Asterisk (31 page)

Then he thought: Whoever had Asterisk had the potential for almost anything. Whoever had Asterisk had the key to space and whatever else the disk might yield in terms of technology. And it all began to make a perverted kind of sense to him, the power play, the rush to understand Asterisk and keep it private and secret for purely logistical reasons as though it were nothing more than another indescribably powerful device on the route that leads down to doomsday. And the major general had died. Anna Burckhardt had died. There would have been others; others who thought it too important to be the personal preserve of a single nation. Others would have died along the way. This is what everything had been about: power. Power. Better ways to kill. Better ways to terrorize. A sick power. A control of space. Even new weapons, new circuitry, an entirely new technology.

It's more than that, he thought.
It has to be more than just that
. It has to be something that goes beyond the nuclear jingoism, something that doesn't simply usher in a new age of ballistic separatism.

No. A disk comes out of space. How it gets to earth isn't important—crashed, brought down somehow—none of that was important. What made sense was if you looked on it as some kind of gift, something that might bring a deeper benefit than the simple gratification of a military machine.

His head had begun to ache. He was being crazy: stop, think it over again, go back and look at the logic—what you're saying to yourself has something treasonable about it. Hasn't it?

He wasn't sure now.

How did you decide between
x
and
y
when
y
was your own country and
x
was some nebulous benefit for the rest of mankind?

The rest of mankind, he thought. The inflated phrase, the bloated turn of speech. He couldn't reduce it below rhetoric, no matter how he tried. He hadn't the language for it. It wasn't that simple anyhow. It was confusion, it had been confusion from the very beginning.

Go public, he thought. His instincts took him that way. No one nation had an exclusive right to this. It didn't make sense to assume so. Go public, get somebody who will write it up: somebody who will demolish the secrecy and blow it wide open. Yes. Yes. Was there another way?

He still wasn't certain.

He sat up on the edge of his bed.

From another cubicle he could hear the sound of a man drunkenly weeping, repeating the same word over and over and over. Life life life life life. A litany of desperation. He wanted to go to the man and offer some crumb of comfort, but it was Marcia he had to see first.

He left the flophouse. The street outside was a narrow passageway of decrepit tenements, forlorn figures sitting on steps and passing brown paper bags back and forth, seemingly immune to the slashing rain that, driven by a slight wind, fell in diagonal lines. He walked quickly up the street. He was looking for a telephone but the first one he came to, located outside a run-down gas station, had been vandalized. He continued to walk. His muscles ached. His strength threatened continually to ebb away from him and, weakened every so often, he would pause, lean against a wall, wait, as if he were hanging to some slender thread that kept him attached to awareness.

He found a main thoroughfare of small stores, pawnshops, a gospel church, cheap eating places where darkening chickens hung barbecuing in windows. There was a telephone box on a corner. He stepped in, shut the door, inserted coins, dialed Marcia's home number. He heard her voice and, as soon as he did, he hung up. Good, he thought. I know at least that she's home. He opened the door and stood for a moment in the street, looking this way and that, thinking: Nobody would believe that only a few days ago this bum was working in the White House. Nobody would buy that one in a hundred years. He began to walk. He considered the possible problems. Her telephone would be tapped, one; her place of residence would be under constant surveillance, two. Therefore, to get in touch with her he would have to circumvent these difficulties.

Okay, he thought.

Okay.

I've come this far. What's a few yards farther?

Dilbeck was wakened by the sound of his telephone ringing. He picked it up. Sleep hadn't eased his headache any; he felt he had been struck by a hammer on the cranium.

“I thought you'd like to be kept posted,” Sharpe said.

Dilbeck said nothing. He could hear his daughter singing somewhere in the house.

“We know that Thorne spent several hours in one of those flophouses for down-and-outs—”

“Is he still there?” Dilbeck asked, hearing his own voice as if it were coming from his gut. He looked out of the window of his bedroom at the falling rain.

