Prisoners of Tomorrow (34 page)

Farther on, another walkway went off to one side. They followed it between the last of the storage tanks and girderwork abutting a bulkhead to a series of bays containing power-distribution equipment and banks of enormous batteries—a backup supply system for emergency power. An intermediate deck split the space beyond into two levels. The upper level was cluttered with more piping and structural work. But the lower space, the floor of which was actually sunken a few feet to make it considerably deeper and roomier than it appeared from even a short distance away, was comparatively empty. Conceivably it had been left as expansion space in which to install more equipment at some later date. McCain and Rashazzi glanced at each other in the torchlight, then moved closer and lowered themselves down into the space.

It went back perhaps twenty feet, ending at a solid bulkhead wall, which Rashazzi estimated could well be the near side of Gorky Street, extending down to the lower levels. That fitted with the mental map that McCain had been constructing, too. A wall of cable guides running between roof supports closed in one of the sides, while the other was semi-open to a forest of supports and tiebars that disappeared into the blackness behind the storage tanks.

Rashazzi stroked his chin and looked around. “I don’t know where we might be able to get to from here,” he said. “It will take some time to check. But you know something, Lew? Think of it—here we are in a pretty secluded place, with another whole level above full of machinery making nice background music to screen out noise. If we could run some power into here from somewhere, this would make the perfect workshop that Albrecht and I were looking for.” He nodded and looked around again with evident satisfaction. “Yes, I’d say that tonight’s expedition has already been well worth the effort.”

CHAPTER THIRTY

The warm, dry summer had done wonders for Myra’s health, and by the middle of August her face had regained its color and filled out again. “Yeah, I figure you’ll last a few more years yet, at least,” Foleda told her approvingly as they sat sipping iced orange juice at a sunshaded table on the veranda at the back of the house.

“Doesn’t she look so much better,” Ella said from where she was sitting with her legs dangling in the pool, watching Johnny and two other boys of about his age from along the street playing in the water on the far side. “You look like a brand-new woman, Mother.”

“I feel like one,” Myra replied.

“See,” Foleda said. He always managed to look outrageous on his days off, and on this occasion was wearing Bermuda shorts of a deafening tartan, sunglasses, and a straw hat. It reminded Ella of pictures she had seen of Churchill in some of his wartime outfits. “That’s what having an attentive husband does for you.”

“Are you going to let him get away with that, Mother?” Ella asked Myra.

“Sure, if it works both ways,” Myra said. “Because I score higher. I mean, look at the state of him. He hasn’t had a day sick for years.”

“And people always think that kind of work is so stressful. You’re a fraud, Dad—and living off us taxpayers, too.”

“Nonsense. I work hard all the time. It’s the best deal you people ever got—worth every penny.”

“How come no heart attacks, then?”

“The light heart and inner tranquility that come from being honest.”

Myra laughed delightedly. “How can you possibly mean it, Bernard? What about the fuss you had last week with the attorney general over that Argentinean minister’s hotel suite your people bugged?”

“Hell,” Foleda grunted. “I said honest, not legal.”

A call-tone came from the screenpad lying by the tray on the table. Myra picked it up and acknowledged. It was Randal, Ella’s husband, from inside the house. “Is Bernard there?” he asked. Myra passed the pad over.

“What?” Foleda said.

“There’s a news item just coming in about that Russian space colony you’re always interested in,” Randal told him.

“
Tereshkova
?”

“Yes. I thought maybe you’d like to see it right away. . . . Or I could store it for later.”

“No, I’d like to see it now,” Foleda said. He started to get up.

“Want me to put it through on the pad out there?”

“No, I’ll come inside. Why spoil the party?”

A bright-red beach ball bounced on the surface of the water and bobbed against the poolside, with Johnny splashing after it. “Where are you going, Grandpa?” he called up.

“Just inside for a minute.”

“Ask them, they’ll know,” one of Johnny’s friends said, coming across behind him.

“We’ll know what?” Ella asked them.

“Which
did
come first, the chicken or the egg?”

“Ask your grandma,” Ella answered. Johnny looked at Myra.

