The House of Thunder

by Dean Koontz

  “And you. What about you, McGee? Where do you fit in? And is your name really McGee?”

  “No,” he said. “My name’s Dimitri Nicolnikov. I was born a Russian, to parents in Kiev, thirty-seven years ago. Jeff McGee is my Willawauk name. You see, I was one of the first Willawauk kids, though that was in the early days of the program, when they took young teenagers and tried to make deep-cover agents out of them in three or four years of training. Before they started working solely with kids obtained at the age of three or four. And I’m one of the few who ever turned double agent on them. Although they don’t know it as yet.”

  “They will when they find all the bodies you left behind.”

  “We’ll be long gone by then.”

  “You’re so confident.”

  “I’ve got to be,” he said, giving her a thin smile. “The alternative is unthinkable.”

  Again, Susan was aware of the man’s singular strength, which was one of the things that had made her fall in love with him.

  Am I still in love with him? she wondered.

  Yes.

  No.

  Maybe.

  “How old were you when you underwent training in Willawauk?”

  “Like I said, that was before they started taking them so young and spending so many years on them. The recruits then were twelve or thirteen. I was there from the age of thirteen to the age of eighteen.”

  “So you finished the training almost twenty years ago. Why weren’t you seeded into the U.S.? Why were you still in Willawauk when I showed up?”

  Before he could answer her, the traffic ahead began to slow down on the dark road. Brake lights flashed on the trucks as they lumbered to a halt.

  McGee tapped the Chevy’s brakes.

  “What’s going on?” Susan asked, suddenly wary.

  “It’s the Batum checkpoint.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A travel-pass inspection station just north of the city of Batum. That’s where we’re going to catch a boat out of the country.”

  “You make it sound as simple as just going away on a holiday,” she said.

  “It could turn out like that,” he said, “if our luck holds just a little longer.”

  The traffic was inching ahead now, as each vehicle stopped at the checkpoint, each driver passing his papers to a uniformed guard. The guard was armed with a submachine gun that was slung over his left shoulder.

  Another uniformed guard was opening the doors on the back of some of the trucks, shining a flashlight inside.

  “What’re they looking for?” Susan asked.

  “I don’t know. This isn’t usually part of the procedure at the Batum checkpoint.”

  “Are they looking for us?”

  “I doubt it. I don’t expect them to find out we’re gone from Willawauk until closer to midnight. At least an hour from now. Whatever these men are searching for, it doesn’t seem to be all that important. They’re being casual about it.”

  Another truck was passed. The line of traffic moved forward. There were now three trucks in front of the Chevy.

  “They’re probably just hoping to catch a black market operator with contraband goods,” McGee said. “If it was us they were looking for, there’d be a hell of a lot more of them swarming around, and they’d be a lot more thorough with their searches.”

  “We’re that important?”

  “You better believe it,” he said worriedly. “If they lose you, they lose one of the potentially biggest intelligence coups of all time.”

  Another truck was waved through the checkpoint.

  McGee said, “If they could break you and pick your mind clean, they’d get enough information to tip the East-West balance of power permanently in the direction of the East. You’re very important to them, dear lady. And as soon as they realize that I’ve gone double on them, they’ll want me almost as bad as they’ll want to get you back. Maybe they’ll even want me worse, because they’ll have to find out how many of their deep-cover agents in the U.S. have been compromised.”

  “And how many of them have you compromised?”

  “All of them,” he said, grinning.

  Then it was their turn to face the checkpoint guard. McGee turned down the window and passed out two sets of papers. The inspection was perfunctory; the papers were coming back through the window almost as soon as they had been handed out.

  McGee thanked the guard, whose attention was already turned to the truck behind them. Then they headed into Batum, and McGee rolled up his window as he drove.

  “Black market sweep, like I thought,” he said.

  As they drove into the outskirts of the small port city, Susan said, “If you were a graduate of Willawauk at eighteen, why weren’t you seeded into the U.S. nineteen years ago?”

