Act of God (2 page)

Tarkovsky was stunned. Did this KGB paranoid think that qualified people were as easy to find as strongarm men for his goon squads? Even so, a Class One priority meant that he could transfer in personnel from almost any other space project. He had never had such power, such a budget, at his disposal. Very few Soviet scientists ever had. But it meant that Peter the Great was no longer his project. As of now, it belonged to Sergei Nekrasov. He lit one of his coarse, cheap cigarettes, stalling.

"Comrade, I have been involved with our space effort as long as there has been a Soviet space program. I am sure that none of my colleagues has ever received such a
carte blanche
. . . ."

"You want to know whether I have the authority to do this?" Nekrasov asked, bluntly. "I assure you that I have. Do you think such a thing could be carried out without the full support of the highest authority?" His glare was in no way mitigated by the thickness of his lenses. "Believe me, Comrade Tarkovsky, as closely as I shall be watching this project, they will be watching me."

Tarkovsky smoked the raw tobacco without tasting it. He had just been told that the Deputy Premier's future was in his hands. Failure might well prove fatal.

"It can be done, Comrade Nekrasov," he said. "Just as I proposed it. It will be done."

CHAPTER TWO

WASHINGTON, D.C.

Sam Taggart slapped his alarm clock into silence as he rolled from his bed. He ached all over. The months of therapy had put him back in operating condition, but it would be a long time before all the effects of his injuries wore off. He crossed the spartan little efficiency apartment and went into the bathroom, switching on lights as he went. At six o'clock on a winter morning, Washington was still dark.

He splashed water into his bleary eyes, brushed his teeth and shaved. He was deeply tanned in winter because he had been recuperating in Florida. Against the tanned skin, the new scars on flank, chest and shoulder were pale pink. There were also older, whiter scars. Before leaving the bathroom he stepped on the scale and noted that he was still about ten pounds below his normal weight. He decided to step up his exercise program at the gym no matter what the damned doctors said and add a few more calories to his diet.

He dressed and went downstairs and across the street to the early-opening diner where he usually had breakfast. He ordered ham and eggs and pancakes and hash brown potatoes, deciding to put his higher-calorie regimen into effect immediately. The waitress, who was familiar with his habits, left a pot of coffee on his table. She studied him from behind the counter as she waited for the cook to fix his order. He hadn't been in for a long time, and he had changed a little since she had last seen him. He was a little thinner, for one thing, and he hadn't had a whole lot of weight to spare in the first place. The skin was stretched more tautly across his prominent cheek bones. His already broken nose looked as if it had been broken again. Most of her early-morning customers were government workers heading toward their jobs. If he was a government man, it wasn't a desk job he was holding down.

Taggart read the newspaper while he waited for his order, downing half the coffeepot in the process. The news was about as bad as it had been every day of his life, no change there. The usual little wars were in progress. More little wars were expected soon in the usual hot spots. Typical day. His order arrived and he ate, listening to the inanities from the radio behind the counter. Afterwards, he got into his old Chevrolet and drove across town to a nondescript building in a nondescript neighborhood.

Inside, he stopped at a desk and picked up his ID badge. The man behind the desk grinned at him and shook his hand. "Good to see you again, Mr. Taggart. How are you feeling?"

"OK," Taggart said, slightly annoyed at the concern. "Is Morgan in?"

"He came in about fifteen minutes ago. Said for you to check in with him first thing."

"Thanks." Taggart pinned the ID badge to his lapel and walked past the desk. The desk man watched him to see if he was moving unsteadily, but Taggart seemed to be in pretty good shape, if a little on the thin side. Not bad, all things considered. Getting four bullets cut out was no picnic.

Taggart took an elevator to the fifth floor and knocked on Morgan's door. "Come in." He went in and Morgan, a tall, beefy man in an expensive suit, stood and grinned and shook his hand. "Sit down, Sam. Good to have you back. How're you feeling?"

"Fine. The doc says I'm about ninety-five percent."

"Good. That's good to hear, Sam. Too bad about that last assignment. I want you to know I think you did the right thing."

"Of course I did the right thing. Who says I didn't?"

"Easy, Sam. Nobody does. Still, getting shot full of holes is considered by some to be an unwise move."

"Now, hold on a minute, nobody said—"

"It's a closed matter, Sam," Morgan said icily. "Now, I said I had something for you. We're going over to State to talk to a defector."

Taggart calmed himself with an effort. He knew his position with the agency was precarious. Best to play it cool. "A defector? That's not my kind of action. I'm a field man."

