Paul Ellison smiled at his friend and pressed the button on his desk. Seconds later a white-jacketed steward came into the room.
“Yes, Mr. President?”
Paul Ellison turned to Rogers. “Coffee?”
“Sounds good.”
“Want anything with it?”
“No, thanks. Barbara wants me to watch my waistline.”
The President nodded to Henry, the steward, and he quietly left the room.
Barbara. She had surprised everyone. The gossip around Washington was that the marriage would not last out the first year. But it had been almost fifteen years now, and it was a success. Stanton Rogers had built up a prestigious law practice in-Washington, and Barbam had earned the reputation of being a gracious hostess.
Paul Ellison rose and began to pace. “My people-to-people speech seems to have caused quite an uproar. I suppose you’ve seen all the newspapers.”
“Yes,” said Stanton Rogers. “And quite candidly, Mr. President, you’re scaring the pants off a lot of people. The armed forces are against your plan, and some powerful movers and shakers would like to see it fail.”
Ellison sat down and faced his friend. “It’s not going to fail.”
The steward appeared with the coffee. “Can I get you something else, Mr. President?”
“No. That’s it, Henry. Thank you.”
The President waited until the steward had gone. “I want to talk to you about finding the right ambassador to send to Remania.”
“Right.”
“I don’t have to tell you how important this ‘is for us, Stan. I want you to get moving on it as quickly as you possibly can.”
Stanton Rogers took a sip of his coffee and rose to his feet. “I’ll get State on it right away.”
IN a little suburb of Neuilly it was two a.m. Marin Groza’s villa lay in ebon darkness, the moon nestled in a thick layer of -storm clouds. The streets were hushed at this hour, as a blackclad figure moved noiselessly through the trees toward the brick wall that surrounded the villa. Over one shoulder he carried a rope and a blanket, and in his arms he cradled a dart gun and an Uzi submachine gun with a silencer. When he reached the wall, he stopped and listened. He waited, motionless, for five minutes. Finally, satisfied, he uncoiled the nylon rope and tossed the scaling hook attached to the end of it upward. It caught on the far edge of the wall, and swiffly the man began to climb. When he reached the top of the wall, he flung the blanket across it to protect himself against the poison-tipped metal spikes embedded on top. He stopped again to listen. He reversed the hook, shifhng the rope to the inside of the wall, and slid down onto the ground. He checked the balisong at his waist, the deadly Filipino folding knife that could be flicked open or closed with one hand.
The attack dogs would be next. The intruder crouched there, waiting for them to pick up his scent. There were two Dobermans, trained to kill. But they were only the first obstacle. The grounds and the villa were filled with electronic devices and continuously monitored by television cameras. All mail and packages were received at the gatehouse and opened there by the guards. The doors of the villa were bombproof. The villa had its own water supply, and Marin Groza had a food taster. The villa was impregnable. Supposedly. The figure in black was here this night to prove that it was not.
He heard the sounds of the dogs rushing at him before he saw them. They came flying out of the darkness, charging at his throat. He aimed the dart gun and shot the one on his left first, then the one on his right, dodging out of the way of their hurtling bodies. And then there was only stillness.
The intruder knew where the sonic traps were buried in the ground, and he skirted them. He silently glided through the areas of the grounds that the television cameras did not cover, and in less than two minutes after he had gone over the wall” he was at the back door of the villa.
As he reached for the handle of the door he was caught in the sudden glare of floodlights. A voice called out, “Freeze! Drop your gun and raise your hands.”
The figure in black carefully dropped his gun and looked up. There were half a dozen men spread out on the roof, with a variety of weapons pointed at him.
The man in black growled, “What the devil took you so long? I never should have gotten this far.”
“You didn’t,” the head guard informed him. “We started tracking you before you got over the wall.”
Ley Pastemak was not mollified. “Then you should have stopped me sooner. I could have been on a suicide mission with a load of grenades. I want a meeting of the entire staff in the morning, eight o’clock sharp. The dogs have been stunned. Have someone keep an eye on them until they wake up.”
Ley Pastemak prided himself on being the best security chief in the world. He had been a pilot in the Israeli Six-Day War and after the war had become a top agent in Mossad, one of Israel’s secret services.
He would never forget the morning, two years earlier, when his colonel had called him into his office and said, “Ley, Marin Groza wants to borrow you for a few weeks.”
Mossad had a complete file on the Remanian dissident. Groza had been the leader of a popular Remanian movement to depose Alexandres Ionescu and was about to stage a coup when he was betrayed by one of his men. More than two dozen underground fighters had been executed, and Groza had barely escaped with his life. France had given him sanctuary. Then lonescu had put a price on his head. So far, half a dozen attempts to assassinate Groza had failed, but he had been wounded in the most recent attack.
“What does he want with me?” Pastemak had asked. “He has French government protection.”