Ник Картер - Agent Counter-Agent

I reached for Wilhelmina and moved up tight against the wall beside the door. There was only silence from the other room. Somebody was stalking me. Somebody who had been watching the apartment building and was worried I’d get too close for comfort. Maybe it was Tanya herself. I heard an almost inaudible squeak of a board under the carpet. I knew the exact location of that board, since I’d stepped on it earlier myself. There didn’t seem to be any reason to put off the confrontation. I stepped out into the doorway.

A man stood in the center of the room, holding a revolver. He was my mystery man, and the gun was the same one he’d pointed at my head in Washington and the one I now remembered seeing in the white corridor at the KGB laboratory. He whirled around when he heard me.

“Drop it,” I said.

But he had other ideas. He fired. I realized he was going to shoot a split-second before the gun went off, and dived for the floor. The revolver barked out loudly in the room, and the slug slammed into the wall behind me as I hit the floor. The gun roared again and chipped up wood at my side as I rolled over and came up firing. I fired three times. The first slug smashed a lamp behind the gunman. The second entered his chest and drove him backward into the wall. The third shot caught him in the side of the face, just under the cheekbone, and blasted out the side of his head, spattering the wall with a crimson mess. He hit the floor hard, but he never even felt it. The man who had haunted me all through this mission was dead before his body knew it.

“Damn!” I muttered. I’d had a live witness, a man who could have told me everything. But I’d had to kill him.

I got to my feet quickly. People in the building would have heard the shots. I went over to the sprawled figure and looked through his pockets. Nothing. No I.D., false or otherwise. But there was a small scrawled message on a scrap of paper. It said merely:

T. La Masia. 1930.

I jammed the paper into my pocket and went to a window. I could hear footsteps and voices in the corridor. I pulled the window open and stepped out onto a fire escape. In minutes I was on the ground, leaving the building far behind me.

It was getting dark by the time I came out onto the street. The message on the note was turning over and over in my mind. There was a La Masia restaurant on Avenida Casanova. I stopped suddenly, remembering. I’d heard of the place because it was noted for its hallaca, Tanya’s favorite Venezuelan dish, if she’d told me and her friend Ludwig the truth. Could it be, I wondered, that the T stood for Tanya and that the mystery man, apparently a Russian agent, intended to meet Tanya there at 19:30 hours — or 7:30 P.M.? It was the only lead I had, so I might as well follow it.

I arrived at the restaurant early. Tanya was nowhere in sight. I took a table at the rear, where I could see everything without being observed, and waited. At 7:32, Tanya walked in.

She was as beautiful as I’d remembered her. That much hadn’t been an illusion. A waiter led her to a table near the front. Then she got up and walked down a small corridor toward the ladies’ room. I got up and followed her.

She had already disappeared into the room marked Damas when I reached the small alcove. I waited there for her, glad that we’d be alone and away from the people in the dining room when she came out. In a minute the door opened, and we met face to face.

Before she could react, I grabbed her and shoved her hard against the wall. She gasped loudly.

“You!” she said. “What do you think you’re doing? Let go of me or I’ll scream.”

I slapped her across the face with the back of my hand.

“What do you think this is, some kind of game in experimental psychology?” I growled at her. “You and I have a score to settle.”

“If you say so, Nick,” she said. She was holding her face with her hand. Her voice had softened.

“I say so, honey,” I said. I let the stiletto drop into the palm of my right hand.

“You’re going to... kill me?”

“Not unless you make it absolutely necessary,” I said. “You and I are walking out of this place together. And you’re going to act as if you’re having a great time. Or you get this in the ribs. Believe me when I say I’ll kill you if you try anything.”

“Can you forget the times we were together?” she asked in that sensual voice.

“Don’t con me, baby. What you did was all business. Now move. And act happy.”

She sighed. “All right, Nick.”

We got out of the restaurant without any trouble. She had come by car, so I made her take me to it. We got into it, and I sat behind the wheel. The car was parked on a dark side street, completely alone.

“Now. Who were you meeting at the restaurant?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

I shoved the knife up against her. “The hell you can’t.”

She looked terrified. “He’s an agent.”

“KGB?”

“Yes.”

“And you are too?”

“Yes. But only because of my special knowledge — because I’m a scientist. I suited their purposes.”

I started the car and drove out onto the Avenida Casanova. “Which way to the clinic?” I asked. “And don’t play games with me.”

“If I take you there, they’ll kill us both!” she said almost tearfully.

“Which way?” I repeated.

She was really upset. “Make a right turn ahead and follow the boulevard until I tell you where to turn again.”

I made the turn.

“Where is Yuri?” she asked. “The one who was to meet me.”

“He’s dead,” I said, not looking at her.

She turned and stared at me for a minute. When she looked ahead again, her eyes were glazed. “I told them you were too dangerous,” she said almost inaudibly. “Now you’ve spoiled their grand plan.”

“Well, maybe it wasn’t all that grand,” I said acidly. “Is Dimitrov the guy who directed this master scheme?”

She was shocked to learn that I knew Dimitrov’s name. She was a real greenhorn in the business, in spite of her fancy credentials. “You know too much,” she said.

“Will I find him at this so-called clinic?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “He may be gone by now. Turn left at the next street.”

She gave me further directions and I followed them. As I made a hard right, she turned to me. “I want to know. What went wrong? When did you come out of hypnosis — and how?”

I glanced over at her and grinned. “I’ve been going crazy guessing the truth for the past couple of days. Now I’ll let you guess for a while.”

At the next intersection we made a final turn to the left, and Tanya told me to stop in front of an old building. The ground level looked like an unused store, and the floors above seemed deserted.

“This is it,” she said quietly.

I shut off the engine. Looking in the rear-view mirror, I saw another car pull up behind us. For a minute I thought it might be Tanya’s friends, but then I recognized the square face behind the wheel. Hawk had borrowed a CIA man to have him keep an eye on me. My sudden anger subsided. I couldn’t blame him, considering how I’d been behaving lately. I decided to ignore my watchdog.

“Get out,” I said to Tanya, waving Wilhelmina at her.

We climbed out. Tanya was tense and really terrified.

“Nick, don’t make me go in with you. I’ve shown you the headquarters. Please save me. Remember those moments we spent together. You can’t forget that now.”

“Oh, yes, I can,” I said in a cold voice. I nudged her with the Luger, and she moved around the building to a side door.

None of it was familiar. I had been heavily drugged when they brought me and blindfolded when I came out. But I remembered the approximate distance from the street to the side door, and it was the same. Inside, when we climbed down a steep stairway to the basement level, I counted the same number of steps I’d counted when I’d left the clinic. There was no doubt about it — Tanya was leading me into the lion s den.