James P. Hogan (54 page)

“Oh, you clobbered him all right,” Scanlon said, grinning. “It was real enough – part of the test, you might say. They wanted a man with fight in him, to be sure he’d hit back at the system when he got the chance. And they made sure the only chance he got would be by setting up a spy operation. They had about a dozen or more people they might have used, scattered around in Zamork. But not all of them managed to set up a communications link back to wherever it was they came from, and others didn’t measure up in other ways.” Scanlon looked at Paula, “That was why the Russians waited until the Earth-end connection into Washington – the end they couldn’t control – was working before they involved you. If that had failed, they’d have concentrated on one of their other candidates.”

“Where is this place?” Rashazzi said. “Where are we all?”

“Underneath some hills near a place called Sokhotsk, in Siberia – where the groundstation is located that handles communications to the real
Tereshkova
,” Scanlon replied. “There’s been a genuine exchange of message traffic with the real
Tereshkova
for your people to follow, to keep up appearances. The Russian code name for this place is ‘Potemkin.’ How’s that for being appropriate? Or maybe there’s someone in the Kremlin with a sense of humor, after all. Now, if —”

“Why?” McCain demanded-He had recovered from the shock, and his mind was starting to work again. “Why are you doing this? It’s not exactly a job they’d have picked anybody for. You must have been pretty hot. What happened?”

Scanlon scratched the side of his sparse head of hair and sighed. “Yes, it’s true that at one time I was mixed up with the IRA. But when I got to thinking about it I found meself asking, Are these really the kind of people I’d like to see running Ireland if the Brits left and they did win? They were not. And they’re not the kind of people you stay around for very long if you’ve crossed them, either. I decided I’d be safer heading East. But I found myself asking the same question about the Russians and the world as I’d asked about the Provos and Ireland: Are these really the kind of people I’d like to see in charge of it? And the answer came out the same.” Scanlon tossed out an arm to dismiss the subject. “But are we to be getting on with what needs to be done, or stand here prattling like old women all day? Olga and the general are waiting in Turgenev for Paula to get back and make her TV debut, and I’ve decided to take my chances with the rest o’ ye and have a shot at getting us out.”

“What’s this about TV?” McCain asked, giving Paula a mystified look.

She avoided his gaze, feeling sheepish now. “Olga and Protbornov asked me to appear on a connection to Washington to back up the signal that we sent. I agreed. They wanted me to try and persuade you to do the same thing – because you’d have better credentials.”

“Some goddam hope! And you actually —”

“No, that’s what I told them… really. Then Olga had this idea that maybe you’d confirm the message if you thought you were doing it independently – using the laser. I came here to try and sell you on that.” Paula exhaled a sharp breath and showed her empty hands. The gesture said that that was the way it was, that she couldn’t change it now, that he could think whatever he liked.

McCain stared at her for a second, then nodded. It was all under the bridge now. “That would have been their trump. Well, at least we didn’t…” He looked at her again, frowning. “Olga suggested that?”

“Yes.”

“But she knows this place isn’t in space. The laser couldn’t communicate out. Why would she come up with a damn fool idea like that?”

Paula bit her lip awkwardly. “I’ve been wondering the same thing,” she said. “It had to be part of what they’d set up all along, too. They could intercept the laser signal at the roof, relay it up to
Tereshkova
, and repeat it on another laser set up inside. They could handle replies from Earth in the same way. That was how they planned to involve you. And I walked straight into it.”

McCain shook his head. “Surely not. That has to be too —”

“She’s right,” Scanlon said. “That’s exactly how it was. Don’t you remember back in June, it was
me
who put you onto the idea for the laser. And it was me who found the broken one that’s now fixed and lying on the bench there – but it wasn’t
too
broken. And it’s me who’s supposed to go with you to Turgenev now, to make sure it’s aimed at the right place on the roof – where the detector to relay the signal up to the groundstation has been fixed.”

McCain stared as if he was having a hard time believing it. “That far back? It was all planned that far back? We were
supposed
to build the laser for this all along?… Jesus Christ!”

“And we thought we were being so cunning,” Rashazzi muttered despondently.

