Agent Counter-Agent (5 page)

The second bullfighter was just coming out to work his bull, a big, fine bull from one of the best ranches. The
torero
was an unknown, but he was taking chances to please the crowd.

"Olé! Olé!" they yelled.

"He's good," Ilse said.

"Yes." I watched him execute a
mariposa,
making the cape flutter like a butterfly. "Do you know any of the
toreros?"

"Not personally," she said. "Even though I like to watch them perform, they are not my kind of men, you know. Anyway, Latin men usually do not appeal to me."

"How long have you been at the embassy," I asked, changing the subject.

"Since my arrival in Caracas, almost a year ago. I thought I wanted to see the world."

"And now you don't?"

She turned those blue eyes on me and then looked back to the ring. "It can be… lonely for a girl in a strange city this size."

If that wasn't a green light, I'd never seen one. "You went to the reception last night with a bachelor," I said.

"Ah, Ludwig." She laughed. "He is a nice man, but he likes to collect butterflies and read long books on ancient history. I am not even sure he is interested in girls."

We exchanged smiles. "Do you work for him?" I asked. I knew that Ilse Hoffmann did not.

She did not look at me but kept on watching the
torero.
"No, not for Ludwig. For a man called Steiner."

The answer was right, but I still wasn't satisfied. "I know Hamburg quite well. Where did you live there?"

"In the north of the city. On Friedrichstrasse. There is a park nearby."

"Oh, yes. I know the area. Did you live there with your parents?"

"My parents were killed in an automobile accident when I was very young," she said.

That was true, too. The ambassador had mentioned to Collins that Ilse Hoffmann was an orphan.

I m sorry.

We watched the bullfight. I bought two drinks from a vendor, and Ilse seemed to be enjoying herself very much. Nunez appeared again and performed better than on his first try. There were just two bulls to go, and the word was that they were immature calves from a second-rate ranch.

"Why don't we leave now and have a drink together somewhere?" she offered.

I looked into her blue eyes and saw the invitation there again. "Sounds great," I said.

We had a drink at a nearby cafe, and then I took Ilse to dinner at El Jardín, on Avenida Almeda. After we had finished our dinner, she asked me back to her apartment for a drink. Because I still hadn't figured her out and because the 'seductive promise in her eyes had really gotten to me, I went.

She had a large apartment just off the Plaza Miranda. It was furnished in period Spanish, with some excellent antiques. There was a small balcony overlooking a narrow street.

When we got inside, Ilse turned to me, and standing very close, said, "Well, here we are, Scott."

Her lips were soft and full and within easy reach. I closed the small distance and kissed her. She responded warmly, as if she had been waiting all day. She pulled away reluctantly.

"Make us a drink while I change," she said.

She disappeared into the bedroom. I poured us a couple of cognacs from a crystal decanter, and by the time I'd finished, Ilse had returned. She was wearing a long, clinging robe that didn't leave anything to the imagination. She dimmed the fights, then came over to me and took a cognac.

I had taken off my jacket while she was in the bedroom and hadn't bothered to hide the Luger and stiletto. I watched the look on her face when she saw them. I'd hoped it would be surprise, and it was. But I couldn't be sure it was genuine.

"What is all this, Scott?" she said.

"Oh, just weapons," I said in an offhand manner. "We have to take extra precautions at the embassy when there's something like this conference going on."

"Yes. Of course," she said.

I took in every detail of her body through the clinging material of her robe. I put my drink down. I hadn't even tasted it, but somehow that didn't seem important at the moment. Ilse took a sip of hers and put it down, too. I slipped my hands around her small waist and pulled her to me. Somehow the robe heightened the effect. No small curve or sweep of flesh was hidden from my touch. I kissed her again and she pressed urgently against me as my hands moved over her body.

"Oh, Scott," she said.

I reached down and slowly unbuttoned the robe, letting it drop to the floor. She stood very still, looking into my eyes. Her body was even more spectacular than I'd imagined. Her breath came shallow, moving her full, round breasts. I removed my holster and stiletto sheath and dropped them on a small table near a wide couch behind us. She helped me undress, then went over to the couch and lay down on it.

