XIV

Wednesday

A351FLASH

DAMASCUS, SYRIA (AP) … ISRAELI JETS ATTACKED THE SYRIAN CAPITAL CITY SHORTLY BEFORE DAWN.

A352BULLETIN

DAMASCUS, SYRIA (AP) … Israeli jets attacked the Syrian capital city shortly before dawn this morning killing, one official estimated, at least 100 civilians.

Meanwhile, Israeli troops and armored divisions poured north of the Sea of Galilee toward the city.

Observers here believe the specific military target is the Duma Military Supply Depot just north of the city.

The Israeli and Egyptian governments had claimed tactical nuclear weapons were being stockpiled at Duma.

Mahoney barged into Carlisle’s office. Stewart Anderson was seated across the desk talking with him and they both looked up, startled.

Mahoney pulled his .45 from his shoulder holster, cocked the hammer and pointed the gun directly at Carlisle. “Where is she?” he said, his voice low.

The color drained from Carlisle’s face and Anderson’s mouth was opening and closing, but no sounds were coming out.

“Where is she, goddammit!” Mahoney shouted. He could feel what little control he had leaving him.

Carlisle reached for the telephone, but Mahoney was across the room in three steps and with his free hand knocked the phone off the desk. He pressed the barrel of the .45 directly against Carlisle’s forehead.

“If you move, I’ll kill you,” Mahoney said.

Carlisle’s face was beginning to turn red.

“I want to know where my wife is.”

“She’s here. In the embassy,” Anderson said.

Mahoney glanced down at the man hunched in his chair, and then looked back at Carlisle. “Is that true?”

“Yes,” Carlisle said, the word choking out of him. “We had to get her out of the apartment. They were closing in.”

Mahoney began to shake as the relief washed through him. He stepped back, uncocked the gun and put it back in its holster. “Where is she?” he said.

“In VIP housing. Unit two,” Anderson said. He had regained his control. Carlisle, however, was still plainly shook.

Mahoney turned to go.

“Wait,” Carlisle shouted.

At the door, his hand on the knob, Mahoney paused.

“It’s about your children,” Carlisle said.

Something stabbed at Mahoney’s gut, and his breath caught in his throat. He slowly turned back to face the man. Anderson looked sympathetic, but Carlisle looked worried.

“John and his wife and your three grandchildren are at the Presidio. We’re sending you and Marge back to the States tomorrow morning. You will be able to see them.”

The children. Mahoney could clearly remember what he and Marge were doing each time they got the call that John’s wife had had a baby. And each time after the telephone call Marge had phoned Michael with the news and invariably she got around to her favorite subject. When was Michael going to settle down, marry, and have children.

“Michael,” Mahoney mumbled. “Where is Michael?”

Carlisle got up and came slowly around from behind his desk.

“I said where is Michael?” Mahoney snapped. The harshness of his voice stopped Carlisle short.

“I’m sorry…” Carlisle began to say.

The ache was in Mahoney’s gut again. He wanted to lash out and hit something. Anything. Carlisle.

Carlisle had selected a piece of yellow paper from his desk and he held it out toward Mahoney. It looked like a copy of a teletype message.

Mahoney moved away from the door and took the paper from Carlisle and quickly scanned the story. It was an Associated Press dispatch, dateline Missoula, Montana. Three men who had apparently burglarized the Forest Products Laboratory near Missoula had burned to death when the car they were in crashed.

One of the men was believed to have been an employee of the FPL. The other two men were unidentified.

Mahoney looked up. “Michael?” he asked.

Carlisle nodded his head. “We missed them by half an hour.”

“Michael?” Mahoney said again. His legs felt like rubber, and his head was spinning.

“Marge has not been told yet,” Carlisle was saying. “Perhaps you should go to her.”

Mahoney looked at Carlisle for a long time before he spoke. He was aware of Anderson out of the corner of his eye. The man was still seated by Carlisle’s desk, but he was staring toward the window.

“How about the operation?” Mahoney asked. “The president tomorrow.”

Carlisle shook his head. “The operation is over with. It is finished.”

“Zamyatin? Gamov?” Mahoney asked. “Do you know about Balachov?”

“Yes I do. But the operation is finished. You and Marge are going home.”

Mahoney took a step closer to the man and Carlisle backed up.

“It’s not what you think, Wallace,” Carlisle said in alarm.

