The Cardinal of the Kremlin

IT was bitterly cold when Ryan awoke to the beeping sound of his watch alarm. There was frost on the windows even at ten in the morning, and he realized that he hadn’t made sure the heat in his room was operating. His first considered action of the day was to pull on some socks. His seventh-floor room—it was called an “efficiency apartment”—overlooked the compound. Clouds had moved in, and the day was leaden gray with the threat of snow.

“Perfect,” Jack observed to himself on the way to the bathroom. He knew that it could have been worse. The only reason he had this room was that the officer who ordinarily lived here was on honeymoon leave. At least the plumbing worked, but he found a note taped to the medicine cabinet mirror admonishing him not to mess the place up the way the last transient had. Next he checked the small refrigerator. Nothing: Welcome to Moscow. Back in the bathroom, he washed and shaved. One other oddity of the embassy was that to get down from the seventh floor, you first had to take an elevator up to the ninth floor and another one down from there to the lobby. Jack was still shaking his head over that one when he got into the canteen.

“Don’t you just love jet lag?” a member of the delegation greeted him. “Coffee’s over there.”

“I call it travel shock.” Ryan got himself a mug and came back. “Well, the coffee’s decent. Where’s everybody else?”

“Probably still sacked out, even Uncle Ernie. I caught a few hours on the flight, and thank God for the pill they gave us.”

Ryan laughed. “Yeah, me too. Might even feel human in time for dinner tonight.”

“Feel like exploring? I’d like to take a walk, but—”

“Travel in pairs.” Ryan nodded. The rule applied only to the arms negotiators. This phase of negotiations would be sensitive, and the rules for the team were much tighter than usual. “Maybe later. I have some work to do.”

“Today and tomorrow’s our only chance,” the diplomat pointed out.

“I know,” Ryan assured him. He checked his watch and decided that he’d wait to eat until lunchtime. His sleep cycle was almost in synch with Moscow, but his stomach wasn’t quite sure yet. Jack walked back to the chancery.

The corridors were mainly empty. Marines patrolled them, looking very serious indeed after the problems that had occurred earlier, but there was little evidence of activity on this Saturday morning. Jack walked to the proper door and knocked. He knew it was locked.

“You’re Ryan?”

“That’s right.” The door opened to admit him, then was closed and relocked.

“Grab a seat.” His name was Tony Candela. “What gives?”

“We have an op laid on.”

“News to me—you’re not operations, you’re intelligence,” Candela objected.

“Yeah, well, Ivan knows that, too. This one’s going to be a little strange.” Ryan explained for five minutes.

“‘A little strange,’ you say?” Candela rolled his eyes.

“I need a keeper for part of it. I need some phone numbers I can call, and I may need wheels that’ll be there when required.”

“This could cost me some assets.”

“We know that.”

“Of course, if it works ...”

“Right. We can put some real muscle on this one.”

“The Foleys know about this?”

“’Fraid not.”

“Too bad, Mary Pat would have loved it. She’s the cowboy. Ed’s more the button-down-collar type. So, you expect him to bite Monday or Tuesday night?”

“That’s the plan.”

“Let me tell you something about plans,” Candela said.

They were letting him sleep. The doctors had warned him again, Vatutin growled. How was he supposed to accomplish anything when they kept—

“There’s that name again,” the man with the headphones said tiredly. “Romanov. If he must talk in his sleep, why can’t he confess ... ?”

“Perhaps he’s talking with the Czar’s ghost,” another officer joked. Vatutin’s head came up.

“Or perhaps someone else’s.” The Colonel shook his head. He’d been at the point of dozing himself. Romanov, though the name of the defunct royal family of the Russian Empire, was not an uncommon one—even a Politburo member had had it. “Where’s his file?”

“Here.” The joker pulled open a drawer and handed it over. The file weighed six kilograms, and came in several different sections. Vatutin had committed most of it to memory, but had concentrated on the last two parts. This time he opened the first section.

“Romanov,” he breathed to himself. “Where have I seen that ... ?” It took him fifteen minutes, flipping through the frayed pages as speedily as he dared.

“I have it!” It was a citation, scrawled in pencil. “Corporal A. I. Romanov, killed in action 6 October 1941, ‘... defiantly placed his tank between the enemy and his disabled troop commander’s, allowing the commander to withdraw his wounded crew ...’ Yes! This one’s in a book I read as a child. Misha got his crew on the back deck of a different tank, jumped inside, and personally killed the tank that got Romanov’s. He’d saved Misha’s life and was posthumously awarded the Red Banner—” Vatutin stopped. He was calling the subject Misha, he realized.

“Almost fifty years ago?”

“They were comrades. This Romanov fellow had been part of Filitov’s own tank crew through the first few months. Well, he was a hero. He died for the Motherland, saving the life of his officer,” Vatutin observed. And Misha still talks to him...

