Under the Freeze

by George Bartram

  Seconds later Falomin shook their hands and went out, and the two men went out after him. Now Falomin’s turn would come — the interrogation in the country about his mistress and his child.

  There were papers to sign and two junior officers to talk to briefly, and then they sat mindlessly in a waiting room for twenty minutes, and then they were allowed to go. They were led along corridors into a comfortable sitting room, and minutes later they were standing in the sunshine of the early morning with Strisz.

  “You are going directly to the airport,” Repin said. “Me, too.”

  “They can’t wait to get rid of us.”

  “We are an embarrassment.” Repin laughed and slapped his hands together. “It is very satisfying, being an embarrassment!”

  Strisz managed to look both official and friendly. “Your money is to be paid over in London.”

  “I’m counting on it.”

  They walked toward three waiting cars. Tarp saw a spear of green tipped with dark red the color of a fire-darkened brick, thrusting out of the dark wetness of a flower bed. Beyond it an old man was slowly raking the winter’s detritus from the earth.

  “You did well,” Tarp said, shaking hands with Repin.

  The old man narrowed his eyes. “You did well,” he said. “I enjoyed our fishing trip. We must go fishing again sometime. Now, I am going home to Tiflis, where I am going to sleep for three days, and then I am going to wake up to the smell of French bread and fresh coffee and brioche.” Tired as he was, he strutted like a rooster. “My Frenchwoman is only waiting for the word.”

  When he was gone, Strisz and Tarp stood together, both a little embarrassed. “Thank Gorchakov for me,” Tarp said. “I never saw him after the shooting stopped.”

  “The general secretary is very grateful for what you’ve done,” Strisz said awkwardly. “He wished me to say that if there is anything else you would like, he would certainly be happy to oblige you.”

  Tarp smiled, but not very pleasantly. He was tired. “Tell him I’d like to meet Raoul Wallenberg.”

  Strisz was shocked. “Not funny!” he said.

  Tarp touched his arm by way of good-bye. “Not meant to be.”

  Chapter 42

  Tarp flew to Paris and slept for twelve hours and then went to the farm. The place was empty and lifeless, although spring had touched the earth around it. A weed was sprouting in the rotted hay where the old man had lain drunk, and there was a film of green in the trees. His was the only car in the rutted yard now; he slept in the kitchen because it was warm and ate out of cans.

  He spoke twice to Juana by telephone and once to Kinsella, and then when he had arranged matters in Buenos Aires he talked to Johnnie Carrington. His last day at the farm Laforet flew in, and Tarp told him everything and gave him four of the phials from the habitat. “Your people may find something there. It may be useful.”

  “We are very interested in the habitat itself,” Laforet said almost languidly.

  “So are ‘Mr. Smith’s’ people. You’d better hurry.”

  “And this Pope-Ginna, and this Schneider — what of them?”

  “That’s what I do next.”

  He flew to London. Johnnie Carrington met him at Heathrow and walked him to one of the VIP lounges.

  “We’ve booked him a seat on a flight that goes in forty minutes. Mexico City nonstop, then Buenos Aires.”

  “Was he pleased?”

  “He seemed delighted.”

  “He didn’t want to stay in England?”

  “He seems to feel that he belongs in Argentina. He hasn’t much patriotism, you know.”

  “He hasn’t much of anything, except self-serving.”

  They chatted for a few minutes, and then Pope-Ginna was led in by two MI-5 men. He looked very chipper — quite as Tarp had first seen him, Dickensian and merry, clearly happy to be heading again for Argentina. Tarp excused himself and went out of the lounge to speak to somebody waiting there, then went back in in time to hear Pope-Ginna saying, “Never again, my young friend — never again!” He put his brown-flecked hand over his chest. “I shall never delve in international intrigue again!”

  “You never know,” Tarp said, coming behind him.

  “Aha, there you are! There, there, there you are!” Pope-Ginna’s tic had vanished and he seemed able to face Tarp squarely. “I believe, you know, Mr. Tarp, I probably owe you an apology — and perhaps a hearty thank-you — now that it’s over.”

  “Is it over?” Tarp said.

  Pope-Ginna laughed; the laugh was boisterous, but the tic appeared, only for an instant. Over his shoulder Tarp was watching three people who had entered the lounge.

  “There’s somebody I want you to meet,” Tarp said. He took Pope-Ginna’s arm and turned him around and started to walk him down the long, narrow room. Partway along, Pope-Ginna moved as if he wanted to escape the grip and not go with him, but Tarp would not let him go.

