Free Why Me? by Donald E. Westlake Page A

the KGB. And the Serbo-Croats. And it still could be the Turks. Couldn’t it, Harry?”
    Cabot nodded, more in amusement than agreement. “The Turks are still a possibility,” he said. “Remote, but possible.”
    â€œHell, Bob,” Zachary said, “there’s groups out there we haven’t even thought about yet. What about the Kurds?”
    Freedly looked astonished. “The Kurds? What’ve they got to do with the Byzantine Fire?”
    â€œThey’ve been in opposition to Turkey a long time.”
    Cabot cleared his throat. “For the last thirty years,” he gently pointed out, “the Kurds’ main revolt has been against Iran.”
    â€œWell, how about Iran?” Zachary looked around like a hungry bird. “Iran,” he repeated. “They poke their nose into just about everything in that Black Sea area. Particularly with the Shah out and the religious nuts in.”
    Freedly said, “Mac, there hasn’t been the slightest rumble from Iran. If there was, Harry would know about it.”
    â€œThat’s true,” Cabot said.
    â€œIrani insurgents, then.”
    Agreeably, Cabot said, “Another possibility, of course, though rather remote.” Seeing that Zachary was about to ring in yet another nation or band of dissidents, Cabot raised a restraining hand and said, “Still, the point has been adequately made. We are nowhere near the end of potential foreign suspects. When this unfortunate news in re Inspector Mologna arrived, however, I was just finishing my discussion of the more likely of these groups, and I’d intended to segue to another and perhaps equally important topic.”
    Zachary restrained himself with the greatest difficulty. He bubbled with undeclared Kazaks, Circassians, Uzbeks, Albanians, Lebanese, and Cypriot Maronites, all of whom made him mutely fidget and squirm at his desk, picking up pencils and paperweights, then putting them down again.
    Having bludgeoned the previous conversation to death with practiced civility, Cabot said, “Whichever of our Free World allies turns out to be responsible for this theft, if any, the fact is that just about every group we’ve mentioned, and some we haven’t discussed as yet, has become active since the theft. So far, we know of the entrance into this country in the last twenty-four hours of a Turkish Secret Police assassination team, a Greek Army counterinsurgency guerrilla squad, members of two separate Cypriot Greek nationalist movements (who may spend all their time here gunning for one another and therefore fail to become a substantive factor from our point of view), two officers of the Bulgarian External Police, a KGB operative with deep connections to the Cypriot Turk nationalist movement, and a Lebanese Christian assassin. There is also the rumored arrival via Montreal of two members of the Smyrna Schism, religious fanatics who broke away from the Russian Orthodox Church in the late seventeen hundreds and live in catacombs under Smyrna. They are rumored to favor the beheading of heretics. In addition, various embassies in Washington—the Turkish, Greek, Russian, Yugoslav, Lebanese, some others—have requested official briefings on the matter. At the UN, the British have called for—”
    â€œThe British!” Surprise unsealed Zachary’s lips. “What’ve they got to do with it?”
    â€œThe British take a proprietary interest in the entire planet,” Cabot told him. “They think of themselves as our landlords, and they have called for a United Nations fact-finding team to assist the rest of us in our investigations. They have also volunteered to lead this fact-finding team themselves.”
    â€œGood of them,” Zachary said.
    â€œBut the main problem right now,” Cabot said, “aside from the loss of the ring itself, of course, is all these foreign gunmen running around New York, hunting the ring and