Skywatcher

by Winona Kent

  “Did you find anything of interest to spies?”

  “Yes. I found some film. In the head. We took it down to this darkroom—Anthony and me—and got it developed. Lo and behold—microfilm.”

  “Interesting,” said Evan, nodding. “What was on it?”

  “Something very Russian-looking.”

  “And you think these two characters who are following you have something to do with the film you found?”

  “All I know is, the day after that woman died, there they were.”

  Evan turned the robot around, examining the makeshift job his son had done at putting it back together again.

  “Have they done anything besides follow you? Come up to you on the street? Tried to talk to you?”

  Robin shook his head. “I don’t think they’re absolutely certain I have it.” He checked the rearview mirror. “Although they do look fairly anxious.”

  Evan peered through the back window at the Buick and its two occupants. “And you have no idea who they are?” he said again.

  “Absolutely none. I mean, it’s possible they’re Russians, isn’t it? That only makes sense. Russian microfilm—Russian secret agents.”

  Evan turned around and faced front again. Riding backwards made him ill. “I’m having second thoughts about catching a lift with you, Robin. I’m likely to be run off the road and accused of being a spy.”

  “A role you should be able to handle with great skill,” his son replied, grinning. “Don’t worry—if they attack us I’ll let them have the robot. I don’t care. I even left the door unlocked for them at the airport but they were too dense to check it out.”

  Evan put the robot in the glove compartment. “Have you been to the police?”

  Robin shook his head. “Not yet.”

  “And the film?”

  “It’s back where I found it, safe and sound.” He switched lanes and joined the steady line of cars sweeping up and over Arthur Laing Bridge into Vancouver. “What would you do, Evan? Give me your informed opinion.”

  Evan thought for a moment. “Well,” he said, carefully, “there was always that picture I did right after Spy Squad was canceled. Remember? I was the fellow who trailed the hero around Switzerland for a day before being dispatched headfirst into a bucket of goat’s milk.”

  Robin loved the way his father expected him to have firsthand knowledge of every movie and TV show he’d ever appeared in.

  “Can’t say I’m familiar with it, Evan,” he said, bravely. “Did the plot involve a toy robot with a cache of secret documents inside?”

  “No, although the props people did develop an interesting variety of other gadgets—a flame-throwing toothbrush, a two-way radio disguised as a bottle of indigestion tablets—”

  Hide the Tums from Anthony, Robin thought. “And?”

  “There was an incident in the story involving a totally innocent bystander who, quite by accident, came to possess an item of highly sensitive information. He faced a quandary much like yours—to go to the authorities, or to wait.”

  “What did he do?”

  “I don’t know,” Evan replied. “He was kidnapped by the villains before he had a chance to do anything, really.”

  “You’ve been a great help,” Robin said. “Thank you very much.”

  “Would you consider having lunch with me?”

  It was an impulsive suggestion on Evan’s part, and he wasn’t sure he could actually manage the time. On top of which, they’d already served him a perfectly good meal on the business flight from Toronto. But the rain was making him feel depressed. He felt the need to retreat behind stone walls, to pull up the drawbridge, to light a fire in the hearth and disappear for a few years. Lacking a castle with a moat in the Chilterns, lunch with his youngest son would suffice.

  “Sure.” Robin shrugged. He’d been able to lose the Buick again—this time by deking around the concrete barricades that blocked off alternate streets in the West End—and was feeling quite pleased with himself. He dropped his father off at the entrance to the Haverstock Hotel and sped around the corner to park.

  Evan checked in and gave a bellboy a couple of dollars to take his bags up to the suite that was going to be his home for the next six weeks. Accommodation here wasn’t so much luxury living as it was fundamental comfort: there would be a large room with a tiny kitchen and a serviceable balcony. He wandered over to a lobby armchair beside a potted palm and sat down with one eye on the tinted picture windows that overlooked the street.

