Ikon

by Graham Masterton

  He lifted himself up on to the window-sill, and then lowered himself feet-first down through the open casement until his feet had reached the ledge. ‘It’s okay,’ he said. ‘The ledge is pretty wide. Three inches at least. Let’s have Susie next, then Kathy. Daniel, you can bring up the rear. Catch anybody if they look like they’re dropping off.’

  ‘Are you kidding?’ asked Daniel.

  ‘Who’s kidding?’

  Daniel leaned over beside Susie, and said quietly, ‘We’re going to try to get away by climbing out of this window and up on to the roof. It’s going to be scary, okay? But Kathy and me are going to be right behind you all the time, and all I want you to do is hold on tight and do everything that Rick tells you to do.’

  Susie nodded. There was a glistening in her eyes that looked suspiciously like the glistening of tears. Daniel hugged her close, and kissed her. Then he lifted her up,

  and helped her to scramble over the window-sill, down through the open window, and on to the narrow ledge. Rick held her close to him, and showed her how to hold on.

  ‘You don’t have to look down if you don’t want to,’ said Rick. ‘But if you do, just think of it as Toytown. Nothing to get alarmed about.’

  Kathy climbed out next, then Daniel. Now they were standing in a line, their heads, with the exception of Susie’s, still up inside the open window. They would have to edge their way sideways to the left, ducking their heads under the metal supporting arm which kept the window open, and then cross three feet of open space before they reached the decorative concrete mouldings on the corner.

  The wind gusted and moaned, and Daniel felt as if it were going to suck him off the side of the building. He had only glanced down once, at the beetling traffic and the crowds of tiny pedestrians, and in that one downward glance, he had felt as if his entire psyche had dropped three hundred feet to the sidewalk and vanished through the concrete into some strange Purgatory of sewers and conduits and cables, to be fed away into some utility system somewhere. A light flickers at Bloom’s the tailors, three blocks away. ‘What’s that, Moishe?’ “That’s young Daniel’s soul, that’s all. God bless him.’

  Rick shouted at them, Take one sideways step at a time. Move one foot and then slide the other foot along to join it. Don’t try to move both feet at once. You get me? Okay, let’s go.’

  Rick ducked under the window-bar, and started making his way to the corner. Susie looked back at Daniel, her eyes wide, but Daniel managed to grin at her and say, ‘Go on. You’re going to be fine.’

  Kathy, under her breath, said something that sounded like a private prayer. But then she turned around to Daniel, and kissed him quickly, and said, ‘Let’s go. Who’s afraid of a little height?’

  It took them almost five minutes to edge their way to the acanthus leaves on the corner. It was windier here:

  unexpected blasts of chilly air kept soughing and moaning around the building from the north-west front, and they all had to grip the concrete tight.

  Rick arched his head back and looked up towards the building’s roof. ‘It’s only two storeys. If you had to climb this moulding from ground-level upwards, you’d be able to go running up there like a monkey up a coconut tree. Come on, let’s get going before they find out where we’ve gone.’

  Inch by inch, gingerly clutching at each concrete leaf, Rick climbed up the corner of the building to the level of the next storey. Susie came carefully up behind him. Kathy was more hesitant, but occasionally Rick would look down and tell her, Tut your hand there, on that leaf there. That’s right. Now your foot there. And up. That’s terrific.’

  Another ten minutes went by before Rick finally managed to reach the curled-over leaves of the top parapet. He edged himself up, and at last managed to swing himself over the parapet on to the building’s roof. ‘Be careful of that corner moulding. I felt it shift a little. It’s probably safe, but don’t risk putting your full weight on it.’

  He reached down and helped Susie to climb up the last two feet, then held out his hand for Kathy. As Kathy was climbing up, she suddenly lost her foothold, and her feet scrabbled desperately at the building’s concrete face. She gasped, and then drew her breath in with a sound like a bellows. She was too frightened to scream. Daniel reached up and managed to hold her left foot. ‘Stop kicking!’ he snouted. ‘Kathy, stop kicking*. There’s a foothold here!’

  She jabbed her foot towards the top of one of the concrete leaves, and at last found somewhere to lodge her toe. Then she managed to climb up the last three feet to the roof, although she was shaking as she did so.

