Prisoners of Tomorrow (30 page)

“Why don’t you find out?” she whispered.

His hand stole down from her cheek, lingered at her breast to excite her nipple, then stroked downward, over her stomach, as the muscles tensed in eager anticipation.

Beep! Beep! Beep! Beep! . . .

“Bloody Christ, not now!
. . . Blast! Blast! Damn and blast the buggering sods! They can’t—”

“What is it?” Daphne shrieked, sitting up.

“I have to call in.”

“You said you were off all night.”

“I am. I mean . . . Oh, it’s too complicated to explain now.”

“Can’t you turn the bloody thing off?”

“It’s somewhere under all this stuff . . .”

“Be careful with that dress, darling.”

“There. Oh, God! . . .”

Daphne pulled her robe back around her and reached for a cigarette. She sighed resignedly. “The phone’s there. Better luck next time?”

“Oh, there will be a next time, then?”

“But of course. In fact, I think you did it on purpose, just to heighten the suspense.”

“You really are insane. But I’ll still take the rain check.”

“Rain check?”

“Oh, it’s what the Americans say.”

“What does it mean?”

Jeremy stopped as he was about to punch in the number. “Do you know,” he said, suddenly bemused, “I have absolutely no idea.”

Jeremy collected Anita in a cab from a rendezvous at Hyde Park Corner and took her to an address south of the river, in Lambeth. When they arrived, Sylvia was already there with another woman from SIS. Two agents would be there twenty-four hours a day until Anita was moved, and the police would be keeping a watch on the outside discreetly.

“What do you think will happen next?” Anita asked them.

“That’s not up to us,” Sylvia answered.

“Since the Americans have been showing so much interest in you, it wouldn’t surprise me if you ended up being whisked off over there,” Jeremy said.

“I do hope I haven’t been a nuisance,” Anita told them.

Sylvia laughed. “Of course not. It’s our job. What a silly thing to say!”

“Never let it be said that we allowed anything to come before King and Country,” Jeremy recited staunchly. Sylvia gave him a curious look. He sniffed disdainfully. “I rather think I’ll go and put on some tea.” With that he marched out of the room and across the hallway outside—stopping to deliver a hefty kick at the umbrella stand on the way.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Getting anything organized in Zamork on the systematic basis that McCain had in mind would require ways of evading the informers and electronic surveillance devices—and if McCain’s theory of the whole operation having been set up as an “information mine” was correct, the Russians were unlikely to have settled for half-measures.

Rashazzi and Haber had developed several techniques for locating and disabling concealed microphones, and were experimenting with ways of neutralizing the bracelet monitors. To mask these activities and at the same time provide some amusement for himself, Rashazzi had been training his mice to eat the polyvinyl insulating coatings of Russian electrical wiring, and then releasing the mice into the spaces behind the floors and walls. When Russian technicians arrived to trace the faults that the two scientists’ tamperings sometimes caused in the security system, they invariably found short-circuited wiring that looked for the world as if it had been nibbled by busy rodent teeth, usually with mouse droppings nearby. The ruse didn’t last long, however, and instructions came down through Luchenko for Rashazzi to get rid of the mice. Then they mysteriously escaped from their cages and presumably disappeared into the hole that just as mysteriously appeared in the wall underneath the tank in one of the B-3 toilet cubicles. Their mobility must have been extraordinary, for within days repair crews were rushing frantically all over Zamork in response to a plague of electrical failures and burned-out lighting circuits. Luchenko was in trouble with the block supervisor, and Rashazzi lost a stack of accumulated privileges, but the reactions went no further than that.

The exercise provided a smoke screen for finding out more about the security system, but it really didn’t solve the overall problem. The Russians had long been adepts at deception, and it was never possible to be sure that the surveillance measures uncovered at one level were not decoys intended to divert the prisoners’ attention while a more cunningly hidden level continued operating unimpaired. Long after Rashazzi and Haber had become experts at ferreting out wired microphones, for example, they discovered another kind embedded in the walls, which operated without any telltale leads at all: they were connected by strips of conducting paint, which were then concealed by a layer of ordinary paint. Rashazzi made a probe tipped by a pair of fine needles that could detect the strips, but it was tedious work.

