The guard at the Pearse main gate signaled for the barrier to be raised and waved the car through. Conrad Ashling followed the concrete approach road by its wire fence to the main highway and turned southward toward Atlanta.
It was a relief to be out among the trees and hills again, after too many late nights cooped up under bright lights between laboratory walls. He had been warned that with his work being taken under an official wing and security classified, there would be restrictions on his privacy and freedom of movement, and reluctantly he had agreed; but this was almost like being some kind of political prisoner under open arrest. He glanced at his mirror as he speeded up along the ramp and merged into the through lane. Sure enough, the surveillance car from Pearse security was just turning out from the end of the approach road to take up station a hundred yards behind him.
He hadn’t liked the notion of his work being confined and adopted for military training purposes from the beginning. His original vision had been of possibilities that would enrich the lives of millions by eliminating the drudgery from learning, and multiplying enormously the amount and variety of knowledge and skills that anyone would be able to amass in a lifetime. But the political realities of the times had not permitted that to happen, and he had been left with only one avenue open to him by which his theories might be tested—and the chance of access to equipment that he could never have obtained through his own resources, and funding that appeared unlimited. So he had gone along with it and accepted the restrictions.
However, the experience had left him distrustful of the people whom he found himself dealing with and the power they represented. His suspicion grew that there was more to the Southside project than he had been told. He began quietly investigating, and in the process discovered that the story about revolutionizing military training was just a cover. The real aim was to determine the feasibility of political reprogramming.
Ashling’s first thought had been to take the whole matter to higher authority. But on reflection he doubted that there would be much point. From what he had seen, he wouldn’t have been surprised to find that it went all the way to the top. So he had decided to get out.
There were hidden networks of communications that scientists in various disciplines maintained among themselves. Through such a channel he had regained contact with an old colleague from the days before the Green Curtain had slammed down around the West, the Russian professor, Ulkanov, who was now on Luna, equipped by a consortium of unfettered public and private interests with a research team of his own, and by the sound of things on the same track as Ashling himself had been before state intervention put an end to his plans. That was where he must go, Ashling had decided. To the Offworld independencies, where knowledge could be pursued for its own sake, without direction to political purposes, and the spirit of discovery ran free.
If he could survive the stress…
He was turning sixty now, and feeling the worse for wear with every new day of awakening. A lifetime of compulsive overwork, too little distraction and relaxation, an attempt at marriage that had never had a hope, and unceasing battles with meddling intellectual dwarfs whose only purpose in life seemed to be to frustrate his goals had left him with a Damoclean blood pressure that threatened to smite him at any time, and an accompanying heart condition that made any excitement an invitation to a terminal attack. But there was nothing left for him here, and so he was determined to go through with it. Even so, the thought of what lay ahead in the next few hours in Atlanta was enough to give him palpitations—never mind getting out of the country, across to the FER, and from there up and off the planet. He fumbled the container of Panacyn from his jacket pocket as he drove, and popped one of the capsules into his mouth, washing it down with a swig of orange juice from the bottle that he kept in the car. Everything, now, depended on Josef having his end of things organized. Ashling prayed that there had been no slipups.
It was important not to break the pattern of movement that he typically followed in his visits to Atlanta. North of the city, he left I-75/85 and parked in a lot off Peachtree Plaza. Taking only his briefcase, he browsed for an hour or so in several of the nearby bookshops, then spent the rest of the morning leafing through scientific journals and making notes in the library of the Institute of Technology. Ostensibly the briefcase contained only routine notes and papers. But in addition, he had concealed inside the lining a high-density holographic storage film carrying details of his most important work.
After that he had lunch in an Italian restaurant that he often used when in town, across the street from the campus. While he ate, he ignored the two agents from Pearse, who took up station over cups of coffee and a sandwich apiece at a table near the door. Instead he thought about the Offworld culture that was coming into being in defiance of all the expert predictions, and the prospect of his living there—which, if it came about, would probably be for the remainder of his years.
Nobody was sure exactly what the phenomenon exploding outward into space to the Moon and beyond meant, or what coming together of happenstance, opportunity, and the realization of human vision was impelling it. Some spoke of it as a new renaissance, others as a next phase of industrial revolution stemming from new, nuclear-based alchemies that would yield bulk transmutation of matter with energy as a by-product on a scale undreamed of, in the same way that Nature did in the stars. But although whatever was happening out there undoubtedly included aspects comparable to both those past upheavals, its true commonality with them lay in its uniqueness. As had been the case with each of the preceding epochs, the significant thing that it shared was that nobody really understood it, for nothing like it had happened before. But, as seemed to have been the pattern of history when Rome began as an outer colony of the Greeks, the nations that gave rise to the West sprang from the periphery of the Roman world, and America grew from an outpost of Western empire, the new, emergent culture was budding from the fringes of the old, while the core stagnated and died. And this latest thrust, Ashling believed, was the one that would carry mankind out of the Solar System.
After lunch he went to a small mall across from the institute and did some shopping, after which he made a phone call. The response that he got told him that everything was still set to go as arranged. Ashling’s hand trembled as he replaced the receiver. He could feel himself breaking out in a sweat. There was a painful constriction about his chest, as if it were bound with chains.
The mall’s principal business was a department store that the lesser shops and kiosks clustered around—a smaller affair now than it had been originally, with about half its space closed for economy and leased off for warehousing. Ashling entered through the main doors and went first to the men’s room, where he took a long drink of water and swallowed another Panacyn capsule to calm himself. Even if he did manage to make it to Luna, the days, maybe weeks, of this kind of thing that still lay ahead of him before then could do nothing to prolong what he could realistically expect would be his time there. His image stared back at him from the mirror: the white hair, the lined features, the ailing frame, and the tired eyes. He was under no illusions as to what it portended. If he could just hold together long enough for his work not to have been wasted…
He emerged from the rest room and went through the fashion department to the menswear section. Every step of the way he was acutely conscious of the two agents sauntering casually after him a short distance back along the adjacent aisle. He stopped at a rack displaying cord and twill pants and began rummaging among the hangers, trying to make his movements natural but seized by an uncontrollable awkwardness that he was convinced was signaling his intent to the whole world as surely as a flashing neon sign hanging over his head. The plan depended on the agents being off guard, with no reason to be suspicious of an aging scientist doing a little shopping on a routine trip into town. All he had to do was act normally. No sooner had he reaffirmed that determination to himself, when one of the hangers came off the rail and dropped to the floor. He picked it up hastily and tried to replace it, but the pants twisted with the ones next to them somehow and wouldn’t hang straight. Then those came away too, and Ashling was left clutching an armful of both.
“Is there something I can help you with?” a voice said from behind him. Ashling turned, startled. An assistant had seen his predicament and come over.
“Oh.…This.” Ashling held the tangle up, and the assistant relieved him of it.
“Sure, I’ll take care of that.”
“And these.” Ashling grabbed two pairs at random from the section labeled thirty-eight. “Where can I try them on?”
The assistant nodded toward a doorway at the rear as he replaced the hangers. “The fitting rooms are that way.”
“Can I leave these here?” Ashling put down the packages that he had been carrying, but kept hold of the briefcase. As he walked through to the fitting cubicles he stole a quick glance back. One of the two agents was on the far side of the menswear area, looking bored and studying shirts; the other was not in sight.
Through the door was a short corridor with louvered doors of changing cubicles on both sides, and at the far end another door leading to a staff washroom. All exactly as he had been told.
He went into one of the cubicles and hung the two pairs of pants on one of the hooks. Then he emerged into the corridor again, but instead of going back the way he had come, he went on through into the washroom and found the emergency door to the outside unlocked as planned.
Josef was waiting for him in the unloading bay outside. He had a car standing around the corner with another man waiting at the wheel, and in a matter of moments Ashling was being whisked on his way.
Employed by the Federal Security Service’s training center for new recruits at Frederick, Maryland, was a former CIA instructor by the name of Lorenzo, whose specialty was lock picking. Over years of experience gained in occupations that predated his hiring by the Agency and not detailed in his personnel record, Lorenzo had built up an extensive knowledge of all the areas pertinent to his craft: all the locks that he might encounter, who designed them and which firms made them, how they worked, the tricks and traps that might be utilized to foil an assailant, how long each type should take to pick. He owned several models of each type in order to practice his picking techniques, which in some cases required the patience of a cryptologist and the delicacy of touch of a surgeon. Locks weren’t just popped open in a matter of seconds in the way invariably depicted in the movies.
For Lorenzo, the simple ward lock, where the correct positions for cutting a blank could be read from a pattern transferred into lighter or candle soot, was child’s play. The feel for tensioning a regular pin-tumbler lock—just hard enough for the pins to stick, but not such as to cause them to jam—came as naturally to him as breathing, after which he could lift each pin to its shear point as deftly as a watchmaker mounting balances, enabling the core to turn inside the shell. He knew how to rake or ease tension gradually to overcome mushroom pins, the quick ways to nudge disk tumblers or wafer tumblers into line, the pressures to apply when tackling lever tumblers, and at precisely which point to forget the niceties and resort to brute-force drilling. His knowledge had been amassed meticulously and carefully over a period that had spanned more than twenty years.
That knowledge was incorporated into the composite, synthetic personality that had been designated “Samurai” in less than fifteen minutes of machine time. An aide brought the message from Nordens, requesting Samurai’s immediate presence, while Samurai was confounding experts in one of the Pearse laboratories by opening a series of test locks in minutes that theoretically should have been impregnable. Shortly afterward, Samurai arrived on the top floor of the Main Complex to find Nordens with Tierney. They were both in an extremely anxious state.
“Ashling has disappeared,” Nordens informed Samurai tightly. “He slipped surveillance earlier today in Atlanta. We think it was prearranged.” He went on to summarize as much as could be pieced together of what had happened.
The news didn’t come as any particular surprise to Samurai. He had been briefed previously to make Ashling a special object for attention, and in keeping with the cynical nature that came with his emerging personality, he had never trusted the competence of Tierney’s security operatives, whom he dismissed with unconcealed contempt as amateurs.
“Don’t worry about it,” Samurai told them. “It was obvious that something like this was going to happen sooner or later. So I took my own precautions.”
Nordens stared at him uncertainly. “How?” he asked. “What precautions? What are you talking about?”
Samurai smiled humorlessly. “Back in my apartment in the Annex is an electronic homing device that’s tuned to a bug that I hid in Ashling’s briefcase several weeks ago. I figured that if he decided to defect he’d take his papers, and the briefcase would be one thing that would be certain to go with him. The bug has a range of over two miles. He has to be in the Atlanta area somewhere. I’ll find him for you before the night’s out.”
Nordens and Tierney exchanged relieved looks. “Go to it, then,” Nordens said. “You can consider this your first test mission.”
Samurai arrived in Atlanta a little over an hour later, and picked up the transmission less than thirty minutes after commencing to cruise the city center. The homing device led him to the Atlanta Hyatt hotel. His cover identity had already been arranged. He parked in front of the Hyatt and went in to register for a room, presenting the ID and credentials of one Maurice Gordon, visiting from Philadelphia. The date was November 14.
Samurai closed the door of room 1406 and put down the black briefcase and leather travel bag that he had brought with him from the car. He inspected the surroundings and the bathroom and put his spare clothes in the closet to hang. Then he sat down at the bureau-vanity and opened the briefcase to lay out the contents and check them item by item, moving with the unhurried purposefulness that comes with total confidence. He set aside the electronic homer, which was still registering the transmission from the bug that he had planted on Ashling, loaded the two weapons that he had selected for the job—one a regular 9mm automatic, the other a compressed-gas pistol that fired up to four nonlethal knockout darts tipped with a neurotoxin, effective in seconds—and replaced them in the briefcase. He stowed the briefcase out of sight in a drawer, and picking up the homer again, he let himself back out into the corridor.
The signal led him through the hotel’s central block into another wing, then up to the eighth floor, partway along a corridor, and finally back down a level via the emergency stairs to pinpoint the source as room 7319. He spent some time surveying the approaches from all directions, noting the locations of fire exits and elevators, and familiarizing himself with the layout from the floor plan displayed at the end of the corridor. The floor plan also told him that 7319 was a two-room suite consisting of a living room with bathroom opening off inside the main door, and a bedroom with a second bathroom through another door at the rear. He walked the floors above and below one more time, took a look around the outside, and then returned to his own room to consider his options.
Almost certainly, Ashling had contacted Pipeline and was being hidden here as a prelude to being moved out of the country. Pipeline would have at least one, probably more, of their people in there with him constantly. They would be on guard, naturally, against anyone’s approaching via the door, which ruled out impersonating the likes of hotel staff or outside delivery carriers. Samurai’s reconnaissance outside had eliminated the windows as a practicable means of entry, also.
He got up and moved around the room, examining the ceilings, flooring, and the wall at the rear of the closet. The building was of fairly recent construction, incorporating a low-cost, highly modular design that enabled maximum use to be made of preformed sections fabricated off-site. The heating and air-conditioning outlet was high in the wall to one side of the closet. The inside of the closet stopped short in that direction, indicating that the space beyond might house the ducting to the outlet—in which case it possibly passed between floors. Also, the bathroom backed onto the closet, making it logical to suppose that the same shaft might carry the plumbing, also. Samurai tapped along the end wall on the inside of the closet. It sounded hollow, sure enough, but offered no ready way of gaining access.
He went around into the bathroom and found an enclosed space beside the shower stall, walled in by screw-down panels, just where such a shaft would be. He brought a multipurpose tool that included a screwdriver bit from his briefcase, and in less than a minute lifted the lowermost of the panels away. Inside was a vertical shaft carrying ducts and various sizes of pipes. There was little room to spare, but it would take him at a squeeze. A probe upward and down with his penlight confirmed that the shaft continued to the adjacent floors without serious obstacles. The screws went into hollow-wall anchors that could be cut from the inside. Satisfied, and with the outline of a plan now taking shape in his mind, he replaced the panel and left once more for the other wing of the hotel.
Back on the eighth floor, he found as he had expected that room 8319 was situated immediately above 7319. The floor plan there also confirmed that 8319 was identical in layout. Samurai went to the door of 8319 and tapped lightly, with a prepared excuse should someone answer. Nobody did. It was a Saturday, not yet evening. There seemed to be no convention or major function being held in the hotel that weekend, and he was banking that the chances of the rooms being unoccupied were high. As a final check, he went back to his own room and called the hotel on an outside line.
“Atlanta Hyatt. Can I help you?”
“Yes. Could I have room 8319 please?”
There was a pause, then, “I’m sorry, but there doesn’t appear to be anyone answering. Would you like to leave a message?”
“Could you tell me if they’ve checked in yet?” Samurai said.
“One moment, I’ll check.” He waited. Then the clerk came back on the line. “That room is empty, sir, and we don’t show any reservation for tonight. What was the name?”
“Carrel. Ms. Judy Carrel.”
Another pause. “I don’t see any reservation here under that name. Are you sure it was tor tonight?”
“Yes, I am. Isn’t this the Hilton?”
“No, sir. We’re the Hyatt.”
“Oh, excuse me. My mistake.”
“Would you like the number of the Hilton?”
“It’s all right. I have it here. I’m sorry to have troubled you.”
So, the suite above the one that Ashling was hiding out in would be empty for a while at least. That was all that Samurai needed to know.
Taking the briefcase, he went out to the front and moved his car around to the parking area outside the door at the rear of the other wing. The inside of the trunk was virtually a mobile larceny, homicide, and espionage laboratory. From its contents Samurai selected a basic kit of tools and drills, several microphone probes along with amplifier and earpiece, and transferred them to the briefcase. Fifteen minutes later he let himself quietly into suite 8319 with a master magnetic passcard stolen from Housekeeping. A quick check of the bathroom confirmed that the hotel’s construction was uniform—it was the same as in his room.
He opened an inch or two of seam in the carpet in the center of the living room. Then, working carefully and silently, he bored a hole through the floor panel, and after that a finer hole almost through the ceiling slab below, into which he inserted one of the audio probes. Through the earpiece he was able to pick up the voices in the suite below, which, although muffled and only semi-intelligible, gave him the number of people down there and a feel for their whereabouts and movements. After repeating the procedure in the bedroom and by the doorway to the living room bathroom, he established that there were three others present besides Ashling. One of them was always in the outer room near the door, which was to be expected, while the others moved around haphazardly. Ashling himself tended to remain in the bedroom at the rear. Also, the TV was on—which was good.
Samurai checked his watch. It was still early evening. Plenty of time. He collected his tools and equipment together in the bathroom and removed the bottom panel by the shower. Inside was a shaft similar to the one he’d found in his own room. There were no nasty surprises. Taking some cutters for the screws below, a couple of other basic tools, the 9mm automatic, and the dart pistol, he eased himself in between the largest of the ducts and a pipe run and lowered himself carefully and noiselessly to the corresponding part of suite 7319 below.
Twenty minutes went by before one of the guards came in to use the bathroom…and went out without a murmur. Samurai lowered the limp form into the shower stall and took out the dart pistol. He flushed the toilet and shot a needlelike projectile into the guard’s neck that would keep him out until the next morning, afterward dissolving in the body fluids to leave just a tiny puncture. Then Samurai sauntered casually out into the living room and shot a second guard before anyone out there realized that the person coming out of the bathroom was not the one who had gone in.
But the third’s reactions were fast. Even as the second guard was falling, he crossed the living room and was through the door leading into the bedroom. Samurai’s reflexes were as quick, however, and before the guard could close the door behind him, Samurai hurled one of the chairs with enough momentum to send the guard staggering back, then followed on through to deliver a sidekick into the midriff that sent the guard reeling backward over one of the beds. While Ashling, who had risen to his feet from a chair by the window, watched, horrified, Samurai leveled the pistol again and shot the guard in the chest through his shirt. The guard stiffened, and fell back onto the bed, senseless.
“Oh, my God!” Ashling whispered.
Samurai turned and laughed derisively at the expression on the scientist’s face. “Don’t worry. We don’t want killings. Too many complications. It’ll keep them out until I get back here to tidy things up.”
Ashling stared at him in confusion. “But you’re one of the volunteers, Demiro, isn’t it?…I thought you’d been transferred away. What’s going on? I don’t understand.”
“Let’s just say for now that there’s more going on than you know about. There isn’t time now. Ask Nordens to tell you about it when we get back.” Samurai made a curt wave with a hand, and Ashling followed him back into the living room. Suddenly he clutched at his chest and fell against the side of the doorway, his face contorted in a grimace. Samurai looked back at him.
“What is it?”
Ashling made a gurgling noise and held on to the doorjamb, his face white. “Pill,” he croaked. “White jar…other bathroom.”
Samurai steered him to the nearest chair, sat him down, and went swiftly through to the bathroom opening off from the living room. Among the articles strewn over the sink top was a white pill container with a label bearing Ashling’s name. Samurai picked it up, filled a glass with water, and went back to Ashling.
Ashling took one of the capsules, downed it with a drink of water, and sat weakly, waiting for his breathing to recover. Samurai waited perhaps half a minute. The TV in the room was on. A program was just beginning about tropical insects. Finally he asked, “Okay? Can you move now?” Ashling didn’t respond, but continued panting, staring down at the floor. “Come on,” Samurai said, straightening up. “We have to get your briefcase. What else do you need?”
And that was the last thing that Samurai remembered.
With no sensation of time having passed, he woke up to find himself covered by a blanket on a rubber-topped couch in clinical surroundings. After a few seconds he recognized it as the recovery room in the experimental wing at Pearse.
A monitoring system that had been tracking Samurai’s condition registered his return to consciousness and activated a staff alert. Moments later, Dr. Valdheim appeared. Samurai rubbed his eyes, shook his head to clear it, and lifted himself up on his elbows to gaze around. Valdheim stacked pillows behind his head and looked down at him gravely.
“How are you feeling?” he asked. There was a curiously uncharacteristic anxiety in his voice.
Samurai took stock of himself. His head felt heavy and muzzy, as if his brain were permeated by a viscous fluid. Such sluggishness of thought was not normal for him. “I’m not sure.…How did I get back here?”
Valdheim ignored the question and raised a hand with the index and little fingers extended. “Just a few answers, please. How many fingers do you see?”
“Two.” Valdheim opened his full hand. “Four.” Valdheim straightened his thumb. “Five.”
An attendant appeared in the doorway. Valdheim continued, “You know who I am?”
“Of course.”
“Tell me.”
“Valdheim.”
“And where is this place?”
“Pearse laboratories, experimental wing inside the Restricted Zone. Recovery room adjoining the machine bay, Southside project.”
Valdheim nodded. “And who are you?”
“Special agent, code name Samurai.”
“What was your last mission?”
“To find and apprehend the scientist Ashling, believed to be attempting to defect with the aid of the subversive organization Pipeline,” Samurai replied.
Valdheim seemed satisfied. “Fetch Dr. Nordens,” he instructed the attendant. “Say that Samurai appears to be fully reactivated.”
Although Samurai’s head was already clearing, the implication of the term didn’t strike him immediately. “How did I get here?” he asked again.
“What is the last thing you remember?” Valdheim asked in turn.
“I was at the Hyatt in Atlanta.”
“More detail, please. What were you doing at the Hyatt?”
Samurai propped himself higher against the pillows and took a moment to recollect. “I’d traced Ashling there, by means of the bug in his briefcase. I ascertained the room that Pipeline was keeping him in and evaluated the situation as involving three others in addition to the target. Entry was effected successfully and the opposition neutralized. The target was apprehended. Preparations for delivery and eradication of traces were complete.”
“Go on,” Valdheim said.
Samurai replied expressionlessly, “Recollection ends at that point. Indicated conclusion is that another party was present, undetected, or that somebody entered unobserved. Unable to offer explanation in either case.”
