Destroyer 035 - Last Call.pdf - po ang - Januszek66

Red Peril

"Just a minute," Stantington began.

"We may not have a minute, thanks to your bumbling," Smith said. "Did the President authorize closing

down Project Omega?"

"Not exactly," the CIA chief said.

"Weren't you aware that there is a notation in the CIA's permanent records that Project Omega can be

closed down only on the specific written authorization of the President of the United States?"

"Never mind that," Stantington replied. "Since it's been closed down, two Russian

diplomats have been killed. The Russians are blaming it on us. They say that both

assassins were on our payroll."

"That's right," said Smith. "They were." He spun around in his chair and looked out

the one-way windows. "And that's not the worst of it. The Russian premier is on the

hit list, too."

"Oh, my god," Stantington said. He slumped back in the couch. "How can we

stop it?"

Smith turned back. His face still showed no emotion.

"We can't," he said. "Once Project Omega has been set in motion, it can't be stopped."

THE DESTROYER SERIES:

CREATED,

#22

BRAIN DRAIN

THE DESTROYER

#23

CHILD'S PLAY

DEATH CHECK

#24

KING'S CURSE

CHINESE PUZZLE

#25

SWEET DREAMS

MAFIA FIX

#26

IN ENEMY HANDS

DR. QUAKE

#27

THE LAST TEMPLE

DEATH THERAPY

#28

SHIP OF DEATH

UNION BUST

#29

THE FINAL DEATH

SUMMIT CHASE

#30

MUGGER BLOOD

MURDER'S SHIELD

#31

THE HEAD MEN

#10

TERROR SQUAD

#32

KILLER

#11

KILL OR CURE

CHROMOSOMES

#12

SLAVE SAFARI

#33

VOODOO DIE

#13

ACID ROCK

#34

CHAINED REACTION

#14

JUDGMENT DAY

#35

LAST CALL

#15

MURDER WARD

#36

POWER PLAY

#16

OIL SLICK

#37

BOTTOM LINE

#17

LAST WAR DANCE

#38

BAY CITY BLAST

#18

FUNNY MONEY

#39

MISSING LINK

#19

HOLY TERROR

#40

DANGEROUS GAMES

#20

ASSASSIN'S PLAY-OFF

#41

FIRING LINE

#21

DEADLY SEEDS

#42

TIMBER LINE

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This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to

real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

DESTROYER #35: LAST CALL

form.

An original Pinnacle Books edition, published for the first time anywhere.

First printing, December 1978 Second printing, October 1980

ISBN: 0-523-41250-9

Cover illustration by Hector Garrido

Printed in the United States of America

PINNACLE BOOKS, INC.

2029 Century Park East

Los Angeles, California 90067

For Alice B. in Boston

last call

CHAPTER ONE

It would have seemed like a crime against nature if Admiral Wingate Stantington (USN Retired) had not

risen to a position of great prominence in the United States. The new head of the Central Intelligence

Agency was the sturdy, clean-faced epitome of the best of all his schools. He had gotten his character from

Annapolis, his computer efficiency from Harvard Business School, his culture from Oxford. He had been a

Rhodes scholar and a second-string ail-American halfback for the Navy.

His ice blue eyes twinkled with wit and strength, exuding a certain happy courage

that had shown America over its television screens that brains and pluck and a new broom

were now sweeping our intelligence agencies into a lean, clean top-flight group that not

only America but the whole world could be proud of.

Sixty minutes before he was to make an offhand decision that could trigger World War

III, Admiral Stantington was arguing with a man who obviously had not read the New

York Times Sunday magazine article about Stantington's ir-

resistible "he gets what he wants but always with a smile" charm.

"Shove it, Stantington," the man said. He was sitting in a hard-backed wooden chair in the middle of a

bare room in a federal detention center outside Washington, D.C. The man wore light, plastic-framed, round

eyeglasses that were too small for his face, the big sturdy round open face of an Iowa farmer.

Stantington walked in circles around the man, his tall, trim athletic body moving as

briskly as if he were on a parade ground. He wore a light blue shadow-striped suit that

accentuated his height and whose color went well with his eyes and his impeccably styled

sandy hair with the faint touch of gray distinction over each temple.

"That's not really the tack to take," Stantington said in his soft Southern accent. "A

little cooperation now might help you in the future."

The prisoner looked up at Stantington and his eyes narrowed behind the thick-lensed

glasses.

"A little cooperation?" he said. "A little cooperation? You've got thirty-five years of my

cooperation and what did I get for it? A jail sentence." He turned his face away

and crossed his arms stubbornly, covering the printed number on his chest. He wore twill

prisoner's fatigues.

