Azrael

by William L. DeAndrea

  “I thought you were going to tell me it was a mistake.”

  “It might have been. But I liked it. More, I needed it.”

  “You’re welcome.” She looked down at her plate. “I didn’t expect any of this.”

  “I did. Your part of it, I mean. I can make women ... care about me. It’s part of the training.”

  Regina looked at him. She wanted to be dead. In a few seconds, the growing sense of humiliation she felt would kill her.

  He was still talking. “... but this is new. In a way, I don’t like it. It could be dangerous for me, and for you. And we don’t have much of a future, because I don’t have much of a future.”

  “What are you trying to say?”

  “Look. I came here to do a job, and I’ll do it, but you are no longer part of it. I’m trying to say last night was real. It’s never been real for me before. I’m a different man from what I was when I got here last night.”

  “And this could all be part of the training, couldn’t it?”

  “Yes,” he said. “It could.”

  Then why didn’t he deny it? If he was stringing her along, he’d have to deny it. Unless he knew she’d think that. But why tell her in the first place?

  “For God’s sake, Allan, tell me the truth or lie to me, but stop confusing me.”

  “I don’t want you confused. I want you suspicious.”

  “Suspicious? Of you?”

  “Well, wary. Of me, of everybody. My attitude toward you isn’t the only part of this mess that went into a new phase last night.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Never mind about that.”

  “Damn you, this is my mother we’re talking about. It was my brother’s fiancée who was killed.”

  “This,” Allan corrected her, “is your country we’re talking about. Your family is just the point of attack. All I can tell you is this: You made the right move when you went to Rines for help.”

  “I’m supposed to take your word for that.”

  “One of the things I like best about you is the way you bounce back from emotional upsets.”

  “You’re wrong. You’re no different than you’ve ever been. The ultimate wiseass.”

  “I won’t argue with you. The thing is, the other side made a move last night and missed. And now I can begin to—”

  The phone rang. Regina choked back some agitated words she had ready and went to answer it.

  Allan followed her to the living room. “That could be for me,” he said. “I told them I might be here.”

  Regina picked up the phone and said hello, then wordlessly extended the receiver toward Trotter.

  He took the phone and said thanks. He didn’t tell her to leave, so she stayed. And listened. It was her goddam apartment.

  “Trotter,” he said. “Secure from your end? Okay, check. All the way through, I’m on a regular phone.”

  He smiled at her while he waited.

  “Okay. Good. What have you turned up? Well, then, who’s your favorite possible?”

  Regina looked at him. She could almost hear the sizzle of nerve ends firing in his brain. For the first time, she was seeing him completely in his element. She was impressed, and just a little afraid.

  “Oh,” Trotter told the phone. “Him. I thought he was a little too good to be true. What did he do, come on too strong to one of our friends on campus? One of our friends’ friends?”

  Trotter scratched his nose. “Sure, what the hell. If he bites, you’ll know for sure. No, right away. No time like the present.” He hung up the phone. “Did you understand that?” he asked her.

  “Smarter for me to say no, isn’t it?”

  “Right. Although I don’t think interrogation is what these people have in mind. They haven’t so far.”

  No, Regina thought, just death.

  Allan said, “I’m going to stick close beside you for the next few days.”

  “All—all right. Why now?”

  “I started to tell you before. The situation now is such that I can begin to stir things up. It might start getting a little hairy.”

  “So you think I’m in danger.”

  He looked at her. “You’ve been in danger since the day you were born. It matters more than ever to me that I get you out of it. I hope you believe that.”

  Hope more than logic made Regina decide to believe it. And (she had to face it) she wanted him to care about her, as she had come to care about him, however little she understood him.

  He asked her if he could make a phone call, and waited until she said of course before he started to dial. He pressed 1, then seven more digits, meaning he was dialing a number outside Kirkester, but within the 315 area code.

  “You can learn the number on your next phone bill,” he told her. “One way or another, this will be over by then.”

  One way or another, Regina thought.

  Allan spoke to the phone. “Hello, this is Allan Trotter speaking. From the Kirkester Chronicle. I’d like to interview you for a possible feature article. We were thinking of calling it ‘KGB—The Ultimate Terrorists,’ and we thought your experiences as a victim of oppression would be a good concept to hang the article on.”

  Regina was impressed with how quickly he’d caught on to the jargon.

  “No, sir. But I would be honored to meet you. I believe we have mutual acquaintances. When would be a convenient time for me to see you? ... Not at all?”

  Allan sighed a sigh that had so much sincere disappointment in it, Regina had to suppress a giggle.

  “Well, sir,” Trotter said sadly, “if you do change your mind, please call me at the newspaper. In case you do. Anytime, there’s always someone there to take messages. It’s not just a local paper, it’s the Hudson Group. But I’m sure you know that. Thank you for your time.” He hung up.

  “Wouldn’t talk to you?” Regina said. She assumed that it was part of this silly game they seemed to be playing for her to pretend she hadn’t guessed it was Professor Smolinski at Sparta University he had been talking to.

  “No, he wouldn’t. Too afraid.”

  “Maybe he has relatives in the Old Country,” Regina suggested.