“And you remember nothing else since then?” Valdheim said. Once again, his voice carried a strangely ominous note.
Samurai could only shake his head. “No. Why?” Valdheim said nothing but moved a step closer and tilted Samurai’s head lightly to one side. He stared at a spot below Samurai’s ear and explored it lightly with a fingertip. The area felt slightly sore. Samurai brought his own hand up and felt the fading traces of some kind of lesion. “What is this?” he asked. “What’s been happening?”
Before Valdheim could say anything, Nordens came in with Tierney.
“It’s true?” Nordens said without preliminaries. “We have full reactivation?”
“So it would appear,” Valdheim murmured, nodding, still looking at Samurai. “As far as it’s possible to say initially, anyway.” He went on to summarize briefly what he had learned from Samurai, and concluded, “He seems to be himself again.”
Samurai looked sharply at Nordens. “Why shouldn’t I be? What has been going on?”
Nordens settled himself on a stool by the door and lifted one heel onto the circular bar bracing the legs. “Tell me, Samurai,” he said, “does the name Jarrow mean anything to you? Richard Jarrow?”
“Nothing. Should it?”
Nordens peered intently through his spectacles. “What about Minneapolis, or Chicago? Do you have any recent associations with those places, for any reason?”
Samurai shook his head, by now completely mystified. “No, I don’t.”
“What was the date, when you tracked Ashling to the Hyatt?”
Samurai thought for a second and replied, “A Saturday, November fourteenth.”
“After which you remember nothing?” Nordens checked.
“I’ve already said, no.”
Nordens glanced at Tierney, then looked back at Samurai. “The following day, Sunday, you made a call here, to Pearse, and left a message for me saying that you knew how Ashling was to be got out of the country. You intended giving us full details when you got back here…but you never did. It’s vital that we retrieve that information. You have no knowledge of leaving that message?”
Samurai shook his head, trying to make sense of it. “I must have been jumped somehow…and they got Ashling away again,” he said. “But you’re saying that I picked up his trail again.…But no, I don’t remember it.” He looked from Nordens to Tierney to Valdheim and asked again, “Will somebody tell me what in hell has been going on?”
“I wish we knew,” Nordens replied. “Saturday the fourteenth was some time ago now. A lot of strange things have been happening since then. You see, Samurai, today is Monday the twenty-third.”
Later that day, a helicopter bearing government insignia arrived at Pearse from Washington, D.C. A tall, square-built man with smooth, tanned features, hard eyes, and straight gray hair, wearing a hat and dark overcoat, alighted and was shown straight up to Director Fairfax’s office. He was Roland Circo, deputy head of the Federal Security Service. The look on his face was not a happy one. Nordens, Tierney, and Valdheim joined them shortly afterward.
Circo was wishing he’d never heard of this insane Samurai experiment, which hadn’t been authorized officially and which the President didn’t know about. The President! Washington’s daily soap offering to distract the electorate and foster the illusion that they had a say in anything that mattered. The real power game took place behind the facade, and one group of the adversaries involved in it was very interested in the possibility of being able to transform, or even create, political personalities to specification. Circo’s place, if that became the winning side, was assured. And not just his: Fairfax, Nordens, Tierney—they were all in it for the same thing. The screwup that had led them into having to fake the record of Demiro’s death should have been warning enough, he could now reflect wryly. Now Ashling had turned and was loose, and the Samurai agent who was supposed to be proof of the concept couldn’t remember what he’d found out and didn’t know what day it was. The whole thing was a mess of worms.
“So what have we got?” Circo said after Nordens had gone through the details. “Ashling took off over a week ago now. You got word from Samurai that he knew where and when and how Pipeline were getting him out, but now Samurai’s been through a couple of identity flips and doesn’t remember anything about it. Is that it? I’ve got it right so far?”
“That’s about how it is,” Fairfax agreed gloomily.
“Except that he doesn’t remember consciously,” Valdheim put in. “The information is in there, inside his head. With the facilities we have we can get it out. We just need a little time.”
“Time!” Circo threw the word out derisively and looked in despair at the ceiling. “After a week? Are you trying to tell me that Ashling will still be sitting there in Atlanta, waiting for us to get our act together? If he’s not in the FER already, he’s halfway there.”
“We have to use whatever overseas help we can,” Fairfax urged. “Alert them for leads on anybody of Ashling’s description being concealed or smuggled in that direction.” He glanced quickly at the others in turn. It was a lame suggestion to have to fall back on, as he knew and their expressions affirmed. He added, to make it fractionally more credible, “Keep a special watch on medical contacts. He’ll need a supply of that drug that he has to take all the time because of his heart condition. What was it called?”
“Panacyn,” Valdheim said, seeming to only half hear.
They all knew they needed something a lot better than that. Nordens gnawed pensively at a knuckle, then said finally, “Valdheim’s right. We have to get a lead on the route that Ashling took, even if he’s already left.”
“Then what?” Circo asked him.
Nordens paused just long enough to suggest an appropriate shade of regret and delicacy, then shrugged. “We go after him. Either he’s brought back here, or…” He left the obvious unsaid. The others all found places to stare at that avoided meeting anyone else’s gaze.
After several seconds, Circo emitted a heavy sigh and shook his head. “I can’t have our field men implicated in this. We’re already in for enough. I’m not prepared to risk it getting messier. This is a pig’s ass as it is.”
“I didn’t say to use your field men,” Nordens answered. He waited until the faces turning sharply one by one told him that the others had caught what he was saying. “We already have the ideal person to go after him.”
Circo frowned. “Do you mean Samurai?”
Nordens nodded. “Of course.”
“But—”
“Oh, he’s functioning quite normally now, I can assure you of that.” Nordens glanced around at the others again. “In terms of professional abilities to carry out the job, you won’t find an equal.…And then, of course, there is the additional advantage that as far as the rest of the world is concerned, Samurai doesn’t exist.”
Which meant, as everyone in the room understood, that once it was done, Circo’s agents would be used to get rid of Samurai. After which, all traces of the entire affair could be quietly eradicated.
All they needed was a lead to set them on Ashling’s trail.
Throughout it all, Jerry Tierney remained silent. Inwardly he was growing increasingly uncomfortable.
Samurai stood naked, facing one of the mirrors in the bedroom of his apartment in the PQ Annex, regarding his reflection with satisfaction. He raised his arms to chest height, and went through a slow sequence of formalized karate attack and defense movements, his muscles outlining themselves and rippling like cables with every feigned jab, punch, change of posture, and kick. Two lines of fresh fingernail gouges stood red against the skin of his back.
Vera, covered as far as her pubic mound by a sheet, watched from the bed. A redness still smarted on one side of her face, but her eyes showed excitement in spite of it—or maybe in part because of it. Samurai’s lovemaking was brutal and harsh, the compulsive expression of domination and the will to subdue, forged from a synthesis of human drives that had been fashioned to know no other context for relationship. His function was to observe, to analyze, to kill, and to destroy. He had no other purpose. Vera’s was to react, to provide, to comply; to be used—and, if necessary, abused. That was what the government paid her for.
“Welcome back,” she commented approvingly.
Samurai extended an arm horizontally, fingers flattened, the other arm guarding, and returned to a formal defensive pose. “Not all back,” he replied, still looking in the mirror. “This week is still mostly a blank.”
“You’re making good progress.”
“Maybe.”
“You still don’t remember anything about the cars?”
“No.”
After Samurai’s disappearance in Atlanta, his car was found to be still parked in the Annex at Pearse, its windshield shattered. A pickup truck belonging to the Maintenance Department, which Samurai had a spare set of keys to and sometimes borrowed to go on recreational trips into the hills in the area, was missing, which was presumably how he had gotten into Atlanta. This had been confirmed when two of Tierney’s security staff, sent to check, found the pickup in the parking lot of the Hyatt. Samurai could offer no explanation.
Samurai’s briefcase, leather traveling bag, and the clothes left at the Hyatt had been returned via the Philadelphia address given for Gordon, after Jarrow walked out and left them. But still, Samurai’s memory of the circumstances surrounding his actions was a complete blank.
“How about a swim to cool off?” Vera suggested. “Then I thought we’d find something relaxing to do this evening, maybe. Valdheim wants to run some more tests later.”
“I don’t need to relax. I want a challenge. Something that stretches nerves and tests abilities.”
“That would sound a bit too much like work for most men,” Vera remarked.
Samurai snorted contemptuously. “Worms. I could crush them.” He drew back into a disengagement posture, held it for a second, then turned and reached for his robe. “The world drowns itself in words that achieve nothing. Action alone has meaning. Nothing else.”
Vera leaned across to open the drawer in the bedside unit. “Well, there’s one small action I’d appreciate right now. We’re out of joints. I think there are some in the desk.”
“A weakness,” Samurai said.
“Guilty.”
Samurai tied the belt of the robe and went out into the living room. He crossed to the desk, opened the center drawer, and checked over the items inside. Some pieces of paper caught his eye that he didn’t recall putting there. He picked them up and examined them curiously.
Headman to ship out via J’ville, sometime Nov. 19. Check ref “Cop 3.”
“Headman”?
Who else could that be a reference to but Ashling?
Shipping out via J’ville—which had to be Jacksonville, Florida—on November 19? That was four days ago. Cop 3? Maybe something to do with police, but that wasn’t the important thing right now.
Samurai activated the desk terminal and punched in Nordens’s number. Nordens’s assistant answered.
“Samurai. Put me through.”
“Hey, what’s up out there?” Vera’s voice called from the bedroom.
Nordens appeared on the screen. “What?”
Samurai spoke rapidly and urgently. “I’ve found it. He shipped out by sea from Jacksonville four days ago, on the nineteenth. If he’s going in via Europe, that means he won’t be there for probably another seven days. There can’t be many ships going there from Jacksonville. If we can identify the one he’s on, we can intercept him at the other end.”
In a brothel in the nightclub district of the German city-port of Hamburg, the girl who called herself Dagmar steered her unsteady client across the landing and into her room at the top of the second flight of stairs. It was a snug, warm-looking room with chintz draperies, red wallpaper and lighting, and a king-size, brass-railed bed. Dagmar was petite, blue-eyed, and blond with an urchin-cut fringe. The client was cheerful, merry, and drunk.
“Come on, in here. Don’t make so much noise or the madam will come and throw you out early.”
“Ah, and you are the pretty Dag-Dagmar, yes? I like that name. Yes, it’s a very pretty name. You’re a pretty lady.”
“I’m glad you think so,” she said, closing the door.
“And this is where Dagmar lives, eh?”
“It’s where I work.”
“I think I would like to live here too. Can I come an’ live here with you?”
“You haven’t paid for that long.”
He threw up his arms and beamed at her. “Oh, well, too bad.”
Dagmar kicked off her shoes and began unfastening her dress. “Aren’t you going to get undressed?” she suggested. The man took off his jacket. She hung it over a chair. He fumbled with the knot of his tie, which was pulled several inches down below the open neck of his shirt and had tightened. “Here,” she said. “I’ll do it.”
“And I like the perfume,” the man said.
“You’re easy to please, I can see. So what should I call you?”
“People who like me call me Nicolaus. Others think of other things. But I don’t care about them.”
“You’re from farther east somewhere, aren’t you?”
“That’s right. I’m Estonian. Ever been there?”
“It’s not so easy these days for us to get over into the FER states.” Dagmar was suddenly more attentive. “Are you visiting Hamburg?”
“Oh, yes.” Nicolaus put a fingertip to his lips and swayed. “An important international assignment,” he whispered.
“Oh, really?”
“You don’t believe me.”
“How could you possibly think that?” Dagmar steered him to the bed, and he collapsed down onto it. He looked up at her as she removed her underwear and joined him.
“I’ll have you know that you are p-privileged to be en’taining a very important person,” he mumbled.
This was going to take time, she could see. If he wanted to talk a bit first, that was fine by her and would probably help him relax. He had bought plenty of time.
“Don’t tell me,” she said. “You’re here to negotiate Germany out of the Consolidation and get us into the FER.”
“Those are nice tits.”
“Hm…that feels good. Really, I’m interested. What brings you here?”
Nicolaus bunched his mouth tight and shook his head knowingly.
“You’re right, then. I don’t believe you,” Dagmar told him.
He focused on her with an effort and looked pained. “Promise you won’t tell?”
“Not a soul.”
Nicolaus looked from side to side over each shoulder and leaned closer. “I’m meeting a very special illegal who’s arriving here tomorrow from America. A scientist, no less.”
“A scientist!” Dagmar looked impressed. “What does he do?”
“Ah, that’s a secret.” Nicolaus shook his head firmly, in a way that said hot irons and pliers would never get that out of him.
Dagmar traced fingers over his chest. “Where are you staying in Hamburg?” she inquired lightly.
“Oh, what’s it called?…The Harbor Light Bar, down by the water. Sort of a pub. But they let a few rooms.”
“Yes, I know it.”
“Why?”
She shrugged. “Oh, I do outcalls too. I just thought that this scientist might enjoy a little native hospitality…some relaxation after the journey, maybe?”
“Unlikely,” Nicolaus said. “I’m told he’s getting old. In any case, we’ll be gone by tomorrow night. Anyhow, I’m fed up talking about him. Let’s do something about me.”
Later that night, Dagmar made her routine call to a number at the local police headquarters to report the snippets she had collected that evening. It was amazing how interested they were in even the most trivial-sounding gossip. Besides ensuring that she always had friends in the right places, the extra money came in useful. She was learning to cultivate some refined and expensive tastes.
The foreign liaison officer at police headquarters traded information with a contact at the U.S. consulate who had put out a priority request for anything on a defecting scientist, aged sixty, possibly sailing from Jacksonville, known to have a heart condition for which he was prescribed Panacyn, and thought to be using the code name “Headman.” The details from the hooker’s account were delivered to Circo in Washington less than thirty minutes later, at what was still 5:00 p.m. local time.
Circo had already established that three ships had sailed from Jacksonville for Europe on November 19: one bound for London, one for Naples, and one for Hamburg. The one going to Hamburg, the Auriga, also registered there, was due to arrive on December 1—which was the following day. It all fitted. The “Cop 3” reference in Samurai’s message was thought to mean the Offworld colony at Copernicus, on Luna. A scientific group there was known to be working in the same field of research as Ashling. That, then, would be the destination that Ashling was making for.
Circo called Fairfax at Pearse on a secure channel and announced, “We’ve got the break!”
Samurai hadn’t incurred any physical or psychological impairment that the formidable battery of tests, which he had been subjected to through the past week, could detect. On all fitness and reflex scales he scored well above average, his mental acuity rated superbly, and there was no measurable loss of performance in any of the skills that had been combined into his persona. These had been further extended and now included marksmanship and expertise in all weapons categories as well as hand-to-hand combat; gymnastics, swimming-diving, climbing, and parachuting; survival and stunt driving; fixed and rotary-wing aircraft piloting; codes and communications; familiarity with subversive organizations and enemies of the state, their methods, ideologies, and sympathizers; expertise in electronics, chemistry, forgery, explosives, vehicle mechanics, and computer techniques; and fluency in French, German, Spanish, and Russian.
After an hour of tests on breaking computer access codes, then a shower followed by a light dinner, he was sitting at the kitchen table in the apartment, confronting Vera across a chessboard.
Vera frowned down at the pieces while Samurai watched indifferently, still playing in his mind with decision trees and probability matches. Finally she moved a knight.
“You lose in three,” Samurai said. “Rook takes pawn, check, followed by bishop to bishop six if you block it, or pawn takes pawn if you move the king. Either way, the queen mates.”
“Hm. What if I exchange rooks?”
“The same thing, after rook to bishop one. You’re dead.”
Vera pushed the board aside with a sigh. “Oh, this isn’t fair. They’ve downloaded a tape. How am I supposed to compete against that?”
She said the right thing instinctively. It all nurtured the feeling of his own dominance and invincibility, which Samurai seemed to need. He got up and moved out into the living room.
“Any plans for this evening?” Vera asked, rising and following.
He scowled, seemingly morose and restless. “I don’t know. Maybe I’ll work out on the mat. Find out for me if Nagaoko is available. He’s good.”
“I thought Valdheim wanted to stage some retentivity tests tonight.”
Samurai’s expression darkened. “Tests, tests. I’m tired of their tests. It’s time to get out of here.”
“The NSA are doing what they can. They don’t exactly have a lot to go on.”
“The NSA are imbeciles. I could do it better myself. Give me a day to go through their intercepts and I’d—”
A call tone sounded from the desk unit. He strode over and stabbed a button to accept. It was Nordens, for once looking excited.
“Get packing. You’re on your way,” he announced. “They’ve found him.”
“Where?” Samurai snapped.
“Hamburg. It’s as well that we made one of your test languages German, because there wouldn’t be time to add it in now. Ashling arrives aboard a German ship called the Auriga, due to dock at two-thirty tomorrow afternoon. There’s a flight out of Dulles to Frankfurt tonight. You’re booked through as Sam Harris.” Since the Gordon identity was compromised, a new cover for Samurai had already been created. “Circo is arranging entry papers now. His people from the consulate will meet you at Hamburg when you arrive tomorrow morning. You leave right away.”
Nordens stood with Jerry Tierney by the landing pad at Pearse, watching the helicopter that would take Samurai to Dulles rise into the night sky. The helicopter turned onto a northeast heading and sped away to lose itself among the stars. Nordens stared after the receding speck, moonlight glinting from his spectacles. Tierney looked disconsolately at the ground.
“We can do no more,” Nordens said. “Everything depends on Samurai now.”
“If you say so,” Tierney replied neutrally.
They turned and began walking toward the experimental wing. “I don’t get the impression that you quite understand the full ramifications of the project, Jerry,” Nordens said, as if reading his thoughts.
“Explain it to me, then,” Tierney said.
“We are constrained to the service of fools. Those people in Washington are too dull-witted to grasp the opportunity for real power when it presents itself to them. They live their overcautious lives paralyzed by their own indecision and half measures.”
Tierney looked at him uncertainly. Nordens seemed not to notice, and expounded as they passed the security post and went on into the ground-level reception area, “Reprogramming the opposition’s political beliefs is only the tip of what can be achieved. It’s too limited—limited by the necessity of concentrating on just a few key individuals—people like Daparras, for instance. The targets that we could hope for would be too few, and the time required for each too much for the whole thing to be really effective. It’s not a practicable way to go about things if you want to shape a society.”
They stopped in front of the elevators. It wasn’t the first time that Tierney had heard Nordens talking in this fashion.
“Have you read Plato, Jerry?” Nordens asked.
“Can’t say it’s something that I ever got around to,” Tierney replied.
“Do so. It will clarify your understanding of the importance of the state, and the duty of the citizen to subordinate individual interests to those of the whole. And who is to decide what are the better interests of the whole? That’s where what we in this part of the world called democracy was bound to fail, leading us to the predicament that we now find ourselves in. Sheep can’t rule themselves. They’re not capable of determining in which direction their true interests lie. Society will produce an elite whose natural role is to know and decide, just as the place of the rest is to follow. But discipline and firmness are essential for such an order to prevail—and, if need be, ruthlessness.”
The elevator arrived, and the door opened. Tierney was going on through to the security office and had intended leaving Nordens here, but Nordens ignored the waiting car and continued, “That truth was glimpsed by many thinkers in history, but the ideals that they aspired to were always thwarted by the perverseness of raw human material, which was all they ever had to work with. Even Plato himself failed, when he went as adviser to Dionysius and attempted to guide the formation of a model state in Sicily. The ideal society has always been unattainable because the material to build it was unsuitable. Until now.” Nordens’s eyes gleamed behind his spectacles. “Now we can change the material!”
Tierney looked at him uncertainly. “The material? You mean all of it? You’re not talking about just a few individuals?”
Nordens shook his head. “Test cases. Mere beginnings. You might alter the population’s disposition slightly by influencing a few individuals like Daparras, but you won’t change it radically. What a paucity of result for the effort expended.…But suppose we had the ability to predispose an entire population to exhibiting more desirable and compliant attitudes, say by introducing suitable chemical agents on a mass scale—which could be accomplished by any of several means. Because I think that could be the next step in this—provided we can learn enough about the relevant transfer patterns to encode them into molecular form.” Nordens was visibly excited by the prospect. He grasped Tierney by the arm. “And who knows. Maybe, one day, we could actually fuse it into the genome and make it hereditable. So once society was conditioned into being untroublesome, its traits would automatically be passed on, which would enable us, its rightful rulers, to govern unthreatened and effectively, without the inconvenience of having to indoctrinate every generation afresh. In other words, we are standing on the threshold of a whole new age. But Ashling could give the Offworlders the key to unlocking the information that will enable it to be realized. And that’s why he must be stopped. That is what this is all about.”
Tierney looked away, at the concrete-walled passages and doors leading to the lab areas. Or to prevent the rest of the world from finding out, he thought to himself.
Nordens, carried away now by his vision, went on, “We’ve shown that we can shape an individual to our needs. Next is to shape a whole population. That’s where the people who are backing this are heading. I’m talking about powerful people, Jerry. There’s no better security in life than making sure you’re on the right side.”
Clearly, Nordens had no hesitation in ranking himself among the elite who would plan and guide the shaping of this Utopia. Tierney was less happy about where those such as himself were likely to end up in the eventual scheme of things.
After Nordens finally entered the elevator, Tierney continued on his way to the security office. It led through the bio-assay section, where various animals were kept. Tierney walked between the cages of rats, hamsters, and rabbits, all laid out in neat rows according to what people like Nordens viewed as a desirable pattern of order and tidiness, suited to their own convenience. That’s how they would organize all of us, Tierney thought.