Stantington walked around him again until he was in front of the prisoner and the

man could see the new CIA director's winning smile.

"That's all water under the bridge," Stantington said. "Come on. Why don't you just

tell me where it is?"

"Go to hell. You and that peckerhead you work for."

"Dammit, man. I want that key."

"Will you please tell me why a forty-nine-cent key is so important to you ?" the prisoner

asked.

"Because it is," Stantington said. He, wanted to grab the man by the throat and wring the truth out of

him. Or call in a CIA goon squad and have them apply electrodes to his testicles and shock the answer out of

him. But there was no more of that. That was the old CIA, the discredited CIA, and it was probably

knowing that the CIA had changed that made this prisoner so truculent and unreasonable.

"I threw it in a sewer so you couldn't get your manicured hands on it," the prisoner

said. "No. No, I didn't. I had a hundred copies made and I gave them away to

everybody and when you're not looking they're going to sneak into your office and go

into your private bathroom and piss in your sink."

Admiral Wingate Stantington took a deep breath and clenched his hands behind his

back.

"If that's the way you want it," he said to the prisoner. "But I just want you to know I

won't forget this. If I have anything to say about it, you can kiss your pension

goodbye. If I have anything to say about it, you'll serve out every goddamn last day of

your term. And if I have anything to say about it, people like you will never again

have anything to do with this country's intelligence apparatus."

"Go piss up a rope," the prisoner said.

Stantington walked briskly toward the door of

the bare room. His pedometer, which measured how many miles he walked each day, clicked against his

right hip. At the door, the prisoner called his name. Stantington turned around and looked back into his eyes.

"It's going to happen to you too, Stantington," the man said. "Even as dumb as you

are, you're going to try to do your best and one day they'll change the rules in the

middle of the game and your ass'll be grass, just like mine. I'll save you a spot in the

prison chow line."

And the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency smiled at Stantington, who

walked out of the room without comment, a deep sense of disquiet and irritation flooding

his mind.

Admiral Wingate Stantington brooded in the back of his limousine, all the way back to

CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, just a few miles from Washington, D.C. He had

wanted that key to the private bathroom in his office. Time magazine was coming the next

week, probably to do a cover story on him, and he had already written the lead of the

story in his mind:

Admiral Wingate Stantington, the man chosen to lead the beleagured Central

Intelligence Agency, is both brilliant and budget-minded. In case anyone doubts

that last point, when Stantington was installed in his new office last week, he found

the door to his private washroom locked. The only key, he was told, was in the

that last point, when Stantington was installed in his new office last week, he found

the door to his private washroom locked. The only key, he was told, was in the

possession of the former director of the CIA, now serving a five-year jail term.

Rather than call a locksmith and

put in a new lock ($23.65 by current Washington prices), Admiral Stantington

drove by the prison on his way to work the next day and got the key from his

predecessor. 'That's the way we're running things around here from now on,'

Stantington said when he reluctantly confirmed the story. 'A tight ship is one

that doesn't leak and that includes not leaking money,' he said."

To hell with it, Stantington thought. Time magazine would have to think of some

other lead for its story. He couldn't be expected to do everybody's job for them.

The admiral was in his office at 9 A.M. He called his secretary on the intercom and

told her to get a locksmith tout de suite and get a new lock for his bathroom door.

"And get two keys," he said. "And you keep one."

"Yes, sir," the young woman said, slightly surprised, because she hadn't thought it took

a CIA command decision to get two keys for a new lock.

When he clicked off his intercom, Stantington checked his pedometer and found that he

had already walked one and a half miles of his ten-mile daily quota. It gave him his first

warm feeling of the day.

The second warm feeling came twenty minutes later when he met with his director of operations and chief

of personnel and signed an order terminating the employment of 250 field agents and, thus, with a stroke of

the pen, accomplishing the kind of decimation of the CIA's field forces that

the Russians had lusted after for years but had always been unable to accomplish.

"Have to show them up on the Hill that we mean business," the CIA director said.

"Anything else?"

He looked at the two men. His chief of operations, a round man who sweated a lot and

had yellow teeth, said "Here's something you'll like, Admiral. It's called Project Omega

and it's ours."

"I've never heard of it. What's its function?"

"That's just it. It doesn't have any function. The biggest damned no-show job I've ever seen." The

operations director spoke in a crackly Southern accent. He was a lifelong friend of Stantington's and had

formerly headed the highway system of a Southern state. He got the CIA job, out-of a large group of other

close political friends, because he was the only one who had never been indicted for taking construction

kickbacks.

