Prisoners of Tomorrow (18 page)

Foleda sat back and tapped absently at his tooth with a thumbnail while he stared at the map of the Soviet Union being presented on a wallscreen. His brow creased beneath his wiry, short-cropped hair. “Where’s this place, again?” he asked after a thoughtful silence.

Gerald Kehrn operated a control on a panel inset below the edge of the table. For once, to Foleda’s relief, he was managing to keep reasonably still this morning. On the map, a light-cursor moved to seek out a point located in the Vilyuisk Mountain region, in a desolate part of Siberia between the Olenek and Lena rivers. A moment later, one of the auxiliary screens beside the main one showed an enlarged satellite picture of a fenced-in cluster of buildings and other constructions scattered among a forest of communications antennas. A pattern of rectangular buildings arrayed in monotonous, barrack-like lines was partly visible outside the fence on one side, while an open expanse of wet-looking terrain broken by patches of scrub and an occasional tree rose toward a ridge of hills on the other.

“It’s called Sokhotsk,” Kehrn said. “Located on the Central Siberian Plateau about two hundred miles southwest of a city called Zhigansk. We know it’s a major node in the Soviet military- and emergency-communications network; also, it’s one of their primary space-operations groundlink stations.”

Litherland, a solidly built CIA man in his late thirties, with collar-length blond hair and broad, linebacker shoulders, was sprawled casually in his chair in the center in a way that contrasted with Kehrn’s tense, upright posture. He tossed up a hand loosely to interject, “There’s more going on at that place than we’ve figured—something very big and very classified. That’s why Cabman could be extremely useful.” In the eternal double-talk that pervaded the intelligence world, “Cabman” was the code name that had been given to Professor Dyashkin.

“Is that the nearest town—the one two hundred miles away?” Foleda asked, still studying the display.

“There’s a small industrial town called Nizhni Zaliski about ten miles north,” Kehrn replied. “About five thousand people. But it doesn’t have much connection with Sokhotsk. It was built for the workers of a new mining and construction project over the mountains from Sokhotsk.”

“How far from Sokhotsk is this project?”

“Aw, six to ten miles, I’d guess.” Kehrn glanced at Litherland. Litherland confirmed with a nod.

“Over the mountains,” Foleda said.

“Yes.” Kehrn looked puzzled. “Is it important?”

Foleda shrugged. “Who knows? Just trying to get the picture.” He looked at Barbara. “Did you have any other points, Barb?”

She glanced at her notes. “Is Bowers okay?”

“Yes, how about this Professor Bowers from California?” Foleda asked. “Are we happy he’s clean?”

Litherland nodded. “First-rate record. He’s had top clearance for government work for six years. Stable, married, no personal problems, and a history of everything okay in the family. We’re running a check on anything that may have changed since his last review.”

“Is he available if we need to talk to him?” Foleda asked.

“He’s staying in the area, for the time being,” Litherland confirmed. “Fifteen minutes from here.”

Foleda nodded, satisfied. He glanced first at Kehrn, then at Barbara for possible further questions or comments, then looked back at Litherland. “Okay. So, Robert, what can you tell us about Comrade Professor Igor Lukich Dyashkin, alias Cabman?”

Litherland called a databank record onto the tabletop screenpad that everyone had before them. A heading cabman: summary personal profile appeared at the top, and below the name. Underneath, a picture appeared in the upper left corner of a man in his late forties, fresh-faced with a straight mouth, candid stare, and boyishly cut hair parted conventionally on the left. Beside the picture was a summary of height, weight, and other personal statistics. After a couple of seconds, a synthetic voice began reciting details of Dyashkin’s history, which appeared as text in the space below, line by lie, as each was narrated.

Born April 6, 1964, Tula, USSR.

Father: Anton Konstantinovitch, b. Leningrad, 1935, production engineer.

Mother: Natasha Pavlovich, nee Sepirov, b. Odessa, 1939, civil servant.

1973 Moved with family to Orel.

1979 Joined Komsomol, Young Communist League, @ high school.

1982 Admitted Kharkov University. Graduated 1987, electrical/electronic engineering.

1987-1994 Soviet Navy. Two years postgraduate studies, Naval Technical Institute, Leningrad. One year posting to satellite tracking station, Archangel. Two years Pacific Fleet communications, based Vladivostok. Discharged with honor, second lieutenant.

