Code to Zero (30 page)

The first task of the radio transmitters is to provide signals enabling the satellite to be followed by tracking stations on earth—to prove that it is in orbit.

The train pulled slowly out of Chattanooga. In the cramped roomette, Luke took off his jacket and hung it up, then perched on the edge of the lower bunk and unlaced his shoes. Billie sat cross-legged on the bunk, watching him. The lights of the station flickered then faded as the locomotive gathered speed, heading into the southern night, bound for Jacksonville, Florida.

Luke undid his tie. Billie said, “If this is a striptease, it doesn’t have much oomph.”

Luke grinned ruefully. He was going slowly because he was undecided. They had been forced to share the roomette: only one was available. He was longing to take Billie in his arms. Everything he had learned about himself and his life told him that Billie was the woman he should be with. Yet, all the same, he hesitated.

“What?” she said. “What are you thinking?”

“That this is too quick.”

“Seventeen years is nothing?”

“To me it’s been a couple of days, that’s all I can remember.”

“It feels like forever.”

“I’m still married to Elspeth.”

Billie nodded solemnly. “But she’s been lying to you for years.”

“So I should jump out of her bed into yours?”

She looked offended. “You should do what you want.”

He tried to explain. “I don’t like the feeling that I’m seizing an excuse.” She said nothing in reply, so he added, “You don’t agree, do you?”

“Hell, no,” she said. “I want to make love to you tonight. I remember what it was like, and I want it again, right now.” She glanced out of the window as the train flew through a small town: ten seconds of streaking lights and they were in darkness again. “But I know you,” she went on. “You’ve never been one to live for the moment, even when we were kids. You need time to think things through and convince yourself that you’re doing the right thing.”

“Is that so bad?”

She smiled. “No. I’m glad you’re like that. It makes you rock-solid reliable. If you weren’t this way, I guess I wouldn’t have. . . .” Her voice trailed off.

“What were you going to say?”

She looked him in the eye. “I wouldn’t have loved you this much, this long.” She was embarrassed, and covered up by saying something flip. “Anyway, you need a shower.”

It was true. He had been wearing the same clothes since he stole them thirty-six hours ago. “Every time I thought about changing, there was something more urgent to do,” he said. “I have fresh clothes in my bag.”

“No matter. Why don’t you climb up on top, and give me room to take off my shoes.”

Obediently, he climbed the little ladder and lay down on the top bunk. He turned on his side, elbow on the pillow, head resting on his hand. “Losing your memory is like a new start in life,” he said. “Like being born again. Every decision you ever made can be revisited.”

She kicked off her shoes and stood up. “I’d hate that,” she said. With a swift movement, she slipped off her black ski pants and stood there in her sweater and brief white panties. Catching his eye, she grinned and said, “It’s okay, you can watch.” She reached under her sweater at the back and unfastened her brassiere. Then she drew her left arm out of her sleeve, reached inside with her right hand to pull the strap off her
shoulder, thrust her left arm back into the sleeve, and drew her bra out of her right sleeve with a conjurer’s flourish.

“Bravo,” he said.

She gave him a thoughtful look. “So, we’re going to sleep now?”

“I guess.”

“Okay.” She stood on the edge of the lower bunk and raised herself to his level, tilting her face to be kissed. He leaned forward and touched her lips with his own. She closed her eyes. He felt the tip of her tongue flick over his lips, then she pulled away and her face disappeared.

He lay on his back, thinking about her lying a few inches below, with her neat bare legs and her round breasts inside the soft angora sweater. In a few moments he was asleep.

He had an intensely erotic dream. He was Bottom in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
with donkey’s ears, and he was being kissed all over his hairy face by Titania’s fairies, who were naked girls with slim legs and round breasts. Titania herself, the queen of the fairies, was unbuttoning his pants, while the wheels of the train drummed an insistent beat. . . .

He woke up slowly, reluctant to leave fairyland and return to the world of railroads and rockets. His shirt was open and his pants were undone. Billie lay beside him, kissing him. “Are you awake?” she murmured in his ear—a normal ear, not a donkey’s. She giggled. “I don’t want to waste this on a guy who’s asleep.”

He touched her, running his hand along her side. She still had on the sweater, but her panties had gone. “I’m awake,” he said thickly.

She lifted herself on hands and knees so that she was over him, poised in the narrow space below the ceiling of the roomette. Looking into his eyes, she lowered her body to his. He sighed with intense pleasure as he slid inside her. The train rocked from side to side, and the tracks sang to an erotic rhythm.

He reached inside her sweater to touch her breasts. Her skin was soft and warm. She whispered in his ear, “They missed you.”

