by Joe Haldeman
I laughed, a new sensation. “Come on.”
“You think I’m kidding?” He showed me one ad that asked for British, French, and Greek girls. “You believe it’s nationality they’re talking about?”
I looked at the section. “You know, this is an idea. They must have clients who want older women.”
He frowned at me. “You’re not serious.”
“I am indeed.” I lowered my voice. “I don’t mean fucking them. It’s an escort service, after all. I get dolled up and let some poor old guy squire me around for a few hours, and when he pops the question, I say no. Hell, I can take care of myself.”
He nodded slowly. “You know, you may be right. They certainly wouldn’t expect you to work under your real name. Probably the best pay either of us could get, under the circumstances.”
That was true, because “the circumstances,” although I hadn’t yet discussed this with him, included keeping Nick absolutely out of sight until he had his power back. Not even grocery shopping. Nick certainly had some idea of how thorough they could be in searching for someone. But I was the authority on what they could do if they found you.
Most of the men were likable enough, older fellows too shy or too busy to go through the slow excruciation of senior-citizen dating. A few had some unusual ideas about the way of a man with a maid, but it’s hard to shock an abnormal-psychology professor, or even a normal one. About half of them really just wanted someone to talk to; someone who would listen respectfully. The half who wanted to get their rocks off were satisfied with quick masturbation, which I could do almost as dispassionately as a massage. I never mentioned that to Nick, though. He’s more reasonable than most men, but he’s still a man.
It only took two weeks to get a thousand dollars ahead. (All the income I’ve lost, teaching in college!) That was my arbitrary cutoff point. I bought a soldering gun and a sackful of components at Radio Shack and then picked up kits for wave generator, preamp, simple oscilloscope, and a small amplifier at a Heath-kit shop. Then I got some aloe ointment at the drug-store, since I’ve never soldered for a day without being burned at least once, even without poor clumsy Nick as my helper/holder.
We did collect a few burns a day, but in one ninety-hour week we got everything assembled. Just in time. The rent was due, and I didn’t want to go out manhandling for it.
Nick turned on the machine and asked me to stand on my head and whistle Dixie. I did a credible job, for a forty-five-year-old indoor woman who can’t whistle (he mercifully cut me short after a couple of bars). We asked the landlord to come in, and he not only forgave us the rent but insisted on giving us twenty dollars for groceries. That was fun. Greasy slumlord.
But we did have a problem. The apparatus took up as much room as a large stereo component set. We couldn’t really plug together a bunch of extension cords and haul it down to the sidewalk, so our victims were limited to people who could be enticed into our lair.
I have to admit that the first solution that occurred to me was a thoroughly immoral one. I could go back into the hand-job business and enveigle the customers up to our apartment. A lot of them were well-heeled family men who wouldn’t miss a few hundred bucks, or at least wouldn’t try to track it down. Instead, I came up with a technological “fix.” Good old American know-how.
Sound waves can be reflected, refracted, and focused just like light waves. I remember how, in high school physics club, we made a “sound magnifier” out of a balloon filled with carbon dioxide. My approach would be a little different.
Various firms make “remote microphones,” which are just plain microphones braced in front of a reflecting bowl. The bowl, which is a paraboloid, focuses onto the microphone all the sound waves that are coming from whatever direction you point it. They sell the things for bird-watching, supposedly. No harm done if a chatty neighbor gets in the way, right?
It occurred to me that you could reverse the thing—replace the microphone with a sound generator, and you would get the sonic equivalent of a searchlight! It could send a beam of ultrasonic whine for blocks, along with whispered commands.
I called up Edmund Scientific in New Jersey and had one of the things sent C.O.D. We scrounged another couple of hundred from the landlord to pay for it and keep us going in the meantime.