His mood had grown very troubled by the time he got back to his office. Somebody was going to have to do something before this got out of hand, he decided. Nordens and Circo were already taking it upon themselves effectively to formulate their own foreign policy. What would be next if that kind of megalomania went unchecked?
Samurai was met at Hamburg’s Fuhlsbüttel airport by the local CIA station chief, Ambrose Chame, who was based at the U.S. consulate ostensibly as a member of a trade delegation, and a younger man whom he introduced as William Litherland, one of his agents. A black Mercedes waited for them outside the terminal. As they sped south into the city preceded by a Hamburg police car flashing a blue light, Chame briefed Samurai on the measures that had been put in place. Circo had called somebody at the Berlin embassy the night before, requesting police cooperation but declining to give details on grounds of national security, and the German federal authorities had cleared things with Hamburg.
Chame was a solid, heavily built man in his fifties, who moved ponderously and wheezily, with shaggy hair, ample, ruddy features, and a ragged mustache. He was wearing an open raincoat and scarf with a Tyrolean hat against the north German winter cold, and talked in a blunt, forthright manner that said he’d been doing this for years, it was as lousy as any other job, and anyone who didn’t like his manners should be looking for a different line of work.
“The latest is that the boat’s on time. The kraut honcho running this end is a guy called Weyel. He’s down at the docks now, getting set up. They’ll be checking out everyone who comes down the plank.”
“How many men does he have? Where has he deployed them?” Samurai asked.
“That’s his bag. We’ll find out when we get there.”
“How will they identify Ashling?”
“We got pictures through the wire first thing this morning.”
“These men of Weyel’s, I assume they are reliable?” Samurai fired the questions in a clipped, authoritative voice, conveying more than a hint of presumption that he already regarded this as his operation.
Chame eyed him undecidedly for a second before replying. “Relax. Yeah, they’re as good as you’re gonna get, okay?”
“We can’t afford any mistakes,” Samurai insisted.
“We’re just gonna grab a guy who’s coming off a fuckin’ ship, for chrissakes,” Chame pointed out. “You wanna call out the whole army?”
“I’m used to perfection, and I expect nothing less,” Samurai informed him curtly.
Chame caught Litherland’s look; turned his eyes upward briefly, and looked away out the window at the outskirts of the city. Desk cowboy from inside the Beltway. This was going to be one of those pain-in-the-ass jobs that he just loved.
Inspector Weyel, in contrast to Chame, was small and dapper, clad in a gray overcoat over a suit, with checkered vest and a crisp white shirt. Also, to begin with anyway, he was impressed by, and approving of, Samurai’s display of professional thoroughness.
The Auriga was a medium-tonnage freighter that carried maybe a dozen passengers in addition to cargo. It would moor at the Baltic-Pacific Line berths on a quay backed by warehouses and the company’s offices in the north-shore docks. Weyel had the full cooperation of the owners, and had spread out a plan of the berthing area on a table in the loading manager’s office, which looked out over the quay. Three gangplanks were usually used, one forward, one stern, and one amidships. The passengers disembarked via the last. Nevertheless, Samurai had insisted on having one of Weyel’s men at every gate, each of them backed by two uniformed men.
“What happens after they come ashore?” Samurai asked, studying the plan. “Which way do they leave?”
An official of the company pointed. “The luggage is brought through to there, where they clear immigration and customs. Then along that corridor past the trucking bays to the exit. The roadway there connects out through gates to the street.”
“Place another man in the customs hall there, with two uniformed men by the door out,” Samurai directed. “Also, keep a car standing by outside the gate.” Weyel nodded and passed the instructions to an assistant, who said “Ja” and hurried away.
Samurai went to the window and surveyed the berth where the Auriga would dock. “There is the chance that they could take him off the far side in a boat,” he said. “Contact the harbor police and have a launch patrolling about five hundred meters out there.”
Weyel thought that was getting a bit melodramatic, but he complied.
“I assume we have direct contact from here to all your units?” Samurai said.
Weyel indicated the radio on the table beside the plans.
“The sets have all been tested?”
“They are quite reliable,” Weyel assured him. For the first time, a discernible edge of irritation crept into his voice.
“Test them,” Samurai said.
Chame and Litherland were watching from inside the doorway. “Think we need the Navy too, in case he tries to get away in a submarine?” Litherland murmured from the side of his mouth, his face deadpan.
Chame snorted beneath his breath and shook his head. “That guy’s got a fuckin’ cattle prod stuck up his ass. Where are they getting ’em from these days, Bill?”
The harbor police launch duly appeared and began circling slowly offshore in the estuary. The phone rang and was answered by the company official, who announced that the Auriga was less than a kilometer away along the channel. The ship came into sight shortly afterward under the overcast sky, an unremarkable container ship with a stern superstructure, hull lime-green showing a few streaks of rust, and an orange stack. It turned at one of the outer buoys, came in on an approach course to align gradually with the dock, reversed screws, and nudged gently against the quay. Hawsers were pulled across and secured fore and aft. The gangways went up, shouted orders and replies sounded back and forth, and a few minutes later figures began filing down.
But nothing came from the policemen watching the midships ramp to report anybody resembling Ashling. Nor from either of the other two ramps, where crewmen had also started coming off.
“Stop them all at the customs point,” Samurai instructed, looking strained. “I’m going down there myself.”
He did so, and observed personally while each of the ten listed passengers was interviewed by an immigration agent. None of them was Ashling.
“Seal off this whole area,” Samurai said. “None of the crew are to be let out without being checked. He could be disguised.”
Everyone who had come ashore was cleared. The delay was affecting operations aboard the ship, and the captain was getting annoyed, demanding to know what in hell was going on. Chame stayed out of it, smoking cigarettes, and seemed to find it amusing.
“There is no way they could have been tipped off,” Samurai fumed. “He must be here somewhere. Inspector, organize a search of the ship.”
But by now Weyel had had enough. “Look, I think it’s about time you realized that you don’t have the authority to give orders here,” he retorted.
“Just do it, dammit!”
“My instructions were to assist you in apprehending a passenger,” Weyel reminded him. “The passengers have all been accounted for, and the man you’re looking for was not among them. Therefore I have no further obligation. I suggest you recheck with your sources of information.”
Samurai looked across in exasperation to Chame, who was smirking over a plastic cup of coffee. “Can you explain to this idiot that this is important?”
“You’re the hot shit from the top, who knows what’s going on. You explain it to him.”
At that moment, hurrying footsteps sounded from the corridor leading out to the street entrance. The policemen by the door into the customs hall parted to let through a man in a raincoat, who came straight over to Weyel.
“What is it, Gustav?” Weyel said, reading the urgency on his face.
“We’ve just got news from the Harbor Light Bar, sir. The Estonian who calls himself Nicolaus was seen there within the last hour, accompanied by a man answering to Ashling’s description. They left through the rear entrance when our men arrived who were sent to check.”
Samurai put a hand to his brow. “You mean you didn’t have the back of the place covered?” he grated.
“Let’s get over there,” Weyel snapped. Chame gulped down the last of his coffee, crumpled the cup, and tossed it at a bin. Samurai was already following Weyel out, while the other policemen around the room converged toward the doorway behind them.
The Harbor Light Bar was little more than a glorified pub down on the waterfront, with a couple of drinking lounges, one of which also served as the restaurant, and a few rooms that were let out upstairs.
“Yes, he left that way, the Estonian,” the proprietor confirmed, indicating a passageway leading to the back of the premises. He nodded and stabbed a finger up and down on the photograph of Ashling that was lying on the bartop. “The man who was with him looked like that. They sneaked out with their bags as if they were in a hurry. It was when your police came in this way and started asking questions.”
“You’re sure?” Weyel said, sounding as if he found it hard to believe.
“Of course he’s sure,” Samurai seethed. “Does he look like one of those incompetents that you’ve got working for you?”
“I’d suggest that language like that is hardly likely to prove constructive,” Weyel said stiffly.
“What kind of language do you expect, Inspector?” Samurai demanded. “Why not face the facts? Hell, you screwed up.”
Weyel wasn’t used to having this kind of difference aired in public. “How can you say that?” he retorted. “We did everything exactly as you specified.”
“On the contrary, you did everything wrong. Am I expected to be everywhere at once?”
“What else did you want?” Weyel demanded angrily.
Samurai enumerated on his fingers, his eyes blazing. “You let him slip through somewhere, off the ship. You didn’t have this place staked out from the start, which allowed them to get back here. You sent uniformed men blundering in the front to alert them. You hadn’t secured the rear. Do you want me to go on?…Should I take over running whatever passes for a training school in this city?”
Weyel colored visibly and whirled upon him, whereupon Chame interjected, “Why don’t we check out the room? It might tell us something.”
Which averted a row for the time being. The policemen, Chame and Litherland, and Samurai followed the proprietor up a flight of stairs behind the living room, and along a passage adorned with nautical decor and paintings of ships.
The room was a plain but bright and cleanly kept single, with closet doors open, a half-empty bottle of schnapps left on the vanity, and other signs of having been hurriedly vacated. There were some oddments of food, discarded wrappings, and a couple of used bus and train tickets lying around, but nothing immediately useful. Litherland touched a fingertip to a trace of white crystalline powder on the vanity top near the bottle and tested it experimentally with his tongue. “Salt,” he informed the others simply.
Chame, meanwhile, had straightened up from the waste bin, holding an empty, cylindrical, plastic container.
Samurai took it from him and turned it to show the label. It read “Panacyn,” and had Ashling’s name, along with directions.
“It’s his,” Samurai announced grimly. “He was here.” He held the container out, as if offering evidence that he was inviting any of the others to challenge. None of them did.
The implication was clear. Germany was part of the Consolidation, and hence its security and police forces cooperated closely with U.S. and other Western agencies, and maintained strict frontier controls. But if Ashling nevertheless managed to cross over into Poland or the states that had once constituted Czechoslovakia, he would be virtually unstoppable. After half a century of the delights of communism, those countries took a more relaxed attitude toward such matters, making passage onward into the FER little more than a formality. In fact, some said that Eastern Europe was already as good as a part of the FER. And once there, in the chaos and anarchy that now prevailed where tsars and commissars had once ruled, he could vanish without effort.
Samurai looked from one to another of the faces confronting him, as if expecting somebody to voice the obvious. They stared back, waiting. “He must be stopped before he gets out of Hamburg,” he said finally.
“Very well. You’re the perfectionist. What would you suggest?” Weyel replied, sounding sarcastic and relishing it.
For once Samurai’s resourcefulness failed him. After a final check around the room, which turned up nothing new, the party went back downstairs and split up to depart in several vehicles. Weyel accompanied Chame, Litherland, and Samurai back to the U.S. consulate to make sure that his version of the story was incorporated into the record there. Samurai said nothing, but sat glowering with suppressed rage throughout the drive.
Chame, in between popping peanuts into his mouth and studying the city passing by, sent occasional, curiously thoughtful glances in his direction as they drove. For somebody who seemed to be exceptional in a lot of ways, this Sam Harris was astoundingly inept at handling the human side of the business, Chame thought. And in Chame’s experience, the people side was what it was all about. Somehow he got chilly passings of a feeling that Harris didn’t have a human side to him at all. Either that, or something inside the hotshot from Washington was starting to come apart.
The news waiting when they got to the consulate changed the whole picture, however. Following a priority-one request from Circo, search keywords relating to Ashling’s defection had been watchlisted in the National Security Agency computers at Fort Meade, the final repository and clearinghouse of the nation’s prolific industry in global communications tapping and eavesdropping. A satellite intercept that morning had picked up an item in a microwaved message stream of telephone conversations emanating from an unidentified source inside the FER. The extract, routed to the consulate in Hamburg via the U.S. embassy in Berlin, had come in only minutes previously. It read:
“There’s been a change of plan. We’ve got a place reserved for Headman on a December 6 launch from Semipalatinsk. Have you got that?”…There was a gap to indicate a reply, which the satellite hadn’t recorded since it would have been carried in a transmission going the other way. Then: “Yuri won’t be able to make it tonight to collect him in Berlin. So can you put him up somewhere overnight, and Yuri will meet you for breakfast instead.”…Another gap, followed by, “Okay, then. That’s the Brandenburger on Heerstrasse, ten o’clock sharp. Yuri will be there.…” The route-back code contained in the transmission indicated that the call had originated from Volgograd, in what was now the Kalmyk Republic.
And that suddenly answered everything. Semipalatinsk, formerly a center of the Soviet space program, was now one of the principal Earthports to Offworld, located in the Kazakh Free State. Pipeline’s intention was clearly to ship Ashling up from there, launching in five days’ time. Yuri was evidently a courier being sent to collect Ashling and take him across the frontier. And they weren’t due to meet until tomorrow!
Samurai departed for Berlin less than an hour later, having made arrangements with his U.S. embassy contact to be met there, and for police cooperation and backup to be available.
This was going to be Berlin district’s problem now! Inspector Weyel obligingly agreed to provide Samurai with a car. He even supplied him with a police driver. Just to make sure he got there.
Circo’s boss, the head of the Federal Security Service, was a man called Andrew Grazin. The FSS was essentially his own creation. Introduced to begin with—ostensibly, at least—as an exclusive intelligence arm of the Executive Branch, it had swiftly expanded its role to supplant the FBI in the investigation and prosecution of domestic matters deemed “political”; it could also intervene in situations outside the home borders when directed, which the CIA resented but found itself powerless to change. In practice this meant having virtually a free hand to pursue and suppress any organization, critic, or other focus of opposition that was considered to be sufficiently inconvenient, and that the ordinary constraints on search, privacy invasion, and seizure made it difficult to deal with. This, of course, had been the original intention. The service had been modeled on lessons drawn from experiments in drug and environmental law enforcement conducted in earlier years to test just what degree of constitutional circumvention it was possible to get away with. The answer turned out to be “practically as much as you like,” since the bulk of the population was long past being able to distinguish between mass-media-created make-believe and reality, anyway.
By its very nature, the FSS was an organization that attracted people who were ambitious, adversatively disposed, unlikely to be impressed by legal or ethical impediments to getting results, and who presumed ulterior motives in everything, suspected anything that came too easily, and trusted nobody. Grazin, therefore, took it for granted that all of his subordinates were potential rivals for his job. Accordingly, he considered it no more than an elementary precaution to divulge nothing unnecessarily, while expecting everything to be reported to him, thus exploiting their lack of security and bolstering his own. Since nothing in life had caused him to conceive otherwise, he assumed that, whatever else their public images and pretensions, all organizations that had demonstrated the wherewithal for survival worked the same way.
It didn’t strike him as surprising or unfitting, therefore, when Jerry Tierney, head of internal security at Pearse, contacted him late at night on a personal line with something urgent to discuss. Grazin had been informed of Southside over a year ago when the project was conceived, his brief being to render support and cooperation, if requested, while keeping a low profile. A week ago some of Circo’s men had been mixed up in the fiasco in Chicago, when three of Tierney’s men had gone after a subject from Pearse who had gone off the rails and needed to be brought back. Grazin assumed that Tierney’s request had something to do with that—although why he hadn’t gone through Circo, who handled Southside, or why, if it was really a top-level matter, it hadn’t come through Fairfax, was a good question.
They met early the following morning. In view of the irregularity of the situation, and since, in any case, Grazin generally preferred not to advertise whom he was talking to and when, they talked from the windows of their cars in a parking lot outside Union Station, a quarter mile from the Capitol.
“Sure, of course I know that the business about military personnel training was just a cover,” Grazin said when Tierney went back to the origins of the project. “The real object is ideological reprogramming.” He shrugged in a so-what kind of way. “It’s a changing world. You can’t just keep freaks who want to change the system off the streets anymore. So you change how they think, instead.”
“That was how it started out,” Tierney agreed. “But then things got more complicated.”
Grazin frowned. “I thought everything was okay. The first phase was wrapped up. Now they’re evaluating results out in the field. Isn’t that how it is?” As far as he was aware, the volunteers who hadn’t been screened out had each been implanted with a test set of reorientation patterns, and then returned to their normal working environments so that the results could be observed.
Tierney shook his head. “There’s more to it. One of the subjects wasn’t returned. There was some kind of screwup, and he ended up with the donor’s complete personality in his head, not just the target patterns. In other words, he thought he was the donor. Only, in the meantime, the guy’d had a stroke and fallen over up in Minneapolis. It was all a mess. So an accident record was faked to write the subject off in a helicopter accident—to clear the picture.”
“Shit.” Grazin covered his eyes. “Who arranged this?”
Tierney sighed resignedly. “Fairfax, Nordens.…”
“You’re telling me you weren’t a part of it?”
“I knew there was something odd going on, but I didn’t realize how much at the time.”
Grazin didn’t believe that, but this wasn’t the time to worry about it. “And Circo?” he guessed.
Tierney nodded heavily. “Sure. Circo was in it up to his ass. He fixed things with the military.”
Grazin nodded curtly. “So why are you telling me now?”
“Because of the way it’s gone since. You see, they could have come clean with the people who’d need to know, and simply told them that they’d screwed up and were stuck with this guy who thinks he’s someone else who’s dead. But they didn’t do that. They’ve been using him for a different kind of experiment that nobody knows about—that goes a lot further than Southside.”
Grazin frowned again. “Further?…What are you talking about?”
“Something that Nordens dreamed up—about not just changing parts of a person, but creating a whole new one, to order.”
“Creating a person?”
“Right. Synthetic. Purpose-built to be anything you want. Think what the right people could do with that.”
“What people? Who else are you saying knows about this?”
“Fairfax and Circo have got the backing of some group somewhere, who are worth a lot of bread and think they can run the system better. I don’t have names yet.…But there’s a crazy note starting to sound all through this. To try and check out this idea, they turned this volunteer they were left with into a kind of super field man: a composite of everything, physical skills, tech know-how, knowledge base, you name it. His code designation is Samurai. There were a few problems—”
“Wait. Wasn’t he the loose cannon that Fairfax wanted Circo’s people to bring back from Chicago?”
“Right. Only, recently it’s gotten worse. The scientist who started the whole business off, the one they thought they had by the balls, who was working down at Pearse, opted out and blew the country through Pipeline. Right now he’s in Germany, offplanet-bound via the FER, obviously to spill the works. Fairfax and the others have panicked and sent Samurai after him. Circo has requested official cooperation locally through the embassy. They’ve—”
“What!” Grazin paled. “You mean they’ve sent him to Europe, on their own authority?…Obtained unsanctioned involvement of foreign government agencies? This is insane.”
“That’s what I’m saying. They’re out of control down there. He’s briefed to assassinate if necessary.”
“Jesus Christ!”
“They—”
“Taking out a dissident scientist on foreign territory? Getting foreign authorities mixed up in it? He’s got to be called off. This is a fuse leading straight to an international situation.”
Tierney shook his head. “No chance. You don’t understand.”
“Understand what?”
“You can’t call him off. Samurai won’t stop.”
Grazin’s expression hardened. “Then he’ll have to be stopped,” he declared grimly.
Tierney bit his lip. “That mightn’t be so easy,” he replied.
This time there would be no mistake. The Brandenburger restaurant was being staked out from unmarked cars placed in both directions from the entrance; the only other exit at the rear was covered; a plainclothes policeman and policewoman had been inside, posing as customers, since 9:30; and the arrest squad was with Samurai in the temporary headquarters that he had set up in a hairdresser’s on the other side of the street, with an open line to police headquarters. It had all been arranged smoothly and without hitches since Samurai’s arrival from Hamburg the previous evening: a paradigm of German thoroughness, exemplifying the kind of discipline and concern for detail that the rest of the Consolidation needed. Samurai was well satisfied.
Tension rose as 10:00 drew nearer, peaking expectantly as the hour came.…But nothing happened. By 10:30 the watchers were growing anxious and puzzled. Chief Inspector Gelhardt of the Berlin Police tapped a code into his communicator to activate the unit contained in the purse that the woman inside had placed on the table in front of her. It emitted a low beep, inaudible beyond a few feet.
“Go ahead,” the woman’s voice acknowledged, indicating that it was clear for him to speak.
“Anything?”
“No. There has been nobody resembling either of them.” They had Ashling’s picture and knew what Nicolaus looked like from the description furnished by the girl in the Hamburg brothel. Yuri’s appearance, of course, was unknown.
When it got to 11:00, Samurai had had enough. Followed by Gelhardt and two of his men, he crossed the street and entered the restaurant. The plainclothes policeman shook his head almost imperceptibly. Samurai marched up to the cash desk and confronted the manager with an ID card.
“International security. These men with me are police.” He produced a print of the picture of Ashling sent through from Washington. “Have you seen this man in here this morning?”
The manager looked at the picture. “Yes,” he replied simply. “He was here with two other men. They had breakfast together.”
“What!” Samurai nearly choked. “When was this? How long ago?”
The manager looked across at a clock on the far wall. “Let me see, a while ago now—the early rush was still on. They sat at that table over there.…I’d say about eight, eight-thirty, something like that. A quarter to nine at the latest, anyway.”
Samurai stared at him, speechless. It was sickening. There must have been another call from Volgograd later, changing the time, which had either been missed by the NSA or hadn’t got through yet. Or maybe the first message had been in a code, where “ten” meant “eight,” or something equally simple. But if that was the case, why hadn’t the name of the location been coded?…Whatever the answer, it wouldn’t help now.
“How did they leave?” Gelhardt inquired.
“By taxi.”
“Were they carrying anything?”
“I’m sorry, I don’t remember.”
“Have you any idea where they were heading?”
The manager spread his hands and smiled apologetically. “Again, I am sorry, gentlemen. I don’t know where our customers go when they leave. What else can I say?”
The operation was called off forthwith. The cavalcade formed up and proceeded back to the local police headquarters. It wasn’t long before Samurai was upsetting people again.