“No.” Sharpe could be heard coughing. “A bus driver remembers dropping him off this morning in that neighborhood. I had my people do a door-to-door of hotels. I don't think we're far behind him now.”

“Good,” Dilbeck said. “Keep it moving.”

Sharpe hung up.

Dilbeck put the receiver down. My head, he thought. He opened a bottle of aspirin that lay on the bedside table, spilled a few into the palm of his hand and swallowed them with a mouthful of stale water. Closing in, he thought. Closing in.

His bedroom door opened. His daughter stood there grinning.

“I've made you a poached egg for lunch,” she said brightly.

“Splendid,” he said, thinking: The last thing I need is a poached egg.

Thorne went inside the florist's, fully aware of the disdain his appearance would arouse in the smug face of the assistant. She was middle-aged, her face both self-satisfied and sour, as if life had come to her as an unwanted gift.

Thorne heard the tiny bell ring above his head as he stepped inside. The air was scented, heavy with a variety of perfumes. He selected roses, red roses, and carried the bunch to the counter.

The assistant stared at him. “You want to buy these?” she asked, as though the possibility of a man in a shabby overcoat having any need for such delicacies as flowers was quite beyond her comprehension.

“I want them delivered,” Thorne said. “I understand you have a speedy delivery service.”

“I believe that is what it says in the window,” she remarked, touching the roses in such a way as to suggest that she suspected Thorne had contaminated them.

“I want them delivered immediately,” Thorne said.

“Anything to oblige,” she said, curtly.

“I don't expect to pay for sarcasm,” he said.

She stared at him in a chilly way, then apparently chose to jettison his rudeness from her mind.

“You wish to write a card,
sir?
” she asked.

“I do.” Thorne was given a small card and a pen. He thought for a moment, considered the risk, then wrote anyhow.
I love poetry and the places where poetry is read. But it is a cautious thing. I hate lint in my navel
. He slipped the card across the counter to the woman, having added the address. She scrutinized the message.

“How long will it take?” he asked.

“To that part of town?” She frowned a little. “An hour, perhaps less.”

“It's very important,” he said.

“It always is.” She slipped the card into a small envelope and attached it to the wrapping around the flowers. “Cash or charge?”

“Charge,” he said.

She appeared dismayed. He gave her a bank card, a driver's license, but held back his White House pass out of the fear that, given his appearance, she would consider him a total fraud and call the police. She made out the slip, he signed, she checked the picture on his driver's license against his face, and finally looked up his bank card account number in her book of lists.

“Thanks,” Thorne said.

“Call again, won't you?” she said.

Thorne went outside, hoping the roses would be delivered, hoping Marcia would understand both the message and the terrible need for caution. He looked up and down the street. It was still raining hard. The street glistened, the gutters ran, litter and debris rushed in a crazy way to the drains. Now, he thought. The poetry room. Where, with his fingers crossed, he would wait for her.

3

Brinkerhoff picked up the telephone. The call that was coming through was long distance, his second of the day. He switched the scrambler button on and heard the undersecretary's voice on the line, although it was distant, fading, sucked away at times by static.

“I think you should know, Brinkerhoff, that since we last spoke, nothing has happened. Absolutely nothing,” the undersecretary said. “How do you explain that away?”

“I'm not sure,” Brinkerhoff said. He was frowning, and noticed that he had twisted his fingers in the telephone cord.

“Consider,” said the undersecretary. “Consider the silences. Aren't they unusual? Consider, too, our previous experiences in situations similar to this one—”

“There haven't been situations similar to this one,” Brinkerhoff said. He gazed up at the obligatory portrait of Lenin, then away, looking at the sunshine on the window.

“Defectors, man, defectors,” said the undersecretary. “We've had them before. And in every case, every case, as soon as we had the defector safely in our possession our intelligence people began to pick up on the desperate attempts of the CIA to discredit the defector. Obviously, they would have to try to undermine the credibility of someone who has, so to speak, jumped the wall. It's a part of the game …”

The undersecretary was silent a moment.