It had been a setup. From day one it had been nothing more than a Carlisle scheme. And whatever else happened now, he was getting out. Quitting the company, just like Marge had suggested. He had had enough. More than enough.

He turned without another word and left Carlisle’s office. It was nearly ten in the morning. The last time he had slept had been Monday night, and now everything that had happened in those hours was catching up with him. His legs throbbed, his gut ached, and his head felt as if it were detached from the rest of his body and floating somewhere near the ceiling.

The corridors and offices were filled and busy, and as he worked his way over to the housing section of the embassy complex several people called greetings to him. But he heard none of it.

How could he tell Marge that her favorite son was dead? He had not been shot down in Vietnam. He had not given his life saving a drowning boy. He had not even gotten himself lost in the woods and died of exposure in the line of duty for some Forest Products Laboratory project.

How could he tell Marge that Michael had died because his father was in the wrong kind of a business for a man with a family?

How?

The VIP guest quarters of embassy housing looked like any Holiday Inn the world over. Here was carpeting, wood paneled walls, recessed lighting and piped-in music. A marine guard stood duty at the entry door, a precaution taken only when the president, vice president or secretary of state was due to arrive.

Unit one, which was reserved solely for the president if and when he ever visited the Soviet Union, would now be sealed off until the Man arrived. Marge had been given the second best unit.

Mahoney showed the marine guard his identification, signed the visitor’s log, and shuffled down the wide corridor past the presidential suite to the second unit.

He hesitated a moment at the door, took a deep breath and went inside.

Marge was seated on a long divan in the large, well appointed sitting room, sipping coffee from a silver service with Mrs. Leland Smith, the ambassador’s wife.

Both women looked up, Marge’s face lighting up with a bright smile that almost immediately darkened to a frown.

The ambassador’s wife put her cup down and got up. “Mr. Mahoney,” she smiled, her voice smooth and confident. “Your wife and I have had the loveliest of chats.” She came forward and held out her hand.

Mahoney shook it delicately as Mrs. Smith looked into his eyes. There was a certain shrewdness about the woman that in itself commanded respect.

“Mrs. Smith,” he said politely.

“I understand that you and Margery will be leaving us tomorrow,” the woman said conversationally. “I for one will be sorry to see your delightful wife go. I had no idea how charming a woman she is.”

“Yes,” Mahoney said, and he felt slightly foolish that he could think of nothing else to say.

The ambassador’s wife glanced back at Marge. “Well, my dear, I will leave you two alone. But remember we are scheduled for tea with some of the other ladies at four.”

Marge had not moved from her spot on the couch, nor had she even put down her coffee cup. She was staring at her husband.

“See you then,” Mrs. Smith said, and she went out the door, closing it softly behind her.

Mahoney remained where he was standing and after a moment, Marge reached forward and set her coffee cup down, and then managed a slight smile.

“I was so excited when the ambassador’s wife herself came calling for me this morning that I completely fell to pieces.”

Mahoney said nothing.

“I forgot my raincoat and my umbrella, and I even forgot to leave you a note, poor dear,” she said. “But when she came to my door personally and said a car was waiting, I just lost my head. We came right here and had coffee. She is such a wonderful lady. She said that we were leaving tomorrow. And that certainly came as a surprise.”

Mahoney came all the way into the room, sat down on the couch next to his wife and took her hands in his.

“We must leave,” he said. “I am in danger of being arrested by the Russians for spying.”

“There has been some trouble?”

Mahoney nodded. “Yes, Marge, there has been some trouble.”

“You poor dear,” she said. “You must have been out of your mind with worry when you came home and found out I was gone. I didn’t leave a note or anything. I’m sorry, Wallace, I’ll never…”

“Margery,” Mahoney said, interrupting her.

She looked at him, her eyes gentle and understanding, almost like a salve on a wound. She had been there when Michael was a baby, as any mother would be. She had been there when Michael was five and he fell off his tricycle and broke his arm. She had been there when he fell out of his tree house and broke his nose. He was only twelve. And she had been there when, as a senior in high school, he broke his leg skiing. Only this time she could not be there. Never again could she be there. It was too late.

Mahoney started to cry, the sobs wracking his entire body. Marge cradled him in her arms and made soothing sounds as she rocked him back and forth like a mother would a child.

It had been so useless, so fucking useless, one part of his brain cried out in despair. But another part of him, the rational, more professional self, remained detached. It was his training and experience.

