by Joe Haldeman
Borachev’s office was comfortably cluttered. He got us each a cup of coffee and sat down behind his desk. The only other chair was a few inches lower. He smiled down at me, a wan smile. “So you have some interest in the import-export business?”
“As I say, there’s not time to be coy. I’m sorry to hand you such a shock. I’m sure that the Agency would much rather leave you alone in place—”
“’Better the devil you know,’” he said.
“Right. But many lives may be at stake. We have to move quickly.”
“Forgive me for pointing out that this is a common American trait, certainly in business: perceiving a need for haste in all things.” He looked quizzical. “Many lives?”
“Yes. What do you know of Nicholas Foley? Do you know where he is?”
For a long time he chewed at his lower lip. “I think I had better not answer that. If you press me, I’ll have to get a lawyer.”
“Let me spell it out for you. I know and you know that you are a rather high-ranking officer, a colonel in the KGB. But your official identity here carries no legal perquisites. No diplomatic immunity. And you are implicated in a kidnapping and at least two murders.” His brow furrowed at that, but he didn’t say anything. “Gas chamber,” I added helpfully.
He covered his face with both hands and kneaded. “No. This is some kind of…CIA trick. Setting me up, as you would say.”
“Nothing of the kind. Day before yesterday, two people kidnapped Valerie Foley. They spoke Russian.”
“Valerie Foley, that is his wife?”
“Yes.”
He nodded, thoughtful. “It wasn’t anybody from the KGB. You had better look to your own house. I’m sure the CIA has many Russian-speaking employees.”
“The CIA didn’t kidnap her. If we wanted to pressure Foley, we have dozens of legal ways to do it. You don’t.”
“But neither do we have a reason!”
I had to laugh at that. “Two murdered KGB agents isn’t enough reason?”
He leaned back, chair squeaking. “All right. Now I know something, uh, fishy is going on. Some sort of game.”
“Not a game.”
“I’ve known Professor Foley since he was a young man. Since we were both young men. He’s not capable of violence.”
“A few days ago, I would have agreed with you. He’s a gentle, pleasant man. But either that’s a mask or he is genuinely mad. Perhaps in the sense of having more than one personality. Look at this.” I handed him two grisly still photographs we had made from the Sûreté tape. “I do think he’s mad.”
“My word.” Borachev looked genuinely repulsed. “You claim Nicola did this?”
“Worse—he compelled them to do it to themselves. The one who shot himself in the head lived long enough to tell. He has some sort of Svengali-like power. We don’t know what the limits of it could be. I know it sounds fantastic, but it’s true. That Marine says they’re calling him the most dangerous man alive. Probably no exaggeration.”
“All right. I do know where he is.” He opened a desk drawer and fished around inside. “I have the hotel name in here somewhere; he’s in Paris.”
I laughed. “Not anymore. Not since he killed those two.”
“Ah.” He looked at the pictures again. “These are the KGB agents?”
“Bulgarian KGB.”
He pursed his lips, nodding, and handed back the pictures. “That could be why I don’t know more about this than I do.”
“You think the Bulgarian KGB might be behind the kidnapping?”
“Oh, possibly. That’s not what I mean, though. You know.” He flapped a hand, thinking. “It’s true that I’m an officer in the Soviet army, as you say, in the KGB division. But my daily connection with the KGB is as tenuous as yours would be with the American army if, say, you were a colonel in the Reserves. I’m not a spy. I’m an import-export analyst and adviser, who keeps his eyes open. You see the distinction I’m making?”
“What you mean is that the KGB could be behind it without your having been notified. Even the Soviet KGB.”
He shrugged. “If you were this Reserve colonel in the American Army, would the army ask your advice before invading some small island? Would the Navy? I think not.” There was a knock on the door. “Come in.”
The receptionist walked in with a frozen scowl. Behind her was Jefferson, the.44 dangling.
“Jefferson,” I said with some pain in my voice, “this is not Vietnam. You’re not supposed to point guns at people and march them around.”