"Come over here, Scott," she whispered.

I went to her. We lay together on the sofa, and the exciting aroma of her perfume filled my nostrils. Her warm flesh was in my hands and the sweet taste of her was on my lips. She moved insistently against me as my hands and lips covered the swell of her breasts, caressing the erect nipples. Her hand was on me, and it was guiding me to her, and then there was a hot sweetness engulfing me. Her hips undulated against me, and her legs locked around my back. She made low, sensual noises in her throat as our passion mounted. Then she gave a harsh cry, and her soft flesh trembled violently as I exploded inside her.

A little while later, Ilse got up to get our cognacs. I lay relaxed and satiated on the couch, sprawled out full length. If this was what Ilse had to offer in return for my doubts, it seemed pointless to go on worrying about her.

Still, I watched her carefully and at the same time kept my eye on my weapons on the nearby table. I let Ilse take a drink of her cognac before I took one.

"Did you enjoy it?" she asked me after I had taken a sip.

"The drink or the entertainment?" I asked. Just then I began to feel a little dizzy.

"The entertainment," she smiled back.

"It was first class." As I sat up on the edge of the couch beside her, I felt my arms getting heavy.

"I enjoyed it, too."

I was really beginning to get tense. I was feeling dizzier and weaker, and there was no reason for it. Unless Ilse had drugged me.

"What the hell…" I said. The words just wouldn't come.

Ilse didn't say anything. She moved slightly away from me.

I looked over at her. I was suddenly very angry — with her and with myself. I had let my guard down, in spite of Hawk's warnings and my own doubts.

"You bitch!" I said loudly, the words echoing strangely in my ears. I slapped her hard across the face, and she fell back on the sofa with a muffled gasp.

I got up and reeled drunkenly. I grabbed my clothes and began pulling them on. "What's your real name?" I asked, trying to zip my pants.

She looked at my weapons but didn't have the courage to try for one of them. She wiped a trickle of blood from her mouth. "My real name is Tanya Savitch," she said.

I had my shoes on now. I took a step toward the table where the Luger and stiletto lay and almost fell on my face. I grabbed for the table, but I knocked it over and it crashed to the floor I steadied myself on the arm of the sofa, standing over the girl named Tanya Savitch.

"And you work for the KGB," I said.

"Yes. I am sincerely sorry, Mr. Carter," she said quietly. "I like you."

I glared at her and saw two Tanyas. "It was the cognac, wasn't it? But you drank it yourself. And I watched you when you went to get the glasses. What did you do, stuff yourself with an antidote earlier?"

"It was not the cognac," she said almost unhappily. "It was the lipstick. And I have a hypnotic immunity to its toxic effects."

"Hypnotic…?" I couldn't finish the question. I felt the swelling darkness overpower me, and then I hit the floor.

I didn't care about the weapons any more. I just wanted to fight the blackness and get out of the apartment. If I could even make it to the corridor, somebody might help me. I somehow found enough strength to get back on my feet and stumble toward the door.

Just as I reached it, it opened, and two men stood there. One a short, bald thug, had a stupid grin on his face. The other was the man I had seen at the cafe and the palace, probably the one who'd held the gun on me back at the training school in Washington. Their faces blurred as the drug really began working. The taller of the two, the one who had plagued me since Washington, stepped toward me.

"You appear to be a little under the weather, Mr. Carter."

I took a clumsy swing at him. He ducked away easily, and I fell against his stocky companion, who grabbed me and held me up for a moment, then hit me hard in the side of the head.

I went falling back into the apartment, landing on the floor again. As the short, stocky man stood over me, I grabbed at his legs and pulled them out from under him. He hit the floor beside me. I could just barely hear the Russian obscenities. The tall man came over and kicked me in the side.

"Don't hurt him," I heard the girl say. "There is no need to hurt him." The voice seemed to come from the other end of a long tunnel or maybe from the other side of the world.

The tall man swore loudly at the girl. The stocky man stumbled to his feet. The vertigo was getting worse and worse. I tried to get to my knees but fell back heavily onto my side. The thing that kept running through my mind was that they had come to kill me. This had been a plot to assassinate AXE's top agent, and it had succeeded. But neither of the men had guns out.

