Target, p.47
Target, page 47
Hannah excused herself quickly from the meeting with Muller, her arms tight against her sides. Inside her room she secured the door and then stood uncertainly in the middle of the room. Her attention gradually fixed upon her complicated radio equipment. Curiously she adjusted it to the wavelength to which it had been tuned since the arrival in the complex of Michael Bohler and Gerda Lintz. She waited and after a few seconds she heard the American operator’s voice, the alarm very obvious despite the distortion of distance. “Acknowledge,” it said. “Acknowledge.”
She spun the dial, losing the transmission, then sat down heavily on the bed only hours before he had occupied with her. Would he have done it? she wondered. At last her control went and she fell forward, sobbing.
Epilogue
Peterson had expected the tension, so he was not concerned by it. Lucille kept moving around the room, adjusting things that needed no adjustment and then going to the table, re-arranging the cutlery and the crockery. Paul tried humorous stories which he told badly in his nervousness, having to prompt responses from Beth and his mother by leading the laughing. For once Peterson would have welcomed a drink, but decided against having one. Dr. Harrap had decreed there should be wine with the meal to test Lucille’s control, but Peterson decided that was as much as he would risk.
“A family again,” he said proudly, leading them to the table.
“Until we have to go back, at six o’clock,” said Lucille.
“Next month there’ll be day releases every week.”
Peterson poured wine for himself and Paul, conscious of Lucille’s eyes watching the movement.
“Will there be lots of meals like this … all of us together?” said Beth, anxiously. She still looked very ill.
“Yes,” promised Peterson. “A lot.”
“Ever thought of trying another job?” asked Paul.
Peterson looked sharply at his son, then realized there had been no intended point to the question. “Sometimes,” he said.
“Why don’t you?” asked Beth. “There must be dozens of things you could do … there’d be a queue of people wanting you.…”
Peterson smiled at her pride in his ability. “Maybe sometime in the future, when I get fed up with what I’m doing. Not yet though.”
The phone jarred abruptly into the room and Lucille, who was the most nervous, jumped.
“Damn!” said Peterson. He got up quickly. “Excuse me,” he said.
He took the call in the study, among the unread books and photographs of old friends, immediately recognizing Jones’ voice.
“Sorry to interrupt you,” said the deputy. “I thought you’d want to know.”
“What?”
“A message from Jerusalem … from Levy.”
“Read it.”
“It says, ‘Thanks for responding as I hoped you would.’ What does it mean?”
Peterson fought against the frustration, biting his teeth into his lip. “It means I was meant to guess it,” he said bitterly. “That it wouldn’t have worked completely if I hadn’t.”
“I’m not sure I understand,” protested Jones.
“They won,” said Peterson. “In the end the bastards won completely.”
Author’s Note
The Doomsday weapon exists. Near the city of Semipalatinsk, north-east of Tashkent and not far from the Chinese border, the Russians have created their most secret scientific installation to perfect the beam weapon. The device is triggered by a controlled nuclear explosion from which giant electrical energy is generated. This is stored for several seconds, then electrons of high energy and intensity are injected into a collective accelerator which takes the pulsed stream of electrons, mixed with heavier protons, and then accelerates the protons with such velocity that a lightning bolt is created.
All three branches of the American armed forces have been working on the development of a beam weapon. The greatest progress has been made at the New Mexico laboratories at Los Alamos, where the atom bomb that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki was made. The project — code-named Sipapu — has almost reached the point where a space vehicle can be launched and a proton beam fired in outer space.
The effect of both the Russian and American weapons would be to eviscerate anything at which they were pointed.
As I indicated in the introduction, Western intelligence sources in 1981 believed that the complex was moved from the African country in which the rocket development began into Libya. Up to the time of writing, no rocket has been successfully launched. The Soviet spy satellites are still monitoring the area.
Winchester, 1981
A Biography of Brian Freemantle
Brian Freemantle (b. 1936) is one of Britain’s most prolific and accomplished authors of spy fiction. His novels have sold more than ten million copies worldwide, and have been optioned for numerous film and television adaptations.
