Prisoners of Tomorrow (37 page)

Svetlana, the former KGB agent, was in when Paula got back to the hut, trying a new picture in different positions on the walls. It was a scene in a city of tall buildings. The city was inhabited by a mixture of all the monsters that had ever crashed, roared, terrorized, and demolished their way across the world’s movie screens—Godzillas, mutant spiders, giant ants, barrel-chested gorillas, creaking Frankensteins, and shapeless blobs. But these monsters were panicking, fleeing in wide-eyed terror through the streets and pulling their baby monsters after them, while others shrieked from windows. It was also, evidently, a city of monsters-in-miniature . . . for looming above the buildings in the background, silhouetted against the sky as it lumbered closer, was a spacesuited human figure. Paula studied it and managed a smile despite her weariness after the past few hours. “Cute,” she pronounced. “Where’d it come from?”

“You met Maurice, the Frenchman who paints,” Svetlana replied. “It’s one of his.”

“I thought he was going back. Wasn’t there an exchange deal that the Russians worked out with the French and the West Germans, or something?”

“Yes, that’s right. He went a couple of days ago. This picture is a parting gift that he left for me, but I only got it this morning. . . . I was thinking, maybe here, by Elena’s baskets. How does it look?”

“Perhaps a little more to the right . . . there, that’s good. Want me to hold it?”

Paula watched while Svetlana fixed the corners of the picture with pieces of adhesive tape. Svetlana had dark hair with a reddish tint, brushed into long waves that curled forward beneath her ears, and a trim figure whose curves not even the standard baggy green priv’s tunic could hide. People got along well with her, and it seemed natural that the Frenchman should have left her a farewell present. It was strange, Paula thought. She had been arrested while on a professional espionage assignment for the United States government, Svetlana was a former KGB agent, and yet here they were living together and acting naturally like affectionate sisters. It said how people everywhere could be if only those who aspired to power would leave them alone. Or was it the people’s own fault for taking any notice in the first place of those who presumed to command them?

Svetlana finished fixing the picture and stepped back. “Yes, I think that looks fine. We’ll leave it there.” She put the tape back on a shelf. “I’ve just made some tea. Would you like some?”

“I could use something,” Paula said.

“How was it today?”

“The usual. They want me to take a guided tour around the colony and send a vigram home saying there are no nasty things hidden up here.” Since the West had never concealed its suspicions about weapons on
Valentina Tereshkova,
Paula wasn’t revealing anything that Svetlana didn’t already know about.

Svetlana poured strong tea into two cups and topped them up with hot water. She handed one to Paula, added sugar and a drop of lemon juice to her own, and sat down on one of the hut’s two double-height bunks. Paula sat down at the table and sipped her tea, savoring the taste and the feeling of the hot, refreshing liquid moistening her dried mouth. The Russian woman lit a cigarette. “Well, why don’t you do it?” she asked Paula. “Surely it can’t do any harm. I mean, if what they say is true, it could only be for the best if the West were told about it.”

“I don’t know,” Paula said after considering the question. “I guess I don’t like the thought of being used as a political mouthpiece. It’s not my kind of business. I’m a scientist.”

“Then, what are you doing here?” Svetlana asked.

“That’s what I mean—I’ve gotten mixed up in more than enough of what I should have stayed out of, already.” Paula seemed dissatisfied with her own answer and frowned while she drank from her cup again. “Anyway, it shouldn’t be up to me. If the Russians want to convince the Americans that this place is legitimate, all they have to do is bring them here and let them walk around. Why should it need to be my problem?”

Svetlana sighed. “You know how it is with stubborn old men who worry about what history books might say about them.” She fell silent for a while, contemplating the smoke from her cigarette. “We got to be quite friendly, Maurice and I,” she said at last in a distant voice that seemed to change the subject.

Paula smiled. “I can’t say I’m surprised. You are quite attractive, after all, and he was, well . . . very French.”

“No, I didn’t mean that way. I meant just as friends. We used to talk a lot. He was very intellectual as well as artistic.”

