James P. Hogan (27 page)

And on her first evening there, when she walked down through the rows of huts to the reservoir, along by the water, and back following the outer hull wall via the hill at the rear, it rained.

At the end of July, the Russians privately released to a number of selected Western and Asian governments a recording of what they claimed was a voluntary confession by Magician, In it, Magician appeared at ease, composed, and in good health. In their consensus, the doctors, psychologists, and experienced interrogators who viewed the recording found no evidence of coercion.

Magician claimed that for many years he had been obsessed with concern over the international situation. He abhorred the distrust between the Communist world and the West, and the prospect of its leading to a global calamity horrified him. So, when what seemed like a unique opportunity presented itself, he had attempted to make his own single-handed contribution to easing world tensions. The file of information he had compiled to substantiate the claims of advanced weapons systems being concealed on
Valentina Tereshkova
was a fake. He had invented the data and misled Western intelligence deliberately, in order to provoke public accusations and denials. He had believed at the time that this would force the Soviet government into a more open policy and lead eventually to full international inspection. Thus a major source of potential misunderstanding would have been defused. His intentions had been for the best, as he saw it. However, since then he had come to realize that he had acted naively, and in fact had aggravated the situation instead. He hoped that in setting the record straight he would undo some of the damage he had caused. He regretted his actions, asked the West to understand, and expressed thanks to the Soviet counselors and doctors who had helped him see everything more clearly.

“What do you make of it?” Philip Borden, the UDIA’s director, asked Foleda after they had viewed the recording with others in a conference room inside the Pentagon.

Foleda shrugged. “How can anyone know what to make of it? You know as well as I do, Phil, that with the things they’ve got these days, they could have turned the pope into an atheist since Magician was grabbed. I’d be closer to being convinced if they let some of our people talk to him freely, face-to-face. If he’s genuine, what would they have to lose?” Foleda wasn’t the only person to feel that way. After consultation, the US ambassador in Moscow, on behalf of a number of interested nations, challenged the Soviet government to make Magician available for unsupervised interviews by experts freely selected by the West. To the surprise of everyone involved, the Soviets readily agreed.

“… in the formation of a class with
radical chains
, a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society, an estate which is the dissolution of all estates, a sphere which has a universal character by its universal suffering and claims no
particular right
because no
particular wrong
but
wrong generally
is perpetrated against it; which can invoke no
historical
but only its
human
title, which does not stand in any one-sided opposition to the consequences but in all-round opposition to the presuppositions of…” The tall, bearded Estonian standing on the box in the general compound delivered his reading from the works of Marx in an untiring, strident monotone that sounded like a long-playing version of a Moslem call to prayer from the top of a minaret. The audience before him continued murmuring among themselves with total inattention, reasonably confident that even the most diligent KGB eavesdropper who might still be glued to a directional microphone capable of distinguishing anything intelligible would long since have been put to sleep.

“We could pool some points and try getting approval to start glassblowing as a hobby, for ornaments or something,” Rashazzi suggested. “That would get us some basic equipment and materials. For the optical cavity we’d need, oh… say, a meter or two of Pyrex tube. Then for —”

“Sealing it would require a gas-oxygen torch,” Haber said. “Soda-lime glass could be worked with a propane torch, which would be easier to get hold of.”

“Okay, soda-lime glass. Then we’d need some optical-quality glass to make Brewster windows, an abrasive powder for sawing and grinding, and components for the end-mirror cells….”

Haber was still shaking his head. “It’s formidable. You still need a vacuum pump and manometer…”

“We use the glassblowing setup,” Rashazzi said.

“And then the electronics.”

“I know where I can get neon-sign electrodes from somebody in the town. A plain, double-sided, epoxy-glass PCB could be made into a twenty-kilovolt capacitor. We’ve already got some rectifiers.”

McCain kept quiet. There wasn’t much he could have contributed, anyway. He’d asked them if it would be feasible to home-build a suitable laser device for the method that Scanlon had first speculated about to communicate mes-sages out of
Tereshkova
.