“It was a judgment call.” He gestured with the weapon, and all three of us flinched in unison. “I think you’re fishin’ in the wrong hole. She assumed that a big black dumb Marine couldn’t speak Russian. Made a phone call. I felt I had to interrupt it.”
“Who was the call to?”
“Don’t know. Called him tarakan, ‘cockroach.’ I don’t guess that’s a name in Russia. Maybe a term of endearment.”
“Yeah, code. Who was it?” I asked her.
She ignored me. “You have broken the laws of the state of New York. You are a dangerous hooligan, and I will take you to court.”
He laughed. “Yeah, you’ll see me in court, all right.”
Borachev was looking at her as if he’d never seen her before. “—Please, Galina. We have enough trouble.” She answered with one syllable of dismissal.
“What was she talking about?”
Jefferson showed many square teeth too perfect to be real. “She told the cockroach that Borachev was about to betray them. She tried to listen in, and the gizmo didn’t work.”
Borachev reached into the open drawer and pulled out a small button microphone. “This is yours, Galina? I was just going to tell you about it; I thought it was—”
“You stay quiet. For your own good if not for… principles.”
“What do you know about Nicholas Foley?” I asked her. “About the kidnapping of Foley’s wife?”
“I know nothing about anything.” She didn’t look at me, still glaring at Borachev.
“You’re withholding evidence pertaining to capital crimes.”
“I know all about crimes in this country. You can’t make me talk.”
“She’s only been with the firm for two weeks,” Borachev said with no irony. “She has some odd ideas about America.”
“You have some odd ideas, Comrade Borachev.”
“Which is why you were sent to replace me?” She made a disgusted noise and stalked over to stare down at the East River, her back to us. Borachev turned to me. “No matter what she thinks… I am not going to be on your side. I will be of whatever aid I can be in the criminal aspects of this, this murder. But you cannot expect me to betray my country. Not even to stay out of prison.”
“—Such a patriot,” she said venomously.
“—Such a pain!”
“Jefferson,” I said, “do you have an FBI contact number?” He did. “Have them come collect her. Our liaison on the Foley case is Herb Stratton in Washington; have them check in with him.” He escorted her to the outer office and we sat back down.
“What I said was true. You can’t turn me. I will allow you to convince me that this is serious enough for me to give you limited cooperation.”
“Good,” I said. “I can’t promise anything, but it could be the difference between jail and deportation.” I seemed to be offering that choice to a lot of people lately.
“Wonderful. If I could only decide which would be better.”
CHAPTER TEN: NICK
Fasting for two weeks, with cautious exercise, I managed to reduce my beer belly to reasonable proportions. Working up to an hour a day on the sunlamp, I started to look less like a bookworm and more like a farmer or sportsman.
I stayed in the Bangor-Portland area, changing motels every two days. Both cities had university libraries; I spent a lot of time in each. A little research. A lot of thinking. Or at least a lot of worrying.
When I was young and philosophical, I t
hought that I would be able to live a blameless life governed by Kant’s Categorical Imperative: Act as if the maxim of thy action were to become by thy will a universal law of nature, on which every other person would act. The agnostic’s all-purpose do-unto-others; the eightfold path boiled down to one hard step.
It does work well for moral and ethical problems of a universal nature: Should I take a chance on getting the girl in trouble? Should I go off to war, help my friend cheat on the exam, tell the boss that Bob’s a slacker, bring children into a world of pain? Hard questions, but everybody has to answer them.
It’s not so easy to apply the Imperative to a singularity: a problem that no other person has ever experienced and probably never will. You are the Soviet premier and president; you have authorized missiles to be sent to an ally nation being bullied by a mutual enemy. The enemy orders a blockade and implies that there will be war if the missile bases aren’t dismantled. Nuclear war. But he’s probably bluffing. What do you do? How could you reasonably apply the Imperative? No other person in the world is in a position to decide; it’s meaningless to claim that your decision would be “right” for someone else. It has to be right, period. You have to admit that you are special and that for you there are no rules, only results.
