The Sleeping Spy

by Clifford Irving

  "This is the third request for ..."

  He twisted the bottom of the oscillator and flicked the switch to the on position. There were six seconds to go.

  "... voice identification. No further requests will be made. Speak into . . ."

  The voice stopped abruptly. Eddie smiled. The ultrasonic oscillation fed into the microphone at 200,000 vibrations per second, or ten times the upper limit of the human ear, had effectively spiked the sound-based programming of the computer in control of the voice-identification system. He also had a pretty good idea of what it had done to the two men on the other side of the door who had heard the signal amplified over an open loudspeaker.

  Working quickly, but without the pressure now of a timetable measured in seconds, he packed the RDX around the wheel-shaped handle of the door, inserted a ten- second-delay detonator into the putty, and retreated down the hall. The wheel blew off with a dull, almost muted explosion, and the door swung open.

  Inside he found what he had expected: two technicians sitting at a control panel, a bit of blood trickling from their ears, eyes glazed and staring straight ahead in shock. He passed his hand in front of those eyes. There were no reactions. They would recover, but for now they were helpless.

  He looked around the room. It was just as Vasily had described it - small steel self-service elevator on the far wall and, on the other side, the mouth of the old Fun House drop chute. Swan's bunker was thirty feet below, an efficiency apartment with living room, bedroom, kitchenette, and bathroom. The elevator doors would slide open in Swan's living room. The chute went straight down into Swan's kitchen.

  I hope the son of a bitch is alone, Eddie thought, as he emptied his pockets. He had two smoke grenades and half a dozen high-explosive Beanos, each the size of a golf ball. He pulled the pins on all of them and sent them clattering down the chute, smoke bombs first and then the Beanos. The crump crump crump of the explosions echoed and died away.

  There comes a time, Eddie told himself, when there are no more gadgets to use, no more tricks to pull. Like a World War II movie, after the bombardment, when the squad of tired soldiers has to enter the town on foot - you have to fight.

  I hate that time, he thought, but it sure as hell looks like it's here.

  He drew his pistol and headed for the chute.

  "There was a sound reason for the biblical injunction against nakedness," said Joseph Wolfe, "and it wasn't just prudishness. A man without his clothing is something considerably less than a man."

  "You might at least give me back the shoes," Vasily complained. "This floor is cold."

  "I think not. From what I've seen so far, those shoes of yours could be as deadly as a machine gun."

  Stripped naked and shivering, Vasily leaned against an open wine cask and strove for a nonchalance that he hoped would be convincing. The wine cellar of the monastery was low-ceilinged and vaulted, built of slabs of stone, and even in July it was damp and chilly. To add to his discomfort, the fumes of sour wine rising from the cask behind him were making him dizzy, and he had to shake his head to clear it. Both Barto and Carlos stiffened at the motion, then relaxed. They stood at opposite corners of the room, their knives exchanged for pistols, and they watched him closely. Wolfe, too, had produced a pistol, but it lay on the old refectory table before him as he examined the clothing he had taken from Vasily: trousers, shorts, shoes, shirt, jacket, and the robe of the order. To one side of the clothing was a pile of his personal possessions: billfold, card case, keys, and the electronic chess set. To the other side was a far more imposing pile.

  "Absolutely amazing," said Wolfe, looking over the collection of weapons, gadgets, tubes, and vials that he had found secreted in seams, linings, hidden pockets, flaps, collars, and cuffs. So far he had uncovered two lengths of serrated steel wire, two incendiary pencils, six miniature grenades that looked like cigars, a throwing knife complete with arm sheath, a plastic bag of RDX, an assortment of detonators, a one-shot pistol concealed in a fountain pen, and two ominous-looking bottles of dark liquid. He held one of the bottles up to the light and asked, "What's in this one?"

  "The boomslang venom that I put on the scourge," said Vasily, shifting his feet.

  "And this?" Wolfe held up the other bottle.

  Vasily looked embarrassed. "My cough medicine," he confessed. "I'm subject to head colds this time of the year. Look, Wolfe, just let me have the robe back. It isn't even mine; I borrowed it from one of your monks."

  "Cough medicine?" Wolfe couldn't believe it. "How do you tell them apart?"