“Intelligence coups are the stuff of spy novels, and spy novels alone,” he himself had told a young staffer once.

“Shoot ’em ups, cloaks and daggers, fake passports, safehouses, planes to Lisbon, wild Nazi plots for a new Third Reich … all those are elements of a James Bond movie, and hardly ever the real world.

“A good intelligence officer is nothing more or nothing less than an astute observer of human nature. Have dinner with a foreign diplomat and his wife and observe their reactions to what you say for a clue to how they feel and what they are doing.

“Read a foreign newspaper or watch a foreign news broadcast, pay attention to local elections, and haunt the news venders to see just what books and magazines the government you are studying allows its populace to read.”

John had been the good boy. The boy they never had to worry about. Straight A student all the way through school. The one to volunteer to cut the grass. Up early on Saturdays. The one to go to church with his mother without being asked.

Michael, on the other hand, was their rascal. Until his last year in high school he only ever had two grades. The D’s were for the serious subjects and the occasional C’s were for the snap courses.

He had been the one to first sass back. He was the one who was never able to make it home from a date on time. He was the one who was forever borrowing against his allowance although he never wanted to do a thing around the house.

But Michael was the one whose cup ran over with love and enthusiasm.

Steady John. Rock of Gibraltar John. Free and easy Michael. Michael, the boy with the laughing eyes.

Mahoney was drifting. He knew he was drifting and he wanted to stop it but he could not.

He was only faintly conscious of Marge moving away from him and laying him back on the couch. What seemed like years later she was standing over him, pulling a blanket up under his chin, and then taking off his shoes.

Then nothing.

*   *   *

Mahoney sat straight up with a start, the blanket falling away from him. The room was dark, the only light coming from under the corridor door.

The telephone rang again, and he realized that must have been what had awakened him.

He pulled the blanket off his legs, got up and headed for the door as the phone rang again. In a moment he had found the light switch and he flipped it on.

The telephone was across the room on a low table. He stumbled over to it as it rang again, and picked it up. “Yes?”

“Do you feel better now that you’ve slept?” It was Carlisle.

“Where is my wife?”

“At Congdon’s apartment with Zamyatin’s children.”

Mahoney looked at his watch. It was nearly ten o’clock. He had slept for twelve hours. “I don’t want her involved.”

“Like I told you this morning, Wallace, this operation is over with. You and Marge are leaving in the morning. Everything you own has been packed and shipped from your apartment out to Vnukovo. We’ve got diplomatic passports for both of you. There will be no trouble tomorrow.”

“How did you do that?” Mahoney heard himself asking, although he didn’t care. He was seeing Michael again in his mind’s eye.

“The ambassador returned this afternoon. He has been appraised of the situation, and he arranged it.”

Mahoney said nothing.

“I’m in my office. I want you to come over here now.”

“No,” Mahoney said flatly.

“I need your report,” Carlisle said. “Finch told me there was a gunshot.”

Mahoney sighed deeply. “I’ll be right there.”

“Good,” Carlisle said and hung up.

Mahoney put the phone down, went into the bathroom and splashed some water on his face. He looked like hell. His eyes were bloodshot and baggy, he needed a shave, and he felt as if he hadn’t taken a bath in years.

What he wanted most of all now was a hot bath, a stiff drink or two, a little something to eat and another twelve hours of sleep with Marge by his side.

But those pleasures would have to wait. Above all else Mahoney had always been, was now, and would probably forever be, a man of duty.

He dried his face and hands, went back into the sitting room and pulled on his shoes and his jacket, went out the door and shuffled down to the guard post at the end of the corridor.

The young marine on duty had watched Mahoney coming and at the last moment he jumped up. “May I see your identification, sir?” he asked in a Southern drawl.

Mahoney stopped directly in front of the young man who towered over him, and smiled.

The marine seemed startled. “Your identification, please,” he repeated, this time with a certain amount of sternness in his voice as if someone who looked as bad as Mahoney had absolutely no business being here.

Mahoney reached inside his coat for his wallet and the marine reached for the gun strapped at his hip. When he saw Mahoney had only pulled out a wallet he relaxed slightly.

Mahoney flipped the wallet open and handed it to the young man who took it and looked down at the ID that identified Mahoney as a trade mission specialist.

“Has the president arrived yet?” Mahoney asked taking the wallet back.

“No, sir,” the marine replied with the same sternness.