  Daniel glanced down again. The sidewalk seemed even further away than twelve storeys. He felt as if he were on top of a dizzying mountain, and that the world had shrunk so far away that it had completely lost any reality. He grasped the last corner moulding, and pulled himself

  up; but as he did so, there was a grating noise, and a shower of mortar, and suddenly the moulding toppled off the side of the building and fell towards the ground.

  Daniel almost went with it. But Rick had snatched his sleeve to steady him; and with a last panting scramble, Daniel swung himself up and over the parapet. He looked down and saw the concrete moulding dwindle and dwindle and dwindle, and at last hit the sidewalk below like a bomb. Pedestrians scattered in all directions, and several cars swerved, but nobody was hit.

  ‘We’d better move,’ said Rick. ‘It won’t be long before somebody starts asking where that lump of stone came from.’

  ‘But how are we going to get out of here?’ asked Kathy. They’re bound to search the building when they find out we’re gone; and all the entrances are guarded.’

  ‘We don’t get out,’ said Daniel.

  ‘You got an idea?’ asked Rick.

  ‘We don’t get out. It’s the only way. The first thing they’ll be expecting us to do is make a run for it; and of course they’ll be waiting for us. So what we have to do is stay inside the building. The best place is probably the basement. There’ll be plenty of places to hide down there, and we won’t be too far from the exits when we feel we’re ready to make our break.’

  ‘Sounds like some sort of sense to me,’ said Kathy.

  ‘It doesn’t sound very heroic,’ said Rick.

  ‘You want heroic, you make a dash for the entrance and see how far you get,’ said Daniel.

  ‘Okay,’ said Rick, dubiously. ‘We’d better find ourselves an elevator. Let’s just hope the door to the roof isn’t locked.’

  They heard sirens in the street below. The Washington Fire Department, investigating the falling moulding. Kathy said, ‘Let’s move it. Anywhere’s got to be safer than here.’

  Thirty-Six

  Kama had intended that morning to fly to New York to talk to Serge Gaponenko at the United Nations. But Gaponenko had been called back to Moscow for an important briefing, and so Kama had decided instead to call on Nikolai Nekrasov at Pennsylvania Avenue; to see if it wasn’t time for him to beard the mangy old lion in his den.

  Kama was still furious at the way in which Ikon had outwitted him; and at the way in which he had so badly underestimated the old man’s ruthlessness. His ears still went hot when he thought about how he had offered Ikon the job of a harmless ‘figurehead’ when all the time Ikon had already destroyed all the evidence that would have halted the RING talks. How Ikon must have been laughing at him!

  Now, to cap everything, his limousine was stuck in a gridlock traffic-jam on E Street, and the car’s air-conditioning was faltering. He sweated and ground his teeth, and every now and then he punched one hand into the palm of the other as if he could scarcely wait to hit that complacent Nikolai Nekrasov right where it would hurt him the most.

  In his darkened room on Pennsylvania Avenue, however, Nikolai Nekrasov was enjoying his breakfast. Swathed in a silk smoking-robe patterned with dragons which had been given to him by Chai Zemin, the Chinese Ambassador to the Autonomous Capitalist Oblast of America, he was spreading Mexican honey on to thick slices of wh
olemeal bread, and drinking lemon tea out of a Russian glass.

  Titus sat on the opposite side of the room, stiff as a tailor’s dummy. Nadine sat a little way away from him, as chic as ever, her hair drawn back, watching this first encounter between the two most important men in her life with a mixture of pride and deep apprehension. They

  were both fierce-willed, both uncompromising; and while Nikolai Nekrasov felt that his administration of America was both rightful and historic, Titus saw him as a usurper, and a bitter enemy. More so because Nikolai Nekrasov had secretly controlled Titus’ life and his destiny for more than twenty years, and Titus had only just found out about it.

  ‘This honey is very good,’ said Ikon. ‘Are you sure you won’t join me for breakfast?’

  Titus didn’t answer.

  ‘I have always believed in eating a slow and satisfying breakfast,’ Ikon went on, unperturbed. ‘After that, there is nothing that the day can bring that cannot be dealt with calmly and effectively.’

