Alternities

by Michael P. Kube-Mcdowell

  “What yardstick are you using? Everything the Tower’s given us—you know the list better than anyone—we owe to him.”

  We earned that ourselves, Tackett fumed silently. The kids downstairs bought it for us. All Endicott did was giftwrap a white elephant. It wasn’t worth a damn until he gave it to us.

  “What’s he do with them, anyway?”

  “Do I have to tell you at your age what a man does with a woman?” The President chuckled.

  Tackett was not amused. “Men I understand. Leeches are another matter. I wish you’d cut him loose.”

  “A convenient brain tumor, perhaps, and a quiet death in Walter Reed?” Robinson chuckled again. “It’s a little thing, Albert, what he asks. Hold your nose and do it. Save your worrying for the big problems. Like putting things in order in Blue. Your personal attention, now, understand? Rathole is one piece in a bigger picture. I want it there when everything comes together.”

  “Understood, sir.”

  After he hung up, Tackett sat in the chair scowling for long minutes. The pipe was cold, but he did not bother to relight it. The aftertaste had already turned acid in his mouth. Finally he reached for the phone.

  “Bret, this is the old man,” he said with a touch of weariness. “Director’s briefing in one hour. Call in the team. We’ve got work to do.”

  From the desk of BARBARA ADAMS

  * * *

  Meeting notes—10/2/77

  Needed: ALPHA LIST ORIENTATION PACKET for BLUE

  → HOLD FOR ACTIVATION OF RATHOLE ←

  Briefing Outline:

  Phase 1: En route—Guard reps on each train, no disclosure

  Phase 2: Staged to Tower—minimal disclosure

  Phase 3: Crossgate—adaptive disclosure

  What do we tell them about the gate? (Look at Guard briefing materials for guidelines)

  Consideration: protecting security of Tower Rec—blacked out wind, on trains and vans. Can we take them through blind?

  Gate City: Indianapolis, Ind.

  Gate House and Field Station: Scottish Rite Cathedral, Meridian St.

  NATIONAL:

  Federal Government: Pres. Daniel Brandenburg, state sens. (How much do the locals know?)

  Social Control: Identity cards N.R. Relocation permits N.R. No local travel restrictions in effect. (Talk to Martin about setting up ‘house rules’ for A’s—local regs too permissive.) Domestic police forces have national information exchange but no federal mandate for internal security (need to minimize exposure to civil violations).

  Media: wide open. High Priority → censor/limit access.

  LOCAL:

  Safe houses: Several small (distributed) or buy apartment house?

  (N. Meridian has possibles.) $ $ $

  Glossary: get station staff to abstract from Guard masterlist

  Needs:

  clothing, coupons, cash, trans., housing, secure communications, ded. ferryman, etc, etc.

  ?? Whose idea was this anyway?

  CHAPTER 8

  * * *

  What Begins in Fear

  Boston, The Home Alternity

  Even at 7:00 a.m., the Medford-City Center flesh-hauler was full. Full of people trying hard not to look at each other. Full of people withdrawn inside cocoons of myopic blindness.

  Pairs of strangers shared benches, each pretending they were alone. They studied their reflections in the window, scrutinized the papers on their laps, glanced up at the advertisements on the ceiling—anything but look at each other with more than a furtive, suspicious glance.

  Wallace was the exception. Spoiled by the company vans, he wanted to share a joke, a grin, a few words of idle chatter. He wanted the dark-haired woman across the aisle and two rows back to look up from her poem cards, bright rectangles of floral color, so he could tell her in a moment of eyes meeting how attractive he thought she was.

  Most of all he wanted something to keep his mind off the double-edged anxiety that went with returning to work. His own problems had been bad enough; what Jason told him Saturday night was worse.

  But the bus was full of strangers. Even those that had gotten on with him at the Block had been strangers—science faculty from MIT and Harvard, execs from the Navy shipyard, junior surgeons from Chelsea and Memorial. Neighbors, but strangers, belonging to circles which had no intersection with his own, their faces as cold as the rest. Even after two years, it had the power to make Wallace feel like a new and not particularly welcome arrival to the city.

