The Matarese Countdown (Matarese Dynasty 1)

"The old man can now go to work, " whispered Beowulf Agate to himself.

"Move, boy!"

Miniature wire prongs in his hand, Bray manipulated the lock of the side door and walked inside. The corridors were dark, the neon lights at their dimmest, gray upon gray, all muted, dull and shadowless. Bray knew he could not use an elevator, so he looked for a staircase; he found it and began climbing. The Atlantic Crown building was seventeen stories high; he had to reach the sixteenth floor.

He did so.

In an odd way, Scofield felt exhilarated. The fear was there, of course, and that was a good thing; he had been away too long and needed the brakes of caution. But he had recalled the tools of his former profession, starting with the thick crepe-soled shoes that reduced the noise of footsteps; the lock prongs; a blue penlight; a magnetized stethoscopic meter for vaults; a canister of immobilizing gas; a miniature camera; a Heckler & Koch .25-caliber automatic, silenced, of course, and a wire garrote. His hair had been cut, his beard trimmed, and he wore Army-issue combat fatigues with multiple pockets. He delighted in the fact that Frank Shields had paid for his entire outfit by requisitions without being told the truth.

"You're not to go into the field!" exploded the CIA analyst.

"We agreed to that."

"Of course I'm not, Squinty," Beowulf Agate had replied.

"You think I'm as fruit-looped as you are? I know what I can do and what I can't do even though I'm a hell of a lot younger than you."

"Barely a year and a half, Brandon. Then why all these expenditures?"

"Because the lead I've got could be the breakthrough we need over here."

"That doesn't answer my question."

"All right, I'll be up-front, but only to a point, and you'd better accept it. I hired the best rogue agent the Stasi ever had, a cold-blooded son of a bitch wanted by a few governments as well as Interpol representing a few others. He's off the books, off any and all records, with no name and no history. We've done it before, Squinty; we've got to do it again."

"What's his tariff?"

"Two thousand a day plus all expenses, and a bonus of a hundred thousand if he brings back the goods."

"It's outrageous, of course, but if what you say is true and your rogue can pull it off, I guess we can live with it. We've paid more in the past. Pick up the supply funds at the Commercial Bank of Nova Scotia, there's only one and it's in the book. Ask for a vice president named Wister, he's the finance contact. I'll authorize an initial ten thousand."

"There's a financial good side, too, Squinty. Our man says that if he buys a grave, we're off the hook. As he puts it, he hasn't got any relatives he'd leave a deutsche mark to, so the hell with it."

"He's a confident bastard, isn't he?"

"He's both. That's why he's good."

Damn, thought Scofield as he approached the fifteenth-floor landing, out of breath. He should have quoted Squinty Shields five-ten times what he had told him! His fictional Stasi agent was such an inspiration he almost believed in the man himself. There was no question about it, mused Beowulf Agate, briefly resting his legs and his lungs, the out-of sanction agreement with his brilliant German creation had to be restructured. Considerably upward. That was, if anything came from the Wichita operation, which, Scofield considered, he had better start thinking about.

Scanning the data they had gathered from the Atlantic Crown conglomerate, legally and illegally, two names kept surfacing. They were Alistair McDowell, chief executive officer, and Spiro Karastos, treasurer and chief financial officer. Their memoranda to each other, as well as to their subordinate departments, were almost robotically similar, mixing the corporate se with contemporary vernacular. Judging by analysis of isolated words and phrases, either or both could have been responsible for the instructions issued to Lieutenant Colonel Leslie Montrose, mother of the kidnapped James Montrose Jr.

It was a simple matter to learn the whereabouts of each man's office and the schedules of the night cleaning personnel. The offices were on the sixteenth floor, so near to each other that there was a connecting door, and the cleaning crews who divided up their maintenance labors generally reached the sixteenth floor between one and one-fifteen in the morning; their chores took no longer than forty minutes. It was further established that as the stairs beyond the exit doors had to be mopped and all debris removed, the doors to the floors' corridors were opened in sequence. A well-rewarded cleaning woman, convinced that her job would not be in jeopardy-quite the contrary-agreed to place a rubber doorstop on the sixteenth-floor landing. She did, a hundred dollars richer in the cause of a harmless corporate prank being played by top executives. In addition, and in the spirit of corporate conviviality, she also agreed to keep the door to Alistair McDowell's office unlocked.

The purpose? So his corporate associates could surreptitiously place two dozen Happy Birthday balloons, along with a buffet of caviar and champagne, in their colleague's office. Why not? The elderly corporate big shot, who had made the request in the parking lot, was such a nice gentleman, and dressed in one whale of an expensive suit. Pricey enough to feed her family for six months.

Beowulf Agate had retained a few of his more-persuasive talents. In other days, older days, he might have opted for less time-consuming, but riskier, preparations. However, the advancing years dictated a more carefully thought-out approach. In retrospect, he wished he had had the wisdom of such cautionary practices before. Perhaps it would have eliminated two shoulder wounds, three bullets in his legs, and a stomach puncture that took weeks to mend. So what? He couldn't spring over a five-foot fence now, either. Five feet, hell, three with luck and a sore back!

