by Thomas Craig
No sign of people. The coastal strip was virtually uninhabited; barren, infertile, the palms simply a margin between sea and desert. A ship passing along the horizon and making a thin smudge of smoke hang there long after its silhouette had disappeared beyond the nearest headland. Otherwise, nothing. Gant looked at his watch once more; it was a nervous tic.
Three. It would take them almost two hours to reach Karachi, and the Galaxy would take another two hours to reach Peshawar. Seven at night before they crossed into Afghanistan… and they had to wait, just wait, while time ran out.
Despite his tinted pilot's glasses, he squinted at the sea and the heat haze. His eyes felt tired, strained, and his body somnolent; as if he were within the context of a restless night's sleep, half waking, always shifting position. The sense of unfairness remained with him; they had done enough to earn Islamabad's wink and nod, enough to get out of here.
"Major," Garcia called. "Anders."
Gant hurried to his feet, as if startled by danger. Mac looked up, Lane broke off the sentence he had begun. He strode toward the MiLs, lifting the netting and ducking beneath it. Garcia's face was strained with expectation. He handed the lightweight headset to Gant, who snatched it, tugging it on.
"Anders?"
"Gant." The strangeness of the remote, toneless voice was unsettling as it emerged from the decoding process. Similarly, Gant's voice would be somehow dehumanized aboard the Galaxy as Anders listened. "Gant — it's OK. Mission continues."
"Thank God," Gant murmured. Garcia crossed himself with a fervent detachment. "Can we leave now?"
"Immediately. To rendezvous at" — he gave the map reference, then repeated it—"with Pakistani helicopter units offshore. They'll bring you in — in disguise, sort of. Wolves in sheep's clothing. Fly an offshore routing to avoid visual sighting before the rendezvous point — you got that?"
"I copy." Garcia was holding the relevant map, folded in deep creases, in front of Gant. He saw the rendezvous point clearly. Ten miles offshore. They'd go in like a flock of low-flying birds, two MiLs submerging their identities within the flight of Pakistani air force helicopters. Anders had done well.
"OK. Good luck."
"How high was the price?"
"You wouldn't believe it, Gant. The President is not pleased. Your debt is climbing."
"The hell with that. I'll report when we're airborne. See you, Anders." He threw the headset into Garcia's arms. Grinned. Felt his body shaking with relief. "OK, Garcia, let's get moving. Close formation, you fly to port of me and a little behind. Constant visual surveillance, and fifty feet off the water. OK?"
"OK, Major."
He had already turned away from Garcia, lifted the netting, and was shouting at Mac, Kooper, and Lane, all on their feet, like customers waiting for some store to open.
"Let's move it. We're back on the ice!"
Priabin had never before experienced, in quite such a satisfying manner, the charm of unsuspected surveillance. Powerful glasses on a tripod, their twin black snouts hardly jutting through the slight gap in the net curtains; the camera's long, long lens beside them. The pleasant ache in his back after stooping for a long time to the viewfinders, the numbness in his buttocks after perching on a hard chair for some time. The aches of a gardener satisfied with his day's work, or a man who has harvested successfully. The beer and sandwiches in the darkened room and the surprising camaraderie among unseen watchers.
It was just after dark now. He straightened up once more, sighing, his hands cradling his back. The glasses were now night-vision binoculars that rendered the world in shades of gray, adding to that inevitable sense of the unreality; the person under surveillance being an object, not a human being.
There was special film in the camera. Each of the surveillance instruments had its own pleasure to give. The tape recorder linked to the phone tap, voice-activated. Rigged to record even their own telephone reports. The laser eavesdropper, which collected the vibrations of a windowpane as it quivered in sympathy with a human voice, had developed a fault and stood, as if it had transgressed, in one corner of the bare, carpetless room. Priabin shifted his weight from foot to foot. It was easy to let time slow down. He possessed Rodin like this.
Power, that's what it was, in the end. He'd spent what? More than three hours just watching, doing nothing. He made himself move. The other two men in the room, Mikhail and Anatoly, stirred like large, impatient cats. The room smelled of waiting, dust, pungent garlic sausage, and beer. And heady, cheap tobacco.