It came in three days and only took an hour to set up. It worked beautifully. Nick would sit down on the stoop, in view of our window, and wait until a prosperous-looking person came by. (In our neighborhood, that meant dope dealer or pimp.) Nick would ask him for a light, which would immobilize him long enough for me to line up the searchlight on him. Then Nick would ask whether the guy could spare a couple of bucks. If he reached for his wallet, we knew the machine was working, and we’d clean him out, erase the memory, and send him on his way.
On the third day, we stopped a handsome black dude who had a specially made thick wallet that produced seventeen thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills. Nick asked whether he had any more money on him, and from various pockets he produced five shrink-wrapped packages of ten thousand dollars each. We decided it might be healthy to move across town that afternoon.
With over seventy-five grand to work with, we could easily have hired out the job of miniaturizing the signal generator and hiding it inside a watch. But the person who made it might wonder about its function. So we had to be a little circumspect.
We found a small firm in Fort Lauderdale, Suncoast Micro-engineering, that would probably be able to make the watch. I rigged up the searchlight device to work with a cigarette-lighter rectifier, and we rented a van without windows. Backed up to the place so I could get a bead on the front door. Then Nick went inside and engaged the president of the firm with a line of convincing bullshit (was that a talent he learned at KGB school? MIT?) and invited him to lunch. They stepped out the door, and I snared him; we found out from him who would be the best technician for the job and then snared him. In ten days, Nick was wearing a Svengali Timex on his wrist.
All this time we’d been making plans—or rather, Nick had been talking about the future, and I had been listening. I guess I was waiting for him to come up with something I could live with. But he never did.
What Nick wanted was for both of us to undergo radical plastic surgery—an unpleasant prospect, but one that I agreed was probably necessary. We parted company very profoundly on what to do after that, though.
Nick wanted us to find a hidey-hole, some country place or idyllic island, where we would go to ground and hide for the rest of our lives. All right; I could see that eventually.
But first there were some things that had to be done.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR: NICK
I told Valerie the truth about the two Bulgarians and the shootout with Tarakan, who I could almost honestly say was the first person I’d ever killed. I couldn’t tell her about all the desperados I’ve talked into killing themselves, obviously—though in fact it hadn’t occurred to me at the time to mention them; I don’t think about them in that context.
The idea of the magic watch fascinated her. She’d had the process halfway figured out from what Shilkov had revealed with his questions, combined with her own memory of the pivotal undressing experiment. She didn’t question my saying that I’d never used it for professional advancement, which was true, or for personal gain, except while I was “on the lam.” I admitted having been tempted to turn the thing on to encourage sexual favors, but had so far resisted the temptation. I’m not sure she believed me about that, about resisting, but it didn’t seem very important to her.
Our real falling out came over what to do with it now. I was ready to retire from the spy business, and you’d think she would be triply ready. But no; she wanted me to go out with a real bang.
Our new apartment, after I’d hit the dope dealer for $67,000, was a furnished penthouse in western Miami, nowhere near the ocean. From our twenty-fifth-floor balcony we had a fine view of a hundred square miles of urban sprawl and hot, low smog. It was on that ba
lcony, while I was grilling shrimp and scallops en brochette, that she divulged her grandiose, if nonspecific, plans for my future. I had to admit that I didn’t find the idea completely unattractive.
“We can’t just use this thing to get a grubstake and go to some island to play Gauguin or Robert Louis Stevenson,” she said.
“I’m not suggesting anything that bucolic,” I said. “We can’t afford to be conspicuous, wherever we go. Has to be a place with lots of Americans or Europeans.”
“That’s not what I mean. I mean we can’t just use the watch to make money, get security, and then put it away in a safe deposit box. We should use it to do something!”
“I think I know what you’re getting at.” I turned the skewers and started brushing the seafood with lemon butter. “I wonder whether you’ve thought it through in as much detail as I have.”
“Maybe not. But it seems to me you could get next to any politician, even the president of the United States, you know, put a bee in his bonnet. Cooperation with the Russians, world peace… something.”
