Alternities (18 page)

The query assumed that he had joined the YDR by choice. He hadn’t. As a fourteen-year-old with no clearly expressed goals of his own, he was programmed into it by a quota-conscious ninth-grade advisor. He had found more there to like than he expected—trips to Wright-Patterson and Fort Benjamin Harrison, firepower displays at Jefferson Proving Ground, a phys ed program which offered something more interesting than endless pick-up basketball games.

YDR, summer camps at Atterbury, ROTC at Purdue, then the Army and a Monroe Line assignment in the Canal Zone or the Alaskan Territory. Like the leather-faced soldier in Diego’s painting, looking out through a tunnel of fur across the Bering Strait at Russia, holding a frost-coated rifle in gloved hands. That was how it was supposed to go.

But it hadn’t. One summer camp missed due to his father’s heart attack, a year’s delay when his application to Purdue was rejected, and suddenly he had found that he had wandered off course with no idea how to get back on.

“Truthfully, our unit wasn’t very sharp,” he lied. “I don’t know how much of a taste of it I really got. But that wasn’t why. I got… sidetracked.” When no understanding appeared on Monaghan’s face, he added quickly, “By Annie. Ruthann.”

“I see. You’ve been married—”

“Almost five years.”

“Happily?”

Why do you care? he thought hotly. But he hid his indignation. “Well—sure. As much as anybody. I mean, everybody has rough spots now and then, right? But Ruthann’s prime.” His face creased in a half-smile. “My friends are jealous.” One of them, anyway.

“And you have a child?”

The smile widened into a happy grin. “Katie. A sweetheart. Prime.”

Monaghan nodded, shuffling a page to the back of the folder. Expressionless, he scanned the new top sheet slowly.

“Sir—about that business in Red. I know it was a little messy, but I don’t think I did anything wrong—”

“I’m not concerned about that,” Monaghan said, closing the file. “You showed a bit of resourcefulness. And results matter.”

“Then what’s this about, sir? If you can tell me.”

The deputy director sat back in his chair. “We need to expand Blue Section. Ops is setting up an accelerated qualification program for field agents. You were recommended as a candidate. This was your screening interview.”

“Recommended?”

“Maybe I should say your name came to our attention.”

That goes down easier, Wallace thought. “I understand.”

“Your Indiana background is a plus. Everything is going to happen very quickly, Rayne. We need people who can keep up with the pace.”

“I just want to make sure I understand: Do you want me for this side of the gate? Or the other side?”

“The other side. Is that a problem?”

Problem? You offer to solve all my problems and you ask if it’s a problem? Jason, my friend, I hope they’re calling your number, too. “I don’t think—”

“Because it’s refusable. You know that. Mole assignments always are. But if I were you, I’d be feeling lucky. You’re going to lose your Red papers for sure, and there’s enough bad talk about you downstairs that I wouldn’t be surprised to see you eased all the way out. You got your high profile the wrong way, you know?”

Swallowing hard at the reproof, Wallace nodded. “What’s this going to mean? I mean, to my ticket?”

“Standard,” Monaghan said with a disinterested shrug. “Push to Grade 4—Grade 5 when you clear probationary. Release time depends on assignment. I can almost promise you’ll be on a six-five schedule for the foreseeable future.” He dropped the folder on the desktop. “So what are you going to do?”

Six weeks in, five days out—a pay grade he’d never reach as a runner. Wallace did not hesitate. “I’m in.”

With a lazy motion, Monaghan reached at last for the red-eyed stub of the cigarette. “Stop by Blue Section to draw your training materials, then clean out your locker,” he said. “And catch lunch. In the next ninety minutes. The Section supervisor wants all of you in Aud 5 at noon to get things started.”

The head of the CIA plans division handled the new NSC directive gingerly, as though wary of it. He read it through, looked across the table at Dennis Madison with a deeply troubled expression on his face, then looked down at the document again.

“Is this for real?”

“Absolutely.”

“And it means what I think it means?”

“It does.”

“You’re not just teasing me.”

“Never,” the director said. Tut on a happy face, Wally. You’re back in business.”

“All right,” the plans chief said fervently. “About damn time.”