“Ask your grandfather,” Myra said.

“Didn’t they teach you at school that birds evolved from reptiles?” Foleda said as he made to leave.

“Sure.”

“Well, there’s your answer: dinosaurs were laying eggs before there were any chickens.”

Foleda found Randal sprawled along a couch in the window-lounge a half level below the kitchen and dining area, a handpad resting on his knee. “What have we got?” Foleda said, perching himself on an arm of one of the chairs facing the wallscreen across the room.

Randal touched a button and the screen came to life with a view of Moscow’s Red Square, showing the Kremlin wall and St. Basil’s Cathedral. After a few seconds it switched to columns of parading tanks and missile carriers, and then a line of heavily muffled Soviet leaders saluting from the reviewing stand atop the red-marble mausoleum of Lenin’s Tomb. “It came in live a few minutes ago,” Randal said.

The commentator’s voice-over narrated: “News from Moscow today of a big break with tradition. The customary military parade held every November seventh to celebrate the uprising that brought the Communist Party to power, which has long seemed an inviolable national institution, will not take place in this, the Revolution’s centenary year. A spokesman for Tass, the Soviet news agency, announced this morning that this year the occasion will be commemorated out in space. Instead of reviewing the traditional military parade in Red Square—which tends to be a cold business around November in Moscow—the Soviet leaders will be traveling en masse to the experimental space colony
Valentina Tereshkova,
two hundred thousand miles from Earth”—a view had appeared of
Tereshkova
hanging in space, followed by standard shots of a transporter docking at the hub, a view of the Turgenev urban zone, and a harvesting machine at work in one of the agricultural sectors, while the voice continued—“to see not marching soldiers and rockets, but scientists, engineers, farmers, and spaceborne factories. So, what does it mean? Are they sending us one of those famous ‘signals’ we’re always being told about? Some of the experts will be giving us their interpretations later. Frank Peterson talked in Moscow with Mr. Gorlienko, the Soviet foreign minister.”

“What do you think?” Randal said to Foleda. “Doesn’t that look like a change? Come on, Bernard, give them some credit when it’s due. This is exactly the kind of initiative we need more of. We have to reciprocate.”

“We’ll see.” Foleda sounded skeptical.

“Dammit, anyone would think you people wanted a war,” Randal said, shaking his head in exasperation.

It was a subject they often argued about. Randal was a psychiatrist. He considered all nuclear weapons immoral and had pronounced the world leadership collectively insane. Foleda, on the other hand, contended that the nuclear-tipped ICBM was the most moral weapon to have been invented since the days when kings led their soldiers into battle. It put the wealthy and powerful of all nations right up in the front line, where the risks were no longer exclusively other people’s. “With true democracy,” Foleda maintained, “everybody is in the trenches.”

On the screen the Soviet foreign minister was telling an interviewer, “Yes, you could describe it as a gesture. We see it as symbolizing the direction of the Soviet Union’s commitment to the twenty-first century. Coming in the one hundredth year of our existence as a modern nation, the completion of
Valentina Tereshkova
is a model to the world of what can be accomplished under a communist system. Your economists and experts said it couldn’t be done—that our system was too inefficient to achieve any significant nonmilitary goals. They discouraged the emerging nations of the world from trying to emulate us. But we have shown them! Tell us now what we are or are not capable of achieving. That is the direction in which we will continue to grow—stronger and more prosperous. And is it not appropriate that on our centenary, when this policy becomes demonstrable reality, that is where our leaders should be?”

“It’s an honest, straightforward, goodwill gesture,” Randal said across at Foleda. “Somebody has to start trusting somebody.”

Foleda didn’t reply, but stared hard at the screen, trying in his mind to reconcile what he had just heard with the most recent trends to be distilled from the various intelligence sources that his people tapped. Deliveries of fuel and supplies to Soviet naval bases had been increasing significantly. The Warsaw Pact nations had announced plans in the weeks ahead for military exercises to be held in Eastern Europe and Siberia that would involve large-scale troop and armor movements. Soviet aircraft had been doing a lot of practice flying lately. Fourteen hospitals near major cities had installed emergency generating equipment in the last three months alone. A KGB general had taken charge of the Soviet civil-defense organization. No single item stood out as grounds for anything conclusive, but taken together they added up to precisely the kind of situation that made intelligence analysts nervous.