It was possible to play various games to try and deduce if a particular location was being monitored, such as deliberately staging a provocative-sounding dialogue there and watching for any Russian response. The trouble was that Russians could play games like that too, by weaving their net with a wide mesh and purposely allowing the small fry through in order to catch the bigger fish later. How many were willing to be fall guys to find out?

McCain concluded there could be no safe way of communicating inside Zamork’s regular environment. The outside work details offered better prospects, but he had no control over who was assigned to them—and he himself was confined to working inside Zamork, anyway. But then, he asked himself, was it so essential to get out of Zamork itself, after all? Surveillance devices would be in the places where people went: in the billets, corridors, mess areas, and so on. But in addition to places like those, the structure included spaces behind the walls, machinery compartments between decks, and shafts carrying cables and ducting off in all directions. If there were some way of getting into places like that . . .

McCain put the question to Rashazzi one morning as they were walking along Gorky Street, staying close to a tractor hauling a trailer loaded with trays of rattling pipe fittings.

“Albrecht and I have been looking into that for some time,” Rashazzi said. “The problem is that the wall- and floor-panels everywhere carry a system of conductive strips on the back that will cause open circuits and set off alarms if they’re moved.”

“Couldn’t you jumper the connections or something before the panels were lifted, so the circuit wasn’t broken?” McCain asked.

“You could, if you knew the circuit layout. But you can’t trace the layout until you lift the panels. So it’s a vicious circle. A lot of people around Zamork have gotten themselves stretches in solitary through fooling with it. It’s a tricky business.”

McCain fell silent and stared moodily at the floor as they walked.

Without some way of being able to talk and exchange information freely, he wasn’t going to get anywhere.

The outer torus of
Valentina Tereshkova
was a little over three miles around, which meant that the total length of the colony’s road system was not large. Therefore the Russians hadn’t bothered shipping up heavy road-maintenance machinery to stand idle most of the time; they made use of the labor force already available there instead. When centralized planning failed to produce enough bolts to match the number of holes that Scanlon was drilling, bedframe production ceased while the planners brooded over their schedules, and McCain was sent on an outside assignment with the road-resurfacing gang that Koh was with, working near the edge of one of the agricultural zones. He hoped this would give him the chance he’d been waiting for to talk with Koh in less restrictive surroundings.

The road that the gang was working on ran between rows of corn, at the base of a series of terraced plantations of vines, fruit trees, soybeans, and tomatoes. Above, through the transparent roof section by the nearby agricultural station, one of the minor spokes soared upward to merge into the clutter of the hub structure a half mile overhead. A mild breeze was blowing from the west, and the environment provided a welcome change from Zamork for the guards as well as for the prisoners, which meant that nobody was in any hurry to get the job done, so supervision was minimal. Two of the guards were playing cards across the hood of one of the trucks and another was sitting reading in the driver’s seat, while the rest sauntered about casually, sometimes exchanging words with the prisoners. McCain was working with Koh a short distance away from the others, using rakes to spread a sticky gray concoction of lunar-rock furnace slag and binding compound processed from industrial leftovers.

“So, what did you do?” McCain asked.

“How do you mean?” Koh replied. McCain had the feeling that Koh knew quite well what he meant.

“You said once that you’d tell me sometime about what you did to wind up in here.”

Koh worked on in silence for a while. McCain thought he was ignoring the question, when suddenly Koh chuckled. “Do you remember the incident at the Asian Industrial Fair in Chungking a couple of years ago?”

“Seems to ring a kind of a bell. . . . There was a fire, wasn’t there? Something to do with the KGB.”

“A Chinese traditionalist movement called White Moon was making a nuisance of itself, campaigning against industrialization and modernization,” Koh said. “They staged a demonstration at the Chinese pavilion . . . or at least, that was the way it was supposed to look.”