The muscles of his calves still throbbing from the climb, he shook his legs one by one rapidly, harshly, and started up the final flight. As promised, the small rubber stop kept the crash door open barely an inch, sufficient without being apparent. Again in the arrogance of satisfactory security, there were no cameras in the hallways; a team of night watchmen patrolled the corridors, checked the office doors, and clocked in with their keys at the end of each floor. Scofield reached the top step, approached the door, and pulled it back just enough to glance down the hallway. He immediately shoved it back against the rubber; a guard was walking toward him, dangling the large metal security key that he would insert into the watchman's clock at the end of the hall, only feet from the exit staircase.

Suddenly concerned, Bray crouched, removing the doorstop and painfully holding the heavy steel door by his fingertips so that barely a slit of light showed. His right hand in agony, his fingers on fire, he held his breath in an attempt to suppress the pain. At last, he heard the click of the watchman's time clock and the sound of the guard's footsteps retreating toward the elevators. He again pulled the crash door open slightly, plunged his left hand into the tiny space, and removed his right, bringing it to his mouth for warm moisture. The uniformed guard stood by an elevator; he pressed the button and the undisturbed panel instantly opened. The man disappeared and Scofield, perspiration gathering at his hairline, quickly walked into the dim hallway.

The cleaning crew had disappeared, the silence comforting. Bray rapidly made his way down the corridor, checking the nameplates and the titles on the doors.

ALISTAIR MCDOWELL CHIEF

EXECUTIVE OFFICER

It was the center door directly ahead at the far end of the hallway.

There were no similar doors on either side, signifying a suite, not a normal corporate office. Scofield reached for the glistening brass knob, hoping his rewarded cleaning lady had duplicated her service at the exit staircase. She had. Slowly Bray turned the knob and cautiously opened the door, prepared to run if an undetected alarm went off. None did, and he swiftly entered, pivoting, and closing the door as he switched on his small, powerful flashlight with the blue beam. He circled the room with it, aiming the light at the floor, then crossed to the four large windows, found the cords, and pulled the heavy drapes across the glass.

He wa

s ready to start his search.

Alistair McDowell was a family man and apparently wanted everyone to know it. Emphatically. There were at least two dozen silver-framed photographs placed about his huge polished desk and in the bookshelves between the windows. They depicted three children in varying stages of growing up, from infancy in their mother's arms to teenage status. They were seen with their parents and the accoutrements of the progressing years: cribs, baptismal robes, playpens, swings, tricycles, bicycles, tennis racquets, horses, and Comet sailboats. What was shown was a limited history of the Good Life, deserved by a God-fearing man who was proud of his family, his community, his church, and his country. The fruits of his industriousness were wealth, happiness, and stability. It was the American way; he reveled in it.

And if Beowulf Agate's suspicions were even close to the mark, one Alistair McDowell would be among the first to destroy that way of life by restricting it to a select elite, with its legions of sycophants-read slaves.

The desk drawers, two of which were locked, presented no problem for the prongs but neither did they reveal anything helpful except, perhaps, for an appointments calendar. Scofield removed his miniature camera with the 1,000-ASA film and photographed every page; it took nearly fifteen minutes. He then proceeded to examine the entire suite, starting with the unexpected bedroom beyond the right wall, the interior of the office itself, and ending with a conference room on the left, stern but elegant in its heavy simplicity. The search had uncovered several items that required intensive examination. First among them was a wall safe concealed behind a row of leather-bound legal volumes. They had caught Bray's attention, for regardless of McDowell's vaunted ability in management, he was not an attorney.

The thick tomes were there to impress his visitors, not for practical research. They were also an excellent front for a wall safe. Another discovery was a locked closet that, when manipulated open, revealed an obviously state-of-the-art computer and a curved white plastic chair, the enclosure so small only one person could sit inside. A third object was a four-tiered locked mahogany file cabinet that awkwardly stood below the painting of an old English hunting scene, as if the interior decorator had forgotten to build' it into the wall. The last entry in the reevaluation sweepstakes was the most curious: a large freestanding antique music box that was placed above a carved cherry wood cabinet, the price undoubtedly in the neighborhood of thirty thousand dollars, if not a great deal more.

What piqued his curiosity, however, were the unique contents within the locked cabinet, once again subjected to Bray's sophisticated prongs.

It was a self-contained electronic unit, but not a computer, for it was designed for a single purpose and nothing else. Beowulf Agate recognized it at once, recognized the typewriter keys and the four succeeding cylinders that rolled forward and in reverse, slowly, as if inexorably, until all were synchronized and came to a halt, its elusive problem having been solved, a cipher broken. It was a decoding unit designed around the principles of the converter that had cracked the famous Enigma, the cipher machine used by the German high command to send encrypted messages in the Second World War.

The one modern addition to this machine was obviously usurped from the computer. Instead of a printed page that emerged from the lowest platen, there was a small television screen mounted on top of the equipment. Scofield recalled his earlier days in London while working with British intelligence and how he had been fascinated by the stories about cracking Enigma. An English colleague had taken him to a branch office in Oxford where an updated version of a decoding machine was in operation, the proximity to the university for purposes of immediate scholarship and research.

"Type in the word 'aardvark,"

" the young MI-5 officer named Waters had said. Bray did so and the screen instantly printed out the words