Without Remorse

  Back up.

  Kelly had rescued the Madden girl, but he’d had help getting her straightened out. Professor Sam Rosen and his wife, another physician. So Kelly finds Doris Brown—whom would he take her to? That was a starting place! Ryan lifted his phone.

  “Hello.”

  “Doc, it’s Lieutenant Ryan.”

  “I didn’t know I gave you my direct line,” Farber said. “What’s up?”

  “Do you know Sam Rosen?”

  “Professor Rosen? Sure. He runs a department, hell of a good cutter, world-class. I don’t see him very often, but if you ever need a head worked on, he’s the man.”

  “And his wife?” Ryan could hear the man sucking on his pipe.

  “I know her quite well. Sarah. She’s a pharmacologist, research fellow across the street, also works with our drug-abuse unit. I help out with that group, too, and we—”

  “Thank you.” Ryan cut him off. “One more name. Sandy.”

  “Sandy who?”

  “That’s all I have.” Lieutenant Ryan admitted. He could imagine Farber now, leaning away from his desk in the high-backed leather chair with his contemplative look.

  “Let me make sure I understand things, okay? Are you asking me to check up on two colleagues as part of a criminal investigation?”

  Ryan weighed the merits of lying. This guy was a psychiatrist. His job was looking around in people’s minds. He was good at it.

  “Yes, doctor, I am,” the detective admitted after a pause long enough for the psychiatrist to make an accurate guess as to its cause.

  “You’re going to have to explain yourself,” Farber announced evenly. “Sam and I aren’t exactly close, but he is not a person who would ever hurt another human being. And Sarah is a damned angel with these messed-up kids we see in here. She’s setting aside some important research work to do that, stuff she could make a big reputation with.” Then Farber realized that she’d been away an awful lot in the past couple of weeks.

  “Doctor, I’m just trying to develop some information, okay? I have no reason whatever to believe that either one of them is implicated in any illegal act.” His words were too formal, and he knew it. Perhaps another tack. It was even honest, maybe. “If my speculation is correct, there may be some danger to them that they don’t know about.”

  “Give me a few minutes.” Farber broke the connection.

  “Not bad, Em,” Douglas said.

  It was bottom-fishing, Ryan thought, but, hell, he’d tried just about everything else. It seemed an awfully long five minutes before the phone rang again.

  “Ryan.”

  “Farber. No docs on neuro by that name. One nurse, though, Sandra O’Toole. She’s a team leader on the service. I don’t know her myself. Sam thinks highly of her, or so I just found out from his secretary. She was working something special for him, recently. He had to fiddle the pay records.” Farber had already made his own connection. Sarah had been absent from her clinical work at the same time. He’d let the police develop that themselves. He’d gone far enough—too far. These were colleagues, after all, and this wasn’t a game.

  “When was that?” Ryan asked casually.

  “Two or three weeks ago, lasted ten working days.”

  “Thank you, doctor. I’ll be back to you.”

  “Connection,” Douglas observed after the circuit was broken. “How much you want to bet that she knows Kelly, too?”

  The question was more hopeful than substantive, of course. Sandra was a common-enough name. Still, they’d been on this case, this endless series of deaths, for more than six months, and after all that time spent with no evidence and no connections at all, it looked like the morning star. The problem was that it was evening now, and time to go home for dinner with his wife and children. Jack would be returning to Boston College in another week or so, Ryan thought, and he missed time with his son.

  There was no easy way to get things organized. Sandy had to drive him to Quantico. It was her first time on a Marine base, but only briefly, as Kelly guided her to the marina. Already, he thought. You get home for once with your body in tune with the local day/night cycle, and already he had to break it. Sandy was not yet back on 1-95 when he pulled away from the dock, heading out for the middle of the river, advancing his throttles to max-cruise as soon as he could.

  The lady had brains to go with her guts, Kelly told himself, sipping his first beer in a very long time. He supposed it was normal that a clinical nurse would have a good memory. Henry, it seemed, had been a talker at certain moments, one of them being when he had a girl under his direct control. A boastful man, Kelly thought, the best sort. He still didn’t have an address to go along with the phone number, but he had a new name, Tony P-something—Peegee, something like that. White, Italian, drove a blue Lincoln, along with a decent physical description. Mafia, probably, either in it or a wannabe. Somebody else named Eddie—but Sandy had matched that name with a guy who had been killed by a police officer; it had made the front page of the local paper. Kelly took it one step further: what if that cop was the man Henry had inside? It struck him as odd that a senior officer like a lieutenant would be involved in a shooting. Speculation, he told himself, but worth checking out—he wasn’t sure yet exactly how. He had all night for it, and a smooth body of water to reflect his thoughts as it did the stars. Soon he passed the spot where he’d left Billy. At least someone had collected the body.