  Blockbuster was going to be a nice change. For some reason, he had lately developed a reputation for playing nut cases. He supposed it was his own fault for accepting too many scripts that set him up as an immigrant from The Twilight Zone. Well. Four pictures did not in themselves constitute a trend. Four pictures out of…how many? He couldn’t recall, offhand. There was a list somewhere that the Spy Squad people in New Hampshire had compiled by issuing a clubwide appeal.

  Four pictures out of a good many, anyway, plus the three series on television and all that guest work in the States. In this film he was only a car thief. A nice car thief, too. George Castelluco, a small-time crook with a heart of gold. No mental deviant. No mental giant, either, but at least he didn’t have to stagger around the set looking like Jack Nicholson after his lobotomy in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

  He leaned forward slightly as a dark blue car pulled up in front of the hotel. False alarm: it was somebody’s Cadillac Seville. And there was Robin, arriving from the opposite direction.

  Someone climbed out of the Seville, exchanged a few words with the driver, and sauntered into the lobby. With a sinking feeling, Robin recognized his older brother: Mr. Success, in a three-piece suit, hair thoughtfully sprayed with cement, shoes perfectly shined. Arriving in style from the big lunch. The Seville drove away, while Ian, in a much-practiced gesture of humanity and hard-nosed business finesse, shook his father’s hand.

  “How are you?” he said. “Have a good trip in?”

  “Fine. Yes.” Evan stared at his oldest son with a mixture of curiosity and humor. He’d better keep these two separated if he wanted a peaceful meal.

  Robin sat on the far side of the table, waiting for Ian to finish showing his father a picture of the year-old black BMW he was thinking of buying.

  “This was the entire purpose of your very important lunch?” he inquired. “A used car?”

  “It was either lunch this afternoon,” Ian said, “or a five-mile jog around the seawall before breakfast. He’s a difficult fellow to get hold of.” He checked his watch. It was new—a birthday present from his girlfriend, Robin remembered, a yuppette who shed fake fingernails like lint and whose ultimate ambition was to own a time-share on Maui.

  “Perhaps,” Robin suggested, “you should consider buying a truck.”

  Ian looked at him.

  “Think of it. A Kenworth. Forty-inch sleeper, rebuilt three-fifty Cummins ten-speed, air ride, eleven new tires—”

  “Excuse me, but bearing in mind what you currently call a car—”

  “You bought it for me,” Robin reminded him, pouring himself a beer.

  Evan studied one son, then the other. He found it interesting how they interacted—how the pecking order rose to the forefront in the presence of a catalyst. Ian was the most like himself: emotionally calm, a watcher. Anthony’s solution to everything was to plunge in with both feet and see how many waves he could generate. Robin was cautious—except when it came to his relationship with his oldest brother.

  “Perhaps,” Robin continued with an impish smile, raising his glass, “you should consider buying a horse.”

  “Tell you what,” Evan said. “While you two compare rites of passage, I’ll go and make a telephone call. All right?”

  “Do you think twenty-six thousand dollars is too high an offer?” Ian asked, ignoring Robin.

  “A brain the size of a racquetball.” Robin sighed into his beer. “An ego as big as the court.”

  Ian was beginning
to look dangerous. “And with that,” their father decided, hastily, “I shall excuse myself.” He pushed his chair back and went off in search of the pay phones he’d seen in the lobby, slipping neatly past a couple of middle-aged women who were on the verge of putting a name to his face. A brain the size of a racquetball and an ego as big as the court?

  When he returned, some fifteen minutes later, Robin was still there, and Ian was not.

  “You must have mortally wounded your brother with that last thrust,” he said in amusement, as he sat down.

  “He had to go back to work.” Robin swirled the remainder of his beer around in the glass. “A black BMW. Whatever happened to the old Ian—the one who’d sooner submit to primitive African tribal rituals of manhood than consider putting his name down for an American Express card?”