“Then relax,” Mahoney said with obvious amusement, and he turned and headed down the corridor toward White Room territory, leaving the marine wondering just who the hell he was.

Carlisle was in his office when Mahoney knocked once and entered. He indicated a chair for Mahoney to sit down as he poured a drink from a decanter into a large glass.

“Bourbon. No ice. Is that right?” Carlisle asked, handing the drink across the desk.

Mahoney accepted the glass and took a deep drink, the liquor warming his insides and straightening out the knot in his stomach. “Did you bring my cigars as well?”

Carlisle smiled. “You were out, actually, so I got you some more. Probably the last Cubans you’ll get for a while.” He opened his desk drawer, took out a cigar box and handed it across the desk.

Mahoney took out a cigar and after he had it lit he sat back in his chair and took another deep drink.

“The gunshot,” Carlisle said. “Was it Zamyatin?”

“No,” Mahoney said, and he took the KGB agent’s wallet out of his pocket and handed it to Carlisle. “He had Zamyatin’s apartment pretty well torn up.”

Carlisle had flipped the wallet open and was looking at it. “You thought Zamyatin had Marge picked up?”

Mahoney nodded. “The president is in no real danger tomorrow, is he?”

“No,” Carlisle said.

“And Nikolai Gamov?”

“I was running him. But he was nothing more than a very low-level intelligence source. It was a favor, as a matter of fact, to the State Department. They wanted something on prisons. Gamov supplied it.”

“And Sakharov?”

“He was mine also. It was a multi-station project. I ran him here, and the chief of station in Zurich ran a friend of his there. There was a lot of good material while it lasted.”

“How about the laser Zamyatin was worried about?”

“No such device exists. Or rather I should say the lasers that had been developed that have any military potential would take a battleship to carry. Too much electronics.”

“Zamyatin?” Mahoney asked, holding himself in check. He felt as if he were on the verge of exploding—literally exploding—into a million tiny pieces.

Carlisle shrugged.

“One last question,” Mahoney said, setting his glass down on the edge of the desk.

Carlisle’s eyebrows rose.

“Why?”

“Why what? Why weren’t you informed from the beginning? Or why are you being shipped out? Why what?”

“Why did my son die?”

Carlisle looked uncomfortable. “It was an accident, Wallace. Nothing more than an unfortunate accident.”

Mahoney still held himself in check although it was difficult. “You owe me an explanation.”

Carlisle looked even more uncomfortable. “No,” he said. “You are put out of the operation. There is no longer a need to know.”

“I’ll go to the newspapers.”

“You’ll go to jail,” Carlisle said. Sweat was forming on his forehead.

“I’m an old man. It doesn’t matter. My son is dead.”

“Leave it alone,” Carlisle pleaded. “Leave here tomorrow and forget about it.”

Mahoney was shaking his head. “No chance. You want my report on Zamyatin, I want your explanation. It will be a trade.”

“I can’t.”

“I’ll name names. Yours included.”

“I’m shipping out within the month myself.”

“I’ll find you if necessary.”

Carlisle looked like a cornered animal. “Why are you doing this, Wallace? What can you possibly gain?”

Mahoney sat forward. “My son is dead. I want to know if it was worth it. I want to know if I am going to be able to face myself in the mornings.”

Behind Carlisle the window was nothing more than a dark square, and Mahoney could see his reflection in the glass. It was as if he were looking over Carlisle’s shoulder at himself. He looked like a desperate man.

“What do you want to know?” Carlisle said finally.

Mahoney shifted his eyes to him. “Everything. Right from the beginning.”

“And once you have that information?”

“Marge and I will go home. I am retiring.”

Carlisle nodded. “I see,” he said. “There are no records of this operation.”

“Not even my RTA on Zamyatin’s children? Or my contact reports?”

“Those,” Carlisle conceded, “but nothing more. They are in one jacket, classified top secret. They won’t be placed in our archives here. We’re shipping the jacket back to Langley tomorrow in the pouch.”

“Why?”

“That one I can’t answer. The brass ordered it, that’s all I know. When you get back you’ll be debriefed.”

“How did it begin?” Mahoney said. He sat back again with his cigar.

“About a year ago, just before I was assigned here, State asked me to look up a man by the name of Nikolai Gamov. He had won the Nobel Prize for his book on civil law and prisons within the Soviet Union and it was felt that he could be what they called ‘a friend of the West.’”