“Absolutely out of the question!” Gelhardt threw up his hands, turned away toward the window to compose himself, then wheeled back again and planted his knuckles on the top of the desk in his office. “Look, Mr. Harris, I don’t think you quite appreciate what you’re asking. Close all crossing points through the eastern frontier? I don’t have the authority to do that. Nobody in this department does. Nobody in this building does. It’s not even under police jurisdiction. It’s a matter for border security, and they—”
“And I don’t think that you appreciate that what we’re talking about here has ramifications of the utmost importance,” Samurai countered. “National and international. The outcome of this could affect the political stability of your country and mine…of the whole Consolidation.”
“That’s as may be, but if so it’s a matter for international authorities, not us.”
“Then I strongly suggest that you—” A phone on Gelhardt’s desk interrupted.
“Excuse me.” He touched a button to accept. The screen showed the face of an aide in the general office outside—Gelhardt had closed the door when his exchange with Samurai started getting heated. “I thought I said we weren’t to be interrupted,” Gelhardt said.
“I know, sir, but we’ve just had some news that appears pertinent. The desk sergeant at Third Precinct station is on the line. A taxi driver has just walked in there, saying he has information concerning three men that he understands you were looking for at the Brandenburger. Apparently he took them to Friedrichstrasse.”
“Third Precinct?” Samurai queried.
Gelhardt glanced at him. “Off Heerstrasse, a few blocks from the Brandenburger.” Samurai didn’t need to be told that Friedrichstrasse was one of the city’s principal railroad stations.
Gelhardt looked back at the screen. “Tell them to keep him there. We’re on our way over.”
Another break, straight out of the blue, just when Samurai had been hard put to know which way to go next. It was almost as if Fate was determined to lead him on. Lucky coincidences, he concluded gratefully, didn’t only happen in second-rate fiction.
He drove with Gelhardt and several other officers to the Third Precinct station, where a small and scruffily clad man with a day’s growth of razor stubble and yellow teeth confirmed that he had picked up two men fitting Ashling’s and Nicolaus’s descriptions, along with a third man, pinkish in complexion, from the Brandenburger at eight-forty according to his log, and driven them to Friedrichstrasse. He had returned to the Brandenburger later for another fare and been told by the manager that the police were looking for his previous passengers.
“Did they say where they were going?” Gelhardt asked the taxi driver.
“Not to me, sir. But on the way I overheard one of them grumbling about having to spend half the day in Zittau. Then the pink-faced one said that he hoped that this person would get them across tonight. I didn’t really catch the name. It sounded like Rosky, Rosesky, or something like that. Then one of the others hushed him up—you know, as if he shouldn’t have been talking about it.”
There was no guarantee, of course, that all three men would actually be traveling together, which would have been conspicuous. From the wording of the telephone call picked up by the NSA, it seemed more likely that Nicolaus would have handed Ashling over to Yuri and seen them onto the train, and then gone his own way.
A check of the railway timetables showed that a train had departed at 9:35 from Friedrichstrasse going through Cottbus, a rail interchange town to the east, roughly halfway down to the southern tip of the country. There was a regular service through Cottbus down to Görlitz, farther south and east, situated on the Lausitzer Neisse River, opposite the Polish town of Zgorzelec. There was a rail connection from there to Zittau, the town mentioned by the taxi driver, which lay yet farther south in the extreme southeastern tip of Germany.
“Why go all the way to Zittau?” Samurai asked Gelhardt after digesting this much from maps.
“It’s just past the point where the three frontiers meet,” Gelhardt replied. “The crossing is into Bohemia, not Poland. Controls are easier. From Bohemia they could either go north again into Poland, or eastward, through Moravia and Slovakia into FER territory. Either way would be easy, since outside the Consolidation everything gets lax. Zittau is the kind of place that Pipeline would use.”
Samurai departed for Zittau shortly after lunch. Gelhardt, suddenly undergoing the same kind of miraculous transformation into a model of cooperation as had overcome Inspector Weyel in Hamburg, phoned ahead to have the local agents there check into possible leads on anyone called Rosky, Rosesky, or anything similar, who might be connected with border crossing procedures. As an afterthought, he told the desk sergeant to slip the taxi driver an extra fifty marks from the grease fund the next time he came in.
While Samurai was on his way to Zittau it was still morning in Washington, where a dumbfounded Circo was being blasted by Grazin after being wakened and flown up from Pearse in the middle of the night.
“I don’t have any time for bullshit. The war’s over for you, buddy,” Grazin stormed. “There’s only one thing left for you to do now to make it easier on yourself when you go through the wringer, and that’s come clean. I want a full disclosure of what’s been going on and who’s been involved. But before we get into that, we’ve got this situation over in Europe. Now, I want to know where this Samurai is, exactly what he’s doing over there, and who his contacts are.” He flipped a switch to start the recorder built into the desk’s comm unit. “So sing.”
There was something odd about Captain Erenthaller, Samurai had decided.
It was early evening in the border town of Zittau. Snow had fallen during the day, and against the heavy sky the outlines of factories stood out starkly behind rows of drab, slate-roofed houses huddled in the pale light from the street lamps. In the yellow-painted, austere local offices of the Dresden district border police, Samurai sat making notes and watching as the staff searched records and dossiers for possible leads to the names that the taxi driver had given in Berlin. The commissioner was standing behind a clerk at a computer screen, checking the “Rovikossky” who was listed as working at the passport office in Dresden, but it appeared that he had retired some years ago. A policeman was going through one of a pile of files, while another was on the line to verify an address. They were all working methodically, if a little tensely in view of the urgency that Samurai had stressed. But the captain, Erenthaller, seemed deeply ill at ease. Samurai had been observing him surreptitiously for some time.
He was heavily built but out of shape, late thirties, with black hair cropped close above a creased bull neck, a slack but pugnacious mouth set in a blue-shadowed chin, and furtive eyes that betrayed slyness but little intelligence. For the past hour he had been in constant nervous motion about the room, unable to keep still, and had flinched visibly every time an incoming call sounded, then watched when somebody took it, as if on tenterhooks over what it might be about. And there was a pallor about his face that Samurai sensed not to be normal, and a dampness that could almost be felt, emanating from his skin.
He knew something, Samurai was certain. His reaction had started as soon as the commissioner gave them the brief on Rosky/Rosesky and introduced Samurai as a “special agent from Washington, cleared by Berlin.” He knew something. At any moment the checks could turn up something that he was involved in and that would incriminate him, and he was scared. And being scared meant being vulnerable, as Samurai was well aware.
The policeman who had been on the phone cleared down, shaking his head. “Nothing there. He did have a boat, but he got rid of it six months ago and now lives with his daughter in Leipzig.”
“Cross him off,” the commissioner said. He looked at the policeman who was checking the files. “What about this Rossinsky?”
“Well…yes, he’s still here in town. But at fifty-five, a night watchman at a shunting yard? What’s the connection?”
The commissioner pulled a face. “Railroads, eh? Put him down as a possible.”
Across the room, Erenthaller started to move, changed his mind, then stood up. “Er, I’ll be back in a minute,” he muttered, and left. Samurai set down his pen and sat back in the chair. Through the doorway, which had been left slightly open, he tracked Erenthaller’s footsteps and movements: away a short distance to the right along the corridor outside, a turn, several more steps, then the wary opening, as if making sure that nobody was inside, and then even more careful closing, of a door.
A tone rang for an incoming call. One of the policemen turned to a screen and activated it. The commissioner looked at a sheet of paper that he was holding and moved over to compare something written on it with an item showing on another screen. “What the hell’s this name doing here, Carl?” he grumbled, “it’s a woman.”
“Oh, sorry. My mistake.”
Samurai moved his chair and stood up. “Excuse me for a moment,” he murmured softly, and vanished.
To the left, the corridor opened into a main office; there was nobody in the part of it that was visible. In the other direction it passed a wide alcove a few yards away on one side, across which two doors faced each other, and continued beyond. Samurai moved quietly to the alcove and listened at one of the doors, but could hear nothing. He tried the other. Inside, a lowered voice was speaking hurriedly, the words too indistinct to make out. He tried the handle gently. The door was locked. Drawing a long breath to concentrate his strength, he drew back a short distance, then launched himself at it, at the same time half turning his body to impact with full force focused on a line from the shoulder to the hip. The lockplate tore out of the jamb with a sharp crack; without breaking his movement, Samurai pivoted inside, wheeled to face the room, and closed the door behind him.
Erenthaller was standing beside a desk with a phone in his hand, guilt etched all over his face. Samurai took the phone from his hand before he had reacted to what was happening and hung it up.
“Okay, let’s hear it,” he hissed.
Erenthaller looked confused for a moment, and then took a swing. It was clumsy and inexpert. Samurai rode the blow easily with an arm and went in low and fast with a straight-hand jab to the solar plexus and punch to the kidney, following through by locking an arm across Erenthaller’s throat and slamming him down into the chair. He banged the side of the German’s head hard against the wall and drove a thumb into the cavity beneath his other ear. Erenthaller grimaced and writhed with the pain, but the blow to his middle had paralyzed his breathing and the arm across his throat stifled any sound.
“You know something,” Samurai growled. “What have you been hiding?”
Erenthaller clutched at his chest, gasped, puffed, and shook his head. “You’re mad.…I don’t know…what you’re talking about. Who do you think—”
Samurai palm-heeled his chin, forcing his head back over the top of the chair, and brought a knee up hard into his testicles. Erenthaller shrieked noiselessly. Samurai slapped him several times forehand and backhand across the face. “I don’t have time for games. Who were you calling?” Erenthaller’s head lolled drunkenly to one side in a daze. Samurai seized one of his little fingers and began forcing it back over the hand. Erenthaller could feel it on the verge of cracking.
“Okay, okay.…Don’t.”
“Talk. What’s the name?”
“For God’s sake ease up!” Samurai relaxed the pressure a fraction. Erenthaller licked his lips and swallowed for breath, his head still jammed against the back of the chair and his face running with perspiration.
“Rostiescki.…We have an arrangement.”
“Who is he?”
“Local undercover contact in Zittau.…Arranges crossings for people without papers. Pipeline uses him.…” Erenthaller hesitated. Samurai could see he was holding something back and began increasing the pressure on the finger again.
“Aghhh. All right!…But he’s also a spy. I get tip-offs from him on who’s due to go across. We work it between us. Know what I mean?”
Samurai released him contemptuously. Erenthaller massaged his bruised finger, wheezing erratically, then felt his throat. Samurai understood all too well. Rostiescki betrayed the people who trusted him for favors that Erenthaller could arrange, and Erenthaller took a cut of the fees that Rostiescki was paid. Erenthaller would let enough smaller fish through not to arouse suspicion, but he could make his record look good when an important catch came along. But he wouldn’t be averse to looking the other way if Rostiescki could secure a further payment on top of the original deal. A shabby operation, worked by a pretty shabby pair of operators.
“What do you know about these two men I’m interested in?” Samurai demanded. “These two men coming from Berlin.”
“I don’t know anything about them. You must have made a mistake.”
“There has been no mistake.”
“If they were coming here to go across with Rostiescki, I’d know about it,” Erenthaller insisted.
Samurai remained unimpressed. “Then let’s ask Rostiescki, shall we? Where can he be found?”
Erenthaller stared up and seemed about to say something, then saw the look in Samurai’s eyes and changed his mind. “He has a room in town, but he won’t be there now. There are a couple of places that he hangs around in.”
“Let’s go, then,” Samurai said.
Erenthaller looked startled. “But…” He gestured in the direction of the room they had come from.
“Never mind about them. We’ll get our coats on the way out. Move.”
They stopped at the cloakroom by the entrance for the coats. Samurai also took the briefcase that he carried on assignment, but left the bag with his clothes and personal effects. They slipped out of a side door into an alley and followed it to the street, with Erenthaller slithering on the snow in his attempt to keep up the pace, uncomfortably conscious of the gun that Samurai was holding in his overcoat pocket.
Minutes after they rounded the corner at the end of the street, a black Mercedes drew up at the front door from the opposite direction. Muffled figures emerged, hurried up the steps, and disappeared inside.
The third bar they tried was as drab as the others, with a low door beneath a wooden sign unreadable in the gloom, and yellow light showing through a window of small dirty panes set high in the wall. It lay between a few shops, all closed, and what looked like some kind of commercial premises, looming solid and featureless in the night. Samurai said he’d wait outside. Erenthaller ducked his head and went in. Samurai stamped his feet, then moved away a short distance along the street and back again, swinging his arms to keep up the circulation. The street remained deserted. After a minute or two, Erenthaller emerged clutching the sleeve of a weasely looking man in a flat cap and black overcoat, who was protesting vehemently, but in a low voice.
“What are you doing? I told you not to talk to me in public places. Haven’t you got…” His mouth closed like a trap when he saw Samurai waiting. “Who’s he?”
“It’s complicated,” Erenthaller began. “There have been rumors of a consignment due through here tonight. It seems there’s a lot of interest in high places. Do you know anything about it?”
Rostiescki shook his head violently. “Not me! No, I don’t know anything.” The fearful look that he shot Erenthaller in the wan light from the bar window told Samurai that he was lying. In a movement that all but lifted Rostiescki off his feet, Samurai seized his coat front and banged him back against the wall.
“Two of them, coming from Berlin,” Samurai said crisply.
“I don’t know anything, I swear. On my mother’s holy—”
Samurai produced his automatic and thrust the barrel up under Rostiescki’s chin. The click sounded of the safety catch disengaging. “You’ve got five seconds.”
“You can’t. I’m a—”
“Four.”
“For God’s sake, he doesn’t kn—” Erenthaller pleaded.
“Three.”
“All right, all right!…They’re here. I was scared. Honest, I thought they’d kill me.
“What names were you given?”
“One was Yuri, the other Oleg.”
“Their full names.”
“That’s all I was told, I swear—”
“Don’t treat me like a fool. If you were getting them out, you’d be arranging their papers. You’d need their full names.”
Rostiescki swallowed. “Yuri Baselyavin. Oleg Kubalov. Honest, I don’t know any more.” Samurai released him with a contemptuous shove.
Erenthaller moved forward a step, tensing. “What? Why wasn’t I told about this? When was it arranged?”
“I was going to,” Rostiescki whined. “I didn’t know myself until this afternoon. It all happened too fast.”
“They’re here somewhere now—right at this moment?” Samurai checked, repocketing the gun. “You can take us to them?”
Rostiescki looked at Erenthaller. The captain nodded. “Tell him.”
“They’re holed up in a boardinghouse on Kelenstrasse. The sergeant on the north bridge checkpoint until midnight will pass them through if I’m with them.” Rostiescki looked at Erenthaller pleadingly. “You would have got your cut, slit my throat if it isn’t true. There wasn’t time to tell you about it.”
“We’ll see about that. How many more times has this happened?”
“Save your squabbling until later,” Samurai told them curtly. He gestured at Erenthaller. “I’m going there with him right now. You get some of your men and follow. Meet us at the boardinghouse.”
“Which is it?” Erenthaller asked Rostiescki.
“Number nine. It has a wooden gate. They should be in the back room. I was to collect them.”
“I’ll see you there,” Erenthaller said, and hastened away.
Samurai and Rostiescki walked in silence through narrow, ill-lit streets, passing only the occasional shuffling figure and seeing little traffic. The air had a feel about it of more snow before morning. As far as Samurai was concerned, it was better this way. With treachery working both ways, and people to whom lying and double-crossing came as naturally as breathing, he would trust only what he had control over himself. That meant getting to Ashling first, before anyone else was even close.
They came to the end of a street of nondescript row houses. Rostiescki placed a restraining hand on Samurai’s arm and nodded. “It’s along there on the other side,” he murmured. “Opposite the lamp.”
“Who else is there?” Samurai asked.
“Just regular lodgers in the other rooms, and the woman who runs it.”
“Who’ll let us in?”
“I have a key.”
“We’ll go inside first and make sure that we’ve got them, then wait for the others,” Samurai said. He took out his gun again and fitted a silencer to the end.
Rostiescki watched apprehensively. “What are you going to do?”
“Just a precaution,” Samurai said.
They walked along the street to the door that Rostiescki had indicated. Rostiescki produced a key and pushed the door open. Samurai shoved him in ahead, keeping the gun in the other hand out of sight inside his coat. The passageway was dark and narrow, with stairs going up on one side, lit only by the light from a bare bulb on the first landing. They went past the stairs to a door in an even darker continuation of the passage at the rear, where only the light from an uncurtained window guided them. Rostiescki glanced at Samurai inquiringly. Samurai nodded. Rostiescki tapped on the door. “Hello,” he called quietly. “I am the one who has been sent to fetch you. Open the door.” There was no response. He tapped again, waited some more, then looked around.
“I don’t understand it.”
“Open it,” Samurai muttered. Holding his gun cocked and ready, he flattened himself against the wall on one side of the doorway.
Rostiescki took out his keys, fumbled for a while in the dim light, and eventually the lock clicked. He pushed the door open cautiously. “Hello?” No sound or movement came from inside. Samurai nodded for him to go in. Rostiescki reached inside for the light switch, flipped it on, and went through. “There’s nobody here,” his puzzled voice called back after a few seconds. Samurai came out into the light and joined him.
It was a charmless room with a blanked-off fireplace, a double bed and a few pieces of old-fashioned furniture, dusty drapes still open, and smelling damp. There were no clothes, bags, or other signs of occupancy. Samurai moved around, nonplussed. He opened the doors of the ponderous, freestanding oak wardrobe and looked inside the chest of drawers. Had this loathsome little man been lying all along about this as well? He started to turn toward Rostiescki accusingly, but his eye caught something lying on the mantelpiece. He picked it up. It was an empty matchbook cover from the Atlanta Hyatt hotel.
“They’ve been here,” he snapped. “Where have they gone?”
Rostiescki shook his head wildly. “I don’t know. I was supposed to collect them here. They were supposed to wait. On my mother’s grave I don’t know.”
Samurai stalked over to the window and stared out at the shadows of the tiny rear yard. Now he thought he could see what had happened. Pipeline was smarter than he’d given them credit for. They knew that the operation here was corrupt and unreliable, and had made the arrangements with Rostiescki as a decoy, to mislead him and his contact in the border police, while the real escape was effected by other means. So Ashling was very possibly over the border already.…
And then again, maybe Pipeline wasn’t so smart after all, Samurai reflected as he thought further. For Rostiescki had given one of the names as “Yuri,” which Samurai knew to be correct, since it had been obtained from Pipeline’s own intercepted communication to Nicolaus. Therefore “Oleg Kubalov” was probably correct too, which meant that Samurai knew the name that Ashling was traveling under. And he already knew Ashling’s destination, Semipalatinsk, and that he had to be there on December 6. Tomorrow would be December 3. That would give Samurai the best part of three days to stop him. Ample, he decided with satisfaction as he turned back from the window.
“I could talk to the landlady,” Rostiescki offered.
Samurai shook his head. “She won’t know anything. Turn out the light. We’re going to the north bridge checkpoint.”
As they came back outside, vehicle headlights approached from the direction of the town center. It was a Mercedes. But instead of the detachment of police that Samurai had expected, three men in raincoats and overcoats, all wearing hats, got out, leaving the rear doors open. Another man in civilian clothes was driving, with Erenthaller in the passenger seat beside him.
The three drew up around Samurai, backing him against the wall and ignoring Rostiescki. One of them showed a badge that was invisible in the dark. “You are Sam Harris, on a U.S. military assignment?”
“Yes.”
“Federal Republic State Security. Our instructions are to terminate your mission forthwith. You are to accompany us back to Berlin immediately.”
Samurai thought of the people he’d crossed in Hamburg and Berlin, and decided that this had been instigated out of malice to thwart him. “I’m not under Federal Security orders,” he told them. “My assignment was cleared through the embassy. You don’t give me instructions.”
“Mr. Harris, I must insist. We are authorized to use whatever force may be necessary, should you compel us to do so.” More headlights had appeared at the far end of the street: the backup squad, no doubt.
“Is that so?” Samurai said, planting his briefcase in the unresisting hands of Rostiescki, who looked on incredulously as in rapid succession one overcoated figure was catapulted over the wall by the gate, the second was felled where he stood, and the third ended up tumbling heels over head in the gutter behind the Mercedes. Before the form had stopped skidding in the snow, Samurai yanked open the door, hauled the driver out by the collar, and sent him sprawling with a cuff to the side of the head. He jammed Rostiescki, still clutching the briefcase, into the rear seat and slammed the door behind him.
Erenthaller, still in the front passenger seat, could have opened the door and jumped. Instead he pulled his gun. But Samurai fired first as he slid into the driver’s seat, wounding Erenthaller in the side, and pushed him out the other side with one arm as he steered the car away. Erenthaller fell in the path of the backup car closing in from behind, causing it to brake and swerve. By the time the driver had sorted himself out again, the Mercedes was away along the street.
“Which way is the bridge?” Samurai yelled over his shoulder to the terrified Rostiescki.
“Ahead, but over to the left,” Samurai went in the other direction to draw the followers away for a distance, then lost them without much trouble in some high-speed skidding and cornering around the suburbs, ending when the police car went out of control and fell into a canal. Then he doubled back and drove to within a few hundred yards of the bridge, from which point he and Rostiescki walked.
The turn of events had reinforced his decision to follow Ashling into the FER. After all, he reasoned, he wasn’t about to get any more help here in Germany. The car would have been nice to keep, but it would have attracted too much attention, and getting it over would need all kinds of special papers.
“I’ll be going across tonight, instead of the two you were expecting,” Samurai told Rostiescki as they approached the floodlit gate area with its barriers and uniformed sentries.
“What about papers?”
“Would Oleg and Yuri have had papers? You said you’d fixed things.”
“It costs money,” Rostiescki said.
