by Tom Clancy
The corridors were mainly empty. Marines patrolled them, looking very serious indeed after the problems that had occurred earlier, but there was little evidence of activity on this Saturday morning. Jack walked to the proper door and knocked. He knew it was locked.
“You’re Ryan?”
“That’s right.” The door opened to admit him, then was closed and relocked.
“Grab a seat.” His name was Tony Candela. “What gives?”
“We have an op laid on.”
“News to me—you’re not operations, you’re intelligence,” Candela objected.
“Yeah, well, Ivan knows that, too. This one’s going to be a little strange.” Ryan explained for five minutes.
“‘A little strange,’ you say?” Candela rolled his eyes.
“I need a keeper for part of it. I need some phone numbers I can call, and I may need wheels that’ll be there when required.”
“This could cost me some assets.”
“We know that.”
“Of course, if it works ...”
“Right. We can put some real muscle on this one.”
“The Foleys know about this?”
“’Fraid not.”
“Too bad, Mary Pat would have loved it. She’s the cowboy. Ed’s more the button-down-collar type. So, you expect him to bite Monday or Tuesday night?”
“That’s the plan.”
“Let me tell you something about plans,” Candela said.
They were letting him sleep. The doctors had warned him again, Vatutin growled. How was he supposed to accomplish anything when they kept—
“There’s that name again,” the man with the headphones said tiredly. “Romanov. If he must talk in his sleep, why can’t he confess ... ?”
“Perhaps he’s talking with the Czar’s ghost,” another officer joked. Vatutin’s head came up.
“Or perhaps someone else’s.” The Colonel shook his head. He’d been at the point of dozing himself. Romanov, though the name of the defunct royal family of the Russian Empire, was not an uncommon one—even a Politburo member had had it. “Where’s his file?”
“Here.” The joker pulled open a drawer and handed it over. The file weighed six kilograms, and came in several different sections. Vatutin had committed most of it to memory, but had concentrated on the last two parts. This time he opened the first section.
“Romanov,” he breathed to himself. “Where have I seen that ... ?” It took him fifteen minutes, flipping through the frayed pages as speedily as he dared.
“I have it!” It was a citation, scrawled in pencil. “Corporal A. I. Romanov, killed in action 6 October 1941, ‘... defiantly placed his tank between the enemy and his disabled troop commander’s, allowing the commander to withdraw his wounded crew ...’ Yes! This one’s in a book I read as a child. Misha got his crew on the back deck of a different tank, jumped inside, and personally killed the tank that got Romanov’s. He’d saved Misha’s life and was posthumously awarded the Red Banner—” Vatutin stopped. He was calling the subject Misha, he realized.
“Almost fifty years ago?”
“They were comrades. This Romanov fellow had been part of Filitov’s own tank crew through the first few months. Well, he was a hero. He died for the Motherland, saving the life of his officer,” Vatutin observed. And Misha still talks to him...
I have you now, Filitov.
“Shall we wake him up and—”
“Where’s the doctor?” Vatutin asked.
It turned out that he was about to leave for home and was not overly pleased to be recalled. But he didn’t have the rank to play power games with Colonel Vatutin.
“How should we handle it?” Vatutin asked after outlining his thoughts.
“He should be weary but wide awake. That is easily done.”
“So we should wake him up now and—”
“No.” The doctor shook his head. “Not in REM sleep—”
“What?”
“Rapid Eye Movement sleep—that’s what it’s called when the patient is dreaming. You can always tell if the subject is in a dream by the eye movement, whether he talks or not.”
“But we can’t see that from here,” another officer objected.
“Yes, perhaps we should redesign the observation system,” the doctor mused. “But that doesn’t matter too much. During REM sleep the body is effectively paralyzed. You’ll notice that he’s not moving now, correct? The mind does that to prevent injury to the body. When he starts moving again, the dream is over.”
“How long?” Vatutin asked. “We don’t want him to get too rested.”