  ‘You know that I wasn’t particularly anxious to come to meet you,’ said Titus. His voice sounded like a steel spring being bent back.

  ‘Well, that is only natural,said Ikon. ‘It must have been greatly disturbing for you to discover that so much of what you have been doing was for other ends entirely.’

  I don’t know how the hell you managed to get away with this for so long.’

  Ikon raised his shaggy eyebrows, and smiled. ‘It was a question of preserving that valuable ideal known as “the American Way”. In the Kremlin, very few of my colleagues actually understand what “the American Way” means, and how strongly it motivates the American people. But, I took pains to understand it, and to keep it as the central core of my administration. Slowly, over the years, I have tried to alter your national conception of “the American Way”, so that in a comparatively short time from today, international socialism and “the American Way” will be seen in the American mind to be almost indistinguishable from each other.’

  Titus was silent for a very long moment. Then he said, ‘I see it as nothing more than treachery, subversion, betrayal, and criminal activity.’

  Ikon nodded. ‘I thought you would.’

  Thirty-Seven

  At that second, Daniel and Susie and Rick and Kathy had reached the basement. The door to the roof had been locked from inside with a single bolt, but between them Daniel and Rick had been able to kick it free; then they had quickly run down two flights of stairs to the eleventh-floor elevator. They had been obliged to wait while it climbed slowly up to them from 5, stopping at almost every floor, but at last it had arrived and it had been empty. They had pressed the button for LG, and prayed that nobody would stop them on the way down.

  Down on basement level, there was a corridor of whitewashed brick with three doors in it. The first door led to the boiler-room; the second to the broom cupboard. The third door was fastened with a padlock.

  ‘What do we do now?’ asked Kathy.

  Rick smiled. ‘It’s very easy. All padlocks are susceptible to being picked, and if there is one small talent I have, apart from acrobatics, and sex, it’s picking locks. I used to work for a locksmith on Pico Boulevard: keys cut, cars broken into, ladies rescued from lavatories. All part of a day’s toil.’

  In the broom cupboard, Rick found a cardboard box of rubbish, which included paper-clips from the upstairs offices. He twisted one of the paper-clips around, and inserted it into the padlock. They watched and waited in tense silence while he attempted to release the levers.

  ‘I don’t think this particular padlock is going to prove susceptible,’ said Kathy.

  ‘Patience,’ Rick told her.

  They waited five more minutes. Rick’s forehead was crowned in sweat, and his tongue was jammed between his teeth in concentration. Still the padlock refused to open.

  “The elevator’s coming down again,’ said Susie. ‘Look, the light’s gone green.’

  ‘I think you’d better get that damn door open, said Kathy.

  ‘Patience, for Christ’s sake,said Rick.

  Daniel said, ‘Here, let me try it.’

  ‘What do you know about picking locks?’

  ‘Will you let me try it? I couldn’t do any worse than you.’

  Rick stood up straight, and then handed the paper-clip to Daniel. ‘A paper-clip isn’t strong enough. I need a sharp metal lock-pick, or something like it.’

  Daniel took the padlock in his hand. It was warm and sweaty from Rick’s attempts to open it. He thrust the paper-clip straight into the keyhole, jiggled it violently, and said, ‘Open up, will you. Just for God’s sake, open up.’

  Rick said, ‘He’s talking to it, would you believe?’

  There was a sharp springing noise and the padlock opened. Daniel unhooked it from the hasp, and.threw it at Rick with an expression of mock-professional nonchalance, and then laughed.

  ‘You did it, you bastard!’

  Daniel put his hand over his mouth, and then let out a breath. I never did that before in my life, do you know that?’

  They could hear the elevator descending towards the basement. The cables were rattling inside the shaft. Quickly, they opened the basement door, stepped inside, and found themselves in a huge darkened storage-room.

  ‘The light, for God’s sake, said Daniel.

  Rick found the switch and turned it on. Kathy quietly closed the door behind them, and then ushered Susie off to the side.

