Duel of Assassins (3 page)

A half-hour later, the
Golub
’s nosecone lay hidden
beneath the winter woodpile outside the forester’s cabin, while inside
Marchenko’s final operational order was carefully unfolded, read, encrypted and
sent on its way once more, this time disguised in a stream of meteorological
data over the Akademgorodok computer network for distribution throughout the
Soviet Union. The last sentence of the colonel general’s message was the key
one. Decoded, it read simply:

ACTIVATE MARCUS.

Orlando, a swarthy party animal up for the week from
Brescia, thought up the stunt around midnight in an ersatz London pub in
Kitzbühel, after considerable quantities of dark pilsner. He tried to explain
it to the two Austrian girls at the table, but they were unable to hear over
indefatigable choruses of
“Fräulein, Fräulein, Fräulein”
led by the
resident zither and accordion duo. Finally the Italian shouted out his tipsy
idea.

“Zu-pa!”
answered the girl on his left, Lise—straw
blonde, nicely freckled, smiling while licking off a foam mustache.

“With you everything is ‘super.’ What do you say, Silvie?”

The dark-haired, slightly more serious girl on his right
shook her head: “Orlo, you want to kill yourself, I don’t care. But think of
little Lise. She will be sad forever.”

“Ha! Nothing makes Lise sad.”

“Okay, maybe not sad forever—”

“Maybe only till I find a new big love,” giggled Lise.
“Maybe a week.”

“You lovely ladies don’t understand. It’s not for me to do
such a crazy thing. I must think always of my big future, and of Papa’s business.
No, this is for our brave and crazy American to do. Wake him up, one of you, so
I can tell him.”

The three turned to the young man across the table, just now
lounging back precariously in his cafe chair. Only a long dimpled jaw and
muscular smile were visible below a black felt cowboy hat, tipped comically far
forward. Silvie reached and lifted the hat.

“Okay, I’m awake,” he said, grinning at them out of his
long, handsome, adolescent mask of a face. The voice was husky and melodious,
the mouth frankly sensual, the light-blue eyes playful against a deep Alpine
tan. Despite the boyish appeal, he looked to be past thirty, clearly older and
more experienced than his companions, none of whom knew his real identity.

“But you don’t listen to us, Jack. We are boring you?”

“I heard every damned drunken word, Orlo. I’ll try your
little stunt tomorrow, as soon as the chair lift starts running up to Hohe
Salve. If the weather isn’t too shitty.”

“But Jack! Orlo was only making a joke.”

“Jack”—known to Soviet intelligence as Marcus Jolly—righted
his chair, reached into a jeans pocket and fished out a wad of Austrian
banknotes, peeled off a dozen and tossed them onto the beer-puddled table.
“Orlando may be joking, but twelve thousand schillings says I’m serious. What
do you say,
amico
?”

The Italian grabbed up the notes, shook them dry and handed
them to Lise. “Keep these. It’s not much, but I’m afraid our crazy friend will
need them for the hospital.” He turned to “Jack.” “Okay, fifteen thousand. But
you wake up tomorrow, you want to change your mind, it’s plenty okay with me.”

Marcus shook his head and reached for a fresh half liter of
beer. “What do you mean, ‘wake up’? Who’s going to sleep?”

*

Orlo’s stunt didn’t scare Marcus, it excited him. He’d been
getting stale down in Lugano waiting for something to happen.
Not
trying
something truly balls-out demented once in a while, going for the blood rush,
now
that
was frightening. If he ever reached the time of his life that
he counted all the costs and balked at barriers in his path like a skittish
steeplechaser, they might as well just take him out and shoot him.

Oh, there were plenty of crazy and dangerous things beyond
Marcus’ sphere of daredeviltry—a host of circus stunts, for instance. But only
once could he remember being afraid to try something he wanted desperately to
do.

He’d been fourteen, showing off for a couple of girls at the
local plunge with his self-taught repertoire of forward and backward
somersaults. Suddenly a bunch of country club kids, collegiate types, had
showed up, and several big, musclebound characters took over the diving boards.
Marcus had tried to compete, but was plainly outclassed.

This one bleach-blond guy kept bouncing up and down on the
high board, making the fiberglass twang like a bass guitar string. When he had
everybody watching, he had bounded straight up and grabbed his knees in a tight
backward tuck. There was a collective gasp all around the pool—you could see
the big kid was not going to clear the board.