I have you now, Filitov.

“Shall we wake him up and—”

“Where’s the doctor?” Vatutin asked.

It turned out that he was about to leave for home and was not overly pleased to be recalled. But he didn’t have the rank to play power games with Colonel Vatutin.

“How should we handle it?” Vatutin asked after outlining his thoughts.

“He should be weary but wide awake. That is easily done.”

“So we should wake him up now and—”

“No.” The doctor shook his head. “Not in REM sleep—”

“What?”

“Rapid Eye Movement sleep—that’s what it’s called when the patient is dreaming. You can always tell if the subject is in a dream by the eye movement, whether he talks or not.”

“But we can’t see that from here,” another officer objected.

“Yes, perhaps we should redesign the observation system,” the doctor mused. “But that doesn’t matter too much. During REM sleep the body is effectively paralyzed. You’ll notice that he’s not moving now, correct? The mind does that to prevent injury to the body. When he starts moving again, the dream is over.”

“How long?” Vatutin asked. “We don’t want him to get too rested.”

“Depends on the subject, but I would not be overly concerned. Have the turnkey get a breakfast ready for him, and as soon as he starts moving, wake him up and feed him.”

“Of course.” Vatutin smiled.

“Then we just keep him awake ... oh, eight hours or so more. Yes, that should do it. Is it enough time for you?”

“Easily,” Vatutin said with more confidence than he should have. He stood and checked his watch. The Colonel of “Two” called the Center and gave a few orders. His system, too, cried out for sleep. But for him there was a comfortable bed. He wanted to have all of his cleverness when the time came. The Colonel undressed fastidiously, calling for an orderly to polish his boots and press his uniform while he slept. He was tired enough that he didn’t even feel the need for a drink. “I have you now,” he murmured as he faded into sleep.

“G‘night, Bea,” Candi called from the door as her friend opened up her car. Taussig turned one last time and waved before getting in. Candi and the Geek couldn’t have seen the way she stabbed the key into the ignition. She drove only half a block, turning a corner before pulling to the curb and staring at the night.

They’re doing it already, she thought. All the way through dinner, the way he looked at her—the way she looked at him! Already those wimpy little hands are fumbling with the buttons on her blouse ...

She lit a cigarette and leaned back, picturing it while her stomach tightened into a rigid, acid-filled ball. Zit-face and Candi. She’d endured three hours of it. Candi’s usual beautifully prepared dinner. For twenty minutes while the finishing touches had been under way, she’d been stuck in the living room with him, listening to his idiot jokes, having to smile back at him. It was clear enough that Alan didn’t like her either, but because she was Candi’s friend he’d felt obligated to be nice to her, nice to poor Bea, who was heading toward old-maidhood, or whatever they called it now—she’d seen it in his stupid eyes. To be patronized by him was bad enough, but to be pitied ...

And now he was touching her, kissing her, listening to her murmurs, whispering his stupid, disgusting endearments—and Candi liked it! How was that possible?

Candace was more than just pretty, Taussig knew. She was a free spirit. She had a discoverer’s mind mated to a warm, sensitive soul. She had real feelings. She was so wonderfully feminine, with the kind of beauty that begins at the heart and radiates out through a perfect smile.

But now she’s giving herself to that thing! He’s probably doing it already. That geek doesn’t have the first idea of taking his time and showing real love and sensitivity. I bet he just does it, drooling and giggling like some punk fifteen-year-old football jock. How can she!

“Oh, Candace.” Bea’s voice broke. She was swept with nausea, and had to fight to control herself. She succeeded, and sat alone in her car for twenty minutes of silent tears before she managed to drive on.

“What do you make of that?”

“I think she’s a lesbian,” Agent Jennings said after a moment.

“Nothing like that in her file, Peggy,” Will Perkins observed.

“The way she looks at Dr. Long, the way she acts around Gregory ... that’s my gut feeling.”

“But—”

“Yeah, but what the hell can we do about that?” Margaret Jennings noted as she drove away. She toyed briefly with the idea of going after Taussig, but the day had been long enough already. “No evidence, and if we got it, and acted on it, there’d be hell to pay.”

“You suppose the three of them ... ?”

“Will, you’ve been reading those magazines again.” Jennings laughed, breaking the spell for a moment. Perkins was a Mormon, and had never been seen to touch pornographic material. “Those two are so much in love they don’t have the first idea of what’s going on around them—except work. I bet their pillow talk is classified. What’s happening, Will, is that Taussig is being cut out of her friend’s life and she’s unhappy about it. Tough.”

“So how do we write this one up?”

“Zip. A whole lot of nothing.” Their assignment for the evening had been to follow up a report that strange cars were occasionally seen at the Gregory-Long residence. It had probably originated, Agent Jennings thought, from a local prude who didn’t like the idea of the two young people living together without the appropriate paperwork. She was a little old-fashioned about that herself, but it didn’t make either one of them a security risk. On the other hand—

“I think we ought to check out Taussig next.”