"OK, he's as ready as he'll ever be. I'm going over," he announced.
"You'll want to be wired, then, sir," Mikhail observed, moving to one of the suitcases lying on the other side of the room. His companion, Anatoly, dragged a chair to the tripod and at once sat down, adjusting the focus of the night glasses, humming tunelessly.
"No. Not this time."
"Sir?"
Anatoly had stopped humming.
"Just take it from me — it could prove safer. He won't tell, I won't, and you won't — whatever I learn. But I don't want any record around of my conversation with the lieutenant the military might get their hands on."
"OK, sir, if that's how you want to play."
"Mikhail, believe me. Something big is going on. I can feel it in my water. He knows about it, the fairy prince over the way. He'll tell me, if I can persuade him. Now, where does that leave us?"
"We've got the message, sir. What we don't hear, we can't let slip," Anatoly murmured without turning around. "We'll play dumb."
"Good. Right, I'll be on my way."
"Shouldn't one of us—?"
"You think he's dangerous?"
"Little princess could be desperate, sir. Could come to the same in the end."
"He's up to his eyeballs in coke. I think I can handle him." He clicked his tongue against his teeth. "All right," he added, "if you see me struggling on the bed with him, don't assume I've fallen for his boyish charm — get over there on the double."
Mikhail laughed, an explosive noise in the darkness.
"OK, sir."
Priabin sensed their alertness, all the tiredness of routine and familiarity erased. He picked up his overcoat and pulled it around his shoulders. Straightened his jacket and tie. First impressions—
His boots sounded heavy on the floorboards. He closed the door behind him, walked down the short hallway, and opened the flat's front door. The corridor was empty. As he waited for the elevator, he felt the place's chill, received its smells of cooking and electricity, heard its murmurs. A number of television and radio sets, laughter. It was a squat, modern block of flats spilling from the science city's boundary and encroaching on the most northerly street of the old town; it loomed over the grander, older house — some czarist businessman's idea of a town mansion — where the apartments were allocated to military, top scientific personnel, mistresses. The flats were bought and sold, exchanged for large favors, promotions, used as bribes.
The concierge watched him leave the foyer. He pushed through the revolving doors into the icy chill of the evening. The temperature had plummeted. He stood for a moment looking up at Rodin's windows, two of them lit. He saw again the young man lying on his silk sheets, as if he still watched him through the binoculars; or hurrying to the lavatory to be sick, drinking but unable to eat. Afraid. Posed with his sunken head in his hands on the edge of the bed, staring at the carpet and desperate for the telephone to ring. He was ready to talk.
Priabin sighed with satisfaction as he poised himself on the edge of the pavement. Then he crossed the quiet, narrow street, hunching his overcoat up around his neck. The wind seemed to pass through his clothing with casual, biting ease.
There was carpet in the wide hall. The concierge, summoned by means of the speaker to one side of the door, ushered him in with slight but evident deference. Complicity smoothed his features. He would say nothing, unless directly questioned by someone more imposing than a KGB colonel. Priabin nodded meaningfully at him and
took the stairs two at a time. The concierge had no interest in whom he might be visiting.
Outside the door of Rodin's apartment, he was aware of the degree of quiet luxury around him, foreign even to a colonel in his service. Foreign to him, anyway.
The carpet was thick beneath his soles, betraying where he had walked. Wool, pure wool. The door was perhaps the original one, whatever alterations had been made to the house. Paneled wood dark with stain and age. He did not remove his cap as he pressed the doorbell. First impressions—
He felt subdued by his surroundings, and needed to offer Rodin an image of immaculate authority. He must look as if he meant business, would be satisfied with nothing less than the truth, the whole truth, nothing but…
He pressed the bell again, held it, heard its shrill summons from beyond the door. Hoped Rodin had not passed out. He'd been sitting on the edge of his bed when Priabin left the other flat, holding his head gently like some delicate, ripened fruit. He had been awake, but in what fashion? Had Priabin left it too late? He became aware of the emptiness of the corridor and the staircase behind him. He was an intruder here, making a secret visit. He thought of Viktor Zhikin, and felt the heat of his body mount to his face; his cheeks burned. Rodin had to be awake—
He kicked the lower panel of the door, savagely. A weak, almost pleading grumble reached him from behind the door. It opened.