“You’ve already been paid by Pipeline,” Samurai reminded him. “For two. I’m only one.”
“You weren’t scheduled,” Rostiescki persisted, still holding out. “That’s different.”
“Let’s put it this way. Either I walk off the other end of this bridge tonight. Or you never get to walk off it at all.”
On the far side, Samurai hitched a ride in an oil delivery truck a few miles to the town of Liberec, in Bohemia, one of the states that had previously formed Czechoslovakia. The driver dropped him off a block from a hotel that looked comfortable. After everything that had happened that day, Samurai was content to think simply of sleeping, and let the question of how to get farther wait until tomorrow.
The Federal Security Service preferred to stay out of the public eye and maintain low visibility in the pursuit of its varied objectives. The official lists and guides to government departments made minimal reference to it, and the people who ran it would have preferred not to be mentioned at all. In keeping with this habit of professional shyness, the organization shunned the kind of prestigious headquarters that Washington agencies usually built for themselves to flaunt their success in having made it to the big league. Instead, the FSS operated from an unassuming, unadvertised office block tucked away in a side street near the tiny green rectangle of Marion Park on the south side of town. Such unobtrusiveness symbolized a new management style. In other times and other cultures, the organs of state had cultivated awe-inspiring, intimidating images to impress the populace with its power and authority. Modest, low-profile externals, by contrast, elbowed aside by media-network skyscrapers and ever-vaster football stadiums, offered tangible reassurance that ultimately the people’s temples prevailed and they were in charge.
Some hours after news came in of Samurai’s disappearance across the Lausitzer Neisse River, a Colonel Hautz arrived at FSS HQ to meet with Grazin. Hautz commanded a unit of dirty-work specialists that all armies keep in the background like the shovels at a horse show, officially described as a Flexible Response Team, attached to the Special Forces. Hautz knew of the Southside project through its official relevance to the training of military personnel. He didn’t know, or need to know, about its true political purpose. Grazin presented the Samurai episode as an aberration by a local scientific group at Pearse who had gone too far, and on their own authority produced a military prodigy that went way past all the rules, and who was now out of control.
Grazin gestured at the sheet of computer printout lying in front of him on the desk. “Look at this. We’ve got police departments pissed from one end of Germany to the other—how he got them involved in the first place is a mystery.” Hardly true, but total candor was seldom practicable in life. “He’s hospitalized three of their federal agents. There’s a police captain shot and on the critical list, a car totaled and the crew almost drowned, and now we’re heading for a political assassination that the world will see as officially instigated, no matter what we say. He’s got to be stopped. The President agrees. Tackle it any way you want, as long as we come out clean, with no pointers and no mess.”
Hautz nodded that he understood. It wasn’t clear to him what these scientists down at Pearse had thought they were doing. He had no doubt that others were involved as well, and that there was more to the story than Grazin was telling. But that wasn’t Hautz’s business.
“How sure are we that he’s heading for Semipalatinsk?” he asked.
Grazin pushed across a folder lying on the desk and showed the satellite intercept from two days previously. “It’s right there, in the call that NSA picked up. His target’s due to make a launch out of there on the sixth.”
“Has there been any coordination with the Kazakhskij government—to get the launch port secured and have Ashling put under protective custody when he shows up?”
Grazin snorted and tossed up a hand. “What government? It’s practically anarchy out there. I doubt if they’d have the machinery to do it. Anyhow, Harris could still get to him first.”
Hautz nodded. It was as he’d hoped: a free hand. The squad that he had in mind would also appreciate the informality and the opportunity to operate invisibly. They were overdue for some excitement in life.
“What do we do about the target, Ashling?” Hautz asked.
“If you can bring him back without precipitating an incident, then do so,” Grazin replied. “Otherwise leave him. This is complicated enough already.” He had already discussed it with Fairfax. There was no way around having to face the fact that Ashling would probably get away to tell his story. If it turned out that he knew about the Samurai experiment—and it was by no means established that he did—then the only thing to do would be to eliminate the evidence and dismiss the whole thing as Offworld propaganda.
“He’s got less than three days,” Hautz mused. “It means catching a plane somewhere. He’d have to use the regular airports. There can’t be too many routes that would get him there.”
“Right. That’s what we figured.”
“We’ve got military aircraft on standby, with preclearance codes fixed with the Consolidation states,” Hautz said. “I could have the team over there in eight hours.”
“How about infiltration into the FER?” Grazin asked.
“No problem. Like you said, their security isn’t exactly what you’d call the last word. In fact, from what I’ve seen of it, nobody seems to give much of a shit.”
“You can go after him for us, then, eh, Colonel?”
“He’s as good as in the bag.”
Grazin frowned. “Don’t underestimate this guy. You can see the havoc he’s caused in two days already. This scientist he’s after seems to be becoming some kind of personal obsession with him. He won’t stop. Pick good men.”
“The best,” Hautz assured him.
Samurai studied the breakfast menu dubiously. Full of cholesterol, sugar, fat, starch; it wasn’t the kind of thing he was used to seeing being blatantly encouraged—and without warnings. The people behind him were smoking shamelessly in public, and the staff took no notice. He was only a few miles past the border, and already standards were beginning to revert to primitive. Yet his destination lay nearly three thousand miles farther east. Why would people voluntarily forgo the security of ordered lives and the fulfillment of dedicating themselves to a duty in favor of such places?…Freedom? Most of them wouldn’t know what to do with it. Responsibility would terrify them far more than anything the state could ever impose. No wonder psychiatric wards were full. The counselors and analysts were right: anyone who found things at home dissatisfying had to be a victim of serious maladjustment problems.
He hadn’t risen especially early, and there were only a few people left in the hotel restaurant. A couple was sitting in the far corner, a woman on her own was behind him, two men who looked like travelers were eating alone, and there was a party of two men and a woman together. Samurai’s first thought was to get away from this area as quickly as possible, since he wasn’t sure of the situation concerning possible cooperation between the German and local police. Maybe it was unwise to have remained this close to the border for as long as he had, but that was irrelevant now. The most obvious place to make for would be the capital, Prague, roughly fifty miles away, where the options for further travel onward would be greatest.
The waitress came over and asked something in Czech, which wasn’t among the languages that Samurai was equipped with. He asked if she could repeat it in German, which seemed not unlikely since this was a border town. “Would you like coffee?” she complied.
“Do you have coylene?”
“In the kitchen. I’ll get them to make you some.”
Samurai ordered rolls with an egg dish and sausage that didn’t sound too red. “How could I get to Prague from here?” he asked before she left.
“Are you driving?”
“Of course not. If I were, I’d simply look at a map.”
“Well, excuse me. You can get a bus to Jablonec, or a cab if you’re in a hurry. And another bus or the train from there. They’ll have details at the desk.”
“Thanks.”
“Do I detect German with a trace of an American accent there?” a voice said genially behind him, in English. He turned. The woman who was alone was looking at him. She was approaching middle age, rounding out and showing the beginnings of a second chin. All the same she was not unattractive, with clear, bright eyes, dark hair cut straight across at the neckline, and fresh makeup. She was wearing a navy top with a flimsy orange scarf tied at her throat, which added a mischievous, carefree touch.
“Yes. That’s right,” Samurai said.
“Great! It isn’t exactly what you’d call crawling with us around here.”
“I guess not.” Samurai had a lot of thinking to do. He didn’t have time for chatter, nor any inclination, and tried not to show any reaction that might encourage her.
She gave him a moment to reciprocate, but he turned back to pour himself a glass of water. Then she said, “I heard you asking about getting to Prague. I’m driving there myself, if you’d like a ride.”
Samurai’s head turned back around. “When?”
“As soon as I’ve finished this.”
That changed everything. Samurai grinned and received a pleased smile in return. “That’s very good of you,” he said. “The name’s Sam, Sam Harris. Maybe I could join you? Breakfast is on me.”
The snow in the night had confined itself to the higher reaches of the hills, standing white against a sky that had cleared to misty blue, streaked with furrows of cloud high up. Even so, the road was frosty and treacherous, calling for careful driving.
She had arrived sometime in the middle of the night. Her name, she said, was Roxy, originally from Montana, but that had been quite a few years ago. Although easygoing and convivial, she was vague about what she did these days. Samurai got the impression of some kind of businesswoman or freelancing adventuress who went with whatever opportunities life decided to cast her way at the moment. She seemed to travel a lot and knew the FER, which promised much useful information in the course of the journey and made Samurai doubly glad that he had changed his mind.
“How about you?” she inquired finally.
“What about me?”
“Quit stalling. Where are you from? What do you do?”
“Does it matter?”
“Hell, why not get to know each other a little for the duration, even if it’s not going to be a lifelong affair? I like talking to people. I’m just curious.”
“Oh…I’m based out of Philadelphia right now.” Which was what Sam Harris’s documents said. It saved having to invent a whole new background after Maurice Gordon was deactivated. “I import stuff mostly. This and that. Not anything in particular. Spend a lot of time all over the States.”
“So what brings you here?”
“Some possible lines that I might get an exclusive on. Anyhow, new places are interesting. Like you, curious maybe.”
“This and that, eh?”
Samurai didn’t like the cross-examining and looked away out the window. “Whatever.”
“Now why not come clean?” Roxy suggested.
“What are you talking about?”
“Oh, come on.” Roxy’s voice was softly chiding, in a way that said she wasn’t really trying to pry, but it was too obvious. “A town near the border, first thing in the morning, No transport. No bags, just a briefcase. No real plans.” She glanced across pointedly. “You’re defecting, right? You want to get through into FER territory.”
“Look, I just agreed to accept a ride to Prague, okay?”
“Hey, don’t worry about it. There’s no need to be so touchy. How do you think I got here? I said Montana was a long time ago now.”
He was being touchy, he told himself. She could be useful, and she sounded as if she wanted to help. “I’m sorry.…Okay, so I’m just out. It does things to your nerves.”
“I know. Like I said, don’t worry about it. So where are you heading, out east?”
“Yep. I’ve got contacts in a couple of places that I can follow up.”
“So you want a connection from Prague. Do you like driving? I’m going to Budapest. Not FER, but it’s closer.”
“It’s a nice thought, but I have to be a long way from here in two days.”
“Do you have cash?”
“Oh, enough, I’d think.”
“Be careful budgeting. Consolidation currency probably isn’t worth as much as you think. Train or plane, then? I can drop you at either.” Samurai didn’t reply immediately. He needed to find out about how his being a fugitive on the other side of the border might affect things here. “You’ve gone quiet,” Roxy said, looking across. “Is there some kind of problem?”
“I don’t know too much about this country,” Samurai said. “I ended up here…I guess you could call it kind of ‘unintentionally.’”
Roxy’s eyes wrinkled with amusement. “Okay.”
“How closely do the police here cooperate with the Germans? If you were being chased over there, would they be watching for you here?”
She answered matter-of-factly, almost as if expecting it. “A lot of the old system is still intact here at the western end of what used to be Czechoslovakia. In Moravia it gets easier, and Slovakia is FER. But here where we are, yes, the police across the border tend to work together. It depends how bad it is. If it’s a parking ticket, don’t lose too much sleep about it. But if you’ve just assassinated the German chancellor or something…”
“No.” Samurai hesitated, but decided that his best chance was to be straight. Roxy could hardly tell him what he needed to know without knowing the situation herself. He drew a long breath and sighed. “But there was a mess with their border police last night. One of them stopped a bullet.”
“Oh, shit.”
“Don’t worry. He’ll live.”
“Did you do that?”
“Somebody I was with, but does it matter?…There were Berlin federal agents involved too.”
“Terrific.…Boy, do I pick me some company for breakfast.”
“So, what would you do?”
Roxy thought for a few seconds, then shook her head. “If you’re hot, I wouldn’t risk the airport. You want to keep your name off the passenger lists. In the FER it gets easier, but here you’re too close. Train would be better.”
“I don’t have the time. It’s too far. I need to fly.”
Roxy fell silent again for a short while, then said, “Maybe there’s another way. The airport at Ruzyne has a flying club attached, where the small stuff is based: private planes, company planes, choppers, that kind of thing.”
“Do they lease planes out?” Samurai asked, seeing the possibility. “I am a pilot, fixed wing and helicopters.”
“To someone they’ve never heard of, who just walks in off the street? That could be difficult. I was thinking more that you might be able to work a deal with somebody—you know, make it worth their while. That’s how things tend to work here. There’s all kinds of commercial activity going on in places like Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia. It shouldn’t be hard to find someone who’s heading that way.”
“Do you know anybody at this airport?” Samurai asked.
“Not really. But I know how to talk to people.”
“Why should you do that for me?”
“Well, I assumed you’d be making it worth my while too.” She flashed him a mock-seductive, pouty look. “What’s wrong with helping a guy out for a little money? Maybe I missed out when I was younger.”
They passed through some snow that had been recently plowed, and descended out of the hills to the north of Prague, with the landscape taking on a recognizably Wenceslasian flavor. Lower down, they passed a baroque mansion, solid and immutable amid high-walled grounds, washed up from the ocean of a time long gone.
“You say it should be easier once I’m in the FER,” Samurai checked.
“So long as you mind your manners and don’t go trying to rip too many people off. They call it the Wild East, didn’t you know?”
She seemed to approve of such a state of affairs, and that provoked him. “Don’t they have any law there?” he said acidly. “Is everyone a criminal?”
Roxy laughed delightedly. “Boy, did they put you through school. Look, don’t believe everything you heard back home. It’s the gateway off the planet out there in the FER, the new frontier. That’s where it’s all happening. Oh, sure, it can be kind of rough and ready at times. People who mess other people around tend to get dealt with pretty abruptly. But it works the other way too: people don’t bother you too much. Just don’t try and push them around; and be straight, because they’re sharp.…So, yes, there the law is pretty straightforward in most of the territories, even if some people might say it’s a bit basic. It protects rights. But it doesn’t concern itself all that much with the rest of the world’s politics.”
“Well, maybe it should,” Samurai suggested. “Politics is the science of maintaining order, which makes it necessary that people obey the same rules. And the only way they can be made to do that is through force and through fear.”
“They’re obeying something else inside them, which they believe in,” Roxy said. “Maybe fifty years from now academics will invent a word for it. Meanwhile, it seems to be working a lot better than the things you’re talking about ever did.”
They stopped for a snack and a shared pot of tea, after which the surroundings became more suburban, with townships, industrial and office parks, and newish-looking road systems. To Samurai, it all suggested a playpen for overindulged children. The cars were gaudy, and there were too many of them in too many needless varieties, spread unnecessarily over multiple lanes that wasted fuel as well as space by encouraging uneconomical speeds. The buildings were flimsily built and inefficient, with too much glass. Roxy said it was because they ran on fusion-generated electricity fed into the grid from the FER, which was cheap enough to make the building codes that were mandatory back in the States not worth the hassle. Samurai doubted it, since technical problems had caused the U.S. fusion program to stagnate years ago. It was inevitable that when this kind of extravagance had run its course, these people would be coming bowl-in-hand to the West like prodigals returning to the family estate, in the way the experts were predicting. Only this time, there would be no bailouts. If they had listened, they would have known that a finite world imposes its own harsh realities. That was when the reckoning would come.
They skirted the western outskirts of Prague and joined a wide highway that brought them to Ruzyne by early afternoon. Roxy followed signs into the airport complex, and after a couple of wrong turns, doublings back, and a stop to ask directions, they found their way to the terminal and outbuildings of the club and flying school, located at a remote end away from the main facilities. They went inside, and after a brief look around sat down with two cups of coffee—there was no coylene this time—at a window booth in a cafeteria lounge situated on one side of the reception area. The place was filled with a colorful mix of people, talking, laughing, arguing, some sitting alone; wearing business clothes, casual gear, flying suits, others in working jeans and mechanic’s coveralls.
The window looked out over the parking apron for private aircraft, beyond which lay a taxiing area and the main airport runways. There was a steady traffic of international and regular domestic flights, most of the aircraft types being one or other of various Siberian makes. Samurai hadn’t realized that they were so widely used. In the immediate vicinity there seemed to be a fairly continuous coming and going of smaller machines, also—as Roxy had said would be the case.
She looked across at him and raised her eyebrows. “Well, want me to give it a shot?”
“Why? It’s my problem.”
Roxy pursed her lips for an instant, then smiled. “Nothing personal, Sam, okay? But you fly the planes. I think I might be better at handling the people.” She stood up before he could respond, squeezed his shoulder good-naturedly, and sauntered over to a group of men and a woman in a mixture of flying clothes, who were talking loudly around a table.
“Hi, guys, how’re you doing today?” he heard her say. Then her voice fell and some muted conversation followed, marked after a while by several curious glances thrown in Samurai’s direction. Then one of the men called over two others who were sitting together a short distance away. More talking ensued, and then the two came with Roxy over to the booth where Samurai was sitting. One was tall and swarthy, with a lazy stride, an easygoing face that seemed to smile easily, and a walrus mustache. He was wearing a fleece-lined leather jacket, woollen cap, and jeans tucked into calf-length boots. The man with him was short and pale, with a fur-trimmed parka and cossack cap. Samurai’s first thought was of flying cowboys.
“I hear you’re looking to hitch a ride east,” the tall one said without preamble, perching himself on the end of the seat opposite.
“Where are you going?” Samurai asked him.
“We’ll be taking some parts for a turbine to Cluj. They’re being loaded outside there now.”
“How far’s that?”
“About two hours’ flight time. But we gain an hour because of the time zone.”
“Cluj-Napoca,” Roxy supplied. “It’s FER, in Transylvania—part of what used to be called Romania.”
“Where do you want to get to?” the smaller of the two asked Samurai.
“East, into Siberia. Could I connect from Cluj?”
The one who was sitting showed a palm casually. “Sure. Straight into Odessa. There should be something going there tonight, but if not there’s definitely a couple in the morning. From there you’re in the trans-Siberian trunk net, with flights round the clock.”
Samurai regarded him cautiously. It sounded too easy. “There are no exit formalities for leaving Bohemia?” he queried.
The flier with the mustache grinned. “Why? Did you want to ask someone if it’s okay?”
“What about getting into Transylvania at the other end? I don’t have any entry permit or visa, you understand.”
The smaller one gave a short laugh and looked at his companion. “He hasn’t been in the FER before,” he said.
The other shrugged and showed his palms to indicate that he had no more to say. “So, we’ve got a spare seat. Does that sound good?”
Samurai still felt uneasy, mainly because of the unfamiliarity of the situation, he had to admit. But really he had no choice. “Okay,” he agreed.
The flier gave one of his easy smiles. “Good. Now let’s talk about money.…”
But when Samurai tried to settle up with Roxy, she would have none of it. “Let’s make it a way of saying welcome to somebody else from home,” she told him. “Always be the first to do the other guy a favor—it’s a saying they’ve got in Siberia. Remember it. That’s the way you get along in the FER.” She smiled and gripped his hand. “So long, Sam Harris. Good luck.”
They took off later in the afternoon in a small cargo plane with twin turboprops. Samurai sat by a window in one of several seats in the forward cabin behind the pilots. The seat next to him was empty, the two behind piled with baggage, and the only other passengers were two Asiatics opposite, who talked between themselves in a dialect he didn’t understand. Apart from offering him a swig of a potent-smelling drink from a flask that they kept passing back and forth, which he declined, they paid him no attention.
The plane flew south of the Carpathian Mountains across Bohemia and Moravia, which like Poland were in a halfway state between the West and the FER. Then, above lengthening winter shadows, the plane entered FER airspace over the northern part of Hungary. By the time the pilot announced the commencement of their descent, the ground was getting dark. On the approach, Samurai was surprised to see a bustling city with lots of tall buildings, bridges, and lights spread out below, and enormous floodlit structures of steelwork and engineering that appeared to be under construction beyond the perimeter of the airfield. For some reason he’d expected Cluj to be some kind of shanty-town, neglected and decayed.
After landing, they taxied to a parking area in front of a hangar away from the main terminal. The three passengers and two-man crew climbed down to the tarmac and walked to an entrance in a row of small buildings housing workshops and a cargo bay. Inside was a small reception office with seats and a counter. For a moment it seemed to Samurai that he could simply walk through, but the pilot indicated for him to wait at the counter.
“We’ll get you a ride over to the terminal,” he explained.
“I’ll be okay.”
“No chance. They make changes to this airport so fast that even I get lost in it.” Just then, a man came out of the office behind the counter. “Marek, can we get this guy a ride to the terminal? He just came in with me.”
“Sure.” Marek turned and called back through the door. “Is the wagon out front? We got somebody who needs to go across to main arrivals, international.”
Samurai resigned himself to accepting that he wasn’t going to have much option. An old man with a grizzled beard drove him along the side of the tarmac behind a line of parked aircraft, across part of the airfield, and deposited him at a glass door with stairs leading up inside. Samurai followed the corridor and ramp at the top and found himself on the route through to the main arrivals concourse. Ahead, he could see, he would have to pass a desk where an official in a white shirt was sitting. There was no way around. Samurai thrust across his passport, and having nothing else to offer, his German visa and U.S. exit papers.
The official pushed them back again. “I don’t need those. You’re in the Free World now.” He stamped the passport without giving it a second glance and handed it back. “Welcome to the Federation of Eurasian Republics.”
Samurai stared about him. There was no obvious continuation from there on, no indicators for the next stage of processing, no guards, no signs instructing anyone what to do.
He looked back uncertainly. “Where do I go now?”
The official shrugged. “Anywhere you want.”
The first thing that Samurai checked while still in the airport was on getting the rest of the way to Semipalatinsk. The last flight that evening to Odessa, shown on an illuminated map by the ticketing desks as the capital of the Independent State of Moldavskaja, was full, but there would be two the next morning and another in the afternoon. From Odessa, as the cargo pilot had said, he would be in the trans-Siberian trunk net, and the rest was straightforward.
