The Mirror Maze

by James P. Hogan

  “I take it it’s not important which one,” Mel said.

  Dave nodded. “That’s all you need to know.” He rested his arms on the wheel and started straight ahead at the neon signs in the bar window. “Eva and I had a professional relationship, besides being just friends. She and I worked together unofficially.” He paused to allow Mel a moment to digest that. “It was the kind of trust that grows over years. I was a source to Eva about things that were going on in parts of government. And her work with the Constitutionals enabled her to supply information that helped me. It was a two-way thing.”

  “So you already knew she was working for Newell?”

  “Oh, sure.”

  Mel frowned as he tried to visualize the chain in his mind. Warren Landis worked for Newell, and Eva had worked for Landis. But Landis, no doubt, also had his own contacts and informants in official circles, and somewhere in the tree of subordinates reporting to one of them was Dave. And Dave’s personal relationship with Eva had led to their helping each other informally. However, in view of the uncertain environment that prevailed, it was understandable that Eva should have kept details of those dealings to herself, and it made sense that Landis and the rest of Newell’s people had known nothing about it. In this light it was all the more curious that Dave should be revealing as much as he was.

  “You didn’t think it was Eva back at the house, from the first moment you walked in, did you?” Mel said.

  “No.”

  “What gave her away? I mean, that’s something we have to know about.”

  “Nothing that Seybelman or any of those would have spotted.” Dave paused for a moment. “I’d been trying to contact Eva for over a week. That doesn’t sound like a long time, but we had ways of getting in touch when we needed to. I knew something was wrong. I ended up trying the long shots, and one was to call the Brodsteins.”

  Mel nodded. “Paul told us about that. So?”

  “Eva wouldn’t have gone there. After she got in deep over in California, she quit contact with most of her old circles of friends and what-have-you. You don’t want to leave audit trails all over the country of where you go and who you talk to. Paul and Martha were part of the old scene. So were you. She wouldn’t have shown up in the middle of it all again. When we had business to discuss, either I went to LA, or we met somewhere between.”

  It sounded almost right, but something didn’t quite add up, Mel thought. Or, more precisely, there was something that hadn’t been said. Why would Eva not want to leave trails pointing back to the Brodsteins?

  “Were Paul and Martha working with you too, somehow?” Mel asked when he pinpointed what was nagging him.

  Dave conceded the point with a nod. “The Opposition extends a long way past the borders of the U. S. A. Keeping tabs on it can involve contacts overseas that you don’t always want the world to know about.”

  “So that’s why they’re always traveling?” Mel said.

  “Not exactly. They travel because their jobs take them places and because they like it. But it does make them a good cover for carrying out other errands on the side.”

  Mel thought about their recent visit to Lebanon. “Did you know that Eva was supposed to go to the Middle East in January with McCormick?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “So, what about the trip that the Brodsteins have just come back from? Was that just a coincidence, or what?”

  There was a short silence, as if Dave were weighing things one last time in his mind before committing himself irreversibly. Finally he said, “No. That wasn’t a coincidence. The reason I was looking for Eva was to brief her about a job that we want her to do for us while she’s out there. Paul brought back details of a contact in Tel Aviv.”

  “But how could he?” Mel queried. “I thought you said the Brodsteins weren’t in touch with Eva.”

  “They didn’t know Eva had anything to do with it. It was a contact for me to make, to set things up.”

  “You mean you’ll be going out there too?”

  “That’s right.”

  Which gave Eva three jobs to handle on the trip: her official PR duties with McCormick’s party; the scheme that Seybelman wanted to use her in; and now this, whatever it was, for Dave. “She was in for a busy time,” Mel commented dryly.

  “Well, you knew Eva.”

