Firechild (14 page)

“If it’s anything like that—” Kalenka stared at him and turned to peer into the weeds where the creature had vanished and swung back to scowl again. “You had it here, and you—you let it go!” A burst of baffled anger. “A physician, trained in science, aware of what has happened here and suspecting what the monster is—” He tried to calm himself. “Doctor, can’t you grasp the enormity of what you have done?”

“Saved the little thing from vivisection, I imagine.”

“You had no right—no moral right!” Kalenka paused as if to swallow his indignation. “Do you value your pet monster above the survival of mankind?”

“It’s no threat. If you had felt what it is—”

“Just look out there!” Still pale with anger, Kalenka gestured at the dust. “Somebody has murdered a city. God knows how many thousand innocent human beings. Killed by a means not yet known. It may be deliberate. I suppose it may have been a laboratory accident, which wouldn’t excuse it. If it happened once, it can happen again. I’m going to identify the killer and the cause. As of now, your strange pet—”

His voice was trembling, and he turned again toward that gray waste as if to hide his face.

“Your pet!” Swinging back to glare at Belcraft, he spoke the word like an oath. “Your brother’s creation or not, the thing came out of the laboratory where this disaster began. The only clue we’ve found—a vital clue, if it was somehow immune to the killing vector. And you—trying to conceal it!”

“I can’t help the way I feel.”

“If you can’t—” Eyes narrowed, he shrank back as if he had seen the infection in Belcraft. “Your criminal attitude makes the situation worse than I’d imagined.”

“If you blame that little being, you—you’re wrong!”

“I’m afraid you are.” Kalenka glanced toward the wheeling choppers and turned intently back. “This brother—did you ever suspect that he was in weapons research?”

“No. I can’t believe—” Belcraft frowned. “Have you found evidence of any actual weapon?”

“General Clegg is convinced there is—or was a weapon. He has lived in dread of genetic war. That’s why he was the prime mover of Bioscience Alert, which was formed to prevent this sort of tragedy. At first we were a civilian group, but he has drafted most of us now, into Task Force Watchdog. Maybe too late.”

Kalenka sat silent for a moment, bleakly scowling at nothing, before he shrugged and forced a stiff little smile.

“Doctor, you and I had better understand each other. I hope you have at least begun to get the situation. Our nation is in danger. All humanity is, unless this peril can be understood and controlled. Before it’s too late.” He tried to warm his tone. “We can’t afford to fight. We must work together. Learn to trust each other. Perhaps —perhaps it will help if I tell you something about myself. I—I’m a Jew.”

Emotion hushed his voice.

“My parents died in the Holocaust. Along with part of me. I grew up haunted by what I recalled and what people told me. It left a terror in me, a dread I can’t shake off—because the world won’t let me shake it off. I’ve always been afraid of a new and greater war. There could be a greater holocaust, wiping out more than just us Jews.”

Brown hands clenched on the wheel of the jeep, he stared hard into Belcraft’s face.

“Doctor, that’s why I’m here. I used to see genetic research as a sort of safe harbor. A new science of life that promised to make us immune to the old sciences of death. I was horrified when researchers began to talk about a possible genetic super-weapon. The notion has always torn me up. I joined Bioscience Alert to help stave that desecration off.” His face looked sick. “I’m afraid we’ve failed.”

“Failed?” Belcraft nodded toward the dust. “I hear the danger has been contained.”

Kalenka’s lean lip quivered and tightened again beneath the close-clipped mustache. “It’s panic, first of all, that has to be contained.”

“I’ve walked in the dust. Breathed it. I’m not hurt.”

“Not yet, perhaps.” A troubled shrug. “But we don’t know the incubation time. The initial spread of the lethal vector seems at least to have slowed. If it hadn’t—”

He shivered, with a gesture toward the dust.

“You don’t know why it stopped?”

“Not a hint, though God knows we’ve tried.” He nodded at the far-off choppers. “The lab records were probably burnt—if not consumed by the vector itself. Nothing tells us anything.” An anxious half-smile. “That’s why we need your cooperation. And why we’ve got to have that monster. The only possible key we’ve turned up.”

