Prisoners of Tomorrow

by James P. Hogan

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  Paula leaned forward to enter a reply . . .

  She wasn’t sure what it was that registered—a sound, something glimpsed from the corner of her eye, an unconsciously perceived sense of movement? Earnshaw was still down next to her, watching the screen. She turned her head suddenly to look up past him . . . and gasped out loud in sudden dismay.

  “Remain as you are!” the Russian officer snapped, pointing his pistol. Earnshaw’s head jerked around. Paula could do nothing but stare up numbly.

  There were four more uniformed guards behind, two of them holding leveled submachine guns. The officer moved a pace forward to the edge of the bay, and looked down. He had a Tartar face beneath the peaked cap, olive-skinned, with narrow eyes and high cheekbones. “Keep your hands in sight,” he instructed. “Now, back slowly against the far wall. Make no sudden moves.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The night’s rain had freshened the air after a week of early summer heat that had become oppressive, and the scattered clouds left over Washington, D.C., by morning promised a spell of cool relief. Bernard Foleda let the drape fall back across the bedroom window with a satisfied “pom, pom, pom, pom, pom-pom-pom-pom-pom” to the tune of Mozart’s overture to The Impresario, and finished knotting his tie. He took the jacket of his suit from the closet, and, draping it over an arm, pom-pommed his way in a gravelly bass-baritone downstairs to breakfast. There was no reason for him to be humming to himself, considering the disaster that had befallen the department in the past week—it was simply a habit born of years. And besides, he had learned a long time ago that when people in his profession started letting the job get to them personally, they tended not to last very much longer.

  Myra was sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee in her hand, studying selected items from the morning’s news offerings on a flatscreen pivoted to face her from the worktop opposite. Like him in her fifties, she was a tall, normally full-bodied woman, with a face that had managed to retain its composure and humorous set despite eyes and cheeks still sunken from a five-month illness that had lasted through winter. The skin on the backs of her hands was still loose from her not having fully regained her weight yet, and her dark, neatly trimmed hair showed gray streaks which she hadn’t attempted to disguise by tinting. They had been married for almost thirty years, and unlike the mysterious, withdrawn spy chiefs of the popular movies, Foleda discussed his work with her regularly. He didn’t understand how scriptwriters could expect people like him, on top of everything else, to carry on being furtive and secretive after they got home. Maybe they did it to give themselves an excuse for introducing beautiful women into their plots—usually Chinese, for some obscure reason—who made their livings by coaxing secrets out of semicomatose government officials in between bouts of frenzied lovemaking. If so, Foleda had no objection—the image was good for recruiting.

  “The rain’s stopped,” Myra said as Bernard came in and hung his jacket over the back of one of the kitchen chairs. “It looks as if it’s going to be cloudy today. Nice and cool for a change.”

  “Yes, I already looked. We could use it.” Bernard walked over to the chef, took out two plates of scrambled eggs, ham, and a hotcake, and pressed a button to start the toaster. His wife poured the coffee while he sat down. The item on the screen was about a Japanese astronaut who had scored a first by achieving escape velocity under his own power with a series of hops and a leap off the surface of Deimos, the smaller of the two moons of Mars. “So maybe the old nursery rhyme isn’t so silly after all, if we just change it slightly,” the commentator babbled cheerfully in a way that Bernard found indistinguishable from banal at that time of morning. “The cow jumped off the moon, ho-ho!”

  Foleda snorted. “What else do we have?”

  Myra touched a button on the handpad lying beside the coffeepot, and a yellow light on the wallpanel by the stove came on to indicate that the house-manager was active. “Cancel,” she said in a slightly raised voice. The picture vanished and was replaced by a selection of options. “Five-three,” Myra instructed, and a new list appeared. “Poland,” she said. A headline replaced the list: more warsaw demonstrations. Myra glanced at Bernard. He nodded. “Yes,” she said at the panel. Then, “X-out, out.” The yellow light went off.