"They don't do a damn thing," the operations director said. "They sit around and

play cards and the only thing even vaguely worklike they do is make a phone call once a

day. Six agents. Nothing but one phone call a day."

Stantington was pacing the perimeter of his office, making neat 90-degree turns at each

corner.

"Who do they call?" he asked.

"Somebody's aunt, I think. A little old lady in Atlanta."

"And their budget is how much?"

"Four million nine hundred thousand. But it's not all salaries of course. Some of it gets

hard to trace."

Stantington whistled, a small sip of noise. "Four million nine hundred thousand," he said aloud. "Fire

them. Imagine if Time magazine found that one out."

"Time magazine?" said the director of operations.

"Forget it," Stantington said.

"Should I check the old lady out?"

"No, dammit. Check her out and that'll cost money. Everything around here costs money. You can't even

go to the toilet without it costing you twenty-three dollars and sixty-five cents. No. We check her out and that

pushes the cost of this Omega whatever-it-is up to five million. And that's a bad number. Nobody's going to

remember four million nine hundred thousand, but give them five million and they'll notice that. And then

they'll start, five million here and ten million there and they'll nickel and dime us to death. Let that happen

and we'll be crapping in the hallways."

The director of operations and the chief of personnel looked at each other quizzically. Neither understood

the admiral's obsession with bathrooms, but both nodded at the Omega decision. The project, whatever it

was, had no linkage to any program anywhere. The group was connected to nothing but the old lady in

Atlanta and she was nothing. Without notifying anyone, the personnel director had checked. She was nothing

and knew nothing or nobody. He had checked because he thought she might be related to the President.

Everybody in that part of the country

seemed to be. But she wasn't. It was agreed wholeheartedly. Fire them. Toss them

overboard.

At 10 a.m., the six Project Omega agents were notified that they were separated from the service as of that

minute.

None of them complained. None of them knew what he was supposed to be doing

anyway.

Admiral Wingate Stantington continued to pace around his room when the two men

left. He was composing a new lead for the Time cover story.

Between 9 and 9:20 A.M. last Tuesday morning, Admiral Wingate Stantington, the

new director of the Central Intelligence Agency, fired 256 agents, saving America's

taxpayers almost ten million dollars. It was just the start of a good day's work.

Not bad, Stantington thought. He smiled. It was just the start of a good day's work.

In a small frame house just off Paces Ferry Road on the outskirts of Atlanta, Mrs.

Amelia Sinkings stood at her kitchen sink, peeling apples with stiff arthritic fingers. She

glanced at the clock over the sink. It was 10:54 A.M. Her telephone call would come in a

minute. They came at different times each morning and she had a plastic laminated chart

that told her what time to expect the call on each day. But after twenty years of getting

the telephone calls, she had the chart memorized, so she'd put it in the closet under her

good dishes. Ten fifty-five A.M. That's when the

call would come. There was no question about it, so she turned off the faucet and dried

her hands on the ironed cotton towel she kept on a rack over the sink. She walked slowly

over to the kitchen table and sat there, waiting for the phone to ring.

She had often wondered about the men who called her. Over the years she had

gotten to recognize six separate voices. For a long time, she had tried to engage them in

conversation. But they never said anything more than "Hi, honey. All's well." And then

they hung up.

Sometimes she wondered if what she was doing was . . . well, was proper. It seemed

like very little to do for fifteen thousand a year. She had expressed this concern to the

dry little man from Washington who had recruited her almost twenty years earlier.

He had tried to reassure her. "Don't worry, Mrs. Sinkings," he had said. "What

you're doing is very, very important." It was during the atomic bomb scares of the

1950's and Mrs. Sinkings had giggled nervously and asked, "What if the Russians bomb

us ? What then,"

And the man had looked very serious and said simply, "Then everything will take care

of itself and none of us have to worry about it."

He had double-checked again with her. Her mother had lived to be ninety-five and her

father ninety-four. Both sets of grandparents had lived into their nineties.

Amelia Sinkings had been sixty when she took the job. She was almost eighty now.

She watched as the second hand finished its sweep around the clock and the time neared

10:55. She reached her hand for the telephone, anticipating the ring.

Fifty-nine seconds. Sixty. Her hand touched the telephone.

One second after 10:55. Two seconds. Three seconds.

The telephone had not rung. She waited another thirty seconds before she realized

that her hand was still on the telephone and it was beginning to ache from being held

over her head that way. She lowered her hand to the table and sat there watching the

clock.

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