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“I need more money.”
Carl frowned. “I might get you thirty-five. I can try. I promise I will try.”
“That’s it? Tops?”
Carl nodded.
Actually, thirty-five was more than he’d dared think about. He owed about fifteen. Still, it would be a horrible effort. His gut would be a mess until it was over. He continued to object. “You’d have to get the frequency to me. So I’d know what to set in the plane. I’d try to give you the target. The timing’s all wrong.”
“I’ll have a frequency for you when you put into Mombasa. Then you should know the rest by the time you reach Bahrain.”
“What if we make the hit before we get to Bahrain?”
“We’ll take that chance. These people understand that such a thing is not easy. They have a good idea what the potential targets are, anyway.”
“I oughta get my money either way.”
“That is understood. I think there will be a bonus for a confirmed kill. Yes, I think it is a very good idea, this one. They will be able to test their system and the Navy will have no idea it has happened. Then, the next time—” He fluttered his fingers in the air like disintegrating aircraft.
Bonner felt sweat trickling down his ribs. “I’ll be shitting bricks until it’s over,” he said.
“Yes, but when it’s over, think how good you’ll feel. Money, Sheldon!”
They spent some time talking over the details, and the longer they talked, the more familiar it seemed to Bonner, therefore the more workable. This was a trick he would have to play on himself, making it familiar, so that after a few days he would not come to with a start and remember that he was going to do this thing, feeling his colon lurch. Actually, even now, once he got a little used to it and the chill of fear had passed, he liked the planning, and he liked sitting here with this important man, who had been a big gun in Moscow and now was going to be a big gun in Tehran. He liked being wanted. And he liked the money.
“How is your son?” Carl said when they were done.
“Good. He writes, like, once a month.”
“He is still in the satellite communications school?”
“Yeah. Four months, he comes out, he’s an E5, one bump down from his old man.”
“Tehran are very interested in him. They are mad for communications technology. You will speak to him?”
“The time isn’t right. When it’s right, I will.”
“Maybe, the slow approach, Sheldon—little by little—”
“Don’t tell me how to handle my own son! I’ll do it. In my time! He’ll come around. I gotta put it to him just right—father and son, doing it together. He’s very idealistic. He doesn’t know I do this, I’ve told you that. I’ll bring him around, but—Just don’t tell me how to handle my own son.”
“Well—Of course. It is a wise father who knows his child—eh?”
They walked up the hill to the car. Carl told him a taxi was waiting for him around the next curve.
They did not touch. Carl put on sunglasses, as if he were withdrawing his personality. “You must bring your son in, Sheldon. It will be worth—lots of money. Eh?”
The car pulled away, and Bonner was left feeling suddenly isolated on that sunny stretch of road, with the city close by but somehow unreal, as if it was unpopulated, as if he was the only man on earth. He had no idea how close he had come to dying.
He walked up the hill, sweating again, and found the taxi. On the back seat was a bottle of Jack Daniel’s.
Bonner went back to his hotel and turned on the television and began to drink. It was only early afternoon, but he was content to sit there, watching the bright colors, hearing the language he did not understand, a man more comfortable with his loneliness than with any other companion the teeming city could offer.
He began to plan how he would turn his son into a spy.
1615 Zulu. Moscow.
Ouspenskaya slipped into the Director’s office after a single knock. The receptionist was gone, the building quiet except for the duty crews on the second floor, and here and there some manager like the Director plugging away. He knew she was coming.
“Well? What is urgent?” His cold was worse.
“Efremov.”
“Yes?”
She sat down. Her hands were trembling. She was truly wretched, for something monstrous had obtruded into this place, this idea she had of Moscow and being Russian, as if an obscene animal had dragged its slime across her foot. “Five days ago, a gang attacked an office in the Stitkin Building here in Moscow. Twenty-nine dead.”
“I remember.” He guessed at once; his voice showed it.
“The office was Efremov’s latest front operation. Venux, Inc. To run the four agents I told you of.”
“Oh, my God.” He was breathing through his mouth like an adenoidal child, looking absurd and feeling dreadful. “My God,” he said again as he saw it all. “They wiped out the entire operation.”