“She lives alone.”

“I’m sure.” It would take time to look at every senior staffer at Tea Clipper, but you couldn’t rush this kind of investigation.

“You shouldn’t have come here,” Tania observed at once. Bisyarina’s face didn’t show her rage. She took Taussig’s hand and brought her inside.

“Ann, it’s just so awful!”

“Come sit down. Were you followed?” Idiot! Pervert! She’d just gotten out of the shower, and was dressed in a bathrobe, with a towel over her hair.

“No, I watched all the way.”

Sure, Bisyarina thought. She would have been surprised to learn that it was true. Despite the lax security at Tea Clipper—it allowed someone like this inside!—her agent had broken every rule there was in coming here.

“You cannot stay long.”

“I know.” She blew her nose. “They’ve about finished the first draft of the new program. The Geek has cut it down by eighty thousand lines of code—taking out all that AI stuff really made a difference. You know, I think he has the new stuff memorized—I know, I know, that’s impossible, even for that.”

“When will you be able—”

“I don’t know.” Taussig smiled for a second. “You ought to have him working for you. I think he’s the only one who really understands the whole program—I mean, the whole project.”

Unfortunately all we have is you, Bisyarina didn’t say. What she did was very hard. She reached out and took Taussig’s hand.

The tears started again. Beatrice nearly leaped into Tania’s arms. The Russian officer held her close, trying to feel sympathy for her agent. There had been many lessons at the KGB school, all of them intended to help her in handling agents. You had to have a mixture of sympathy and discipline. You had to treat them like spoiled children, mixing favors and scoldings to make them perform. And Agent Livia was more important than most.

It was still hard to turn her face toward the head on her shoulder and kiss the cheek that was salty with tears both old and new. Bisyarina breathed easier at the realization that she needed go no further than this. She’d never yet needed to go further, but lived in fear that “Livia” would one day demand it of her—certainly it would happen if she ever realized that her intended lover had not the slightest interest in her advances. Bisyarina marveled at that. Beatrice Taussig was brilliant in her way, certainly brighter than the KGB officer who “ran” her, but she knew so little about people. The crowning irony was that she was very much like that Alan Gregory man she so detested. Prettier, more sophisticated though Taussig was, she lacked the capacity to reach out when she needed to. Gregory had probably done it only once in his life, and that was the difference between him and her. He had gotten there first because Beatrice had lacked the courage. It was just as well, Bisyarina knew. The rejection would have destroyed her.

Bisyarina wondered what Gregory was really like. Probably another academic—what was it the English called them? Boffins. A brilliant boffin—well, everyone attached to Tea Clipper was brilliant in one way or another. That frightened her. In her way, Beatrice was proud of the program, though she deemed it a threat to world peace, a point on which Bisyarina agreed. Gregory was a boffin who wanted to change the world. Bisyarina understood the motivation. She wanted to change it, too. Just in a different way. Gregory and Tea Clipper were a threat to that. She didn’t hate the man. If anything, she thought, she’d probably like him. But personal likes and dislikes had absolutely nothing to do with the business of intelligence.

“Feel better?” she asked when the tears stopped.

“I have to leave.”

“Are you sure you’re all right?”

“Yes. I don’t know when I’ll be able to—”

“I understand.” Tania walked her to the door. At least she’d had the good sense to park her car on a different block, “Ann” noticed. She waited, holding the door cracked open, to hear the distinctive sound of the sports car. After closing the door, she looked at her hands and went back to the bathroom to wash them.

Night came early in Moscow, the sun hidden by clouds that were starting to shed their load of snow. The delegation assembled in the embassy’s foyer and filed off into their assigned cars for the arrival dinner. Ryan was in car number three—a slight promotion from the last trip, he noted wryly. Once the procession started moving, he remembered a driver’s remark from the last time, that Moscow had street names mainly to identify the pothole collections. The car jolted its way east through the city’s largely empty streets. They crossed the river right at the Kremlin, and motored past Gorkiy Park. He could see that the place was gaily lit, with people ice-skating in the falling snow. It was nice to see real people having real fun. Even Moscow was a city, he reminded himself, full of ordinary people living fairly ordinary lives. It was a fact too easy to forget when your job forced you to concentrate on a narrow group of enemies.

The car turned off October Square, and after an intricate maneuver, pulled up to the Academy of Sciences Hotel. It was a quasi-modern building that in America might have been taken for an office block. A forlorn string of birch trees sat between the gray concrete wall and the street, their bare, lifeless branches reaching into the speckled sky. Ryan shook his head. Given a few hours of snowfall, and it might actually be a beautiful scene. The temperature was zero or so—Ryan thought in Fahrenheit, not Celsius—and the wind almost calm. Perfect conditions for snow. He could feel the air heavy and cold around him as he walked into the hotel’s main entrance.