Paula sat down on one of the stools. “My God, and it came so close…” She looked at McCain. “Would you have? If I’d told you the story and you went to Turgenev to see the VIPs for yourself, would you have confirmed it to Washington with the laser?”

McCain turned his face toward her, thought about the question, and then nodded with a strange, glassy-eyed expression. “Yes,” he told her. “To be frank, I think I might.”

“And perhaps we won’t disappoint them yet,” Scanlon said. Everyone turned to look back at him curiously. He nodded, satisfied that he had all their attention again. “Right, are we through with the talking now?” he asked. There was silence, “Good. Now, they say the best way to catch a thief is with a thief. It might be, I’m thinking, that the best way to outwit deceivers is with deception. And there’s something all the more poetic when it’s by turning their own deception around on them, which has a natural appeal to an Irishman. The first thing we have to do is collect Sargent and Mungabo, And let’s get Charlie Chan and Borowski down here, too, since they’re okay and we’ll need all the help we can get. After that, this is what I’m, proposing…”

The Infra-Red Orbiting Observatory (IROO) was a permanently manned astronomical space observation platform operated jointly by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, NASA, and the East Asiatic Scientific Research Council. Designed for studying the universe at high resolution in the longer-than-optical wavelengths that the Earth’s atmosphere blocks almost completely, it boasted a main telescope built around a 200-centimeter-diameter primary mirror, which was cooled with liquid helium to avoid polluting its sensitive detectors with heat radiated from the structure. Since becoming fully operational five years previously, the observatory had penetrated the screening dust clouds that attend both the births and deaths of stars, bringing a new understanding of stellar evolution; it had mapped the inner regions of the Milky Way and pinpointed the super-massive black hole centered there; and it had helped reveal the dynamics, of energetic distant galaxies. Its instruments were sensitive enough to detect a speck of dust thirty miles away by its heat radiation alone; also, it was in an almost-polar orbit oriented such that for the next several days it would be able to train those instruments on
Valentina Tereshkova
continuously.

“We’re keeping a line open to Tokyo,” Kay Olson, a special assistant at the State Department, said from one of the screens in Foleda’s outer office. “The Japanese prime minister is talking to Professor Kobasuka at this moment. Meanwhile the IROO crew have been alerted via JPL to stand by for a special operational directive. The President has asked to be kept informed, and we’ll advise you of further developments as they happen.” Kobasuka was chairman of the committee that selected the program of objectives for IROO to study from proposals submitted by scientists all over the world.

“Fine,” Foleda acknowledged. He turned his head toward Barbara, who was waiting for a response from a man looking off-screen on another display. “How’s it going?”

“Defsec C-three-I has ordered an emergency-band connection into MILCOM from the NASA tracking net. They’re testing it now. JPL has confirmed that the IROO high-power signal-laser can be tuned to the frequency specified in Pangolin’s message.”

“Anything on Sunflower from Sexton?”

“No.”

Foleda grunted. “Stay with it and let us know straight-away when anything new comes up.”

“Will do.”

Foleda walked back to the interview room next door to his office, where Philip Borden and Anita Dorkas were sitting at the table with a heavily built, bearded man. Foleda waited inside the door without interrupting. “You’re certain,” Borden was saying to Anita. “You arrived that morning and were transferred to low-security work without explanation, and Colonel Felyakin talked to you the same day. What did he say, exactly? It’s important.”

“He told me to reschedule the day’s leave I had listed for the next day, because some people were due to arrive from Moscow to straighten out an administrative mix-up. He said it involved the durations of some of the postings in England, and asked me to be there at ten o’clock with Enriko, and to make sure we had our passports.”

Borden nodded. “And Enriko came home drunk that same night?”

“I don’t know that I’d say drunk. He had been drinking.”

“With the Line KR chief, Colonel Shepanov.”

“Yes.”

“And what did Enriko say?”

Anita sipped from a glass of water on the table. “He was very quiet and preoccupied – not the way he usually was when he and Shepanov got together…”

“Go on.”

“He mentioned that Shepanov had been having personal problems and sometimes talked too much. Then, quite suddenly, he asked about the scientist from Novosibirsk that my ex-husband went off with seven years ago. Shepanov had let slip that she’d been arrested for dissident activities.”