  “I think you know Juaquin Schneider,” Tarp said, standing before a man in a wheelchair. Behind the chair was a beautiful woman who might have been the invalid’s nurse. “Juana Marino,” Tarp said easily. He nodded at the man with her. “Jaime Kinsella, of the Argentine air force.”

  Pope-Ginna needed a moment to try to pull it off, but he made a good effort. “Well, Jock!” he said very loudly, his voice going up too much in pitch. “What a hell of a coincidence!”

  “Don’t touch me,” Schneider said. He pulled back a little as Pope-Ginna’s hand came toward him.

  “Well, you needn’t take the high-and-mighty with me, Jock!” Pope-Ginna bellowed. He laughed. He swung about to Tarp and said, “I told you how our millionaire friend behaves, Mr. Tarp!” He looked a little wildly at Tarp, then back at Juana and Kinsella. “I don’t know these people, Jock! Where are, uh — Fleming, and — Voerdreck — and …”

  Schneider fixed him with a look of sheer hatred. His small face, which Tarp had found effeminate before, looked demonic. “Your boys won’t be here, for once.”

  “M-my …” The laughter faded in Pope-Ginna’s throat. “See here,” he said to Tarp, “I demand to know what the hell’s going on!”

  “Why, this is your farewell delegation, Admiral — seeing you off to Argentina. Señor Schneider and Señor Kinsella want you to know how welcome you’ll be when you get back there. Now that Señ or Schneider is no longer surrounded by the mercenaries you used to guard him, he has some very strong ideas of what sort of welcome you ought to have.”

  A terrible smile lighted Schneider’s face. “Yes! And Mr. Tarp himself — Monsieur Selous, as I know him — said it best: Is the death squad the purpose of wealth?”

  “I don’t understand this at all,” Pope-Ginna said in a strangled, small voice.

  “Oh,” Juana said in rapid Spanish, “it is not at all complicated, Admiral Pope-Ginna. It was complicated to find out, but it is not complicated to understand. Señor Kinsella and I have found it quite easy to understand, with the help of Señor Carrington here in England. Put most simply of all — it is you!” She came around the wheelchair, smiling beautifully. “It was always you. You found out who Nazdia Becker really was. You paid to bring her to England and to continue her training in science. Was she your mistress, ever? Was she? Well — you sent her to Argentina to marry Señor Schneider, who was nobody then. You have lied so much. You lied when you said Schneider was rich when you first met him; oh, no, he was a very poor young man looking for a way to be rich. And you married him to Nazdia Becker — or the woman who called herself that — and then you and she could legally get at the German money in Argentina that had been left in her father’s name. I have seen the bank records, Admiral. I have nine signed statements.” Pope-Ginna was staring at Tarp. The tic came and went. “I could deny this,” he said in an uninflected voice. “But I wouldn’t di-dignify it with a denial.”

  “You were the one who wanted the habitat, Admiral.” Her voice went on, measured and accusing.”You arranged the death of Juaquin Schneider’s wife; one
of your ‘boys’ told us how it was done. You made Schneider a virtual prisoner, black-mailing him with the vaccine that his own wife had discovered.”

  Tarp looked at Schneider. “You are Gaucho, aren’t you?”

  Schneider glared at Pope-Ginna. “I am.”

  Tarp touched Pope-Ginna’s shoulder. “And it was you who invented Maxudov. For a long time, I thought that Maxudov was somebody who had gone looking for a way to sell plutonium. I had the wrong end of the stick. It really began with somebody who wanted to buy plutonium — you! And you found your man when you were arranging the purchase of the submarine. A soviet KGB bigwig who was dying of cancer.” Tarp shook his head. “You turned a man with the only thing that nobody else could promise him — a few more months of life.”

  Pope-Ginna gave up trying to deny. “He took it willingly,” he said. “The whole Maxudov business was his invention. Not mine.”

  “You made him a traitor.”

  “I told him what I wanted, and I told him what he would get in return. How he did it was his business.” He drew himself up — the first time Tarp could remember his ever asserting himself with that gesture. “What difference does it make? I got what I wanted and now it will be used in the way that I intended.”

  “The plutonium is back in Russia. I didn’t tell you that before, Admiral. For a while, I thought perhaps it really was Schneider who was behind it, and not you — but of course it wasn’t.” He looked down at Schneider. “It was you who passed us the message in Havana, wasn’t it?”