“You came here and looked him up. Was he receptive?”

“Very,” Carlisle said. “His philosophy is that all Russians should be friends of the West. Everyone should be friends with everyone else.”

“Cozy.”

“Rather,” Carlisle said dryly. “At any rate, it was a low-level operation. Strictly extracurricular. I’d send a brief back to State every so often and everyone seemed happy. Until one month ago.

“I saw Gamov at a party and he told me that a Major Boris Azarov was attempting to infiltrate the Democratic Movement. He said he was afraid the KGB was closing in on them because of his contacts with me. He wanted to cool our relationship for a while.”

“Azarov?” Mahoney asked. The name was not familiar to him.

“I put Switt on it. If the KGB was interested, then I figured we’d better take a closer look. As it turned out Azarov was really Major Boris Balachov, head of Zamyatin’s Department One. Balachov had also gone under the name Leonard Skyles, supposedly an American businessman. He’s used that ploy before to fool his fellow Russians, but of course the cover would never hold up with another American.”

“So you informed Gamov that the KGB was indeed interested. In fact, since Balachov was head of Department One—the department that watches us—and since he was trying to infiltrate the Democratic Movement, then he must have known about your contacts with Gamov.”

“I didn’t tell Gamov a thing.”

“You left him in the dark? Exposed like that?”

Carlisle nodded. “Gamov is a writer, not an actor. I wanted to see just what Balachov was up to.”

“Which was?”

Carlisle smiled. “It was a fantastic plot, actually. Balachov convinced Gamov and the others that he could kidnap Sakharov and a portable laser device. His plan was to use the laser to kidnap President Forsythe when he arrived here in Moscow.”

“Jesus,” Mahoney said. “But why? What was the ransom going to be?”

“World peace. Human rights in the Soviet Union. The usual crap.”

“And Gamov went along with this?”

“Only because I asked him to.”

“Asked him, or forced him,” Mahoney said sardonically. “I can see it now. You would have had photographs, perhaps tape recordings of your contacts with the man. Send those in a package over to Dzerzhinsky Square and Gamov would be on the first train to Siberia.”

“Something like that,” Carlisle said evenly.

“Gamov let Balachov into the fold and gave him a gold star for his plan.”

Carlisle nodded. “As far as we can tell, someone from the T Directorate did the actual kidnaping of Sakharov and his briefcase. Meanwhile Balachov reported back to Gamov that he had the scientist and the laser in hiding. The morning the president arrived he could arrange to be in the control tower with the laser and Sakharov to operate it. From there the laser beam would have been aimed at the president. An announcement over the airport’s public address system would have announced the fact, the president would have been hustled back aboard Air Force One, and the pilot would have been forced to take off and circle above Moscow. Meet our demands or else.”

“How about the Lubyanka II guard? Who killed him, and how did he fit in?”

“The Komitet’s thinking becomes a little thin at this point, but it goes back to the reason Balachov was ordered to infiltrate the Democratic Movement in the first place,” Carlisle said. He paused a moment to marshal his thoughts, and Mahoney puffed on his cigar.

“The Democratic Movement had been a thorn in the Kremlin’s side for a long time. First came Andrei Amalrik’s book, Will The Soviet Union Survive Until 1984? Then came Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, which won him the Nobel Prize. And finally came Gamov’s Punishment Without Crime. When it, too, won the Nobel Prize, the Party was shook up all the way down to the lowliest commandant in the boondocks.”

“President Forsythe’s comments about human rights in the Soviet Union could not have helped the situation either.”

“Exactly,” Carlisle said. “The Democratic Movement was becoming an embarrassment. But the kind of a thorn in the Kremlin’s side that could not merely be plucked out. It would bleed all over the place. The harder the Kremlin would push on the Democratic Movement the more martyrs they would make. The entire Western world would have been in an uproar.”

“The plan was to infiltrate the movement, set them up for an act of terrorism that would look bad in the eyes of the world, and then expose them. No hue and cry would be sounded if Gamov and his followers were executed. Kidnaping the president of the United States. A clear act of terrorism.”

“That’s correct as far as it goes,” Carlisle said. “But there was much more.”

“Weren’t you taking a terrible risk that Gamov himself was playing the double? And that the kidnaping would actually take place?”

“I didn’t think so at first,” Carlisle said, and he looked somewhat uncomfortable again.