"You think that what we're going to do to him won't hurt him?" The stocky Russian gave an ugly laugh. He kicked me hard in the ribs. I groaned and fell onto my back. I heard the girl named Ilse Hoffmann and Tanya Savitch deliver some well-chosen words to the stocky man. Then the voices faded away and became a dull buzzing in my ears.

A minute later the blackness returned, and there was no pushing it away this time. I was suddenly falling, falling through a bottomless black space, my body turning slowly as I fell.

When I came to, I was lying on the floor of a bright, antiseptic-looking room, about ten feet square. The room was empty except for a white cot. The ceiling lights shot rockets of pain into my head when I looked at them. I struggled to sit up and immediately felt the pain in my side where the men had kicked me. I examined my ribs. There were some nasty bruises, but nothing was broken.

I had no idea how they'd gotten me here. At first I couldn't even remember the events leading up to my blackout, but then slowly the scene with the girl came back. Damned clever of them to put a drug in her lipstick. But what was it she'd said about her immunity? And why did I remember, now, her soothing voice speaking to me in the overwhelming blackness, her sensual, irresistible, voice telling me to sleep undisturbed? The fact was, I'd gone out completely, so completely that I'd have felt refreshed now if it hadn't been for the throbbing pain in my side.

With some difficulty I got up, and went over, to the cot, and sat down on the edge of it, rubbing my face with my hands, trying to clear my head. Whatever drug they'd used on me, its effect was temporary and apparently harmless. For some reason I couldn't figure out, they wanted me alive and unharmed. Maybe before it was all over I'd be wishing they'd put a slug in my brain back at the girl's apartment.

I remembered Tanya's warm flesh under me on her sofa. The KGB was big on sex as a weapon, always had been. But that wouldn't have been enough to get me without the new cosmetic drug. There'd been rumors that the Russians were working on hundreds of drugs and that they were many years ahead of the West in that area. I may have been the first enemy agent they'd used the drug on. It wasn't a distinction I wanted to claim.

Looking back on it, I didn't figure Tanya for an ordinary KGB agent. There had been that attempt to keep the men from beating me and that mention of… some kind of hypnosis.
Hypnotic immunity,
that was it. I'd never heard the term before. My mind raced through all sorts of possibilities and probabilities and ended up nowhere, and my head throbbed violently. I had just succeeded in thoroughly confusing myself when I heard a sound at the door.

I tensed automatically. The door opened, and the two men who had appeared at Tanya's apartment came in. The fat, bald guy had the same ugly grin on his face. The tall one looked at me impassively.

"Well," the tall one said, "I hope you had a good rest." It was definitely the voice of the man who'd attacked me in Washington.

"It was you with the stocking over your face in Washington." I said.

"Yes, it was I," he said patronizingly. "The man you killed was merely an American who worked for us. He was expendable."

"And you've been keeping an eye on me in Caracas."

"Of course. We did not want to lose contact before Dr. Savitch had a chance to ensnare you."

"Dr.
Savitch?"

"You'll see her presently," he said. "On your feet now, Mr. Carter. You have an appointment to keep in our laboratory."

"Laboratory?" I stood up and gauged the distance and position of each man, wondering if I could get past them to the door. "Where am I?"

The tall man smiled. "You're still in Caracas. We just brought you to a new KGB facility, Carter — one set up especially for you."

"You talk too much!" the stocky man growled.

The tall man didn't even look at him. "It does not matter," he said coolly.

I wondered what that meant. If they intended to kill me, why hadn't they already done it? So far, none of it made any sense to me.

"What are you going to do with me?" I asked.

"You will find out soon enough. Come on. And don't give us any trouble."

I walked past them to the door, and they followed close behind. I looked up and down the white corridor, hoping to find a door that looked like an exit. It was a short hallway with a door at each end and a couple of others in the middle. I figured the end doors had to be exits. They were closed, but something told me they wouldn't be locked. For one thing, the Russians didn't have any keys on them.