  “I was. I earned my college degrees there, a medical degree with a specialty in behavioral modification medicine. But by the time I had obtained an important job with connections to the U.S. defense establishment, I was no longer a faithful Russian. Remember, in those days, recruits were chosen at the age of thirteen. They weren’t yet putting three-year-olds into the Willawauk program. I had lived twelve years of ordinary life in Russia, before my training was begun, so I had a basis for comparing the U.S. and the Soviet systems. I had no trouble changing sides. I acquired a love for freedom. I went to the FBI and told them all about myself and all about Willawauk. At first, for a couple of years, they used me as a conduit for phony data which helped screw up Soviet planning. Then, five years ago, it was decided that I would go back to the USSR as a double agent. I was ‘arrested’ by the FBI. There was a big trial, during which I refused to utter one word. The papers called me the ‘Silent Spy.’ ”

  “My God, I remember! It was a big story back then.”

  “It was widely advertised that, even though caught red-handed in the transmission of classified information, I refused even to state what country I was from. Everyone knew it was Russia, of course, but I played this impressively stoic role. Pleased the hell out of the KGB.”

  “Which was the idea.”

  “Of course. After the trial, I received a long prison sentence, but I didn’t serve much time. Less than a month. I was quickly traded to the USSR for an American agent whom they were holding. When I was brought back to Moscow, I was welcomed as a hero for maintaining the secret of the Willawauk training program and the deep-cover network. I was the famous Silent Spy. I was eventually sent back to work at my old alma mater, which was what the CIA had hoped would happen.”

  “And ever since, you’ve been passing information the other way, to the U.S.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I’ve got two contacts in Batum, two fishermen who have limited-profit deals with the government, so they own their own boats. They’re Georgians, of course. This is Georgian SSR that we’re traveling through, and a lot of Georgians despise the central government in Moscow. I pass information to my fishermen, and they pass it along to Turkish fishermen with whom they rendezvous in the middle of the Black Sea. And thereafter, it somehow winds up with the CIA. One of those fishermen is going to pass us along to the Turks the same way he passes classified documents. At least, I hope he’ll do it.”

  Access to the Batum docks was restricted; all ships, including the fishing boats, could be reached only by passing through one of several checkpoints. There were guarded gates that accepted trucks loaded with cargo, and there was one gate that accepted only military vehicles and personnel, and there were gates to accommodate dock workers, sailors, and others who were obliged to approach on foot; Susan and McGee went to one of the latter.

  At night the wharves were poorly lighted, gloomy, except around the security checkpoints, where floodlights simulated the glare of noon. The walk-through gate was overseen by two uniformed guards, both armed with Kalisnikovs; they were involved in an animated conversation that could be heard even outside the hut in which they sat. Neither guard bestirred himself from that small, warm place; neither wanted to bother conduc
ting a close inspection. McGee passed both his and Susan’s forged papers through the sliding window. The older of the two guards examined the documents perfunctorily and quickly passed them back, not once pausing in the discussion he was having with his compatriot.

  The chainlike gate, crowned with wickedly pointed barbed wire, swung open automatically when one of the guards in the hut touched the proper button. McGee and Susan walked onto the docks, uncontested, and the gate swung shut behind them.

  Susan held on to McGee’s arm, and they walked into the gloom, toward rows of large dark buildings that blocked their view of the harbor.

  “Now what?” Susan whispered.

  “Now we go to the fishermen’s wharf and look for a boat called the Golden Net,” McGee said.

  “It seems so easy,” she said.

  “Too easy,” he said worriedly.

  He glanced back at the checkpoint through which they had just passed, and his face was drawn with apprehension.

  Leonid Golodkin was master of the Golden Net, a hundred-foot fishing trawler with immense cold-storage capacity. He was a ruddy, rough-hewn man with a hard-edged, leathery face and big hands.

  Summoned by one of his crewmen, he came to the railing at the gangway, where McGee and Susan waited in the weak yellow glow of a dock lamp. Golodkin was scowling. He and Jeff McGee began to converse in rapid, emotional Russian.

  Susan couldn’t understand what they were saying, but she had no difficulty understanding Captain Golodkin’s mood. The big man was angry and frightened.