“Depends on the subject, but I would not be overly concerned. Have the turnkey get a breakfast ready for him, and as soon as he starts moving, wake him up and feed him.”
“Of course.” Vatutin smiled.
“Then we just keep him awake ... oh, eight hours or so more. Yes, that should do it. Is it enough time for you?”
“Easily,” Vatutin said with more confidence than he should have. He stood and checked his watch. The Colonel of “Two” called the Center and gave a few orders. His system, too, cried out for sleep. But for him there was a comfortable bed. He wanted to have all of his cleverness when the time came. The Colonel undressed fastidiously, calling for an orderly to polish his boots and press his uniform while he slept. He was tired enough that he didn’t even feel the need for a drink. “I have you now,” he murmured as he faded into sleep.
“G‘night, Bea,” Candi called from the door as her friend opened up her car. Taussig turned one last time and waved before getting in. Candi and the Geek couldn’t have seen the way she stabbed the key into the ignition. She drove only half a block, turning a corner before pulling to the curb and staring at the night.
They’re doing it already, she thought. All the way through dinner, the way he looked at her—the way she looked at him! Already those wimpy little hands are fumbling with the buttons on her blouse ...
She lit a cigarette and leaned back, picturing it while her stomach tightened into a rigid, acid-filled ball. Zit-face and Candi. She’d endured three hours of it. Candi’s usual beautifully prepared dinner. For twenty minutes while the finishing touches had been under way, she’d been stuck in the living room with him, listening to his idiot jokes, having to smile back at him. It was clear enough that Alan didn’t like her either, but because she was Candi’s friend he’d felt obligated to be nice to her, nice to poor Bea, who was heading toward old-maidhood, or whatever they called it now—she’d seen it in his stupid eyes. To be patronized by him was bad enough, but to be pitied ...
And now he was touching her, kissing her, listening to her murmurs, whispering his stupid, disgusting endearments—and Candi liked it! How was that possible?
Candace was more than just pretty, Taussig knew. She was a free spirit. She had a discoverer’s mind mated to a warm, sensitive soul. She had real feelings. She was so wonderfully feminine, with the kind of beauty that begins at the heart and radiates out through a perfect smile.
But now she’s giving herself to that thing! He’s probably doing it already. That geek doesn’t have the first idea of taking his time and showing real love and sensitivity. I bet he just does it, drooling and giggling like some punk fifteen-year-old football jock. How can she!
“Oh, Candace.” Bea’s voice broke. She was swept with nausea, and had to fight to control herself. She succeeded, and sat alone in her car for twenty minutes of silent tears before she managed to drive on.
“What do you make of that?”
“I think she’s a lesbian,” Agent Jennings said after a moment.
“Nothing like that in her file, Peggy,” Will Perkins observed.
“The way she looks at Dr. Long, the way she acts around Gregory ... that’s my gut feeling.”
“But—”
“Yeah, but what the hell can we do about that?” Margaret Jennings noted as she drove away. She toyed briefly with the idea of going after Taussig, but the day had been lo
ng enough already. “No evidence, and if we got it, and acted on it, there’d be hell to pay.”
“You suppose the three of them ... ?”
“Will, you’ve been reading those magazines again.” Jennings laughed, breaking the spell for a moment. Perkins was a Mormon, and had never been seen to touch pornographic material. “Those two are so much in love they don’t have the first idea of what’s going on around them—except work. I bet their pillow talk is classified. What’s happening, Will, is that Taussig is being cut out of her friend’s life and she’s unhappy about it. Tough.”
“So how do we write this one up?”
“Zip. A whole lot of nothing.” Their assignment for the evening had been to follow up a report that strange cars were occasionally seen at the Gregory-Long residence. It had probably originated, Agent Jennings thought, from a local prude who didn’t like the idea of the two young people living together without the appropriate paperwork. She was a little old-fashioned about that herself, but it didn’t make either one of them a security risk. On the other hand—
“I think we ought to check out Taussig next.”
“She lives alone.”
