Back Channel

by Stephen L Carter

  Startled by the swift change of subject, Margo almost blurted what her captor wanted to hear. But in her mind’s eye, her father was pulling the pin on a hand grenade and holding it to his chest, sacrificing himself to protect the members of his réseau.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. Although her voice was not as cool as she was hoping, she was relieved at how little it trembled. “I want to contact my consulate.”

  “After we discuss your mission. Your father would have been proud of you for undertaking this mission. Surely you see that.”

  Margo shook her head slowly, not sure what to say.

  Fomin was growing impatient. “There is no point in lying further, Miss Jensen. It is perfectly plain that you are here as part of a conspiracy of the West against the socialist peoples of the world. You are here as part of an operation code-named QKPARCHMENT. Correct?”

  This time her bewilderment was genuine. “I don’t know what that is.”

  “Come, Miss Jensen. Let us be honest with one another. Your President believes his own side’s propaganda that the Chairman has been forced to place offensive missiles in Cuba. This of course is capitalist fantasy, but your security apparatus will pretend to believe it in any case. You are here in Bulgaria to make contact with reactionary and revanchist elements for the purpose of provocation. You are a spy, and the Bulgarian People’s Republic punishes spies severely.”

  “What is it you want me to say?” she asked when he paused for breath.

  The dark eyes were unforgiving. “I want you to tell me the truth. I want you to describe your mission.”

  From somewhere she found a bit of sass, for she had started to think of Fomin the way she thought of her professors. “Which of us truly longs for truth?”

  The Russian pursed heavy lips. “You seem unaware of how serious a crisis we face, Miss Jensen. Whatever we have done, we have done because we believe that your regime may be planning a surprise attack against the socialist countries. Naturally, we would be required to respond. Is it your wish to contribute to the horror that is sure to follow?”

  Margo shook her head. She wasn’t sure what to say, because she wasn’t sure what her father would have said. She wanted to see the photograph again.

  Fomin was pawing through his folder. “I have a copy of your application for the grant that has paid for your travel. Our experts tell me that this is not your handwriting.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “But going out by yourself in the middle of the night to meet a stranger in the roughest part of town—that isn’t ridiculous?”

  “I was trying to arrange an interview for Bobby. I don’t know anything about the rest of what you—”

  Fomin stood, very fast, and leaned over the table, mouth twisted, eyes blazing. He grabbed the front of her coat. Tugging at his wrist was like tugging steel. His face was so close she could feel the angry heat.

  “You are not your father, Miss Jensen. You are not trained. You do not have his responsibilities, and this is not his war. Your father was fighting against the fascist aggressor. But it is your side that is the aggressor today. There is no reason for you to put yourself through any suffering for the sake of the capitalist gangsters who run your country.” He let her go. Brushed his fingers on his tweeds. “You are nineteen years old, are you not?”

  “Yes,” she said, shakily.

  “Your father briefed saboteurs your age during the war. He sent them out to blow up bridges and sabotage tanks. Some were younger. One was a girl of fifteen. Many were captured. The Gestapo were not kind. In time of war, youth is no protection against the rigors of interrogation.”

  “I’m not scared of you,” she lied, determined to make her father proud.

  “Yes, you are.” Fomin made a show of patting his pockets, then drew from inside his coat a small pair of pliers. “In medieval times, under the ruthless hegemony of the bourgeois Western church, the prisoner sentenced to the Inquisition was first subjected to a ritual known as displaying the instruments. This was to give him the opportunity to repent.” He dropped the tool on the desk. The clank was very loud. Margo couldn’t pull her eyes away. “I will give you one hour to consider whether you wish to tell me the truth, or prefer to suffer the consequences.”

  He left.

  THIRTEEN

  Like Father …

  I

  Alone in the stifling room, Margo thought not of Cuba or of the grim possibilities of war outlined by Dr. Harrington, but only of her father. The fate she faced was the fate he had killed himself to avoid. True, no hand grenade was available. But it was just as well: she didn’t want to end things the way her father had.

  She wished Fomin had left the photograph. Cradling it close, or even gazing at her father’s face, would give her strength. She was sure of it. She wanted to hold out. She didn’t want to suffer, but she didn’t want to talk. Not to protect the mission or even, as Harrington put it, the “security of the nation.” Margo wanted to resist because she knew Donald Jensen would have resisted.

  True, the situation seemed hopeless. She was a prisoner of the DS. She had, as Fomin had told her, no rights. They believed she was a spy and were determined to have the truth. And she was pretty sure she would have to end up telling them whatever they wanted.

  Except for one thing.

  The pliers were still on the desk.

  The instruments, as Fomin called them, displayed for her to see. She wondered how it would feel if he tugged out a fingernail. Two fingernails. She tried to imagine the hot, shining pain. She shuddered, but briefly. Because, for all that she might wonder how badly the pliers could injure her, the really important question was whether they could pry open locked windows.

  II

  She stood by the window, hands clasped innocently behind her back, the pliers still lying where Fomin had dropped them, in case this was all a trick. Margo was not particularly mechanical, but she loved solving puzzles, and this was just another.