He saw a pale-blue carpet, flowers in a tall vase that had begun to droop and fade. Priabin straightened. Immaculate authority. He stared into Rodin's sunken eyes and saw them flinch with recognition and anxiety.
"Good evening, Lieutenant," he said with overflowing confidence. "I think it's time we had a long chat, don't you?"
He studied Rodin's features. Saw deterioration and experienced satisfaction. He had chosen the right moment. There was tiredness and empty loneliness; dark blue rings under the pale eyes.
"May I come in?" His hand pushed authoritatively at the door.
"I–I—what do you want?" The eyes finally narrowed against a realization of danger. "Who — what do you want?" His drugged awareness picked up disconnected phrases.
"To talk to you, Valery." His hand pushed the door further open. Large rooms beyond Rodin's narrow shoulder, pale, rich carpeting, ornaments and prints. Just as he had seen through the binoculars. It seemed to Priabin, not without irony, like a glimpse into the West from the far end of a long tunnel.
"Why?" Stubborn anger now, gathering slowly like a storm. "Get out."
"No."
He turned Rodin's body with the hand that still held his gloves, propelling him into the apartment's long hallway. Rodin accepted the inertia of his entry and moved ahead, his feet shuffling, his body leaning slightly against the strong hand's certainty, as if grateful.
Prints of hunting scenes and the French Impressionists, red walls set against an almost white carpet. An extravagance of rugs. Priabin could imagine loud rock music and laughter from past parties. He shunted Rodin into the main living room. All the time he had been whispering to him as to a child being shepherded into the dentist's office. Rodin seemed to accept the spurious comfort and the imposed situation.
As Priabin had moved through the hallway and past the rooms, he realized that the image through the binoculars had not conveyed the wealth here, the possessions, the splashes of carpet, rug, picture, vase, ornament, hi-fi, record collection. It wasn't the taste, simply the income — the influence, he corrected himself — that could obtain all these things for a mere lieutenant. Cushions, jade, heavy drapes, his thoughts catalogued.
He pushed Rodin gently into a deep beanbag of a chair. The young man, no more than twenty-two or — three, adopted a yogalike posture, arranging his robe to tidiness. His eyes were blue and blank. He seemed to be staring at his visitor's boots intently. As Priabin lifted his head, he saw the extravagant molding and the plaster frieze of shepherds around the main light fixture. The room suggested the existence of an elite beyond that of his own service. There, the wooden dacha amid the trees was the best that might be hoped for. Obscurely, the room angered him. He was not the simple son of a peasant; his father had been a schoolmaster and Party member, with a medal from the Great Patriotic War — he'd seen the red banners rise above the shattered, grandiose buildings of Berlin. Seen the Fascists finished off.
And now this. A lieutenant in the People's army with all this.
He moved closer to Valery Rodin. And sat on the floor, cross-legged in front of him.
"Tell me," he said softly, his hand touching the sleeve of Rodin s robe. 'Tell me about it." His overcoat, after he had removed it from his shoulders, lay at his side like a large, untidy dog. He placed his cap and gloves on top of it, making himself look younger, less official. Sympathy, not envy, he cautioned. Pat his arm, but gently.
Rodin's features seemed engaged in an effort to regain an attentive pattern around his nose and mouth. The cocaine, as a stimulant to the nervous system and taken, no doubt, to help him climb out of the pit of loneliness his father had condemned him to, had lost its effect. It had been defeated, to some extent, by the brandy. He was now quiescent, but deeply introverted and depressed. Priabin felt himself little different from a bomb-disposal officer approaching a suspicious device.
Rodin's pupils were like shriveled raisins in his chalky face. Acute paranoia, Priabin recalled from somewhere. Large doses of cocaine and acute paranoia. The bomb might explode; worse, it might be a complete dud and not go off at all. He continued to pat the young man's arm. Rodin did not respond to the contact. Eventually, Priabin said:
"Tell me, Valery, who's locked you up in this expensive cell?" He shook Rodin's arm gently, but the lieutenant dragged it away from his touch. He scowled because his features could not find a sneer of contempt quickly, then the look soured into a drooping snarl.