“Gas-dynamic would be simpler to construct,” Haber said. “Although there would still be the problem of procuring suitable nozzles and fuel supplies.”

After more than two months of observing, listening, and getting to know how the system at Zamork worked, McCain had come to the conclusion that there might still be a chance of carrying out the mission he’d come here to accomplish. True, there was scant likelihood of obtaining the Tangerine file now; but that had been only a means to the end of ascertaining
Tereshkova’s
true nature. His unique situation compared to the rest of the interested section of the West’s intelligence community put him in an ideal position to do just that. It couldn’t be a one-man operation, however, and that raised the eternal Zamork problem of trying to decide who was reliable. He’d already recruited Scanlon and Mungabo, and now he was putting out feelers to Rashazzi and Haber. It was difficult to imagine anyone with their kind of knowledge earning a living as jailhouse stool pigeons.

“Perhaps you’re right,” Rashazzi said resignedly to Haber at last,” It’s complicated. Maybe the answer isn’t to try making our own laser at all. Suppose we just get enough pieces to make what looks like a broken Russian one, Then we find some way to switch it with a working one – there must be some in the labs in Landausk, for example. Or what about alignment lasers? There’s still construction going on in some areas.”

Haber admired the young Israeli’s enthusiasm, but remained pessimistic. “It’s no good,” he told McCain. “There simply aren’t enough places to hide all the parts we’d need, never mind to assemble and test the finished device. Such a task could never be concealed from surveillance.”

In the background, the Marxian chant continued with no sign of abatement. “What we need is somewhere permanent to do it, free from surveillance,” Rashazzi muttered, staring down at the floor.

“Something like a workshop,” McCain said.

“Yes, that’s it exactly. We need a workshop.”

If Andreyov was a plant, it was the best piece of acting McCain had ever come across. But that in itself didn’t make him potentially useful – he was getting old, and he had a loose tongue. All the same, McCain tried making a few indirect references to subverting the system to see if he would catch the gist, Andreyev missed the point and responded typically.

“The system wasn’t always like that. The czars, oh yes, they were authoritarian all right, but then Russia has always been authoritarian. It wasn’t the same kind of thing. The arts flourished then, because artists were allowed to express what they felt. It wasn’t all political. There were Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky, Borodin… And there were some executions, yes – a few, mainly criminals – but nothing compared to what came later. Political prisoners weren’t treated badly under the czars, you know. The jailers got reprimanded if they didn’t address them respectfully. Most of them were cultured, you see. Gentlemen. Not like the rubbish that took over later – murderers and thieves, the lot of them, no better than Hitler. Worse than Hitler.

“Do you know what lost Hitler the war? It was the Nazi racial lunacies. When the Germans invaded Russia in 1941, whole nations of people that the Bolsheviks had taken over wanted to help throw the Communists out – Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Ukrainians. Eager to fight they were. But Hitler thought they were subhumans and wouldn’t use them. He wanted Russia to be defeated by Germans. But it wasn’t, of course.”

“I heard a joke about Russians,” Charlie Chan said, who was listening. “Ivan and Boris meet in the square outside a railroad station in Moscow, you see. Ivan says to Boris, ‘Where are you going?’ and Boris says, ‘I’m catching the train to Minsk, to get bread.’ ‘But you can get bread right here, in Moscow.’ Boris says, ‘I know, but the line starts in Minsk.’”

Antonos Gonares, the Hungarian who shared a partitioned bay with Smovak and Vorghas, interested McCain because he often went on work details to the hub. The official plans of
Tereshkova
showed the zone behind the docking ports as housing the nuclear reactors that powered the main generating plant and provided process heat for some of the manufacturing operations. Other reports, however, held that the manufacturing was less extensive than claimed, and that most of the space in those compartments held other installations.

“What kind of work do you do in the hub?” McCain asked Gonares casually one day.

“It varies, Sometimes we move freight around in the cargo bays. Sometimes it’s cleaning out tanks or scraping down metal for repainting.”

“In the cargo bays? You mean behind the docking ports, back near the nuclear area?”

“Yes, sometimes. Why?”