  But the fact that he was feeling that way this morning was his own doing. He could have lingered at home and taken the company van at his scheduled time. But troubled dreams had opened his eyes a dozen times through the night and finally driven him from bed before even Katie was stirring. Thinking about them when awake, sitting alone in the kitchen, only gave them more power. Talking about them to Ruthann was impossible.

  But then, talking to Ruthann had not been an option for a long time. They had come to Boston united, three as one, and silence had divided them. Silence promised with an oath and bought with pale blue checks drawn on the U.S. Treasury.

  He shared nothing of his time away, not trivia, not triumph, not fear, not failure. Ruthann and Katie lived in one world, and he moved back and forth between it and his own, the maze of the city linking and dividing them, an ironic echo of the task which took him away from them. The secrets weighed heavy, the silence thundered in his ears. It was easier now to be away.

  Work was the antidote. Four days away from the Tower was three too many. A sweetheart run to a downhill gate, that’s what I need, he thought as the tandem bus bumped and swayed its way along Mystic Valley Parkway past anonymous plants and warehouses labeled only with large black numerals. It’s Jason’s boogeyman, not mine.

  Except that in his dreams, Jason’s shadow had been a Philadelphia cop named Chambers, and it was Wallace he was looking for.

  Ordinarily, there was no special rush at the assignment desk on Monday morning. Continuous operations and overlapping duty shifts served to spread the constant parade of runners and ferrymen through the regular Guard’s eighteen-hour operational day.

  But when Wallace reached the duty room just before eight, he found the desk triple-staffed, with a line waiting for each dispatcher. The room was almost as full of rumors as people. By the time he made it to the front of the line, Wallace had heard several: that Red Section was closed, that Red Section was being expanded, that the Guard was being cut back, that Security was going to rescreen everyone from Tackett on down.

  “Wallace, Rayne. 21618,” he said. “Any of what’s buzzing true, Bo?”

  Declining the chance to serve as a rumor clearinghouse, the dispatcher ignored the question. “Wallace, Rayne,” he repeated, scanning down his list. “You’re out of the rotation.”

  “What?”

  “You’re to report to the clinic first thing to get your medical release. Then you’re scheduled to see the deputy director at 10:10. Do you know where his office is?”

  “See Monaghan?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Uh—somewhere up in Ops, I suppose.”

  “Take any of the east elevators to the twenty-sixth floor. Turn right and check in with the receptionist at the end of the hall. Got it?”

  “Got it—”

  The dispatcher was already looking past him to the next runner. Out of the rotation—what does that mean? God, don’t let it mean they’ve pulled my papers. Not now. I’d never get back on Annie’s good side. Damn it, I didn’t do anything wrong!

  Deputy Director Bret Monaghan was a whippet of a man, looking out at Wallace with squinty eyes from behind wire-frame glasses. His jacket was already on the back of his chair, and his shin sleeves were rolled up one turn, revealing a few inches of freckled forearm and a black-banded watch with a badly scarred crystal.

  To Monaghan’s right, on one corner of the desk, a neglected cigarette consumed itself silently in an ashtray, tiny smoke tracings climbing skyward
until the current from the vent scattered them. Behind him on the wall, a reproduction of Diego’s stark “Cape Prince of Wales, Twenty-Four Degrees Below Zero” reflected as glare the light from Monaghan’s desk lamp.

  Wallace waited as patiently as he could while Monaghan made notes on a tablet, most likely about his last visitor. Monaghan’s schedule was so tight that Wallace had shared the waiting area with two other runners, so tight that the cushion of the one spare chair in Monaghan’s office had been warm when Wallace settled on it.

  While he waited, he wrestled with problems to come. So I lose my Red papers, drop to Grade 2. Probably won’t have to leave the Block. Have to sell our share of the Spirit. Shouldn’t be hard, in the Block. No new couch. Annie won’t like that. Won’t like any of it. Won’t understand and I can’t tell her. Goddamn it all.