  Vasily shrugged. "The medicine smells bad. What about the robe?"

  "Not a chance. You're safer naked."

  "You mean you're safer."

  Wolfe nodded. "That's exactly what I mean. I don't even feel safe with this arsenal in the same room with you. Carlos, get these things out of here. Put them in my cell and lock the door."

  Carlos shoved his pistol into the pocket of his robe and gathered up the weaponry. He was about to go when Wolfe stopped him. He pointed to Vasily's personal belongings.

  "Take this stuff, too. Mr. Borgneff won't be having any use for it now."

  Vasily raised an eyebrow at this. "Since you're robbing me of my personal property, you might try your hand at the electronic chess. I find it amusing."

  Wolfe glanced down at the black case and dismissed it with a grunt. "A toy, nothing more."

  "Perhaps for you," Vasily conceded. "I find that it has its uses."

  When Carlos had gone, clanging shut the heavy doors behind him, Wolfe said, "I suppose I should feel flattered. All that sophisticated weaponry just for me."

  "Not really. They're just the normal tools of my trade."

  "Your trade." Wolfe made a sneer out of the word.

  "A poor one, but my own. A while back you referred to me as a murdering son of a bitch. I prefer to think of myself as an avenging angel."

  "The Carillo business?" Wolfe looked at him won- deringly. "All this for something that happened ten years ago. And you're supposed to be a professional. Professionals don't carry grudges."

  "I'd argue that point, but I don't have the time. I didn't come here to debate with you, I came to kill you."

  Wolfe's eyes traveled over Vasily's lean, naked body. "With what? Your bare hands?"

  "If necessary."

  Wolfe stroked his chin thoughtfully. "You seem extraordinarily confident for someone in your position. I hope that you're not counting too much on the Rule of the Order you mentioned before. About not spilling blood within the monastery walls."

  "I was rather hoping that you'd keep it in mind," Vasily admitted.

  "As I said before, I'd be willing to make an exception in your case, but actually I don't think it will be necessary."

  Vasily looked perturbed. His eyes narrowed and searched around the room. Then he felt the open wine vat at his back and his lips twisted in a grimace. "Richard the Third? You're going to play the hunchback to my Duke of Clarence, is that it? Drowned in a butt of malmsey wine, by God."

  Wolfe pursed his lips and nodded. He seemed to be enjoying himself. "An interesting end for a professional assassin, wouldn't you say? And not a drop of blood will be spilled. As soon as Carlos returns ..."

  There was a dull crack above their heads that echoed through the thick walls of the wine cellar. Wolfe and Barto looked up instinctively.

  "What was that?" Wolfe asked.

  "Oh dear," said Vasily. "Oh dear, oh dear. That must have been Carlos."

  "Carlos?" Wolfe repeated, uncomprehending.

  "I have the feeling that there's been a terrible mistake."

  "Mistake?"

  "I really should apologize, but it wasn't supposed to happen this way. That electronic chess game was meant for you, but I imagine Carlos just couldn't keep his hands off it. You see, it's been programmed to explode when White checkmates Black."

  Wolfe's hand jerked and his pistol came up. "You mean that Carlos ..."

  "It probably took the top of h
is head off."

  "You're lying," Wolfe shouted.

  "Afraid not. I'm really very sorry about this."

  "Barto!" Wolfe wheeled and made a gesture toward the door, then shouted, "No, wait. . . !" He looked back and forth wildly between Barto and Vasily.

  Vasily extended his arms out, palms up, his naked body posed against the wine vat in the attitude of the crucified. "Are you afraid of dividing your forces, Chessmaster? You have me pinned here, totally helpless."

  Wolfe hesitated, considering. Then, over his shoulder, he said, "Barto, go. Find out what's happened."

  This time the door was left open, and they heard Barto's footsteps scurrying up the stairs and then fading away as he ran down the hallway. Wolfe breathed deeply, but the hand that held the pistol was steady.

  "I hope for your sake that you're lying," he said. "Those boys mean a lot to me, and if anything has happened to Carlos you're going to die very badly. There won't be any talk about spilling blood, either. You'll wish you . . ."

