Flight of the Raven (3 page)

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

J
ulie 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 relationship 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.”

Julie received the new information in stunned silence. Cal’s sources must be a lot better than hers. The consular officer pressed his advantage. Getting up, he went to a combination safe in the corner and pulled out two fat folders, which he dropped in her lap. “The first file has pictures and fact sheets on all the known KGB agents in the area. Naturally, a lot of them have cover jobs at the Russian embassy. The second one has a number of miscellaneous troublemakers that have come to our attention. I’d like you to look through the pictures and tell me if you’ve seen any of these people with Dan. And note the names in case they come up in any of the information you find out about the incident. I expect you to report any of that back to me.”

“Is that all?” She stood up, the folders clutched in her hand.

Cal ran blunt fingers through his close-cropped light brown hair. “You can’t take that material out of this room. Sit down at the table in the corner and go over it. I’ll lock it up again when you’re finished.”

Julie nodded. She should have realized that Cal’s connection with the CIA was probably as classified as the material he had in the folders. Without another word she took the files over to the table he’d indicated and set to work.

* * *

T
HE REST OF THE DAY
was not much better. Because Cal’s unpleasant assignment had taken up the morning, there wasn’t time to spare for even a late lunch away from her desk.

“I’m going down to pick up something to eat before the snack bar closes. Do you want me to get you a sandwich?” Paula Collins, one of the junior political aides, asked sympathetically, popping her blond curly head in the doorway of Julie’s office. Like the rest of the staff, she knew who was drawing extra duty because of the bombing.

Julie looked up gratefully from the newspaper she was scanning for details on the incident. “That would be wonderful. Do you know what’s edible down there today?”

Paula laughed. The basement cafeteria was one of the embassy’s secret weapons. It was often bandied about that all they’d have to do to disable the Russians would be to invite them in for a fast-food snack. “Probably nothing’s edible, but I hear today’s special is pizzaburgers.”

Julie grimaced. “Oh, what’s the difference! Everything they fix tastes the same anyway.”

“Isn’t it the truth,” Paula agreed. She hesitated for a moment. “You know, Julie, everybody was really shocked to hear about Dan. But since the two of you were...” She let the sentence trail off, not knowing quite what the relationship had been. “If there’s anything I can do, just let me know.”

“Maybe you could start a collection envelope, and we could send it to the hospital for handicapped kids across town where he was donating some time.”

“Gee, I didn’t know he was doing that.”

“He didn’t talk about it, but I think it’s because his older brother died of cerebral palsy. It really hit Dan hard, and he wanted to make a difference.” Julie felt her vision begin to mist again. Dan had been such a good person. It wasn’t fair that this had happened to him.

“I’ll take care of it,” Paula assured her. “But let me get you something to eat now.”

Julie nodded, reined in her emotions, and turned back to the papers that had been delivered that morning. Spain’s terrorist activity was relatively minor league, compared to that in the Middle East or Northern Ireland, for example. But there were sporadic outbreaks and always the chance that the U.S. presence could be the target. Scanning the local media for articles on the ETA, FRAP, and other agitators was part of her routine. Today, stories about the bombing covered the front page and spilled into the other sections. There was a lot of speculation on who was responsible, but despite earlier rumors, no one had claimed credit for the destruction.

The bombing had pushed to page five a story about a cornice from a library under renovation falling on the king’s limousine. Luckily, Juan Carlos had been inside the library making a speech. Other than that it had almost crushed the monarch’s car, Julie reflected, the accident wasn’t all that rare. Supervision of public construction under the previous regime had been all too lax, and almost every other month a part of a building came crashing to the pavement.

After thanking Paula for the hot sandwich and Coke, Julie turned quickly back to her newspaper. She didn’t really want to encourage any more sympathetic conversation about Dan, no matter how well-meaning. The subject was still too painful.