No one had been at them; the room had not been searched. Outside he could hear the big trucks roar by on the freeway and the lament of a distant siren. He dialed nine for an outside line and then a seven-digit number; it was answered on the first ring and Belsky said, “Hello, this is Dangerfield.”
“Sorry, I think you must have the wrong number.” It was Douglass’ voice, feigning impatience. Belsky said, “I’m at the New Executive, Room Twelve. Call me back within ten minutes.”
“That’s okay.”
Belsky took the multiband transistor radio out of his suitcase and opened the back of it to expose the high-speed cassette recorder and the telegrapher’s key. He took out a notepad and coded a brief message in dots and dashes. Before he was finished the phone rang.
“Dangerfield?” It was Douglass again.
“Yes. We’re on an open line.”
“I know.”
“How are we set?”
“Two of them can’t make it tomorrow. One’s in Washington and one’s in Phoenix and they’ll both be tied up. The rest can make it.”
“When do you go on duty?”
“Eight.”
“Anyone in your group go to work earlier than that?”
“No.”
“We’d better meet at five in the morning, then.”
“That early?” Douglass didn’t bother to keep the irritation out of his voice.
“You people have gone soft, haven’t you?” Belsky said.
“What did you expect?”
“It’s the only time I can give you. Get them there.” Belsky hung up and resumed coding the report in his notepad. He knew how Douglass would handle it; it was standard operating procedure: dial each number, let it ring once, hang up. For the recipients the single ring was a signal to look at their watches. Five minutes later Douglass would dial the same series of numbers again, and again let each ring once. It was a simple code: the five-minute interval between rings indicated a five-o’clock meeting; the place was prearranged.
When he finished coding the report to Moscow he connected the telegrapher’s key to the cassette recorder’s input terminals and tapped out the cipher onto a slow tape. He hooked the radio’s transmission antenna into the room’s television-aerial socket and connected the output terminals of the tape deck to the microphone jack of the transmitter, checked the transmission frequency setting and turned his wrist to look at his watch. Twenty-two minutes past the hour he pressed the send key and switched on the cassette recorder. It had been rigged to a high playback speed, so that the signal went out in an instantaneous pulse, a burst far above audible range.
He repeated the impulse twice within thirty seconds and then began to dismantle the equipment. A Red submarine lying off the coast of Baja California would have picked up the signal and relayed it to a trawler in the North Pacific, from which the signal would again be amplified and rebroadcast to a KGB receiving station in Kamchatka. None of the relay stations possessed copies of the master code and therefore the content of the message would be known to no one but sender and final recipient.
Belsky ripped the top four sheets off his notepad to make sure there were no indentations on the pages below. He burned the loose sheets over the toilet and flushed the ashes down.
After he bathed he lay on the bed, reviewed the day’s events and made his evaluations. He had to activate the teams as quickly as possible and that left no time for the retraining they required; he would have to reassert discipline immediately and the best tools for that purpose were fear and humiliation.
When he was satisfied with his plan, he allowed himself to catnap.
At three o’clock he dressed and drove into the city and found a curbside telephone booth under the overhanging illuminated sign of a savings-and-loan office; he chose the spot because neon lights would jam most electronic bugs.
When Hathaway answered Belsky said, “I’m at 989-2612. Get to a pay phone and call me.” He hung up and stood beside the booth waiting for the telephone to ring and watched insects swarm under the intersection’s hard blue mercury lights. He was moved to remark the contrast between this desert springtime and the dark Asian winter which still gripped the steppes at home.
A passenger in a passing car threw out an empty paper cup and the wind scudded it to the curb and the telephone rang.
“Mr. Dangerfield? Hathaway.”
Belsky said, “They’ll start arriving at five o’clock. Have you got everything ready?”
“Yes, sir. We’ve spent three hours going over the place and it’s clean.”
“All right,” Belsky said. “Keep your people alert. I’ll get there before five but if any of them arrive ahead of me hold them in the front room until I come in. I’ll want a complete search of every arrival, down to the skin. Explain that to your team.”
“Yes, sir. Looking for anything in particular?”
“Weapons and bugs.”
Belsky rang off and drove down the avenue to an all-night diner with a bright neon American flag above its massive Fat Boy sign. The place had been invaded by a crowd of motorcyclists and the plastic tabletops were thick with crash helmets. But the late hour seemed to have subdued even these predators, and Belsky was undisturbed at his counter place except for a plump girl who took the stool beside him and ate four doughnuts with single-minded concentration. The motorcycle toughs trooped out after a few minutes and he heard the arrogant thundering of their bikes. Belsky felt that a society so decadent as to permit the continued existence of anarchic bands of killer-terrorists was doomed to self-destruction. He was not given to political introspection but certain things were self-evident and one of them was the abiding need for discipline within groups of any size. That was true of the Illegals especially.
He checked the hour again but there was ample time; he allowed himself an extra cup of coffee, pouring cream from a glass syrup pitcher with a steel spring-loaded thumb lid—a peculiarly American device that fascinated him.