“Oh, I thought—”

“That’s all right. He seemed to know a lot about science—to me he did, anyway, which doesn’t say all that much. You’d have liked him. It’s a pity he’s gone.” Svetlana hoisted her legs up onto the bunk and shifted back to prop herself against the end wall. She looked at Paula quizzically. “Were you really a spy?” she asked matter-of-factly.

“Come on. You know better than that.”

Svetlana didn’t seem to have expected a straight answer. “You know, I think Maurice might well have been. He never said so, but when you’ve worked as I have, you develop an instinct for these things.”

“With the French intelligence people, you mean?”

“Yes. You know it’s funny, the different reasons why people get involved in espionage. With me it was virtually automatic. My father was a KGB colonel, and I went into the academy at Bykovo straight from university. It was just a job that the family expected me to go into, and quite an exciting one, too—almost a game, in fact. But some people do it for very deep, premeditated reasons, such as ideological beliefs. Maurice was like that. He was one of those serious minded people, always worried about humanity and where it was heading for a thousand years from now.”

Paula thought instinctively about Earnshaw, but couldn’t place him in that category. For him it came closer to soldiering—a job that had to be done that obviously everyone couldn’t leave to everyone else. His motivation reflected short-term realities more than distant ideals.

Svetlana went on, “Maurice worried that the stubborn old men might get the world into a war. They were all just as paranoid, he thought—yours as well as ours—all equally responsible for the lunacy that things have come to. ‘Impotent dinosaurs, stuck in a swamp with nothing but umbrellas,’ he used to say. And finding out the truth about the weapons that some people say are hidden up here concerned him a lot.”

“What bothered him so much about that?” Paula asked.

“The thought that all the suspicions might be nothing more than the products of fantasies and preconceptions. If that turned out to be so, then how many more crucial judgments are being based on equally wrong perceptions?”

Paula was staring at the far wall. Suddenly she glimpsed the entire situation and her own relationship to it from a new perspective. What she saw didn’t make her feel entirely comfortable. “It would be insane,” she agreed in a faraway voice.

“Yes. And the really insane part is that we could end up blowing everything for no other reason than wrong information. Maurice’s big obsession was to make sure that the right people got the right facts. You see, intelligence work was almost a religion with him. That was why the Russians were always moving him around the colony so much. Probably that was why they let him go.”

“How do you mean?” Paula asked.

“They offered him the same kind of deal as they did you: a tour around, if he would agree to relay back what he saw. And he went along with it.”

“Did he ever say what he found?”

“Not in so many words—not to me, anyway,” Svetlana said. “But think about it. If he discovered anything that shouldn’t have been there, would he be on his way home right now? That must say something.” Paula cast an eye around at the walls and ceiling and gave Svetlana a cautioning look, querying if they ought to be talking aloud like this about somebody who was quite possibly not out of the Russians’ hands yet. Svetlana laughed. “What does it matter if they are listening to us?” she said. “He would only be confirming what they themselves have been telling the world for years.” She lifted her head and called out in a louder voice, “Can you hear me, former comrades? Am I right? Are we saying anything you don’t agree with?”

Paula fell quiet as she sipped the rest of her tea. Suddenly she saw the role that she had been slipping into as one of mere academic detachment—an irrelevancy. The thought made her feel, in a way . . . irresponsible. It was the first time that the job she’d come to
Tereshkova
to do had felt like something that really mattered.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

The big news in the second week of September was that the Russians had yielded suddenly and unexpectedly to the international pressure that had been building up for several years. In a surprise announcement from Moscow, the Soviet foreign minister stated that
Valentina Tereshkova
would be opened to unrestricted international inspection immediately following the November 7 celebrations. This was also the colony’s official completion date. The Russians pointed out that it was not normal to permit outsiders into any site while construction was still in progress. It had always been their intention to declare an open policy, they claimed; but the persistent Western harassment would have been an affront to anyone’s dignity. As a further gesture toward reconciliation, and to mark the departure from precedent, they invited the nations of the West to send delegates to join the Soviet leaders for the centenary, to symbolize their common commitment to a harmonious and prosperous future.

