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mission forthwith. You are to accompany us back to Berlin immediately."
Samurai thought of the people he'd crossed in Hamburg and Berlin, and decided
that this had been instigated out of malice to thwart him. "I'm not under
Federal Security orders," he told them. "My assignment was cleared through the
embassy. You don't give me instructions."
"Mr. Harris, I must insist. We are authorized to use whatever force may be
necessary, should you compel us to do so." More headlights had appeared at the
far end of the street: the backup squad, no doubt.
"Is that so?" Samurai said, planting his briefcase in the unresisting hands
of Rostiescki, who looked on incredulously as in rapid succession one
overcoated figured was catapulted over the wall by the gate, the second was
felled where he stood, and the third ended up tumbling heels over head in the
gutter behind the Mercedes. Before the form had stopped skidding in the snow,
Samurai yanked open the door, hauled the driver out by the collar, and sent
him sprawling with a cuff to the side of the head. He jammed Rostiescki, still
clutching the briefcase, into the rear seat and slammed the door behind him.
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Erenthaller, still in the front passenger seat, could have opened the door
and jumped. Instead he pulled his gun. But Samurai fired first as he slid into
the driver's seat, wounding Erenthaller in the side, and pushed him out the
other side with one arm as he steered the car away. Erenthaller fell in the
path of the backup car closing in from behind, causing it to brake and swerve.
By the time the driver had sorted himself out again, the Mercedes was away
along the street.
"Which way is the bridge?" Samurai yelled over his shoulder to the terrified
Rostiescki.
"Ahead, but over to the left." Samurai went in the other direction to draw
the followers away for a distance, then lost them without much trouble in some
high-speed skidding and cornering around the suburbs, ending when the police
car went out of control and fell into a canal. Then he doubled back and drove
to within a few hundred yards of the bridge, from which point he and
Rostiescki walked.
The turn of events had reinforced his decision to follow Ashling into the
FER. After all, he reasoned, he wasn't about to get any more help here in
Germany. The car would have been nice to keep, but it would have attracted too
much attention, and getting it over would need all kinds of special papers.
"I'll be going across tonight, instead of the two you were expecting,"
Samurai told Rostiescki as they approached the floodlit gate area with its
barriers and uniformed sentries.
"What about papers?"
"Would Oleg and Yuri have had papers? You said you'd fixed things."
"It costs money," Rostiescki said.
"You've already been paid by Pipeline," Samurai -reminded him. "For two. I'm
only one."
"You weren't scheduled," Rostiescki persisted, still holding out. "That's
different."
"Let's put it this way. Either I walk off the other end of this bridge
tonight. Or you never get to walk off it at all."
* * *
On the far side, Samurai hitched a ride in an oil delivery truck a few miles
to the town of Liberec, in Bohemia, one of the states that had previously
formed Czechoslovakia. The driver dropped him off a block from a hotel that
looked comfortable. After everything that had happened that day, Samurai was
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content to think simply of sleeping, and let the question of how to get
farther wait until tomorrow.
thirty-six
The Federal Security Service preferred to stay out of the public eye and
maintain low visibility in the pursuit of its varied objectives. The official
lists and guides to government departments made minimal reference to it, and
the people who ran it would have preferred not to be mentioned at all. In
keeping with this habit of professional shyness, the organization shunned the
kind of prestigious headquarters that Washington agencies usually built for
themselves to flaunt their success in having made it to the big league.
Instead, the FSS operated from an unassuming, unadvertised office block tucked
away in a side street near the tiny green rectangle of Marion Park on the
south side of town. Such unobtrusiveness symbolized a new management style. In
other times and other cultures, the organs of state had cultivated
awe-inspiring, intimidating images to impress the populace with its power and
authority. Modest, low-profile externals, by contrast, elbowed aside by
media-network skyscrapers and ever-vaster football stadiums, offered tangible
reassurance that ultimately the people's temples prevailed and they were in
charge.
Some hours after news came in of Samurai's disappearance across the Lausitzer
Neisse River, a Colonel Hautz arrived at FSS HQ to meet with Grazin. Hautz
commanded a unit of dirty-work specialists that all armies keep in the
background like the shovels at a horse show, officially -described as a
Flexible Response Team, attached to the Special Forces. Hautz knew of the
Southside project through its official relevance to the training of military
personnel. He didn't know, or need to know, about its true political purpose.
Grazin presented the Samurai episode as an aber-ration by a local scientific
group at Pearse who had gone too far, and on their own authority produced a
military prodigy that went way past all the rules, and who was now out of
control.
Grazin gestured at the sheet of computer printout -lying in front of him on
the desk. "Look at this. We've got police departments pissed from one end of
Germany to the other how he got them involved in the first place is a
mystery." Hardly true, but total candor was seldom practicable in life. "He's
hospitalized three of their federal agents. There's a police captain shot and
on the critical list, a car totaled and the crew almost drowned, and now we're
heading for a political assassination that the world will see as officially
instigated, no matter what we say. He's got to be stopped. The President
agrees. Tackle it any way you want, as long as we come out clean, with no
pointers and no mess."
Hautz nodded that he understood. It wasn't clear to him what these scientists
down at Pearse had thought they were doing. He had no doubt that others were
involved as well, and that there was more to the story than Grazin was
telling. But that wasn't Hautz's business.
"How sure are we that he's heading for Semipalatinsk?" he asked.
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Grazin pushed across a folder lying on the desk and showed the satellite
intercept from two days previously. "It's right there, in the call that NSA
picked up. His target's due to make a launch out of there on the sixth."
"Has there been any coordination with the Kazakhskij government to get the
launch port secured and have Ashling put under protective custody when he
shows up?"
Grazin snorted and tossed up a hand. "What government? It's practically
anarchy out there. I doubt if they'd have the machinery to do it. Anyhow,
Harris could still get to him first."
Hautz nodded. It was as he'd hoped: a free hand. The squad that he had in
mind would also appreciate the infor-mality and the opportunity to operate
invisibly. They were overdue for some excitement in life.
"What do we do about the target, Ashling?" Hautz asked.
"If you can bring him back without precipitating an inci-dent, then do so,"
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