“Sure. And have you considered what would happen if I got caught? If any government got hold of this, even a so-called free one, it would destroy the social contract forever. No need for that government to give any rights to the governed—you just tell them to do what you want them to do. For their own good, of course.” I picked at a scallop with a fork; not quite done yet. “In a matter of months, every government in the world knows the ‘secret.’ Can you imagine Stalin with a tool like that? Hitler? Make Genghis Khan look like a social worker.”
“But you’d be okay as long as nobody tumbled to it. You’ve kept it secret this long.”
“Because I’ve been able to stay in hiding; only come out on my own terms. How many layers of people do you think I’d have to bluff my way through to get to the president’s ear? And how could I be sure I wasn’t being recorded?”
“Of course you’d have to be careful.”
“Careful as I was with that guy from Watergate? I got him killed because someone was listening.”
She looked out over the city with her mouth set in a stubborn line. “Look,” I continued, “they don’t even have to get the watch. Don’t have to know the frequency. If they just deduce the simple fact that there is a noise that will make people do what you say—”
“I know. They’ll find out what the noise is.”
“In no time. Especially since it’s a pure tone. If it were a chord or a mixture of harmonics, or if it had to be a certain amplitude, it could take them forever. Trial and error. But hell. They could deduce that it was either ultrasonic or subsonic, and they’d just run up and down the scale. Probably find it in a couple of days’ systematic searching.”
“Yeah, maybe. I’m going to open that bottle of wine. Toss the salad.” With a posture of resignation, perhaps calculated, she headed for the kitchen. This is the way she normally wins arguments with me.
Halfway conceding that I’m right, and letting me talk myself over toward her position.
Of course I also had a certain amount of guilt pushing me into a desire to use this power for good, for a change. Not so much the trail of dead pushers, pimps, and muggers; that disturbed me, but more because I didn’t understand it than out of feeling remorse for them. No, the main source of guilt was Valerie’s suffering. I’d proceeded with such a slow pace supposedly to protect her—but had to come in with all the subtlety of a firestorm anyhow. I could have done that the first day I’d seen the message in the paper. I could have done it the night I came home from Paris.
Besides, I’d accepted a small risk of exposure every time I’d used the watch down in the Zone. What if some undercover cop had witnessed me asking a pimp to throw himself in front of a speeding bus? The power would have wound up in the hands of the authorities that way, just as surely as it would if they caught me whispering into the president’s ear. And the payoff could be so much greater, the potential to change things…
Virtually the whole plan came to me in an instant. Valerie returned with the wine and salad, and we served each other in silence. Finally I spoke up.
“I’ve been thinking about what you said.”
“So?”
“Leningrad is beautiful in the spring. We should go there.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
President Nixon met the Russians in Moscow and President Ford met them in Vladivostok, and then for a long time the two countries’ leaders stayed off each other’s soil. They communicated by diplomatic pouch and phone in the best of times, and in the worst, only through inflammatory rhetoric in Pravada and the New York Times.
President Gideon Fitzpatrick wanted to change that. A neoconservative with impeccable anti-Communist credentials, he was safe including in his platform a proposal to get together with the Russians and “try to talk some sense into them.” Their meeting would be more symbolic than substantial, but it would open a new round of formal talks on arms limitation, cultural and scientific exchange, and the possibility of restoring to the Soviet Union “most favored nation” import-export status—which not incidentally would put the fear of God, or at least the Almighty Dollar, into the Chinese and Japanese.
President Fitzpatrick did have one important emotional tie with Russia and, not too indirectly, with the new Soviet premier. On 25 April 1945, as a very young and green lieutenant in the 69th Infantry Division, he waded ashore on the eastern bank of the Elbe, to be greeted by cheers and incomprehensible gibberish and a canteen cup foil of vodka. By dawn he could almost understand Russian. At least he could sing the first few bars of the Soviet national anthem.
He was not so happy with the Russians in subsequent years and decades, though not even the McCarthy era could permanently affect his preference for vodka. (A very junior senator at the time, in public he did drink bourbon for a couple of years.)