“I’m sure.” It would take time to look at every senior staffer at Tea Clipper, but you couldn’t rush this kind of investigation.
“You shouldn’t have come here,” Tania observed at once. Bisyarina’s face didn’t show her rage. She took Taussig’s hand and brought her inside.
“Ann, it’s just so awful!”
“Come sit down. Were you followed?” Idiot! Pervert! She’d just gotten out of the shower, and was dressed in a bathrobe, with a towel over her hair.
“No, I watched all the way.”
Sure, Bisyarina thought. She would have been surprised to learn that it was true. Despite the lax security at Tea Clipper—it allowed someone like this inside!—her agent had broken every rule there was in coming here.
“You cannot stay long.”
“I know.” She blew her nose. “They’ve about finished the first draft of the new program. The Geek has cut it down by eighty thousand lines of code—taking out all that AI stuff really made a difference. You know, I think he has the new stuff memorized—I know, I know, that’s impossible, even for that.”
“When will you be able—”
“I don’t know.” Taussig smiled for a second. “You ought to have him working for you. I think he’s the only one who really understands the whole program—I mean, the whole project.”
Unfortunately all we have is you, Bisyarina didn’t say. What she did was very hard. She reached out and took Taussig’s hand.
The tears started again. Beatrice nearly leaped into Tania’s arms. The Russian officer held her close, trying to feel sympathy for her agent. There had been many lessons at the KGB school, all of them intended to help her in handling agents. You had to have a mixture of sympathy and discipline. You had to treat them like spoiled children, mixing favors and scoldings to make them perform. And Agent Livia was more important than most.
It was still hard to turn her face toward the head on her shoulder and kiss the cheek that was salty with tears both old and new. Bisyarina breathed easier at the realization that she needed go no further than this. She’d never yet needed to go further, but lived in fear that “Livia” would one day demand it of her—certainly it would happen if she ever realized that her intended lover had not the slightest interest in her advances. Bisyarina marveled at that. Beatrice Taussig was brilliant in her way, certainly brighter than the KGB officer who “ran” her, but she knew so little about people. The crowning irony was that she was very much like that Alan Gregory man she so detested. Prettier, more sophisticated though Taussig was, she lacked the capacity to reach out when she needed to. Gregory had probably done it only once in his life, and that was the difference between him and her. He had gotten there first because Beatrice had lacked the courage. It was just as well, Bisyarina knew. The rejection would have destroyed her.
Bisyarina wondered what Gregory was really like. Probably another academic—what was it the English called them? Boffins. A brilliant boffin—well, everyone attached to Tea Clipper was brilliant in one way or another. That frightened her. In her way, Beatrice was proud of the program, though she deemed it a threat to world peace, a point on which Bisyarina agreed. Gregory was a boffin who wanted to change the world. Bisyarina understood the motivation. She wanted to change it, too. Just in a different way. Gregory and Tea Clipper were a threat to that. She didn’t hate the man. If anything, she thought, she’d probably like him. But personal likes and dislikes had absolutely nothing to do with the business of intelligence.
“Feel better?” she asked when the tears stopped.
“I have to leave.”
“Are you sure you’re all right?”
“Yes. I don’t know when I’ll be able to—”
“I understand.” Tania walked her to the door. At least she’d had the good sense to park her car on a different block, “Ann” noticed. She waited, holding the door cracked open, to hear the distinctive sound of the sports car. After closing the door, she looked at her hands and went back to the bathroom to wash them.
Night came early in Moscow, the sun hidden by clouds that were starting to shed their load of snow. The delegation assembled in the embassy’s foyer and filed off into their assigned cars for the arrival dinner. Ryan was in car number three—a slight promotion from the last trip, he noted wryly. Once the procession started moving, he remembered a driver’s remark from the last time, that Moscow had street names mainly to identify the pothole collections. The car jolted its way east through the city’s largely empty streets. They crossed the river right at the Kremlin, and motored past Gorkiy Park. He could see that the place was gaily lit, with people ice-skating in the falling snow. It was nice to see real people having real fun. Even Moscow was a city, he reminded himself, full of ordinary people living fairly ordinary lives. It was a fact too easy to forget when your job forced you to concentrate on a narrow group of enemies.
