Warren Murphy: In Enemy Hands

Once again, his timing had been awful.

But if he were going to die, at least he was going to have one good Parisian meal. Not a great one, but a good one. He somehow felt that if he headed himself toward a great meal, his luck would not allow it. But he might be able to sneak a good meal past his luck.

On Boulevard St. Germaine, he chose Le Vagabond, an adequate two-star restaurant. He began with Fruits de Merraw clams, raw shrimp, and raw oysters.

"Walter. Walter Forbier," said a man in an elegant Pierre Cardin suit. "I'm so glad I found you. You're really wasting a meal with Fruits de Mer. Please let me order."

The man deposited his black homburg on a chair next to Walter and sat down across from him. In perfect French, he ordered a different meal for Forbier. The man was in his early fifties, with an immaculate tan, the elegant smile of a Wall Street board room.

"Who are you? What's happening?" asked Walter.

"What's happening is Sunflower is surrendering its weapons. This is an order from the Security Council to the top of the CIA. The government is terrified of any more CIA incidents. They figure with no weapons, you can do no damage."

"I don't mean to be rude, sir," said Forbier, "but I don't know what you're talking about."

"That's right. The contact word. Let's see. This is the first day of spring. Subtract two letters from G, which gives us E and we have Early End, Ethel's Earrings. All right?"

"Fine Friends," said Walter using the following letter of the alphabet half the number of times the previous letter had been used to him.

"I know who you are. No one uses the contact words any more. Everyone knows everyone else. Don't eat the bread."

"Am I glad to see you," Forbier said. "When can I make contact with the rest of the team?"

"Let's see. Cassidy is in London and retiring, Navroki is out, Rothafel, Meyers, John, Sawyer, Bensen, and Kanter were out yesterday and Wilson this morning. So that leaves seven more, but they're in Italy and they should be out by tonight and tomorrow."

"Out? Out where?"

"Out dead. I told you not to eat the bread here." The man snatched the crust from Walter's hands.

"Who are you?"

"I'm sorry," said the man. "I'm so used to everyone in Sunflower knowing me. Didn't they tell you who I was in the States? I guess they don't bother any more with photographs. I'm Vassily."

"Who?"

"Vassily Vassilivich. Deputy commander of Treska. You would have gotten to know me better if your government hadn't gone bananas. I'm sorry things worked out this way. Here comes the food."

Forbier noticed the man was armed. He had a trim shoulder holster tailored to the lines of the impeccable suit. Almost invisible, but armed he was. So were the two men looking at Forbier from the back of the restaurant. One was a giant. He was laughing.

Vassilivich said to ignore the laughter.

"He's a stupid brute. A sadist. The problem with long-term operations like these is that you live like a family with your group. That laughing man is Mikhailov. If it weren't for the Treska, he would be hospitalized as criminally insane. Like your Gassidy."

Forbier decided to change his order. He wanted a filet. When that came he complained the knife was too dull. The waiter, white apron swinging before him, disappeared into the kitchen to get a sharper one.

"Am I the last of the Sunflower?"

"In Northern Europe? Just about."

"I guess you're pretty happy with your success," said Forbier.

"What success?" said Vassilivich, swirling a piece of veal in wine sauce and carefully balancing it up to his mouth so the dripping sauce would not mar his shirt.

"Destroying Sunflower," Forbier said. He knew what he would do. He had been trained for five years to do something and if he were the last of the weaponless Sunflower team, they would at least go out with something on the Scoreboard. He forced himself to avoid looking at Vassilivich's throat and looked toward the kitchen on the left rear of Le Vagabond, from which the waiter would be returning with his sharper knife. He took a bite of the bread. Vassilivich had been right. The crust was a bit too cardboardy.

"When Sunflower is destroyed, we will have our way in Western Europe and England, and then, if we are not stopped, we will be sucked into America. And then, if we are not stopped, we will ultimately all find ourselves in a nice little nuclear war. So what have we won by destroying you? A battle in Europe? A battle in America? We had a nice balance of terror going here and your idiot Congress decided to live by kindergarten rules that never applied anywhere in the world. Your country is insane."

"Nobody's forcing you to work over Western Europe," said Forbier.

"Son, you don't know how vacuums works. They suck you in. Already there are people back home plotting brilliant moves for us. And it will all look so good. Until we kill ourselves. If you had lived, you would see. Just as we must take advantage of your being weaponless, so we will take advantage of Western Europe being weaponless, so to speak."

"Your English is very good," said Forbier.

"You shouldn't have eaten the bread," said Vassilivich.

When the sharper knife came, the laughing giant, not the waiter, delivered it, and, still laughing, cut Forbier's filet for him. Forbier declined dessert.

In an alley, off a side street near St. Germaine, behind a shoe store featuring high glossy boots, the laughing man and three others beat in the rib cage of Walter Forbier.

Vassilivich watched in gloom.

"Now it begins," he said in his native Russian, gloom on his face like the coming of a winter storm. "Now it begins."

"Victory," said the laughing giant, wiping his huge hands. "A great victory."

"We have won nothing," said Vassilivich. A sudden shower came upon the city that spring day, feeding the roots of the trees for the new buds and washing the blood of Walter Forbier from his young face.

In Washington, a messenger arrived from Langley, Virginia, with orders to interrupt a National Security Council meeting at which the President was presiding.

The messenger got a signature from the Secretary of State to whom he was assigned to deliver the small sealed package. Under the first wrapping was a white envelope, chemically treated so that if anyone touched it, a black mark from his body oils appeared. The Secretary of State, wheezing from his paunchy weight, left a trail of black marks across the envelope as his pudgy fingers tore it open. The President looked on, occasionally sucking at the pain in his right forefinger. Someone had passed a document marked "Single, Lone" around the large polished oak table in the sealed room behind the Oval Office. It had been fastened with a paper clip. It went from the Secretary of State to the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Secretaries of the Army, Air Force, and Navy, the Secretary of Defense, and the director of the National Defense Agency. When it got to the President, he grabbed it in such a way that the clip plunged into his index finger, drawing blood.

"It's a good thing the Secret Service isn't in the room," the President said, laughing, "or they would have wrestled that paper clip to the ground."

Everyone laughed politely. It was no accident that the three water pitchers always ended up, bunched at the far end of the long table. Whoever sat next to the President somehow found himself nudging any close pitcher away. The Security Council had accidentally discovered that some classified documents were water soluble when someone had left a water pitcher near the President's elbow. The Secretary of State read the document he had been handed, and in solemn tones, reflecting the guttural accents of his German youth, he said, "It was to be expected. We should have known."

He removed the single paper clip from the document and handed three loose sheets of gray paper to the President of the United States, who cut his thumb on their edges.