Samurai hadn’t realized that in their race to lay waste the planet, the Eurasians were flying SSTs. If he took the early flight to Odessa, he could get an SST connection direct into Semipalatinsk by early afternoon, even with the four-hour time difference; but the fare was high compared to the subsonic alternatives, and Roxy hadn’t been kidding when she warned him that Western currency wouldn’t stretch very far. He didn’t want to use his credit cards because of the risk of giving anyone with the right contacts or access procedures an audit trail of his movements—despite superficial East-West differences, he didn’t know what arrangements might exist between security agencies. And it was still only December 3. The launch that Ashling was scheduled on wasn’t until the sixth. Samurai still had plenty of time.
The Air Moldavskaja flight tomorrow afternoon would get him into Odessa at 5:00 p.m. local time, with a connection later that evening to Volgograd. From there, a long Aerospaceflot night flight would arrive in Novosibirsk at the ungodly hour of 4:40 a.m., from where an early morning flight south to the Kazakhskij Republic got into Semipalatinsk at 8:30. That would be on the morning of the fifth, still giving him a full day to locate Ashling. Of the two morning flights to Odessa, the first was too early, and a quick study of the connections showed that the second wouldn’t gain him anything. Accordingly, he booked a seat on the afternoon flight. Any misgivings that he might still have had about being traceable from passenger lists were quickly dispelled: the ticket carried flight details only, without requiring a name. Tomorrow morning, he decided, could usefully be spent shopping to replace the clothes and other things that he’d left with his bag in the police building at Zittau.
A branch of the local rapid transit system, running every two minutes through a glass-walled flyover, connected the terminal to a hotel complex by the airport approaches. From the view out of the car as it passed above traffic ramps and parking lots, much of the surroundings seemed to be still under construction, with concrete being poured under arc lights into huge steel and timber forms, and cranes working into the evening. But the hotel section itself, when he got there, was more or less complete, even if still lacking in some of the finishing touches of comfort and decor, and Samurai had no trouble getting a room for the night.
The room came with bathrobe, disposable slippers, and a complimentary kit of toilet articles, he discovered, so at least he would be comfortable until morning. On a less salubrious note, an automatic dispenser offered candy, alcohol, coffee, tobacco, and a selection of drugs, right there in the room. The local business and entertainments directory included with the hotel guide listed sexual companionship—straight, gay, male, female, or both—alongside where to shop, places to eat, music and shows, and the old city’s museums and medieval churches. Guns were advertised openly, and there was a school of erotic moviemaking. The police even ran an ad giving a get-you-home-safe number that drunks could call to avoid driving. Farther on, Samurai was astounded to read that a private investigative agency in the city included “legally sanctioned homicides” in its list of professional services.
But at least there was some comfort in the thought that self-destruction would inevitably overtake such a society before it could proceed too far with the destruction of everything else. He could see why many of the West’s analysts had concluded that eventually the solution would have to be a military one.
He ate later in the hotel restaurant. The food was ample and varied, but irresponsibly nonselective. Service, although efficient, was performed with a presumptuous familiarity that bordered on insolence. The host who showed Samurai to a table joked about American “neurotics” as if there were something wrong with being educated about dietary risks, and then added insult by referring to the U.S. Bureau of Environmental Control as the Green Gestapo.
Later, the waitress, as she was clearing the dishes, asked Samurai if he was on his own here. When he replied that he was, she murmured that she finished her shift at ten and could stay an extra hour “for half the rate you’ll get in town.”
A big, bearded man dining at the next table overheard and cautioned Samurai not to have anything to do with it. “It’s a rip-off. She’ll talk the money out of you ahead of time, then no-show. By the time she gets back on her next shift you’ll be a thousand miles away. She wouldn’t try it on us, but Westerners get taken every time.”
Samurai was outraged. “Why doesn’t someone tell the management about it?” he demanded.
“They already know.”
“What! And they don’t do anything?”
“What should they do?”
“Well, get it stopped. Fire her or something.”
“Why? Whose rights are being violated?”
Samurai gestured helplessly with a hand and shook his head. “But hell, their staff, their room?”
“She’s not ‘theirs.’ She works the hours for them that she contracts to, that’s all. And so long as you’re paying the charge, it’s your room.”
It still didn’t sound right to Samurai. “Well, if it’s a rip-off, doesn’t the hotel figure its customers have a right to be protected?” he said.
The bearded man thought about it. “Maybe,” he conceded. “But they probably figure they’re doing them a bigger favor by letting them learn not to be stupid.”
After dinner, Samurai wandered into the bar and permitted himself a vodka with tonic. The place was raucous and noisy with what looked like engineers and construction crew from the work going on all around the area, and a lot of what Samurai assumed were local women. He left and wandered around a few more parts of the complex that were sufficiently finished to be open for business, but found them much the same. The atmosphere didn’t appeal to him, so he returned to his room and retired early.
More of the vicinity was visible the next morning. The airport adjoined what was virtually a new industrial city springing up separate from the older, historic capital of Transylvania, which dated from fortifications first recorded in the thirteenth century and had been largely preserved as a cultural center. The constructions that Samurai had seen from the plane lay beyond the far edge of the airfield, and revealed themselves now as just one end of a line of massive structures in various stages of completion extending away for what must have been one to two miles, with tangles of service roads, pipe runs, and latticeworks taking shape between them.
He asked about it at the hotel information desk and learned that the new city was being developed as a spaceport and would become the region’s principal link to the Offworld independencies. Similar things were going on in Latvia and the Belorussian Republic. The Eurasians, it seemed, regarded the Consolidation as a temporary affair that was destined to fall apart, and the westernmost FER states were vying for the Western European space business that they expected to materialize when the Green Curtain came down.
Samurai didn’t bother disagreeing. It was depressing enough to watch so much effort and material being misdirected into pipe dreams. But the more chilling thought was the ease with which such facilities could be converted for military use when the orgy of profligacy ended and the FER was forced to turn upon the West. Or maybe the Eurasians weren’t the simpletons they seemed. Could that be the real intent, he wondered, and the talk about spaceports mere camouflage?
He took the transit shuttle into a nearby part of the city to buy the things he needed, and found it to be pretty much as he’d expected: superficially glittery and affluent, but underneath it all the kind of mindless gaudiness that inevitably accompanied preoccupation with the material and the banal. There were too many colors and styles of everything on the shelves, too many overproduced, overadvertised gimmicks that consumed resources to no useful purpose, and that no half-effective planning committee would ever have allowed. The automobiles were huge and criminally wasteful, many of them carrying only the driver. Every conceivable type of electronic and computing device was on open sale, with no evidence of proof-of-need or licensing requirements.
He was in a sober and reflective mood by the time he returned to join the flight for Odessa. There were no security checks on boarding. Half the people on the plane were smoking and drinking. Segregation was nonexistent, and he had to share the cabin with plebs.
At Odessa everything was as bad, but on an even vaster scale, with hypersonic, suborbital transports leaving for Tokyo, Singapore, and Capetown. During the flight from Odessa to Volgograd, two couples across the aisle were playing a card game that involved brazen gambling, and the flight attendants didn’t even seem to notice.
Everywhere was degeneracy, recklessness, profligacy, corruption, all on its way to going out of control. Samurai didn’t think that these people would ever find it within themselves to put a stop to it. That meant the West would have to, before everyone was dragged down.
Previously known as Stalingrad, the easternmost limit of advance reached by Hitler’s armies in 1942, Volgograd had been completely rebuilt from rubble after World War II. It suffered further damage in the turbulent years following the final breakup of the Soviet empires—though nothing like the devastation wrought previously—and was again restored to become one of the FER’s most ambitious metropolises. Samurai had neither the time nor reason—nor, for that matter, any particular inclination—to leave the airport to see the city at close hand, but as the plane came in late in the afternoon, it presented a full view of the integrated central area, with towers, terraces, and glass-walled cliffs, all flowing together and interpenetrated by elevated roads and rail tubes like arteries feeding a single sprawling organism.
One of the major Siberian spacegates already operating to support the Offworld expansion was located several miles to the north. Shortly after Samurai emerged into the elevated level of the airport transfer lounge, with high observation windows stretching the length of the building, a squat delta shape rose up above the skyline, balanced on a pencil of violet light, and accelerated rapidly to vanish into the high cloud cover.
“Heavy-lift surface shuttle going up on a ground laser,” he overheard a man nearby saying to a boy, who looked like his son. “Could be heading for a lunar-transfer orbit.”
“That’s three in the last hour,” the boy said.
“Gonna be a lot more’n that before much longer too.”
Samurai turned away and began heading toward the departure gate for his flight. Just then, an unusual sound, like that from an approaching train still in a tunnel, came from outside, and several people began pointing. He stopped and looked back. A craft unlike anything he had seen before had broken through the cloud canopy and was coming down toward the field at an angle steeper than any conventional airplane. It was disk-shaped, black and featureless in silhouette against the sky, although there seemed to be a bluish radiance emanating from parts of the rim. As it came lower over the far boundary fence, it revealed a humped upper part, the shape of a flattened bell. And most puzzling of all, it seemed to be hanging on the end of a faint beam of pinkish light, like a barely visible rod supporting it at its center, coming down through the clouds.
“That’s an IRH pulsejet lifter,” a voice mused next to him. “What’s it doing here? I thought they were still experimental.”
Samurai turned and saw that it was a man in a jacket and tie with an overcoat, addressing a companion.
The other shook his head. “Maybe they’re trying out a few prototypes.” He noticed Samurai looking at them and inclined his head to indicate the vessel outside. “Do you know anything about it?”
Samurai shook his head. “I’ve never even heard of it.”
The man caught the accent and smiled elusively. “Canadian? American? I can tell it’s not British.”
“U.S.,” Samurai said.
“Ah, yes.…We’re engineers, you see. That uses what’s called IRH: Internal Radiation Heating. It’s an air breather, but using external laser energy to heat it instead of onboard fuel. The beam comes from a nuclear generator satellite in a two-thousand-mile-high orbit.”
Samurai looked out across the airfield again. The disk was just coming down behind some conventionally shaped craft on the far side of the main runways and appeared a little smaller than them, making it maybe fifty to a hundred feet across. “I’ve never seen anything like that,” he said.
“No, probably not,” the first of the two engineers said. “Your countries won’t let them fly over because they think the risks of down-pointing lasers are too high. There was a big political thing about it a few years ago. But I don’t suppose they told you about that.”
A part of Samurai’s implanted nature had been designed to make him an instinctive combatant. Alertness to danger was his natural condition, causing him to scan and scrutinize everything around him constantly and automatically.
As soon as he entered the departure lounge, he read something suspicious in the manner of the two men sitting together among the passengers awaiting the Aerospaceflot night flight to Novosibirsk. Their body language betrayed tenseness, and they shifted their eyes away too suddenly when Samurai entered, yet at the same time their altering of postures signaled an unnatural interest in him. Without changing his step, he ambled across to a bookshop on the far side of the area and observed them through the window while turning idly through a magazine from one of the racks. Their clothes were of American style and cut, marking them as recent arrivals. One of them was watching him and trying not to show it.
Samurai bought the magazine and tucked it under his arm, then came out of the shop and began walking toward them, noting the involuntary stiffening of their postures as he approached. He stopped several yards away from them and reached suddenly inside his coat. One of the men began moving a hand reflexively toward his jacket, checking himself with a conscious effort when Samurai produced his ticket.
They were armed.
Samurai studied his ticket nonchalantly for a few seconds and then walked away without looking at them. Why anyone from the States should be after him was a question that could wait till later. The important thing for now was that somebody was trying to interfere with his mission. If it were anyone legitimately connected with it, they would have simply contacted him openly. When he was out of sight around a corner he bought himself a cup of tea and sat down to think what he was going to do.
Meanwhile, one of the two Americans had gone to a booth to make a phone call. “Identification positive,” he said into the receiver. “We’ll be shadowing him all the way on the same flight. Get the welcoming party ready at Novosibirsk. We’ll grab him there.”
During the flight a movie was shown depicting ordinary citizens taking up weapons and violently resisting representatives of the state’s authority. Most of the passengers seemed to enjoy it.
The two men who had attracted Samurai’s attention at Volgograd had boarded also, and were sitting together several rows behind him. He was now certain that their presence was no accident; they were keeping him under observation.
He reflected on their probable plans. The flight was due to arrive at Novosibirsk at 4:40 a.m., after a long haul from Volgograd. At that time of the morning, in the cold and dark of midwinter, airport activity would be at its lowest, with relatively few staff on duty and those at a reduced level of alertness. Response times by the local authorities in the case of a possible hitch would be greatest. There, Samurai concluded, was where the reception for him was being prepared. What, then, would be his plan?
His best strategy would be to reduce the odds against him by eliminating the two who were on the plane from the equation before having to tackle the rest. That much seemed eminently simple and basic. However, it would be better to avoid killing people from his own side if he could help it, he decided. Besides being a messy way to go about things in a foreign country, it was likely to create complications when he got back. He sat quietly, staring at a magazine and considering his options.
When the movie ended, the lights remained dim and most of the passengers settled back with pillows and blankets to snatch a few hours’ sleep. Samurai took down his briefcase, ostensibly to put back the magazine he had been reading and to take out a few others; but while doing so, he removed a pack containing another of his specialized devices: a spring-operated syringe with an assortment of needles and nozzles, which among other things could inject various lethal or incapacitating substances. Slipping the pack in his jacket pocket, he strolled back to the toilet, noting on the way that one of the two agents seemed to be asleep and the other was reading. There were some empty places in the row behind them, and the people in the occupied seats were asleep.
On emerging again, instead of returning to his own seat, Samurai went to another, farther back, from where he could observe. When the agent who was awake began turning his head curiously to see what had become of him, he saw Samurai stretched out with a blanket about him, apparently having moved to be by some empty seats in order to sleep more comfortably. The agent returned to his book, but seemed restless. Samurai carried on watching him. Eventually the agent put down the book and went back to use the toilet.
In the shadows, Samurai sat up and looked around. Of the few people awake, no one was paying any attention. The only visible flight attendant was back at the far end of the next cabin, talking to a colleague. Samurai fitted a long, large-bore needle to the syringe, which he had already loaded while he was in the toilet. He folded the blanket aside, rose, and, taking one of the magazines, moved into the aisle. A couple of steps brought him behind the agent who was asleep. Nobody in the row behind stirred. For the benefit of anyone who might be watching, Samurai dropped the magazine and, in the process of going down to retrieve it, moved into an empty space in the row behind the sleeping agent. He positioned the needle carefully behind the soft backrest, slightly to the left of the spine, then quickly slipped a hand around and cupped it over the agent’s mouth while he drove the needle home. The spring trigger did the rest, and he felt the body go limp after four or five seconds. He straightened up again, holding the syringe under cover of the magazine, then continued forward to return the items to his briefcase in the overhead bin above his original seat. By the time the agent in the toilet came out, Samurai was back once again in the seat that he had moved to before, with the blanket pulled over him.
When the lights brightened and the cabin staff began moving around to awaken the passengers in preparation for landing at Novosibirsk, Samurai got up and returned to his original seat. Behind him, the efforts of the agent to rouse his companion drew the attention of the flight attendant. She tried, equally unsuccessfully, and called a companion. The agent was still out cold when the plane touched down. When the doors were opened, Samurai collected his things and began moving nonchalantly to the forward door with the other deplaning passengers. Behind him, the agent who was left assessed the situation frantically while three of the cabin crew fussed over the unconscious form next to him. Whatever was wrong with him, there was nothing to be done that would add to what was being done already, he decided. The important thing was to maintain contact with the target.
“No, we’re not together,” he said in answer to one of the flight attendants. “I just got talking to him, that’s all. I guess he’ll be okay, eh? You’ll take good care of him.” With that he grabbed his coat and carry-on bag and hastened after Samurai, who by now had disappeared from the aircraft.
By the time he reached the exit ramp, the last of the passengers were out of sight. He hurried along after them, and on the way passed a service doorway leading to a cupola where an external stairway went down to the tarmac outside. Samurai stepped out behind him and pulled him back into the cupola without a sound. He emerged alone ten seconds later with his coat and briefcase, checked that nobody had observed, and resumed walking toward the arrival gate. As he did so, he put on a pair of heavy dark glasses.
Two down, but an unknown number to go.
When Samurai came through the gate, the gaggle of arrivals and the few people out to meet them at that hour of the morning were already thinning. The three men still scanning the jetway anxiously from the far side of the hall gave themselves away instantly. Samurai ignored them and walked on by, following the other passengers. The three exchanged puzzled looks when the two who were supposed to be following him failed to materialize. But then, after a moment’s hesitation, the leader gave a curt nod; they turned and followed at a quickening pace.
A long corridor led toward the arrivals concourse. Halfway along it, two of them moved up alongside Samurai while the third closed in behind. Guns pressed into Samurai’s ribs from both sides.
“One wrong move and you’re Swiss cheese, buddy,” a voice muttered. “Just make for the door in front there on the right, and we’ll all be okay.” They steered him through the straggle of people to a door with a STAFF ONLY sign. Inside was a storage room of some kind, with a passage and stairway leading down. The last of the three closed the door.
“Now reach high, nice and easy.”
As Samurai brought his right hand out of his pocket to obey, he let go the flash grenade that he had been holding primed, and closed his eyes tight. Even behind his dark glasses, the four-million-candlepower detonation was blinding. For the other three, it was devastating—a couple of days was usually necessary for vision to return to normal. It was an easy matter to dispose of them in such a condition, after which he checked their pockets, in the process finding the means of relieving his cash situation appreciably. Then he paused to reflect on what their intentions might have been.
Why had they brought him in here? Most likely, it led to an exit that would have enabled them to get him away without risking a public spectacle. He followed the stairs down and found a passage leading past more rooms to, sure enough, what looked like an outside door. One of the rooms to the side had a window. Samurai moved over to it cautiously in the darkness and peered out. There were two cars outside, one empty, the other with a man standing by the open driver’s door. It was a service road, deserted and dark except for a few orange lamps. That suited Samurai just fine: if whoever was trying to stop him had the airports covered, it wouldn’t be a good idea to carry on any farther by air.
He explored along the building until he came to another door, well beyond where the cars were, in the shadows. It was locked, and took him a few minutes to open. By then, the man waiting by the car was getting worried. He stood anxiously, directing all his attention toward the building…and oblivious to the shadow stealing up through the night from behind him.
The keys were in the car. Samurai hauled the unconscious form inside the door that the others were supposed to have come out of, and was on his way less than a minute later. He found his way to the main airport exit and stopped in a parking area to check the glove box for maps. He found some, and the tank was not far off full. It was not yet 5:30 in the morning; the distance to Semipalatinsk was roughly 400 miles. Depending on driving conditions and assuming that whoever was responsible did a reasonable job of keeping the main road clear, he should still be able to make it by late afternoon or evening, he estimated. That didn’t give him as much time as he’d hoped to figure out how he was going to deal with Ashling. But having gotten this far, he wasn’t about to quit now.
News of the debacle didn’t reach Washington until a couple of hours later, by which time it was midnight and Grazin was just about to go to bed. He called Colonel Hautz at once on an emergency circuit.
“He wiped out your whole squad,” Grazin fumed. “Now will you believe what I told you about this guy? How many more people do you have out there?”
Hautz was stunned by the news. “The rest of the group at Novosibirsk are still functional. And we’ve got the backup team arriving in Semipalatinsk in the next eight hours.”
“Well, amend your field orders,” Grazin instructed. “Forget any notion of trying to apprehend or immobilize. A lot of people over here would be more than happy if he never set foot in the country again, anyhow. Kill him on sight, then get your men out.”
The car was absurdly large, even if it could hold five people. The upholstery was plush and pretentiously ornate, with padded trim inside the doors and seats that felt like armchairs. The controls had a section labeled “Autodrive” that included a switch with a “Wireguide” position, and an electronic device tagged as a “Navgrid Locator,” neither of which Samurai understood. But they were both evidently optional, for the conventional systems that he was familiar with all responded normally. It fairly surged with power and handled amazingly well. And although there was snow on the rooftops, highway shoulders, central divisions, and other unused areas, the roadways and sidewalks themselves were actually dry! Surely not even Eurasians could be sufficiently out of their minds to heat them. But what other explanation was there?
As he had come to expect by now, everything was built on a scale that was big, brash, gaudily flaunting its imagined grandeur. Huge buildings flanked the highways like mountains of luminescent crystal towering in the night. Lurid signs proclaimed the presence of hotels, business corporations, the Berdsk Plasma Physics Institute, the South Sub-City, whatever that was; others advertised everything from brands of hashish and vodka to dance schools and performances of orchestral music. There was a rainbow-lit fountain throwing water hundreds of feet into the air. He passed some kind of enormous glass enclosure with domes, illuminated inside and containing an artificial beach and palm trees.
Farther on, the roadway merged alongside several rail lines, some regular, others monotrack supported by pylons, to follow the top of a huge dam at one end of a lake, which, from the lights stretching away along its shore, receded as far as it was possible to see. The far shore was lined with floodlit industrial installations: tanks and towers braced by latticeworks, domes and spheres, concrete massifs wreathed in power lines and pipes. The lights of an aircraft rose up from among it all and vanished into the far sky over the lake.
There was a modest amount of other traffic about. A train and several unattached cars on the monotracks sped past him while he was negotiating the dam. Some distance past the end of it, the rail lines went off in their own separate directions. He passed what looked like an all-night restaurant and service area where several hopefuls were trying to hitch rides. Past the dam, the artificially dry road ended; but the continuation had been effectively plowed and the surface treated, enabling him to keep up a better speed than he had hoped. As the route began climbing into the hills south of Novosibirsk, his hopes for the mission rose with it.
