Bombshell by Max Collins (pdf ebook reader TXT) 📕

Troyanovsky got right in Harrigan’s face. “You try to shift blame at a time like this! Don’t you know what this means?”

“Not yet I don’t. Before you came in, I was starting to conduct an investigation. This is a crime scene, and I’d like you to move out into the hall. We’ll be setting up some kind of task force HQ, and—”

“Well, I know what it means!”

Harrigan raised his eyebrows; if the man had a theory, he’d like to hear it.

But all the translator had to offer was more frenzy: “It means war between our countries! And that means annihilation for us both!”

Harrigan grabbed the frantic man firmly by the forearm.

“Pull yourself together, goddamnit,” Harrigan said. “Stop and consider—maybe whoever is behind this wants us at each other’s throats!”

The translator blinked, looking somewhat embarrassed, and his composure began to return.

Harrigan took command. “We’ve got to contain this,” he said to Krueger and Troyanovsky. “The Secret Service will continue to handle the search of the grounds and this facility. I want the KGB to stay put.”

The translator’s eyes tightened. “Why would you close us out of this? It is our man who is missing…”

“I’m not at liberty to disclose everything I know, Mr. Troyanovsky … but those two dead KGB agents may have been part of an assassination conspiracy. We don’t know who, among your people, can be trusted.”

Troyanovsky brooded on that for a second, then said, “This will go down hard.”

“Too bad. Leave it at this: we already have two dead Russians; we don’t need any more… Mr. Troyanovsky, has Mrs. Khrushchev been informed?”

The translator shook his head. “She is still asleep … the children, too. How is it you say? Ignorance is bliss.”

Harrigan thrust a finger at the man’s silk-pajamaed chest. “Who among the entourage knows what’s happened?”

Troyanovsky shrugged. “Only me.”

“Fine—and we’ve got to keep it that way… If anyone asks, the premier couldn’t sleep, and is out on a moonlight stroll with his two bodyguards.”

Troyanovsky considered this for a while; finally, he nodded solemnly. “You are right. To protect the premier, we must … as you say … contain.”

“Thank you, Mr. Troyanovsky.”

A thin smile allowed itself to appear on the Russian’s handsome face. “You might be interested to know, Mr. Harrigan, that the premier has a liking for you. He respects you.”

“I appreciate that.” Harrigan found a small smile of his own. “I’m not sure I deserve it, but I appreciate it.”

Krueger, who had stepped to one side to answer a walkie-talkie call, now sidled up next to Harrigan.

“You’ve got to come with me,” Krueger told him.

“Now?” Harrigan asked irritably. “Sam, I have just a few things to do here, in light of this situation—can’t this wait?”

“No,” Krueger said, in a manner that conveyed Harrigan’s single option in the matter.

Out in the corridor, when an elevator arrived and Harrigan began to step on, Krueger fell back.

“Are you coming, Sam? I mean, it’s your party, isn’t it?”

“Not hardly,” Krueger said, planted firmly on the other side of the elevator doors. “He’ll be waiting for you in the basement.”

“Who will?”

“Company man.”

“Jesus Christ,” Harrigan muttered as the doors swooshed shut. That was all he needed—CIA intervention; or maybe his dream was about to come true, and Allen Dulles was waiting down there to transform him from goat into hero. Somehow that seemed just a little unlikely, and the rapid descent of the elevator only added to the sick feeling in his stomach.

The elevator doors slid open in the basement of the Beverly Hills Hotel to reveal a man leaning against the opposite wall smoking a cigarette in a holder, smoke curling upward in a near question mark.

Harrigan didn’t know the man—and yet he did.

Lanky, at least ten years older than Harrigan, the spook looked like a high-rent undertaker in his black Brooks Brothers suit with the crisp white button-down shirt and thin black tie, his dark Brylcreemed hair parted on the side. His eyes were china blue and almost pretty, an anomaly in a once handsome face ravaged by time and dirty jobs that somebody had had to do.

As Harrigan stepped out of the elevator, the man switched the affectation of the cigarette-in-holder to his left hand, extending his right.

“John Munson,” the man said. “Would you like to see my I.D.?”

“You show me yours,” Harrigan said, shaking the clammy hand, “and I’ll show you mine.”

They held up their respective I.D. wallets—this was no situation in which to cut corners—and Harrigan said, “I figured you guys’d be lurking around.”

“Our accommodations aren’t as nice as yours,” Munson said, taking a draw from the cigarette-in-holder, ironic amusement seemingly etched permanently in his features. He gestured and showed Harrigan the way, down a narrow hallway past doors marked LAUNDRY and HOUSEKEEPING, where the pink decor of the fabled hotel continued even in its bowels. In the narrow, windowless, claustrophobic confines of the basement, however, the color reminded Harrigan of Pepto-Bismol—some of which the queasy agent could have used about now.

The two men approached a final door, STORAGE, which Munson opened, Harrigan following him inside.

Bigger than a broom closet, though not by much, the room had walls lined with metal racks, loaded with cleaning supplies and hand tools; a few mops and brooms leaned casually against a wall, disinterested bystanders.

A card table took up the rest of the room, where sat a chubby man in white shirtsleeves and another thin black tie, headphones straddling his bald head like a bad comb-over. On the table, next to a sweating bottle of Coke and a half-eaten corned-beef on rye dripping with hot mustard, a large tape recorder whirred, in the process right now of being rewound.

“Khrushchev’s room?” Harrigan asked, gesturing toward the machine.

Munson nodded. “We put the bug in right after his people swept it.”

The combination of smoke, cleaning fluid, and corned-beef on rye was not helping Harrigan’s stomach.

“We swept it, too,” the State Department man said.

“No, the guy working for you was really working for us. He was installing devices, actually, not just checking