Like most Russian buildings, it was overheated. Jack removed his overcoat and handed it over to an attendant. The Soviet delegation was already lined up to greet their American counterparts, and the Americans shuffled down the rank of Soviets, ending at a table of drinks of which everyone partook. There would be ninety minutes of drinking and socializing before the actual dinner. Welcome to Moscow. Ryan approved of the plan. Enough alcohol could make any meal seem a feast, and he’d yet to experience a Russian meal that rose above the ordinary. The room was barely lit, allowing everyone to watch the falling snow through the large plate-glass windows.

“Hello again, Dr. Ryan,” a familiar voice said.

“Sergey Nikolayevich, I hope you are not driving tonight,” Jack said, gesturing with his wineglass to Golovko’s vodka. His cheeks were already florid, his blue eyes sparkling with alcoholic mirth.

“Did you enjoy the flight in last night?” the GRU Colonel asked. He laughed merrily before Ryan could reply. “You still fear flying?”

“No, it’s hitting the ground that worries me.” Jack grinned. He had always been able to laugh at his own pet fear.

“Ah, yes, your back injury from the helicopter crash. One can sympathize.”

Ryan waved at the window. “How much snow are we supposed to get tonight?”

“Perhaps half a meter, perhaps more. Not a very large storm, but tomorrow the air will be fresh and clear, and the city will sparkle with a clean blanket of white.” Golovko was almost poetic in his description.

Already he’s drunk, Ryan told himself. Well, tonight was supposed to be a social occasion, nothing more, and the Russians could be hospitable as hell when they wanted to be. Though one man was experiencing something very different, Jack reminded himself.

“Your family is well?” Golovko asked within earshot of another American delegate.

“Yes, thank you. Yours?”

Golovko gestured for Ryan to follow him over to the drink table. The waiters hadn’t come out yet. The intelligence officer selected another glass of clear liquor. “Yes, they are all well.” He smiled broadly. Sergey was the very image of Russian good fellowship. His face didn’t change a whit as he spoke his next sentence: “I understand that you want to meet Chairman Gerasimov.”

Jesus! Jack’s expression froze in place; his heart skipped a beat or two. “Really? How did you ever get that idea?”

“I’m not GRU, Ryan, not really. My original assignment was in Third Directorate, but I have since moved on to other things,” he explained before laughing again. This laugh was genuine. He’d just invalidated CIA’s file on himself—and, he could see, Ryan’s own observation. His hand reached out to pat Ryan on the upper arm. “I will leave you now. In five minutes you will walk through the door behind you and to the left as though looking for the men’s room. After that, you will follow instructions. Understood?” He patted Ryan’s arm again.

“Yes.”

“I will not see you again tonight.” They shook hands and Golovko moved off.

“Oh, shit,” Ryan whispered to himself. A troupe of violins came into the reception room. There must have been ten or fifteen of them, playing gypsy airs as they circulated about. They must have practiced hard, Jack thought, to play in perfect synchronization despite the dark room and their own random meanderings. Their movement and the relative darkness would make it hard to pick out individuals during the reception. It was a clever, professional touch aimed at making it easier for Jack to slip away.

“Hello, Dr. Ryan,” another voice said. He was a young Soviet diplomat, a gofer who kept notes and ran errands for the senior people. Now Jack knew that he was also KGB. Gerasimov was not content with a single surprise for the evening, he realized. He wanted to dazzle Ryan with KGB’s prowess. We’ll see about that, Jack thought, but the bravado seemed hollow even to himself. Too soon. Too soon.

“Good evening—we’ve never met.” Jack reached into his pants pocket and felt for his keychain. He hadn’t forgotten it.

“My name is Vitaliy. Your absence will not be noticed. The men’s room is that way.” He pointed. Jack handed over his glass and walked toward the door. He nearly stopped dead on leaving the room. No one inside could have known it, but the corridor had been cleared. Except for one man at the far end, who gestured once. Ryan walked toward him.

Oh, shit. Here we go ...

He was a youngish man, on the short side of thirty. He looked like the physical type. Though his build was concealed by an overcoat, he moved in the brisk, efficient way of an athlete. His facial expression and penetrating eyes made him a bodyguard. The best thought that came to Ryan was that he was supposed to appear nervous. It didn’t require much in the way of talent to do so. The man took him around the corner and handed him a Russian-made overcoat and fur hat, then spoke a single word:

“Come.”

He led Ryan down a service corridor and out into the cold air of an alley. Another man was waiting outside, watching. He nodded curtly to Ryan’s escort, who turned once and waved for Jack to hurry. The alley ended on Shabolovka Street, and both men turned right. This part of town was old, Jack saw at once. The buildings were mostly pre-revolution. The center of the street had trolley tracks embedded in cobblestones, and overhead were the catenary wires that supplied power to the streetcars. He watched as one rumbled past—actually it was two trams linked together, the colors white over red. Both men sprinted across the slippery street toward a red brick building with what looked like a metal roof. Ryan wasn’t sure what it was until they turned the corner.