She nodded. “A hired job. Ex-military all over it.”
“Maybe it’s a fake—”
She shook her head. “What do you think, the Army did it? No, no! It’s just what we’re doing to ourselves! Efremov disappears; somebody wipes out his best operation—every clerk, every computer operator; they burned the place out—files, disks, shredder, everything! We’re already four days late; the police treated it as ordinary crime—‘ordinary,’ ah!—and our people didn’t go in until I sent them an hour ago. There’s already been looting of what’s left. What kind of people are we becoming?”
“You think—the father of the girlfriend? Mafia?”
“I don’t know. For what? Revenge?” She shrugged. “I’m having Papa Malenkov brought in. No pussy-footing. I’ve told them to rough him up and see what he says. Let him know we’re not the Moscow police.” She shook her head. “But it doesn’t add up. If it’s a message to us, why hit a disguised operation that we don’t know about? If it’s a message to Efremov, where is he? Is he dead? Then what’s the point?” She wiped her cheeks, sank back. What she was suffering was grief, grief for a lost ideal. “Maybe he’s dead. But maybe he isn’t. And if he isn’t—”
“If he isn’t—Maybe he did it. Eh? You say this operation was new—a few months. Nine? Nine. So—maybe, that long ago, he was planning—something?”
“It seems far-fetched. But Efremov could be very cute if he wanted to. He liked to cover his tracks, even long before—mmm—current conditions.”
The Director made a face. “Say it. Long before perestroika. My God! The good old days.” He made a sound, something between a laugh and a groan. “My God, Ouspenskaya, what a ball of shit it’s all turned into! Any idea where Efremov would go?”
“None.”
“Out of the country?”
“I suppose.”
“You’ve checked the various agencies that—of course you have. All right, he was clever, he was an old campaigner, he could have gone over any border he wanted. I’m only brainstorming, mind you—improvising; I’m sure he’s dead, in fact. But let’s say, for argument’s sake, he isn’t. Presumably he had money abroad. Well. So, he destroys the organization that handles his best agents. To deny us? Of course, a nice joke, one ‘in your eye,’ as they say. He never liked me, I might say. You, I always thought he had his eye on. No? Well, there you are. I’m a bureaucrat, not a human relations specialist. Presumably he plans to take himself to somebody else, with his star agents as his salesman’s samples—eh? So he destroys everything and everybody who can track those agents. Well, that makes a grisly kind of sense. So who does he go to? The Americans? Not likely; he really despised the Americans. Notice I talk of him in the past tense, as if he were dead.” He made the laughing groan again, trying to break through her mood. Failing, he said, “Please, Ouspenskaya!” He came around the desk, stood in front of her, patted her shoulder. He only made things worse: she began to weep. The Director poured a glass of water from his carafe (made in Sweden) and held it out to her.
“There’s something else,” she said.
“Oh, shit.” He retreated behind his desk.
“I’m sure there’s a discrepancy between his claims for eighty agents and the agents themselves. I haven’t got proof yet, but there’s too much organization, too much system manipulation, and not enough information. I think some of the eighty are dummies.”
He leaned his forehead on one hand. “Not all of them. Efremov got wonderful information from real agents!”
“I have an idea, Director.”
“Good, because I certainly don’t.”
“There is probably more in the computers than we can tease out. We need specialists. The computer was installed ages ago by East Germans who would not even be seen speaking to us now. Let’s go to the Americans.”
He paused, a tissue halfway to his nose.
“The Americans know everything about computers,” she went on. She was more cheerful, talking about what could be done. “We tell them that Efremov has bolted and that one of his agents is American. That will make them hot, you know. Then we tell them there is more in the computer but we can’t winkle it out. We will let their specialists into the computer if they will replace the system with IBM machines when they are done. And give us whatever they find of Efremov’s. We lose nothing. And they will take care of Efremov for us.”
He stared at her.
“I am sick of using low-end technology!” she shouted. “And I want a new telephone, too!”
