She wheeled around at the sound of his voice. "Is he coming?"
"He's agreed to everything. He'll be here tomorrow, and you'll leave tomorrow night. I'll make contact with the sub this evening."
"I see," she said softly. "Not that I'm surprised. He wouldn't have done anything else. How did he sound?"
"Concerned about you. I assured him that you were unharmed. The important thing is that he's coming."
"So you've won, Sasha, after all."
"We," he said pointedly. "We have won."
"Yes, I suppose so. But I've lost, too. I won't have much of a marriage after tomorrow."
Sasha looked away, unwilling to meet her eyes. He muttered, "Perhaps it won't work out that way."
"Of course it will." Her voice was sharp. "How would you feel if you found out that the woman you loved had been lying to you for more than twenty years?"
"Not very happy about it," he admitted.
"So my marriage becomes a casualty of war," she said, still staring out to sea. "I knew it would happen. I knew it as soon as I was activated. Unfortunately, knowing doesn't make it any easier."
"Once he's hack home." he said hopefully, "once he's had a chance to adjust to a different way of life, once he becomes a Russian again ..." His voice dropped off and he finished lamely, "Maybe then he'll be able to see your side of it."
"You don't know Jim."
"I know about him. He's a soldier, and you were following orders. That's something he should be able to understand."
"Possibly. I'm hoping that Petrovich will be able to make him see it that way."
"The colonel can be very persuasive," Sasha said cautiously.
"And the other two, Kolodny and Radichek, his old comrades on board to welcome him home. Once they talk to him, remind him of the old days ... it might help, Sasha, don't you think?"
"It might," he said, keeping his voice neutral, but at the same time thinking: Christ, how naive can she be? She doesn't have the faintest idea of what her man is in for once he sets foot on that sub. First the soft persuasion, then the hard, and then, if they have to, the drugs. She makes it sound like a reunion of old soldiers sitting around the campfire and trading war stories.
"It might help," he repeated, then added slowly, "I admit that I don't know much about marriage, but from what you've told me yours is one of the good ones. It seems to me that a marriage as good as yours should be able to survive any kind of shock, even one as heavy as this."
"Do you really think so?" For the first time she gave him a faint, hesitant smile. "Oh God, I hope you're right."
"I think it's very possible." He was forcing confidence into his voice. "Look, it's going to be a hell of a blow to him, and it's going to take a very unusual man to absorb that blow, but from what I understand, that's exactly what your husband is. A very unusual man."
Her smile broadened. Impulsively, she put her arm through his. "I know that you're just trying to be kind, but you're saying all the right things. You're good for me. Sasha. I'm glad it's you I'm here with."
"All part of the service," he said airily. "Always try to look on the bright side of things, I say. For instance, you're going home. That's something vow want, isn't it?"
She sighed. "More than I can tell you. I've had to listen to an awful lot of bad jokes about the motherland these past weeks. Herring and black bread, lumpy shoes, that sort of thing. That's Jim's sense of humor, but isn't mine. I don't care how lumpy the shoes are - I'm going home."
"They really aren't lumpy at all . . . at least not the ones that you'll be buying."
"It's going to be so strange. I'll have to learn Russian all over again."
"One never forgets."
"I know, but look at the two of us. We're both Russian, but we've been speaking only English."
He shrugged. "It's easier that way. Always drink the wine of the country."
"Still, back home I'd know your patronymic by now."
"No, you wouldn't. I don't have one."
"I don't understand. Every Russian has a patronymic."
"Not if he doesn't know his father's name," he said casually.
"Oh, I'm sorry." Confused and embarrassed, she took her hand from his arm. He laughed and tucked it back in again.
"Call me Aleksander Yuriovich," he told her. "It's as good a name as any."
"Aleksander, son of Yuri. Your father had the same name as my husband." She felt she had to comment, if only to acknowledge that she was no longer embarrassed by the revelation of his bastardy.
