Deep Cover (30 page)

George's voice said, “Don't be so quick to assume he'll pull in his horns and run for it. He hasn't finished whatever he came here for. Moscow had something important in mind or they wouldn't have picked a heavyweight in his class. He knows we've spotted him but he's got a lot of room to hide in. He knows we haven't got the slightest idea where to start looking for him. We have to go on the assumption that he hasn't completed his assignment yet and that he'll try to go through with it; he's taken risks before, he's not easy to scare off. So there's still a chance we can flush him.”

Spode knew what was coming. “I don't work for you guys any more, George.”

“Cut that out. This is big and you know it.”

“Nobody's paying me to stick my neck out. I'm on the Senator's payroll, not yours. He's got things he wants me to do—I can't just cop out on him.”

“Lose a little sleep—work two shifts.”

“I've got a girl waiting on my front porch right now wondering where the hell I am. If I don't get home soon it's going to be a cold night.”

There was a stretch without talk and he heard Art Miller breathing. George said, “You mind hanging up, Art?”

“Not at all. Talk to you later.” There was a click and shortly afterward Spode heard the darkroom door latch shut.

Spode talked quickly, trying to forestall the grey-faced Virginian at the other end of the line. “I'm going home, George. It's not my war any more.”

“It never was, was it.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“Jaime, you never got a commission in the Army and you never worked your way above the subaltern level in the Agency.”

“So I ain't got a whole lot of ambition. So what?”

“You don't need ambition, Jaime. You just need to get yourself together. You want to figure out where your loyalties are. You've never wanted responsibilities and you've never wanted to take initiative. You always had to have somebody hand out the assignments—tell you what to do.”

“Okay, there's chiefs and Innuns. Everybody can't be a chief.”

“You could. Any time you decided to get off the fence.”

“George, I haven't got time for a fifty-dollar-an-hour consultation.”

“This is for free. Belsky's dropped a responsibility in your lap and you've got to decide whether or not you're going to accept it. And you've got to think about something bigger than yourself when you weigh it out.”

“Oh Jesus. Now you're waving the fucking flag at me.”

“You're the only one who can get to him.”

“I didn't ask for it.”

“Jaime, you didn't ask to be born.”

“The answer's still no. It ain't my job.”

“Then think about this. Belsky knows your face. He's got some connection with Ross Trumble and you're also involved in something that Trumble's involved in—the Phaeton project. It's not unlikely you'll cross Belsky's path again. But in the meantime he's not going to ignore the meeting you had. He won't be able to let it alone, he'll pick at it until he finds out what you were doing at the house and who you are and who you work for. He'll find out you're on Senator Forrester's
staff and he'll decide there's a chance you didn't report the meeting to anybody else. You see what that could lead to? He'll want to cover his tracks and he may decide he can do it by silencing you.”

“I've been shot at before.”

“What about Senator Forrester? You want him shot at too?”

“You bastard,” Spode said wearily.

“Belsky will look for you, Jaime. It's not my fault, it's just a fact. He's going to look for you anyway so you may as well let him find you, because that's the best way for us to find him.”

Spode sagged into the chair with the phone against his ear. “All right, George. Let's have all of it.”

“We'll put people on Trumble to try to find out what connection he's got with Belsky. I'll keep you up to date. We'll put some men on Forrester to cover him. Is there any intermediary you usually report to on the staff or do you work direct with Forrester?”

“I work with him. Sometimes Lester Suffield's in on it—the Senator's aide.”

“All right. We'll do the legwork. Maybe Belsky's registered somewhere under the Meldon Kemp name—we'll cover that. I'll have Art put one or two people on you so you won't have to feel too exposed.”

“Tell them not to get in my way. I hate tripping over eager beavers.”

“I wouldn't use second-string people on this, Jaime. You know better than that.”

“Just keep them out of my hair,” Spode said with a good deal of force. “Tell them to stay out of my goddamn bathroom. I don't like being spied on when I crap.”

“Look, we've been over all that before and I've apologized to you before. It was a mixup with the FBI, some crank anonymous accusation, and it shouldn't have happened.”

“You're damn right it shouldn't.” Somebody had written a letter saying he was a fag and all the departments from FBI
to the Agency were paranoid on that subject. Spode tightened his dark face into a savage grin. “Suppose I
was
a faggot, George?”

“Shut up and get to work.”

“Yeah.” He hung up and glanced at Belsky's automatic pistol on the table and called back through the house. When Art Miller appeared Spode said, “I'll see you. You may as well hang on to that iron. Might find out who it was registered to.”

“You back on the team, Jaime?”

“Let's just say I'm free-lancing on a one-shot contract. The day I sign onto you guys' payroll again is the day you better have me inspected for rabies.” He turned to the door. “You know my phone number,” he said morosely by way of parting, and went.

Chapter Ten

Friday in Moscow the snow was falling as if dumped out of shovels and scattered by big-bladed fans. The Chaika moved along the Official Cars Only lanes with its wipers thumping, snow building into little cakes in the lower corners of the windshield. Inside the car Rykov felt overheated, partly because of his overcoat and partly because of the big meal he had put under his belt at the Aragvi.

He had stuffed himself to the belching point with
canakhi
and
shashlik
and Georgian tea and watched Yashin pick at his
chakhokhbili;
the sword dancer had whirled by, fast pirouettes with the sword pointed at his own body, and the music had been high and frantic, and through it all Yashin had maintained his ascetic detachment and infuriated Rykov. Men without passions were abominations.