And he didn’t. He finished the somersault cleanly and banged
both feet right back on the end of the vibrating board. It twanged again as he
arced up and out into a graceful forward one-and-a-half pike with hardly a
splash. As he broke surface and flung his blond hair out of his eyes, the
poolside gasp had turned to applause.

Later, when the college kids had left and the guard was
clearing the pool, Marcus had gone out on the low board—the high board was out
of the question. He had screwed up his courage to attempt the incredible dive.
He had bounced on the end—three,  four, five times. But that was all. His knees
had turned to jelly, his stomach got oily, cowardice stole his soul. When the
guard ordered him out, he slunk away.

Marcus had pretty much given up on diving the rest of that
summer. In the amazing run of years since, Lord knows, he’d pulled off many
crazier and incomparably more dangerous stunts, while today that country-club
showoff was probably pushing insurance and turning into one more lard-ass. But
Marcus could never forget that dive. Someday, before it was all over, he’d get
up there and do the damned thing.

Now he hung suspended beneath a rainbow-striped hang glider.
Increasing his exhilaration, and in violation of all the rules of the
Hopfgarten Hang Gliding School from which he had hired his Rogallo wing, Marcus
was unencumbered with helmet, goggles, flight suit or cocoon harness. Except
for swimming briefs, Rolex and running shoes, his sleekly muscled body was
bare, stretched prone and prismed by sunlight through the multi-hued sailcloth.

Directly above, a tiny, drifting circumflex against the
vaulted blue, a golden eagle worked the same thermal that held Marcus. It was a
perfect morning for soaring. He had gained a thousand meters in ridge lift from
the grassy summit of Hohe Salve, his launch site. That put him something like
twenty-two hundred meters above the emerald vales of Brixental and Kelchsau,
which joined just beyond Hopfgarten. From here the tumbling Kelchsauer Ache, in
a full spring torrent he had kayaked two days before, shone as a fine, golden
filament in the sunlight.

Arrayed off to his left were the snowglossed summits of the
Kitzbüheler Alps and the Wilder Kaiser, and beyond them, rising from the Hohe
Tauern on the horizon, the bright white saddle of the Grossglockner, at nearly
thirty-eight hundred meters Austria’s highest peak.

He would have liked to ride the thermal higher, to chase the
eagle like Icarus, beyond the limestone crags and the far glistening
snowfields, allowing the sense of splendid isolation to overcome him. It was
supremely intoxicating and utterly solitary. Indeed, Marcus prized this feeling
precisely because—like all the really extraordinary experiences of his life—it
could not be shared.

But a wager was on, and far below the little trio waited
witness. Mundanity, more than gravity, thus summoned him down. Reluctantly he
exited the updraft, drew his body toward the control bar, dipped his wings
below the horizon and, carefully gaining airspeed, began a slow, spiraling
descent to the valley.

Several minutes later he was skimming steep green pastures
dotted with butterscotch cows, then banking in a wide turn above the storybook
village of Hopfgarten, with its plump, white and wood
gasthofs
cascading
red and pink pelargoniums from their balconies. Marcus’ wing shadow passed
directly over the tidy parish churchyard cemetery, then flashed across the
church’s steep roof and between its twin baroque spires.

He was steering toward one of the larger structures, a
Tyrol-ean-modern hotel bordering a grassy meadow. He swooped in from the west
over a windscreen of dark solar-glass, unbuckling his harness a dozen meters
above the sudden sparkle of a swimming pool. He had only an instant to register
the trio of familiar upturned faces on the stone-flagged terrace. Then he let
go the control bar, grabbed his knees and executed a forward two-and-a-half
into the deep end.

He surfaced to cheers from the poolside table, in time to
see his glider vanish serenely over the windscreen. The dive had been fairly
ragged, but Orlo had stipulated only a successful splashdown, not a thing of
beauty. And Marcus had by God pulled it off. He stroked to the side, lifted
himself out in one fluid motion and walked toward the group, grinning and
dripping. They continued to applaud, all three in tennis whites, shoes and
socks powdered with red clay from the nearby courts.

“Bravo, Jack!” Orlando said.

“The name’s Bond. James Bond. Just dropped in for a swim,
old chap.” He caught the towel tossed by Silvie, bent to her kiss and sank into
an empty chair. “It wasn’t half bad, was it?”

“It was
zu-pa
!” Lise said.

“But we should have made a video,” Silvie complained. “Jack,
could you do it again?”