By the time daylight arrived, he was descending again. The surroundings now were more sparsely inhabited, but the traffic increased steadily. An hour later he passed through another urban area, which his map showed to be the city of Barnaut—almost a quarter of the way to Semipalatinsk already. As the morning traffic got into its swing, he was astonished to see swarms of what had to be tiny personal aircraft taking to the skies in orderly, well-defined traffic corridors.
Eurasians doing something orderly? It didn’t seem possible. Maybe if their necks were on the line, even they were capable of some measure of rationality, he reflected. Or maybe all the ones who weren’t up to it had self-selected themselves out of the population by now.
In his own mind, Samurai had far from written off the opposition who were out looking for him. The sight of the personal flyers made him think of them again, and left no guessing what their next move was likely to be. From the NSA intercept they knew where he was heading; there was only one route for getting there; and they knew what car he was driving, since he’d stolen it from them. There were no doubt as few restrictions on hiring private aircraft here as on everything else. As he continued southward from Barnaut, the surroundings became bleaker and more deserted; the traffic thinned down to occasional heavy commercial rigs. Perfect surroundings for an interception. Having concluded that much, Samurai began taking a greater interest in the hitchhikers out on the road, whom he was still passing from time to time.
He raised and then dashed several hopes by slowing down promisingly, then speeding up again and driving on by. But eventually he saw what he was looking for: a man of reasonably presentable appearance, around thirty, dark-haired, with olive features—not unlike Samurai himself. He was wearing a blue parka and woollen hat, and had a black leather carryall by his feet. The man grinned and made a face to say it was cold out here. Samurai pulled over.
“Going as far as Semipalatinsk?”
“All the way.”
“Great. Can I put this in the back?”
“Go ahead.” The man heaved the carryall inside. “You might want to throw that coat in there as well,” Samurai said. “It’s warm in the car.”
“Good idea. I’ll do that.”
His name was Rudi, from a province in the central Urals. He was heading south for the winter after working on a land drainage project farther north, which was now frozen. He was jovial and talkative, and especially curious when he learned that Samurai was a recently arrived American.
“Are you going back, or will you be staying here now?” he asked.
“Why shouldn’t I want to go back?” Samurai said. He was preoccupied with keeping an eye on the mirror and trying to watch the skyline behind them, happy to let Rudi carry on doing most of the talking.
“Is it true what they say about the repression over there? All the censorship, and everything they say on the news being distorted? A friend of mine told me that communications equipment can only pick up approved channels, by law. Is that right?”
“We don’t like anybody who wants to be able to pump whatever they like into people’s minds,” Samurai said shortly. “Is that so bad?”
“Well, can’t the people have a say in it? They don’t have to listen.”
“People are like sheep. Most of them have never had a worthwhile thought in their lives. They’ll believe anything they’re told.”
“Maybe not, if they’re allowed to learn how to think. Instead of being told what to think.”
“Look, if you must talk, why not find a different subject? I’m not criticizing your country. Otherwise you might end up hiking it to Semipalatinsk.”
Rudi grinned unrepentantly and raised a hand in mock submission. “You’re absolutely right! How ungracious of me. You are our guest. Not another word, I promise.”
They drove on in silence for a mile or so. The road followed the base of a line of low, rounded hills, with desolation stretching away on the opposite side. “Do they really think we’re running out of room?” Rudi said. “I mean, look at that. And it’s nothing. I read somewhere that Americans have to move into smaller houses when their children leave home. Is that right? Do you really need licenses to have children there?”
“Do you drive, Rudi?” Samurai asked.
“I’m doing it again, aren’t I?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“Sure, everyone drives. Why?”
“I’ve been traveling all night. I could use an hour’s sleep in the back. How would you like to take over for a spell?”
“Okay, if you trust me with it.”
“Just don’t talk so much, and watch the road.”
They pulled over onto the shoulder and got out. The air outside was cold, with a mild but biting wind. Rudi got into the driver’s side and adjusted the mirrors and seats. Samurai climbed in the back and settled down among his and Rudi’s coats, his briefcase, Rudi’s bag, and a couple of bags belonging to the Americans, which had been there when Samurai took the car. As they came back onto the roadway, he scanned the sky behind through the rear window. There was no local air traffic now, and anything approaching would stand out easily.
“I grew up in a place as dismal as this,” Rudi said. “Sometimes it got so waterlogged in the thaw that we went to school in a boat.”
“Really?”
“Yes.…I heard that over there they teach children in the schools that nobody should be different,” Rudi said over his shoulder. “Is that really true?”
It was about a half hour later when Samurai spotted what he had been expecting: a dot flying low, following the road behind them. It gained rapidly, swooping even lower, circled, then passed immediately overhead for a close look as it overhauled the car. Rudi peered in his mirror and turned his head to look up at it through the window, muttering to himself but not bothering Samurai, who he believed was asleep. Samurai slid the automatic from his briefcase and squeezed himself down behind the seat, covering himself with the coats and bags to make it look as if the car had only one occupant. Then the aircraft rose and sped away ahead of them—checking that the road was free of approaching traffic from that direction, Samurai had no doubt. As it receded, he raised his head and saw that it was a rotorless hoverjet, about the size of a six-seat chopper.
Minutes later it was back again. Samurai didn’t expect for a moment that its occupants would simply open fire; besides its being a messy and needlessly overdramatic way of going about things, there was always the risk that they might have latched on to the wrong car. They would check it out first.
The machine came in close to fly just above the car, slightly back and to one side, the noise from its turbines drowning out the car’s engine. Rudi, clearly alarmed by now, was turning his head frantically from side to side as he drove.
“Don’t look back. Just keep driving and do as I say,” Samurai instructed. His tone was harsh and authoritative suddenly, leaving no room for argument.
“What the hell’s going on?” Rudi demanded. “Who are they? Look, I don’t know what—”
“Shut up!”
Ahead, a wide expanse of flat, open ground lay to one side of the road, churned up by tire marks. It looked like a rest area that trucks used. A door in the side of the hoverjet opened, and a figure inside made pointing motions toward it. He was also holding a submachine gun.
“Slow down,” Samurai ordered.
“But shit, that guy’s got a gun! This doesn’t have anything to do with me. I don’t want to get mixed up in it.”
“You are mixed up in it, so just do as I say. Pull over and stop.” Rudi did so, and sat, shaking visibly. The flyer came down and hovered a few yards behind him, probably checking the registration. “Now get out, leave your door open, and move well away from the car with your hands raised,” Samurai said. “Don’t look back at me!”
Rudi’s voice was choking with fear. “They’ll k-kill me. This hasn’t got anything to do with me.”
“They might,” Samurai agreed. “But I will for sure if you don’t get out. Do it.” Rudi opened the door with trembling hands and got out. “Hands high. Away from the car,” Samurai repeated. Rudi raised his hands and stumbled away dazedly. Samurai stayed low, watching motionless through the chink beside the driver’s headrest.
The flyer came down in a flurry of snow about thirty feet from the car, facing where Rudi was standing. The engine note dropped, and two armed men jumped out, leaving a third still in the pilot’s seat. All attention was on Rudi, standing ahead of them in the snow with his arms high. Samurai eased himself up a fraction, his eyes moving rapidly, assessing distances and angles. The two who had got out approached Rudi warily from different sides, their guns leveled. Then the voice of the one who had remained in the cabin sounded over a loudspeaker. “Don’t fuck with this guy. You heard the order. Drop him.”
Very well. They had made the rules.…
And then one of the two on foot moved a pace closer and peered at Rudi quizzically. “Wait. That isn’t—”
From the car, Samurai took out the pilot with a head shot through the open door of the hoverjet; the other two started to turn, but were dispatched before they had registered what was happening. Rudi, still with his hands in the air, watched horrified as Samurai got out. But Samurai gave him no time for wondering.
“Come on. You can’t stand there like a tree all day. Help me move them.” They dragged the bodies to the car and heaved them inside. Then Samurai told Rudi to move the car over to the far side of the open area, away from the road. While Rudi was doing that, Samurai loaded their coats and bags into the flyer.
“Now get in,” Samurai said, waving toward the passenger-side door when Rudi came back.
Rudi, still white-faced and feeling nauseous, shook his head fearfully. “I’ve seen enough. I don’t want any part of this.”
“Do you want to stay here and freeze? Look, you wanted a ride to Semipalatinsk, didn’t you? If I wanted to kill you, you’d be with those three in the car already, wouldn’t you? So get in and stop looking like that. It’s over.”
Rudi obeyed, moving as if in a trance. Samurai spent some time going over the controls and checking the instruments. Satisfied that he understood the basics, he increased power and lifted off cautiously. Everything felt right. “It goes without saying that you don’t mention anything to anyone,” Samurai said as they rose. Rudi had seen what Samurai was capable of, and didn’t argue. Soon they were high over the road and heading south once more.
Being in motion again seemed to snap Rudi out of his stupor. He looked at Samurai with a new interest. “Who are you?” he asked. His voice was genuinely curious. “I mean, whatever you do, there has to be money in it, right?”
“I get by,” Samurai replied neutrally.
There was a short silence, as if Rudi was weighing his chances. Then he said, “Whatever you’re here for, you’re a stranger in the FER. I know my way around, how things work here.…You know, Sam, I could be a useful guy to have around.”
Samurai looked across at him. That was certainly a thought. He was glad now that he hadn’t eliminated Rudi along with the other three. That had puzzled him, since it would have been the correct and logical thing to do.
Perhaps a little something had rubbed off on him from Roxy.
Semipalatinsk was one of the Siberian space cities, a major gateway to the baffling outthrust of humanity nobody could quite explain that was bursting spaceward beyond Earth. The shuttles and orbital lifters stood on their pads among launch complexes, beam ground-stations, support installations, and freight-handling bays that extended for miles outside the city. Samurai contacted local control for directions on flight procedures, and was diverted to a landing pad for private flying vehicles not far from the regular airport, on the opposite side of the Irtysh River. From there, he and Rudi, who was by this time a fully recruited accomplice, took a transit tube into the city and arrived not long after noon. Ashling’s launch was scheduled for 10:00 a.m. the next day. Therefore it was very likely that he was already in the city somewhere. So Samurai still had the best part of a day to track him down. And if he failed to intercept Ashling before the launch, he now had the wherewithal for buying a shuttle ticket himself to go after him.
After they had eaten lunch together, Samurai sent Rudi off to find them a hotel for the night, with instructions to reserve Samurai’s room under the name, dreamed up on a whim, of Abraham Washington. They arranged to meet up again later at four o’clock. That would keep Rudi usefully occupied for a while and allow Samurai some free time to consider how to go about tracing Ashling. The other problem, of course, would be to avoid whoever the people were who were pursuing him. They had known where he was heading, and it wouldn’t be long before somebody realized that the group dispatched to take care of him on the road from Novosibirsk wasn’t reporting in. Knowing the way such people operated, Samurai guessed that there would be a backup group here in Semipalatinsk as well. In any case, the only prudent course would be to assume that there was.
What, he asked himself, would they expect him to do?
Since they knew the contents of the NSA intercept, they would also know the time of Ashling’s flight. Also, they knew that he knew it. From that, it wouldn’t be difficult for either them or him to establish which particular shuttle Ashling would be departing on. By this time, also, the authorities in Zittau would no doubt have obtained from Rostiescki the information he had given Samurai—that Ashling was traveling under the pseudonym of Oleg Kubalov—and passed it back via Berlin. Therefore the people pursuing Samurai would know that he was on the trail of somebody called Kubalov.
But they would have no reason to think that he knew where Kubalov was staying in the city—any more than they did themselves. Therefore they would be expecting him to try to find out. And the way to do that would be to get at the spaceline’s records, which would almost certainly show phone numbers at which passengers could be contacted, to notify of any schedule changes, confirm bookings, and so forth. If Samurai could get access to the record for Oleg Kubalov, he would be able to trace Ashling’s whereabouts.
That, Samurai decided, was what they would expect him to do. Thus they would be on the lookout for anyone showing an undue interest in the name Kubalov and the passenger list for that particular shuttle flight. And that gave Samurai the beginnings of a notion of how Rudi might begin his apprenticeship.…
He found some phone booths in a commercial and shopping precinct, and called up the directory listing of local Aerospaceflot branches and offices. A quick call to one of the numbers established that the only candidate was one of their own shuttles, flight LTR-7, due off the pad at 10:00 the next morning for an orbital transfer to an LLL transporter, which, he discovered, stood for Lunar Link Lines, an Offworld operation based at Copernicus.
After establishing that much, he went on, “I’m trying to contact one of the passengers on that flight. It is very urgent. His name is Oleg Kubalov. Do you have a number or something, by any chance, or some other way I can get in touch with him?”
“Sorry, sir. I can’t give you the hotel’s number,” the clerk replied. “But I can have them get Mr. Kubalov to call you. Where can you be reached?”
“Oh, I see. Well, I haven’t checked in anywhere myself yet. Why don’t I give you a call again as soon as I’m fixed up?”
“Very well, sir. Thanks for calling.”
“Thank you.”
Which was what Samurai had expected. But it had confirmed his hope that Ashling was in a hotel, which made things a lot simpler. So, Samurai could more confidently proceed to the next stage of what he had in mind.
He browsed around a little, and after making inquiries located a theatrical supply shop that sold wigs, hairpieces, dyes, face paints, and other aids to disguise. After selecting several items there, he bought himself a change of clothes to complete the transformation. Then he found a small hotel called the Kestrel. He took a room there as George Lincoln and left the things he had purchased.
From there, he went to a travel agent and checked the booking situation for tomorrow’s Aerospaceflot flight LTR-7 and connection to Luna Copernicus. There were a few places left but they were filling fast. He made a reservation in the name of Carl Zimmer and left a deposit, arranging to pay the balance and collect the ticket when he checked in the next morning. Finally he went back to meet Rudi at four as arranged, in the same restaurant where they’d had lunch.
“I got us into a place called the Hotel Marko,” Rudi said. “It’s small, and a bit on the bare side, but out of the way. I assumed you didn’t want to be too visible. Anyhow, here’s the address. You’re booked in as Abraham Washington, like you said.”
“It sounds fine,” Samurai said, taking the hotel’s card that Rudi had picked up.
“Is it true that in your country, hotels have to report their guest lists to the police?”
“You know, you really are going to have to quit this,” Samurai told him.
Rudi held up his hands in apology. “Not another word, I promise.”
Samurai sat forward over the table and lowered his voice. “Look, there’s something I want you to do.”
“If I can.”
“How’s your charm with women? You strike me as the kind who could probably talk acid into being sweet if you had a mind to.”
Rudi grinned at the compliment. “I have my days,” he agreed. “What do you want?”
“I’m being watched, and I can’t move too openly. There’s a person leaving tomorrow on a lunar transfer shuttle that I need to get in touch with. His name is Oleg Kubalov. He should be out at the spaceport later today. What I want you to do is go to the Aerospaceflot desk there at about six and get them to put out a call for him. If he’s there, give him the Hotel Marko’s number and get him to call me there. If he’s not, see if you can find out from the desk where he’s staying.”
Rudi looked doubtful. “Will they tell me?”
“They’re not supposed to. That’s where the charm comes in. They won’t give it over the phone, but they might if you go in person. I can’t risk being seen there myself. Will you give it a try?”
Rudi thought, then turned up his hands. “It can’t hurt, I guess. What happens if they won’t buy it?”
“Then we’ll have to think of something else.”
Rudi drummed his fingers on the table and eyed Samurai obliquely. “Can I ask what this is about?”
“Sure.”
Rudi waited. Samurai remained impassive. Finally Rudi asked, “Okay, what’s it about?”
“It’s none of your business.”
Rudi sighed and nodded resignedly. “Okay, I’ll give it a shot. What about you?”
“I’ve got some other things to do, so I have to go now. I’ll see you back at the Marko at…oh, it should be sometime around midnight.”
“I’ll see you then,” Rudi said.
“Let’s hope you have some luck.”
By 6:00 Samurai, with blond hair, mustache, glasses, and wearing the change of clothes he had bought, was inconspicuously reading a newspaper in the back row of some seats near the Aerospaceflot desk in the main spaceport terminal building. Rudi appeared on time and approached one of the clerks. She nodded after listening to him for a moment and scribbling down a note, then picked up a phone and called somebody. Shortly afterward a message came over the public-address system:
“Would Oleg Kubalov, traveling tomorrow to Luna Copernicus, contact the Aerospaceflot desk, please. Mr. Oleg Kubalov.”
Obviously, before Rudi could credibly pester the clerk for information connected with a name, he would need to have tried paging the name first. And if he was supposed to be trying to trace Ashling, he would have to give, and therefore have paged, the name that Ashling was going under—as anybody looking out for such behavior would already have figured.
Nobody responded to the call. After waiting a few minutes, Rudi went back to the desk and said something to the clerk. She checked on her terminal and nodded, Samurai saw with satisfaction: yes, there was an Oleg Kubalov booked on the flight. Rudi leaned closer and started talking. Samurai also saw another man in a tan suit, who had been hanging around in the general area, draw nearer behind Rudi, apparently trying to catch the conversation.
Rudi became more earnest, coaxing, beguiling, then finally throwing up his arms and demanding. But it did no good. The clerk shook her head insistently, and when that failed to deter him, she called a man in a red blazer out from the doorway behind. The man listened as Rudi remonstrated, shook his head, and ended up thumping the countertop and making a dismissive gesture. Well, nobody could have tried harder than that. Rudi finally gave up and walked away.
So did the man in the tan suit, along with a couple of others who had been moving closer. They recognized a setup when they saw it. It meant that Samurai was here and testing the water to see who was about.
They grabbed Rudi in a corridor leading to the transit-tube terminal and bundled him outside into a waiting car. “Okay, okay, take it easy,” the one in charge said in appalling Russian. “It’s not you that we want. Where’s the guy who put you up to this?”
Rudi looked at them fearfully. They were all lean, tough, and looked mean. He was rapidly coming to the conclusion that he’d had enough of this particular profession already.
One of them drew out a wad of FER notes and waved them provocatively in front of Rudi’s face. “This could keep you comfortable for a long time. Come on, fella, you haven’t done anything. You could be a thousand miles from here by midnight.”
Rudi licked his lips uncertainly. “Or think of it this way,” the leader suggested. “It’s a bit like getting old: the alternative’s a lot worse.”
“Well,” Rudi said, “if you put it like that…”
Meanwhile, Samurai had left to return to the Kestrel. They could spend their evening looking for him as Abraham Washington, while he got on with the job at hand.
Back at the hotel, he ordered a meal in his room and settled down to begin the tedious process of calling every hotel in the city in turn, asking to speak to a guest called Oleg Kubalov. Ever since Rostiescki gave him the name in Zittau, Samurai had been growing increasingly uneasy that even Pipeline, after their carelessness in using it on that occasion, wouldn’t be so lax as to book Kubalov’s room under that name also. But now that he had come this far, he had no choice but to press on.
He got lucky after a little under an hour, with a place called the Kosmogord.
“Yes, sir, one moment,” the voice on the line said when he inquired. “Putting you through now.”
Samurai hung up. So Pipeline, apparently, could indeed be that amateurish after all.
“Ashling, I’ve got you!” he breathed.
While in another part of town, Colonel Hautz’s men were setting up their stakeout of the Hotel Marko. All the angles were covered. Samurai would be back around midnight, the Russian had said.
It was going to be a long night.
The Kosmogord was one of the city’s more prominent hotels: an orientally inspired extravaganza of marbled halls and pointed arches, with an indoor arboretum and cascading rock pools giving its main lobby area something of the look of a Moorish palace garden.
Samurai arrived shortly after 9:30, disguised since Ashling knew him, and booked a single room, again as George Lincoln—although by now what name he chose didn’t matter. Having deposited his briefcase, he went back to the elevators and visited every floor, noting down the room numbers indicated on the direction signs at each level. That gave him a list of all the rooms in the hotel. He then returned to his own room and began calling each of them in turn to pose the same question:
“Hello, is this Mr. Kubalov’s room?…I’m sorry, I must have the wrong number.”
But when he tried Room 1205, a woman’s voice responded. “Yes. Who is this?”
Samurai penned a heavy circle around 1205 on the list he’d been working through. “Room service here, ma’am. Sorry to trouble you, but we’ve got some confusion over an order here. Was it 1205 that wanted a chicken salad for two and a carafe of wine?”
“No, not us.”
“Oh, then it must be the other one. Sorry again for disturbing you.
“That’s all right. These things happen.”
“Thanks. Good night.”
“Good night.”
In room 1205, Kay replaced the phone and turned back toward Scipio and another Pipeline member called Julius, who were watching her expectantly. Julius had also been involved in the Ashling business and would be traveling to Luna with them tomorrow.
“He’s here,” Kay told them.
In the staff section at the rear of the second floor, the hotel security manager came back to his office, unlocked the door and went in, and never knew what hit him.
Samurai relieved him of his blue blazer, tie, badge and ID, and passkeys. He didn’t like these kinds of impersonations, but there was no time left for fooling around. This would be his last chance to intercept Ashling before the launch tomorrow morning.
Ten minutes later, after using the emergency stairs to stay out of sight as much as possible, he came to the door of Room 1205. He checked the gun inside his jacket and the other items concealed about his person, looked each way to be sure he was alone, and rang the bell. There was no answer. He tapped on the door, waited, and then rang again. Nothing. After checking around him once more, he produced the security manager’s passkeys, slid the gun from its holster beneath his arm, then entered swiftly and silently, closing the door and swiveling to cover the room from a crouch against the wall in one smooth movement.
It was deserted.