"Get out," he whispered, blinking his eyes to make them focus.
Priabin shook his head. "I know you want company, Valery," he asserted. "You're all alone here. They've seen to that, haven't they?"
Perhaps ten seconds later, Rodin nodded. Once the action had commenced, he continued to nod, like a doll. His breathing was loud and ragged; his hps quivered, and his eyes appeared damp.
"Your father?"
"Of course my bloody father!" Rodin hugged his arms around himself, turning into the beanbag, drawing his feet up. His whole body shivered. He began to sob. His voice had seemed to tire after the scream. "Always my bloody father. He made me go into the fucking army when all I wanted to be was a painter." Priabin glanced swiftly around the room. The walls displayed nothing that might have been painted by Rodin. "No good at it, anyway," Rodin pursued, "but he couldn't wait to tell me that." He looked at Priabin, who arranged his features to express sympathy. Rodin's voice was a transmission from a distant radio station; fading, indistinct. "In the bloody army for you, my lad," Rodin mocked, his face twisted, his hand flapping in a caricature of a salute near his temple. "In the army, make a man of you." He turned once more to his listener. It seemed that he did not recognize his visitor; did not care who it was. "Never admitted it, never, never, never. All the army gives you is privileges and a chance to bugger the conscripts!"
He laughed raggedly, staring at Priabin. His attention subsided almost immediately, the world around him rushing into a vague distance. His eyes were inwardly focused, and the retreat seemed more profound. Priabin was greedy to interrupt, to begin to interrogate, yet restrained his mounting impatience. But it was a race against time.
"Worse for him, really, now I'm in the army and under his nose. He had to — to keep sweeping up after me, cleaning up the turds I leave on — his doorstep… art, culture, acting don't interest him. Queers are forbidden, don't talk about them. My mother knew, she understood. Couldn't bear it, but understood. He can't though, never has."
Priabin absorbed the room once more. The father paid. Every day, General Lieutenant Pyotr Rodin paid. Drugs, affairs, indiscipline; the general had committed a grave error in having his son
posted to Baikonur. Custody must have turned into a nightmare.
Away, he suddenly thought. The next logical step, especially now, would be to send his son away somewhere; to avoid any and all consequences of the interest he had aroused — that Sacha's murder had aroused. That was why the boy was in quarantine. He might have no other chance of talking to him; it had to be now. He had to press.
"Why did they kill Sacha?" he asked bluntly, but not without a sympathetic tone.
Rodin's face paled further around his open mouth.
"What?" He was attempting to concentrate, to realize that it was cold water that had been thrown over him, to wake him.
"Why did they kill Sacha, Valery?"
"I killed Sacha. / did it."
"Why, then, Valery? Had you quarreled? Out of love?"
"What?"
"Why did you kill him?"
"Sacha? I didn't."
"You said you did. Did you?"
Tears leaked from Rodin's eyes. He began nodding again like a round-based doll, tilting his whole upper body time after time.
"Yes," he breathed at last. Then: "Yes, yes, yes, yes."
"How? How did you do it?"
Would the paranoia hold? Persecution, the sense of isolation, the depth of misery, all conspirators surrounding Rodin, making him spill his little cargo of guilt.
"How?"
"Yes, how? Did you rig the car?"
"What do you mean?"
"You killed Sacha."
"I told them about him!" he cried out, then curled more tightly into the beanbag chair, into himself. He cringed away from further pain.
Priabin stood up, and Rodin shivered at his movement. The lieutenant was more deeply withdrawn than ever, almost lost to him. Priabin crossed the room, looking for the bathroom.
Bedroom, bathroom next door, he remembered. Bathroom— yes, light on; drawers, cupboards, vanity, marble-topped — my God. Aftershaves, colognes, shaving lotions, hair spray — yes, expensive makeup, French and American. Whose? Sacha's?