  “I’m sure he does, but that’s not the reason he’s afraid.” He smiled slyly. Regina had never seen that expression before. “Still, that would make a good hook to hang an article on, wouldn’t it?”

  “What would?”

  “Did you ever hear of anyone who was afraid to talk because he had relatives in America?”

  “Now that you mention it, no.”

  “This concludes number seven hundred sixteen in a series of eight thousand installments of ‘Why We Fight.’ Tune in tomorrow for more.”

  Regina smiled. “I’ve never seen you like this. You seem more ... real.”

  “The key word there is seem. Come on, boss, I’ve done my mischief for the morning. Let’s go to work.”

  PART FOUR

  Chapter One

  GENERAL BORZOV WAS IN a bad mood. Something was wrong with the plumbing in this ancient building, and the hot water in his shower showed a disturbing tendency to disappear after three minutes, or just when he’d gotten his squat body thoroughly lathered up with the fragrant English soap Bulanin’s successor in London got for him. There was no warning, either. One second, everything would be fine, the hot water stimulating the flow of blood to his brain, the scent of lavender pleasing his senses, and the next he was in Siberia, soaked and thrown into the cold. It was a technique still used as a punishment in many portions of the Gulag. It had the advantages of economy and of being able to be disguised as an accident. Borzov could swear to its effectiveness.

  The shower didn’t fail every time. If it did, he would simply give up the showers at the office until the plumbing was fixed, or take less time to wash. As it was, though, he had discovered a singular new form of Russian roulette. Sometimes, everything was perfect. This happened often enough to tempt him back under the water for the next possible freezi
ng. When he did rush himself, and got out before the water turned cold, he always wondered if that time it had indeed been going to turn cold at all. The whole business was frustrating. Frustration was something Comrade Borzov did not react well to.

  It was not wise, of course, to shoot or threaten a plumber whose worst crime was incompetence. Competence and sufficient loyalty and trustworthiness to allow him behind the walls of this building was perhaps too much to ask of one man.

  Borzov never committed acts that could be foreseen to be unwise. That did not mean he was immune to error. As he looked over the latest reports from Smolinski, he realized just how little it meant he was immune to error.

  His mistake was not in using Smolinski—that had been an experiment, a calculated risk. He was a Pole, and therefore under slightly less suspicion. He was a fanatical believer, and therefore safe to send into the West. The occasional agent came along who was vulnerable to temptation by the lushness of life in the West. Bulanin, for instance. Smolinski posed no such problem. Smolinski was intelligent, in his own way brilliant, and during his supposed time in prison he had been given intensive training, at which he had excelled.

  Borzov, a student of the myths and legends of many societies, liked to think of the Pole as his Trojan Horse. The Americans would fawn over him; politicians and officials would climb over each other to be photographed with him. There would be some suspicion at first, but the Pole had been equipped with special bug-proof and interception-proof equipment, so that he should be safe. Borzov knew how they thought in the West. He did not understand it, any more than in his youth he understood what drew a fly to feces. But he learned that if the droppings were there, so would the flies be. In this case, no American agency would move against Smolinski without proof.

  The proof was necessary because the Americans worked under a severe hardship—they could not count on anything remaining secret. Where Borzov might suspect a spy had been planted on him and order the man killed in the same week (sometimes the same hour), the Americans always worked with the specter of rampant journalism and political repercussions looming over them.

  Borzov scratched his ear, though the itch he felt was inside his skull. Almost all the Americans acted that way. There were exceptions. The Congressman and those who worked for him. Borzov had resisted for a long time the idea that the Congressman was still active in the field. They had worked together against Hitler, and the General (as he was then) had been the most valuable of allies. After the war, he had been the most dangerous of enemies.

  Borzov had rejoiced at the General’s election to the Congress. But he came to realize that what he’d seen as the American’s retirement had been simply a move to give himself more scope. Borzov told himself he should have been expecting it.

  Then there was this “Trotter.” Or “Bellman,” or “Driscoll”—the names meant nothing. What mattered was that this young man had been trained by the Congressman, might be the old man made young again. His style was the same, the risks, the ruthlessness. And the results were the same. This young, real-nameless man had become a thorn deep in Borzov’s insufficiently showered flesh.

  And then he had turned up in Kirkester.

  If there were two men in the world who could deduce what was going on in Kirkester, they were the Congressman and this “Trotter.” If any agent could find and stop the man Borzov called Azrael, Trotter was the one.

  The mistake had not been in wanting to kill Trotter. It was important to get him out of the way.

  Borzov wanted control of the Hudson Group. He did not mean influence. Borzov and his colleagues had enough influence on the rest of the American press. When destiny was fulfilled, and the world was controlled by the Kremlin (whether or not the world became aware of it), thousands of American journalists would be unknowing Heroes of the Revolution. They were always ready to believe whatever Borzov instructed the handsome men the West was pleased to call “Soviet Journalists” to tell them. And anyone in opposition to the United States—anyone—from these Soviet Journalists, to that useful madman in Libya, to the anarchic terrorists who frightened even Borzov himself, to some worthless drug-addicted thief, would be given broadcast time and newspaper space to air their views, unchallenged, and usually uncommented upon.

