Flight of the Raven Page 2

  “Give me a few minutes,” she told him, reaching for a tissue. “Then I’ll get on the phone to some of my contacts.” She paused and looked up at Fitz, tears still glistening in her eyes. “And I can also go through Dan’s things to see if there were any notes he left about what he was doing this evening.”

  He sighed. “That leaves me free to make the identification at the morgue and call his family in New York.”

  When Fitzpatrick reached the door, he turned back for a moment. Julie was sitting completely still, her face slightly averted. He was struck by how she looked in this moment of crisis. He’d always thought of her as sensitive and attractive but not beautiful. Tonight the unaccustomed pallor of her skin against the background of the dark curtains made her profile look like an antique cameo. Even now, her carriage and style spoke of wealth and culture, reminding him again of her privileged background. More than once he’d wondered how one of the wealthy Baltimore McLeans had gotten into this kind of business in the first place.

  Not that she hadn’t done an excellent job here, he reminded himself. But she wasn’t detached enough. You had to know her well to see the symptoms of stress beneath her controlled exterior. Perhaps denying herself the conventional emotional outlets made things worse. He knew she’d already opted out of the service for a lower-key translator’s job back in D.C. Too bad this mess had to cloud her last couple of months here.

  None of the calls Julie placed netted much immediate hard information. Although Madrid was a city that kept late hours, most government offices were already closed. Even her contacts at UPI and Reuters were of little help. A rumor that the ETA, the Basque separatist activists, would claim credit for the bombing was still unconfirmed. Whoever wanted that report in Washington wasn’t going to be happy with the dribble of facts she was able to collect.

  Still feeling numb inside, she got up and crossed to the door. She wanted to put off going through Dan’s office, but she knew that it was probably the most constructive thing to do now.

  The only way she could cope with the smiling picture of him and his parents on the bookshelf was to lay it facedown before starting to go through desk drawers full of manila folders neatly labeled with project names. She recognized most of them, but the one at the very back, labeled Foolery, piqued her interest. It turned out to be full of risqué cartoons and jokes that had been passed around the office. They must have appealed to Dan’s offbeat sense of humor, she thought, realizing with a painful stab that she was already thinking of him in the past tense.

  Pulling out his appointment book, she flipped through the pages. His schedule, like her own, had been full of meetings with Spanish government officials, briefings for visiting U.S. dignitaries, and the long afternoon lunches where the Spanish habitually concluded a surprising number of business negotiations. Most of the entries were complete with names and phone numbers. But on a few scattered dates there was simply a capital R lightly penciled in the lower left-hand corner. Julie thumbed back through the previous six months and found they came in pairs—about twice every three weeks, but never on exactly the same days. One, she noticed, was for today—Wednesday, May 15. Another was for this Friday. The R‘s might designate the days he practiced on the rifle range out at Torrejon. Or maybe they indicated when his laundry was supposed to be returned from the Rodriguez cleaners. She had no way of knowing.

  Closing the book, she went on to the other contents of the center desk drawer. Tucked in the back was a carved wooden box full of ticket stubs to the bullfights and other attractions Dan had enjoyed. She’d attended some of them with him, and again her emotions welled up at the thought of the friend she’d lost. She’d known that he’d wanted to be more than friends, but he settled for what she was willing to give to their relationship.

  At the bottom of the pile was one ticket that was not torn in half. It was for the revival of a class Spanish play, La Dama del Alba. With Dan’s Spanish she couldn’t imagine him catching the subtlety of such a downbeat tragedy. Had someone given him the ticket? She glanced at the date. It was for this Friday. The day clicked in her mind. It matched one of the cryptic R‘s in the appointment book. Flipping through the pages, she matched a dozen R‘s to torn ticket stubs. They were all for obscure events in out-of-the-way places where you wouldn’t expect to see an American.

  Her brow wrinkled. She’d thought she’d known Dan pretty well. But now she was wondering if he’d had a Spanish girlfriend on the side.

