Talons of the Falcon (22 page)

Mark put their bags in the bedroom wardrobe. There was only one bed, she noted, with rope stretchers and what she guessed was not an innerspring mattress.

She had to swallow a lump in her throat as she followed Mark back into the tiny living room with its fireplace wall and country furniture. The isolation in these beautiful green hills and the primitive setting held a certain fascination for her. She could imagine having come here to spend her honeymoon with this man.

“Regrets already?” he asked, joining her by the window.

She straightened her shoulders. “No. I was just thinking about what I’m going to put you through for the next few days.”

He tried to make a joke of it. “That bad?”

“You know it will be.”

Time was crucial. If there was any possible way to do it, she had to make him remember what had happened in East Germany.

The next day, somewhat recovered from the frantic departure preparations at the Aviary—as well as from their jet lag—they got down to work right after breakfast.

“If the rocks aren’t bugged, there’s no reason why we can’t talk outside,” Eden said. A sunny day was unusual for Ireland, and she felt they should take advantage of it.

“Whatever you say.” He tossed off the comment lightly, but inside he still felt that familiar tightening in his chest. He watched as Eden spread a thick wool blanket on a level spot on the grassy meadow. Although the air was cool, the sun was warming, and the fisherman’s knit sweaters and jeans from the Peregrine boutique were just the right weight.

He lay on his back, his hands behind his head. She rolled onto her stomach and looked down at him. The silver still concealed his vibrant dark hair color. But he had washed off the heavy makeup—and with it the ten years that had lined his face. Now his scars stood out again—even more so in this natural light. God, he had been through so much. And she hated to put him through any more pain. With anyone else she would have taken months, maybe even years, to work through the trauma of East Germany. They simply didn’t have that luxury. Yet she wanted to make it as easy as possible for him.

“Despite what I said, we’ll start slowly.”

She could see the relief in his eyes.

“Why don’t you tell me about that evidence? How did you get it and where is it?”

“There’s an agent in Madrid who’s helped Gordon out on more than one occasion. He’s a Russian and his code name is the Raven. Apparently he’s pretty highly placed. I think if he could have gotten the goods on this guy in Washington himself, he would have. But he has to be very careful of his moves right now, so as not to jeopardize his own position. Gordon had gotten word to him about what I was looking for, and through a contact in Berlin he gave me a pretty good lead on where to start.”

“And where was that?”

“Eden, the less you know about this, the better. Let’s just say it arrived in East Berlin in a Soviet diplomatic pouch, and a copy was smuggled out to me. I hope the guy who accepted my money lived to spend it. Double-crossing the Russians does put one at high risk.”

“But how do you know he was reliable?” Eden questioned.

“I don’t. My only choice was to trust him.”

Suddenly the warmth of the quiet Irish meadow had turned bone-chillingly cold.

“What is it?” Eden whispered tensely, watching Mark’s expression change.

He didn’t answer immediately. He hadn’t thought about any of this in months—he’d been too busy coping with Downing’s interrogations. Now his mind needed a moment to assimilate the information it had just processed. A part of the picture had just fallen into place like a missing puzzle piece.

The bomb on the plane. The disappearance of the letter he’d sent to the Falcon. Even Marshall’s presence at Pine Island to make sure he never got off that island alive. The Russians had been tipped off. The man he’d been forced to trust in Berlin must have been working both sides of a very dangerous game.

So the Russians knew all about Berlin, and they were probably waiting for him there now, as were the East Germans. Lord! He was going to have to keep Eden safe here in Ireland somehow—even if it meant tying her to the bedpost and slipping away in the middle of the night.

“What is it?” Eden repeated.

“Nothing important,” he lied.

Chapter Thirteen

M
aj. Ross Downing, who had been sitting with his chair tipped backward against the wall, let the front legs fall forward to the floor with a resounding thump. His usually immaculate desk was awash with an assortment of manila folders, some spilling their contents onto the polished wood surface. He was still playing chief of station at Pine Island, although the station’s mission had evaporated with the disappearance of Col. Mark Bradley. At the moment, he was commanding a pretty dispirited bunch of men, and he couldn’t pretend he felt much like keeping their morale up.