“Si,”
Orlando laughed.
“Encore, encore!”

“No problemo. As soon as
il grosso Italiano
here pays
up.”

“Ecco!”
Orlando tossed some bills across the table.
“For you, my crazy friend, you earn it.”

“Why crazy?”

“Because, to win only fifteen thousand schillings, you just
destroy a beautiful glider for which you are going to have to pay, I don’t know,
maybe forty, fifty thousand?”

“I didn’t hear a crash, did you? I’ll bet you another ten
thousand the glider’s hardly got a scratch.”

Orlando shrugged in apparent defeat.

“So, what is it like up there, Jack?” Lise asked.

“It’s fucking
zu-pa
, Lise! I was playing sky-tag with
an eagle. You ought to try it.”

“Scheisse!
Too much of danger.”

“Naw! The only really nasty part is catching all the damn
bugs in your teeth.” Marcus spat over his shoulder. “Seriously, you know what
it’s like?”

“Sex?” asked Silvie.

“Better.”

“Nothing is better!” Orlando protested.

“How do you know, until you’ve tried everything else? Okay,
I’ll agree, great sex is the best thing going. But the kind of high you get
from risking your buns hang-gliding, say, or sky-diving or helicopter skiing—I’m
talking about really nifty, gung-ho, semi-life-threatening activities—let me
tell you, it’s usually a whole lot better than your ordinary, everyday,
run-of-the-mill fuck—”

“Hey, you bastard!”

“Silvie, take it easy. I’m not talking about you and me
here. This is a purely philosophical discussion, okay? All I’m saying is, good
danger beats bad sex, or even average sex, okay?” He fished a
Süddeutsche
Zeitung
off the next table and began idly leafing through the pages. “As a
matter of fact, it’s almost the same sensation for a guy, gets you right down
in the nuts,
verstehe?
Obviously I don’t know what it’s like for you
Fräulein
—hey,
Silvie, what’s your problem?”

“You! Why you talk so dirty? And you think you are such a
smart guy. What are you doing back there?” She slapped the newspaper down. “You
can’t read German.”

“I can read the damned
Fussball
scores, okay, and
today’s
Wetter
.” He readjusted the paper. “Anyway, how do you know what
I’m looking for?”

Several minutes later, while the others were debating the
relative merits of afternoon water-skiing on the Schwarzee or more tennis,
Marcus finally took his nose out of the newspaper.

“Sorry,” he said, getting to his feet, “you folks will have
to excuse me.”

“Where are you going?”

“For starters, München.”

“München? Now? What about tennis?”

“Well, I’m afraid doubles is definitely out.”

“Jack! Stop making jokes!”

“Silvie, I’m being serious now. Something just came up. In
fact, my whole damn holiday might have just gone
kaput.
Orlo, can you
take care of getting that glider back to Gunther for me at the school? I’ve got
to leave right now.”

“But you are a madman!” Silvie said.

“I know. I’ll telephone you later, I promise, and explain.”

Before they could muster further protest, Marcus had
collected his morning winnings from the table, folded the newspaper under his
arm and was striding off the terrace, leaving the confounded trio almost as
abruptly as he had joined them. They could not see the intense excitement that
now blazed in his eyes.

So
, he thought, hurrying down the outside hotel
stairs toward the car park,
Marchenko is gone
. And how many of his
highly placed people had been taken out with him? But the skeleton of the
Colonel General’s network was obviously still intact—at least enough had
remained to get the old man’s last command relayed to Marcus.

The small, carefully worded display ad—for a nonexistent
package tour to the Canary Islands—was the one Marcus had been told to look
for, the green light for the biggest assignment of his life. But he had not expected
the code words signaling the General’s death. It made this morning’s
foolishness recede into split-second oblivion, along with the trio of his most
recent playmates—fatuous Orlo, silly Lise, sullen and sultry Silvie. (How long
would she wait for his call, he wondered, before she gave up?) No matter what
happened, none of them would ever see or hear from him again.

As Marcus had predicted, the hang glider had landed safely
in the grassy meadow, a giant, exotic butterfly nestled among the Alpine wildflowers.
He gave it only a glance before opening the saddlebags of the Moto Guzzi
sportbike he had parked earlier, pulling out and zipping into his cycle
leathers. Then he helmeted, straddled the saddle, fired up the 1000cc engine
and, spitting gravel, snarled off down motorway 170 through the shining
mountains toward Kufstein and the German border.