“How long will it take you to pick a few well-ripened notions out of your if-only box? I’d like to get back to the President with something before the services can. He’s going to have to pick and choose, and it won’t hurt to be first in line.”

“What does Robinson really want? Where are we trying to get to?”

The CIA director idly spun a pencil on the gleaming wood tabletop. “I think you have a full range of objectives from a nettle in the Bear’s breakfast to mounting the trophy head on the Oval Office wall.”

An eager light came into the plans chief’s eyes as he leaned forward in his chair. “How spooky do you want me to get?”

“Don’t limit yourself, Wally. I’ll prescreen before we walk it downtown. You have something particular in mind?”

“There’s a… ah, a kind of a neat idea one of my people came up with a year or so back. Very off-the-wall. Very ambitious.”

“Want to give me the skeleton?”

“Now?”

“Why not?”

“Well—sure. It was a juxtaposition of numbers that got us thinking. The blast radius of a Mark XII Super at a thousand feet is fifteen miles. The primary international airport for Moscow—that’s Sheremetyova—is fifteen miles from the Kremlin.”

Madison gave the pencil another spin as he played with the implications.

“I see where it goes, but I don’t think too much of the margins. If you’re going to bum out a bunch of hornets, you’ve got to hit the nest square the first time.”

“Another number or two, then. The ground speed of an Aeroflot Tu-85 is 550 miles per hour. That puts Sheremetyova about two minutes away. Say you’re the air controller at Vnukovo. A flight from London aborts a landing because of gear failure and overshoots the airport. How eager would you be to order one of your own airliners shot down? How long would it take you to make that decision?”

“A goddamned Q-plane,” Madison mused.

“That would be one way to think of it. I remember reading when I was a kid about the Q-ships during the Second World War, disguising frigates as helpless merchantmen to bring German subs to the surface.”

The director shook his head. “You’re right, Wally. Very ambitious.”

“Too ambitious,” the plans chief projected, enthusiasm dimming as he tried to gauge his superior’s reaction. “I’ll leave that one in the bag.”

“I didn’t say that,” the director said. “I’m right with you. It is a neat idea. Work it up. If you can wrinkle-proof it, I’ll pass it along.”

The plans chief beamed in delight. “Can I have ten days?”

“Knowing how the wheels turn at the Pentagon, you could probably have ten weeks,” the CIA director said with contempt. “No, ten days is fine. But, Wally, let’s consider that little trick the upper limit, all right? Give me a package that includes some ideas that won’t raise the hair on everybody’s neck.”

The Secretary of State sat in his padded swivel chair and stared up at the huge Mercator projection of the world on the wall of the conference room. So hard to think boldly. The many years of being painfully cautious stunted the imagination. Where are the opportunities? Where can we push? How hard? How openly? Where is there ferment? Where are there friends?

North America was the fortress, and it was sound. From the Arctic Circle to the Isthmus of Panama, from the Alaskan Territory to the island states of Cuba and Caribbea, all were friends and allies. All save French Canada, which was an exception of no consequence.

Yes, the department could be satisfied with its work close to home. Greater Canada and Mexico saw their destinies were one with the United States’. Honduras and Guatemala were happy enough in their phantom independence, standing under the American umbrella while proclaiming they were unafraid of the rain. More enlightened governments in the Pacific Coast nations worked hand in glove with Washington.

Panama, its vulnerability more acutely obvious than some, had begun a consideration of the merits of territorial status. And statehood for the islands had been a coup.

No, all the trouble areas lay outside the Monroe Line. And there were few enough of them. It was a quiet world, the silence of the enslaved. There was little fighting, and less revolutionary fervor. Counting the hot spots did not take long. South Africa. India. Malaya. France.

It was too late for France, had become too late the moment Prime Minister Somerset spelled out the conditions under which the Weasels could remain in England. There was a bloc in Congress ignorantly bleating for aid to Paris; they would never know that France’s fall to communism would do more for the democratic cause.

State’s hands were tied in Africa until the FN achieved working control of at least part of South-West Africa, or Namibia as they chose to call it. There had to be something resembling a government to recognize.