McCain nodded. “Now I remember. Except they weren’t White Moon people at all. They were imposters. It was a stunt set up by the Chinese intelligence service to discredit them and justify imposing tighter restrictions. But later, the guy who authorized it admitted he was working for the KGB. So all the time, it was a deception orchestrated by Mosc . . .” McCain’s voice trailed away. He stopped what he was doing and looked up suddenly. “Wait a minute. Nakajima-Lin Kohmei-Tso-Liang—it was
you!
You were the KGB’s inside man, the head of Chinese intelligence.”

“Deputy head,” Koh said.

“Whatever. So what went wrong? How’d you wind up in here?”

Koh chuckled again. “Yes, it was my idea—a bit unfair, I suppose, but you’ve no idea how difficult White Moon was becoming. It was just intended to be a demonstration. The people we hired weren’t supposed to burn the whole pavilion down. That was entirely due to an overzealous subordinate. But it was my responsibility, and we do have a strong sense of honor . . .” Koh shook his head from side to side, and his breath came in quick, shaking gasps, as if what was amusing him was too much to bear. “But, you see, the KGB had nothing to do with it, hee-hee-hee. . . . I only made that confession after everything was blown anyway.”

“You mean you never worked for the KGB?”

“No. It was probably the first piece of international mischief in which they were genuinely innocent, ha-ha-ha . . . and nobody believed them!”

McCain smiled and turned back to his raking. “And so?”

“So, the KGB kidnapped me to make sure I wouldn’t do anything like that again, and here I am.”

The dump truck arrived to deposit another load of material and then went to collect a fresh charge from the mixer at the far end of the workings. One of the guards came close to inspect what they were doing, then moved away. They worked on in silence for a while. Finally McCain said, “Scanlon told me I should talk to you.”

“Oh yes?”

“Have you ever heard of an escape committee, back at Zamork?”

“One hears all kind of things in Zamork.”

“Do you think it’s possible at all—escaping from here?”

“They say all things are possible.”

It seemed McCain was going to have to work for it. He tried a more oblique approach. “If there were an escape committee, and if it were up to you, who would you trust to recruit into it?” he asked.

“I get the impression that you are already doing an excellent job of working that out for yourself,” Koh said.

“Who are the dangerous ones? Who would you leave out?” Koh didn’t answer at once, and McCain prompted, “I’d assume not Luchenko and that bunch at the far end, for a start—Nolan and the rest.”

Koh frowned. “I’m not so convinced Nolan is one of them,” he said at last. “I don’t doubt he’s a true believer, but that doesn’t mean they’d trust him enough to be a plant. Their leaders tend to be contemptuous of true Marxists, you know. Stalin wasn’t at all happy when Beria proposed recruiting upward-bound idealists from English universities back in the nineteen-thirties. He didn’t think people who believed such twaddle could make reliable spies.”

At least Koh was talking more out here than he usually did. McCain sought to keep it going. “What motivates people like Nolan?” he asked.

“Fear of freedom.”

“That sounds like a strange thing to say.”

“Not if you think about it. In the long term, humanity is evolving toward the emergence of individualism. Merging the Western philosophy of individual freedom and the political and economic principles that go with that into its own culture is probably the greatest single thing that has happened to Asia. It’s the force that is shaping the twenty-first century.”

“The good old American system.”

“Yes. But nobody ever said it had to stay in America. In any case, it originated in Europe.”

“Okay.”

Koh went on, “But sometimes social changes are too fast for people to adapt to. When that happens, people are left feeling insecure, threatened by forces they don’t understand and can’t cope with. So they try to escape by turning the clock back. Early social orders like the feudal systems suppressed individuality, but in return they provided security and certainty. You knew who you were, where you belonged, and what was expected of you—as in childhood, where the authority of the family constrains, but at the same time protects.”

“Children have to grow up eventually.”

“Yes, and so do people. But when the change is too fast and leaves them feeling isolated, people turn to authoritarianism for the certainty and security they have lost. Hence the rise of Reformation religions of Luther and Calvin when European feudalism collapsed. The middle classes flocked to prostrate themselves before an all-powerful God whose strength would protect them.”