He felt as if he were still half in the dream as the train rocked and Billie kissed his face and America flew by the window mile after mile. He wound his arms around her back and held her tightly, to convince
himself that she was made of flesh and blood, not fairy gossamer. Just as he was thinking that he wanted this to go on forever, his body took control, and he clung to her as waves of pleasure broke over him. As soon as it was over she said, “Keep still. Hold me tight.” He did not move. She buried her face in his neck, her breath hot on his skin. As he lay prone, still inside her, she seemed to twitch with an internal spasm, time and time again, until at last she sighed deeply and relaxed. They lay still a few minutes longer, but Luke was not sleepy. Billie evidently felt the same, for she said, “I have an idea. Let’s wash.” He laughed. “Well, I sure need it.”

She rolled off him and climbed down, and he followed. In the corner of the roomette was a tiny washbasin with a cupboard over it. Billie found a hand towel and a little cake of soap in the cupboard. She filled the basin with hot water. “I’ll wash you, then you can wash me,” she said. She soaked the towel, rubbed soap on it, and began.

It was delightfully intimate and sexy. He closed his eyes. She soaped his belly then knelt to wash his legs. “You missed a bit,” he said.

“Don’t worry, I’m leaving the best part till last.”

When she had finished, he did the same for her, which was even more arousing. Then they lay down again, this time on the lower bunk. “Now,” she said, “do you remember oral sex?”

“No,” he said. “But I think I can figure it out.”

To help track the satellite accurately, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory has developed a new radio technique called Microlock. The Microlock stations use a phased-lock loop tracking system which is able to lock on to a signal of only 1/1000 of a watt from as far as 20,000 miles away.

Anthony flew to Florida in a small plane that bumped and bucked with every gust of wind all the way across Alabama and Georgia. He was accompanied by a general and two colonels who would have shot him on sight if they had known the purpose of his trip.

He landed at Patrick Air Force Base, a few miles south of Cape Canaveral. The air terminal consisted of a few small rooms at the rear of an aircraft hangar. In his imagination he saw a detachment of FBI agents, with their neat suits and shiny shoes, waiting to arrest him, but there was only Elspeth.

She looked drained. For the first time, he saw signs of approaching middle age in her. The pale skin of her face showed the beginnings of wrinkles, and the posture of her long body was a little stooped. She led him outside to where her white Corvette was parked in the hot sun.

As soon as they were inside the car, he said, “How’s Theo?”

“Pretty shook, but he’ll be okay.”

“Do the local police have his description?”

“Yes—Colonel Hide gave it out.”

“Where’s he hiding?”

“In my motel room. He’ll stay there until dark.” She drove out of the base onto the highway and turned north. “What about you? Will the CIA give out your description to the police?”

“I don’t think so.”

“So you can move around fairly freely. That’s good, because you’ll need to buy a car.”

“The Agency likes to solve its own problems. Right now, they think I’ve gone rogue, and their only concern is to take me out of circulation before I embarrass them. Once they start listening to Luke, they’ll realize they’ve been harboring a double agent for years—but that may make them even more concerned to hush up the whole thing. I can’t be sure, but my guess is there will be no high-profile search for me.”

“And no shadow of suspicion has fallen on me. So all three of us are still in play. That gives us a good chance. We can still pull this thing off.”

“Luke doesn’t suspect you?”

“He has no reason to.”

“Where is he now?”

“On a train, according to Marigold.” A note of bitterness entered her voice. “With Billie.”

“When will he get here?”

“I’m not sure. The overnight train takes him to Jacksonville, but from there he has to get a slow train down the coast. Sometime this afternoon, I guess.”

They drove in silence for a while. Anthony tried to make himself calm. In twenty-four hours, it would be all over. They would have struck a historic blow for the cause to which they had devoted their lives, and they would go down in history—or they would have failed, and the space race would once again be a two-horse contest.

Elspeth glanced across at him. “What will you do after tonight?”

“Leave the country.” He tapped the small case in his lap. “I have everything I need—passports, cash, a few simple items of disguise.”

“And then?”

“Moscow.” He had spent much of the flight thinking about this. “The Washington desk at the KGB, I imagine.” Anthony was a major in the
KGB. Elspeth had been an agent longer—had in fact recruited Anthony, back at Harvard—and she was a colonel. “They’ll give me some kind of senior advisory–consultative role,” he went on. “After all, I’ll know more about the CIA than anyone else in the Soviet bloc.”

“How will you like life in the U.S.S.R?”

“In the workers’ paradise, you mean?” He gave her a wry grin. “You’ve read George Orwell. Some animals are more equal than others. I guess a lot will depend on what happens tonight. If we pull this off, we’ll be heroes. And if not. . . . ”

“You’re not nervous?”