Premier Sergei Vardanyan was also a soldier in the Great Patriotic War, a private even younger than Fitzpatrick, and they may possibly have come in sight of one another that April. Vardanyan’s unit arrived at the Elbe the day before Fitzpatrick’s moved on, and they were stationed barely ten miles apart.
The plan was for them to meet again at the Elbe (now part of East Germany), on the anniversary of the historic occasion, and deliver speeches and lay wreaths. Then Fitzpatrick would make pro forma visits to various European allies, leading up to his meeting with Vardanyan on April 30. The next day, he would be the first American president to observe May Day on Soviet soil.
To be fair to his predecessors, most American presidents since 1918 couldn’t have stood in that reviewing stand—not with a bellicose procession of tanks and guns and missiles rolling by. But since Brezhnev’s time, May Day has been quite the opposite, a gentle celebration of peace. Every factory and school has a float done up with doves and rosy-cheeked girls, papier-mâché globes; all presided over by the benevolent hammer and sickle and the word for peace: mir. (Nowadays the guns don’t go on parade until they celebrate the October Revolution, in November.)
The special assistants and secretariats in charge of protocol did a certain amount of horse trading prior to the announcement of the event. The premier and the president would stand together not in Moscow, where the rest of the Presidium, Supreme Soviet, Council of Ministers, Party bigwigs, and other apparatchiki would be. Fitzpatrick held out for Leningrad, within breathing distance of non-Warsaw Pact Europe. The Russian protocol people let it be, rather than queer the deal.
Fitzpatrick was also allowed to bring into the country a planeload of people and things that would not have to submit to the indignity of inspection: his family; a cook with a kitchen and a week’s supply of bland, safe food; a veritable gaggle of discreetly but heavily armed Secret Service men and women; and a handful of Soviet specialists and translators.
Chief among the translators, if things worked out right, would be the most dangerous man in the world.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX: JACOB
Four Soviet spies found dead, and blood
from a fifth person, in a factory building not ten miles from Langley. Nothing about it was made public—the FBI leaned on the press like a huge unfriendly planet—but the next day the Soviet embassy was demanding an explanation, privately but very strongly. There was precedent for a revenge motive, harking back to the Reagan years, if you believe rumors. They murdered one of our spies in cold blood, and we retaliated by killing ten of theirs the next day, in various places around Europe.
But we didn’t do this. Two of the male spies were killed by the same weapon, a.45 automatic, with two accurately placed shots apiece. The other two, a man and a woman, were executed grotesquely, handcuffed together around a chair leg. The woman’s abdomen was slashed open, from the navel down, with a razor—or scalpel. The man was castrated. Whoever did it had evidently watched their struggles for several minutes and then finished them off by severing the carotid arteries. There’s nothing like that in any CIA handbook I’m familiar with.
Jefferson and I, because of our direct involvement with the Scalpel’s current activities, had to fly down to Washington and stay up all night with a couple of Soviet Affairs people and an espionage woman from the FBI, cobbling together a report for the Soviet embassy. About half truth and half invention, it certainly didn’t tell them anything the KGB didn’t already know, but it did squarely place the blame for the multiple murder on Mikhail Shilkov, a.k.a. the Scalpel. We included a blood-chemistry workup from the fifth person, assuming he was the murderer, suggesting that they compare it with KGB records. It could have been from a fifth victim, though, spirited away for some reason. Like Valerie Foley. (The next afternoon it occurred to me to ask the FBI whether she could have been the victim. They said the sample contained so much testosterone that if it belonged to a woman, she’d shave her face twice a day and sing bass.)
We don’t have a mole deep enough in the KGB to know exactly what the result was—or perhaps we do, and I don’t have the “need to know”—but an East German KGB man who also works for us relayed an order from Moscow that Shilkov, whose whereabouts were unknown, was to be retained for questioning if he showed up, with force if necessary; killed if necessary.