“Item: On a very early Sunday morning the KGB’s downtown headquarters is lit up like a Christmas tree. Everyone and his uncle has come in.”

Carlisle had been ticking the points off the fingers of his right hand, and now he switched hands.

“Question: Why no mention in the Soviet newspapers or their news agency of the president’s visit?

“Question: Why was everyone called in at Dzerzhinsky Square? Or more importantly, why didn’t they try to keep their meeting a secret? Why didn’t they try to hide it, like they do everything else?”

“Like we would have done?” Mahoney asked quietly.

“Exactly,” Carlisle said, and then he slowly got to his feet. A moment later Mahoney followed suit, flicking the thick, heavy, gray ash from the end of his cigar into the ashtray in front of him.

“I want to know what is going on over there, Mahoney,” Carlisle said. “I want to know why. And I want it fast.”

“Sure,” Mahoney said casually, and he made as if to go, but suddenly turned back. “How did you tumble to this meeting so fast?”

Carlisle looked at him blankly for a moment. “Routine surveillance,” he said and Mahoney left the room and headed back to his office with the uncomfortable feeling that Carlisle had been lying about that last part. Only he did not know why.