“Oh, you know journalists – always curious. I was just trying to get a clear picture in my mind of the layout. Who knows? – I might end up writing about it someday. I, ah, I’m sure I could persuade my editors to cash a few points for more details… if they proved useful.”

“Ah, I see…. What kind of details?”

“Oh, nothing very demanding. What’s inside which compartment. The positions and directions of the bulkheads. What kind of security they operate there. Maybe a sketch or two?”

“How much might we be talking about?”

“What are the risks, and what would make them worthwhile?”

“Well, maybe…. Let me think about it.”

Oskar Smovak rubbed his bushy, Fidel Castro beard as he stood watching McCain, who was staring out across the B Block mess area. “What do you see?” he asked after a while. For once, his usually cutting voice was low and measured. McCain turned his head. “How do you mean?” “You watch people, and you think. You say little. What are you looking for?” “I’m just a compulsive people-watcher.” “Is that a common habit among journalists?” “Probably. How can you report what you don’t see?” “Come on, you’re no journalist, Lew. I just wanted to say that if I can, I’d like to help. Okay?” “Help? What with?” “Whatever you’re planning,” “If I find myself planning something, I’ll bear it in mind.”

Smovak sighed. “Yes, I know, it’s difficult knowing who to trust, isn’t it. But for what it’s worth, I’ve managed to get some information for you about the American woman that you came here with.” McCain looked round at him sharply. Smovak went on, “She was in a close-confinement cell in D Block up to about a week ago, but she got sick and was taken to the infirmary. She hasn’t come back since.”

“Who told you that?”

“A nameless friend in another billet who screws an East German wench from the cell she was in. It sounded as if the others gave her a hard time.”

“I see…. Okay, thanks, Oskar. And I’ll let you know if I need a hand.”

Borowski, the Pole, had warned McCain minutes before the incident with Maiskevik. “How did you know?” McCain asked him one day as they talked in the compound.

“I just had the feeling they were setting somebody up that night. I figured it had to be you.”

“So how come I was left alone afterward?” McCain asked.

“You would have exposed Luchenko’s sidelines. He probably bribed someone higher up not to pursue the matter.”

“Wouldn’t that someone have guessed already?”

“Probably. But why go looking under shitty stones when you can be paid not to?”

Which was pretty much what Andreyev had said. But McCain had never been fully satisfied with that explanation. If the authorities already knew about the graft systems that were operating around the place, Luchenko wouldn’t have stood to lose much from exposure. So he could have continued with his taxation racket and have kept face by having McCain put through the mill. Something didn’t add up – but McCain wasn’t about to get to the bottom of it just then, and there would be no point in pursuing the matter. “Why’d you do it?” he asked instead. “Did you have something personal against Maiskevik?”

“We all had something personal against Maiskevik. But on top of that, I’m Polish, I’ve heard you talk; you know our history – how Stalin carved Poland up with Hitler and stabbed us in the back in 1939, about Katyn, and what happened to the Warsaw resistance array. The Russians have always dreaded the thought of a strong Poland. We’ve never had any reason to feel exactly charitable toward the Russians.”

“’Tis very sociable you’re becoming all of a sudden, I can’t help noticing,” Scanlon said over lunch. “Little tête-à-têtes going on all the time wherever I turn my head. I take it you’re recruiting.”

“As you said, just being sociable.”

“Oh, come on now, I thought we were supposed to be partners. Don’t I even get to know who it is I’m likely to find meself working with?”

“If there’s a need.”

“Aha, always the cautious one, eh?”

“You know the rules. It avoids risking embarrassing complications.”

“You went to a good school, I see. Purely out of curiosity, what part of Western intelligence were you with?”

“SIS – the Brits. They infiltrated me in here specially to keep an eye on you. You got yourself such a reputation in London.”

“Oh, it’s like that, is it? Very well, Mr. Earnshaw, journalist, then here’s me with a little tip for ye that’ll make your life a whole lot easier. Talk to Koh. He’ll put you in touch with the escape committee. They’re the people with information of the kind ye could be using.”