  The storage-room smelled very dry and cool, as if it was being kept at a regulated temperature. There was another smell, too: a faintly nutty odour which reminded Daniel of something, but which he couldn’t quite place. One wall of the room was stacked high with small wooden crates, each bearing a stencil of the eagle-and-sickle symbol, and a legend in Russian, including the code RPG7V. Rick immediately walked across to the crates, and sniffed at them. Then he scouted around the basement until he found a screwdriver.

  ‘If these boxes contain what I think they do …’ he said, and started prizing off one of the lids. There was a splintering sound, and a pop of nails, and the lid came up, and dropped to the floor. There was sawdust packing inside, and nestling in the sawdust packing were six four-inch high-explosive rockets.

  ‘Are those bombs?’ asked Kathy.

  Rick picked one up and turned it over. ‘Rocket bombs. Presumably they keep them here as siege supplies, in case anything goes wrong, and the building gets attacked. Most of the major embassies have arsenals of one kind or another, even if it’s only a couple of machine-guns.’

  ‘Well, for God’s sake be careful with it, said Kathy.

  ‘It won’t go off until if s triggered,’ Rick told her, putting it back in the crate. ‘It has an electric fuse which detonates it automatically after it’s been fired. It’s usually launched from an RPG7, that’s a kind of one-man rocket gun. The Russians used to dish them out to guerrilla organizations, like the PLO, and the IRA. They even sent some to the Weathermen, but I think they were seized by US Coastguard.’

  ‘There must be at least a couple of thousand of them here,’ said Daniel. ‘There isn’t any way to trigger them without a launcher, is there?’

  ‘Well, sure, you could - ‘ Rick started to say, but then he raised his hands warningly, and said, ‘Oh, no. You’re not thinking what I think you’re thinking, are you? You mean you want to - ‘

  ‘Why not? We could bring down the whole headquarters of the Autonomous Capitalist Oblast of America, all at once. And presumably Ikon’s here, too.’

  Rick looked at Kathy. ‘You understand what this man’s saying?’

  ‘Sure, I understand.’

  Rick looked back at Daniel. ‘You know something,’ he said. ‘You’re crazier than I thought. If we set this little

  stack of goodies off, what are we going to do? How the hell are we going to get out of here?’

  ‘You fix a way of setting it all off; I’ll think about how we escape/ said Daniel.

  Rick wiped his hands on his jeans. Th
e blood from his two knife-wounds had dried into black stigmata. ‘All right/ he said, resignedly. ‘I’ll do my best.’

  It took Rick nearly an hour to set up a timing-device. He used Daniel’s wrist-watch, and connected it to a second light-switch at the far end of the store-room, so that when the hands of the watch reached a pre-selected time, the full 120-volt mains current would run into the electric timing device of one of the RPG7 rocket bombs. He was proud of his handiwork when he was finished, although he was sweating from concentration and starry-eyed from connecting tiny pieces of wire from the watch to the light-switch.

  ‘I hope you’ve thought of a way to get out of here/ he said, wiping his forehead on his sleeve. ‘I don’t intend to stay around here for one minute when this lot goes up in the air.’

  Daniel said, ‘I think the riskiest way is going to be the best. I think we should set the timing-device for no more than three minutes, then simply take the elevator to the lobby, and attempt to walk straight out of the front door. When these bombs go off, nobody will worry what we’re doing.’

  ‘You hope, said Rick.

  ‘I can hope, can’t I?’ retorted Daniel.

  They discussed the plan for ten minutes more. Then Kathy said, ‘If we’re going to do it, we might as well do it. Rick - you set the timing device. We’ll call the elevator and make sure we keep it here until it’s time to leave.’

  Cautiously, they opened the storage-room door again, and emerged into the whitewashed corridor. Susie pressed the button for the elevator, and they heard it clank and whine and start on its journey downwards.

  ‘Are you ready yet?’ Daniel called to Rick. ‘The elevator’s almost here.’

  ‘I’m coming! We’ve got three minutes dead!’

  Rick came running out of the storage-room just as the elevator doors opened. To their mutual surprise, there was a Soviet security guard standing inside.

  I want your hands up!’ he demanded, unbuttoning his holster. But Rick was too quick for him. With a flying drop-kick that he had learned for his stunt parts in Kung-Fu, he belted the guard under the chin with his sneakers, and both of them crashed to the floor of the elevator in a tangled heap.