"Of course. But ninety-five percent's not good enough for field work. You've got to be one hundred percent."

"All right, I'll go along with that. What kind of defector, military or intelligence?"

"Neither. This one's an astronomer."

Sam wasn't sure whether to be incredulous or insulted. He decided on both. "You can't be serious. What good is a Russian astronomer?"

"Not Russian. Estonian."

"Jesus. A defecting astronomer from a satellite state. Is somebody trying to tell me something?"

Morgan was perfectly bland, which for him indicated intense satisfaction. "Only that someone thinks this is important enough to demand an operative of your caliber, Sam."

Taggart sat in stony silence during the drive to State. He had worked with defectors before, in the days before he got important field assignments. Mostly they had been high-up people from opposition intelligence agencies, people who needed protection and who had to be escorted by someone trained in eliciting and handling sensitive information. Once he'd nursemaided a Czech general for two months, picking up some good Warsaw Pact intelligence in the process. As much as a Czech general would be trusted with, at any rate. That was a long time ago. Being put back on that kind of duty was like a police captain finding himself back in uniform and pounding a beat.

At State, they had to go through the same rigmarole about ID tags before being allowed into the sanctum. They were guided along featureless corridors and past featureless rooms. Sam knew for a fact that these rooms were mostly inhabited by featureless people, which was a major reason that he had opted for hazardous field work as soon as he had sufficient seniority. Just being here was depressing.

In one of the rooms they met Steinberg, a man Taggart knew very slightly. Morgan walked over to a small window in one wall. "That her?" he asked.

A woman? Taggart took a look. The window was a one-way mirror. Sitting in the next room at a table was an attractive young blonde. He guessed her age at about twenty-five. She was nervously smoking, holding her cigarette in the underhanded style of Eastern Europe. She looked tired.

"Not bad duty, Sam," Morgan said. "I never got to work with a looker like that."

"Why's she important?" Taggart asked. "I'm told she's an astronomer. Something to do with missiles or something?"

Steinberg shook his head. "No, she's never been entrusted with anything really sensitive. You know they hardly ever let anybody from the satellites in on the really big stuff. No, she's been employed on scientific research since graduating from school. Some pretty important projects, though."

"Her?" Taggart said. "She's just a kid."

"Look again," Steinberg told him. "She's thirty, and her father was a pretty famous scientist, too."

"I have some things to do back at the office," Morgan told them. "I'll leave you two to it. Sam, don't let her get away from you." He left smiling. Taggart watched as the door shut behind him. Then he turned to Steinberg.

"So I'm going to nursemaid a defecting astronomer, huh? When do they put me on defecting athletes and musicians? This one looks like she could be one of those ballerinas they have such a hard time keeping."

Steinberg looked at him levelly. "As I understand it, Mr. Taggart, you were lucky to get even this."

"That's the word, is it? I'm glad to hear it from somebody at last." It wasn't as if he hadn't been expecting it.

"Word has it you're a prize eight-ball, Taggart. You've been losing friends fast, lately. They say you've gotten trigger-happy. Your agency's trying to play down that kind of action these days. It's bad publicity, bad for appropriations. I think you need to keep a low profile for a while."

"Yeah. No doubt. Well, if she doesn't know anything why don't you just turn her loose? The country's full of people like her. Half our instructors back in Army Intelligence school were satellite defectors. Hell, we even had real Russians."

"She's got an odd story," Steinberg said. "I don't know, there's probably nothing to it, but as long as there's a chance, we're supposed to look into it. I'll let her tell you about it herself. Come on, it's time for you to meet your charge."

They went into the little interrogation room and the woman looked up with weary, frightened eyes. "Miss Tammsalu," Steinberg said, "this is Sam Taggart. He'll be working with you."

Laine Tammsalu studied the man who had just come in. He was tall and rangy and good-looking in a tough sort of way. Men of his physical type were the kind that American movies always cast as cowboy heroes and Russian movies as fascists. He nodded at her curtly, clearly none too happy with his work. That did not look good. She had been hoping that the Americans would take her seriously. "Good day. Are you a scientist, Mr. Taggart?"

"No, I'm a grunt."

"I beg your pardon?" She was unfamiliar with the word and unsure that she had heard him correctly.

"I'm a standard field operative, Miss Tammsalu. No scientific background whatever."

"I see."

"Yeah, well, I was hoping for something else, too. What's the nature of your information?"