The car barn, he realized, remembering similar places from his boyhood in Baltimore. The tracks curved in here, then diverged to the various bays in the barn. He paused for a moment, but his escort waved him forward urgently, moving to the left-most service bay. Inside it, of course, were streetcars, lined up like sleeping cattle in the darkness. It was totally still in there, he realized with surprise. There should have been people working, the sound of hammers and machine tools, but there was none of that. Ryan’s heart pounded as he walked past two motionless trams. His escort stopped at the third. Its doors were open, and a third bodyguard-type stepped down and looked at Ryan. He immediately patted Jack down, seeking weapons but finding none in a quick but thorough search. A jerk of the thumb directed him up and into the tram.

It had evidently just come in, and there was snow on the first step. Ryan slipped and would have fallen had not one of the KGB men caught his arm. He gave Jack a look that in the West would have been accompanied by a smile, but the Russians are not a smiling people except when they want to be. He went up again, his hands firm on the safety rails. All you have to do ...

“Good evening,” a voice called. Not very loudly, but it didn’t have to be. Ryan squinted in the darkness and saw the glowing orange light of a cigarette. He took a deep breath and walked toward it.

“Chairman Gerasimov, I presume?”

“You do not recognize me?” A trace of amusement. The man flicked his Western-made butane lighter to illuminate his face. It was Nikolay Borissovich Gerasimov. The flame gave his face exactly the right sort of look. The Prince of Darkness himself...

“I do now,” Jack said, struggling to control his voice.

“I understand that you wish to speak with me. How may I be of service?” he asked in a courtly voice that belied the setting.

Jack turned and gestured to the two bodyguards who were standing at the front of the car. He turned back but didn’t have to say anything. Gerasimov spoke a single word in Russian, and both men left.

“Please excuse them, but their duty is to protect the Chairman, and my people take their duties seriously.” He waved to the seat opposite his. Ryan took it.

“I didn’t know your English was so good.”

“Thank you.” A courteous nod followed by a businesslike observation: “I caution you that time is short. You have information for me?”

“Yes, I do.” Jack reached inside his coat. Gerasimov tensed for a moment, then relaxed. Only a madman would try to kill the chief of the KGB, and he knew from Ryan’s dossier that he was not mad. “I have something for you,” said Ryan.

“Oh?” Impatience. Gerasimov was not a man who liked to be kept waiting. He watched Ryan’s hands fumble with something, and was puzzled to hear the rasp of metal scraping against metal. Jack’s clumsiness disappeared when the key came off the ring, and when he spoke, he was a man claiming another’s pot.

“Here.” Ryan handed it over.

“What is this?” Suspicion now. Something was very badly wrong, wrong enough that his voice betrayed him.

Jack didn’t make him wait. He spoke in a voice he’d been rehearsing for a week. Without knowing it, he spoke faster than he’d planned. “That, Chairman Gerasimov, is the warhead-control key from the Soviet ballistic-missile submarine Krasny Oktyabr. It was given to me by Captain Marko Aleksandrovich Ramius when he defected. You will be pleased to know that he likes his new life in America, as do all of his officers.”

“The submarine was—”

Ryan cut him off. There was scarcely enough light to see the outline of his face, but that was enough to see the change in the man’s expression.

“Destroyed by her own scuttling charges? No. The spook aboard whose cover was ship’s cook, Sudets, I think his name was—well, no sense in hiding it. I killed him. I’m not especially proud of that, but it was either him or me. For what it’s worth, he was a very courageous young man,” Jack said, remembering the ten horrible minutes in the submarine’s missile room. “Your file on me doesn’t say anything about operations, does it?”

“But—”

Jack cut him off again. It was not yet the time for finesse. They had to jolt him, had to jolt him hard.

“Mr. Gerasimov, there are some things we want from you.”

“Rubbish. Our conversation is ended.” But Gerasimov didn’t rise, and this time Ryan made him wait for a few beats.

“We want Colonel Filitov back. Your official report to the Politburo on Red October stated that the submarine was positively destroyed, and that a defection had probably never been planned, but rather that GRU security had been penetrated and that the submarine had been issued bogus orders after her engines had been sabotaged. That information came to you through Agent Cassius. He works for us,” Jack explained. “You used it to disgrace Admiral Gorshkov and to reinforce your control over the military’s internal security. They’re still angry about that, aren’t they? So, if we do not get Colonel Filitov back, this coming week in Washington a story will be leaked to the press for the Sunday editions. It will have some of the details of the operation, and a photograph of the submarine sitting in a covered drydock in Norfolk, Virginia. After that we will produce Captain Ramius. He’ll say that the ship’s political officer—one of your Department Three men, I believe—was part of the conspiracy. Unfortunately, Putin died after arriving, of a heart attack. That’s a lie, but try proving it.”