There was little to choose between in the ten-year-old Indian civil war, as demonstrated by the fact that neither Russia nor China had elected to favor one side over the other in all that time. The fabric of that many-faced society was in tatters, and it seemed unlikely that there would be peace there until the last Hindu slaughtered the last Muslim, or vice versa.

But Malaya was another story. Malaya was the cork in the bottle protecting Indonesia and Australia from the ambitions of the Chinese Communists for an empire of their own. There had been fierce fighting in the jungle forests of the Kra Peninsula for nearly a year.

Troops from the Chinese client-states in Burma and Thailand were supporting the native Chinese minority in a reprise of the post war struggles between the Malayan Communist Party and the British-backed Malay majority. And the MCP had had a disquieting degree of success. Twice Chief Minister Tan Siew Rahman’s government had been forced to flee the capital for Singapore when guerrilla advances began to threaten the graceful Moorish buildings of Kuala Lumpur.

Here alone was a place where American involvement could make a difference. Economic aid for Rahman’s government, inducements for Australia to increase its aid, a treaty that would open the American armory to both nations, perhaps even the symbolic reappearance of American warships in the South China Sea—all were worth considering.

Pulling a tablet onto his lap, the Secretary of State began to make notes in the pidgin shorthand he had developed as a corporate lawyer in Chicago two decades ago. Malaya was the place. It did not matter that their opponent there was Beijing and not Moscow. Moscow would get the message, all the same.

The room was far too large to be an office. Though poorly lit and dominated by muted colors, the room suggested courtly excess, evoked the great hall of a czar. The footsteps of visitors echoed off the walls and high arched ceiling as they approached the desk.

Spotlit by sunlight from the rank of tall windows at the south end of the room, the desk occupied an island of carpeting in an ocean of hardwood floor. It was the one warm spot in a cool cavern of a room. In the mind of the desk’s owner, the “office” ended at the perimeter of the dark-hued carpet. All that lay beyond was superfluous, immaterial.

General Secretary Aleksandr Kondratyev had always liked the sun. Summers at his grandmother’s in Rybakovka, near Odessa on the Black Sea, had sealed his fondness. Those pre-war summers of swimming and riding and playing on the postage-stamp shell beaches with cousins from Char’kov and Doneck were the strongest memories of a childhood abbreviated by Hitler’s armies.

His Chief of Military Intelligence did not like the sun, but then it was hard to envision Voenushkin as a playful boy. Dough-faced and dour, the head of the GRU was painfully earnest and eternally humorless. He squinted and squirmed in his seat as though the pale October rays were the blinding eye of God Himself.

“Secretary Kondratyev, I thank you for this chance to speak with you directly,” Voenushkin began. “Your generosity—”

“Please, Geidar,” Kondratyev interrupted, “endeavor to use your time more wisely than in thanking me for doing my job.”

“Yes, Secretary. I asked to see you because one of our assets in America has produced an intelligence intercept which I felt should be called to your attention.”

“You may proceed to do so.”

Voenushkin rose half out of his seat to pass a single sheet of brownish—white paper across the desk. The color of the paper announced that it was several hours old, well along toward self-destruction. “This is a transcript of a conversation last Sunday between President Robinson and his spymaster Albert Tackett—”

“I see only Tackett’s words.”

“That is true, sir. It was a telephone conversation, and the intercept was accomplished with a device that reads the vibrations in a pane of glass. But the references are unambiguous.”

“Very well. I will read it.” When he was finished, Kondratyev folded the sheet carefully in quarters and laid it in a large black ashtray. “How do you interpret this intercept?”

“First, it is clear that this National Resource Center is not merely a technical research organization. A significant portion of its employees are involved in espionage. We have suspected this for some time, but without confirmation.

“It is equally clear that the President has asked the NRC to greatly increase its espionage activity to support some unspecified initiative.”

“Yes,” said Kondratyev. “I would agree with your conclusions. Do you have any insight into what that initiative might be, or where it might be aimed?”

“No, sir. May I call your attention to several curious items in the transcript? At one point Tackett refers to a ‘gate,’ at another to ‘common world people’—”