“Gamov did go for it, didn’t he?”

Carlisle nodded his head very slightly. “We didn’t tumble to it until the Lubyanka II guard was killed. They needed a uniform, papers, and a weapon so that Gamov and his people could get close enough to the president at the airport to pull it off.”

“And still you didn’t call the president off?”

Carlisle said nothing.

“There’s even more isn’t there?”

Again Carlisle nodded. “General Barynin himself was in on this. Under orders, I presume, from the Kremlin.”

Suddenly everything fell into place. Zamyatin’s story, what Congdon had told him, what Carlisle had just said. All of it fell into place.

Mahoney got to his feet.

“Don’t you want to hear the rest?”

Mahoney shook his head. “No need. I know what happened. But what about Congdon’s wife, you bastard?”

Carlisle looked away.

“You used Gamov, you used me, but worst of all you used Congdon.”

Still Carlisle held his silence.

Mahoney placed his hands on the desk and leaned forward, taking some of the pressure off his legs.

“General Barynin never does things one at a time. He is famous for his multiple operations. The Democratic Movement would be taken care of. Their plan with Balachov was working beautifully. So well, in fact, that Gamov—a man supposedly of peace—was moved to actually murder a Soviet guard. The Democratic Movement was in their pocket.

“They knew of your connection with Gamov, or at least guessed it, so Barynin ordered the entire shooting match over at Dzerzhinsky Square cranked up on alert to find Sakharov and the mythical laser. He was lying to his own people.

“Barynin and his planners knew damn well that Zamyatin could be maneuvered into contacting someone over here. And he did.”

Something else suddenly and sickeningly came clear in Mahoney’s mind.

“You knew that, didn’t you, Carlisle?” he said, amazed. “You outthought Barynin almost from the start, didn’t you?”

Carlisle would not look up.

Mahoney straightened up. “I was set up,” he said softly. “From the beginning I was the patsy. You must have had a great laugh when I submitted the RTA on Zamyatin’s kids. I was doing exactly what you wanted me to do. It was big. A worldwide KGB operation. So big I’d fall for it. Which is why you stepped on Congdon. If Congdon had told me that the Soviets were not deficit spending, and had no hard Western currency available I would have realized the operation was nothing more than a local push.” Mahoney was tired all over again. “I was set up.”

“Not really. Not at first. Not until Zamyatin contacted you. From that moment on I could not tell you the entire story. You would not have been as effective a contact.”

“If I would have by chance been converted I would have had too much inside knowledge to give them.”

“Right,” Carlisle said.

“And Zamyatin—he was nothing more than a dupe like me. They were using him just like you used me.”

“Hold it right there, mister,” Carlisle said, looking up. “What the hell do you think this was all about? Some Boy Scout picnic? I was doing my job. Nothing more. This didn’t start out as my idea. It was a conspiracy all right. But not mine. The Kremlin came up with it. I just decided to play in the same ball game.”

“A Kremlin conspiracy,” Mahoney said softly. “I go home in one piece, more or less. But let’s take a look at the casualties. First of all my son is dead. And for what reason I still don’t know. For that alone I could kill you.”

Carlisle started to protest, but the look in Mahoney’s eyes stopped him. He suddenly knew that Mahoney was not lying.

“Gamov and the entire Democratic Movement is wiped out. Or will be shortly. So they won that inning. But Zamyatin is finished, so we won that round.” Mahoney’s eyes bored deeply into Carlisle’s. “What about Zamyatin’s children? They had no mother, and now there is no way we can give them back to their father.”

“We’ll drop them off in front of their apartment.”

“What?” Mahoney shouted. “Their father is a traitor. What kind of a life will they have?”

Carlisle shrugged. “It can’t be helped. Zamyatin is going to be a dead man very soon. We won what we started out to win. He was a highly effective officer. We’ve ruined him. As far as his children go, I am truly sorry, but there is nothing I can do about it. I’m sure the Soviet government will put them in a State home. They won’t starve.”

Mahoney suddenly turned away and stalked out the door no longer able to stand the sight of Carlisle. No one had come out unscathed in this operation except for Carlisle himself, and his Soviet counterpart, Major Boris Balachov. Both of them would have promotions. They had earned it.

But there was one final question that Mahoney needed an answer to. Something that had plagued him for a very long time.

And before he and Marge got on that plane tomorrow morning, he was going to get the answer, and if possible set a few things straight.