  At long last, Monaghan tucked the sheet of paper inside a file and relegated the file to the credenza behind him. With the veined hands of someone twenty years older, the deputy director slowly shuffled through his papers to find the folder with Wallace’s name on it.

  “Doctor blue-stamp you?” Monaghan said at last, without looking up.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Looks like you had yourself quite a time over in Red last week.”

  Wallace did not know whether to minimize it or brag, so he said nothing.

  “You all right between the ears?”

  “Sir?”

  “How do you feel about running?”

  “I’m ready to get back in the chute. More than ready.”

  “You like it?”

  Casually as they were being asked, the questions were throwing Wallace off-balance. “It’s an honor to serve in the Guard, sir. I’m glad to be here.”

  Monaghan looked up from his paper, his eyes seeking Wallace’s like a marksman sighting on a target. “So you don’t like it.”

  Why is everyone trying to trap me in my own words? Wallace thought desperately. “I didn’t say that. I like it. It needs doing. I want to make a contribution.”

  “You do?”

  “Yes, sir.” He hesitated, then plunged on. “There aren’t many chances to do that back in Indiana, where I’m from. My older brother works track gang for a National Rail maintenance crew. That’s about the closest any of the family got.”

  “I see you were in the Youth Defense Reserve in school. Why didn’t you go on into the service? Lose your taste for it?”

  After all the interviews Wallace had endured during the selection process, it was a familiar question. He’d learned quickly that the real answer was too complicated.

  The query assumed that he had joined the YDR by choice. He hadn’t. As a fourteen-year-old with no clearly expressed goals of his own, he was programmed into it by a quota-conscious ninth-grade advisor. He had found more there to like than he expected—trips to Wright-Patterson and Fort Benjamin Harrison, firepower displays at Jefferson Proving Ground, a phys ed program which offered something more interesting than endless pick-up basketball games.

  YDR, summer camps at Atterbury, ROTC at Purdue, then the Army and a Monroe Line assignment in the Canal Zone or the Alaskan Territory. Like the leather-faced soldier in Diego’s painting, looking out through a tunnel of fur across the Bering Strait at Russia, holding a frost-coated rifle in gloved hands. That was how it was supposed to go.

  But it hadn’t. One summer camp missed due to his father’s heart attack, a year’s delay when his application to Purdue was rejected, and suddenly he had found that he had wandered off course with no idea how to get back on.

  “Truthfully, our unit wasn’t very sharp,” he lied. “I don’t know how much of a taste of it I really got. But that wasn’t why. I got… sidetracked.” When no understanding appeared on Monaghan’s face, he added quickly, “By Annie. Ruthann.”

  “I see. You’ve been married—”

  “Almost five years.”

  “Happily?”

  Why do you care? he thought hotly. But he hid his indignation. “Well—sure. As much as anybody. I mean, everybody has rough spots now and then, right? But Ruthann’s prime.” His face creased in a half-smile. “My friends are jealous.” One of them, anyway.

  “And you have a child?”

  The smile widened into a happy grin. “Katie. A sweetheart. Prime.”

  Monaghan nodded, shuffling a page to the back of the folder. Expressionless, he scanned the new top sheet slowly.

  “Sir—about that business in Red. I know it was a little messy, but I don’t think I did anything wrong—”

  “I’m not concerned about that,” Monaghan said, closing the file. “You showed a bit of resourcefulness. And results matter.”

  “Then what’s this about, sir? If you can tell me.”

  The deputy director sat back in his chair. “We need to expand Blue Section. Ops is setting up an accelerated qualification program for field agents. You were recommended as a candidate. This was your screening interview.”

  “Recommended?”

  “Maybe I should say your name came to our attention.”

  That goes down easier, Wallace thought. “I understand.”

  “Your Indiana background is a plus. Everything is going to happen very quickly, Rayne. We need people who can keep up with the pace.”

  “I just want to make sure I understand: Do you want me for this side of the gate? Or the other side?”

