Deep Cover (46 page)

“Fine,” Douglass said. “That's fine, Fred.” It was hard to tell if he'd been listening at all.

“What's the matter with you?”

Douglass made an abrupt and violent gesture of negation—a semaphore flash, crossing his hands over each other and whipping them apart. “Christ what a trap.”

“I know what you mean. The whole thing is sick.”

“It's not that. The whole world's sick; this is only a symptom of the disease. Who gives a damn anyway, Fred? In the long run it won't matter. The universe will abide with us or without us.”

Winslow couldn't follow the convolutions of Douglass' wild swings of thought. Momentarily he shut his eyes and a pulse drummed blood-red behind his lids. “But what's going to happen, then?”

“I'm not clairvoyant, Fred. All I can tell you is none of it matters. What do you want to do, make a moral crisis out of
it? Find some pious rationalizations to justify it so you can score a few debating points with the Almighty? Hell, I'll give you that for nothing—in war anything's permissible, most of all murder, and we're going to war. How's that grab you? Make everything hunky-dory? Do you want a pep talk to prop up your sagging resolve, some more of the repetitious rhetoric of the party line?”

“That's Nicole's department, not yours.”

“Nicole is dead,” Douglass breathed, and closed his eyes and wrapped his two hands together and kneaded them violently.

“Dead?”

Douglass straightened his jacket with methodical care, cleared his throat, and answered: “She got a pistol from somebody. She stuck it in her mouth and blew the back of her head off. Yes, dead is the right word. She looked as if she'd never been alive.”

Winslow watched Douglass' face twist up.

“God knows why I should care. She had lousy posture and she was always complaining of headaches and cracking fingernails and backaches and corns and the state of the world. She had a face like a rhesus monkey and for Christ's sake I've kicked better ass than her out of bed. She never gave me the time of day. She used to look at me as if she was measuring me for a box.”

Winslow still didn't say anything but it was becoming clear that Douglass was asking for something—beseeching. And finally Douglass stretched both arms forward along the top of the desk and looked him in the eye. “You know I'm lying, of course. The truth is when I took my clothes off and got in bed with her I had my climax before I touched her. She laughed every time.”

Winslow squirmed and tried to look away but the bleak desperate eyes pinned him. “Oh, hell, Fred.” And it came to Winslow quite suddenly that Douglass had come here to unburden himself because there was no one else to whom he could turn. Winslow, who had always hated him and feared him, was the closest thing to a friend Douglass had.

He said clumsily, “I'm sorry, Ramsey, I wish there was something I could do.”

“Maybe there is.”

Winslow immediately regretted having said it.

“Dangerfield's on my ass,” Douglass said. “I've got to take over Nicole's job—rounding up all our people in the area and getting them out to the airport. I won't be able to be here tomorrow so you're going to have to take over for me. You'll have to double-check Hathaway to make sure absolutely everybody gets on those buses. Nobody gets left behind, Fred. Nobody. That was supposed to be my job. Shoot anybody who balks.”

Winslow blinked.

Douglass said, “They've got dossiers on every one of us. Anybody who doesn't get on that plane can figure on being dead in twelve hours.”

“I see. Yes.” His mind whirled.

Douglass got to his feet. “Tell the bus drivers not to run any traffic lights but if a cop stops them, shoot him. You understand, Fred?”

“I understand that. I'm not sure I understand why you care any more whether I do it or not.”

“Because it comes down to survival, doesn't it. All I want to do is keep them convinced that I'm beneath consideration. As long as they don't notice me I'll survive. If you trip up, it'll be my fault and they'll nail me for it. I need your help, Fred.” He looked hard at Winslow. “Nobody cares what we intended, Fred—nobody cares what our motives are. We're judged by the consequences of our acts, not by our intent.”

“Yes,” Winslow said, and nodded, and Douglass strutted out.

Alone in the office he picked up the phone. “Get my wife for me, will you Lieutenant?”

He sat absolutely motionless, hardly breathing until the telephone buzzed.

“Celia?”

“Hello, darling.”

“About tomorrow night. We were thinking about not going to that damned party but I guess we ought to go.”

The silence was long and ragged but in the end she said, “All right, Fred,” and all the life had drained out of her voice.

“I probably won't be home tonight.”

“I know. I'll see you tomorrow evening then. At the party.”

“At the party.” He closed his eyes and his grip tightened on the receiver until the knuckles ached.

“Take care, darling.”

“Yes. You too.”

He depressed the cradle with his finger and released it again. “Lieutenant? Anything happening?”

“No, sir. Nice and quiet.”

“I'm going topside for a breath of air. I'll be in hailing distance of the gate guard if you need me.”

Along the ramp the tunnel resonated with disembodied announcements on the PA loudspeakers. When he emerged through the great steel doors the dazzling brilliance made his eyes swim. The rain had passed on toward the east and a thin steamy mist hovered along the ground, burning off; his grainy eyes squinted out across the implacable indifferent desert. He began cursing in a lackluster monotone.

Chapter Twenty

Lamplight reflected from the night-black windows. A hard spiral of heat twisted Forrester's abdominal muscles. He glanced up and Spode stared back wordlessly, his face a studied mask. Forrester took Ronnie's hand.

She sat placid and wooden; her voice was flat. “I guess I went away for a little while.”

“It's all right,” he said in a low voice from which he withheld feeling by an effort of will that made him break out in a fine perspiration.

He had sat with her for hours, speaking softly and trying to reassure her.

