High Flight

by David Hagberg

  “What about the submarine?”

  “Presumably on its way home, we think to Yokosuka. We’ll know for sure in a few days at the outside.”

  “Keep on top of this one, Roland,” the President said, his gaze penetrating. “We’re in a very delicate position between Tokyo and Moscow, and I don’t want to be caught short. Anything that has any bearing on this subject, I want to hear about it pronto.”

  “Yes, sir,” Murphy said.

  FIVE

  Dominique Kilbourne was dead tired. Parking her Corvette in the Watergate ramp, all she wanted to do was get upstairs, have a glass of white wine, take a long hot soak in her tub, and crawl into bed. Since McGarvey had left her apartment yesterday morning, she’d been on the go, which in one respect was all right. It kept her from thinking about him. She’d not gotten much sleep since his visit. Alone in bed at night she kept coming back to him, to the expression on his face, to the way he held himself. To the look in his eyes. She had tried to find him, but it was as if Washington had swallowed him. David was suddenly unavailable to her, and her brother was too busy at Gales Creek to talk.

  Starting at noon yesterday when HR95831 had been proposed by William Hyde, the junior Congressman from Utah, her office had been swamped by every airline she represented, and seemingly by every journalist and television or radio reporter in town, and hundreds from across the country.

  The bill proposed that a ten dollar per passenger surcharge be levied on all domestic flights, and twenty dollars on all international flights. The money was to be put into an airports and airways superfund to upgrade U.S. airports and help privatize the air-traffic control system. The bugaboo in the bill, and the one point that the Congressman and his supporters were the most adamant about, was that the tax was not to be charged back to the customer. The airlines would have to absorb this cost themselves out of their profits. But a capper to the proposal was that part of the superfund would be used to “police” the airlines, to make sure the surcharges weren’t passed along to the passenger through hidden costs.

  American Airlines’s Tom Hailey had put it most succinctly, if indelicately. “What the hell is the dumb sonofabitch trying to do, bankrupt us all?”

  There wasn’t enough money in the industry to pay the extra tax. Fuel prices were going up again while the number of passengers was going down. All but a few of the nation’s major airlines were hanging on by the skin of their teeth. Since 1979, the year after the government decided to end its regulation of the airlines and the airfares charged, more than half the carriers had gone out of business. Even the mighty Pan Am had fallen by the wayside. This bill, and the companion bill the Congressman was already talking about, which would add a surcharge to the cargo shipped by airlines, would kill at least two of the majors and several of the others.

  “That’s the minimum damage that would be done,” she’d explained to the Congressman in person this afternoon.

  “Maybe that wouldn’t be so terrible after all, Ms. Kilbourne.” Congressman Hyde smiled. “Maybe it’s for the best that we pare away the dead wood in this country. Look at what the Japanese have done with themselves in the past fifty years. My God, those people started from scratch.”

  “With a great deal of financial and technical help from us,” Dominique said, hardly believing what she was hearing.

  “Certainly. Look at what we did to them in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The innocent lives lost. Women and children, the old and infirm. Lord, it must have been horrible. A blot on our national conscience. We owed them something.”

  Dominique wanted to ask him if that’s what his constituents wanted, but he held her off.

  “We’re not talking about the Japanese now. Admittedly we’re having our difficulties with them, which if the President doesn’t mishandle it will get straightened out. What we’re talking about here is the airline industry in this country. They cried for deregulation in the seventies. Keep the government off our backs, they shouted. So, we stepped away. Have at it boys, we told them. And look what happened.”

  The Congressman glanced at his aide, Pat Staley, who’d been trying to get a peek up Dominique’s skirt since she’d sat down, and smiled.

  “I think the first smart thing they ever did was to hire a pretty spokesperson,” Staley said, grinning broadly. “No offense, and don’t you dare take what I’m trying to say as some sort of sexist remark, but you do have our attention.”

  “That’s what this country is all about, I think,” the Congressman said. “Dialogue. Give and take.”