He swiveled to look out the window. The rain was still streaming down. He balled a damp tissue between his palms, rolling it back and forth, back and forth, at last dropped it into the plastic bag, then got up and left the office. She heard the water run in his private bathroom. The toilet flushed. He came out wiping his hands on a handkerchief.
“Not yet,” he said.
She hitched forward in her chair. “I was approached by an American at the Venice Conference. A very obvious move—in fact, she said so. ‘Now that the Cold War is over,’ and so on. I know I could make the contact!”
“Of course you could make a contact; I could make a contact; who couldn’t? You’re not thinking clearly, Ouspenskaya. No, letting the Americans into Efremov’s computer files would be obscene. Just now. Not that I wouldn’t do it if I was absolutely sure he was alive and working for somebody else.”
“He has been responsible for killing twenty-nine of his own people. And he is a traitor!”
“You don’t know that! Did you report this approach at the Venice Conference?”
“Of course.”
“Who was it?”
“A woman. It’s all in my report.”
He hesitated for that millisecond that betrays suspicion, then glanced at her almost apologetically. He was thinking Those American women—you hear strange things—they do things with other women—He moved uncomfortably; he felt out of place in this new and more dangerous world. He cleared his throat. “What did she offer you?”
“It wasn’t an offer. An idea—a Soviet-American thinktank. American money. I would participate at a high level.”
“A little obvious, maybe?”
“She said as much—pointed out that three SVRR generals were touring US military bases as we spoke.”
He made a little throat-clearing sound, a sign of hesitation—this hint of possibly irregular sex embarrassed him—and said gently, “Who is she?”
“She works for George Shreed. She made that quite clear enough.” She laughed, throatily. “Quite clear. What is it Americans call it—’name-pushing’?”
“Name-dropping, I believe. George Shreed. Well, well.” Shreed was more or less his opposite number in the CIA, at least so placed that the Director looked upon him as almost a rival in the same bureaucracy. Competitiveness tingled, despite his cold. “People like Shreed never dared reach into my directorate before. It’s a new world.”
“One in which a Colonel murders twenty-nine of his own people and betrays his country. For money! I know it! I feel it! The bastard!”
The Director groaned. He was sure that Ouspenskaya would resist any seduction from an immoral American woman. Wouldn’t she? He had managed to clear one nostril. He breathed through it for some seconds. “Did I tell you Gronski left with twenty-four hours’ notice ‘to enter the private sector’? What private sector? Money—the new socialist ideal. Well. All right, renew the contact with Shreed’s woman. Prepare the ground, but do nothing. File a report on everything you do. Put everything in writing for me. Get together with somebody who knows the computer and draft a plan for clearing it, then have them squeeze every drop of data out of it. I want every individual who has worked for Efremov in the last five years interviewed on polygraph—right down to the clerks. You run this, Ouspenskaya. If there are dummy agents he was taking money for, I want details. The individuals won’t know about it; they’ll think everything was straight. If they had suspicions, maybe he paid one or two off. But he was so good I’ll bet nobody got suspicious. But somewhere in the records there will be glitches. You can’t run ghosts and not have it show up.”
She stood. “You go to bed.”
He groaned. As she turned to go, he said, “Get what you can on the four agents who were being run out of the place that was attacked. You’ll have to go back to before he compartmentalized them. Maybe even back before we computerized. A big job.”
“I want to nail him like a new Christ.”
“Yes, but don’t want it so much that you overlook things that will exonerate him. Remember—maybe he’s dead. Maybe he’s under a new pouring of concrete somewhere. Maybe he’s innocent.”
“He isn’t!”
He ignored that. “I want everything on those four agents. Especially the American. I think we can do something with that.”
She didn’t ask him what.
2010 Zulu. Naples.
Kim fed Alan a strawberry from her plate and pressed her leg against his. She had forgiven him, because he had wangled an extra day’s liberty and because he had taken her to this elegant, expensive restaurant where Italian men looked at her as if she were the dessert cart. Then, Alan had pointed out three officers from the carrier, then Narc and two guys and a couple of women who wouldn’t have dared look into the same mirror with Kim. Narc’s eyes had bugged out, not only because Kim was such a woman, but because it was the Spy who had her. She giggled and pressed his leg and said she loved him so much.