When she had first spoken, it had been erratically. She had mumbled about the storm's end, talked childishly about her paintings.

But now she was coming back. She clung to Forrester fearfully. “Forgive me, Alan.”

“Forgive you?”

“For loving you. For bringing you such unhappiness.”

Her voice was stronger and he sat up. “Ronnie—”

“Les was my brother, you know.”

“Yes. Top guessed that.” Still he didn't prompt her with questions because he had no way of being sure what might send her off. He touched his lips gently to her forehead. She said, “You have such huge hands.”

He managed to smile but her face did not change. “I have nothing more to lose, except you,” she said, “and I've lost you already.”

“Nonsense, Ronnie. I'm right here.”

“You're here because you want to know what I know.”

“That doesn't change the way I feel.”

Her eyes filled with tears. “I wish it had. It would be easier if I knew I'd already hurt you as much as I was going to.”

He attempted a smile. What was the answer to that?

“I'm sorry I went to pieces. We didn't have time for me to do that.”

“Are you all right now?”

She had the strength to make a wry face. “As much as I'm going to be.”

“Just take it easy for a while.” Meaningless homilies. He had never been good at comforting.

She said, “In a way it has to be a relief, doesn't it—knowing it's out in the open. It doesn't matter what they do to me anyway, it can't be worse than what I've lived through. I suppose you must have guessed: they made me watch them beat my husband to death.”

Spode's “Jesus” exploded across the room and Forrester tried not to show his shock.

Ronnie said, “I guess I'll handle it now. It was seeing Les …”

Spode said, “God knows I didn't want it that way, Ronnie. But Les didn't give me a choice.”

She took several deep breaths. Finally she lifted her head.

“I'll tell you everything I can. I've got nothing left to lose—I already said that, didn't I?”

“You're alive, Ronnie.”

Spode said, “Help us get to this man Belsky in time to stop them from whatever they're doing.”

She was puzzled. “Belsky? You mean the man from Russia who came to activate us? He's calling himself Dangerfield. How much do you already know?”

“Mostly guesswork,” Forrester said. “You'd better tell us, if you feel up to it.”

“I wouldn't blame you for not believing a word of it, Alan. It's too fantastic for belief, isn't it?” Her face was wholly without expression. She had talked for half an hour and she lay back, drained.

“I believe it all. I have no reason not to.”

“I used to think sometimes that if I just went into a police station or an FBI office and told them the whole story they'd laugh me right into the nearest insane asylum.”

“Did you often think of doing that?”

“Betraying them? Every day. From the first day I arrived here I wanted to explode the whole thing.”

“Because you didn't believe in it?”

“I don't know what I believed in. I'd been conditioned as if I were a laboratory animal—but I didn't recognize that at first. I'd grown up believing in Communism. Born and raised in the Soviet Union. I thought of myself as a loyal citizen—why shouldn't I? I let Les talk me into joining them and he convinced me that what we were setting out to do was right and necessary and just. He really believed that—and so did I.”

“But you said you wanted to get out of it from the first day you came here.”

“That wasn't political conviction, Alan. It was realizing all at once that I just couldn't live my whole life under that stress, every moment waiting for somebody to discover the truth about me. Afterward I began to open my eyes and see how insane the whole thing was.”

“But you still didn't try to get out.”

“I asked them to send me back to Russia. They refused, of course—they said they had an investment in me.”

“They?”

“Ramsey Douglass and my brother Les.” Her face was masked by the weight of her hair; her voice was a monotone. “The more Les saw of American politics the more he was convinced it was an evil regime of rich men and thugs exploiting the people. He had a curious way of rationalizing the way he went on practising the kind of chicanery he claimed to loathe so much—his reasons never made sense to me but he said I just didn't have the right kind of mind to follow it.”

“He was part of it, and Ramsey Douglass, and Ross Trumble, is that right? Why did they all behave like dedicated right-wing reactionaries? Was it intended as camouflage, to throw off suspicion?”

“Partly. We came here with instructions to act ultra-American. But it was more than that. We had to infiltrate the defense establishment and the political power structure, and down here they're both pretty much in the hands of the conservatives. You're not a conservative, of course, but the Republican Party has pretty firm control over Arizona's politics, and you were a Republican, so Les and I attached ourselves to you.” In a lower voice she added, “Like leeches.”

He clasped his hands together and scowled at his knuckles. “They refused to let you go back to Russia but you still didn't try to break loose from them. Why? Because you were afraid they'd kill you?”

“I think I could have accepted that. No, they never make do with so simple a threat as that. You see, as long as Les was loyal to them I couldn't do a thing. If I'd stepped out of line they would have killed him the way they killed my husband. They kept reminding me of that—Nicole did. They had Les and they had my family back in Russia. That's the kind of weapon they've used against all of us.”

“What vicious bastards they are.”

“They're frightened, Alan. Frightened people do desperate things.”

Spode, at the front window, turned his head. “That's no excuse.”

“I don't suppose anything excuses us,” she replied. Her eyes were fixed sightlessly on Forrester's hands. Spode put his back to the window and stared at Ronnie. Clearly Top could not understand why she had gone along all these years without totting up the odds and deciding, quickly and without regrets, either to remain loyal to the Russians or to betray her comrades and take her chances: one way or the other, it would have been done, over with, a clean decision. To Spolde loyalty was not divisible by two; there was no room in his mind for the idea that anyone could love two people on opposite sides of an unbridgeable gap.