Tammsalu looked pleadingly at Steinberg. "Please, I have gone over this so many times. Must I do it again? At least, get me to somebody who will understand what I have to say."

"Sam, I think I can give you the gist of what Miss Tammsalu's told us," Steinberg said. "She is an astronomer, and has lived most of her life in her homeland, Estonia. Until just prior to her defection, she was assigned to a new Soviet space center on the north shore of the Aral Sea. Shortly after her security status was changed, she got an approval to attend an astronomical conference in Yugoslavia, where she managed to cross the border into Italy. She went to the American consul in Trieste and applied for sponsorship through the Estonian-American Society. She's been in debriefing for a week, now."

"Why was your security clearance withdrawn, Miss Tammsalu?" Sam asked.

"When I left Estonia," she said, undoubtedly for the hundredth time, "it was to work at the new Tsiolkovsky Space Center under Pyotr Tarkovsky." Taggart glanced at Steinberg.

"We have a file on him," Steinberg said. "Top Russian astrophysicist. One of the best in the world, but he's seldom been involved in military or defense-oriented work."

"I was to work on Tarkovsky's Project Peter the Great," Laine continued. "It was one of several important scientific projects to be initiated from Tsiolkovsky Center. One day, we received a visit from Sergei Nekrasov—a routine inspection, we all thought at the time."

For the first time, Taggart began to feel a stirring of interest. Nekrasov. He knew that name, for sure. No longer head of KGB, but the new head was rumored to be Nekrasov's man. Sergei Nekrasov was little known in the outside world, but real Kremlin-watchers considered him one of the four or five top up-and-comers among the present generation of Soviet leadership.

"The next day," she continued, "people began to be dropped from the project. Almost all personnel who were not Russian-born were dropped immediately. It was put under highest secrecy status and rumor had it that Tarkovsky was to report only to Nekrasov, that Nekrasov was taking personal charge."

"Do we have anything on this Project Peter the Great?" Sam asked Steinberg.

"Not a thing. It's not a military project and you know how they like to play their space stuff close to the vest."

"What does this project involve?" Sam asked Laine.

"Well, it is a comet research project involving a rendezvous of a spacecraft with a comet, and possibly a soft landing on the cometary nucleus, if sufficient resources were allocated."

Taggart sat and stared at her for several seconds. Then he got up. "Excuse me for a minute, Miss Tammsalu. Steinberg, let's step outside." He waited until the soundproof door was closed behind them before he turned to Steinberg. "Comets! What the hell is this? How in God's name has this got anything to do with state security? I know comets were big stuff in political circles in the old days; foretold the death of kings and the outcome of big battles and all that. Not lately, though. Is this somebody's idea of a joke?"

"I'll give it to you as straight as I can, Taggart. Nobody can make anything out of this, but every test we've got says the woman's telling the truth. If Nekrasov's in charge and a security lid's been clamped on the project there's got to be something of interest there."

"Its a goddamn red herring, is what it is," Taggart fumed. "It's a distraction. Let me guess: she was planning to defect even before her security clearance was withdrawn, right?"

"Right," Steinberg admitted reluctantly.

"So they found out about it and decided to make use of her. You said yourself she had no trouble getting across the border. They loaded her up with this stuff so she could spill it to us and still be telling the truth as far as she knows it. It's not the first time they've done this kind of thing."

"That's been thought of," Steinberg said. "But this is a little clumsy, don't you think? Why not something more believable than comets?"

"It's working, isn't it?" Taggart said. "It's costing us time and attention we should be using on really important matters."

"It's your baby, Taggart. Until you're pulled off of it, you're to investigate. You've got the usual expense account. It's going to call for some travel. You'll probably be talking to a lot of scientists in the next few weeks."

"How the hell can I investigate when I don't even know what kind of questions to ask? She's right: If there is anything to this, she needs a scientist with her, not a grunt."

"It's your baby, Taggart," Steinberg reiterated coldly.

Wearily, Sam turned and reentered the interrogation room.

"You're free to go now, Miss Tammsalu," Steinberg said. "Mr. Taggart here will be your liaison with us. He'll see to all your travel arrangements. I know that these next few days will be difficult for you, Miss Tammsalu. It's never easy to relocate in a new country, but I think that Mr. Taggart will be of great assistance to you. If we can help in any way, please feel free to call on us."

"Yes, thank you," she said, knowing a pro forma offer when she heard one.

"Where are you staying?" Sam asked her.