You’ll have your own room. Try it just for a while; then, if you want to get a place of your own, well, there’s the insurance money from the boat. I’ve opened an account for you at my bank.”
Oskarsson said nothing. He leaned his head against the headrest and closed his eyes. Something had happened to him these last weeks. He had no will to resist Gunnar. He let himself be swept along, and gave himself to whatever was coming.
The house was out past Gustavsberg, and Gunnar had been right; it was right on the water, and the place was beautiful. There were painters working in the living room, and lisa was supervising a man fitting cupboards in the kitchen. She looked nervous when she saw him. lisa had been a model in her youth, and even now, pushing forty, she held onto her fragile good looks. There were wrinkles here and there, Oskarsson could see, and she wore too much makeup, and her jeans were too tight, but she was still pretty. He allowed himself to be pecked on the cheek.
“Hello, Papa,” she said.
He didn’t like that, much, being called Papa by this woman he hardly knew. They had seen little of each other over the years.
“Your room’s ready; come, I’ll show you.” She led the way upstairs and along a corridor, into a large corner room. It was comfortably furnished, more so than the rest of the house, he noticed. The furniture from their flat didn’t fill the place. His clothes were hung in the closet and folded neatly into a chest of drawers. On a dressing table, there was a small, gold cup. lisa picked it up and handed it to him.
“Ebbe won it rowing last year. It was his favorite thing.”
Oskarsson felt the smooth metal and read the inscription.
“We’ll leave you to let you get settled for a bit. Papa,” Gunnar said.
“Maybe you’d like a nap.”
“We’ll have some tea as soon as they’re done in the kitchen,” lisa said.
“Come down whenever you like.”
Oskarsson nodded. There was a rocking chair facing the window. He walked over to it and sat down facing the water, still holding Ebbe’s little cup. He might have arrived on a different planet. He had spent his life on a stretch of the south coast of Sweden among familiar people, places, and boats. Here, in this strange house, in this place, he was an alien. Even his son and daughter-in-law were strangers to him. He gazed out the window over the water, past the rocky islands, out to the Baltic. Here, only the water was familiar. The water and the rage. He held the little gold cup and rocked gently. The rage would never leave him, until he found some way to purge it.
Tears spilled from his eyes and ran down his weathered face, now pale. It was the first time he had wept. He would never do it again. RULE sat in her office and gazed disconsolately at the withering plants on the windowsill. Outside, in the Virginia countryside, a profusion of greenery mocked her efforts. She couldn’t remember the names of these plants, but she had been assured by Molly, a department secretary whose cubicle resembled the National Botanical Gardens, that.
“Even you couldn’t kill these.”
Wrong. She was convinced that her very pores exuded some invisible, toxic mist that choked any green thing unfortunate enough to fall within range. The original Black Thumb, she was. This ability to wither, it seemed to her. had begun to extend itself into her work. for the Majorov research had come to what. seemingly, was a dead end.
She had raped the Agency’s computer banks, running tapes extending back to the formation of the CIA in the early fifties. Before that. there were only the OSS files from World War II. In the thirties, when Stalin was decimating the ranks of the Red Army and the Communist Party, only the State Department and the army had conducted anything like intelligence analysis; each had limited its efforts to its immediate concerns, and God knew where the records were.
She had been unable to locate a single fact about Majorov other than what she had presented to EX COM TWO. and if she had meant that as an appetizer, nobody was hungry.
She had sent memos to her counterparts at the National Security Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency asking for any data. and there had been only silence.
S8
She shuffled listlessly through the cables and reports on her desk. She had already handed out the morning’s assignments to her researchers, and now she was faced with reading her own stack of material, sifting through it for a relevant fact on any one of hundreds of subjects, files, and cases. This, if the thriller writers only knew, was ninety percent of what intelligence was all about; reading, remembering, associating, analyzing, and occasionally, discovering.
It was mornings like this that made her sometimes yearn for foreign duty, where there was, at least, the stimulus of outside contact. There was a rap on her open door.
She looked up to see a man she barely knew, Martin, his name was, one of those people in the bowels of the Agency who did God-knew-what. “Morning, Mrs. Rule,” the man said.
“I’ve got something you asked for here.” He held up a large brown envelope.
“Come in and have a seat,” Rule said, grateful for any interruption.
“What have you got?”
Martin slid a photographic print from the envelope.
“Satellite shot, three days ago, the Latvian coast.”
What had she asked for in Latvia, for God’s sake?
“Let’s have a look,” she said, gathering up her cables and reports and shoving them into a drawer, leaving her desk clear.
Martin laid the photograph before her.
“This is the south side of the city of Liepaja.”
“Mmmm,” Rule said.
Martin pointed.
“This is sort of a tidal lake, except there’s not much tide in the Baltic. There’s an entrance to the sea just here.”
Rule pointed to a widespread group of buildings at the lake’s edge.
“This looks something like a college campus,” she said, running her eyes over the photograph.
“Is that a dock with some small boats?” She indicated the water’s edge.
“Right, it’s a little marina, sort of. Nothing but pleasure boats. Best guess on the adjoining area is it’s some sort of all-service sports complex.” Martin indicated various spots on the photograph.
“Tennis courts, track, soccer field, pretty extensive. You’ve got a couple of dozen runners scattered around, too. and the nonathletic pedestrians are wearing both army and navy uniforms. We can actually read rank on some of them.”
“Looks like a unit drilling.” Rule said, pointing to a group of men formed in ranks.
“Nope, running,” Martin replied.
“They’re all wearing sweat clothes.”