1994 Naval Underwater Research laboratory, Sevastopol, work on submarine communications. Awarded doctorate in communications systems, 1996.

2003 Married Anita Leonidovich Penkev, administrator with Aeroflot. Marriage subsequently dissolved, 2011.

2005 Professor of Communications Engineering, Moscow State University. Also, permanent consultant to Ministry of Space Sciences on strategic military command networks. Admitted to Soviet Academy of Sciences, 2010.

2015 to present, Director of Operations at Sokhotsk facility.

Foleda continued studying the text for a while after the voice had stopped speaking. Then he looked up and gazed at the far wall. “Seems pretty solid,” he murmured. “Do we have any leads on why he might want to come over?”

“We’re not sure,” Litherland said frankly. “He does have something of a reputation as a ladies’ man—it seems that screwing around too much was what got him divorced. He could have upset some of the prudes among the high-ups—but that hardly sufficient. Obviously it’s something to go into when we start talking to him.”

“Yes, exactly,” Barbara said, as if she had been waiting for them to get to that. “How are we going to do that? Where is he now?”

“Back in Siberia, as far as we know,” Litherland said.

“So, how do we talk to him?” Foleda asked.

Kehrn answered. “That was part of what was inside the folder that he slipped to Melvin Bowers in Japan. It contained a number code that he’s proposing to use to communicate to us directly, via the NSA system.”

“You mean straight into our communications net?” Barbara checked. “None of the usual things like drops for our embassy in Moscow?”

“He’s three thousand miles away from Moscow,” Kehrn reminded her. “And besides, what does he need melodrama methods for? He’s got a billion rubles’ worth of some of the most sophisticated communications equipment in the world sitting right there.”

“Okay . . . so how is he proposing to use it?” Foleda was beginning to look uncomfortable.

“He’s in a position to initiate all kinds of transmissions worldwide that NSA listens in on all the time,” Kehrn said, shrugging. “Now that we know what code he’s proposing to use, we just wait for anything that comes in addressed to us.”

“And can we reply the same way?” Barbara asked.

“Sure, why not?”

“How hard is this code of his?” Foleda asked.

“Grade-school,” Kehrn admitted. “He’s a professor, not a spy.”

“So we know their codebreakers will read it.”

“So, they fish it out of the air,” Kehrn agreed. “But even if they know what we say, it doesn’t follow that they understand what it means. And on top of that, they won’t have any way of knowing who we’re saying it to.”

Foleda looked more uncomfortable. “It’s another technical gimmick,” he said. “We’ve seen enough already. First we had a ‘foolproof’ way of getting the Tangerine file down from Mermaid. But we never got any file, and Magician wound up in Lubyanka prison. Then we sent two people up after it with another gizmo that was the wonder of the age. We still don’t have the file, they never came back, and this time we don’t even know where they are. Now you want me to buy into this.”

Kehrn tugged at his mustache, then leaped to his feet and paced across the floor. He turned in front of the large screen still showing the map. “But this time, believe me, Bernard, it really is different,” he insisted. “I’ve been through the details personally, and I’m satisfied. This time we don’t have to send anyone anywhere. All the guy wants to do is talk. We just listen. And when we want to say something back, all we have to do is squirt it out through one of the computers at Fort Meade on a regular beam that we transmit all the time, anyway. All the risks are on the other side this time.”

“It sounds like too many things I’ve listened to before,” Foleda answered.

“But Cabman’s out where the reindeer are, in the middle of Siberia,” Kehrn said. “What else are we supposed do?”

“Hmph.” Foleda began tapping his tooth again, and stared moodily at the pad in front of him, studying the face of Dyashkin once more and then shifting his gaze back to the satellite picture of the Sokhotsk groundstation. Finally he looked away again and asked Litherland, “Why are you people involving UDIA, anyway? This kind of thing is routine for the CIA. You must figure we have some stake in it.”

Kehrn moved forward from the screen and rubbed his palms together agitatedly. “You’re right. Where it involves UDIA, Bernard, is that Sokhotsk is the groundstation that handles the main communications beam up to Mermaid, where our two people might still be.”