  Ordinarily, when McGee had information to pass to Golodkin for transfer to Turkish fishermen on the high sea, those documents were forwarded through a black market vodka dealer who operated in Batum, two blocks from the wharves. McGee and Golodkin rarely met face-to-face, and McGee never came to the boat. Until tonight.

  Golodkin nervously scanned the docks, apparently searching for curious onlookers, agents of the secret police. For a long, dreadful moment, Susan thought he was going to refuse to let them come aboard. Then, reluctantly, Golodkin swung back the hinged section of railing at the top of the gangway and hurried them through the open boarding gate. Now that he had grudgingly decided to take them in, he was clearly impatient to get them below-decks, out of sight.

  They crossed the afterdeck to a spiral, metal staircase and went below. They followed Golodkin along a cold, musty, dimly lighted corridor, and Susan wondered if she would ever again be in a place that wasn’t somehow alien and forbidding.

  The captain’s quarters at the end of the corridor were unquestionably foreign, even though the room was warm and well lighted by three lamps. There was a desk—on which stood a half-filled brandy snifter—a bookcase with glass doors, a liquor cabinet, and four chairs, including the one behind the desk. A sleeping alcove was separated from the main cabin by a drawn curtain.

  Golodkin motioned them to two of the chairs, and McGee and Susan sat down.

  Directing Susan’s attention to the brandy, McGee said, “Would you like a glass of that?”

  She was shivering. The mere thought of brandy warmed her. “Yeah,” she said. “It would sure hit the spot right now.”

  In Russian, McGee asked Golodkin for brandy, but before the captain could respond, the curtains rustled in front of the alcove, drawing everyone’s attention. Rustled ... and parted. Dr. Leon Viteski stepped into the main cabin. He was holding a silencer-equipped pistol, and he was smiling.

  A shockwave passed through Susan. Angry about being betrayed again, furious about being manipulated through yet another charade, Susan looked at McGee, hating herself for having trusted him.

  But McGee appeared to be just as surprised as she was. At the sight of Viteski, Jeff started to rise from his chair, reaching into his coat pocket for his own pistol.

  Captain Golodkin stopped him from drawing the weapon and took it away from him.

  “Leonid,” McGee said in an accusatory tone. Then he said something in Russian that Susan couldn’t understand.

  “Don’t blame poor Leonid,” Dr. Viteski said. “He had no choice but to play along with us. Now sit down, please.”

  McGee hesitated, then sat. He glanced at Susan, saw doubt in her eyes, and said, “I didn’t know.”

  She wanted to believe him. His face was ashen, and there was fear in his eyes, and he looked like a man who had suddenly come eye-to-eye with Death. But he’s a good actor, she reminded herself. For days, he had deceived her; he might still be deceiving her.

  Viteski walked around the desk and sat in the captain’s chair.

  Golodkin stood by the door, his face unreadable.

  “We’ve known about you for two and a half years,” Viteski told McGee.

  McGee’s pale face reddened. His embarrassment appeared to be genuine.

  “And we’ve known about your contact with Leonid almost as long as we’ve known about you,” Viteski said. “The good captain has been working with us ever since we discovered that he was one of your couriers.”

  McGee looked at Golodkin.

  The captain flushed and shuffled his feet.

  “Leonid?” McGee said.

  Golodkin frowned, shrugged, and said something in Russian.

  Susan watched Jeff McGee as McGee watched the captain. He seemed truly abashed.

  “Leonid had no choice but to betray you,” Viteski told McGee. “We have a strong grip on him. His family, of course. He doesn’t like the fact that we’ve turned him into a double agent, but he knows we hold his reins. He’s been quite useful, and I’m sure he’ll be useful unmasking other agents in the future.”

  McGee said, “For two years or more, every time I passed documents to Leonid—”

  “—he passed them directly to us,” Viteski said. “We tinkered with them, edited them, inserted false data to mislead the CIA, then returned your packages to Leonid. Then he passed them to the Turks.”

  “Shit,” McGee said bitterly.