  His father laughed. He quite enjoyed his youngest son’s company—the little he’d been able to share of it, anyway. The visits had been too infrequent. When his eldest had been struggling through the throes of adolescence, the phone calls had flown thick and fast between Vancouver and Toronto, usually in the early hours of the morning, when Rolf and Gwennie were asleep. Usually, Evan recalled, when he was asleep, too.

  Anthony’s teenage years had been calmer. But his father had the oddest feeling this was because his middle son had somehow managed to delay the most objectionable parts for a later, more convenient time.

  And Robin—

  Robin was nearly grown up. Where had all those years gone? Evan knew so little about his youngest son—except that he was likable. And single-minded.

  He’d had to be content with that. Ian was an old friend. Anthony had good intentions. Robin—

  —was staring out the tinted glass window at Robson Street.

  “There they are.” He sighed as the blue Buick slid into view, cruising past the cars parked along the curb. “Come on, you morons, give me a break.”

  Evan watched with interest. The Buick’s signal light flashed on. The man with the Andy Warhol hair angled through the traffic to the turning lane. The car disappeared around the block.

  “You’re late,” Anthony said. He had been waiting in the Gallery Lounge, the SUB’s high-class drinking establishment, for over an hour. A mostly finished cider with ice and lime was turning to water in a glass on the table; he looked nervous.

  “Sorry. I had lunch with Evan.” Robin sat down. “And the robot got stolen.”

  “What?”

  “The robot got stolen. I know who took it—those guys who’ve been trailing me all over the city since last Thursday. They broke into my car while we were eating.”

  Anthony was staring at him in disbelief.

  “Come on, Ant, don’t look at me like that. We have no business messing with these guys. Look what they did to that poor woman with the weird hair.”

  “How do you know they took it?”

  “I saw them,” Robin shrugged. “Well, I didn’t really see them—but I saw their car go down the street where I’d parked The Wreck, and when I went back after lunch, the robot was gone. I’d say it was a fairly logical assumption, wouldn’t you?”

  “I can’t believe it,” Anthony said, shaking his head. “I can’t believe you let them do that. Why didn’t you have it hidden somewhere?”

  “Why?”

  “Do you know what’s on that film?”

  “Yes—instructions for the installation and operation of satellite TV dishes.”

  Anthony looked at him, then produced the large brown manila envelope that held the photocopies of the prints he had given to Giselle’s grandfather to translate. “Check this out,” he said, spreading the pages over the table.

  Robin got up onto his knees on his chair and surveyed the little collection of paper. He recognized the instruction sheet from the darkroom.

  “Welcome to new entertainment facility,” he read aloud, in a thick Russian accent, “designed for hours to endlessly view and enjoy. See how system is fully automatic, this means no cumbersome switches for push and settings for make. Delight in watching many programs not beforehand to be seen.” Robin grinned at his brother. “This is terrible.”

  “Yes,” Anthony agreed, “it is.”

  “I mean the grammar.”

  Anthony looked at him again. “You really don’t have any idea what we have here, do you?”

  “Very bad English,” Robin replied.

  “Look at the name at the bottom of that sheet.”

  Robin scanned down to the logo of the company that was distributing the dishes. “Star Tech,” he said.

  They exchanged glances.

  “That’s Ian’s big account.”

  “Exactly.”

  “I thought they were South Korean, not Russian.”

  Anthony picked up several pages of lined yellow foolscap, scrawled over in large, shaky handwriting. “These are the translations of the typewritten material,” he said. “The dishes are manufactured in South Korea. But they’re being sold on the black market over the border, in North Korea. The North Koreans are taking these basic dishes and modifying them. They’re being programmed to respond to Soviet transmissions, packaged up, and imported illegally into Canada. Star Tech’s the distributor.”

  Robin studied the yellow paper and the tottering, old-fashioned scribble.

  “The reason the dishes are so cheap,” Anthony said, “is because they’re being subsidized by the KGB.”

  His brother glanced up but didn’t say anything.

  “They plan to knock out the entire American satellite surveillance network over Eastern and Northern Europe.”

  Robin put the translations down on the table.

  “How?”