“I hate the Navy,” she said happily. Her tongue flicked at a dot of whipped cream at the corner of her mouth. “I’m going to make my father give you a job so you can get out of the Navy and we can stay in bed all the time.”
He was not immune to being flattered. “You really believe your father’s going to pay me to stay in bed with his daughter?”
“What Kimberley wants,” she said, with a tiny smile, “Kimberley gets.”
Her father was a big shot in Florida. The Hoyts had a huge house on the beach near Jacksonville; Alan had got lost in it, trying to find the head. Her brother had laughed at him for that. Alan hadn’t liked him, a muscled twenty-year-old who spent his spare time on a jet ski and talked a lot about reverse discrimination. He had called Alan “admiral.” Something in his posture, his aggressiveness, had challenged Alan, as if they were rivals. The father had looked on at this with a small smile.
“I don’t think I could work for your father,” Alan said now.
“Oh, if the price is right, I bet you could.” She kissed him. “And the price will be right.”
She smiled. She licked her lips. He thought she was about the most desirable thing he’d ever seen. He began to tell her the story of landing into the net.
5 (#ulink_8338722d-a9d0-5179-be3d-3dc545dc6959)
Their first liberty ports behind them, the Roosevelt and the Jefferson moved down the Med in seemingly separate paths. The two great ships transited the Suez three weeks apart, then lingered briefly within a hundred miles of each other at the mouth of the Red Sea. Roosevelt docked at Mombasa; Jefferson forged eastward toward the Gulf, where Iran and Iraq, exhausted from their war, still lay spitting and snarling at each other like wounded cats. For Alan Craik, the carrier became his life. A meeting with Kim in Bahrain was dreamlike, quickly relegated to a vague background of fantasies and remembrance, against which his real world played. Real life was intelligence and flight, the CVIC and Christine. Now, he was like a hungry man let loose at a banquet table: he devoured and devoured and wanted more.
Over those three months, the two carriers approached each other and moved away, partners in a vast dance discernible only to their captains—never close enough to make a common nuclear target, never far enough apart to foreclose joint operations. Four months after they had passed Gibraltar, they reached designated points within range of the Iranian coast and began to brief their aircrews on the mission labeled KNIGHTHOOD.
On the scale of air warfare, the carrier is a siege engine; its target is a vast fortress of electronics and missiles. Night is the preferred environment, when men’s eyes fail and the side with the best electronic vision wins.
On the night sea, the deck of the carrier is a vision from some ancient legend, lit by flashes like lightning, tense with the nervous movements of men, raucous with sounds like the forges of Vulcan. The senses are battered by the power of the thing, the urgency and vigor of its component parts. Planes land in a roar and flash of sparks or leap into the air from hidden catapults. All around, men labor in shifting, flickering light, while the deck vibrates with the power of the screws and the planes and the machinery, and you feel the vibration in your very bones. The smell of JP-5, the lifeblood of naval aviation, is everywhere.
Beneath this sensual assault is intellectual wonder that the engine works. Men scurry through the noise, the patches of light and blackness, the danger; mysterious instructions whisper down dozens of radio channels; planes are fueled, repaired, launched, recovered, given ordnance, checked for weight, preflighted, tied down, chocked, released, rolled, towed; alerts are set and manned; while high overhead those aloft conduct their missions, talk to the tower, talk to each other, refuel in the air, prepare to land, parts of the great engine even while distant from it. Below the flight deck, intelligence plans missions, reviews debriefings, plays off future against past; powerful computers trade immense quantities of information about the carrier, her friends, her enemies, and all the complex world that now falls between. Elsewhere within, her crew is fed, their clothes are washed, their spaces are kept clean and neat, their beds are made, their confessions are heard and their prayers are spoken, their frailties are punished and their successes are rewarded, all while the ship drives through the water, powered by her nuclear heart. Almost six thousand humans crew her and her brood of aircraft, and very few of them are sleeping now.