  The item concerned Soviet responses to the latest round of protests and strikes in Poland and East Germany. As usual the media were emphasizing the military aspect, with dramatically narrated scenes of troops confronting crowds, NATO units being put on alert—Foleda recognized one shot of rolling tanks as being months old, with no connection to current events at all—and snippets of military and political spokesmen being questioned about the risk of a general European escalation. That was the kind of material that delivered audiences to advertisers, and was only to be expected. Western intelligence had been following the developments behind the present situation since long before the public became aware of them, however, and opinions were that the likelihood of any real shooting was remote.

  The Soviets had accelerated their military buildup in the final decades of the previous century. Their intention had not been so much to provoke war, for they had no more desire than anyone else to be devastated again if they could avoid it, but, taking their cue from the woeful performance of the democracies at Munich in response to Hitler’s aggressions, to gamble that, as before, their adversaries would back down without a fight from the threat of force. And for a time, as Western pacifists howled for appeasement and rediscovered moral outrage with the realization that every pulpit, podium, lectern, and armchair was just twenty minutes from somebody’s launch site, it had seemed to work. But in the crucial early years of the twenty-first century, the Soviets had wavered when they found themselves faced by the prospect of having to take on not only the West’s military technology, but the larger part of the numerically overwhelming population of Asia as well. Originally the Bomb had redressed the balance between sides whose different political systems resulted in unequal commitments to conventional forces. The irony was that when both sides drew even in terms of Bomb-power, people should become the deciding factor to tip the scales. And as Marxism’s original appeal waned in the face of Asia’s rising affluence, the Soviets fell farther behind in the competition for minds and souls. Their moment had gone.

  Paradoxically, it was just this that made the present situation so precarious in a different kind of way. At one time, before Khrushchev, communist dogma had held that the capitalists would launch a last, suicidal war rather than submit to the final triumph of Marx’s immutable laws. Now it seemed more likely to happen the other way around: that in desperation, an irrational element in the Soviet leadership might decide to take everyone else down with them if they perceived all to be lost anyway. It was Asia’s armies that stabilized the situation; in turn, their protection was the West’s “Starshield” orbital defensive system. If that shield were destroyed, the entire system of deterrence and containment around the Soviet bloc would disintegrate and set the stage for exactly the kind of last-ditch gamble that the West’s strategic analysts feared most. That was what made knowing the true nature of Valentina Tereshkova was so important.

  That something big was in the wind, the various intelligence agencies of the US, Western Europe, and Eastern Asia were agreed. Also, it would happen some time within the current year. But what or exactly when, nobody knew. In the eyes of many, the game was nearing its end. But endgames have a perplexing tendency to suddenly go either way. At this stage of this particular endgame, there was no latitude for error.

  “I’ll take a copy to read when I get a chance,” Bernard said. Myra activated the audio again and directed the text to be hardcopied in the den. Bernard washed down the last of his toast with some coffee, and rose from his chair. “How are we for time?” he asked.

  Myra went to the window and looked down over the tree-lined avenue outside, normally peaceful but busier at this ti
me of the morning with people leaving for work. There was a black Chevrolet parked halfway along the next block. “They’re here,” she said matter-of-factly.

  “Damn,” Bernard muttered as Myra helped him on with his jacket. That meant he was running late. The two KGB agents from the Soviet embassy who tailed him every morning always arrived punctually and circled the block three times before parking. He bustled through to the den, picked up the sheets of hardcopied text, and slipped them into his briefcase. When he came back out, Myra was waiting in the hallway with his raincoat.

  “You’d better take this,” she said. “It might start raining again later.”

  “Thanks, I will.” Bernard took his hat from the stand.

  “Oh, and if nothing pressing comes up, remember that Ella and Johnny are coming this evening. I know you wouldn’t want to miss your grandson’s birthday if you can help it.”

  “I’ll try not to. What have we bought him?”