"Yuri is a common enough name," Sasha muttered.
"Do you know if he's still alive?"
"I'll find out soon," he said.
"Soon . . .?"
"Yes. A little sooner than any of us might care for."
They looked at each other silently for a while, then turned to walk back to the house, their eyes on the ground, their feet scuffing dirt. Behind them the sun bounced brass off the sea, sinking lower. The silence continued until Rusty looked up.
"Sasha, are you saying what I think . . .?"
He stopped and swung her around so that they were facing each other. "Are you sure you want to know the answer to that?"
She nodded slowly, her eyes wide.
"Don't look so grim," he said and gave her the smile that he had used all his life to smooth his way. "All I'm saying is that it's entirely possible that your husband is my father."
"I'm afraid ... I don't understand."
"It's really quite simple," he said and told her the story. The telling took only a few minutes, and then he asked, "Does it bother you, knowing about my mother? It was long before he met you."
"Of course not." She shook her head impatiently. "Does Jim know? About you?"
"No, and I don't want him to. Not yet. Someday, perhaps, but not now." He smiled again. "Besides, there's no way of really knowing, is there? My father might well have been the real Emerson."
She reached out to touch his cheek with the tips of her fingers, and her eyes were sad again. "How strange this all is. It was strange enough to start with, but now it's getting to be a family affair. Your mother must be a remarkable woman."
"My mother is a — " He laughed and stopped himself. "Yes. A remarkable woman."
Rusty missed the overtones in his comment; she was thinking of something else. After a moment she said, "That means that you and Ginger are half..."
"Only possibly," Sasha interrupted.
Rusty shook her head. "No. Looking at you now, and knowing. . . . You're his, I'm sure of it. Back in Virginia, when you were hurt, Eddie Mancuso said that we couldn't afford to leave you alive. But Ginger wouldn't let him kill you. She saved your life. She must have felt something." She saw him shake his head doubtfully. "Don't you think it's possible?"
"I don't believe in things like that."
"I do. She must have felt it deep inside, that you were her brother."
"Half. If that." "Still, I believe it."
He laughed. "Because you want to. It's a very Russian way to think. We're all of us determined to forge our own destinies. Life rarely permits that." They went into the house.
Operation Seafire
CHAPTER TWENTY
There are a dozen ways to destroy a man. Killing is only one of them, and a generous one at that. There are other forms of destruction much crueler. You can shatter a man with terror, robbing him of his manhood. You can strip him of ideals and leave him naked in the wilderness. You can stake him out and lift up the rocks of his life to show him what crawls underneath. And at the very end, if all else fails, you can always betray him with the instrument he treasures most, usually the woman he loves. Compared to these more subtle forms of destruction, a bullet in the brain is a blessing.
Rusty Emerson destroyed her man in all these ways, using a string of words spoken softly and sadly. In the weary hours just after midnight she sat in the cramped living room of the house above Scotsman's Bay and poured out the story of twenty-five years of deception. She
gave him all the details, leaving out nothing, not trying to spare herself. She started with her orders years before to meet him and marry him; carried the tale down through the decades of their marriage; and finished with the submarine lying offshore with Petrovich and the others on board, ready to welcome him and carry them both back to the Soviet Union. She told him all this, and by the time she finished he was as close to being gutted as a live man can be. His face was gray and his deep-set eyes were filled with pain. He was close to total destruction, but not quite there yet, for the sanity-saver within him refused, for the moment, to accept what she was saying.
"I don't know how to believe it," he said.
"Darling, I'm afraid you'll have to."
"You?" He could barely manage the word.
"Me."
"Jesus, Rusty, not you."
"Sweetheart, I know it's difficult to accept, but try. I'm a KGB officer, just as you are. I'm under orders to return you to the Soviet Union, and I intend to carry out those orders."
"You ... a sleeper." The words came wonderingly. "Another sleeper."