  It was hard to keep her temper in check. “Perhaps you don’t fully appreciate the ultimate effect this bill would have,” Dominique said. She wanted to slap the smarmy smile off the aide’s face.

  “I’ve talked with the experts,” Hyde said.

  Dominique handed him a report. “When you have the chance take a look at this. Your bill will shut down the weaker airlines. And maybe you have a point, maybe in some ways that might be for the best.”

  The Congressman and his aide looked surprised.

  “But, when an airline goes under two things happen. First, a lot of equipment gets auctioned at a bankruptcy sale.”

  “A good deal for the stronger, better-managed airlines,” Staley suggested.

  “And secondly, because of the glut of used airplanes and spare parts on the market, and because there’s one less airline to purchase new equipment, it drives our aircraft manufacturers one step closer to bankruptcy.” Dominique sat forward. “You are aware, I’m sure, Congressman, that there are only three major manufacturers of commercial aircraft left in this country. These three account for our single largest export in terms of dollars. If any one of them were to go out of business, for whatever reason, it would devastate our precarious balance of trade position, and it would throw at least sixty thousand aircraft employees out of work. Two hundred thousand others would no longer be needed to run the grocery stores or the department stores where the aircraft workers shop. Truck drivers would be idled, contractors, real estate agents, bankers.” Dominique smiled. “But I think you have the picture by now, Congressman.”

  “Who do you represent, the airlines or the manufacturers?”

  “Both, because they’ve become inseparable. Hurt one and the other suffers.”

  “My experts don’t agree,” the Congressman said with less certainty than before.

  “Maybe they’re wrong,” Dominique said. “Maybe after you’ve read my report we can get together for dinner.”

  The Congressman brightened. “I’d like that.”

  “Fine. I’ll have a word with David Kennedy. Perhaps we could make a foursome with your wife. At your convenience.

  Congressman Hyde’s face fell. “Sure,” he mumbled.

  The man was a toad, Dominique thought while riding up in the elevator from the garage. But the disturbing thing was the support he was getting. Some powerful members of the House were apparently behind him. And she was getting hints that the White House might be behind the bill. If that were the case, the situation would be even less understandable to her than it was. Presidents were known to have their own hidden agendas, but this was stupid.

  Getting off the elevator, she slipped out of her shoes and padded down the thickly carpeted corridor to her apartment. She let herself in and flipped the switch for the hall light, but nothing happened.

  “Shit,” she said, flipping the switch again. It was just a minor irritation, but she didn’t need it tonight.

  Leaving the door open so that she could see her way into the apartment she dropped her purse and shoes by the hall table and went to a lamp in the living room.

  Something dark rushed at her from the shadows, knocking her aside before she could react, and then it was down the hall, moving swiftly like a jungle animal in the night.

  “Hey,” she shouted.

  Something very hard slammed into her back, spinning her around. It was a person, dressed in black from head to toe, some sort of a skier’s mask covering his
or her features. Instinctively she reached out to stop herself from falling and grabbed a handful of the mask. It came off, and then she caught the edge of the coffee table with the backs of her legs and sat down hard on the floor, but not before she got a good look at the man’s face … it was a man, she suddenly was certain, and for a second he stood there, unmoving, looking at her.

  He reached down and gently, it seemed, touched the side of her neck. She felt as if she were falling into a very deep and pitch-black hole.

  McGarvey was put up at the monumental Rossiya Hotel on Razin Street just off Red Square with no further word when he would be meeting with Aleksandr Karyagin, the new director of the Russian Federal Intelligence Service. But he’d been assured that he would be leaving on the 10:00 A.M. flight to Washington.

  It was 4:30 in the morning, and unable to sleep he stared out of his eleventh-floor window at the fantastical domes of St. Basil’s and the red brick walls of the Kremlin, a shiver rising up his spine.

