The Sky Is Falling

Dana began to walk along it slowly, looking at the numbers on the doors. 5BE...4BE...3BE...The door to 2BE was ajar. Dana tensed. Cautiously, she pushed the door open wider and stepped inside. The apartment was dark.

"Commissar...?" She waited. There was no answer. "Commissar Shdanoff?" A heavy silence. There was a bedroom ahead, and Dana moved toward it. "Commissar Shdanoff..."

As Dana entered the dark bedroom, she tripped over something and fell to the floor. She was lying on something soft and wet. Filled with revulsion, Dana scrambled to her feet. She felt along the wall until she found a switch. She pressed it, and the room was flooded with light. Her hands were covered with blood. On the floor lay the object she had stumbled over: Sasha Shdanoff's body. He was on his back, his chest soaked in blood, his throat slit from ear to ear.

Dana screamed. As she did, she looked at the bed and saw the bloody body of a middle-aged woman with a plastic bag tied around her head. Dana felt her flesh crawl.

Hysterical, she ran down the stairs of the apartment building.

He was standing at the window of an apartment in the building across the street, loading a thirty-shot rifle clip into an AR-7 rifle with a silencer. He was using a 3-6 powered scope, accurate up to sixty-five yards. He moved with the easy, calm grace of a professional. This was a simple job. The woman should be coming out of the building at any minute. He smiled at the thought of how she must have panicked when she found the two bloody bodies. Now it was her turn.

The door to the apartment building across the street flew open, and he carefully raised the rifle to his shoulder. Through the scope, he saw Dana's face as she ran out onto the street, frantically looking around, trying to decide which way to go. He aimed carefully to make sure she was in the exact center of the scope and gently squeezed the trigger.

At that instant, a bus stopped in front of the building, and the spray of bullets hit the top of the bus and blew part of the roof off. The sniper looked down, unbelievingly. Some of the bullets had ricocheted into the bricks of the building, but the target was unharmed. People were pouring out of the bus, screaming. He knew he had to get out of there. The woman was running down the street. Not to worry. The others would deal with her.

The streets were icy and the wind was howling, but Dana never noticed. She was in a complete panic. Two blocks away she came to a hotel and ran into the lobby.

"Telephone?" she said to the clerk behind the desk.

He looked at her bloody hands and drew back.

"Telephone!" Dana was almost screaming.

Nervously, the clerk pointed to a phone booth in a corner of the lobby. Dana hurried into it. From her purse, she took out a phone card and, with trembling fingers, telephoned the operator.

"I want to place a call to America." Her hands were shaking. Through chattering teeth, she gave the operator her card number and Roger Hudson's number and waited. After what seemed to be an eternity, Dana heard Cesar's voice.

"The Hudson residence."

"Cesar! I need to talk to Mr. Hudson." Her voice was choked.

"Miss Evans?"

"Hurry, Cesar, hurry!"

A minute later Dana heard Roger's voice. "Dana?"

"Roger!" Tears were streaming down Dana's face. "He's - he's dead. They m-murdered him and his friend."

"What? My God, Dana. I don't know what - are you hurt?"

"No...but they're trying to kill me."

"Now, listen carefully. There's an Air France plane that leaves for Washington at midnight. I'll get you a reservation on it. Make sure you're not followed to the airport. Don't take a taxi there. Go directly to the Hotel Metropol. The hotel has airport buses leaving regularly. Take one of them. Mingle with the crowds. I'll be waiting for you in Washington when you arrive. For God's sakes, watch yourself!"

"I will, Roger. Th - thank you."

Dana hung up the phone. She stood there a moment, unable to move, filled with terror. She could not get the bloody images of Shdanoff and his friend out of her mind. She took a deep breath and walked out of the booth, past the suspicious clerk, out into the freezing-cold night.

A taxi pulled up to the curb next to her, and the driver said something to her in Russian.

"Nyet,"Dana said. She began to hurry down the street. She had to go back to her hotel first.

As Roger replaced the phone, he heard Pamela come in the front door.

"Dana's telephoned twice from Moscow. She's found out why the Winthrops were murdered."

Pamela said, "Then we must take care of her right away."

"I already tried. We sent a sniper, but something went wrong."

Pamela looked at him with contempt. "You fool. Call them again. And, Roger..."

"Yes?"

"Tell them to make it look like an accident."

Chapter Twenty-Three

INRAVENHILL, a red NO TRESPASSING sign and high iron fence excluded the world from the wooded acres of the headquarters the FRA had established in England. Behind the closely guarded base, a series of satellite-tracking dishes monitored international cable and microwave communications passing through Britain. In a concrete house in the center of the compound, four men were watching a large screen.

"Beam her up, Scotty."

They watched the television picture shift away from a flat in Brighton as the satellite moved. A moment later an image of Dana came up on the large screen as she entered her room at the Soyuz Hotel.

"She's back." They watched as Dana hurriedly washed the blood off her hands and started to undress.

"Hey, here we go again." One of the men grinned.

They watched as Dana stripped.