Litherland added, “And if Cabman is looking for favors, he’ll be expecting us to ask for some evidence that he’s genuine. Maybe we can persuade him to try and find out something about what happened to your people. It seems worth a shot.”

Foleda was looking more interested already. “So what’s this?” he said. “The CIA handing out freebies?”

Litherland returned a faint grin. “I guess we’ve decided that maybe we’re on the same side after all,” he said.

Foleda looked at Barbara. She inclined her head in a way that said she couldn’t find any snags. “Okay,” he announced resignedly. “Let’s suppose I’m sold. But it’s obvious that Cabman can only serve our purpose for as long as he stays at Sokhotsk. Therefore we should react encouragingly, but keep stalling him.”

“That’s what we were hoping you’d say.” Kehrn came back to his chair and sat down.

Litherland nodded. “Fine.”

“Callous, calculated exploitation of another human being,” Barbara remarked.

“It’s that kind of business, Barb,” Foleda agreed with a sigh.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Back in the days when she was an engineering student, Paula Bryce had had a poster among the pictures, astronomical charts, and assorted samples of encapsulated philosophy cluttering the wall of her apartment, which read:

He who knows not, and knows not that he knows not, is a fool. Avoid him.

He who knows not, and knows that he knows not, is ignorant. Teach him.

He who knows, and knows not that he knows, is asleep. Waken him.

But he who knows, and knows that he knows, is a wise man. Follow him.

At the bottom, in a fit of exasperation one day, she had scrawled,
He who knows not whether he knows or knows not anything at all is a politician. Get rid of him!
Paula had never been exactly enamored with politics.

After growing up in a Navy family with an independent-minded mother whom she admired, she had found most of the girls she met in her teenage years silly and boring, and the boys either crude and immature or despairingly wimpish, rarely somewhere in between. So she tended to spend her time in solitary occupations, usually at a computer keyboard or behind a book. She read Ayn Rand, Kant, and Nietzsche when she was in a serious mood, hard science-fiction to relax, and books that debunked UFO’s, psychic powers, quack medical fads, ancient astronauts, and the like, for amusement. She experimented with drugs, which she didn’t like, alcohol, which was okay, and sex, which was great. In her studies she found the challenge and rigor of the sciences stimulating, but kept liberal arts and the humanities to a minimum; they struck her as wishy-washy, too subjective in their conventional wisdoms, and they invariably attracted in droves precisely the kinds of people she couldn’t stand.

On one occasion during the campus period of her life, she found herself representing the opposition to a group of sociology students who claimed to have obtained positive results in a series of ESP card-guessing tests, which they challenged the science fraternity to debate. Paula showed how a comparable score could be derived by matching the results to a selected portion of a random-number string, thus proving once again to the world that sometimes people have lucky streaks, sometimes unlucky, and most of the time they muddle along somewhere in between. The revelation would not have surprised any experienced gambler, but her efforts made little impression on the judges and the editors of the college magazine, who awarded the verdict to the paranormalists on the grounds that “the influence of ESP has not been disproved.” And neither had the existence of Santa Claus ever been disproved, Paula pointed out in disgust, but to no avail.

Deciding on a career in science or engineering but unable to face the prospect of more years in academia, she followed the family tradition by opting for the services, and joined the Air Force in 2000 at age eighteen. After basic training she entered the USAF electronics school at Keesler AFB, Missouri, qualified there for a grant scholarship, transferred to Communications Command, and went on to complete her doctorate under Air Force sponsorship at the University of Chicago. After that she moved to the Pentagon to work on the performance evaluation of special-purpose military hardware, which involved stints at NASA, Goddard, and the USAF research center at Langley. Life settled down to a fairly humdrum routine in these years, and she relieved the boredom through a protracted affair that she rather enjoyed with a married officer twenty years her senior, called Mike. He was the kind of nonconformist who attracted her, and had earned his promotions through competence rather than the kind of social image-building that was typical in any nation’s peacetime officer corps. But after two years Mike was posted to the Mediterranean, and for a change of scene Paula applied for a posting to Systems Command. She was accepted, and eventually became a specialist in analyzing purloined Russian and East European hardware.