The banner headline of
The New York Times
read: dramatic concessions in surprise soviet initiative. Philip Borden, director of the UDIA, tossed a copy of the morning’s San Francisco
Chronicle
down on top of it. moscow says “da”!

“The news grid and networks are full of it. Peacenik lobbyists have been hounding congresspeople around Washington all morning,” he told Foleda across his desk. “I’ve got to present our assessment to the Security Council at three this afternoon. Half the country’s clamoring for a big gesture of reciprocation, and some of the European governments are already indicating a willingness to accept. The secretary of state says he agrees, and we expect the other intelligence agencies to be cautiously in favor. But you’re not happy, and you think we should sit tight.”

“It was also the Europeans who went rushing off to Munich, don’t forget,” Foleda reminded him. “I don’t like the passive position it puts us in. I don’t like a precedent where they call the tune and we jump. I don’t like the thought of our making a spectacle of falling over ourselves with gratitude just because they’ve said they’ll act reasonably for once—as if that represented some kind of favor. Hell, when did they ever make a big show of being grateful all the times we acted reasonably?”

Borden stared for a moment. “There’s more, though, isn’t there?”

Foleda thought for a second, then looked up to return Borden’s look directly and nodded. “I think this whole business about November is a cover for something else—something a lot bigger. I still think it could be a strike. We’re talking about eight weeks to go, Phil.”

Borden sighed. They had been through all this with the Security Council and the defense chiefs, and the consensus had been that the fears were exaggerated. “Hell, I can’t go back with that again. Don’t you think that just maybe, this time you’re being a little too suspicious?”

“We’re paid to be suspicious. We’re good at it, too. That’s why we’ve worked together for a long time.”

Borden drew a long breath and looked dubious. He gestured at the headlines lying on his desk. “It would mean making myself about as popular as smallpox this afternoon. I mean, do we have anything new to go on? Everything the Dorkas woman says checks out. NSA’s tracer scans didn’t turn up anything, and some of the information she’s come up with is too valuable to have been a gift pack. What else can we say about her?” The tracer scans referred to the Committee for Freedom and Dignity and the Tortoise that Barbara had mentioned during her meeting with Anita in London. The National Security Agency had reported no occurrence of these terms in the Soviet communications traffic that they listened in on. Although it constituted negative evidence, it did support Anita’s story.

“No, that’s not it. They can run all the checks they like. I’m satisfied that she’s okay,” Foleda said.

There was other evidence supporting the Soviets’ proclaimed position, too. A confidential report recently received from the French Deuxieme Bureau concerned a French agent by the name of Maurice Descarde, who had been released in an exchange deal from internment in
Valentina Tereshkova.
Apparently Descarde had returned to Earth a week previously and was now back in Paris. During interrogation he had stated that on numerous occasions he had worked in parts of the colony where weapons systems and ancillary equipment were supposed to exist, but had never seen any signs of them. Physiological and psychiatric tests indicated that he was in good health, functioning normally, and in complete command of his faculties.

“Okay, Bern, I’ll try stalling things for a bit longer and push for using Cabman,” Borden said finally after more wrangling. “We’ve all done our evaluations of Anita Dorkas—us, CIA, the British—and as far as it’s ever possible to be sure, we all think she’s clean. So we’ll assume that Cabman’s straight and play your hunch that he’s got some way of getting messages up to Oshkadov that NSA hasn’t uncovered, and that Oshkadov is inside the same place that Sexton and Pangolin are in.” The names were McCain and Paula’s code designations. “Let’s stop pussyfooting around and tell Cabman now that we know who he’s talking to, and that we want a through-channel to our people up there. I’ll stall at the meeting on the grounds that we’re trying to get independent confirmation.”

Foleda sat back and massaged his eyebrows uneasily for a few seconds. He started to reply, but then stopped, sighed, and then nodded his head in a way that said he was as satisfied as he could expect to be. “Okay.”

“We can’t do a lot more.” Borden waited, looking at Foleda curiously. “What is it that’s really bothering you about this whole thing?”