BY THE TIME GRIGORY Illyich Bulanin got around to making the bomb, he had stopped complaining, even to himself, about the unfairness of it all. He was property; he had to work for the good of the State. It had always been that way—just because he had defected, he had no right to expect his fate to change. So the Americans—well, some of them; fewer and fewer all the time, as far as Bulanin could see—some Americans professed to believe that the individual should not be compelled to labor for the good of the State. What of it? Bulanin had spent his entire adult life in Intelligence. He knew as well as anyone that what a government did had precious little to do with what it professed to believe. Every Soviet citizen, for example, was promised in the Soviet Constitution a job and freedom of religion.
One of Bulanin’s first jobs for Borzov had been harassing Jews in their workplaces, making the job intolerable for them. As soon as they ceased to tolerate it, they were through. If they attempted to end Bulanin’s taunts and tortures through force, they were known as “hooligans,” and sent to jail—after a good beating by Bulanin, of course. If they simply stayed away, they became parasites or refuseniks, and were sent to mental hospitals, until their appreciation of socialism returned to full flower.
Some, of course, were eventually allowed to leave the Soviet Union, but not before they were made to realize that they were the property of the Motherland until such time as it was the pleasure of the Motherland to let them go.
The only way around that, of course, was to defect, which Bulanin had done. Unfortunately, he was not a musician or a ballet dancer, free to use his talent to grab huge handfuls of the unimaginable wealth that was America. He was (or had been) a spy, and his talents were useful only to a select few.
The Congressman, for instance. Trotter. He belonged to them; he would do what they said, or die. They didn’t even have to kill him. They could just abandon him. Without the shield of false identity and false background that the Congressman’s Agency provided for him and kept in repair, the KGB would find him soon enough. They weren’t about to give up; Bulanin had been an important man. The unfortunate thing about defecting was that it was a move that could only be made once. There was nowhere else to go.
Bulanin spread newspapers carefully on his kitchen table, then carefully split open one of the shotgun shells he had bought yesterday. He had driven up Route 8, to the northern part of Connecticut, to buy them. It was a different world up there. He had driven above Water bury, then picked an exit at random. He drove along a country road for about fifteen minutes, then, just as Trotter had told him he would, he had come to a place where he could buy what he needed. He had smiled at the sign above the door—GUNS/Sandwiches/Coffee/AMMO. Bulanin had purchased three out of four. The coffee and the sandwich were standard American fare—they did what they were designed to do without being especially notable.
The same was true of the shotgun shells. Twelve-gauge, from a national manufacturer, one of many headquartered right here in Connecticut.
Bulanin peeled back the stiff paper covering and the plastic collar, removed the wadding, and spilled the black powder and shiny pellets onto the newspaper. He repeated the process with every shell in the box.
It was messy, smelly work. Plastique was so much more pleasant, and, since it didn’t move with a stray breath, you could smoke while you worked with it, if you felt adventurous. Bulanin had smoked for years. He had not cared for the habit, but had embraced it as a way to gain time while he thought things over. He found the action of smoking, though not the tobacco itself, calming. He had quit the habit soon after his defection, but he’d begun to feel the urge once again.
He opened another box of shells, slit and emptied them. Then, with a piece of cardboard, he swept the powder and pellets into a small plastic bag. He rolled it up until it was as round and tight as a sausage, sealed it with cellophane tape, and put it aside.
He repeated the process until he had enough small sausages to fill a child’s lunchbox. The lunchbox he had bought at a CVS pharmacy in Bridgeport on his way back from buying the shells. It had a bad painting of a movie actor on the side of it, with the word RAMBO appearing in the middle of an explosion. Appropriate, Bulanin supposed.
The bomb was to be set off by a simple sparking mechanism that would be activated when the paper wrapping was taken off the cardboard carton Bulanin planned to send it in. Not that it ever would be unwrapped, Bulanin thought.
He sighed as he finished the job. Using his left hand, he addressed the parcel in sloppy, American-style block letters. Tomorrow morning, he would take it to a busy post office in another town and mail it, carrying his part of the charade through to the end.