  Everything was different, and yet nothing had changed. The free market economy had taken hold, more or less, but there was still nothing affordable to buy in the stores. The KGB’s name had been changed to the SUR, and it no longer acted as a thought police, yet the person on the street could still spot an intelligence officer a block away and steer clear. Emigration was no longer tightly controlled, and yet passing the U.S. Embassy in the back seat of General Polunin’s limousine, McGarvey had seen long lines of people waiting to get inside where they could apply for visas, while uniformed militia officers watched and took notes and photographs.

  Everything here was run-down. Cars, roads, buildings in the entire country had gone to hell since he’d last been here. Moscow had always been a seedy old city, but now it was worse. The place was coming apart at the seams, helped by the Russian Mafia and a growing murder rate, yet somehow McGarvey found that he wasn’t glad of it. His parents would weep if they could see what was happening.

  Another change that had taken place was the reopening of the churches and the young people flocking to them. Not so surprising, because through most of Russia’s history its people had been deeply religious. A seventy-year atheism imposed by the communists paled to insignificance when compared to six centuries of Orthodox Catholicism.

  Besides the language, McGarvey had been taught Russian history, which was his father’s first love. In 1310, Moscow became the See—the seat of authority—for the Russian Orthodox Church. In 1367, the first stones of the first Kremlin were laid, and in 1448, going directly against the Council of Florence, which had finally united the western and eastern branches of the Catholic Church, the Church of Moscow became independent. Dates on dates, he remembered them all, remembered having them drummed into his head.

  “Without knowing where we’ve been how will we know where we should go … where we must go?” his father would ask him.

  The building of the new Kremlin—1496 to 1497. War with Sweden—1502. Ivan the Terrible, the first Russian czar—1553 to 1584. The Romanovs begin in 1613 with peace between Sweden and Russia. The Pauls, the Catherines, the Alexanders and Nicholases. War and revolution. The Cheka, the White Army, the Red Guards. The Stalin years and the purges and pogroms and collectivizations. Khrushchev and Brezhnev and Molotov and Andropov … and on and on to Gorbachev and Yeltsin and finally this.

  All the prayers and all the sacraments were for nothing, the thought passed through McGarvey’s mind, because throughout all their history Russians generally had less regard and less reverence for human life than even Hitler had. The sweep of Russian history was a vast panorama of death. Mind-numbing numbers of men and women and children, peasants and officers, kulaks and bankers, by the millions, even tens of millions, had been led off to the slaughter.

  Had his father understood this? He must have.

  This was a land that stretched across eleven time zones. Nearly half the earth’s circumference. Oil and coal and lead and zinc, uranium and gold and platinum and diamonds. Timber stands that stretched for a thousand miles or more. Mighty rivers, at least three major mountain ranges, and coastlines that ranged from the Arctic Ocean to the Black and Caspian seas and from the Pacific to the Baltic. But it was as if a terrible dark cloud covered the entire nation or that some horrible genetic defect had somehow infected the entire people, turning them into a nation of murderers and victims.

  McGarvey turned away from the window. In the dim light from outside he could see his reflection in the mirror above the dresser as a vaguely dark outline, and he could see himself as he might look in twenty or thirty years, the age his father had been at his death. But he could not make out the expression on his face, only that it was incomplete. That he was incomplete, for some reason. He was here on the first leg of a mission that he himself didn’t fully understand, and that he should never have suggested. He was no longer in the business. Hadn’t that been settled in his head after Volodga? Maybe Howard Ryan was right. Maybe he did not belong.

  After he’d returned from the Soviet Union he’d tried to look up his first wife with the thought at the back of his head that they might get together. But she was dead. It had been breast cancer, her dying painful and lonely. She had called for him. But that’s when he had begun to run.

  Maybe he didn’t belong anywhere, he thought grimly. At some point in his life he’d probably had the chance to take a different road, despite how he’d been raised. But he had not. And this was the result.