  The door opened, and Fitzpatrick stuck his head inside. His abrupt reappearance made Julie jump.

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you.”

  “That’s okay. I could use a break,” she admitted, reaching around to massage the ache in her shoulder blades with her finger tips.

  “Then how about coming back to my office for a cup of tea and some Oreo cookies I’ve stashed away for an emergency?”

  Julie slipped the ticket she’d found into the pocket of her skirt.

  “Find anything unusual?” Fitz asked.

  Had she? She didn’t want to stir up anything if there was some perfectly innocent explanation for the tickets. “Not yet,” she answered, “but there are some phone numbers I’ll check out in the morning.”

  “I hate to tell you, but it’s already two in the morning,” Fitz replied, “and neither one of us can go home till we get some kind of report on the wire back to Washington.”

  * * *

  HOW UNFORTUNATE that General Bogolubov had picked this week to inspect his field sites in Spain, Aleksei Iliyanovich Rozonov thought as he read over the night report and made notes for the general’s nine a.m. briefing. All hell had broken loose yesterday evening, and in the midst of it the general had arrived. Yet only the hand Aleksei unconsciously ran through his black hair betrayed his anxiety. The strong lines of his angular face might have been carved from stone.

  The reports said a terrorist attack had destroyed a tavern near the venerable Plaza Mayor. Five people had been killed in the blast. One of them was an American army officer attached to the embassy. Another was a Russian KGB agent carrying a French passport that identified him as a wine merchant.

  Aleksei shifted his almost six-foot frame in the desk chair that, even cranked to its full extension, never gave him quite enough leg room. The ironic humor of the San Jeronimo situation didn’t escape him. Somebody was going to have the very devil of a time explaining that “innocent victim” to the Spanish authorities if they figured out the Kremlin connection. As the cultural attaché, he was glad that it wouldn’t be in his official province.

  Of course, he was on the senior KGB staff at the embassy, which did mean certain duties connected with the incident. The problem was, he was having trouble getting any hard information, and it wasn’t from lack of trying. He would have given a case of export-quality vodka to know what Kiril Ivanov was doing at the San Jeronimo last night.

  Aleksei glanced at his watch and stood up. Bogolubov was obsessed with promptness, among other things. Taking his dark blue European-cut jacket from the coat tree in the corner, he shrugged into it and straightened his tie, noting with relief that even with his eyes half-closed he’d somehow managed to pick an ensemble that actually matched. The duty officer had rung his apartment at five in the morning. Aleksei had been at his desk not much more than a half hour later. But Bogolubov wasn’t going to be concerned with his lack of sleep, only his ability to do his job under pressure.

  He and the general’s son, Leonid, had been in the same class at MGIMO, the foreign ministry’s diplomatic training school. Despite his father’s high connections, Leonid hadn’t done well, and the disappointed father had apparently blamed that failure on those who had excelled in the class. Although the hostility was discreetly hidden, Aleksei suspected that the general was waiting for him to make a mistake so he could pounce.

  Carlotta, one of the Spanish secretaries employed in the cultural section, looked up with expressive dark eyes as he opened the office door. “I’ve fixed some coffee, str
ong and black the way you like it,” she said.

  Despite the stress of the morning, he flashed her a quick smile that transformed his carefully disciplined countenance for just a moment. Carlotta took care of him well at the office, and she’d offered none too subtly to take care of him during off-hours as well. He could have used the human comfort, but it would have brought complications he couldn’t afford.

  Accepting the coffee, he took a few quick swallows and left the half-full cup on her desk. “I don’t know how long I’ll be up there with the general. But I’m expecting some important calls. Transfer them to Ivan and record the conversations. I’ll listen to the information later.”

  “Of course, Señor Rozonov.”

  The strong Spanish brew helped sharpen his wits for what he knew was going to be a verbal fencing match. From long experience at self-preservation, officers in the Soviet higher echelons were skilled at speaking without saying exactly what they meant. Bogolubov was a master at obfuscation.