At the height of the featured dance Yashin had removed his rimless glasses to polish them. “My dear Viktor, surely you know the old Japanese proverb, ‘You can see another's arse but not your own.'” The wintry glance, never quite a smile. “What you propose is a Carthaginian peace. Annihilation of peoples. Really I think you need a rest.”

“Comrade First Secretary, the news from China—”

“I have seen all your evidences and I am not impressed. Xenophobia is the root of the Chinese character, but there's no reason for us to have it—it is not a communicable disease. Viktor, you suffer from messianic fantasies, you wish to think of yourself as the supreme player in an immense global chess game, you are obsessed by the notion that if power is disused it may atrophy and therefore it must be exercised—and since we are not at war with anyone at the moment we must
go
to war with someone.”

But the dark winter of Asia was ending; the Chinese war machine stirred with rumbling vibration; there were no responsible leaders to halt it: China was a country which boasted of its ancient civilization yet remained politically adolescent, full of immature ambitions to achieve rule over all of Asia. Yashin had rested his case on the supremacy of the Soviet retaliatory plan and that was that. In the Kremlin they made a Plan and the Plan was all, the Plan was always right and invincible, only people could be mistaken, and if people made mistakes they were punished. Yashin's plan was the wrong plan and when it proved wrong Yashin would be punished—but that was no satisfaction: that would be too late.

Well, then, I too have a plan.

The Chaika crawled past the Moskva Hotel. Rykov sat drawn into himself with his fist locked over the clubbed handle of his walking stick. His scowl was filled with
weltschmerz.
They were never going to get a full and clear-cut revelation of precise plans from the Chinese, a people whose politics had been steeped in secrecy and intrigue and prestidigitatious misdirection for thousands of years.

Rykov was chief of KGB for the excellent reason that he had not only a brilliant mind but also the peculiar intuitive genius
it took to bridge the rational gap between two separate clues that could appear to have no logical connection. And he was getting his clues every day from his mother-daughter team in Peking. In Beria's day one word from the KGB would have been enough to galvanize the Soviet Far Eastern forces into intensive war preparations. But today there was no one with initiative enough to commit the nation to an attitude of preemptive self-defense. The ruling troika contained three men none of whom dared move before the others, and as a result there was no capability for instant reaction or decisive policy-making. They blundered into situations and they lacked a clear and single will.

He had thrashed it out with them singly and by twos and in group, and it was always the same. They were afraid of one another. They were afraid of making a mistake. They were above all afraid of the United States: “If we attack China the United States will come into it against us, on China's side. We can't afford that.” Over and over again. In the first place it was a dubious supposition: Washington, forewarned but not given enough time to react, might stay out of it altogether. But assuming it was true (and it probably was): there was still a way to forestall it.

Last night he had asked Kazakov, “Suppose I could guarantee that in the event of a war between China and the USSR the United States will come in as our ally. Regardless of who started the war. In that event what would you say?”

But Kazakov like the others had berated him for his primitive militarism: “You are living in the past, Viktor. Can you not comprehend the devastation of a nuclear exchange? Wars must be confined to limited conventional scope and total war must be avoided at whatever cost.”

“Suppose the United States were to initiate a preemptive nuclear strike against China. What then?”

“You talk impossibilities, Viktor.”

At ten minutes to three the Chaika reached the big gray building and Rykov walked across the curb and entered his kingdom with a dusting of snow on his hat and shoulders. It
matted itself and melted slowly as he limped along the corridor taking the uneasy salutes of subordinates. A major wearing stars on his red epaulets stopped him in the hall to talk about the reemergence of the
samizdat
magazine
Novy Mir
and Rykov brushed him aside. The
samizdat
publications were vile and seditious and it was KGB's job to suppress them but in recent years it had become like trying to stamp out armies of ants with a boot heel.
Samizdat
, the underground press, mimeographed and circulated surreptitiously from hand to hand, denigrated the nation and the Party. Some of them had Western assistance. They promulgated the kind of dissidence that had weakened the Russian will and threatened to crumble Russia's inner strengths. Some of the writers whose work appeared anonymously in
samizdat
were clever young intellectuals whom the state had feted as cultural heroes—ingrates, traitors, dupes. Rykov was catching up with them one by one but the flood seemed endless. The big Minsk-32 computers analyzed
samizdat
texts for frequency-of-words and rhythm-of-style to pinpoint the identity of the anonymous authors and in time Rykov always ran them down, but the monster had infinite heads; it was impossible to decapitate it.

It was a grave issue but today he had no time for it—he left the major standing flatfooted in the corridor and limped on toward the lifts. In the bullpens paper tapes writhed on the floors, spilled by automatic typing recorders and decoders. The lift took him up to his own floor; it was quiet here. He went into the great office, hung up his things, sat down at his desk and punched Andrei's intercom line. “Has the Marshal arrived yet?”

“No. He's due in five minutes.”

“Bring him straight in.” Rykov switched the machine off and closed his eyes, the better to concentrate his thoughts.

Marshal Grigorenko's flat beefy face was closed up tight: he distrusted Rykov always.

Andrei ushered Grigorenko into the office and Rykov, as he got up to greet the Marshal, motioned to Andrei to stay.

He got right down to it. “Even at the top of one's profession
there are always men who can destroy you and subordinates who can plot intrigues against you. We're none of us beyond accountability.”