  A truck lumbered by on the street, its exhaust white in the extreme cold. No matter how much trouble Russia continued to have it wouldn’t shrivel up and die, or disappear off the face of the earth. Germany and Japan were totally devastated by 1945. Now, a half-century later, they were among the most powerful nations on earth. But they’d had help, and a lot of it. The question was, who would help the Russians? America or Japan?

  Someone knocked at his door. “It’s time to go.” It was Yemlin.

  McGarvey let him in. “How’d you know I was awake?”

  Yemlin shrugged. “You know.” He glanced up at the ceiling light fixture. The room was bugged. Possibly they’d even watched him with a hidden camera. It didn’t matter.

  “Where are we going?”

  “To see the director, but from there we’ll go directly to the airport, so bring your. suitcase.”

  “This early?” McGarvey asked, putting on his tie.

  “The Lubyanka is very open these days,” the Russian said, smiling wryly. “Western journalists are there practically every day, but not until 8:30 in the morning.”

  “He should move his office.”

  “No.” Yemlin shook his head. “Now please let’s go, Kirk. General Polunin is waiting for us.”

  The temperature had dropped to thirty-eight below zero. The cold took McGarvey’s breath away. Inside General Polunin’s limousine it was roaring hot. It was a wonder that everyone over here didn’t get pneumonia every winter because of the huge contrasts between outside and inside temperatures. His father explained that Russians kept their homes warm simply because they could. The warmer the better. As a nation they remembered going cold and hungry many times during their history. It was the same reason a sign of prosperity among Russian men was a pot belly. It meant the man was wealthy enough and well-connected enough to buy the necessary calories.

  “I’m sorry that you didn’t sleep well, Mr. McGarvey,” the general said. The drive over to Dzerzhinsky Square was only a half-dozen blocks, and at this hour of the morning there was almost no traffic.

  “The effects of jet lag,” McGarvey answered. “I’ll sleep on the way home.”

  “We’ll make sure to get you out to the airport in plenty of time. In the meanwhile Mr. Karyagin is most interested in meeting you. He thinks, as I do, that your being here might kill two birds with one stone. That is, if you will cooperate.”

  “I won’t spy on my country,” McGarvey shot back.

  “But you will have us spy on Japan for you.”

  “Not spy, just share yo
ur product, general. You’re already spying.”

  “That’s all we expect of you. For you to share your influence in Washington.”

  “Is that what Mr. Karyagin is going to ask me?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not the director. But your request has been discussed at the highest levels.” General Polunin looked directly into McGarvey’s eyes. “We take you very seriously, Mr. McGarvey. Please extend to us the same consideration.”

  “Believe me, General, I do,” McGarvey said. “I wouldn’t be here otherwise.”

  The black statue of Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Cheka, which was the forerunner of the KGB and the SUR, that had stood in the courtyard of the KGB’s Lubyanka headquarters, was gone, torn down in 1991 when the Soviet Union had collapsed. Even its granite base was gone now.

  Aleksandr Semenovich Karyagin was a short, well-groomed dapper man in his late fifties. His hair was gray, and he wore a Western-cut suit so that he looked more like an American politician than the head of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service.

  “Good morning, Mr. McGarvey,” he said. “I thought you might want breakfast before you left for the airport.”

  They met in the small ninth-floor dining room. An American-style breakfast of bacon and ham and sausages, eggs, toast, and fried potatoes was laid out. General Polunin came up with McGarvey, but Yemlin remained downstairs.

  “Good morning, Mr. Karyagin. It’s kind of you.”

  Because of a heart murmur, Karyagin had not served in the military. Instead he had thrown himself into politics, first in Leningrad and later in Moscow, doing whatever was asked of him without question or complaint. Unlike many of his counterparts, however, he was intelligent and inventive and soon came to the attention of Boris Yeltsin. They had risen together. The man was generally well liked and respected in the Western intelligence community because of his professionalism.

  “I understand that you still maintain ties with the CIA.”

  “I have a couple of friends who work for the Company. I don’t see them very often, but now and then we get together for a couple of drinks. The breakfast looks good. I’m hungry.”