  Daily, the will of the people was sapped as men making millions of dollars sat in chairs and told their countrymen how corrupt they were, how weak, how foolish, how unjust. Some of these charges were justified. What did it matter if they all were justified? How did it serve the State to have them aired? It was amazing, impossible, that a government would allow it. That the Americans did was a gift Borzov was not about to let go by.

  Because the prize, as always, was the collective mind of the American people. Their will to resist, their desire to strive actively for achievement. If the Soviet Union had been first to the moon, each day they would be reminded of the glory of it. If Chernobyl had been in America, five major corporations would have collapsed in an orgy of fault-finding and guilt.

  But the conscious sympathizers and unwitting dupes in the American press were a constant, an advantage Borzov had come to take for granted. The Hudson Group, on the other hand, was necessary, or at least highly desirable, for the role it would play in one specific plan.

  Important events were coming up. Decisions on arms control and grain sales and the proposed missile defense system that his (knowing and unknowing) friends in the American press had so successfully tagged “Star Wars,” as they obscured its virtues and created doubt.

  The woman known as Petra Hudson had kept the Hudson Group conspicuously apart from the sympathetic views of many of her most powerful colleagues. Borzov had not especially planned it this way, but he saw it was good. Because now, during this crucial time, Borzov would give the word, and the loud, influential voice of the Hudson Group would turn and shout down the men and policies it had cheered (most often alone) in the past. The rest of the American press would lose not a second announcing that a voice previously “ultraconservative” had “come to its senses.” The people who had believed the old words would now either be persuaded or they would be confused and alienated, and they would cease to be factors. They’d join Borzov’s most important army, those millions of Americans who had so lost faith in their country they no longer considered it worth the effort to vote.

  Properly timed, the Hudson Group’s turnaround could keep millions home during the next election. And Borzov had plans for the next election. Great plans. His masterpiece.

  He slammed his hand on the desk. It all depended on this cursed woman. Borzov did not want to be forced to kill her children. That might drive her too far, lead her to kill herself. She was no good to him dead. Still, it might be that he had no choice.

  He would try one more warning before he unleashed Azrael on the first child. If reports could be believed, Trotter would be a logical choice—he was supposed to be close to the daughter. Borzov assumed at least that the daughter thought so.

  But Borzov would not risk Azrael against Trotter. Trotter was too good; Azrael was too valuable. Irreplaceable. It was a chance Borzov was unwilling to take.

  Borzov wanted Trotter to die through ordinary channels. The thought amused him. Not so amusing was the realization that no one Smolinski might be able to muster would be able to succeed at the task. That was less important; at least Trotter would be kept busy.

  But—and there was no way Borzov could have known this in advance—Smolinski was a coward and a fool. The first attempt fails, Trotter responds with a guess and bravado. Smolinski not only confirms the suspicions, he lets Trotter know he is frightened.

  Smolinski had to be removed as soon as possible. That was in the cards all along, of course. The famous defector suddenly resurfaces in Moscow (in this case, Warsaw) and recants. The Western press always lapped it up the way a kitten lapped milk.

  And that had been his mistake. He should have known better than to think a Smolinski would be a match for someone trained by the Congressman. Only
Borzov was ever a match for the Congressman.

  Borzov had trained himself to control his face, even in private, but he could feel his eyebrows climbing up his forehead. It was an interesting idea, to go to America in person and take charge of matters.

  He sighed. It was also inadvisable and horrendously difficult, if not impossible. Besides, although he would kill to bring about the success of the mission he had entrusted to Azrael, he was not yet willing to risk dying or being imprisoned for it.

  That degree of devotion would have to wait until the next American election.

  Chapter Two

  THE CONGRESSMAN PUT DOWN the transcription of his son’s latest report. He frowned, thought for a few seconds, then did something he almost never did—he called for the original tape and something to play it on.

  The Congressman tried to remember how the Agency operated before automatic phone recorders. Mostly, it seemed, by-guess-and-by-God, with field agents dictating things to shorthand experts. Who could make mistakes. Who, even if they didn’t make mistakes, wound up knowing altogether too much. The agents, of course, rarely had the leisure to write their own reports. It was frequently at the risk of their lives that they got to phones at all.

  Now the calls were recorded by a machine at the Washington end of an 800 number (which wouldn’t turn up on anyone’s phone bill). The machine could recognize enough English to obey priority code commands and channel the call to the Congressman no matter where he happened to be.

  Then the tapes were brought to one government typist who had absolutely no interest in anything he typed, a strict eyeballs-to-fingers man who would have faithfully reproduced pig Latin from a tape, if the next higher civil service grade asked him to. He was no risk, especially since the Agency had a full-time man who did nothing but keep an eye on this typist. The reports and tapes were sealed by the typist in a steel box, handed to the Agency man, and delivered to the Congressman.

  It was supposed to be a foolproof system, or as close to one as humans could get in a society that frowned on tongueless slaves. But now, the Congressman wanted to hear the tape. He wanted to know whether the typist had somehow been reached and was now feeding his unknown boss disinformation, or if his son had become suicidal.