“You cannot blackmail me, Ryan!” There was no emotion at all now.

“One more thing. SDI is not on the bargaining table. Did you tell the Politburo that it was?” Jack asked. “You’re finished, Mr. Gerasimov. We have the ability to disgrace you, and you’re just too good a target to pass up. If we don’t get Filitov back, we can leak all sorts of things. Some will be confirmed, but the really good ones will be denied, of course, while the FBI launches an urgent investigation to identify the leakers.”

“You did not do all this for Filitov,” Gerasimov said, his voice measured now.

“Not exactly.” Again he made him wait for it: “We want you to come out, too.”

Jack walked out of the tram five minutes later. His escort walked him back to the hotel. The attention to detail was impressive. Before rejoining the reception, Jack’s shoes were wiped dry. On reentering the room he walked at once to the drink table, but found it empty. He spotted a waiter with a tray, and took the first thing he could reach. It turned out to be vodka, but Ryan gunned it down in a single gulp before reaching for another. When he finished that one, he started wondering where the men’s room really was. It turned out to be exactly where he’d been told. Jack got there just in time.

It was as worked up as anyone had ever been with a computer simulation. They’d never run one quite this way before, of course, and that was the purpose of the test. The ground-control computer didn’t know what it was doing, nor did any of the others. One machine was programmed to report a series of distant radar contacts. All it did was to receive a collection of signals like those generated by an orbiting Flying Cloud satellite, cued in turn by one of the DSPS birds at geosynchronous height. The computer relayed this information to the ground-control computer, which examined its criteria for weapons-free authority and decided that they had been met. It took a few seconds for the lasers to power up, but they reported being ready a few seconds later. The fact that the lasers in question did not exist was not pertinent to the test. The ground mirror did, and it responded to instructions from the computer, sending the imaginary laser beam to the relay mirror eight hundred kilometers overhead. This mirror, so recently carried by the space shuttle and actually in California, received its own instructions and altered its configuration accordingly, relaying the laser beam to the battle mirror. This mirror was at the Lockheed factory rather than in orbit, and received its instructions via landline. At all three mirrors a precise record was kept of the ever-changing focal-length and azimuth settings. This information was sent to the score-keeping computer at Tea Clipper Control.

There had been several purposes to the test that Ryan had observed a few weeks before. In validating the system architecture, they had also received priceless empirical data on the actual functioning characteristics of the hardware. As a result they could simulate real exercises on the ground with near-absolute confidence in the theoretical results.

Gregory was rolling a ballpoint pen between his hands as the data came up on the video-display terminal. He’d just stopped chewing on it for fear of getting a mouth full of ink.

“Okay, there’s the last shot,” an engineer observed. “Here comes the score ...”

“Wow!” Gregory exclaimed. “Ninety-six out of a hundred! What’s the cycle time?”

“Point zero-one-six,” a software expert replied. “That’s point zero-zero-four under nominal—we can double-check every aim-command while the laser cycles—”

“And that increases the Pk thirty percent all by itself,” Gregory said. “We can even try doing shoot-look-shoot instead of shoot-shoot-look and still save time on the back end. People!”—he jumped to his feet—“we have done it! The software is in the fuckin’ can!” Four months sooner than promised!

The room erupted with cheering that no one outside the team of thirty people could possibly have understood.

“Okay, you laser pukes!” someone called. “Get your act together and build us a death ray! The gunsight is finished!”

“Be nice to the laser pukes.” Gregory laughed. “I work with them too.”

Outside the room, Beatrice Taussig was merely walking past the door on her way to an admin meeting when she heard the cheering. She couldn’t enter the lab—it had a cipher lock, and she didn’t have the combination—but didn’t have to. The experiment that they’d hinted at over dinner the night before had just been run. The result was obvious enough. Candi was in there, probably standing right next to the Geek, Bea thought. She kept walking.

“Thank God there’s not much ice,” Mancuso observed, looking through the periscope. “Call it two feet, maybe three.”

“There will be a clear channel here. The icebreakers keep all the coastal ports open,” Ramius said.

“Down ’scope,” the Captain said next. He walked over to the chart table. “I want you to move us two thousand yards south, then bottom us out. That’ll put us under a hard roof and ought to keep the Grishas and Mirkas away.”

“Aye, Captain,” the XO replied.

“Let’s go get some coffee,” Mancuso said to Ramius and Clark. He led them down one deck and to starboard into the wardroom. For all the times he’d done things like this in the past four years, Mancuso was nervous. They were in less than two hundred feet of water, within sight of the Soviet coast. If detected and then localized by a Soviet ship, they would be attacked. It had happened before. Though no Western submarine had ever suffered actual damage, there was a first time for everything, especially if you started taking things for granted, the Captain of USS Dallas told himself. Two feet of ice was too much for the thin-hulled Grisha-class patrol boats to plow through, and their main antisubmarine weapon, a multiple rocket launcher called an RBU-6000, was useless over ice, but a Grisha could call in a submarine. There were Russian subs about. They’d heard two the previous day.