So that is the large problem, the “meta-problem,” which I have been putting off for such a long time, using this power essentially at the party-trick level. The party trick of serial murder.
I could become the most powerful person in the world. Perhaps in the history of the world. All I would have to do would be to talk myself into proximity with one world leader after another and tell them what I want done. Only China would be beyond my grasp—and then only so long as she keeps a premier who speaks no foreign language. Or until I learn Chinese.
But I have no agenda to save humanity, no righteous or even selfish itch for that kind of power. All I desire is quite the reverse: immunity from power, from the powerful. An orderly, bookish sort of existence, occasionally spiced. As I have had for most of my life. Now, I suppose, that’s no longer possible.
Perhaps the course most morally defensible would be suicide. I should destroy the watch and then myself. Any government that learns that watch’s simple secret could, with radio and television broadcasts, make its citizens do anything. Not only its citizens; anyone who comes within earshot. (Would there be an underground of deaf persons? Of people intentionally made deaf in the higher frequencies?) But suicide is unthinkable to me and has been since I was old enough to understand that some people do it, that many of my neighbors had done it—which was perhaps too young. It could be that extreme adversity divides us into two groups: those who are able to surrender to the shadow of death and those who will hang on to life even when it promises nothing but a few more days or minutes of pain. Perhaps the will to survive and survive regardless, once discovered, becomes a reflex attitude that permeates the rest of your life.
At any rate, having rejected the most sensible and simple course, I am now embarked on a rather Byzantine one. In both the Boston Globe and the New York Times, this message has appeared in the personals: “NF-VF wants to talk to you,” followed by Boston and New York phone numbers. And so of course I’m going to Washington.
But not right away. I have to assume that Valerie will be safe so long as they’re still looking for me, and my best chance for rescuing her will be to bide my time until I know enough about the situation to sneak up, free her, and disappear before anyone really knows what’s happening. And do it all without leaving tracks.
My first impulse was to go back to Boston and use the watch on a phone-company person and find out what address corresponds to the number in the paper. Then go rescue her, nonviolently if possible.
A few times each waking hour, and sometimes while asleep, I wish that I had done just that. My nature is to move cautiously, and having charge of this machine makes me triply cautious. But in my own heart I will never be free from the charge of cowardice. If my caution has cost her life, I will die.
But the ones who put that ad in the papers won’t simply be sitting in a room, waiting for the phone to ring. Not with my known association with the CIA, and those two dead Bulgarians, assuming they were found. I must assume that they have been. There will certainly be guards outside, and electronic surveillance. “Action at a distance” is the key.
This should have happened ten years ago; it would have been easier to change my appearance then. The scale says I’ve lost eleven pounds, and indeed I look fairly trim if I keep my abdomen sucked in like a drill sergeant. If I relax, my chest falls half a meter.
I bought a second belt and wear it under my shirt at navel level when I go out, to serve as a reminder. It’s tiring but seems to work. It will probably have a salutary effect on my digestion, when I start eating regularly again.
With the help of the phenylalanine I could have starved for another couple of weeks and will do so now that I’ve found another hiding place. But running took energy, and I did have to run. Jacob, or somebody, forced my hand. They might have caught me with subtlety. Instead they tried force.
I woke up at dawn to a strange traffic sound. Looked out the window and was surprised to see an army convoy.
Television news said that it was “maneuvers”—they just happened to order half of New England’s National Guard into a perimeter around Bangor… while, “in an unrelated story,” the FBI was searching Bangor for a murderer on the fifteen-most-wanted list. Have you seen this man? The picture looked like a portly gentleman with glasses and a Santa Claus beard. Not at all like me.
I remembered reading, though, that nobody gets on that list unless the FBI is pretty confident that they’ll be captured soon. So I moved, as they used to say, with a purpose.
