"Damn!"
Lee Stetson stood just inside the rear door of a Metro Electric panel truck, his golden brown hair brushing the ceiling despite his hunched stance. With his hands balled into fists, he resembled a prizefighter as he glowered at the flustered young agent who had risen to deliver the bad news.
If he had only arrived thirty minutes earlier . . .
"Sorry, Scarecrow." Frank Duffy slipped a pair of headphones off his ears, allowing them to slide down until they dangled around his neck. Pulling himself stiffly to his feet, he stretched his cramped arms and shoulders as much as the small, cluttered interior of the truck allowed. "We're set up for site surveillance. We weren't told to have a tail ready until after 5 o'clock."
Struggling to rein in his temper, Lee swallowed the impulse to snap out a snide reply. He shouldn't have to remind his fellow operatives of the need to think on their feet and adjust to changing circumstances. On the other hand, chided the voice of reason, there was no point in blaming Grayson and Duffy; they had only been following orders. His orders . . . he was in charge of this investigation.
Running an agitated hand through his hair, he gave himself a mental shake. "It's not your fault, Frank, Tony. The message we intercepted instructed the courier to go straight from the airport to his designated contact point and sit tight until the meet tonight. No one expected him to break orders." He offered the other two men a wry smile. "The KGB frowns on that."
"Just our luck to get a maverick," Duffy said, his lips twisting in a dour expression that might have been an answering grin.
"Maybe he went out to lunch," suggested Grayson. The rookie had edged away, pressing his lanky frame against the opposite side of the truck, as far as possible from the frustrated senior agent. From his new vantage point, he looked from Frank to Lee, his boyish face hopeful.
Lee shook his head. "No. These places are always stocked with the basics. Even a low-level courier knows better than to risk a permanent assignment to Siberia for an American chili dog. Something's gone wrong." He closed his eyes for a moment, absently rubbing his left temple as he tried to decide on another course of action, now that their only lead had evaporated. He couldn't think of one. "Let's take it from the top. Maybe there's a clue you guys missed."
Duffy sank back down on the narrow leather seat. Reaching to a small shelf, he retrieved a spiral notebook. "Grayson and I came on duty at nine o'clock. Russert and Collins hadn't seen anything," he added, in reference to the two agents on the previous shift.
Lee nodded. Needing to move, but unable to take more than half a step without colliding with electronic equipment or human bodies, he settled for shoving his hands into his pockets and flexing his long fingers. "He probably came in on a late morning flight; that's one of the busiest times at Dulles, so he had the best chance of slipping past our security teams unnoticed."
Frank flipped open the notebook and ran a finger across the page. "Everything was quiet until 11:40. Then a cab pulled up, and this guy got out." He punched several buttons and a grainy picture appeared on one of the monitors. "We only got his profile."
Lee studied the frozen image, making a mental note to order a couple of still shots. There was always a possibility that Ernie would be able to identify him. If not, the Agency might have to resort to canvassing Dulles for days with only these indistinct surveillance photos. "What about the cab?"
Grayson took a tentative step forward, rubbing his hands together and shifting his weight nervously. "Danielson snagged it. He called in a few minutes ago. The driver checked out. This guy," he nodded toward the screen, "came straight here from the airport -- no stops, no contacts."
Repressing a sigh, Lee turned back to Duffy. "What did he do after he got out of the cab?"
"He went straight inside. He took the stairs instead of the elevator. It was clean -- we'd just swept it thirty minutes earlier. No one else was in the stairwell or the hallway. The apartment door opened and closed at," he paused to glance down at his notes, "11:44. He wasn't there very long --"
"There were no phone calls . . . no radio signals . . . no visitors?"
The air in the truck was stuffy and overheated, the temperature climbing with the midday sun. Duffy ran a handkerchief across his damp brow. "Not even a carrier pigeon. We picked up a few footsteps, but he didn't say a word, pick up the phone or go near a window.
"This doesn't make any sense," Lee growled. A bead of sweat trickled down his forehead, and he shook his damp hair out of this eyes. "Why would he leave if he wasn't contacted?"
"No idea. He opened the door again at . . ." Duffy again consulted his paperwork. "11:56. He took the elevator back down. It was clean, too, and he was the only passenger. He came out the front door and stood at the bottom of the steps for a few seconds." The older man turned his head and gestured toward a red brick building barely visible through the truck's shaded windshield. "I had binoculars on him, and I don't think he got any kind of signal. Then he headed north." He turned back to Lee and shrugged. "The sidewalk was pretty crowded; we lost sight of him before he got very far."
"Damn." Lee repeated his previous invective, glancing at the console's digital clock. The numbers "12:23" flashed at him in bright red. "Even if we brought a full team in, there's no way they could pick up the trail now. It's a total bust," he added, extracting his hands from his pockets. Curling the fingers of his left hand into a fist again, he smacked it into his right one.
"No, it's not!" The younger agent's voice was suffused with excitement as he pointed toward the middle of the surveillance team's three monitors. "He's coming back!"
Lee pivoted, planting both hands on the edge of Grayson's vacated seat as he peered at the tiny screen. Although Georgetown was teeming with the usual lunchtime crush of cars and pedestrians, it took only a split second to spot the Russian agent. The man was short and thin, clad in a drab and ill-fitting gray coat. A shabby hat of the same dull shade was pulled low across his brow, leaving only a rim of short, dark hair and his clean-shaven chin clearly visible. His shoulders were bowed, as though he were trying to make himself even smaller and more nondescript. With his head down and his hands stuffed into his pockets, he walked briskly toward the front steps of the Genessee Arms Apartments.
The three men watched in silence as their quarry started to ascend toward the glass doors of the building. To Lee's surprise, his steady pace faltered as he reached the third step. He resumed the short climb only to stop again, this time crumpling slowly to his knees and then falling backward, almost in slow motion, to the the sidewalk.
Lee jerked open the door of the surveillance van and leapt to the pavement. With only a cursory glance at traffic, he sprinted across the busy street, darting between the slow-moving vehicles. By the time he reached the opposite curb, a group of people had converged on the fallen man. Their indistinct murmuring resembled the buzz of a swarm of bees.
Muscling his way through the excited crowd, Lee quickly reached the center of the human mass. Only one person had actually rushed to the man's aid; the rest were gawking from a safer distance.
The woman who knelt beside the Russian agent had her back to Lee. Although he could see little except her tan coat and chestnut hair, there was something vaguely familiar about the slender figure.
Two long strides brought him to the woman's side. Pushing aside her bags with one foot, he reached down to grasp her elbow and pull her, none too gently, to her feet.
As she turned to face him, he felt a stab of annoyed recognition at the same moment that he felt something warm and damp oozing between his toes.
"What are you doing here?" he shouted, the frustration of the past few minutes finally boiling over.
"What do you think you're doing?" Amanda King said almost simultaneously. Her voice was shrill, and her brown eyes glared indignantly into his hazel ones. "That man needs help! And . . . oh my gosh . . . ." Her words trailed off as she stared down at Lee's feet. The cuffs of his tailored trousers had been liberally splashed with some nameless gunk, and his imported leather shoes were immersed in a pungent brown puddle. "Look what you did to my soup!"