  Aleksei met Georgi Krasin in the elevator. The young political officer with the mop of sandy hair and somber intellectual face had also been summoned to the early-morning inquisition. But that wasn’t surprising, since he was in charge of monitoring—and sometimes abetting—terrorist activities.

  Feliks Gorlov’s presence at the meeting was another matter. Gorlov had been busy with trade negotiations for months trying to buy wheat from anyone who had a spare hundred kilos. So what was he doing here? The nattily dressed agricultural under secretary with the razor-cut brown hair was lounging back in his seat, giving the impression that he and the commanding officer on the other side of the desk had been exchanging confidences for some time. Aleksei shrugged. His own impression of the man was that he cultivated form rather than substance.

  Tabling his opinion, he shifted his attention to the person who had called the group together.

  In deference to the foreign setting, the general was also in mufti. Unlike Gorlov, he was dressed in a boxy, wide-lapel wool suit that would have stood out on the Paseo de la Castellana like a Spanish olive in a jar of Black Sea Caviar. As he took time to shuffle through the folder on his desk, Bogolubov ignored the new arrivals. Finally he cleared his throat.

  “Well, what have you got on that damn bombing?” he demanded.

  Georgi, obviously eager to please, began to summarize what he’d been able to glean from a half-dozen sources. It didn’t impress the general very much.

  “The Kremlin will want an angle we can use to make the Americans look bad. See if you can invent a link to that protest against NATO last month,” he prompted.

  Georgi scribbled madly on the pad he’d brought along.

  “And what about you?” Bogolubov asked, turning to Aleksei.

  He began with a concise appraisal of the damage sustained and the latest list of the victims. “Before we make a political issue of this, Comrade General, I recommend we find out what Kiril Ivanov was doing there,” he concluded.

  The general flashed him a triumphant look. “He was shadowing Eisenberg—on my orders.”

  Aleksei, like Georgi, didn’t have to fake astonishment. “You mean the American who was also killed?” he asked.

  “Yes. We’ve been uneasy about his activities for months now, but I’d just gotten approval from those dunderheads at the ministry to put him under surveillance.”

  The general was gauging reactions around the room. “You think he was working for the CIA?” Aleksei asked.

  The portly man on the other side of the desk snorted. “If he’d been working for the CIA, we would have had a file an inch thick on him. No, this is something else, something I intend to get a handle on.”

  As the others stood up to leave, the general motioned to Aleksei. “Just a minute, Aleksei Iliyanovich, I need something else from you.”

  “Of course, Comrade General. I just wish you’d brought me in on this sooner.”

  Bogolubov closed the door behind the other two men. As the general leaned back in his chair again, Aleksei thought he looked very much like a fat toad that had just snapped up a couple of juicy flies. Others had seen the resemblance, too, because he was often called “the toad” behind his back.

  The general shrugged. “The ministry preferred to restrict the information. But now that Eisenberg’s mission in Madrid has literally been blown to bits, there’s no point in keeping you in the dark. Kiril Ivanov searched the American’s quarters and found some of his secret papers hidden in a corn flakes box, of all places. From them we’ve been able to deduce that he was working with someone right here at the embassy who uses the code name Raven. Your job is to find out who it is.”

  “Where do you want me to start?”

  The toad stood up so that he could slide his hand into his too-tight left trouser pocket and pull out a slightly crumpled white envelope, which he handed to the younger officer.

  Aleksei’s brow wrinkled as he slid a blue theater ticket from the envelope. “I don’t understand. What does a performance of La Dama del Alba have to do with any of this?”

  “Ivanov saw Eisenberg pay for two tickets to the performance and pick up one. The other is still at the box office but may be claimed by performance time. This is a seat near the matched pair. I want you to go and see who shows up.”