  “A junior spy kit, of course. It has invisible ink, false beards and mustaches, a codebook and some software to go with it, and a miniature camera. You see, just like the real thing.”

  “You mean they haven’t got something for kids to tap into phone lines?”

  “Give them time, dear.”

  “Okay, I’ll see you later tonight.”

  “You too. Have fun today.” Myra kissed him lightly on the cheek and watched from the door at the top of the stairs leading down into the garage as he descended and climbed into his maroon Cadillac. The outside door opened, and he backed out.

  Minutes later in the thick of morning traffic streaming toward the Beltway, he caught sight of the KGB car, sitting solidly four places behind him as he swung right off an overpass to take the ramp down to the freeway. Several cars farther back still, just coming across the overpass, was the blue FBI Ford that tailed the KGB every morning. Foleda shook his head as he turned on a piano concerto to relax himself before the working day started. It was all sure as hell a crazy way to run a planet.

  Gerald Kehrn was a born worrier. When he was younger he had worried about the things he read that said resources were about to run out. And then when they didn’t run out and scientists began convincing the world that the whole problem had been exaggerated, he had worried that too many resources would produce too many people. When right-wing administrations were in power he worried about conservative fascists and fundamentalists, and with left-wing administrations he worried about liberal fascists and regulators. And of course, he had always worried about a war breaking out; the more time that went by without there being one, the more he worried that because weapons were constantly getting bigger and deadlier, it would be so much the worse when it did. He worried especially about things he didn’t know about, and so tried to keep himself informed about everything. That made him good with details and a useful person to have around, which helped explain how he had made it to a senior position on the staff of the defense secretary. And the position suited him, for if worse did come to worst, he would prefer to be right there in the center of the action—not able to influence the course of events very much, perhaps, but at least knowing what was going on.

  As he drove toward the Potomac on his way to the Pentagon on the morning of May 4, an inner foreboding told him that this was the beginning. He wasn’t sure why, for there had been enough diplomatic goofs and intelligence screwups before, and this was hardly the first time the Soviets had nailed a couple of agents. Maybe it was the involvement of Mermaid, which had been taking on such big proportions in everyone’s thinking lately. But something about the situation filled him with the dull, cold certainty that this was the first tripping over the edge into the scrambling, steepening tumble that would take them all the way to the Big One.

  Because he worried about being late whenever he had an appointment, he always left early. Hence, none of the others had arrived yet when he got to Foleda’s office. He found Foleda’s operations assistant, Barbara Haynes, a tall, graying but elegant woman in her late forties whom he knew well, and Rose, Foleda’s personal secretary, discussing something being displayed on a screen in the outer room. The strains of some piece of classical music coming through the open door at the rear—Kehrn had no idea what it was; he preferred jazz himself—indicated that Foleda was already ensconced within.

  “We heard there was a snarl-up on the George Mason Bridge,” Rose said. “Didn’t think you’d make it so soon.”

  “A vegetable truck decided to unload itself there,” Kehrn said. “But I left in good time. It wasn’t so bad.”

  “Well, at least the rain’s stopped.”

  “I’m glad I came in the other way this morning,” Barbara said.

  “Who’s out there?” Foleda’s voice called from inside.

  “Gerry Kehrn,” Barbara called back.

  “Tell him to come on in. And you might as well come too, Barb. Let’s get our thoughts together before the others start showing up. And now Volst”—who was the secretary of state—“has just been on the line saying he wants a report on the whole thing personally over lunch before the big meeting starts this afternoon. I’ve got the feeling this is gonna be a long day.”

  Kehrn went on through, and Barbara followed after exchanging a few final words with Rose. Foleda touched a button below his desk to cut the music and pushed aside some papers he had been reading. “Hi, Gerry.”

  “Good morning, Bern. Or is that the wrong thing to say today?”

  “Why should it be?—It’s stopped raining. Sit down. Relax. You look worried.”

