So, you don't care if these operations succeed or fail, Popov thought. Then, why the hell do you fund them? There was no logic to this. None at all. That would have been Should have been troubling to Popov, yet it was not seriously so. He was becoming rich on these failures. He knew who was funding the operations, and had all the evidence-the cash-he needed to prove it. So, this man could not turn on him. If anything, he must fear his employee, mustn't he? Popov had contacts in the terrorist community and could as easily turn them against the man who procured the cash, couldn't he? It would be a natural fear for this man to hold, Dmitriy reflected.
Or was it? What, if anything, did this man fear? He was funding murder-well, attempted murder in the last case. He was a man of immense wealth and power, and such men feared losing those things more than they feared death. It kept coming down to the same thing, the former KGB officer told himself: What the hell was this all about? Why was he plotting the deaths of people, and asking Popov to-was he doing this to kill off the world's remaining terrorists? Did that make sense? Using Popov as a stalking horse, an agent provocateur, to draw them out and be dealt with by the various countries' highly trained counterterror teams? Dmitriy decided that he'd do a little research on his employer. It ought not to be too hard, and the New York Public Library was only two kilometers distant on Fifth Avenue.
"What sort of people were they?"
"Whom do you mean?" Popov asked.
"Dortmund and Fdrchtner," the boss clarified.
"Fools. They still believed in Marxism-Leninism. Clever in their way, intelligent in the technical sense, but their political judgment was faulty. They were unable to change when their world changed. That is dangerous. They failed to evolve, and for that they died." It wasn't much of an epitaph, Popov knew. They'd grown up studying the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and all the rest-the same people whose words Popov had studied through his youth, but even as a boy Popov had known better, and his world travels as a KGB officer had merely reinforced his distrust for the words of those nineteenth century academicians. His first flight on an American made airliner, chatting in a friendly way with the people next to him, had taught him so much. But Hans and Petra well, they'd grown up within the capitalist system. sampled all of its wares and benefits, and nevertheless decided that theirs was a system bereft of something that they needed. Perhaps in a way they'd been as he had been, Dmitriy Arkadeyevich thought, just dissatisfied wanting to be part of something better-but, no, he'd always wanted something better for himself, whereas they'd always wanted to bring others to Paradise, to lead and rule as good communists. And to reach that utopian vision, they'd been willing to walk through a sea of innocent blood. Fools. His employer, he saw, accepted his more abbreviated version of their lost lives and moved on.
"Stay in the city for a few days. I will call you when I need you."
"As you say, sir." Popov stood and left the office and caught the next elevator to street level. Once there, he decided to walk south to the library with the lions in front. The exercise might clear his head, and he still had a little thinking to do. "When I need you" could mean another mission, and soon.
"Erwin? George. How are you, my friend?"
"It has been an eventful week," Ostermann admitted. His personal physician had him on tranquilizers, which, he thought, didn't work very well. His mind still remembered the fear. Better yet, Ursel had come home, arriving even before the rescue mission, and that night-he'd gotten to bed just after four in the morning, she'd come to bed with him, just to hold him, and in her arms he'd shaken and wept from the sheer terror that he'd been able to control right up to the moment that the man Furchtner had died less than a meter to his left. There was blood and other tissue particles on his clothing. They'd had to be taken off for cleaning. Dengler had had the worst time of all, and wouldn't be at work for at least a week, the doctors said. For his part, Ostermann knew that he'd be calling that Britisher who'd come to him with the security proposal, especially after hearing the voices of his rescuers.
"Well, I can't tell you how pleased I am that you got through it okay, Erwin."
"Thank you, George," he said to the American Treasury Secretary. "Do you appreciate your bodyguards more today than last week?"
"You bet. I expect that business in that line of work will be picking up soon."
"An investment opportunity?" Ostermann asked with a forlorn chuckle.
"I didn't mean that, " Winston replied with an almost laugh. It was good to laugh about it, wasn't it?
"George?"
"Yeah?"
"They were not Austrian, not what the television and newspapers said-and they told me not to reveal this, but you can know this. They were Americans and British."