  In addition to the usual swivel clasp, the window was secured by a metal hasp with a padlock threaded through it. She had no hope of breaking the lock itself. The hasp, however, was attached with screws. Though she had no screwdriver, she thought the pliers might be used as a lever to pry the hasp free, screws and all. The trick was getting some piece of the pliers underneath the edge—

  Sound in the hallway.

  She threw herself back into the chair, but the footsteps passed by.

  Margo waited, then returned to the window, still studying, still not touching. She had left the pliers precisely where Fomin had dropped them, on the theory that if he caught her by the window she could say she was only looking out as she tried to make up her mind.

  He’d said she had an hour, but she had no reason to trust him.

  On the other hand, if she got caught, he could hardly threaten her with anything worse than what already loomed.

  Donald Jensen wouldn’t have hesitated; neither would his daughter.

  So she snatched up the pliers and went to work.

  III

  The pliers were of the needle-nosed variety, and she tried to slip one of the metal points between the hasp and the frame. The fit was very tight. She kept wiggling and twisting the pliers, but could not budge the metal. The pliers slipped and pinched her finger. She cried out, then covered her mouth and stopped to listen; nobody seemed to be approaching. She wiped the sweat from her brow and started again.

  This time, the point sank into the wood—not far, but enough to give her a space in which to try to lever. The point sank deeper. Beneath the badly painted surface, the wood was soft. She kept working. The hasp never budged, but the pliers kept sinking. Soon they sank too far. She tried to tug the tool out to keep levering, but now the point was stuck in the window.

  Problem.

  Not only could she not remove the hasp this way, but when Fomin returned, the pliers would be jammed into the window, and he would know she had tried to escape.

  Pa
nic.

  No. Not allowed.

  Margo took a breath. Okay. She was still Claudia Jensen’s granddaughter and Donald Jensen’s daughter. There was a solution, and she would find it. The pliers were stuck because the surface of the wood was hard and the interior was soft. Why was the interior soft? It had to be rotten. When trees rotted from the inside out, her grandmother liked to point out, they would come crashing down at unexpected moments, no matter how sturdy the exterior.

  Okay.

  On a table in a corner was a heavy book. The cover and contents were entirely in Cyrillic, but she wasn’t going to read it. She carried it to the window. If the pliers would not come out, she would presshammer them farther in. When they were in deeply enough, she would start to jimmy them back and forth, hoping to dislodge the hasp that way. She swung the book hard, like a mallet, and struck the pliers.

  The tool barely budged.

  A second hit, harder, made her arm sing with pain.

  She swung a third time, and, to her astonishment, the entire window burst free of the frame, wood and glass blasting outward into the courtyard.

  This time, the noise had to have been heard.

  She put her hands on the sill and climbed out onto the cobbles. She felt her dress catch and knew she’d ripped it, felt her leg scrape and knew she had cut herself, but she was out of that terrible room and in the courtyard.

  IV

  Margo ran. She had no choice. They would be in the room in seconds.

  The courtyard, as she had already observed, was full of cars and trucks and motorcycles. The building made a U-shape around three sides. She ran for the high wall separating the compound from the street. She had no hope of getting over, but the interior floodlights picked out a heavy double gate for the vehicles, flanked on either side by a pair of pedestrian entrances, both shut. Margo suspected that they would be locked on the street side but not necessarily on the inside.

  In any case, Margo had to move. The rising bevy of angry voices behind her, and the searchlight beaming down from the tower, told her that her pursuers were close behind.

  She pelted across the courtyard, hugging the shadows, dodging the parked cars and the crisscrossing beams, ignoring the pain from her wounded leg, attention riveted on the nearer pedestrian door. The cobbles were wet and slippery. She supposed it must have rained earlier but she couldn’t remember just when. She heard a shout in the far corner of the courtyard. Two guards were running in the wrong direction.

  Margo slowed. As children, she and her brother Corbin had been unbeatable at capture-the-flag. The reason was what Edgar Allan Poe called “evens and odds”—the ability to work out how clever their opponents were, and act just one level beyond it.

  She reached the door, which was of heavy wood. A metal bar stretched across the surface, resting in a slot, making access from outside impossible. The bar wasn’t locked in place, however, and Margo had no trouble lifting it. She put her shoulder into the door, budging it open, then took off the other way, back toward the shadows. She had spied an entrance to another part of the building, and that was her goal. Evens and odds. They would try to outthink her, so she had to outthink their outthinking. They knew she was in the courtyard. They would expect her to try for the gate, and guards would no doubt be posted on the other side. Indeed, no sooner had she slunk off into the shadows than the searchlights converged on the exits leading to the street.

  The entrance she had spotted led into a kitchen. The scent of heavily cured meat was in the air. Two men in undershirts were smoking and arguing while one of them poured offal into a pot. Both were heavily muscled. One was older, and bearded. They looked up in surprise at the intruder. They didn’t seem frightened, just confused.

  The bearded man asked a question in Bulgarian, then in German. Margo said nothing. The men laughed. She sidestepped toward the hallway beyond the kitchen. The cooks looked at each other; then the younger moved into her path and put his hands on his hips. He stuck out his hand, palm upward.