  Viteski laughed. He picked up the brandy glass and sipped the amber liquid.

  Susan watched both men, and she grew increasingly uneasy. She began to think this wasn’t just another charade. She began to think that McGee really had meant to take her to safety and that he had been betrayed. Which meant that both of them had lost their last best chance of gaining freedom.

  To Viteski, McGee said, “If you knew I was going to try to rescue Susan, why didn’t you stop me before I took her out of that House of Thunder mock-up, before I shattered the illusion?”

  Viteski tasted the brandy again. “We’d already decided that she couldn’t be broken. She just wasn’t responding satisfactorily to the program. You saw that.”

  “I was half out of my mind with fear,” Susan said.

  Viteski looked at her and nodded. “Yes. Half out of your mind. And that was as far as you were going to get, I believe. You weren’t going to break down. You’re too tough for that, my dear. At worst, you would have withdrawn into some semicatatonic state. But not a breakdown. Not you. So we decided to scrap the program and go with the contingency plan.”

  “What contingency plan?” McGee asked.

  Viteski looked at Leonid Golodkin and spoke rapidly in Russian.

  Golodkin nodded and left the room.

  “What did you mean by that?” McGee asked.

  Viteski didn’t respond. He merely smiled and picked up the brandy snifter again.

  To McGee, Susan said, “What’s going on?”

  “I don’t know,” McGee said.

  He held out his hand, and after only a brief hesitation, Susan took it. He gave her a smile of encouragement, but it was tissue-thin, unconvincing. Behind the smile, she saw fear.

  Viteski said, “This is excellent brandy. Must be black market stuff. You can’t buy anything this good over the counter—unless you can get into one of the stores reserved for high Party officials. I’ll have to ask the good captain for the name of his dealer.”

  The door opened, and Leonid Golodkin came in. Two people entered behind hi
m.

  One of the newcomers was Jeffrey McGee.

  The other was Susan Thorton.

  Two more look-alikes.

  They were even dressed the same as Jeff and Susan.

  Susan’s veins seemed to crystallize into fragile tubes of ice as she stared at her own duplicate.

  The fake Susan smiled. The resemblance was uncanny.

  His face bloodless, his eyes haunted, the real Jeff McGee glared at Leon Viteski and said, “What the hell is this?”

  “The contingency plan,” Viteski said. “We had it in reserve right from the start, though we didn’t tell you, of course.”

  The fake Susan spoke to the real Susan: “It’s absolutely fascinating to be in the same room with you at last.”

  Shocked, Susan said, “She sounds exactly like me!”

  The fake McGee said, “We’ve been working with tapes of your voices for nearly a year.” He sounded exactly like the real McGee.

  Viteski smiled at the doppelgängers with what appeared to be paternal pride. Then, to the real McGee, he said, “You’ll be shot and dumped overboard in the middle of the Black Sea. These two will go back to the U.S. in your places. Our Susan will start working at Milestone again.” He turned to Susan and said, “My dear, it would have been most helpful if we could have broken you. It would have given us a head start. Nevertheless, we’ll still get most of what we wanted by placing your look-alike in your office at Milestone. It’ll just take us a lot longer; that’s all. In a year or so, we’ll have found out everything you could’ve told us. And if our little ruse can last longer than a year, we’ll wind up getting even more data than we could’ve gotten from you.” He turned to Jeff. “We expect your double will find a place in the American intelligence community, perhaps in their behavioral control research, and that’ll give us another well-placed mole.”

  “It won’t work,” McGee said. “They may sound like Susan and me. And your surgeons did a damned good job of making them look like us. But no surgeon can alter fingerprints.”

  “True,” Viteski said. “But you see, for people with very high security clearances, the U.S. has a special system of filing and retrieving fingerprints. It’s called SIDEPS, Security ID Protection System. It’s part of a Defense Department computer to which we’ve managed to gain access. We can simply pull the electronic representation of your fingerprints and replace them with electronic representations of the fingerprints of your look-alikes. In this age of centralized computer data storage, it isn’t necessary to change the real prints; we need only change the computer’s memory of what the real prints look like.”