Nick Carter - The Istanbul Decision

"Uncanny, isn't it?" remarked Hawk, producing a life-size photo of Tatiana Kobelev and holding it up next to Cynthia's face.

"I couldn't tell them apart," marveled Carter.

"Let's hope her father can't either. At least not at first."

"May I see a mirror?" asked Cynthia.

Carter retrieved a small standing mirror from the supply cabinet and handed it to her. She turned her head slowly from side to side, studying it from different angles.

"It's a nice face," Carter offered.

"It's not my face."

"You're still very beautiful."

"You can have your old face back when this business is over," Hawk said. "Meanwhile, you two've got work to do. I want you to start training together, get to know one another again, think like a team. In the meantime, word will be dropped here that we intend to move Tatiana to the St. Denis Clinic outside Dijon. Supposedly, a French surgeon will be there to do one last operation on her back. It'll be perfect, isolated, quiet. Kobelev won't be able to resist. He'll have to figure that even if it is a trap, it'll be the only time Tatiana will be close enough to the Soviet Union to make a grab for her. What he won't know is that it won't be Tatiana he'll be grabbing."

"You mean…?"

"That's right, toots," interjected Carter. "You're the bait."

Carter didn't see Cynthia again until the following afternoon when they started their training together in a little-used loft in the hospital complex. By this time most of the redness was gone, and her face had returned to its natural color. The resemblance mat had been striking before was now even more remarkable.

"You look just like her," he said when she entered the room. "I had hoped for a reasonable physical similarity, but this is really something. The only way I could tell you apart is your voice."

"I've been working on that," she said, pulling off her robe, revealing her beautifully proportioned body clad in a black leotard. "These Americans might not look like ogres," she said, lowering her voice half an octave and stretching her vowels, British style, "but they have the most bourgeois tastes."

Carter laughed. "That's her to a T!"

"Hawk gave me some tapes to study. I think I've just about got her down pat."

"You could certainly fool me."

"Could I, Nick?" she asked, her expression suddenly serious. "What about her father? Can I fool him as well?"

"You don't have to fool him for long, just long enough for us to take care of him." He smiled. She forced a smile, but the troubled look never completely left her face.

A brief silence descended, but Carter picked up the thread again quickly. "Hawk wanted me to take you through some drills to get you out of harm's way when the bullets start to fly. He says you're a bit rusty."

"Okay," she said with a shrug. She was standing very close to him, and her fragrance filled his nostrils. For a moment he was reminded of the night they had spent together on the desert outside of Teheran. It was a pleasant memory. They had been camped at an oasis. The Ayatollah's troops had lost track of them temporarily, and they had taken the opportunity to make love on a blanket under the stars. When they'd finished, they lay back in one another's arms, and listened to the grunts of the camels and the gentle wind bending the palms. Pleasant. But something else was tangled up with it, another unconscious association not at all pleasant, and it left him with a confused feeling.

"How shall we begin?" she asked. "Do you want to attack me and see how my defenses are? Nick? You with me?"

"I'm here. Just lost in thought for a moment."

"Attack me and I'll see if I can fend you off."

He reached out as if to grab her by the shoulder, but she caught his arm, twisted it, stepped through, and in an instant he was sprawled flat on his back ten feet down the mat.

"Not bad," he said, jumping to his feet. "Now finish me off."

She came toward him, a bullish determination in her eyes, and suddenly he knew what it was that had confused him earlier. The look in her eye, her hair, her face, were exactly the same as Tatiana's the night she had supposedly killed her father in their dacha outside Moscow. The menace and loathing that had seemed to fill her entire being as she came running from the study, knife in hand, and plunged it into her father's chest came back to him in a flash, along with all the hatred and dread he'd felt for her at that moment. Without realizing what he was doing, he lowered his shoulder, grabbed Cynthia by the forearm, and catapulted her into the air. She spun once, awkwardly, like a stuffed doll, and landed on the edge of the mat with a sickening thud.

As soon as he realized what he had done, he ran to her. "You all right?" he asked.

She groaned and rolled on her side, gasping for air.

"Lie back," he told her. "You've had the wind knocked out of you."

For several minutes she lay with her eyes closed, trying to breathe. Then she looked up. "You take… all this… pretty seriously… don't you?"

"It's the way you look," he said, helping her to sit up. "You reminded me of Tatiana and all I went through in Russia."

"That must have been rough." Cynthia said, finally getting a deep breath and feeling her ribs to make sure nothing was broken. "Hawk told me about it in a general way, but I never did get the particulars."

He sat down beside her. "Your friend Kobelev has come a long way since the days he was a cipher clerk. He's still ruthless as ever, but his plots have taken on a new ingenuity — an ingenuity bordering on sheer genius for death and destruction. We'd been watching his progress as a case officer, then administrator in Department S for some time. Then when they transferred him to Executive Action, we got worried, but he was still something of an unknown quantity. All that changed with the Akai Maru incident. By that time we'd realized things had gotten out of hand."

"Akai Maru?"

"A Japanese oil tanker. We found oil drums aboard that Kobelev had irradiated with strontium 90, one of the most toxic substances in the world. Our estimates said that if that shipment of oil had ever been delivered, the incidents of cancer in California would have increased fifty percent."

"That's insanity! It goes beyond espionage. It's an act of war."

"That's why he has to be stopped. Shortly after that we learned Kobelev, or the Puppet Master as they call him, was in line to become chief administrator of the entire KGB. If that had happened, his power would have been limitless. He's already professed a desire to see our two countries at war. He has some half-baked idea of seizing power in the aftermath of a nuclear confrontation."

"Is he crazy?"

"He may very well be. You wouldn't know it to talk to him, but he must be. Crazy the way Hitler was crazy."

"You talked to him?"

"I did more than that. I 'defected. Tried to become his chief lieutenant. Hawk developed a plan for assassinating the son of a bitch by convincing the Russian intelligence I was a disgruntled CIA caseworker who wanted to work for the KGB. The idea was to get me close enough to put a bullet in him, then get out of the country somehow. We figured Kobelev knew me from the Akai Maru and that he might be interested in having me on his side if he thought I was sincere."

"How'd you manage to convince him?"

"By giving them files of sensitive material we knew they wanted. Real files. We turned over some valuable information, put some agents' lives on the line, but we felt it was necessary to get me close enough to kill him. You see, we had a time factor. Another few days and the Presidium was going to make his appointment official. After that, as chief administrator, he'd have been under such heavy security we never could have gotten to him."