  She realized he wanted to see her pass. It occurred to her that he didn’t know she was a prisoner. Agatha had said that some African revolutionaries were trained in Bulgaria; they must think she was one of them.

  So she smiled and shook her head, spreading her own hands wide, explaining in her passable French that she was in a hurry, late for a meeting, and hoped that either from some rudimentary understanding of the language, or from her smile and her posture, they would accept that she belonged. The older one said something that made the younger laugh lasciviously, and pointed not down the hallway but to a different door.

  Margo gave him a look that she hoped would convey irritated disdain, then slipped through the doorway to which she had been directed. The room was small and airless. A woman in uniform sat at a desk. She barely looked up before nodding Margo toward a curtained arch, cluck-clucking to herself as the younger woman passed.

  Beyond the arch was a sort of dressing room with bunks included, and there Margo found six or seven women fixing their makeup and adjusting their clothing. They looked dressed for a party. They fixed furious appraising eyes on the newcomer. One of them pointed to Margo’s disheveled clothing and made a comment that was plainly derisive. The others chuckled, then went back to their preening.

  An hour or more passed. The women continued to ignore her. Eventually, a flabby man wearing a uniform stepped in, and the women leapt to their feet, Margo alongside. His froggy eyes lingered curiously on Margo before he pointed to another woman, a very tall redhead, who smoothed her gown and preceded him out the door. He pointed to another woman, who nodded and sat.

  The other women shook their heads, picked up their purses, pulled on their coats, lit cigarettes.

  Margo understood. The man had picked two, and the rest could leave.

  She had no handbag, but she was still wearing her coat, and when the women filed out, she followed. A female guard materialized, led them down a concrete stairway and down a dank basement hallway with dripping water pipes along the ceiling. They went up another stair, at the top of which the guard unlocked a steel door and swung it wide.

  The street.

  Freedom.

  A couple of women headed for the tram stop; the others walked off down the street, perhaps to ply their trade elsewhere. Nobody paid Margo any attention. She studied the neighborhood, trying to get her bearings. She dared not ask directions or take a taxi. Across from the DS headquarters was a park, and beyond the park were low buildings she did not recognize. Above the rooflines, she saw the distant, misty domes of the Dormition of the Theotokos Cathedral, which she had visited last week. If she could get there, she was fairly certain that she could find her hotel.

  Except she didn’t want the hotel.

  If the ploy goes to pieces, Niemeyer had warned her, you don’t go back to your hotel. You march straight into the American consulate, nowhere else. Ask for a counselor named Ainsley. Mr. Ainsley is an associate of mine, and he’ll take care of you.

  Right. Good plan. Margo would march straight into the consulate, and find this Ainsley. It was important that she not be caught—not only because she might face prison or worse, but because she was her father’s daughter and she had a mission to complete.

  She knew precisely what was going on in Cuba. Colonel Fomin had told her.

  She started off down the street.

  FOURTEEN

  Officers

  I

  She hurried along the wide boulevard named for Georgi Dimitrov, the revered Bulgarian Stalinist arrested by the Nazis for supposed complicity in the Reichstag fire, although the locals still called the street Maria Luiza, after the wife of the late beloved Tsar Ferdinand I. The sky was heavy with pre-dawn grayness. She realized that she had spent most of the night in custody. Traffic was light. There were few pedestrians at this hour. Margo kept the hood of her raincoat up and her head down, in the hope that the night would disguise her blackness—a clue that would otherwise lead the DS to her in minutes. The cold, freshenin
g rain helped. Nobody was making eye contact. Everyone was hurrying, umbrellas or newspapers over their heads.

  She walked fast, but not too fast, keeping the cathedral’s golden belfry ahead and to her right. She guessed the distance at about half a mile. From what she remembered, the consulate would be three blocks farther on. She had no idea whether it was staffed at this hour, but she had no other plan.

  She wondered, in a vague way, why Agatha, the minder who scared well-trained intelligence officers, had left her to her fate rather than riding to her rescue. She wondered, too, whether Fomin realized how much he had told her by the questions he asked. Most of all, she wondered whether her father, if he knew, would be proud—

  The sound of whispered conversation ahead made her lift her eyes. Two policemen in dark ponchos were headed her way. Margo didn’t break stride, but felt their hard gazes lift to her as they passed.

  Caught, she told herself; they could hardly have overlooked her color.

  But the policemen kept walking. They weren’t particularly watchful. Routine, she told herself. They were just patrolling the street, and happened to be on the same sidewalk as she.

  She passed a shuttered restaurant and a state commissary, crossed a pretty prewar bridge with an unpronounceable name, and there was the cathedral, diagonally across a well-tended park. As she entered the trees, someone whispered insinuatingly from the shadows, and she walked faster. She heard a footstep ahead of her and took a fork on the path. The trees closed up, and she could no longer see the cathedral: because of the rain there was no moon. Now, the same voice came from off to her right, the sort of nasty male challenge—half querulous, half threatening—that she needed no translation to understand.