Curtain of Death (Clandestine Operations 3)

Mannberg had just put the enormous brass key to the door when Charley Spurgeon pulled the door open from the inside. His Ike jacket was unbuttoned, revealing a Colt .45 automatic in a shoulder holster. Colonel Carl Wassermann was sitting on a couch before a coffee table on which sat a U.S. Army backpack shortwave radio.

“Welcome home,” Spurgeon greeted them. “How was dinner?”

Mannberg and Cronley ignored him.

“She just happened to be there,” Mannberg said to Cronley.

“Or Serov or Dragomirov sent her to make sure we got safely home.”

“Or Serov or Dragomirov sent her, and somebody to watch her, to see how we reacted when we saw her,” Mannberg said.

“Yeah,” Cronley said. “How surprised do you think we looked?”

Mannberg shrugged.

“How did it go?” Wassermann asked. “And who is ‘her’?”

Mannberg handed him the photographs of the NKGB identity documents and Colonel Mattingly.

“Jesus, they really worked him over, didn’t they?” Wassermann said.

“Serov said he showed a ‘frankly admirable reluctance’ to accept their hospitality,” Cronley said.

“What’s with the identity documents?” Wassermann asked.

“Three of them are of the people Sergeant Colbert blew away in the back of an ambulance when they tried to kidnap her. Serov wants us to see that they get a proper Christian burial, complete with a Russian Orthodox priest and their names on a proper Russian Orthodox tombstone.”

“What’s that all about?”

“I don’t know,” Cronley said. “But, as one Christian to another, I said I’d do it.”

“There’s four documents.”

“Colbert missed Major of State Security Venedikt Ulyanov in the ambulance. We’ve got him in the chapel at Kloster Grünau. We call him Lazarus.”

“And Serov wants him back?”

“He suspects—knows—we have one of the four, but he doesn’t know which one. He wants, obviously, whomever we have back, but what he really wants in exchange for Mattingly is Likharev. Likharev and his family. I think he thinks Lazarus is expendable.”

“And?”

“We have been ordered to have the Likharevs on some bridge in Berlin . . .”

“The Glienicke Bridge, between Potsdam and Wannsee,” Mannberg furnished.

“. . . at oh-nine-hundred on thirteen February, when the exchange will take place. In the meantime, Mattingly will be shown to us every day to show us he’s still alive.”

“You’re going to make the exchange?” Wassermann asked softly.

“Over, maybe literally, my dead body,” Cronley said. “That exchange would take a direct order personally from President Truman. And if that order comes, he’s going to have to send someone else to the bridge. I’ll have nothing to do with turning Likharev or his wife and kids over to those sonsofbitches.”

“A direct order is a direct order,” Wassermann argued softly.

“And I knew that sooner or later I would have no choice but to disobey one,” Cronley said.

There was a long moment’s silence.

Wassermann finally broke it.