“I’ll be surprised if you find it. Because it’s afraid— with good enough reason. I don’t know anything about its gifts or its limits or what to expect from it; I do know that it’s smart.” In spite of himself, he let his feelings show. “It’s remarkably perceptive, with no sense organs .1 could understand. For a being so small, lost and hunted in a world that must be strange to it—”

“Never mind!” Kalenka checked him. “Forget your crazy sympathy. Just show us where it went.”

Still keeping a cautious separation from him, they made him lead them the way the pink thing had gone, around the corner of the building toward that gnarled old cherry tree and on beyond into the unmown grass and knee-high weeds around an old farm tractor. He stopped there, with a gesture toward the young saplings and underbrush that choked the slope toward the stream.

“I think it’s smart enough and small enough to hide.”

“Doctor—” Kalenka stepped sternly toward him, as if fear had been forgotten. “We’ll expect your cooperation.”

“If that will get me back to Fort Madison—”

“Forget Fort Madison.” Kalenka’s voice rang harder. “Doctor, you’re a prisoner here. Detained under martial law, with very serious accusations pending against you. You won’t be going anywhere at all. Not unless you decide to cultivate a more helpful attitude. Not until the charges against you are dismissed and we find you free of infection.”

He tried to protest. “Sir, really! I don’t know anything about my brother’s research.”

“Keep him secure.” Kalenka rapped the order at Dusek and swung back to him. “Military intelligence will be here. Save your alibis for them.”

18

Tim Clegg

A
nya waited in the empty tower offices that had been world headquarters of Roman-World-Mart, trying to eat a clammy sandwich a guard had brought up from a deli, trying to nap on a folding cot. Shuvalov came back at last with new orders from the Center. She listened to them stoically. The assignment looked impossible, but saying so wouldn’t help.

Rid of him at last, she caught a late flight out of La-Guardia. A little after midnight, she checked into a hotel in downtown Kansas City.

With funds enough from accounts old Roman had set up for her in European banks, safely out of Julia’s reach, she could travel in the style she used to enjoy, but her pleasure in it was spoiled by the florid, balding businessman who had sat across the aisle behind her on the flight and followed her to the taxi stand and walked into the lobby while she was waiting for the elevator.

Jittery, she slept badly that night and woke too early from dreams of the happier time, when life had seemed kinder and the whole world brighter. Moscow. Skating in winter. The Bolshoi. The university. The dacha some rich Czarist noble had built back before the revolution, the tall-columned mansion out in the woods on the shore of the Moskva. Her parents, till their luck ran out.

The good time had been when her father still had friends high in the Politburo and she had never even heard of the Lubyanka and the Center and the
gulags.
Still fresh and eager then, aware of her looks and a growing power to command the eyes of men, she had relished everything with the same joy she thought her father must be feeling in the important people he entertained and the huge black limousine always waiting to carry him off to work with important people in the Kremlin.

In the dreams, she had even been on the stage again, young male admirers all around her, happily rehearsing for the role she had won in the Chekhov revival. Awake now in this drably cheerless hotel, here in the very middle of the
Glavni Vrag,
she had to cringe again for her father’s stunning fall, that bleak winter day when all his one-time friends turned suddenly against him, accusing him of monstrous things he had never done. Everything had gone so wrong that still she could hardly bear to think about it, so terribly wrong that even the jungle world of the KGB had been a welcome haven.

Once, back in the first exciting months she had known Jules Roman, she had thought those ugly times were gone forever. Old Jules had really loved her, truly loved both America and Russia. Their own love, he used to say, was a symbolic beginning for the great new era of world understanding he wanted to foster.

Hiring her to be his private secretary, he had got her a work permit. Later, in a time of detente, he had helped her obtain a permanent residence visa. Traveling with him, living with him in the Florida mansion and the New York town house, she had almost believed in his visions of a future time of international amity when the nukes could be broken down to fuel power plants.

But Jules was gone. The world he promised, like her father’s, had tumbled down around her. She had applied for naturalization—he had wanted it for her, and the Center had commanded it—but she was not yet a citizen. At the whim of the CIA, she could be arrested at any instant for deportation or worse.