“Did he say when she was arrested?” the bearded man interjected. He had a strong East European accent.

“About three months previously – that would have been April-May, I’d guess.”

The bearded man nodded. “And you assumed that your ex-husband had been under investigation, too, and that as a matter of standard KGB procedure all his close relatives and associates would be suspect, including you.”

Anita nodded. “Yes, exactly.”

“And what was your reaction?” Borden asked her.

“I was terrified, naturally, because of the work I’d been doing for the British. From the other things that had happened that day it seemed likely that I’d been found out al-ready, that Enriko was under suspicion, too, and that the people from Moscow were coming to take us both back.”

“So you ran away, and sought asylum with the British.”

“Yes.”

“Leaving your husband?” the bearded man queried, raising his eyebrows.

“There was no love in our relationship. He was pure KGB. His postings abroad were useful to my own work.”

“That never struck you as just too convenient?” Foleda asked, still near the door, and speaking for the first time.

Anita looked uncomfortable. “Not at the time… although since you mentioned it, I’ve been wondering.”

Borden looked inquiringly across the table. He had been through this many times, but wanted the bearded man to hear it firsthand for himself. Voldemar Zatin, former chief of the KGB’s training academy at Bykovo, forty miles north of Moscow, whose defection to the West five years previously had been a minor sensation, leaned back in his chair and thought for a few moments over the things that had been said. Then he looked at Borden and gave his opinion.

“The business at the London Residency – that is not how they would do it. You would never be permitted to leave the building in a situation like that. The first thing you know is when the KGB men from Moscow come in, and then you stay there in the embassy until you leave for the airport. Complete surprise. No opportunity to suspect or do anything. The passports? Bah!” Zatin waved a hand in front of his face. “They send someone to your apartment for them, if that is where they are.”

“All a setup, then, you think?” Borden said.

“I’m certain of it. It was all so that she would bring a story to the West that would make them believe that Dyashkin was genuine and had a legitimate reason to defect. He was part of it from the start. His dissident activities – all part of his cover.”

Anita stared in astonishment. “But that was over seven years ago.”

Zatin pulled a face and tilted his head indifferently. “Seven years, ten years – what of it? Some operations they plan twenty years ahead. Thirty years, even. The husband was another part of it – from the beginning. They allowed the marriage to happen, exactly so she would get into compromising situations on foreign postings, from which she could defect easily. She was allowed to believe she was using him; in reality, they were using her. I have seen similar schemes.”

Stunned, Anita stared down at the table. Borden looked over at Foleda and exhaled a long breath. “You were right all down the line, Bern…. Look, it’s kinda late in the day to say so, I know, but —” Foleda waved his hand in a way that said it was okay, save it till later. Borden nodded. “So what’s the situation out front?” he inquired, nodding toward the door.

“Technically it looks good,” Foleda said. “State is talking to the Japanese now, and we’ve got an emergency military hookup through NASA. The President’s being kept posted, and the defense secretary and Chiefs of Staff are standing by.”

Borden got up from his chair. “Then, let’s get on down and see what conies in,” he said. And to Anita and Zatin, “You’ve helped a lot. Thanks. We’d like you to stay around for a while.”

As they passed by Foleda’s outer office, Foleda stopped to poke his head in. “Have Security send someone to take care of the visitors while they’re in the building,” he said to Barbara. “We’re going on down to Communications. Anything new here?”

“The Japanese want to know if we’re willing to underwrite the cost of lost research time on IROO if they reassign it to Mermaid,” she told him.

“Shit,” Foleda said over his shoulder as he turned to follow Borden again. “Tell ’em I’ll write a personal check.”

Paula’s feelings as she drove back to Turgenev in the security police van with Major Uskayev and their escort were very different from the zeal that had carried her in the opposite direction just a few hours earlier. Although it was a source of wonder to think that the valley packed with buildings and trees beyond the roadway, the Russian television crews filming decorations being set up for tomorrow’s celebrations, and the panoramic view of the hub and starfield overhead in the agricultural sector were all parts of an illusion manufactured underground in Siberia, she remained quiet and subdued.