Down the block from the house one of Hathaway’s people was sitting in a parked car. Belsky parked some distance away and let the man have a good look at him under the street light when he got out of his car and walked by. The man nodded almost imperceptibly.
The bungalow was obscured from neighbors’ view by tall oleander hedges. Belsky went up the cracked flagstone walk and Hathaway emerged from the shadows on the porch and spoke a low greeting. Hathaway was forty, crew-cut and dark, paunch beginning to swell. He wore a T-shirt that showed off his thick arms and husky muscled shoulders; wire-hard hairs on his chest and back burst through its fabric. He held the door for Belsky.
Douglass had picked the place years ago as his cell’s meeting place because the woman who owned it lived alone and her habits of odd hours and odd company made it unlikely that gatherings here would attract attention. The living room was crowded with flowers and ferns planted in old pharmaceutical jars. The repulsive plants writhed everywhere and for a moment Belsky felt as if he couldn’t breathe.
Hathaway’s Air Force Tech Sergeant tunic was hanging on the back of a chair. A uniformed Airman Second Class named Torrio was fooling with the controls of a portable metal detector. Torrio was a short man with a thin pocked face and a stiff curry brush of brown hair that added two inches to his height. He nodded with reserve. Belsky had assembled them six hours ago with no advance warning and told them precisely what they were to do and no more; now Torrio and Hathaway stood awkwardly, trying to look like typical Government-Issue bureaucrats, but with fear and curiosity on their faces.
Belsky said, “You want to ask questions, don’t you? Forget them. Torrio, go back and get the woman.”
After Torrio left the room Belsky said to Hathaway, “How is it arranged?”
“I’ve got a man outside in a car. He’ll screen them as they arrive. They’ll come into this room and I’ll hold them here. I’ll send them one at a time into the bedroom, back that way, and Torrio will go over them for metal. Then they’ll go out the back door from the bed
room and you’ll talk to them out there. It’s a screened-in porch—patio, if you want to call it that.”
“I don’t like that. Voices carry outdoors.”
“There’s a high hedge around the back of the place and both neighbors have got cinder-block walls around their backyards. There’s nothing behind this house but an empty lot.”
Belsky still didn’t like it but this little living room wasn’t big enough and it was too late to change the location now; he wished he’d had time to inspect the place beforehand. Douglass was a fool for recommending it.
Belsky said, “We’ll be done with the first group in forty-five minutes, no more. You and Torrio will make sure they get on their way. You and your men will leave before six o’clock and you’ll take the woman with you.”
“Isn’t there another meeting at six-fifteen?”
Belsky, removing a thick envelope from his inside breast pocket, only glanced at him. Hathaway said, “I get it. You’re changing the security shift for each bunch so none of us will be able to identify anybody outside of the people we already know from our own cells.”
“Just do your job. I’ll tell you everything you need to know.” But Belsky was impressed; the man was brighter than he looked and might prove useful.
It was a requisite never to break security by allowing subordinates to communicate directly with their superior: any one of them might be tailed to the superior. But Rykov’s message had made it necessary to break many such rules. By midnight he would have met with almost one hundred Illegals, representing sixteen cells, and tomorrow there would be more meetings. He was exposing himself to great personal risk, but only because nobody was going to be able to trace back beyond Belsky himself: he would not lead anyone to his own superior and if he should be trapped there was always the death pill inside the hollowed tooth. Belsky was quite prepared to make use of it if cornered. Nevertheless on those infrequent occasions when his nerves acted up he found his tongue experimenting tentatively with the loose tooth; years ago he had reached the sensible compromise of removing the pill from his mouth whenever he went to sleep. He always kept it near at hand but there remained the chance he might be caught asleep and prevented from reaching it; but that risk was preferable to the risk of swallowing it by accident.
Torrio came in with the woman. She wet her lips with the sharp pink tip of her tongue and said, “So you’re the prince who’s come to wake Sleeping Beauty.”
He made no immediate answer. His silence was calculated to unsettle her. He wanted to use this opportunity to appraise her as he appraised them all, to judge their excellences and weaknesses and to determine the extent to which they had been affected by the cultural shock that penetrated all Communist agents exposed to Western societies.
“You’re a pretty drab-looking prince,” she said, trying to needle him into response. He didn’t rise to it and she began to show she was unnerved.
Her name was Nikola Lavrentyeva; in America she was Nicole Lawrence. A little crepe dress clung to the curved surfaces of her small spider-waisted body. When she moved, her breasts stirred with braless insouciance. Her toes, in open sandals, were a bit dirty. Cynical dark onyx eyes in a pinched simian face; a vague sullen smile, nervous, discontented, suggestive of stormy passions. The ugly wizened face was at odds with the lean thrusting body and he got the feeling her looks had faded faster than her appetites. Her hair was pulled back from her scalp so tightly that it looked as if it must ache: a sign of things repressed, emotions held precariously in check. She looked susceptible to the kind of incendiary emotions that could make a shambles of surface loyalties and rationalizations. Dangerous, then; to be watched.
He said, “Leave us,” and waited until Hathaway and Torrio had gone away into the back of the house. Then, finally, he spoke to the woman. “Nikola Lavrentyeva, daughter of Nikolai Lavrentyev and Ella Galharova Lavrentyeva.”
