Lydia Neumann sat in her office. Her fingers were poised above the cream-colored keys. The screen was blank save for a flashing green cursor.
The floor was nearly deserted because this was Sunday and her office was in the suite at the west end of the floor where R Section hierarchy had their private rooms and private showers and executive washrooms. Her presence was sometimes inconvenient, especially in managing executive washroom privileges, but there was nothing to be done: She was a woman, and she had risen very high indeed in Section.
The door to her office was open, as always. The office did not have a window; she was the only one of the four division directors without a window. But it was the most cheerful office of the four. There was a sampler on one wall, above the computer screens, that advised: Garbage In, Garbage Out. It had been a gift from some of the staff in division when she made the grade; it was a little joke the women shared and the men in the other divisions would never understand.
Lydia Neumann sat at the keyboard like Stravinsky. She summoned Tinkertoy to life on her screen.
She knew Tinkertoy so well.
Tinkertoy was the computer system used in R Section. It was named for the child’s building toy. Link by link by link. The endless links fit numberless pieces of information together. Tinkertoy reconstructed the universe every millisecond as information poured into the computer from a thousand sources. Each bit of information was not merely added—it was indexed, categorized, fitted with other bits of information. Tinkertoy contained all the secrets of the spies, living and dead.
Tinkertoy was secure. It required a voice print, face print, fingerprint, and heat print.
When Tinkertoy’s monitor flashed: “READY,” she began.
She approached the information she wanted in three ways. Each approach was cautious and it allowed her time to retreat.
In each approach, she signed on at her level but then changed level of access by inserting the correct “add-on” code. This was only possible to her because she had designed the system with the safeguards. Even locked doors in secret buildings have to have keys and, generally, the lowliest worker in the building—the cleanup man—is given all the keys.
In each of the three approaches, she added on at a higher and higher level, to see how high the level of the secret of Nutcracker was kept.
She did not see Claymore Richfield walk into the room.
“Back on it already, Mrs. Neumann?”
She struck “BLACK,” the key that cleansed the screen. She was annoyed; she would have to start over. She turned to Richfield.
Richfield lounged in his jeans and sweater at the door.
“I hope I kept everything in order.”
“I hope you did, Clay,” Mrs. Neumann said.
“I wouldn’t expect you back until tomorrow.”
“Yes. I wouldn’t have expected to be here.”
“Problem?”
“No problem.”
Claymore Richfield smiled. He was one of Yackley’s loyalists. Why shouldn’t he be? He had a free hand and free budget. His only complaints came when field agents rejected one of his devices. He had a James Bond idea for an exploding briefcase that had cost the hands of one of the field agents in Japan. He had complained the Japanese agent did not know how to use it properly and that the briefcase was perfectly safe. The agent in Japan had sued R Section for $4 million.
“I kept things tidy,” Claymore said.
“Yes.”
There was no encouragement to further conversation.
She waited at the keyboard.
“Well.” Richfield seemed put out. “I suppose I’ll be going.”
“Yes,” Mrs. Neumann said.
“Nice to have you back,” he said.
“Nice to be back,” she said.
When he was gone, she closed the door. She went back to the screen. She tapped Tinkertoy to life again.
At the fourth approach, in the fourth add-on level of security, she moved very far and it was frightening. She existed in a world of secrets, those kept and those stolen. Secrets have their own familiarity, like the furniture in a room you know well. But to stumble in the dark in a strange room and not to know where the room is or when there will be light to see the way makes for fear.
She nearly stopped. She was in a country without maps.
For a moment, she paused. She thought of Hanley in St. Catherine’s. She thought of Margot Kieker, overcoming her own fears and uncertainties.
She thought of November, in clerical collar. And that made her smile and she plunged in.
The computer was very quick to respond this time. The numbers tumbled out.
NUTCRACKER:
CODE 9, PRIORITY ULTRA:
NUTCRACKER: 22 APR: DIRECTOR GORKI RESOLUTIONS COMMITTEE;
EXCHANGE OF PERSONNEL: JANUARY, NEWMOON, EQUINOX, JUNE, AUGUST, VERNAL, WINTER; EXCHANGE: ALEXA, ANDROMEDA, SATURN, MERCURY, HEBRIDES, GORKI.
KEY: GORKI FLUTTER ONE; ALEXA IN BLACK: ANDROMEDA TO GREEKSTATIONFIVE; KEY: VERNAL IN BLACK; WINTER IN GREEKSTATIONFOUR; JANUARYX; NOVEMBERX.
She used a Number 2 pencil to write down all she saw on the fluttering green screen. The screen held the message, waited patiently.