  “The other side. Is that a problem?”

  Problem? You offer to solve all my problems and you ask if it’s a problem? Jason, my friend, I hope they’re calling your number, too. “I don’t think—”

  “Because it’s refusable. You know that. Mole assignments always are. But if I were you, I’d be feeling lucky. You’re going to lose your Red papers for sure, and there’s enough bad talk about you downstairs that I wouldn’t be surprised to see you eased all the way out. You got your high profile the wrong way, you know?”

  Swallowing hard at the reproof, Wallace nodded. “What’s this going to mean? I mean, to my ticket?”

  “Standard,” Monaghan said with a disinterested shrug. “Push to Grade 4—Grade 5 when you clear probationary. Release time depends on assignment. I can almost promise you’ll be on a six-five schedule for the foreseeable future.” He dropped the folder on the desktop. “So what are you going to do?”

  Six weeks in, five days out—a pay grade he’d never reach as a runner. Wallace did not hesitate. “I’m in.”

  With a lazy motion, Monaghan reached at last for the red-eyed stub of the cigarette. “Stop by Blue Section to draw your training materials, then clean out your locker,” he said. “And catch lunch. In the next ninety minutes. The Section supervisor wants all of you in Aud 5 at noon to get things started.”

  Washington, D.C., The Home Alternity

  The head of the CIA plans division handled the new NSC directive gingerly, as though wary of it. He read it through, looked across the table at Dennis Madison with a deeply troubled expression on his face, then looked down at the document again.

  “Is this for real?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “And it means what I think it means?”

  “It does.”

  “You’re not just teasing me.”

  “Never,” the director said. Tut on a happy face, Wally. You’re back in business.”

  “All right,” the plans chief said fervently. “About damn time.”

  “How long will it take you to pick a few well-ripened notions out of your if-only box? I’d like to get back to the President with something before the services can. He’s going to have to pick and choose, and it won’t hurt to be first in line.”

  “What does Robinson really want? Where are we trying to get to?”

  The CIA director idly spun a pencil on the gleaming wood tabletop. “I think you have a full range of objectives from a nettle in the Bear’s breakfast to mounting the trophy head on the Oval Office wall.”

  An eager light came into the plans chief’s eyes as he leaned fo
rward in his chair. “How spooky do you want me to get?”

  “Don’t limit yourself, Wally. I’ll prescreen before we walk it downtown. You have something particular in mind?”

  “There’s a… ah, a kind of a neat idea one of my people came up with a year or so back. Very off-the-wall. Very ambitious.”

  “Want to give me the skeleton?”

  “Now?”

  “Why not?”

  “Well—sure. It was a juxtaposition of numbers that got us thinking. The blast radius of a Mark XII Super at a thousand feet is fifteen miles. The primary international airport for Moscow—that’s Sheremetyova—is fifteen miles from the Kremlin.”

  Madison gave the pencil another spin as he played with the implications.

  “I see where it goes, but I don’t think too much of the margins. If you’re going to bum out a bunch of hornets, you’ve got to hit the nest square the first time.”

  “Another number or two, then. The ground speed of an Aeroflot Tu-85 is 550 miles per hour. That puts Sheremetyova about two minutes away. Say you’re the air controller at Vnukovo. A flight from London aborts a landing because of gear failure and overshoots the airport. How eager would you be to order one of your own airliners shot down? How long would it take you to make that decision?”

  “A goddamned Q-plane,” Madison mused.

  “That would be one way to think of it. I remember reading when I was a kid about the Q-ships during the Second World War, disguising frigates as helpless merchantmen to bring German subs to the surface.”

  The director shook his head. “You’re right, Wally. Very ambitious.”

  “Too ambitious,” the plans chief projected, enthusiasm dimming as he tried to gauge his superior’s reaction. “I’ll leave that one in the bag.”

  “I didn’t say that,” the director said. “I’m right with you. It is a neat idea. Work it up. If you can wrinkle-proof it, I’ll pass it along.”

  The plans chief beamed in delight. “Can I have ten days?”