Nothing like this had ever happened to him before. He’d always done things by the book. Even his plans to give Bradley the RL2957 had come from someone pretty high up in Washington—he wouldn’t have taken a step like that on his own. Until now, playing it straight had paid off, but not this time. This time he’d gotten a dressing down from air force security.

Yet the reprimand wasn’t what rankled the most. This was his first failure, and since he’d found Marshall and Hubbard on the beach, he’d been trying to figure out what had gone wrong.

There were so many things that didn’t add up. Hubbard’s presence on the other side of the island, for example. He’d always had a keen sense of people’s strengths and weaknesses, and he’d written the doctor off as a wimp. He still couldn’t picture Hubbard as a spy. He couldn’t even imagine him getting involved. So what had he really been doing on that beach with a gun in his hand?

And for that matter, he couldn’t imagine Eden Sommers as a spy—although, in retrospect, there was something fishy about the way she had turned up here. Parts of her records had been sanitized before he’d gotten them. He had assumed the deletions were for clearance purposes. But after the escape, when he’d demanded and gotten the unedited version, the previous association between her and Bradley was there to read. Who had intervened? It must have been someone pretty powerful, someone he didn’t even know about.

But there were plenty of other leads to follow. Marshall for example. The way
he
had turned up here wasn’t exactly legitimate, either. Someone in Washington had pulled strings to get him the assignment. That source was now pushing Marshall’s version of the escape. Had the same person sent both Sommers and Marshall? Or were two powerful forces working against each other—with Pine Island and Mark Bradley in the middle? The possibilities were mind-boggling.

And what about Bradley himself? Downing had been told this was a national security problem involving the Orion weapons project. But was that the real issue? Over the past few days he’d made himself throw out all his carefully nurtured preconceptions about Bradley and consider his own observations.

He’d been led to believe the man was mentally ill, but Sommers had gotten through to him pretty fast—damn fast. In hindsight, he could believe Bradley was a man with something so important to conceal that he couldn’t trust anyone—least of all a ham-handed security chief named Ross Downing. Or was he just conjuring these possibilities up because he wanted to find a scapegoat for what had happened?

Damn! He’d bungled this. He hadn’t even figured out who had rewired the hair dryer. And he was a man who didn’t like to see things half done.

This time he would go with his hunches. He’d be willing to bet Bradley would end up sooner or later in Berlin, where all this had started.

Downing snapped his fingers. He had a few strings he could pull at the Pentagon himself, and there were some people in NATO who owed him, as well. He wanted to finish this, and he was determined to secure the chance to try to do it.

* * *

“M
ARK
, I
M NOT
buying that,” Eden objected.

The urgency in her voice brought him back to the Irish meadow where they were lying. He reached up to touch her hair, allowing himself a moment to comb his fingers through the newly shortened strands. He had to bury his new doubts so deeply that Eden would never find them. Yet, with her training, that wasn’t going to be easy.

“The important thing is that the information was the real McCoy.”

She studied his face. He was keeping something back. Should she go after it or press on? She made a mental note to come back to this later. “So what did you do with the evidence?”

He grinned, partly from relief that she was going to let him off the hook, and partly at the memory of his own ingenuity. “Well, you remember that I was always interested in military letters and memorabilia?”

She nodded, recalling the first time he’d invited her to see his collection. She’d thought it was a ploy. But she’d ended up being impressed with his locked cabinet full of historical letters, orders and diaries.

“While I was in Berlin, I visited some estate sales and was able to pick up the three-volume journal of General Ludendorf’s administrative aide. It was written before Ludendorf got to be supreme commander, and it would really only be of interest to a collector like me.”

She waited to find out where all this was leading. What did a World War I German diary have to do with the evidence that would uncover a mole in the Pentagon?