She couldn’t help feeling that she stood alone against the whole
Glavni Vrag,
all its defenses now alert to trap her. Shuvalov expected courage and cleverness she lacked, miracles she couldn’t perform.

Too long under too much strain, she had thought of trying to defect, but that could have no happy ending. The Americans would certainly suspect her of trickery. Even if she somehow persuaded them to believe she’d had some change of heart, they would doubtless want to make her a double agent, working for two masters and in danger from both. She knew how the Center dealt with traitors.

Besides all that, she couldn’t quite forget Jules’s great hope for the foundation. Just perhaps, if this crisis passed with no greater disaster, if it could be funded in spite of Julia Roman, if she herself stayed free to set it up, perhaps it might really help begin an age of worldwide peace and understanding.

Thus far, however, it was only a device of the KGB, useful cover for her own travels around America on the pretext that she was interviewing people for the foundation staff. A cover too flimsy to save her if things went wrong.

All that dismal morning, she longed for the lost joys that had come back in the dream. She ordered breakfast sent up to her room because she knew American agents would be watching for her in the lobby. The phone rang. A history professor from the University of Kansas. He wanted to talk about a position on the foundation staff, or perhaps a grant to support his research into czarist economics.

Hoping he had brought some message, she let him come up to her room. Black-bearded and fat, hairy as Scorpio, he was so eager to show off his command of Russian, and he asked such searching questions about her plans for the foundation, that she knew he was with the CIA. She got rid of him with a promise to consider his application when funds came through.

He had brought no message. The fact depressed her because she had no way to reach Scorpio. Alarmed when Carboni failed to appear in Chicago, he had refused to set up another meeting. He asked for her travel schedule instead, promising to get in touch when he felt safe about it.

The room had grown too warm, and the professor had left a faint, stuffy scent of stale cigar smoke. She was turning up the air conditioner when the phone rang again.

“Anya Ostrov?” A man’s quick voice. “May I come up?”

“Who are you?”

“Nobody you know, but you should see me.”

The contact from Scorpio? “Okay, come on up.”

He knocked, and she let him in. A lanky young man with pale blue eyes and straw-colored hair. She shut the door behind him. Waiting to see what he wanted, she studied his neat gray business suit, his anxious smile, his own searching glance at her.

“Miss Ostrov?”

She nodded, wondering.

“My name is Clegg.” The name startled her, and she saw a flash of amusement in his eyes. “Tim Clegg. My father is General Clegg, in command of the task force at Enfield.”

An instant of sheer terror. She tried not to show it. Heart thumping, she scanned him again. He looked harmless enough, even almost shy, but her voice was still gone. She gestured at a chair.

“Wondering how I know you?”

She nodded again.

“Thanks to a man I knew as Herman Doerr.”

“Doerr?” Relaxed enough to breathe again, she stepped quickly toward him. “Have you some word from him?”

“From Scorpio?” The code name hit her like a fist. “I don’t think you’ll hear from Scorpio again.”

“Why not?” She tried not to tremble. “Has he—is he in trouble?”

“Too slick for that. But he told me who you are.” She was still standing. He nodded at another chair. “Relax, Miss Ostrov. The situation needs explaining.”

Reluctantly, she sank into the chair. His face looked open and honest. She couldn’t help wanting to like him, but she had lived through too many years of deceit and betrayal to trust anybody.

“Don’t shut me out.” He smiled again, frankly approving her. “Not before you know why I’m here.”

She shook her head, and he saw her apprehension.

“Please, Miss Ostrov. I don’t want to harm you. We’re players in the same game. I hope we can team up.”

“Game—” She had to gulp. “What sort of game?”

“Intelligence.”

“Intell—”

Panic took her voice. She saw him move his hand as if to wave her fear away, but his air of easy reassurance meant nothing at all. An American prison might be better than the Lubyanka or treatment in the sort of hospital where Alyoshka had died, but it would be the end of her life. She sat staring at him, feeling cold and giddy. She must have turned the air conditioner too high. She tried to listen, but his voice seemed far off.