“Coffee, sir?” the wardroom attendant asked. He got a nod and brought out a pot and cups.

“You sure this is close enough?” Mancuso asked Clark.

“Yeah, I can get in and out.”

“It won’t be much fun,” the Captain observed.

Clark smirked. “That’s why they pay me so much. I—”

Conversation stopped for a moment. The submarine’s hull creaked as it settled on the bottom, and the boat took on a slight list. Mancuso looked at the coffee in his cup and figured it for six or seven degrees. Submariner machismo prevented him from showing any reaction, but he’d never done this, at least not with Dallas. A handful of submarines in the U.S. Navy were specially designed for these missions. Insiders could identify them at a glance from the arrangement of a few hull fittings, but Dallas wasn’t one of them.

“I wonder how long this is going to take?” Mancuso asked the overhead.

“May not happen at all,” Clark observed. “Almost half of them don’t. The longest I’ve ever had to sit like this was ... twelve days, I think. Seemed like an awfully long time. That one didn’t come off.”

“Can you say how many?” Ramius asked.

“Sorry, sir.” Clark shook his head.

Ramius spoke wistfully. “You know, when I was a boy, I fished here—right here many times. We never knew that you Americans came here to fish also.”

“It’s a crazy world,” Clark agreed. “How’s the fishing?”

“In the summer, very good. Old Sasha took me out on his boat. This is where I learned the sea, where I learned to be a sailor.”

“What about the local patrols?” Mancuso asked, getting everyone back to business.

“There will be a low state of readiness. You have diplomats in Moscow, so the chance of war is slight. The surface patrol ships are mainly KGB. They guard against smugglers—and spies.” He pointed to Clark. “Not so good against submarines, but this was changing when I left. They were increasing their ASW practice in Northern Fleet, and, I hear, in Baltic Fleet also. But this is bad place for submarine detection. There is much fresh water from the rivers, and the ice overhead—all makes for difficult sonar conditions.”

That’s good to hear, Mancuso thought. His ship was in an increased state of readiness. The sonar equipment was fully manned and would remain so indefinitely. He could get Dallas moving in a matter of two minutes, and that should be ample, he thought.

Gerasimov was thinking, too. He was alone in his office. A man who controlled his emotions even more than most Russians, his face displayed nothing out of the way, even though there was no one else in the room to notice. In most people that would have been remarkable, for few can contemplate their own destruction with objectivity.

The Chairman of the Committee for State Security assessed his position as thoroughly and dispassionately as he examined any aspect of his official duties. Red October. It all flowed out from that. He had used the Red October incident to his advantage, first suborning Gorshkov, then disposing of him; he’d also used it to strengthen the position of his Third Directorate arm. The military had begun to manage its own internal security—but Gerasimov had seized upon his report from Agent Cassius to convince the Politburo that the KGB alone could ensure the loyalty and security of the Soviet military. That had earned him resentment. He’d reported, again via Cassius, that Red October had been destroyed. Cassius had told KGB that Ryan was under criminal suspicion, and—

And we—I!—walked into the trap.

How could he explain that to the Politburo? One of his best agents had been doubted—but when? They’d ask that, and he didn’t know the answer; therefore all the reports received from Cassius would become suspect. Despite the fact that much good data had come from the agent, knowledge that he’d been doubled at an unknown time tainted all of it. And that wrecked his vaunted insights into Western political thought.

He’d wrongly reported that the submarine hadn’t defected, and not discovered the error. The Americans had gotten an intelligence windfall, but KGB didn’t know of it. Neither did GRU, but that was little comfort.

And he’d reported that the Americans had made a major change in their arms-negotiation strategy, and that, too, was wrong.

Could he survive all three disclosures at once? Gerasimov asked himself.

Probably not.

In another age he would have faced death, and that would have made the decision all the easier. No man chooses death, at least not a sane one, and Gerasimov was coldly sane in everything he did. But that sort of thing didn’t happen now. He’d end up with a subministerial job somewhere or other, shuffling papers. His KGB contacts would be useless to him beyond such meaningless favors as access to decent groceries. People would watch him walking on the street—no longer afraid to look him in the face, no longer fearful of his power, they’d point and laugh behind his back. People in his office would gradually lose their deference, and talk back, even shout at him once they knew that his power was well and truly gone. No, he said to himself, I will not endure that.

To defect, then? To go from being one of the world’s most powerful men to becoming a hireling, a mendicant who traded what he knew for money and a comfortable life? Gerasimov accepted the fact that his life would become more comfortable in physical terms—but to lose his power!