Brinkerhoff stood up. He paced around the large room, passed the overstuffed furniture, the trappings of a diplomatic mission. It was stuffy, the air stale, and he found difficulty in breathing.

“Why, then, have there been no attempts so far to discredit your Hollander? Why? Why this huge silence? Do you have an explanation?”

“No,” Brinkerhoff said. “Of course, it's early, their machine may not have begun to work—”

“I don't buy that,” said the undersecretary. “Their machine never stops working. No sooner do we have a defector than we start to receive reports, reports we are meant to intercept, of course, saying that the defector is a sexual pervert, or he's had electric shock therapy, or he hasn't got information that's any good or that he has a history of lunacy—So why haven't we heard anything on Hollander?”

Brinkerhoff was silent. He stared at his long white fingers, turning them over, as if there he might find written the answer he needed. The undersecretary, for once, had a good point.

“I ought to say that this is a special case,” he said eventually. “When have we ever had someone like Hollander come across? When have we had this kind of information before?”

“Still, Brinkerhoff. Don't you think that would be all the more reason for them to grind up their propaganda machine? Don't you?”

“
I don't know,” Brinkerhoff said. “They may be playing it this way simply to throw us. Isn't that possible?”

The undersecretary was heard to sneeze twice.

“I want you to know, I want you to hear this for the record, I was never keen on Hollander from the beginning.”

Brinkerhoff thought of the tape that would be recording this talk. The undersecretary liked to hedge his bets.

“What do you suggest?” Brinkerhoff asked.

“I suggest
you
decide,” said the undersecretary. “You started this. You therefore finish it.”

“I believe in Hollander—”

“And I don't. It smells to me. It's a dead fish.”

“They're trying to confuse us—”

“We shall see. I believe that everything comes out in the wash, Brinkerhoff.”

The line was dead.

Brinkerhoff, troubled, put the receiver down.

It was a double bind. Either Hollander was real or he was not. After all, hadn't he seen with his own eyes Hollander kill his own countrymen? Hadn't he seen that? But how could one explain the silence? Either the Americans erected this silence to imply that Hollander wasn't of any significance or they were doing it because he was. How did one choose? How?

Brinkerhoff sat down.

After a moment, he rose. He opened the bottom drawer of the desk, took something out, closed it again. Either/or, he thought. It was always either/or and their complicated twists, their complex ramifications, their elaborate little possibilities and perplexities. Sometimes, he thought, it would make more sense to toss a coin or roll a die. Sometimes, you simply could not fathom any of it on the basis of logic alone.

A florist's delivery van, embroidered with painted flowers and the slogan
LET A FLOWER SPEAK FOR YOU
drew up outside an apartment complex in the suburb of Chevy Chase. The driver got out, carrying a bunch of flowers, and went inside the building. In a parked car across the street, a man in a gray overcoat noted the arrival of the van. He stepped out of his car, waited for the delivery man to reappear. In the lane at the back of the apartment building there was another parked car, a black Marina. Nobody could enter or leave without being seen either back or front.

The man in the gray overcoat saw the van driver come out. This time he was carrying no flowers. The man in the gray overcoat walked quickly toward the van. He showed credentials which established him as a lieutenant in the District of Columbia police. The van driver, a small man with a reddish beard, appeared impressed.

“Who did you deliver the flowers to?”

“Second floor,” the driver said. “Name of Emerson.”

“Emerson?”

“Marcia Emerson, right.”

“Was there a message?”

“I guess. I don't read them, you know.”

“Where would the order have originated?”

“From the store—”

“Okay. You can go.”

The driver got into his van and drove away.

The lieutenant went back to his parked car and spoke on the radio. He knew that a check would be made with the store where the flowers were bought. Then he switched his radio off and waited. He watched the apartment building.