Samurai straightened up slowly, nonplussed. There were no people, but the signs of rapid departure were everywhere: ruffled beds, one with pillows stacked at the end; drawers half open; a folded newspaper on top of the vanity; used napkins in the trash bin. He went through to the bathroom. Sink and shower used recently, towels damp and crumpled. He came back out and rummaged through the trash bin. There was a receipted bill from the Harbor Light Bar in Hamburg, along with a couple of Ukrainian Airlines boarding passes from Odessa to Novosibirsk direct, dated December 3. He picked up the newspaper and saw that it was the Berliner Zeitung from the day previous to that. Some papers that had been inside the fold dropped out and fell to the floor. Samurai picked them up and examined them. Most were of no interest. One, however, had written on it among other things, Dr. Andre Ulkanov, Neurophysiology Dept., Science Institute at Copernicus 3, and a phone number with a lunar access code.
Still uncomprehending, Samurai returned to his own room and called the hotel on an outside line.
“Kosmogord, good evening.”
“Hello, Room 1205, please. Mr. Kubalov.”
There was a pause, then, “I’m sorry, sir. The person of that name has already checked out.”
“What? How recently? I talked to him less than an hour ago.”
“He left within the last half hour, sir.”
“I see.…Thank you.” Samurai hung up and stared at the phone.
So perhaps he hadn’t been careful enough after all, he thought to himself as he put his own clothes on again. His call as room service must have tipped them off, and obviously they were taking no chances. He wouldn’t locate Oleg Kubalov again tonight, anywhere in the city. There was nothing for it, then, but to return to the Kestrel and go on to his fallback plan of pursuing Ashling to Luna tomorrow morning.
On his way, he reflected on the incredible sequence of bad luck that had dogged him all the way from Pearse. It was uncanny. He had managed to miss Ashling by a hair’s breadth every time; and in not a single instance had Samurai actually caught a glimpse of him.
If he hadn’t seen him with his own eyes before whoever it was jumped him in the hotel in Atlanta, he could almost have believed that Ashling didn’t exist at all.
Passengers and well-wishers began arriving early the next morning, and by eight o’clock the Aerospaceflot departures hall was filled with people. For the most part they were younger, ambitious professionals, some traveling singly, others with partners, spouses, and families, bound offplanet because that was where the Offworld enterprises needed them and made it worth their while to go. There were scientists and engineers, drawn by what they had read and heard of breathtaking leaps in concept and theory that were already making Earth’s contemporary technologies as obsolete as the stagecoach. There were teachers, eager to go where the creative potential of young minds was regarded as the most precious resource that the universe had to offer; entrepreneurs with an instinct for opportunity still to be uncovered; writers, artists, moviemakers, poets, searching for new elements and inspiration. And there were the restless, the curious, and the adventuresome, unable to resist the lure of challenge and an environment that would be unlike anything they had ever known.
Some sat quietly and stared, lost in thought as they prepared to leave for new worlds. Others milled around in constant agitation, checking and rechecking details needlessly, and talking incessantly in vain efforts to mask their nervousness and excitement.
Samurai arrived disguised, proceeded to the Aerospaceflot ticketing desk to confirm his reservation as Carl Zimmer and pay the outstanding balance. It was too easy: no documentation was required; nobody asked to see any ID.
“How can you people permit this?” he couldn’t keep himself from saying as he watched the clerk enter the transaction. “Do you really believe that resources out there are unlimited? You can’t simply open up the Moon to the whole world.”
The clerk smiled as if he had heard it many times before. “I’m no scientist, but they tell us they’re on the verge of being able to turn moonrock into anything you want,” he replied. “And nobody’s shipping the whole world anywhere. We can only send as many as there are places on the ship.”
“But you haven’t told me where to stay. Nobody’s asked me how long I’ll be there. Isn’t there any control? Doesn’t anyone plan anything?”
“Of course they do. How many designers do you think it took to plan the construction of the ship? We plan the flight schedules, because that’s what we do. The hotel and real estate people plan the accommodation, because that’s what they do. It all works itself out in the end.” The clerk slipped the ticket into a plastic holder and held it out. “Enjoy the flight.”
Samurai took the holder and tried to summon a response from all the reasons why he knew it couldn’t be so. But as he stood, trying to sort the words out in his head, he found that he could only stare in mute confusion. All of a sudden, something inside him didn’t feel right.
The slogans marched through his head like obedient soldiers. But they rang hollow, playing themselves automatically as if from a tape. It was as if he had forgotten what the words meant. He searched in his mind for some significance behind the phrases, some bedrock of conviction that should exist underneath…but encountered only emptiness.
Forcing the thought, he repeated to himself that the day would come when all this would collapse under its own contradictions, and the Consolidation would stand strong. But again the fingers of his mind slipped around and away from the words in vain, unable to capture any substance. It was as if his mind were continuing to function as a collection of mechanical parts only, going through their prescribed motions but somehow incapable of attaining any depth of thought. For the first time, the unassailable, total self-confidence that he had never doubted for a moment was shaken. He seemed to be feeling pieces of his mind beginning to slip apart.
He took the ticket in its holder and moved away from the desk. Several men were standing around in the vicinity, a couple of whom he recognized as the Americans who had followed Rudi from here the previous evening. They scrutinized all the passengers intently, including Samurai. But they had no idea what appearance he might have adopted. And as foreign agents operating under cover, they had no authority to interfere with passengers boarding a spacecraft in the Kazakh Free State. There was nothing they could do.
Expelling all other considerations from his mind and forcing himself to concentrate only on the mission, Samurai drifted away and around the hall to see if he could spot Ashling among the knots of people. But there was no sign of the scientist. It wasn’t especially surprising. After the alarm last night, Ashling could be in disguise also, or was being kept out of sight until the last minute.
He realized that two children were looking up at him, a boy and a girl, both about ten. They looked like twins.
“Our daddy’s a famous conductor,” the boy informed him. “He’s going to start an orchestra on the Moon. Are you coming to live on the Moon too?”
“We’re going to have more brothers and sisters, and they’ll be born on the Moon,” the girl said.
Automatically the words formed in Samurai’s mind: And in ten years’ time, more hungry mouths will be coming back to Earth, begging to be fed. But another part of him didn’t want to believe them. Something about these people was stirring a piece of him somewhere deep inside, but at the same time another piece rebelled and didn’t want to be stirred.
“Where are you from?” the boy asked.
Samurai could only stare at them. He could remember fragments of pictures of what he knew was Minneapolis, others that were Denver, and then bits of yet other places again, all of them in conflict. He didn’t know where he was from.
He turned and walked away. Concentrate on the mission.…
Boarding commenced at nine. Since the flight up to the orbiting lunar transporter would be short, the shuttle cabin contained mainly seating, as in a regular airliner. However, since the craft was in the shape of a short, fat cone, the seats, all elaborately sprung and pneumatically contoured, were in a number of boxlike container-cabins set on transverse decks, like the floors of a house—which suited the ship’s vertical attitude when on the ground. Once in free-fall, of course, it wouldn’t matter which way up they were.
“Thank you for choosing Aerospaceflot today, and welcome aboard our flight LTR-7 to orbit, connecting with LLL’s onward service to Luna, Copernicus. For those of you who will be going offplanet for the first time, there are some procedures and safety features that you should be aware of.…”
There was no sign of Ashling in the seats on the deck where Samurai was. But that meant little, since there were two other decks above and more below. Samurai checked in his pocket that he still had the piece of paper that he’d found in the hotel room the previous night, giving Professor Ulkanov’s whereabouts at Copernicus. So even if he failed to pick up Ashling on disembarkation, he still had Ashling’s final destination.
Now that he was aboard the shuttle and settled, Samurai felt more himself again. Perhaps the confusion that he’d experienced outside had been just a passing effect, caused by the accumulated stress and conflict of the last few days. He thought back over all the obstacles that he’d overcome since leaving Pearse and felt a deep sense of satisfaction.
And now he was so close.
Talk around the cabin died away, and the air tensed with expectancy tinged with apprehension for the unknown as the moment for departure approached. But the actual liftoff, when it came, was smoother, though noisier, than the takeoff of an airliner, with no rumbling rush across concrete, sudden pull-up to unstick, or clunkings of landing gear being retracted to reduce drag.
Instead, rapid pulsations throbbed through the structure to mark ignition of the onboard start-up booster, growing quickly to a pounding roar to achieve positive thrust and set the craft into motion. Then the three ground lasers went up to full power to energize the main propellant, and within seconds the shuttle was accelerating fast, then streaking skyward, riding on a controlled, laser-sustained detonation wave, course-corrected by alteration of the beams following it from the ground. Onboard optics redirected the tracking beams to sustain drive for over a thousand miles downrange, by which time the shuttle was up to orbital speed and on a closing trajectory for its onboard auxiliary thrusters to complete rendezvous maneuvers with the transfer satellite where the LLL transporter was waiting.
The transporter was essentially a framework supporting two co-joining spheres that formed the manned section, along with a number of gas, water, and auxiliary propellant tanks, and a nuclear main-propulsion module. One of the spheres contained the crew’s quarters, flight deck, and control room, while the other, which was larger, held the passenger lounge-cafeteria, galley and other services, and a playroom-nursery. There was no need for passengers to leave their seats and move through into the lunar transporter when the surface shuttle docked. The box-shaped containers holding the seating cabins slid out of the shuttle as sealed units, into slots in the transporter framework, where they mated with ports connecting to the main passenger module.
There were more announcements, reminding passengers of the effects of free-fall and instructing them to keep seat belts fastened and loose objects secured. During the next two hours, three more shuttles, one from the other end of Siberia, one from Japan, and one from Malaysia, arrived to exchange similar passenger and cargo containers for others inbound from Luna. When preparations were complete, everyone returned to their seats. Then the main drive fired to begin lifting the fully loaded transporter up through higher orbits and speed it onto the escape trajectory that would carry it from Earth.
For a long time the cabin’s occupants, for the most part silent, stared from their seats in awed fascination as the full disk of Earth being captured by the rear-pointing imagers came into view on the display screen. The transfer satellite shrank and was lost against the surface detail, and then Earth itself could be seen diminishing gradually against the background starfield.
“I still can’t get used to the idea that it’s really out there,” a woman’s voice said from the row behind where Samurai was sitting. “I mean, it isn’t just another movie that was sent back. It’s right out there, on the other side of the wall.”
“Makes this thing feel like an eggshell, doesn’t it,” a man replied.
After a while the atmosphere relaxed, and such being the adaptability of human nature, what had been new and wondrous only an hour before soon became the norm. Some of the passengers began moving about to stretch their cramped limbs and check out the menu and other facilities available in the communal services module. The nuclear main drive was still sustaining enough thrust to maintain a mild acceleration, so conditions were not entirely weightless. The ship would enter a fully free-fall phase later into the voyage, however.
Confusion and disorientation were beginning to come over Samurai again. Something catastrophic was happening to him, he could sense, but he didn’t know what. Splinters of memories came together in his mind and tumbled apart again like the pieces of a kaleidoscope picture, forming patterns of chance associations that hung together for fleeting moments but made no sense. An apartment in Philadelphia; a girl with red hair in Chicago; a room in which soldiers lived; a corridor full of students in a school somewhere.…There were guns, all kinds of weapons; two punks lying crumpled on the ground in a dark, narrow street.…The red-haired girl again, this time lying naked on a towel by a lake surrounded by trees. A machine surrounding his head.…He saw a ship coming into dock in a port, he wasn’t sure where. Some part of him thought it was in Germany. Had he ever been to Germany?
He didn’t know. Who were these people who came and went through his awareness like fish glimpsed in a turbulent river? Which of it was real, which was fabrication? He couldn’t tell.
Perspiration was damp on his forehead, slippery across his palms. A feeling close to panic gripped him. Suddenly the rows of people pressing in on him from every side in the confines of the cabin were asphyxiating. He undid his seat belt, mumbled his way past the people to the nearest aisle, and headed through the connecting port to the services module.
Two catering attendants were dispensing snacks, sandwiches, hot food, and beverages in closed cups with drinking tubes from a horseshoe counter projecting into an eating area of tables and booths. Samurai selected a plate of fish with potato salad and bread, and a hot tea, and took it over to an empty stool at a side bar where several other people were already sitting.
As he ate, he remembered a woman and a car. She was driving. They were on a road winding between snowy mountains. He didn’t know where or when it had been…or even if it had ever happened.
But there was something about her that mattered. He tried to think what. She had been different, somehow, and cared about a stranger. Been something that he never could be.…And it mattered.
“Apparently we’re doing almost fifty thousand kilometers an hour,” a voice said nearby. “You’d never believe it.” Samurai looked up. A gray-haired man with a short beard was looking at him genially. “Hello. My name is Piotr. It’s going to be a long trip, so we might as well make the best of it. Why go out of one’s way to be strangers?”
“Oh…yes,” Samurai responded uncertainly, still half immersed in his reverie.
“I’m a petrologist,” Piotr went on. “Rocks and soils, you know. Lots to do out there. They’re going to be digging half of Luna up. Copernicus goes down hundreds of meters already.” He waited expectantly for a moment, then prompted, “What do you do?”
Samurai looked at him blankly. “I kill people,” he replied.
Back in his seat, Samurai stared unseeingly at the display on the forward wall of the cabin, which was now showing a movie. All around him were creators, builders, producers, discoverers: men and women who belonged to life, who were life; who extended life through the power to forge out of ideas and matter the tools that could transform deserts into gardens, and the lunar waste into cities. He had been programmed only to kill and destroy.
By now he had forgotten what his mission was, and why it mattered. He knew only that it was Ashling who had made him what he was. And that was why Samurai had to kill him.
That was all.
Balanced on its descent jets like a metallic sculpture coming down out of the black lunar sky, the transporter sank between the opened outer doors of an immense subterranean docking bay. On every side stretched the clutter of domes, towers, and surface constructions forming the North Complex of the thirty-mile-wide interconnected sprawl of the Copernican base system. Beneath the arc lights inside the doors, tiers of access platforms and service gantries lined the sides of the docking bay, with freight hoists going down to deeper levels.
Shock absorbers disposed of the last remaining momentum, and the ship came to rest. The huge doors slid together overhead, and the dock began filling with air. Umbilicals and access ramps swung out to mate with the craft, and shortly afterward its passengers began walking through, moving warily and awkwardly to the unfamiliar sensation of possessing only a sixth normal bodyweight, into the reception area.
The hall was small compared to the arrivals lounge of a typical airport of any size, and the sudden flood of several hundred arrivals, augmented by others who had been waiting to meet them, quickly transformed it into a confusion of jostling and bustling, with relieved and excited talk breaking out on every side now that the voyage, with all its unknowns, was over. There was little evidence of officialdom or bureaucracy in action. A man and woman in pale blue police uniforms stood looking on from beside one of the exits, and a number of Lunar Link Lines agents in maroon suits and tunics were on hand to help people with directions. A sign above the main doors proclaimed WELCOME in a score of languages. Nearby was a clock showing local time, and above it a picture of earth and a footprint with the legend: One Small Step.
Samurai moved to the center of the hall and allowed himself to be carried along with the current of people that was beginning to flow through into a brightly lit concourse on the far side of the exit. Surrounding it were desks for information, transportation, and accommodation, and at the far end, several further exits with signs denoting ways to other parts of the spaceport and to local transitube terminals. Opening onto the concourse were several shops, a restaurant and bar, an employment, insurance, and real estate agency; a chapel; an entrance to a pool and gymnasium; and a massage and sauna parlor with scantily clad girls and several well-muscled studs in the foyer, with the invitation to “Rest, Relax, Enjoy. It’s Out of That World!” flashing in colored lights above.
He searched with his eyes, one way, then the other. Everywhere the same milling tide of men, women, figures, faces, couples, groups, scurrying, standing, children looking lost, clutching hands.…
And then he saw them.
It was only a glimpse through the crowd: two men and a woman, one of the men in a long coat and with a hat pulled down low, just in the process of disappearing into an exit marked LOWER LEVEL & TRANSITUBE. In that brief moment and from that angle Samurai didn’t see their faces; but their hurried pace and hunched postures, as if unconsciously trying to conceal themselves, signaled all that he needed to know. He began moving in that direction, slipping swiftly through the crowd.
Outside the concourse was a foyer with sales booths and escalators going up and down. Samurai joined the short tail of people moving onto the down-going one. Below, he could see the three figures just stepping off at the bottom and disappearing into one of several tunnels leading away in different directions. But he could do nothing to close the distance, for the moving stairway was filled with people.
He fretted impatiently while the escalator carried him down, then as soon as he was off at the bottom, dodged around the group immediately ahead and threaded his way through the people moving along the tunnel that the three from the shuttle had taken. It brought him to a crossway, with stairs going down on both sides, while a wide passageway continued ahead. He could see no sign of his quarry, but there were signs giving directions.
The note on the piece of paper that he’d picked up in the Kosmogord said, Science Institute, Cop 3. A sign by one of the stairways read: EASTBOUND, with a schematic map of the line. The loop at the far end was indicated as COMPLEX 3, FRANCINE, with stops at Mineheads, Orchard, Astrakhan, Zagreb, University-Observatory, Central, Maindome, Shinjuku, Aquamarine, Eratosthenes Link, Valley, Gorky, and Junction. People were emerging from the archway next to the sign, indicating that a train was already in. Samurai went through the archway and hastened on down.
He came out onto a platform with a transparent wall running along one side. A train consisting of three short cars was standing on the far side. But the platform was already clear of boarding passengers, and even as he watched, the gates through the wall closed and the train began moving noiselessly away.
Thwarted and exasperated, Samurai turned away. Already more people were coming out onto the platform. Between the seats set along the rear wall was a picture of a grinning Mickey Mouse face, with a monitor screen and audio grille. Above the screen an illuminated sign proclaimed INFORMATION. Samurai moved over in front of it.
“Hello,” a squeaky voice greeted cheerfully from the grille. “How can I help you?”
“Copernicus Three, the Science Institute,” Samurai answered. “Do I get there this way?”
“Sure. Get off at University-Observatory and just follow the signs.”
“How long?”
“It takes about fifteen minutes.”
“I mean how long before the next train?”
“With an Earthship just in, no time at all. In fact the next one’s coming in right now.”
In his office on Level 5B of Neurophysiology, Professor Andre Ulkanov stood watching one of several monitor screens set into a panel that took up part of one of the walls. The screen showed a side view of the head of Jason, one of Ulkanov’s graduate students, who was posted on a gallery overlooking the entrance lobby above, in the upper levels of the largely subterranean institute. After a few seconds the head turned full-face. “I think this might be him, Professor.” Ulkanov raised an eyebrow and caught the gaze of his assistant, Barbara, standing a short distance back.
“Now, we’ll see,” he murmured softly.
Another screen showed a view from a hand-held camera that Jason was operating, looking down over the floor of the lobby. A figure with fair hair, a mustache, wearing glasses, and carrying a black briefcase, had entered from the doors leading through from the Transitube and was looking around. Jason’s voice reported, “He’s going over to the information desk.”
Ulkanov turned toward the three people, still in their traveling coats, who had arrived only minutes ago. “Is that him?” he asked them. “The man who showed up at the Kosmogord?”
Kay and Scipio came closer and studied the image for a moment. Julius, the other member of Pipeline who had come with them from Earth, sank into a chair and lit a cigarette. “Man, that was a long trip,” he sighed.
Kay nodded to Ulkanov. “It’s him.”
“It’s unbelievable,” Scipio breathed. “He’s here at the institute already? What kind of person is this?”
Ulkanov looked at another screen, this time showing two girls in white lab coats. “Okay?” he asked them. “Is everything ready there?”
One of them nodded nervously. “Yes.”
“Be careful, now. Remember that he’s dangerous.”
“You don’t have to remind us,” the girl said in a shaky voice.
“Will this count toward grade points?” the other asked.
Ulkanov smiled thinly. “We’ll see what we can do.”
Jason said from the first screen, “The clerk at the information desk is sending him to the elevators. He’s moving away…on his way over. Get ready. He’s coming down.”
Level 5B, Experimental Wing, Samurai repeated to himself as the elevator door closed. The first place that Ashling would have been taken to on arriving would almost certainly be Ulkanov’s office. There was no call for stealth or elaborate planning now, Samurai decided. His world had reduced itself to the single, overriding obsession to kill Ashling. One fast, sudden stroke, and it would be over with. Then they could do whatever they liked.
The elevator descended a level and stopped. Two girls in white lab coats got in, carrying some items of technical equipment. Neither took any notice of him. The doors closed and the elevator resumed its descent. The girls talked in nervous, subdued voices, but Samurai didn’t really notice as he softly fingered the lines of the automatic in his coat pocket.
Two levels farther down the elevator stopped again, and the girls got out. The doors closed. The elevator began moving once more. And only then did Samurai see the flask that the two girls had left in a corner on the floor…a split second before it burst, releasing a pungent vapor that filled the small volume of the elevator car in moments. Samurai tore his handkerchief from his pocket and clamped it over his nose and mouth, then punched the button to stop the car at the next level.
But it never reached the next level. It stopped halfway between, and the door remained firmly closed against Samurai’s frantic attempt to force it. He braced his back and feet against the walls, intending to work his way up to see if there was a hatch in the roof that could be opened; but before even making the first move he could feel his strength failing. He slid down into a sitting posture, keeled slowly over sideways, and lost consciousness.
He awoke many hours later, in a treatment room near the machine facility in the institute’s advanced research labs. Ulkanov was standing near the door, watching his patient’s recovery and smiling.
For the person who was staring up from the cot was no longer the synthetic creation that had been named Samurai.
Nor the teacher, Richard Jarrow; nor Warrant Officer Demiro.
But the missing scientist himself: Conrad Ashling.