The car turned off October Square, and after an intricate maneuver, pulled up to the Academy of Sciences Hotel. It was a quasi-modern building that in America might have been taken for an office block. A forlorn string of birch trees sat between the gray concrete wall and the street, their bare, lifeless branches reaching into the speckled sky. Ryan shook his head. Given a few hours of snowfall, and it might actually be a beautiful scene. The temperature was zero or so—Ryan thought in Fahrenheit, not Celsius—and the wind almost calm. Perfect conditions for snow. He could feel the air heavy and cold around him as he walked into the hotel’s main entrance.
Like most Russian buildings, it was overheated. Jack removed his overcoat and handed it over to an attendant. The Soviet delegation was already lined up to greet their American counterparts, and the Americans shuffled down the rank of Soviets, ending at a table of drinks of which everyone partook. There would be ninety minutes of drinking and socializing before the actual dinner. Welcome to Moscow. Ryan approved of the plan. Enough alcohol could make any meal seem a feast, and he’d yet to experience a Russian meal that rose above the ordinary. The room was barely lit, allowing everyone to watch the falling snow through the large plate-glass windows.
“Hello again, Dr. Ryan,” a familiar voice said.
“Sergey Nikolayevich, I hope you are not driving tonight,” Jack said, gesturing with his wineglass to Golovko’s vodka. His cheeks were already florid, his blue eyes sparkling with alcoholic mirth.
“Did you enjoy the flight in last night?” the GRU Colonel asked. He laughed merrily before Ryan could reply. “You still fear flying?”
“No, it’s hitting the ground that worries me.” Jack grinned. He had always been able to laugh at his own pet fear.
“Ah, yes, your back injury from the helicopter crash. One can sympathize.”
Ryan waved at the window. “How much snow are we supposed to get tonight?”
“Perhaps half a meter, perhaps more. Not a
very large storm, but tomorrow the air will be fresh and clear, and the city will sparkle with a clean blanket of white.” Golovko was almost poetic in his description.
Already he’s drunk, Ryan told himself. Well, tonight was supposed to be a social occasion, nothing more, and the Russians could be hospitable as hell when they wanted to be. Though one man was experiencing something very different, Jack reminded himself.
“Your family is well?” Golovko asked within earshot of another American delegate.
“Yes, thank you. Yours?”
Golovko gestured for Ryan to follow him over to the drink table. The waiters hadn’t come out yet. The intelligence officer selected another glass of clear liquor. “Yes, they are all well.” He smiled broadly. Sergey was the very image of Russian good fellowship. His face didn’t change a whit as he spoke his next sentence: “I understand that you want to meet Chairman Gerasimov.”
Jesus! Jack’s expression froze in place; his heart skipped a beat or two. “Really? How did you ever get that idea?”
“I’m not GRU, Ryan, not really. My original assignment was in Third Directorate, but I have since moved on to other things,” he explained before laughing again. This laugh was genuine. He’d just invalidated CIA’s file on himself—and, he could see, Ryan’s own observation. His hand reached out to pat Ryan on the upper arm. “I will leave you now. In five minutes you will walk through the door behind you and to the left as though looking for the men’s room. After that, you will follow instructions. Understood?” He patted Ryan’s arm again.
“Yes.”
“I will not see you again tonight.” They shook hands and Golovko moved off.
“Oh, shit,” Ryan whispered to himself. A troupe of violins came into the reception room. There must have been ten or fifteen of them, playing gypsy airs as they circulated about. They must have practiced hard, Jack thought, to play in perfect synchronization despite the dark room and their own random meanderings. Their movement and the relative darkness would make it hard to pick out individuals during the reception. It was a clever, professional touch aimed at making it easier for Jack to slip away.