“I only had the project Orion specs for a few hours,” Mark continued. “The contract had to put them back before they were missed. So I photographed them and then had a lab reduce them to two microdots. One was in my briefcase. The other is still dotting an
i
in that German diary, and I’m the only one who knows what page it’s on—I hope.”

Eden still looked confused. “So where is the diary and why can’t you simply go get it?” she questioned.

He sat up and looked away toward the distant shoreline. “I couldn’t go rent a safe-deposit box in Berlin. What was I supposed to do, rent another box for the key? So I left the diaries where I knew they would be safe—with the city’s most reputable dealer in historical books and papers, Schultz and Stein. But I couldn’t sell the diaries to them and I couldn’t just deposit them there forever. So I agreed to have them auctioned off if I didn’t come back to collect them within nine months—with the proceeds going to me. That seemed like a safe enough bet at the time. I had the other copy, after all. If I didn’t make it, I had sent a letter to the Falcon telling him where to get the material. It was a double fail-safe plan. The trouble is, I didn’t make it back, and neither did the letter.”

Eden stared at the rigid line of his back. “I know what happened to you, but what about the letter?” she whispered.

He shook his head. “That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question.” He thought he knew, but he was going to keep that information to himself. Despite his careful precautions, the Russian agent he’d dealt with must have had him under twenty-four-hour surveillance—undoubtedly by several men, so he wouldn’t have known he was being followed. One of them had gotten that letter out of the mailbox right after he’d dropped it in.

They talked for the rest of the morning about Mark’s last few hours in Berlin. Now she had a much better idea of what had happened just before that plane exploded. But they still had the crucial issue of his time with Hans Erlich to deal with.

That afternoon the weather turned nasty. As the heavy rain pounded on the thatched roof, Mark made a fire and they got to work again, but the depressing weather turned out to be an omen. Though she tried to help him get in touch with the memories of his captivity, he simply couldn’t do it. She watched as he broke out in a cold sweat, his face deathly white and teeth clamped together. She knew that trying to pierce the protective shell around that time had brought back one of the terrible headaches she remembered from Pine Island.

They progressed no better the next day, or the next. In fact, it was worse. The knowledge that she was putting him through such agony tore Eden apart. She felt that one of them was going to break and she didn’t know which.

Maybe that was why every evening they ended up in each other’s arms, each seeking comfort from the other and returning it with a desperation neither could hide.

By the fourth morning, as she woke up in the double bed beside him, Eden pressed her forehead against Mark’s shoulder and knew that something radical must happen to break the intolerable stalemate. She had told the Falcon she had a plan to crack the shell around Mark’s buried experiences, but she’d known the risk it would entail. She’d tried every other way. Now she was left with this one dangerous strategy. It might well help Mark, but it could also destroy their relationship.

He stirred slightly in the warmth of the bed they shared, and she closed her eyes again, hoping he wouldn’t awaken yet. She wanted to put the reckoning hour off as long as possible.

But when his eyes opened and looked into hers, he knew without a word passing between them that things were going to be different today.

Her fingers groped for his under the covers, and they twined together. He waited for the guillotine blade to fall.

“Mark, we have to shatter the mental wall you’ve built around that Leipzig clinic, no matter what the cost.”

His fingers tightened painfully on hers.

“We’re going to have to use hypnosis.”

It was almost a relief for him to hear those words. “I can’t be hypnotized.”

She shook her head. “Not by anyone else. But while we were at the Aviary, I studied the reports on the self-hypnosis methods you learned as an interrogation protection. I think I can do the same thing to you that you did to yourself.”

“You’ll use those techniques to take me back?”

“We have to do more than that. We don’t have time to gather up fragments and piece them together. The only way you’re going to know what happened is by interacting with Erlich again.”

“But that’s impossible.”

“No. Remember, I’m talking about hypnosis. I’m going to be Erlich and you’re going to believe it.”