  The ground was settling over the grave in a place that some still called Potter’s Field, a tradition dating back to someone named Judas. The doctors at the community hospital that had treated the man were still going over the pathology report from the Medical College of Virginia. Baro-Trauma. There were fewer than ten severe cases of this condition in the whole country in a year, and all of those in coastal regions. It was no disgrace that they hadn’t made the diagnosis—and, the report went on, there was no difference it could have made. The precise cause of death had been a fragment of bone marrow that had somehow found its way into a cerebral artery, occluding it and causing a massive, fatal stroke. Damage to other organs had been so extensive that it would only have been a matter of a few more weeks in any case. The bone-marrow blockage was evidence of a very large pressurization imbalance, 3-bar, probably more. Even now police were inquiring about divers in the Potomac, which could be very deep in some places. There was still hope that someone would eventually claim the body, whose location was recorded in the county administrator’s office. But not much.

  “What do you mean, you don’t know?” General Rokossovskiy demanded. “He’s my man! Did you misplace him?”

  “Comrade General,” Giap replied sharply, “I have told you everything I know!”

  “And you say an American did it?”

  “You have seen the intelligence information as well as I have.”

  “That man has information that the Soviet Union requires. I find it hard to believe that the Americans planned a raid whose only result was the abduction of the one Soviet officer in the area. I would suggest, Comrade General, that you make a more serious effort.”

  “We are at war!”

  “Yes. I am aware of that,” Rokossovskiy observed dryly. “Why do you think I am here?”

  Giap could have sworn at the taller man who stood before his desk. He was the commander of his country’s armed forces, after all, and a general of no mean abilities himself. The Vietnamese general swallowed his pride with difficulty. He also needed the weapons that only the Russians could provide, and so he had to abase himself before him for the sake of his country. Of one thing he was certain. The camp wasn’t worth the trouble it had caused him.

  The strange part was that the routine had become relatively benign. Kolya wasn’t here. That was certain. Zacharias was sufficiently disoriented that he had difficulty determining the passage of days, but for four sleeps now he hadn’t heard the Russian’s voice even outside the door. By the same token, no one had come in to abuse him. He’d eaten and sat and thought in soli
tude. To his surprise it had made things better instead of worse. His time with Kolya had become an addiction more dangerous than his dalliance with alcohol, Robin saw now. It was loneliness that was his real enemy, not pain, not fear. From a family and a religious community that fostered fellowship, he’d entered a profession that lived on the same, and being denied it his mind had fed on itself. Then add a little pain and fear, and what did you have? It was something far more easily seen from without than from within. Doubtless it had been apparent to Kolya. Like you, he’d said so often, like you. So, Zacharias told himself, that’s how he did his job. Cleverly, too, the Colonel admitted to himself. Though not a man accustomed to failure and mistakes, he was not immune to them. He’d almost killed himself with a youthful error at Luke Air Force Base while learning to fly fighters, and five years later, the time he’d wondered what the inside of a thunderstorm was really like and nearly ended up hitting the ground in the manner of a thunderbolt. And now he’d made another.

  Zacharias didn’t know the reason for his respite from the interrogations. Perhaps Kolya was off reporting on what he’d learned. Whatever the reason, he had been granted the chance to reflect. You’ve sinned, Robin told himself. You’ve been very foolish. But you won’t do that again. The determination was weak, and Zacharias knew he’d have to work to strengthen it. Fortunately, he now had the time for reflection. If it was not a real deliverance, it was something. Suddenly he was shocked into full concentration, as if he were flying a combat mission. My God, he thought. that word. I was afraid to pray for deliverance... and yet... His guards would have been surprised to see the wistful smile on his face, especially had they known that he was starting to pray again. Prayer, they’d all been taught, was a farce. But that was their misfortune, Robin thought, and might yet be his salvation.

  He couldn’t make the call from his office. It just wouldn’t do. Nor did he wish to do so from his home. The call would cross a river and a state line, and he knew that for security reasons there were special provisions for telephone calls made in the D.C. area. They were all recorded on computer tape, the only place in America where that was true. Even so, there was a procedure for what he had to do. You were supposed to have official sanction for it. You had to discuss it with your section head, then with the chief of the directorate, and it could well go all the way to the “front office” on the seventh floor. Ritter didn’t want to wait that long, not with lives at stake. He took the day off. not unreasonably claiming that he needed the time to recover from all the travel. So he decided to drive into town, and picked the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History. He walked past the elephant in the lobby and consulted the YOU ARE HERE plate on the wall to find the public telephones, into one of which he dropped a dime and called 347-1347. It was almost an institutional joke. That number connected him to a telephone that rang on the desk of the KGB rezident, the chief of station for Washington, D.C. They knew, and knew that people interested knew they knew. The espionage business could be so baroque, Ritter told himself.

  “Yes?” a voice said. It was the first time Ritter had done this, a whole new collection of sensations—his own nervousness, the evenness of the voice at the other end, the excitement of the moment. What he had to say, however, was programmed in such a way that outsiders could not interfere with official business:

  “This is Charles. There is a matter of concern to you. I propose a brief meeting and discussion. I’ll be at the National Zoo in an hour, at the enclosure for the white tigers.”

  “How will I know you?” the voice asked.

  “I’ll be carrying a copy of Newsweek in my left hand.”