  Schneider lowered his head. “It was.”

  “I don’t believe you!” Pope-Ginna rasped. “The plutonium is not back in Russia! It can’t be!”

  Tarp heard Carrington’s voice behind him intoning the formula. “Anthony Marcus Aurelius Pope-Ginna, I charge you with crimes most grave and heinous against the Crown and against the government. Let me warn you that anything you say —”

  Pope-Ginna brushed past Carrington as if the words meant nothing. “I don’t believe, I say. Did you hear me? I don’t believe you!”

  “I was in the habitat, Admiral. I took the plutonium off.”

  The old man stared at him, his mouth working. “You couldn’t have.”

  “Shall I repeat the charge?” Carrington murmured.

  “What? What? Oh, don’t bother me!”

  “Admiral Pope-Ginna, you’re under arrest. Don’t you understand?”

  “Don’t bother me! Can’t you understand plain English? Doesn’t anybody here understand me? What is going on!”

  Three of Carrington’s men appeared and took Pope-Ginna by the arms. He still seemed not to care about them, not even to have noticed them. Instead he turned on Schneider and Kinsella.

  “You idiots!” he said in his slightly accented Spanish. “You pathetic idiots! Another year and I could have had forty atomic warheads and we could have blown the British Navy out of the water — and you started the Malvinas war too soon!”

  They led him out, white-faced, muttering to himself. Carrington introduced himself to Kinsella and to Schneider, then pulled up a chair and began to explain the kind of statement he hoped to get from them. Tarp knew it would be a long, difficult process, for already Schneider was talking about a lawyer and Kinsella would say only that his work was done.

  Tarp took Juana aside. She was wearing a turtleneck that hid her scar, and, except for a small depression in the skin high on her left cheekbone, she looked unmarked. “You did wonderfully,” he said.

  “What happens now?”

  “They’ll take depositions, testimony. It will take weeks. They’ll want statements from you, too.”

  “Weeks?”

  “At least. You’ll have to stay in England, I’m afraid.”

  “With you?”

  “I was thinking that might be a good idea, yes.”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes.”

  *

  There was still snow in the deepest part of the woods, but the ice had gone out of the rivers and ponds, and the winter-bound animals prowled again at night. He had found bear tracks in the soft mud along the bank of a stream, and in the mornings the badger that lived at the edge of his clearing came as far as his door for crusts. He took the old canoe out of its storage and put it on the pond and coaxed the first brook trout up from the depths; and in the deep pool below the biggest rock in the river, he took a landlocked salmon on the fly just at dusk.

  He spent the days at the computer console, studying the discs from the habitat. There was much there that he did not understand about genetic research and viruses, but there was a lot in there he did understand that had been gotten from Beranyi just before he’d died. He took it all in and filed it carefully in his data banks, where it would serve him well.

  He awoke in the mornings while it was still dark. Outside the big window the sky was dull red above the black treetops. The room was cold. He moved quickly, naked, feeding the wood stove, making coffee. One morning he pressed a switch on the console and the screen glowed, and the grid of his security system appeared. He pulled on blue jeans and a sweater, and he was reaching for a cup when a light began to blink rapidly in the upper right-hand corner of the CRT.

  Bogeys, he thought. At the river. Early risers.

  He slipped his feet into canvas boots and took a pistol from a drawer, then went out through a trap in the cabin floor. The air had bite, and the wind that shook the trees was cool. Above, the sky was lighter, and a sparrow was singing as the woods woke.

  He made his way to the riverbank. When he got there the sun was just appearing over the hills on the other side, and its first brightness struck on a shiny piece of metal on a tree limb near him. Tarp hung back behind a massive pine and looked at it. There was a long strip of red ribbon and then, below it, a disc of silver.

  Bogey’s been and gone, he thought.

  He took it from the limb and held it in his hand. It was a medal as big as the bottom of a coffee cup. On one side was a man’s head in deep relief, on the other the hammer and sickle and a quotation from Lenin in Cyrillic characters. Below it were his name and the date and For service to the struggle for the people.

  Tarp looked up and down the riverbank. He knew that somebody was watching out there, probably from the other side of the river.

  He threw the medal as high and as far as he could. It went up, glinting in the morning sun, trailing its ribbon-like blood, and then turned over and arched down and down and fell with an inaudible splash in the deep, swirling water where he had caught the salmon, where it sank at once and was gone.

  Then Tarp turned his back and went toward the cabin for breakfast.

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