Satori - Don Winslow [65]
Winifred was the new love of his life, in fact, a new lease on life itself, the very renewal of his youth.
Lost in this reverie, he didn’t notice the three men come in. One stepped around him toward the elevator, the other went to check his mail at the boxes along the opposite wall. The third barred the doorway.
“Excuse me,” Guibert said.
He felt a forearm come around his throat and a cloth held against his face.
53
HAVERFORD SAT in the “situation room” in the Tokyo station and finished his coded cable to Singleton in Langley.
ALL IN PLACE. + 6 HRS. ADVISE PROCEED OR ABORT.
Part of him still hoped that Singleton would call the whole thing off. It was so risky from so many angles. Fail or succeed, Hel could be captured. If captured, he might talk. If he talked, Kang would quickly wrap up the whole Beijing network, from the White Pagoda to St. Michael’s to the Muslims in Xuanwu. Liu could be terminally weakened and China forced even deeper into the Soviet orbit.
“Great rewards demand great risks,” Singleton had said.
Fine, Haverford thought.
In fact, everything was in place.
The extraction team was embedded in the mosque, its leader had successfully been infiltrated into the country. A string of “sleeper alerts” about a Chinese attempt on Voroshenin’s life had been successfully planted into the Soviet intelligence services through double agents and would be triggered after his assassination. A similar string — indicating that the killing was a disinformation plot by the Soviets and laying the blame on an apparatchik named Leotov — had been laid with the Chinese.
As for the assassination itself, Hel had done a brilliant job of luring Voroshenin onto the killing ground. Hel was fully briefed on the site, the opportune moment of the opera, and his “escape route.”
Haverford looked at his watch, a graduation gift from his old man. Five hours and fifty minutes until the opera commenced. An hour or so after that, the termination.
The train was in motion.
Nothing could stop it now, unless Hel backed out — which he wouldn’t — or Singleton called it off, which was unlikely.
Still, Haverford hoped he would and sat waiting for the “abort” cable.
54
VOROSHENIN SAT by the phone.
The damn thing was quiescent and the clock not his friend. Barely three hours now until his appointment with Hel.
The more he thought about it, the more convinced he was that “Guibert” was Hel and the more concerned he became that whatever Hel’s assignment with the Americans, he had really come on a mission of vengeance.
If this were Russia or one of the Eastern European satellites, he would simply have the young man killed. Or if it were a city in Western Europe, he could arrange for his quiet disappearance. Even in China, just a few years ago, a few coins and a whisper in the right ear and the young Hel would be fish food by now.
But not in China these days. Even with the Soviets’ enormous influence, Beijing wouldn’t easily tolerate an unsanctioned killing on its territory. There would be an incident, and an incident could very well send him back to a cell in Lubyanka.
Better there than dead, though, he thought, fingering the pistol he had slipped into his belt that morning before leaving his quarters. If it is Hel, and if he does intend to kill me for some fancied transgression against his slut of a mother, I do not have to play the sacrificial lamb.
They say he killed that Jappo general with a single strike to the throat.
Well, let him try.
I have three bodyguards, all trained in judo, all armed. And if somehow he gets through them … Voroshenin touched the gun butt again and felt reassured.
But why is my hand shaking? He took another sip of vodka. When this is over I shall have to do something about the drinking, he thought. Perhaps go off to one of those spas in the mountains. Clean air, exercise, and all that.
Hopefully it won’t come to my shooting Hel, he thought. Hopefully they will have picked up the elder Guibert, sweated him, and made him admit