But the signs didn’t seem to anticipate the same level of activity extending into the longer term. The Soviet military units undergoing mobilization, for example, were not being issued with winter clothing and equipment; the quantities of spare parts being ordered from factories were not consistent with demand requirements extending far into the future. It seemed that whatever they were hatching would happen soon, and was expected to be over with quickly. At a time of acute first-strike apprehensiveness everywhere, such a thought was blood-chilling. And now here was a specific date, less than ten weeks away, slap in the middle of the time frame that seemed to be indicated. Suddenly Foleda felt the sickening certainty that he could already look at a calendar and put his finger on doomsday.

“. . . you’d think that some people wanted a war.” He realized that Randal had been saying something.

“What are you saying we should do, disarm unilaterally?” he asked, snapping himself back to the present.

“Why not? If we did, they would. Then the problem would have gone away. That’s simple enough, surely.”

“But suppose you were wrong, and they didn’t,” Foleda said, his voice still numb. “Would you be willing to run
that
risk? Which would you see as greater?”

Before the exchange could proceed any further, a flashing symbol appeared in the bottom corner of the screen to indicate an incoming call. Randal touched a button on the handpad. “Foledas’. This is Randal.”

“Hello, Randal, this is Barbara Haynes, calling Bernard,” a woman’s voice said from the unit. “Is he around?”

“Hi, Barb. Sure—one moment.”

“I’ll take it up in the kitchen,” Foleda said, relieved at the chance to extricate himself. Randal redirected the call, erased the stored bulletin that they had just watched, and settled back to see what else had come in on the news.

Barbara was calling from a house that the CIA owned on some tree-covered acres in Maryland. “We collected Mrs. Jones and took her to the farm. Everything’s fine. Shall I confirm that you’ll be coming out tomorrow to talk to her? It meant that Anita Dorkas had arrived from London, been smuggled through the airport despite attempts by Soviet officials to intervene, and was now installed at the safe house.”

“Good work,” Foleda said. “You bet I’ll be there.”

The room had a large marble fireplace, a molded plaster ceiling, and high windows with rich, heavy drapes, looking out over lawns and a rose garden. It was furnished traditionally with a slender-legged Georgian sideboard, davenport, side tables, and several settees and wing-backed chairs. A grand piano stood at the far end, inside the arched entranceway from the hall. Anita Dorkas was sitting at one end of the long central table, with Foleda across the corner from her on one side and Barbara on the other. Harry Meech, also from the department, sat at the other end with a portable screenpad, surrounded by files and notes. Gerald Kehrn from the Defense Department was pacing around agitatedly, first studying the pictures on the walls, now picking up a vase, then stooping to examine the china in one of the glass-fronted cabinets.

“And that was enough to make you so certain you’d been discovered?” Foleda said again.

“It wasn’t just that. It was a combination of several things,” Anita replied. She sounded tired, but not resentful. This kind of thing was necessary and not unexpected. “The behavior of my superior at the embassy that day. The fact that they chose a time when Enriko was away. And when he told me what Shepanov had said—about the woman that my ex-husband had taken up with being arrested—the implications were obvious. Igor—my ex-husband, Professor Dyashkin—would have come under suspicion immediately. We had both been involved in underground dissident activities, and for all I knew he might have been arrested, too, by then. Either way, it was only a matter of time before they got onto me. I was afraid that if I went in to work the next morning, I would only come out again under arrest, en route for Russia.”

“You just walked out,” Foleda said. “Not a word to your husband? You didn’t say anything? You’ve never seen him since. Isn’t that a little odd?”

“I’ve already explained: I used him. He was head-to-toe KGB. There was never anything between us as far as I was concerned. I had no qualms in that respect.”

“How did he feel about it?”

“As far as I could tell, he saw ours as a normal marriage.”

“How would you describe his attitude to your relationship?”