  The second crack was louder than the first because of the open door. Again Wolfe jumped and looked around.

  Vasily said conversationally, "That was Barto. It's a two-stage gadget, you see. The second explosion comes ninety seconds after the first."

  Wolfe wheeled around, his face contorted, his pistol coming up, but by that time Vasily had moved. He jumped in back of the wine vat and crouched down low behind it. Wolfe fired, and the bullet plunked into the side of the vat. Vasily laughed and did four things very quickly.

  He took a deep breath, bent his head over, and plucked his artificial eye from its socket.

  He pressed the brown iris of the eye with his thumb, and it depressed with an audible click.

  Still holding his breath, he tossed the eye out from behind the vat in Wolfe's direction. As he released his thumb the eye began to hiss.

  Then, in one quick motion, he rolled over the side of the vat and under the murky surface of the wine until he was wholly submerged. The wine slopped over the sides of the vat.

  Wolfe stared in horror at the disembodied eye bouncing at his feet. The eye regarded him, unblinking. The hissing sound was louder now. He kicked wildly at the eye and missed. He kicked again, and then a third time, breathing deeply. A lethal dose of the gaseous nitrobenzine hissed out of the eye. The effect on Wolfe was the same as that of a massive coronary attack. He felt a single sharp pain in his chest, and then he fell to the floor, dead.

  Vasily held himself under the surface of the wine by bracing his hands against the side of the vat. He counted off thirty slow seconds, the dispersal time for the nitrobenzine. Then he forced himself to count off thirty more before he rose up out of the wine like Bacchus at harvest-time, the rich, red liquid running from his head and shoulders. He stepped out of the vat and looked around for something with which to dry himself. There was nothing. Without even bothering to look at Wolfe he padded up the stairs, dripping wine from his naked body, and ran down the hallway. At the door of Wolfe's cell stood a group of horrified monks peering in at what remained of Carlos and Barto. The monks fell away when Vasily appeared, opening a path for the wine-soaked apparition.

  Inside the cell, he used the coarse brown robe of the order as a towel and quickly dressed in his own clothing, retrieving his wallet and keys. Wolfe's own chessboard lay on the table. On impulse, he took fresh pieces and set up the end position of the game they had played in Barcelona. He studied the board, shaking his head.

  "He has to resign; he doesn't have a chance," he murmured, and then added brightly, "Of course, he never did."

  No one tried to stop him as he left; the monks regarded him silently as he passed by. At the end of the hall he looked back. They were still staring at him, just as they might have stared at an elephant that had suddenly appeared within their monastery walls.

  "You make an excellent wine," he told them. "Vivid, dramatic, authoritative, and with a definite lilt to the aftertaste. But I don't suggest bathing in it."

  They looked at him as if he were crazy. He decided that at the moment he probably was.

  Instead of driving back to Barcelona, he took the precaution of going north over the border into France. It was a needless precaution - the monks would bury their own - but he felt better for taking it. Seven hours later he bought himself a new eye patch in Marseilles and boarded a flight, by way of Paris, for Mexico City.

  The drive from Mexico City to the U.S. border took fifteen hours with only five ten-minute stops for gas, food, and rest rooms. The three men from the Soviet Embassy did all the driving; Rusty and Sasha sat in the back of the Lincoln for the entire trip. As they drove through the night Rusty found herself responding to the young man. He was anxious about the operation, concerned for its success, but he also was cheerfully impudent and without any of the conventional stuffiness that she would have expected from such a man. He joked with her, told her outrageous stories, gave her coffee from a Thermos flask, but most of all he coaxed her to talk about herself. She needed little coaxing. There was a quarter of a century of conversation dammed up inside her.

  "I'm not one of your big-city people." she said, leaning back into the softness of the seat. "I come from farming country just outside Orel. Do you know Orel?"

  "Only from reading Turgenev," Sasha admitted.

  "Then you know Orel, at least the way it used to be. Turgenev captured it perfectly. Such a fine, fair land, and the river ... to me the Oka will always be the loveliest river in the world. How I hated to leave there to go to Gaczyna."

  "You trained at Gaczyna?"