  Anthony picked up the papers and looked through them for the appropriate page. “Here,” he said. “There’s the data. The regular TV dishes everybody has in their backyards are built to receive, not transmit. These dishes—the Star Tech ones—have descramblers that have been modified so they can transmit as well as receive. They also have steering mechanisms. They can be told to track onto one or more particular satellites. The Russians broadcast a signal—about fifty of the dishes respond by transmitting another amplified, synchronized signal containing the access code of the one satellite they’ve been assigned to track—and wham, every targeted eye in the sky comes under the control of the Russians. That’s how.”

  Robin rested his chin on his fist. “That’s very good,” he said. “Who gave you a crash course in broadcasting electronics?”

  “Giselle. She’s very talented.”

  “I’ll bet.” He looked at the page Anthony held in his hand. “What are they going to do once they send all the satellites whizzing out into space?”

  “They won’t go ‘whizzing out into space,’ Pooh—that’s the terrible thing. They’ll all be right where they’re supposed to be, but the Russians will have cracked their access codes, and they’ll be sending bogus information back to the Americans. They can do anything they want: launch missiles—anything—and the Americans won’t know a thing about it. They won’t have control of their satellites anymore.”

  “Oh,” said Robin, quietly.

  “The information we found’s only a part of it: we’re still missing the exact data on the access codes, and we don’t know how they plan on doing it, and we don’t know when.”

  “I really think,” said Robin, “that we ought to go to the RCMP with this. Even if it is Ian’s big account. No way he would be a party to something like this. No way.”

  Anthony shook his head. “I just can’t believe you let those guys take the robot, Pooh.”

  “I didn’t let them—they helped themselves. Anyway, what did you want me to do? Embark on a mission to seek out the secret agent arm of the Canadian government? Where would I start looking? I know—a building. A large building, art deco, with a big black-and-white sign posted outside, SPY CANADA. And in French. ESPIONAGE CANADIEN. With a little red-and-white flag over the word Canada to show they mean business. Come on, Anthony
—let’s be realistic.”

  His brother didn’t seem to be convinced.

  “OK,” said Robin, “go ahead—argue with me. Quote Spy Squad, chapter and verse. What would Jarrod do?”

  “Arm himself to the teeth with incredible gadgets and take off in search of the fellows in the blue Buick, to get back the documents that his stupid son left sitting in his car,” said Anthony, staring pointedly at his brother.

  Robin ignored him. “Are you coming with me?”

  Anthony shook his head again. He gathered up the papers, bundling them back inside the large brown envelope. He handed the envelope to Robin. “These are the photocopies of the prints we made. I still have the originals at home. And I have a copy of the translations, too—you can take those ones to the police.”

  Robin stuck the envelope under his arm and zipped up his jacket. “Evan asked how you were.”

  “That’s nice. Tell him I asked how he was.”

  “I think he probably wants to hear it from you in person. He’s here for a month and a half.”

  “OK,” Anthony said, in an annoyed voice.

  “He’s staying at the Haverstock.”

  “I’ll call him. I promise. Tell Mom I’ll be home after supper.”

  “OK.”

  “Bye,” Anthony said, donning a pair of sunglasses. “Good luck,” he added, worriedly.

  Robin ran down the steps of the Student Union Building and across the boulevard to the visitors’ lot, where he’d had to leave The Wreck. He walked between the rows of cars, carrying the brown manila envelope rolled up lengthwise. He’d parked down at the far end of the enclosure, on the Gage side of the lot. As he trudged by, he gazed up at the towering student residences. His fear of heights aside, that had been a hell of a distance to fall.

  He heard a car pull up behind him, and stepped aside to let it pass. What happened after that he wasn’t absolutely certain. He had the impression that someone had leaped onto his back, at the same time clamping an arm around his throat. He could barely breathe. It all happened so quickly that before he could yell for help, his right leg had been kicked out from under him, and he was being dragged, backward, into the rear seat of the car. The door slammed shut. The car sped out of the lot.