That was the issue, after all. Whether he left or stayed, to become just another man ... that would be like death, wouldn’t it?

Well, what do you do now?

He had to change his position, had to change the rules of the game, had to do something so dramatic ... but what?

The choice was between disgrace and defection? To lose everything he’d worked for—within sight of his goal—and face a choice like this?

The Soviet Union is not a nation of gamblers. Its national strategy has always been more reflective of the Russians’ national passion for chess, a series of careful, pre-planned moves, never risking much, always protecting its position by seeking small, progressive advantages wherever possible. The Politburo had almost always moved in that way. The Politburo itself was largely composed of similar men. More than half were apparatchiks who had spoken the appropriate words, filled the necessary quotas, taking what advantages they could, and who had won advancement through a stolidness whose perfection they could display around the table in the Kremlin. But the function of those men was to provide a moderating influence on those who aspired to rule, and these men were the gamblers. Narmonov was a gambler. So was Gerasimov. He’d play his own game, allying himself with Alexandrov to establish his ideological constituency, blackmailing Vaneyev and Yazov to betray their master.

And it was too fine a game to quit so easily. He had to change the rules again, but the game did not really have any rules—except for the one: Win.

If he won—the disgraces would not matter, would they? Gerasimov took the key from his pocket and examined it for the first time in the light of his desk lamp. It looked ordinary enough. Used in the designed manner, it would make possible the deaths of—fifty million? A hundred? More? The Directorate Three men on the submarines and in the land-based rocket regiments held that power—the zampolit, the political officer alone had the authority to activate the warheads without which the rockets were mere fireworks. Turn this key in the proper way at the proper time, he knew, and the rockets were transformed into the most frightening instruments of death yet devised by the mind of man. Once launched, nothing could stop them...

But that rule was going to be changed, too, wasn’t it?

What was it worth to be the man who could do that?

“Ah.” Gerasimov smiled. It was worth more than all the other rules combined, and he remembered that the Americans had broken a rule, too, in killing their courier in the Moskvich railyard. He lifted his phone and called for a communications officer. For once the longitudinal lines worked in his favor.

Dr. Taussig was surprised when she saw the signal. One thing about “Ann” was that she never altered her routine. Despite the fact that she’d impulsively visited her contact, heading to the shopping center was her normal Saturday routine. She parked her Datsun fairly far out, lest some klutz in a Chevy Malibu smash his door against hers. On the way in, she saw Ann’s Volvo, and the driver’s side visor was down. Taussig checked her watch and increased her pace to the entrance. On going in, she turned left.

Peggy Jennings was working alone today. They were spread too thin to get the job done as fast as Washington wanted, but that wasn’t exactly a new story, was it? The setting was both good and bad. Following her subject to the shopping mall was fairly easy, but once inside it was damned near impossible to trail a subject properly, unless you had a real team of agents operating. She got to the door only a minute behind Taussig, already knowing that she’d lost her. Well, this was only a preliminary look at her. Routine, Jennings told herself on opening the door.

Jennings looked up and down the mall and failed to see her subject. Frowning for a moment, she commenced a leisurely stroll from shop to shop, gazing in the windows and wondering if Taussig had gone to a movie.

“Hello, Ann!”

“Bea!” Bisyarina said inside Eve’s Leaves. “How are you?”

“Keeping busy,” Dr. Taussig replied. “That looks wonderful on you.”

“She’s so easy to fit,” the shop owner observed.

“Easier than me,” Taussig agreed glumly. She lifted a suit from the nearest rack and walked to a mirror. Severely cut, it suited her present mood. “Can I try this one on?”

“Surely,” the owner said at once. It was a three-hundred-dollar outfit.

“Need a hand?” “Ann” asked.

“Sure—you can tell me what you’re up to.” Both women walked back to the dressing rooms.

Within the booth, both women chatted away, discussing the everyday things that differ little between women and men. Bisyarina handed over a slip of paper, which Taussig read. The latter’s conversation stuttered for a moment before she nodded agreement. Her face switched from shock to acceptance, then switched again to something that Bisyarina did not like at all—but the KGB didn’t pay her to like her job.

The suit fitted rather nicely, the owner saw when they came out. Taussig paid the way most people did, with a credit card. Ann waved and left, turning to walk past the gun shop on her way out the mall.

Jennings saw her subject come out of the shop a few minutes later, carrying a clear plastic garment bag. Well, that’s what it was, she told herself. Whatever was bothering her the other night, she went shopping to make herself feel better and got another one of those suits. Jennings followed her for another hour before breaking off the surveillance. Nothing there.

“He’s one cool dude,” Ryan told Candela. “I didn’t expect him to jump into my lap and thank me for the offer, but I expected some reaction!”

“Well, if he bites, he’ll get word to you easy enough.”

“Yeah.”