She understood it only a little but it would take too long—perhaps be too dangerous—to press the file inward for CLEARSPEAK. CONDSPEAK (for condensed version, the version on screen) would have to serve.
But serve whom?
Noon on Sunday. The fog was gone from the capital. The streets were wet and warm under the sun. The churches spoke songs and the bell tolled in the National Cathedral. From his apartment a block away, Hanley had often listened to that bell. But Hanley had not been in that place all this spring.
The gray Mercedes sloshed through puddles along Massachusetts Avenue. The car followed the gentle circle beneath the U.S. Naval Observatory and down across Rock Creek Park and down into the bowels of power. At DuPont Circle, the automobile leaned slightly into the curve and continued south along Connecticut Avenue toward the White House and the Executive Office Building.
The driver was a GS 9, cleared to Top Secret level for no other reason than that he drove an assistant national security adviser named Perry Weinstein.
Yackley had been on the phone at eleven. He had been contacted by Claymore Richfield, who had gone back through Tinkertoy after Mrs. Neumann left the DA building. Richfield had been merely curious and he had no way of understanding a damned thing that was going on. But Richfield was now a dangerous man.
Damnit. This was what you had to work with.
Perry Weinstein, in the back seat of the Mercedes, still had not repaired his horn-rimmed glasses. He wore a jogging suit that had never been sweated in. He sat back in the Mercedes and closed his eyes and tried to think.
It had only been thirty hours to Nutcracker, Yackley had shouted. It was April 18, the feast of Pentecost. Every move had been put in place. All the agents to be defected East were in place; Gorki had kept his bargain as well. But, perhaps, that was the way it was supposed to be. You didn’t bargain with the devil.
Yackley, on the phone to Perry, had been very close to hysteria.
Hanley was snatched. By someone. Dr. Goddard said a nun was dead, as well as the security director, Randolph Finch. There had been two of them: A priest and a young woman.
Yackley had been babbling when Weinstein hung up the phone on him and made a second call. There was a scramble going on right now inside Operations Wing 3 of FBI. “The Sisters,” as usual, didn’t have a clue but they were the domestic intelligence agency and when it came to tracking people inside the citadel, they were the best at the game. So the FBI director kept explaining to the National Security Director who passed on his budget recommendations to the White House.
Now prove it, Perry Weinstein thought. Find Hanley and his abductors and do it in twenty-four hours.
He had allowed too much rope for Yackley. Yackley, in the end, was too stupid to know what to do with it. Weinstein had even had to prod the boob on electroshock treatment. Hanley was lingering too long; it was quite possible he could be legally rescued from St. Catherine’s before he died. At least let his memory die.
He never said it in those terms to Yackley, of course.
Perry Weinstein was so careful and so close and it was not going to end badly. He had worked out a careful bargaining. Yackley had been assured he would have five enemy agents to show for the work and he would be more secure than ever. Even when this administration came to an end, Yackley would be included at the highest levels in the next administration—whatever the party. Perry Weinstein was a pragmatist and he promised practical things to people like Yackley.
And he would bring out Gorki. That was the key to the whole exchange. The master spy, the director of the Committee for External Observation and Resolutions—the Resolutions Committee of KGB. Gorki would come, kicking and screaming, because Gorki was the prize that Weinstein needed to make himself a “made” man in intelligence, one of the litmus tests to apply to others again.
And now some goddamn double-cross at the lowest level was being worked and two killers had snatched Hanley from St. Catherine’s.
And a busybody named Lydia Neumann had somehow uncovered the digest of Nutcracker. She was being taken care of now.
The telephone was ringing when Weinstein entered his office. He popped buttons on the console and put on the speaker phone. He crossed to the window, hands in jacket, and stared down at the White House while he listened.
“Two chasers were put on Alexa ninety minutes ago,” said the voice. There was a laconic charm to it. Ivers was the fixer from NSA; he had been part of Nutcracker from the beginning. Not that Ivers understood what Nutcracker was really all about. He was a good, loyal, conspiratorial, and limited man of action; his part in Nutcracker was just large enough to hold his interest.
“She is due to call in by one. We’ll hold her this time, trace the call—”
“It’ll be a pay phone—”
“That’s in the movies, sir. We can trace anyone. Anytime. From any place.” Ivers was sure and that amused Perry Weinstein. He pushed the glasses up his nose and smiled at the White House. The President was at Camp David. In a little while, the helicopter would clatter in and the ghouls from the networks would gather and wait for some word from the Main Man and the helicopter blades would keep rotating until the President had crossed to the south portico and entered the White House.