Born in Southampton, on the southern coast of England, Freemantle began his career as a journalist. In 1975, as the foreign editor at the Daily Mail, he made headlines during the American evacuation of Saigon: As the North Vietnamese closed in on the city, Freemantle became worried about the future of the city’s orphans. He lobbied his superiors at the paper to take action, and they agreed to fund an evacuation for the children. In three days, Freemantle organized a thirty-six-hour helicopter airlift for ninety-nine children, who were transported to Britain. In a flash of dramatic inspiration, he changed nearly one hundred lives—and sold a bundle of newspapers.
Although he began writing espionage fiction in the late 1960s, he first won fame in 1977, with Charlie M. That book introduced the world to Charlie Muffin—a disheveled spy with a skill set more bureaucratic than Bond-like. The novel, which drew favorable comparisons to the work of John Le Carré, was a hit, and Freemantle began writing sequels. The sixth in the series, The Blind Run, was nominated for an Edgar Award for Best Novel. To date, Freemantle has penned fourteen titles in the Charlie Muffin series, the most recent of which is Red Star Rising (2010), which brought back the popular spy after a nine-year absence.
In addition to the stories of Charlie Muffin, Freemantle has written more than two dozen standalone novels, many of them under pseudonyms including Jonathan Evans and Andrea Hart. Freemantle’s other series include two books about Sebastian Holmes, an illegitimate son of Sherlock Holmes, and the four Cowley and Danilov books, which were written in the years after the end of the Cold War and follow an odd pair of detectives—an FBI operative and the head of Russia’s organized crime bureau.
Freemantle lives and works in London, England.
A school photograph of Brian Freemantle at age twelve.
Brian Freemantle, at age fourteen, with his mother, Violet, at the country estate of a family acquaintance, Major Mears.
Freemantle’s parents, Harold and Violet Freemantle, at the country estate of Major Mears.
Brian Freemantle and his wife, Maureen, on their wedding day. They were married on December 8, 1956, in Southampton, where both were born and spent their childhoods. Although they attended the same schools, they did not meet until after they had both left Southampton.
Brian Freemantle (right) with photographer Bob Lowry in 1959. Freemantle and Lowry opened a branch office of the Bristol Evening World together in Trowbridge, in Wiltshire, England.
A bearded Freemantle with his wife, Maureen, circa 1971. He grew the beard for an undercover newspaper assignment in what was then known as Czechoslovakia.
Freemantle (left) with Lady and Sir David English, the editors of the Daily Mail, on Freemantle’s fiftieth birthday. Freemantle was foreign editor of the Daily Mail, and with the backing of Sir David and the newspaper, he organized the airlift rescue of nearly one hundred Vietnamese orphans from Saigon in 1975.
Freemantle working on a novel before beginning his daily newspaper assignments. His wife, Maureen, looks over his shoulder.
Brian Freemantle says good-bye to Fleet Street and the Daily Mail to take up a fulltime career as a writer in 1975. The editor’s office was turned into a replica of a railway carriage to represent the fact that Freemantle had written eight books while commuting—when he wasn’t abroad as a foreign correspondent.
Many of the staff secretaries are dressed as Vietnamese hostesses to commemorate the many tours Freemantle carried out in Vietnam.
The Freemantle family on the grounds of the Winchester Cathedral in 1988. Back row: wife Maureen; eldest daughter, Victoria; and mother-in-law, Alice Tipney, a widow who lived with the Freemantle family for a total of forty-eight years until her death. Second row: middle daughter, Emma; granddaughter, Harriet; Freemantle; and third daughter, Charlotte.
Freemantle in 1999, in the Outer Close outside Winchester Cathedral. For thirty years, he lived with his family in the basement library of a fourteenth-century house with a tunnel connecting it to the cathedral. Priests used this tunnel to escape persecution during the English Reformation.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 1980 by Jonathan Evans
cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa
This edition published in 2011 by Open Road Integrated Media
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Brian Freemantle, Target