Her dour smile showed tiny teeth. Her eyes were overhung by thick droopy lashes—cunning eyes. “What if I don’t play the game with you, Comrade?”
“Do you want me to answer that question?”
Her face changed; she saw he had no patience with coquetry. She said in a harder voice, “My grandparents—Anastas Lavrentyev, Valentia Lavrentyeva, Josef Galharov, Nikola Blokhova Galharova.” She tilted her face away from him. “I’m surprised I still remember them.”
“Your parents are quite well. Your sister Marya is a successful physician, you know.”
“Little Marya. That’s hard to picture, Comrade—ah?”
“You’ll know me as Dangerfield.”
“That’s not quite fair. You know my name.”
He said, “Come with me,” and went toward the hallway. “Is that the bedroom?”
“Yes.”
Torrio and Hathaway were inside the cluttered room and Belsky sent Hathaway back to the front of the house. “They’ll start arriving soon.” When Hathaway had left he said to Torrio, “This one first.”
Torrio showed his surprise. “Her too?”
“Get on with it.” Belsky backed up against the door to push it shut and stood with his shoulderblades against it.
Torrio said, “I got to search you. Better take off your watch and rings. You got any metal teeth?”
“No.” She turned toward Belsky; her mouth was sucked in with a tight look of disapproval. “It so happens this is my house.”
“You’re rather defensive, aren’t you?” he said mildly.
Her eyelids dropped, covering her thoughts. “All right, Torrio, get it done.”
Torrio ran the nozzle of the metal detector over her as if it were a vacuum cleaner. Belsky said, “Finish it, Torrio,” and Torrio’s face became suffused with color when he put down the metal detector and spread his hands in a gesture of apology to the woman. “You’ll have to strip.”
She hated it but she pretended indifference. She lifted the dress off over her head and dropped it carelessly on the bed and stood quivering in translucent panties. Torrio made his face blank. “Them, too.”
She stripped them off without remark. Torrio glanced toward Belsky and found no reprieve there; he went forward breathing shallowly and examined her armpits and the soles of her feet and went into all the orifices of her body with a doctor’s rubber finger-glove. When Torrio was done and had turned to the bed to inspect her clothes, the woman stood up straight and faced Belsky. She had the body of a ripe young girl—rigid high breasts like pink rubber, soft curve of waist and thighs. She faced him with her breasts thrust forward, arms akimbo, feet apart, challenging him to remain unperturbed, and she scored her point; Belsky did not take his eyes off her when she put her clothes on and smoothed down her dress.
Torrio’s face was covered with a light oily sheen. Belsky said, “Do that with all of them.”
“You really think you need to—”
“Be quiet,” Belsky said. “Do as you’re told.” He went through the back door and found himself on a concrete patio surrounded by screens. Evidently it had once been an open carport. It ran the width of the house, about twenty-five feet by fifteen. The furniture was bamboo and rattan with print-fabric cushions. Reptilian potted plants hung from the roof on wrought-iron chains. He said, “There’s another room I haven’t seen.”
Nicole’s reply was hostile. “You haven’t seen the kitchen or the bathroom or my office. Which one did you have in mind? Or were you thinking of another bed?”
Of course she had an office. Probably she did most of her work at home. She was a political reporter for one of the television stations, he recalled. “Don’t spar with me, I haven’t got time.”
“What’s the matter? You’re not a fag, are you?”
“You haven’t got meat on you like a good Russian woman.”
“If you like cows.” She showed her teeth. “I think you’re kinky. You get your kicks out of pushing people around. I know a couple of cops like you.”
He put his lazy stare on her and after a moment it made her step back; she waved a hand aro
und in front of her and said in a different tone, “Look, I keep forgetting you’re not local product. The average red-blooded American loudmouth is a whining coward inside. You’re not like that but it takes some getting used to—don’t forget I’ve been out of touch for twenty years.”
“I haven’t forgotten it,” he said.
Five of them arrived shortly before five o’clock. They emerged from the bedroom one by one, adjusting their clothes; they were all on edge. Ramsey Douglass was last to arrive. Belsky was displeased. At sight of Douglass, Nicole stirred and lifted her hand quickly to her hair as if to reassure herself nothing had given way. A curious and revealing reaction: Belsky watched them now as a pair.
Ramsey Douglass was handsome in a weak Byronic way; he wore his hair in sleek fingerwaves and a comma of it fell across his forehead. He had the look of one who was recovering from a fashionable illness. (Belsky’s mind made the automatic memorized connections: Ramsey Douglass = Dmitri Smolny, born Leningrad 1931, trained at Dubna, commissioned ensign in Red Air Force 1952, degrees in aeronautical engineering and physics, linguistic aptitude high, political rating adequate; married 1952, widowed 1953, son Fyodor Dmitrovich now 22 and employed by Intourist in Moscow.)
There was very little time to study the others because he had a great deal to tell them and they would have to be on their way within forty-five minutes to make room for the next batch. He made a kind of shorthand inventory compounded of what he knew from their dossiers and what he got from quick scrutiny:
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