I gathered up my few things and drove across town to a motel where I hadn’t stayed before. Loitered for a while and then borrowed a car from a new patron right after he checked in, suggesting that he sleep for at least twelve hours. I got past the roadblock by telling the private I was his company commander. (He was taking a picture of each person, but I asked that he skip me.) I drove toward the coast and stopped at the first small airfield; took a puddle jumper to Boston and shuttled Logan-LaGuardia-National. Caught the next Eastern flight to Atlanta, then Miami, and by sundown I was just another tourist strolling along the docks at Key West. Salty fresh-fish cucumber smell and flowers I couldn’t identify. Compared to the austere Maine winter, a riot of sensation. Jugglers shouting and laughing, singing buskers with their hats out, a contortionist, people hawking carnival food and tropical drinks. A girl on a bicycle with a Styrofoam box, selling chocolate-chip cookies still warm from the oven. I had broken my fast slightly with bites from two damp airline sandwiches, which had made me feel vaguely ill. One cookie awakened the hungry beast in me. I ate four more before I got control of myself.
Valerie and I had visited Key West for a conference in the late seventies but hadn’t seen any of the other Keys, being earless and fairly broke. We’d been especially intrigued by a place called No Name Key, about thirty miles away. I asked around and found out there was nothing there but a fishing camp. That sounded good, and the name was certainly right for a person in my situation. I bought a rod and reel and some appropriate clothing, filled a cooler with various fruit juices, and drove out there in a Rent-A-Wreck.
You couldn’t see anything at night, and I was dead-tired anyhow from running all day. But at dawn I knew I’d made the right choice. December sun burning away early mist, stillness only broken by jumping fish and the occasional cries of odd wading birds. Even a small alligator. A good place to drop another ten pounds, work on my tan, read a dozen books.
Rest up for the assault.
CHAPTER ELEVEN: JACOB
He made a mistake, fingerprints. But then we made a bigger one.
Actually, he left just one fingerprint. That was enough, with the FBI’s computers and organizational power. Plus a good portion of luck, which unfortunately didn’t last.
First this young man showed up at Logan, fresh off a plane from Las Vegas, with a fat roll of used twenties and no memory of the past nine days. He reported a stolen car, a van, and since the interviewing officer’s report mentioned the key word amnesia, the FBI computer’s “expert system” flagged it.
The van’s engine surfaced in a parts store in Albany. With some impromptu plea bargaining and perhaps muscle, the FBI tracked down the boy who had stolen it. He led them to the van’s body, which had been repainted and was doing service delivering sheetrock. Most of the interior had been stripped, but they went over every square inch of it anyhow. With an infrared laser they found a full set of prints from an Albany woman who had also recently suffered amnesia, evidently right after her high school reunion in Bangor, Maine. On her purse they brought out one latent print from Nicholas Foley.
Jefferson and I found out about this some twelve hours after the FBI had set its wheels in motion. Weather had closed the Bangor airport; we got the first flight to Portland and drove the hundred-plus miles too fast for the conditions, to be caught in the largest traffic jam in Bangor’s history. Hundreds of military vehicles had thrown a cordon around the town. It looked like the Normandy invasion with snow.
They had every road going out of Bangor blocked. They weren’t stopping cars going into town, but they might as well have been, since everyone slowed down to gawk. Jefferson turned our rented Dodge Dart into an off-the-road vehicle, and we passed everybody on the far right, chains digging up the real estate. A jeep full of MPs came after us and attempted to cut us off, television style, which doesn’t work in a vacant lot. Jefferson steered a four-wheel drift around them, laughing. They cut us off again and then pulled guns. Jefferson slammed on the brakes, jumped out, and stalked toward them holding his identification out in front of him, like a priest warding off vampires with a crucifix, though with unpriestly language. The MPs were in the right, just following orders, but he had more rank than all of them put together, as well as histrionic ability and decibels. Black Conan on angel dust.