  Mel waited, but Dave volunteered nothing further. Now Mel saw the situation clearly. “You’re going to have to tell us the whole thing, Dave,” he said in a quiet voice. “Because you need Stephanie out there to do your job, just as much as we do. That’s what this conversation is all about, isn’t it? It’s the only reason you’d have for telling me all this.” Dave drummed his fingertips on the rim of the steering wheel and looked about uncomfortably as his professional instincts rebelled against disclosing anything further. Mel waited, but the silence persisted. Finally he asked, “Why Eva? Why do you have to have someone from McCormick’s party to do this job? You must have enough people of your own, especially in an area like that.”

  “We’ve been instructed specifically that it has to be somebody connected with the new administration.”

  “Why?”

  “We don’t know. But I will tell you that it involves one of the Palestinian groups connected with international terrorism. And some of the covert backers of that group have financial connections to certain interests over here, in the U.S.—interests, that seem to be centered on the conservative Right. Does that strike you as odd?”

  Mel frowned. “But I thought those people were supposed to be backed by the Soviets.”

  “Exactly. A strange coincidence of interests, you’d think…”

  “The same as discovering that somebody like Oberwald is running a spy operation for them,” Mel commented distantly. “It’s strange all right.”

  Dave let him mull over it for a few seconds. Then he added in a curious voice, “Until you remember that the far Right is against Constitutionalism because it promotes individualism and secular values. And the Soviets aren’t exactly wild about the political changes we expect to see over here, either.” He looked across the car, as if inviting Mel to complete the rest for himself.

  Mel wrinkled his brow as he assembled the facts into order in his head. “A lot of people—here, and abroad—won’t like what will happen if the twenty-eighth amendment goes through,” he began. Dave nodded. Mel continued, “From California we learn of something that’s being planned to happen before the inauguration, but we don’t know what. And now you’re telling me that another side of the Opposition has links to a Middle East terrorist group controlled by the Soviets.”

  “You’re getting there,” Dave said, nodding.

  Mel brought a hand up to his mouth and thought it through. “The Soviets are in collusion with the factions that are aligning against the Newell administration—foreign, at home, some inside the government, even…” His eyes widened. “Christ!” he whispered as the implication dawned. “The Soviets could be orchestrating the whole thing.”

  Dave nodded. “Right. And think of some of the people it might involve. Oberwald was something I didn’t know about.”

  Mel nodded dizzily. “Everything fits… almost,” he murmured. He could see tantalizing fragments of the pattern. It was like a multiple-peaked iceberg with just the tips showing. They all connected together somehow, just below the surface, but exactly how was obscured.

  Dave opened the door and stuck a leg out. “Anyhow, that’s more than I should have told you,” he said. “Come on. Let’s go in and have a drink. Then we’ll get those pizzas.”

  CHAPTER 33

  There was an airstrip of some kind behind the ridge at the back of the camp. Brett had heard the sounds of engines several times, echoing distantly and distorted by the surrounding hills. He had thought idly that maybe it could provide the basis for a way of getting out… But there was nothing more to build the idea upon, and it had never gone further than that.

  It was the first day of December. A year ago
he would have never dreamed that he’d be spending it like this, at an unheard-of spot somewhere in Syria. He had followed world reactions to the American election on the news and wanted to be back there now to share the excitement. During recent years he had been too wrapped up in his work to devote a lot of thought to the political developments that had been unfolding, but since coming here he’d had more time to think than at any time previously in his life. Lying on his bed, staring across the room with his hands clasped behind his head, he could think of a lot of people he’d known who might have benefited from being kidnapped for a couple of months.

  There were a number of socialist intellectuals in the camp—political officers to indoctrinate the troops, he supposed—who had sought him out to open his eyes to the errors of his ways, or perhaps to hone their own rhetorical skills. They had struck Brett as sincere, convinced that the road to improving the world lay with “scientific” direction and rational planning. The same methods that produced machines which functioned flawlessly, with no redundant parts and everything serving a purpose, would yield a society with similar attributes. Cooperation would replace competition, and everything would be waste-free and efficient.