  She nodded in the darkness. "Just like Jim did. Of course, I was five years behind him and so we never met. It's strange, thinking back on it now, but I fought so hard against the assignment. It wasn't just leaving the motherland, perhaps forever. That was bad enough, but the idea of marrying a man I had never seen seemed horrible. And spying on him for the rest of my life, being a watchdog as well as a wife . . . well, I was a romantic girl, only nineteen, and you know what girls that age can be like."

  "Yes, that much I know about women."

  "So romantic. I begged my control for another assignment, literally begged, but you can guess how much good that did me. In the end, I went. I knew my duty and I did what had to be done. Infiltrated through Canada with an American birth certificate and set out to marry James Emerson."

  "Advance my education on women, please. How does a woman make a man marry her? How were you so sure that you could do it?"

  "Why, Sasha, that's nothing. You certainly do need educating. A good-looking woman can always do that. There's no great trick in getting a man to marry you; the part is to keep him in love with you. And to love him. I hated him at first, hated him because he was the man other people had chosen for me. It wasn't prudishness, understand. If my control had ordered me to seduce a stranger, or something like that, well, it's all part of the job. But to marry a man, to bind myself to him for the rest of my life ... on orders. Can you understand why I hated him at first?"

  "Yes, I think so." They were passing through treeless desert, but the moon was up and there were shadows on the rocks to mark their speed.

  "If you can understand that, then perhaps you can understand what a miracle it seemed to be when I realized that I was falling in love with him. It was after we were married. Yes, I admit that, I married him as cold as a fish, without the slightest feeling for him. I thought I had signed up for a life without love, and then . . . it's funny how it happens. You wake up one morning and you think to yourself, you know, I may not be in love with him, but he's such a thoroughly good man, he's so decent and tender, and later that day he calls to say that he'll be working late at the office and you think, good, that gives me a chance to wash my hair before he comes home. Only you don't wash your hair. You sit in the kitchen staring at the clock, watching the hands crawl. Six, six thirty, seven, seven thirty, and all you want to hear are his footsteps in the hall, the click of his key in the lock, and all you want to see is him walking
in the door, that night and every other night for the rest of your life. And just about then you begin to laugh at yourself, just a giggle at first, and then louder, and pretty soon you're laughing like a crazy woman because you know what's happening to you. Love, that's what's happening, love for that good, thoroughly decent man who suddenly means more to you than anything else in the world. You can feel it rising up in you like water in a well, and it's like nothing that you ever felt before. And there's your miracle. Love where it never should have been, love where you never thought you'd find it. It started that night, and it's been the same that way for me ever since. Twenty-five years, the finest years a woman could ever have."

  She stopped suddenly. She closed her eyes and put her head back.

  Sasha said softly, "Until we came along to mess up your lives."

  "I've been talking too much," Rusty said, her eyes still closed. "Don't confuse my personal life with my professional obligations, and don't make the mistake of confusing me with Jim. America never seduced me. I left Russia over twenty-five years ago as a convinced Marxist-Leninist, and my convictions are the same now as they were then." She opened her eyes and looked at him directly. "So don't talk about messing up my life. I'm a loyal daughter of the socialist revolution, a member of the Communist Party of the USSR, and a serving officer in the KGB. I am not only doing what I was trained for, I am doing exactly what I want to do. I'm going home."

  He absorbed that, then asked, "And your husband?"

  "It will take time. He's wearing emotional blinders now, but once he gets home, once he stands on Russian soil, once he breathes Russian air again ..." She finished lamely, "It will take time, but it will work, I know it will. We have a good life ahead of us. Back home."

  "I hope so," said Sasha.

  They had left Mexico City at nine in the evening, and they came into the border town of Nuevo Laredo at noon the next day. The man driving the Lincoln dropped them off a block away from the International Bridge and turned the car around to make the return trip to Mexico City alone. Rusty, Sasha, and the other two embassy men walked over the bridge to the Texas side of the border. There they were met by a car from the Houston consulate that drove them north to San Antonio. A chartered jet was waiting for them at the airport there. At five in the afternoon they landed in San Francisco and headed north in a rented car along Route 101. Just short of twenty-four hours after leaving Mexico City they arrived in Point Balboa, California.