"Again, just like you. I didn't want you to know it, not ever, but it's too late for that now."
"And you got me to come here knowing that — " He stopped, struck by a sudden hope. "They forced you to write that note. They made you do it, didn't they?"
She refused the offer. "Nobody forced me to do anything. It was the only way to get you here. I did what I had to do." She looked away from him. "I hope that someday you'll understand that. And forgive me."
"Then all these years . . . ?"
"All these years," she repeated, but her voice was pleading now, "I have been exactly what you are - a sleeping spy. But all these years I've also been the woman who loves you. And I still do. You have to believe that, Jim."
"I don't know what to believe anymore." He shook his head dumbly. "I don't know how to believe any of this."
But as he said the words, he had already begun to believe. A man's disbelief is a fragile shield, easily shattered. There is the disbelief in his own mortality that vanishes with the first sharp pain in his chest, the disbelief in the frailty of a friend that crumbles with the first betrayal, the disbelief in the chaos of life that is whisked away when the fist of random chance first raps him rudely in the ribs. I don't believe it, he says, but he does. Deep down in the primeval place where everything human is known to be possible, there is room for belief; and as Emerson stared across the room at his wife he began to believe. It happened quickly. The shield of his disbelief shattered; he believed it all, and in that moment his destruction was complete. The light went out of his eyes like a campfire quenched by a sudden storm.
All right, that's it, he thought. That's it, that's it, that's it. End of the road, nothing more after this, and keep on going . . . where? Does it make any difference? Down those rickety stairs, I guess, down to the beach and whatever happens . . . happens. Whichever way it goes. I don't much care anymore. If I could call it off now I would, but I can't. No way in the world I can stop Eddie from making his move, and so more people are going to get hurt. More blood. I've been wading in blood ever since this began, starting with that poor homesick kid who had to die so that Andrei Petrovich could have his sleeping spy. . . and ending with Lex Enhora. Too much blood, or maybe not enough. Maybe once it starts, it takes an ocean of blood to wash things clean. Maybe that's what it takes, and maybe that's what I'll get, but either way I don't give a damn anymore.
Rusty said hesitantly, "Jim ..."
He shook his head. "Don't bother. No matter what you say, it doesn't mean anything now."
She turned to Sasha, seated at a small blond-wood desk in a corner of the room. On either side of him, lounging against the walls, stood the two embassy guards, the pistols in their hands dangling casually. In the same pleading voice, she asked, "Could Jim and I have a few minutes alone? Is that possible, Sasha?"
"I'm afraid not." Sasha stood up, and the two guards shifted position slightly to keep him clear of any line of fire. He looked at his watch. "We leave for the beach in twenty minutes. Until then, everybody stays in place."
"Please, Sasha, there are things I have to tell him."
"Can't be done, love, that's the drill. You'll have plenty of time to talk once you're at sea."
Rusty accepted it. She leaned forward, staring across the room at her husband. Her eyes met his but could not hold them; his vacant gaze slid off into space. In a low, urgent voice she said, "Jim, listen to me. This isn't something I want to talk about in front of people, but I have no choice. I have to say this now, and so I'm going to pretend that no one is listening, that we're alone. Because before we go down those steps to the beach, before we get on that boat, you have to believe me when I tell you that no matter what else I did, I never stopped loving you."
She paused, hoping for a response. But Emerson sat slumped in his chair, uncaring. Her words came down on his head like raindrops on the surface of a pond. Sasha grimaced and said, "Rusty, enough. This is embarrassing."
She ignored him and went on. "Do you hear what I'm saying, Jim? The love was always there. I did what I did because of the love, because it was right for you. And for me. It was right for us and for our country, and one day you'll know that and you'll thank me for it. Not now, I don't expect that now. You're hurt and betrayed now, and that's my fault, too . . . but that was the duty part of it. I had my job to do, but my job had nothing to do with my love. The love was always real. You believe that, don't you?"