Rule nodded.
“What’s here that I asked for?”
Martin pointed to a car park next to one of the buildings.
“Exotic car. A Mercedes. either a 380 or 500 SE sedan, silver metallic paint. The Soviets don’t use metallic paint on any of their cars. and apart from the German Embassy in Moscow and their various consulates, I’ll bet there aren’t three of the big Mercedes in the USSR. Whoever’s driving it is important enough to turn down a Chaika or a Zil limo in favor of a foreign wagon. Never mind who has the juice to get one, who’d have the chutzpah to drive it around?”
Rule stared at the car.
“Pity you can’t see the license plates from overhead; that would tell us something. Listen, let’s ask NSA for some more angle on this place. I’d like to see some building entrances—we might even pick up a face—and I’d sure like to see the designation on this car’s plates. The Soviets tag everything with some sort of code-foreign diplomat, trade official, journalist. Central Committee—and the city of registration is on every plate, too.”
Martin shrugged.
“I’ve no idea when the next satellite pass will be over the area, and I don’t have the authority to ask for the shots. The DDI. Nixon, will have to do that.”
“Right. I’ll handle the request, then. Thanks a lot.
Martin, this is the first break I’ve had on this one. It may not go anywhere, but who knows? Can you leave this with me?”
“Sure, but I’ll need a tight receipt to replace it in the file.”
Rule wrote out a receipt, mentioning the file number and date of the photograph, and Martin went on his way.
She dictated a memo to NSA for Alan Nixon’s signature and made a routine request to operations for any HUMINT. human intelligence, on the Liepaja site. and gave the tape to her secretary.
“Do this now, will you, Jeff?” Some joker in personnel had given her a male secretary. He liked it even less than she did.
“Don’t you want the weekly summaries first?” he whined, waving at what was already in his typewriter.
“Now, Jeff, please, and if you screw around, I might miss a satellite pass, so move it, will you?”
He sighed and whipped the paper from the machine.
Rule went back to her desk and pored over the photograph.
She couldn’t shake the feeling that it was a campus, and she had learned to listen to her hunches. There were too many buildings to just house athletes, given the extent of the visible training facilities. They were teaching something here. She stared hard at the group of running men.
Athletes didn’t train in ranks, not even in the Soviet Union; training was too individually planned for that. This was a military unit of some sort; these men were training together for something, and it wasn’t the next Olympics.
She found a loup in her desk, laid it flat on the photograph, and worked her way around it. There was not a sign of anything military; not a firing range, even. That was interesting; an athletics training camp would certainly have a firing range; shooting was an Olympic event.
She ran the loup around the perimeter of the facility.
There was a double fence, and she’d bet the area in between was mined. Who needed a double fence around a sports center? She looked at the boats and wished Will were here to tell her about them. They looked entirely pleasure-oriented to her. There were some dinghies drawn up on a beach, and from a scale imprinted on the photograph, she reckoned the largest boat in the marina to be about thirty-five feet long. She was puzzled that a long stretch of the water’s edge above the marina was edged with what looked like a concrete curb. It reminded her of a lake’s edge in a park, but there was no grass, just more of the same shale that made up the beach. She tried and failed to think of any good reason why anyone would want the water’s edge curbed.
Jeff came in with the memo.
“You want me to take this to Mr. Nixon?”
“No, I’ll do it,” she said, taking the paper from him.
“You get back to the summaries.” She hoofed down the hallway to Nixon’s bigger, plusher office. The door was closed, and his secretary was filing her nails.
“Anybody in there with him?” Rule asked.
“No, but he said he didn’t want to be disturbed,” the young woman said. She leaned forward conspiratorially.
“Just between me and you, I think he’s reading the new Len Deighton. Tell you what. I’ll go to the John, and you just barge in.”
Rule laughed, waited for the girl to disappear, rapped once on the door and opened it before Nixon could reply.
His feet were on the desk, and he nearly spilled himself from the chair, taking care to drop the book in the process.
“Jesus, Kate, you scared me half to death.”
“Sorry, Alan, I did knock.”
He shuffled some papers on his desk.
“What is it?” he asked testily.
“Just need your signature on a memo to NSA for some satellite shots.”
“Shots of what?”
“I asked everybody for a sweep on exotic cars in the Soviet Union; one turned up in a sat shot of the Latvian coast. Interesting place. Seems to be some sort of sports training facility, but it smells funny to me. There’s a big Mercedes in the parking lot, too, and it’s not the sort of place the German ambassador would be visiting. I’d like some angle to see if we can read the plate.” She put the memo in front of him.
Nixon regarded it with distaste.
“Kate, do you know what a satellite run costs?”
She did, and she knew he didn’t.
“Well. they’re not going to bill us for it, Alan, it’ll come out of their budget. Come on,” she cajoled, “it’ll give the layabouts over there something to do.”
“This is that—what’s his name? Finsov?”
“Firsov. aka Majorov. I sent you the sheet on him. I’ve also made a request to ops for HUMINT. but I’m not optimistic. The last couple of years, I seem to have had more and more trouble getting information collected at ground level. Sometimes I think Senator Carr and his committee are right—the agency’s putting too many bucks into hardware and not enough into training your good. old-fashioned spies.”
“This Majorov is one of your intuition numbers, isn’t it.
Kate? Every now and then you get a wild hair up… ah. in your ear. and you go shooting off on a tangent.”
“This is no tangent, Alan.” She felt herself blushing.
“Well. not exactly. This guy was deputy director in charge of the First Chief Directorate. He’s within my province.”
”