  Which was great, Brett had told them, for people who wanted to be pieces of a machine—and who were these guys to be telling him, from the U.S. of A., how to run a more efficient production economy, anyway?

  He’d told them they were full of shit. For a start, it was a fallacy that private enterprise prevented cooperation. The people involved in turning raw material from all over the world into, say, an automobile—miners, rubber growers, oil drillers, metal smelters, machinists, chemists, shipbuilders, truckers, packers, accountants, salesmen, storemen, clerks, to name just a few—managed to cooperate very effectively. It was something he remembered hearing Mel talk about years ago, but he hadn’t given it a lot of thought at the time.

  Second, eliminating the competition of a free market wouldn’t eliminate competition. For the command system erected in its place would create new positions of power—to allocate, license, grant approvals, issue permits, vote their own pay raises and other peoples’ taxes—whose favors would be competed for every bit as fiercely—but with a greater guarantee of graft and corruption.

  They had asked why he didn’t think that the solution to wars was a single-government world order. “How do you vote with your feet when there’s nowhere else to go?” he’d answered.

  Shortly after that, he was branded as “subversive” by somebody higher up, and no more debating had been permitted. So he must have been brainwashing the brainwashers a little too effectively, he reflected with satisfaction.

  He got up and walked across to the bookshelf, but at that moment the sound came of keys in the door. Hamashad entered. “Is time for use some exercise,” he said. “Will be soccer game outside. You play, yes? Come now.”

  Brett shrugged. “Sure, why not?” They began crossing the compound.

  “First, I have some bad news, I’m afraid,” Hamashad muttered. “The girl that you asked me to get a message to in the U.S., Stephanie Carne.”

  Brett’s chest tightened. “Yes?”

  “She’s dead.”

  Despite the importance of keeping up normal appearances, Brett stopped in his tracks and closed his eye. “How?… How did it happen?”

  “You were reported as killed. Your car was found at the bottom of a cliff by the sea. She committed suicide three weeks later… I’m sorry.”

  Brett exhaled a long, shaky breath. If Hamashad had no means of contacting the U.S., and therefore couldn’t relay anything back about Stephanie, this would be exactly the kind of lie to be expected. “Hamashad,” Brett whispered. “If it’s true, and if I find out that you’re really one of the people who brought me here, I swear I’ll kill you.”

  They started walking again. There was little time. “You claim that you are an expert on Western missile defenses,” Hamashad said.

  “I’ve told you as much as I’m prepared to at this stage,” Brett answered.

  “Why were you brought here?”

  “You’re asking me?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “No.”

  Hamashad glanced quickly around. Two other guards were approaching, but they were still some distance away. “Has anything been said to you about the presence of missiles here?” he asked.

  “Here?… You mean at this camp?”

  “Somewhere in the vicinity.”

  “This isn’t an original method of interrogation,” Brett said.

  “You must trust me.”

  “Why should I?”

  “This is important.”

  Brett shook his head. “That isn’t good enough… And in any case, I don’t know anything.” He paused. “You were going to come up with some way of proving that you are dealing with the West. That could make a difference.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “Any ideas yet?”

  Hamashad shook his head. “Not yet… But we are working on it.”

  CHAPTER 34

  Lieutenant Colonel Sergei Chelenko stood with his hands clasped behind his back, staring at the thick, downy snowflakes falling past the window of his office on the fifth floor of the KGB headquarters. He had a deep-lined, pinkish, face, darkening to purple at his ears and a rather bulbous nose, but his eyes were keen, and the look in them on this white December morning was a perplexed one.

  Since General Goryanin’s assignment of him full-time to the mystery of the two missing nuclear shells in Hungary, a dismal picture had emerged of the security record for the past year. Pilfering and unexplained disappearances of everything from housepaints and cans of beans to television sets and automobile engines had been accepted as a part of life for as long as anyone could remember—much the same as anywhere else, he supposed. But it wasn’t supposed to happen with military equipment.