  Kehrn pulled out one of the chairs at the meeting table set at a tee against Foleda’s desk and sat down, placing his briefcase in front of him. Barbara shut the door. “Who wouldn’t be worried?” Kehrn said. “What a goddamn mess.”

  “A million years from now it won’t matter,” Foleda assured him.

  “Who else have we got coming this morning?” Kehrn asked.

  “Pearce and somebody else from State. Zolansky from Operations. Do you know him?”

  “We’ve met.”

  “Uh-huh. And Uncle Phil will be coming in at around eleven to see where we’re at.” Philip Borden was the UDIA director. Foleda sent an inquiring glance at Barbara.

  “Zolansky’s deputy will probably be coming too,” she said, sitting down at the far end of the table.

  “But keep your party-joke book in your pocket, Gerry,” Foleda advised. “They won’t be in the mood.”

  Kehrn fiddled with the lock of his briefcase and began taking out notebook, compad, and several files. “So what do we have?” he asked. “Anything new?”

  Foleda shook his head. “Nothing.”

  “What’s the story with Pacific News Services?”

  “Forget them. They’re out of it. PNS agreed to being used as cover for a government operation. If our operatives haven’t come back, it’s our problem. The Soviets haven’t lodged any protest with PNS, and PNS isn’t going to go out of its way to pick a quarrel with the Soviets.”

  “The Soviets know they were our people, and they’re letting us sweat for a while,” Barbara said. In other words, the Soviet reaction would come via the official channels.

  “And there’s been nothing so far through State?” Kehrn checked.

  “As Barb says, they’re letting us sweat,” Foleda said. “In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if they let us stew for a lot longer and don’t do anything.”

  “You mean, like waiting until we bring the matter up with them.”

  “Sure. Let us come crawling. We have to do something. Two of our citizens have disappeared, who were last heard of heading for a Soviet transfer station. Presumably they were caught red-handed committing espionage. Why should the Soviets be in any hurry to come to us?”

  “How much trouble are we in with the Air Force?” Kehrn asked Foleda.

  “None yet. Bryce was assigned to us for the duration. So far they don’t know bout it.”

  Kehrn shuffled some papers aimlessly for a few seconds and fi
dgeted in his chair. “What, er . . . what about the two people up there?” he asked at last. “Do we know what to expect?”

  “I imagine they’re still up there, and possibly will be for a while. Is that what you meant?”

  “I was wondering more, how much are they likely to give away?”

  “You’re worried?”

  “I’m worried.”

  “Well, Lew McCain’s an old hand. You needn’t worry about him,” Foleda said. “He’s worked for me for years. He won’t tell them anything. Even if it’s something that’s obvious and undeniable, he won’t confirm it. That’s the way he is. That’s the way they’re trained.” Foleda’s brow creased and his expression became more serious. “I wish I could say the same about the girl, though. This kind of thing isn’t her specialty. She’s from a different world. I don’t know what to expect there.”

  “It’s one of the things we’ll try and get an opinion on from Colonel Raymond up at Hanscom when we’ve figured out how to break the news,” Barbara said.

  Kehrn nodded and looked uncomfortable while he wrestled with some new thought. Finally he said, “What are the chances of the Soviets using . . . well, let’s say, ‘extreme methods’ of interrogation?”

  “I can’t see it,” Foleda said. “This whole business has big propaganda potential if the Soviets decide to go public, and they know it. This one they’ll want to play clean for the world to see. They wouldn’t jeopardize their advantage by risking bad counterpublicity.”

  “But threats, maybe,” Barbara said.

  “That’s something else,” Foleda agreed, nodding. “Threats, implications of nasty things . . . McCain would read the situation and not be intimidated. But again, with the girl . . . who knows?”

  “We shouldn’t have used her,” Kehrn said. “There had to have been someone else, with the right background as well as the technical know-how. It was a bad decision from the start.”