  Chapter Two

  Julie folded the message from Cal Dixon and slipped it in her desk drawer. Nominally, he was the mid-level consular officer in charge of dispensing U.S. government benefits to Americans living in Spain and checking the credentials of Spanish nationals wanting U.S. visas, but it was whispered around the embassy that he was connected to local CIA operations. It was considered bad form to mention the suspected association to his face.

  He looked, Julie reflected, like a slightly older but still well-conditioned version of a high school quarterback. His suits and shirts were expensive yet not flashy. More than once she’d seen him in the area’s plushest restaurants obviously cultivating Spanish contacts. She’d never quite been able to put her finger on what she didn’t like about the man.

  Ostensibly, Cal wanted background information about the political affiliations of several visa applicants. But she had to wonder, given the crisis mode of the past twelve hours, why that routine piece of business couldn’t be taken care of on the phone instead of in a personal meeting.

  Julie sighed wearily and picked up a notebook, wishing she were out of the Foreign Service and back in her cozy Washington town house. But despite her present state of mind, she was a woman who honored her obligations—and completing this tour was one of them.

  A few minutes later she pulled open the door to the waiting room of the consular section of the embassy. It was one of the few areas to which Spanish nationals had access, subject to security clearance at the door. Although the room had been recently redone, the plastic furniture and government-green walls had all the ambience of an unemployment office. It was probably to encourage the petitioners to fill out their forms as rapidly as possible and be on their way, she speculated.

  A secretary buzzed Julie through to the “employees only” area, where she made her way past desks of junior-grade clerical workers checking visa applications and benefit forms.

  “It’s unlocked,” Cal called out in response to her knock on the door to his private office.

  As she entered the room, he logged off the computer terminal and swung his chair back toward the desk. “Thanks for sparing me some time this morning,” he said. “I hear you had a busy night.”

  “Bad news travels fast.”

  “Unfortunately that’s true. Listen, Julie, I’m going to come right to the point. The note I sent was just to get you down here. I really want to talk about Captain Eisenberg.”

  “Oh?”

  “The two of you were friends, weren’t you?”

  “Dan was a very likeable guy. He was friends with a lot of people.”

  “But the two of you were ‘close friends.’”

  Julie sat up straighter. “My past relat
ionship with Dan Eisenberg is no business of yours. But my God, what does it matter anyway? The man’s dead.”

  “I was hoping you might be in a position to tell me if he was up to anything—shall we say—that might not have been in the best interests of the U.S. government.”

  She struggled to control her anger. “I had absolutely no reason to question his loyalty, and you have no reason to question me like this.” Her fingers pressed painfully into the spiral binding of the notebook as she started to stand up.

  “I think you’d better stay. I’m not making any accusations. but I am conducting an authorized investigation.”

  “For whom?”

  He hesitated, a look of indecision crossing his guileless features. “What I’m going to tell you is strictly confidential. The investigation is for the Director of Central Intelligence.”

  Julie felt her stomach knot. It had crossed her mind last night when she’d been going through his desk that she hadn’t known Dan Eisenberg as well as she’d thought. She couldn’t picture him as a traitor, but that’s what Cal was hinting. Her own doubts fueled the vehemence of her response. “You can sort through the contents of Dan’s day-old garbage, but I doubt it will turn up anything criminal in his background.”

  “Hey, don’t take offense. I’m only doing my job, the same as you are. And since you’ve been working the embassy side of this, we ought to at least touch base and share information,” he said.

  She nodded tightly. “If I find anything that I think will be of interest to you, I’ll pass it on. But my own opinion is that poor Dan was at the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  Cal steepled his hands and looked thoughtful. “To show you my spirit of cooperation, I’ll start by sharing some privileged information with you.”

  When she didn’t ask what it was, he continued. “There were a number of unsavory characters in that tavern last night. One of my underworld informants say that a local drug kingpin escaped with minor injuries and has gone into hiding. And if that isn’t interesting enough, there was also a KGB agent enjoying the local color. He was a clandestine operative named Kiril Ivanov. I’d like to ask him some questions about what he was really doing there, but unfortunately he bought the farm along with the captain.”