  The list of items lost or inadequately accounted for was appalling—and it had probably been doctored to hide as many sins as was humanly possible before it reached him. Yes, there would no doubt be the ritual demotions and removals from office, but invariably only of second-ranking scapegoats. Too much buying off and mutual covering up went on at the top for the real culprits ever to be incriminated. But that was hardly a new problem, and Chelenko could live with it.

  What alarmed him more was what some of the items buried in that list could add up to when somebody who knew what to look for—such as the weapons-systems specialists that he had brought in on Goryanin’s orders to evaluate the damage—sifted them out and revealed the possible connection between them.

  After a round of disarmament talks with the Americans, it had been agreed to destroy two hundred of the Soviet SA-37 long-range, supersonic, air-to-ground missiles—they were reliable but getting old, and the nuclear material in the warheads would be better used reprocessed into fresh explosives for newer models. Accordingly, early in the year, the airframes, stripped of warheads and security-sensitive components, but with the electrical and hydraulic flight-control systems intact, had been shipped under the supervision of an international inspection team by a procession of trucks from a servicing depot in East Germany to a railway yard, and from there by train to a plant near Lvov for final dismantling. But somewhere along the seven-hundred-kilometer route, two of the missile carcasses had disappeared. Or had the number dispatched been miscounted somehow? Nobody knew.

  In April, an inventory check at a testing ground near Tashkent had failed to locate a version of the type of motor used in the SA-37, and another had been written off as destroyed at air base six weeks later. A complete flight-control computer had been reported missing from a military engineering college in Odessa sometime in May, and careful scrutiny of the list of missing electronics components had revealed enough from a dozen different places to build another.

  And worst of all, the specialists had confirmed that shells of the type unaccounted for in Hungary could be modified to fit an SA-37, and would give it approxim
ately the punch of a tenth of a Hiroshima bomb.

  If all of those pieces found their way to the same place, it meant that whoever possessed them could put together two weapons capable of taking out with precision a couple of city blocks from several hundred kilometers away.

  Who would want something like that? He had begun by considering a number of possible candidates, none of them reassuring. But as the range narrowed, it was becoming clear that the chains of clues that his analysts were beginning to link together out of the flood of reports, information summaries, message intercepts, hints, allegations, rumors, and tip-offs, that poured into the KGB headquarters daily from its various sources throughout the Soviet Union and beyond, all pointed in one direction.

  It concerned a particular guerrilla camp in the remote eastern regions of Syria, which the Israelis had been quietly developing an interest in, also. Chelenko’s group had given the place the code name Glinka.

  The door opened, and Goryanin entered. Chelenko turned from the window. “How are we doing, Sergei?” Goryanin asked, crossing the room to inspect the summary board fixed to the wall, covered with a web of names, dates, questions, and comments, written in various colored inks.

  Chelenko moved over to stand beside him. “Well, although it’s described as one of the PALP training bases, it operates autonomously from the regular PALP command structure. In fact no one seems to know anything about it.”

  “What do the Syrian authorities have to say?”

  “To put it mildly, they’re being less than forthcoming. It’s almost as if they’re under orders from the top to forget that it exists.”

  “Hmm… Odd.”

  “And now we have this latest snippet,” Chelenko said. He pointed at an area on the board that related to an American couple who had visited the Middle East a few weeks previously, both of them university professors. While in Lebanon, they had met one of the Israeli intelligence people involved with Glinka, who passed them confidential information to take back to someone in the U.S. The new Constitutional party came into it too, somehow, but in what way was obscure. But the connection had been sufficient for Goryanin to arrange for the couple to be put under surveillance in the U.S., after their return. Chelenko went on, “Three days ago, they were visited at their home in Florida by a man called Fenner from Washington, who we think works for U.S. military intelligence, and a girl that he’s been associated with for years, who—and could this really be just a coincidence, do you think, Leonid?—just happens to be a full-time employee of the Constitutional party.”