“Sure I am. I’ll be lonely at first—no friends, no family, and I don’t speak Russian. But maybe I’ll get married and raise a brood of little comrades.” His flip answers disguised the depth of his anxiety. “I decided, a long time ago, to sacrifice my personal life to something more important.”

“I made the same decision, but I’d still be frightened by the thought of moving to Moscow.”

“It’s not going to happen to you.”

“No. They want me to stay in place, at all costs.”

She had obviously talked to her controller, whoever that was. Anthony was not surprised by the decision to leave Elspeth in place. For the last four years, Russian scientists had known everything about the U.S. space program. They saw every important report, all the test results, each blueprint produced by the Army Ballistic Missile Agency—thanks to Elspeth. It was as good as having the Redstone team working for the Soviet program. Elspeth was the reason the Soviets had beaten the Americans into space. She was easily the most important spy of the Cold War.

Her work had been done at enormous personal sacrifice, Anthony knew. She had married Luke in order to spy on the space program, but her love for him was genuine, and it had broken her heart to betray him. However, her triumph was the Soviet victory in the space race, which would be sealed tonight. That would make everything worthwhile.

His own triumphs were second only to Elspeth’s. A Soviet agent, he
had penetrated to the highest levels of the CIA. The tunnel he had been responsible for in Berlin, which had tapped into Soviet communications, had in fact been a channel for disinformation. The KGB had used it to mislead the CIA into wasting millions shadowing men who were not spies, penetrating organizations which were never communist fronts, and discrediting third-world politicians who were in fact pro-American. If he was lonely in his Moscow flat, he would think of what he had achieved, and it would warm his heart.

Among the palm trees on the roadside ahead, he saw a huge model of a space rocket above a sign that read Starlite Motel. Elspeth slowed the car and pulled in. The office was in a low building with angular buttresses that gave it a futuristic look. Elspeth parked as far as possible from the road. The rooms were in a two-storey building around a large pool, where a few early birds were already sunbathing. Beyond the pool, Anthony could see the beach.

Despite the assurances he had given Elspeth, he wanted to be seen by as few people as possible, so he pulled his hat low and walked quickly as they went from the car to her upstairs room.

The motel was making the most of the space-program connection. The lamps were shaped like rockets, and there were pictures of stylized planets and stars on the walls. Theo was standing at the window, looking out over the ocean. Elspeth introduced the two men and ordered coffee and doughnuts from room service. Theo said to Anthony, “How did Luke find me out—did he explain that to you?”

Anthony nodded. “He was using the Xerox machine in Hangar R. There’s a security log book beside the machine. You have to note the date and time and the number of copies you made, and sign the log. Luke noticed that twelve copies had been signed for by ‘WvB,’ meaning Wernher von Braun.”

Elspeth said, “I always used von Braun’s name, because no one would dare to question the boss about the Xerox copies he needed.”

Anthony went on. “But Luke knew something Elspeth and everyone else didn’t know—that von Braun was in Washington that day. Luke’s instinct rang an alarm bell. He went to the mail room and found the
copies in an envelope addressed to you. But he had no clue as to who had sent the package. He decided he couldn’t trust anyone down here, so he flew to Washington. Fortunately, Elspeth called me and I was able to intercept Luke before he could tell anyone.”

Elspeth said, “But now we’re right back where we were on Monday. Luke has rediscovered what we made him forget.”

Anthony asked her, “What do you think the Army will do now?”

“They could launch the rocket with the self-destruct mechanism disabled. But if it got out that they had done so, there would be hell to pay, and the fuss might spoil the triumph. So my guess is they’ll change the code so that a different signal is required to trigger the explosion.”

“How would they do that?”

“I don’t know.”

There was a knock at the door. Anthony tensed, but Elspeth said, “I ordered coffee.” Theo went into the bathroom. Anthony turned his back to the door. To look natural, he opened the closet and pretended to study the clothes inside. There was a suit of Luke’s hanging there, a light gray herringbone, and a stack of blue shirts. Instead of letting the waiter in, Elspeth stood in the doorway to sign the bill, tipped the man, then took the tray from him and closed the door.

Theo came out of the bathroom and Anthony sat down again.

Anthony said, “What can we do? If they change the code, we can’t make the rocket self-destruct.”

Elspeth put down the coffee tray. “I have to find out what their plan is and figure out a way around it.” She picked up her handbag and slung her jacket over her shoulders.“Buy a car. Drive to the beach as soon as it’s dark. Park as near as you can to the Cape Canaveral fence. I’ll meet you there. Enjoy your coffee.” She went out.

After a moment, Theo said, “You have to give her credit, she’s got a cool nerve.”

Anthony nodded. “It’s what she needs.”