Liberty Read Free Page B

task force. We have a mole in the CIA.”
    â€œJesus,” Jake muttered, shaking his head.
    â€œHis name is Richard Doyle. Don’t let him see anything with my name on it.”
    â€œWhat if we arrest him?”
    â€œThat’s up to you. As long as he doesn’t learn that I betrayed him.”
    â€œWe may use him to feed you disinformation. There’s a spy term for that, though I have forgotten it.”
    â€œRichard Doyle is a traitor,” Janos Ilin said softly. “He
signed his death warrant when he agreed to spy for the communists fifteen years ago. He’s been living on borrowed time ever since.”
    â€œFifteen years?” Jake was horrified.
    Ilin took out his thin metal case, opened it and extracted another cigarette. He played with it in his fingers. His hands, Jake noted, were steady.
    â€œFifteen years … and now he gets the chop.”
    â€œUnfortunately, Mr. Doyle must be sacrificed for a larger cause.”
    â€œWho made that decision?”
    â€œI did,” Ilin said without inflection. “A man must take responsibility for the world in which he lives. If he doesn’t, someone will do it for him, someone like bin Laden, Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao … . Murderous fanatics are always ready to purge us of our ills.” He shrugged. “I happen to believe that the planet is better off with civilization than without it. This tired old rock doesn’t need six billion starving people marooned on it.”
    â€œAnd you? Are you a traitor?”
    â€œLabel me any way you wish.” Ilin grinned savagely. “I don’t want to read about four two-hundred-kiloton nuclear explosions devastating the only superpower left in the world. Russia needs a few friends.”
    â€œWhere are the weapons now?”
    â€œI don’t know. They could be anywhere on the planet,” Ilin said, and puffed slowly and lazily. Airplanes came and went overhead. The late-winter breeze was out of the west and carried the smell of the Hudson.
    â€œWhat kind of information is the SVR getting from Doyle?”
    â€œThat’s an interesting question,” Ilin said, brightening perceptibly. “I don’t see all of the Doyle material, but one listens, makes guesses, surmises. Doyle is quite a source. Almost too good. I got the impression that his control and the Center have wondered at times if perhaps he was a double agent, yet his information has been good. From
across a surprisingly large spectrum of the intelligence world.”
    â€œHe’s getting intelligence from someone else inside our government?”
    â€œHe’s remarkably well informed.”
    â€œAny guesses where some of this other stuff is coming from?”
    â€œSomewhere in the FBI, I would imagine. Counterintelligence.”
    â€œWant to give me a sample or two?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œThe Sword of Islam,” Jake mused. “I’ve heard of them. Rumor has it they were involved with something called the Manhattan Project, but we assumed it was that.” He pointed toward the southern skyline.
    â€œThat would be a dangerous assumption,” Ilin said. “Four tactical nukes, warheads for long-range, stand-off antiship missiles. Fleet killers. Each packs roughly twenty times the yield of the weapons you used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Easily transported. If competent technicians get their hands on them, they could be used as portable bombs.”
    â€œHandy.”
    â€œQuite. I would imagine each warhead would weigh about a hundred kilos, and be, perhaps, a little larger than a soccer ball. As some wit pointed out years ago, the terrorists could disguise them as cocaine and bring them in through the Miami airport.”
    â€œAny other thoughts?”
    â€œDon’t assume that the target is America. Oh, certainly, America is the great Satan and all that, but the real target is Western civilization.”
    He smacked his hands together.