He was silent.
"We're talking about twenty-five years of loving now. Do you think I was faking it all that time?"
It was as if he had not heard her.
"Do you think that every time I kissed you, every time we made love -1 was doing it under orders?"
His head was down and he was staring at the floor.
"The baby we made, the child we raised ... do you think I did that because somebody told me to?"
His head still down, he crossed his arms over his chest and hugged his shoulders as if he were cold.
"Is that what you think?"
He started to shake his head, then stopped.
"Answer me," she said fiercely. Leaning forward in her chair, every line of her body was tense. "Is that what you think? Is that the kind of bitch I am? Is that the kind of whore you married?"
She stopped abruptly, breathing heavily. For a moment she looked as if she were going to cry, but she held the tears in, the tips of them glistening on her lashes. Sasha stirred uncomfortably and turned away.
Emerson raised his head, and for the first time his eyes met hers. "Don't cry," he said gruffly. "For Christ's sake, whatever you do, don't cry."
"I won't."
"You know how it pains me when you cry."
"I know."
"Then don't do it."
"I won't. I promise."
"You always promise, but you do it anyway."
"This time I won't. Really."
She sat back in her seat, her eyes on his, and made sure that she did not cry.
"Ten minutes to go," said Sasha, looking at his wrist. He perched himself on the edge of the desk, watching the two Emersons carefully. Oh Lordy, but she's good, he thought. She's going to turn him around; she's going to make it work. First she took him apart, and now she's going to put him back together again. Not right away, not today or tomorrow, but sometime between here and Vladivostok she's going to have him licking her fingers again. Yes, she's good, all right, so good that she almost had me crying there myself. It was either that or throw up. Or is Sasha being his silly old cynical self again? Maybe so, but that lady is one high-class, machine-tooled piece of work. Not taking anything away from her - she's the key to the whole operation - but she sure knows how to handle a man. I thought I was immune to that particular brand of horseshit, but she even had me going for a while, yesterday out in back of the house and that time in the car when she told me about her romantic girlhood and how she didn't want to take the Am
erican assignment. She's so good that you have to believe her at first, but then you begin to think. Postwar Russia with everything in ruins and people dropping like flies from typhus and starvation, and what young girl wouldn't have sold her soul to get out of there? But not our Rusty; she didn't want an assignment to the land of the hamburgers and the nylons. What kind of a twit does she think I am to swallow that crap, or does she really believe it now? Could be. Time, the great editor. But whether she wanted the assignment or not, she got it and she did well with it. Parlayed it into a good marriage, a soft life, and now she's heading home with his scalp in her belt. The most important defector since Philby. She devoted herself to a lifetime of deceit, and the man she deceived still adores her. Look at him sitting there. She just ripped his guts out, and all he can do is ask her not to cry. I'm beginning to wonder if he's my dear old daddy after all if he can be such a sucker.
Not that it matters anymore. If he is or if he isn't. Spent too much of my time worrying about that, too much of my life wondering what it would be like to have a father, grow up holding someone's hand. There weren't all that many hands available when I was growing up. Half the kids I knew had no fathers in the house, but theirs were buried in Poland and the Ukraine, while mine was on assignment in the land of soap and sunshine. So what? Comes a time when you have to shove all that behind you. There's no need for it anymore. The game is over and, Lordy, it was close. Sweet Sasha's nookie was really on the line this time, but we made it, thanks to Rusty. In the homestretch now; just get them on board and the job is done. Petrovich has his triumph, and Sasha's stock goes up again. Just walk through it nice and slow; don't screw things up at the very end. The boat should hit the beach just before three, so we start from here at two thirty sharp. Out the back and down the steps, Anatoly first, then Emerson, then me, then Rusty, and with Marko in the rear. Straight down to the beach, guide the launch in and load them abroad. Wave bye-bye, and there they go, the colonel and his lady, homeward bound.
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