  “One hour,” the voice grumbled. He probably had an important meeting this morning, Ritter thought. Wasn’t that too bad? The CIA field officer left the museum for his car. On the right seat was a copy of Newsweek he’d purchased at a drugstore on the way into town.

  Tactics, Kelly thought, turning to port, finally rounding Point Lookout. There was a wide selection. He still had his safe house in Baltimore with a false name on everything. The police might be interested in talking to him, but they hadn’t made contact with him yet. He’d try to keep it that way. The enemy didn’t know who he was. That was his starting place. The fundamental issue was the three-way balance among what he knew, what he didn’t know, and how he might use the first to affect the second. The third element, the how, was tactics. He could prepare for what he did not yet know. He could not yet act upon it, but he actually knew what he would do. Getting to that point simply required a strategic approach to the problem. It was frustrating, though. Four young women awaited his action. An as yet undetermined number of people awaited death.

  They were driven by fear, Kelly knew. They’d been afraid of Pam, and afraid of Doris. Afraid enough to kill. He wondered if the death of Edward Morello had been a further manifestation. Certainly they had killed for their safety, and now they probably did feel safe. That was good; if fear was their driving force, then they had more of it now that they felt it a thing of their past.

  The worrisome part was the time element. There was a clock on this. The police were sniffing at him. While he thought there was nothing they could possibly have to use against him, he still couldn’t feel good about it. The other worry was the safety—he snorted—of those four young women. There was no such thing as a good long operation. Well, he’d have to be patient on one thing, and with luck, just the one.

  He hadn’t been to the zoo in years. Ritter thought he’d have to bring his kids here again now that they were old enough to appreciate things a little more. He took the time to look at the bear pit—there was just something interesting about bears. Kids thought of them as large, animated versions of the stuffed toys they clutched at night. Not Ritter. They were the image of the enemy, large and strong, far less clumsy and far more intelligent than they appeared. A good thing to remember, he told himself, heading over to the tiger cage. He rolled the Newsweek in his left hand, watching the large cats and waiting. He didn’t bother checking his watch.

  “Hello, Charles,” a voice said beside him.

  “Hello, Sergey.”

  “I do not know you,” the rezident observed.

  “This conversation is unofficial,” Ritter explained.

  “Aren’t they all?” Sergey noted. He started walking. Any single place could be bugged, but not a whole zoo. For that matter, his contact could be wearing a wire, though that would not have been in accordance with the rules, such as they were. He and Ritter walked down the gentle paved slope to the next animal exhibit, with the rezident’s security guard in close attendance.

  “I just returned from Vietnam,” the CIA officer said.

  “Warmer there than here.”

  “Not at sea. It’s rather pleasant out there.”

  “The purpose of your cruise?” the rezident asked.

  “A visit, an unplanned one.”

  “I believe it failed,” the Russian said, not tauntinaly, just letting “Charles” know that he knew what was going on.

  “Not completely. We brought someone home with us.”

  “Who might that be?”

  “His name is Nikolay.” Ritter handed over Grishanov’s paybook. “It would be an embarrassment to your government if it were to be revealed that a Soviet officer was interrogating American POWs.”

  “Not a great embarrassment,” Sergey replied, flipping briefly through the paybook before pocketing it.

  “Well, actually it would be. You see, the people he’s been interrogating have been reported as being dead by your little friends.”

  “I don’t understand.” He was telling the truth, and Ritter had to explain for a few minutes. “I did not know any of that,” Sergey said after hearing the facts of the matter.

  “It’s true, I assure you. You will be able to verify it through your own means.” And he would, of course. Ritter knew that, and Sergey knew that he knew.

  “And where is our colonel?”

  “In a safe place. He’s
enjoying better hospitality than our people are.”

  “Colonel Grishanov hasn’t dropped bombs on anyone,” the Russian pointed out.

  “That is true, but he did take part in a process that will end with the death of American prisoners, and we have hard evidence that they are alive. As I said earlier, a potential embarrassment for your government.”

  Sergey Voloshin was a highly astute political observer and didn’t need this young CIA officer to tell him that. He could also see where this discussion was headed.

  “What do you propose?”

  “It would be helpful if your government could persuade Hanoi to restore these men to life, as it were. That is, to take them to the same prison where the other prisoners are, and make the proper notifications so that their families will know they are alive after all. In return for that, Colonel Grishanov will be returned unharmed, and uninterrogated.”

  “I will forward that proposal to Moscow.” With a favorable endorsement, his tone said clearly.

  “Please be quick. We have reason to believe that the Vietnamese may be contemplating something drastic to relieve themselves of the potential embarrassment. That would be a very serious complication,” Ritter warned.

  “Yes, I suppose it would be.” He paused. “Your assurance that Colonel Grishanov is alive and well?”

  “I can have you to him in ... oh, about forty minutes if you wish. Do you think I would lie about something as important as this?”

  “No, I do not. But some questions must be asked.”

  “Yes, Sergey Ivan’ch. I know that. We have no wish to harm your colonel. He seems to have behaved rather honorably in his treatment of our people. He was also a very effective interrogator. I have his notes.” Ritter added, “The offer to meet with him is open if you wish to make use of it.”