In two weeks, there would be the summit in May. But first, a crossing of swords called Nutcracker. A skirmish with spies and defectors.
Ivers rang off.
Dickerson at FBI was next. The Sisters had already found the abandoned Buick in Hancock. A second car had been stolen in that small town in western Maryland. “They’re heading back this way,” Dickerson said.
What a genius, Weinstein thought. “Do you have helicopter surveillance?”
“Yes sir, but it’s a limited advantage today. The fog is really thick out on the Panhandle, I—”
“Roadblocks?”
“Yes sir, this is Division A emergency, we are moving—”
He rattled on in that dry disguise-my-accent voice. He offered reassurance like a telephone company salesman.
When the domestic business was done, Perry Weinstein moved to the other phone. It was colored red and it was safe and the numbers that it dialed were also safe.
He picked up the phone, waited, decided on the first block to be pushed over. Nutcracker was commencing in the morning because every block was in place now and the whole edifice could be tumbled.
Alexa had not slept at all.
She had followed the taxicab containing November all the way back to the hotel. Wisconsin Avenue was bright and unsuitable for the sort of direct hit she intended. And then the hotel had been wrong as well. She had lost him at the elevators and she suspected he had doubled back behind her. Watergate was so complex.
She had failed again. Everything else was an excuse.
She had not eaten for two days. She felt sick to her stomach all the time. She thought her breath smelled foul, for the first time in her life.
She dressed carefully, as always, but there was no joy in it. She was a woman who had delighted in all her senses, in feeling and smelling and touching. She was imbued with self-love but she never thought it was excessive. There had been much to love about herself.
How quickly it broke down, she thought.
A gesture from an old man with yellow skin in Moscow and suddenly she was a puppet on the stage with its strings cut. She had no action. She could not even save herself.
She pitied herself. And that was why she had not slept. That and the words of the man she had come to kill. So flat and soft in the darkness. He had known her. He had told her she was in danger.
She stood on Pennsylvania Avenue and the street was empty because it was Sunday and she looked at the White House. She thought it should be more impressive, like the Kremlin. She thought she would kill the second November today and then kill herself. It would be far better than to be arrested by the Americans and put in cells for the rest of her life.
She dropped coins in the pay telephone and made the call to New York City.
The phone was picked up at the other end. There was no other sound.
She identified herself.
“You had opportunities. Why didn’t you take them?” The voice spoke English; it was without any accent.
“I could not ensure my own way out,” she said. She spoke as brutally as the voice. “Each time, there were difficulties. He knows me. He called me by name last night.”
There was silence. She had silenced the pitiless voice for a moment. It was almost a moment of triumph.
“Is this true?”
The question was not meant to be answered.
“Do you have him?” Alexa said. “It doesn’t matter now. I know what I will do. I will fulfill the mission.” She closed her eyes and felt faint. She tried to think of the heroic posters thrown up in Moscow each May Day and in the fall, in celebration of the October Revolution. Men and women marched on banners hundreds of feet long, striding with Lenin toward the Revolution. But she did not feel heroic. Only sick and alone in this foreign, savage country. She would do her duty this last time.
“Yes. This time, without fail. Even at risk to yourself.”
“Where is he?”
“There is a house on P Street,” the voice began. “Go to the house on P Street and when you reach it, wait inside. The key is under the mat at the door. Wait there for instructions.” He gave her the address on P Street N.E.
She felt very afraid in that moment, more afraid than at any time since Helsinki when the agent there had directed her to “the second November in Switzerland.”
“What will happen to me there?”
“Happen to you?” The voice seemed on the point of taking on coloration. But the voice paused and resumed in the same bland tone. “Nothing, Alexa. It is for instructions. This time, there will not be failure. There is no time for failure now.”
And the line was broken.
She replaced the light-green telephone receiver. She looked around her. What a queer city of low buildings and Greek columns and shabby streets full of slums. There were trees everywhere and yet there did not seem to be gaiety to the city at all. She felt a sullen undercurrent around her. She was accustomed to the same thing in Moscow: But there was vitality in Moscow that came from within, from secrets kept locked in secrets.
Alexa thought there was no vitality in Washington on this Sunday afternoon. She felt alone and abandoned in the West.
She stared around her. Her eyes carried down to her soul. They were shining and black and dangerous. Her eyes could not be disguised and she would not die like a victim. If they meant to kill her, they would have to engage her.
She felt the pistol in her pocket.
She saw Lenin on the wall hangings, striding toward the Revolution.
She even felt the first stirrings of hunger.