The Mirror Maze

by James P. Hogan

  At last, if he had counted correctly, the truck reached the straight stretch after which there would be one left-hand turn, followed after a short distance by a right-hand one, which would be the start of the drop down to the bridge where he was to jump off. He readied himself. And then lights appeared behind. He turned his upper body painfully to peer back beneath the tailboard, and something missed in his chest. There were headlights behind them, gaining fast. He lost them as the truck entered the left-hand bend, three hundred yards from the bridge. But as the truck straightened out, the lights emerged from the bend immediately behind it. They flashed several times, signaling urgency, and there was a series of blasts from the vehicle’s horn. Brett felt the truck slow down, and then it pulled over. His impulse was to drop down and make a break for it, but he fought it down. It would have been hopeless—he would have come out fully in the glare of the headlights of the vehicle behind.

  But the vehicle didn’t stop. It bounced on by amid dust and flying stones—something small, like a jeep with a canvas top, Brett saw as it passed through the lights from the truck. It wasn’t somebody from the camp coming after them, but simply someone in a hurry. The truck pulled out again and continued on its way.

  It came to the sharp turn and the dip down, then made a turn the other way to cross the ravine. Brett braced himself, ready. The wheels made a hollow sound as the truck crossed the bridge, and then the truck ground almost to a halt as it came to the steep upward bend and the driver slammed into bottom gear.

  Now!

  Brett launched himself downward and as far sideways as he could, bumped and scraped himself on the ground, and without daring to hesitate a moment, rolled clear, pulling his arms in tightly just as the wheels began turning again. And then the truck had gone. Brett lay motionless, listening as it ground its way up the turns out of the ravine, then changing to a higher gear and receding. Gradually, the quiet of the night asserted itself. He sat up, waited, listening for a few seconds, then got to his feet and walked back to the end of the bridge. He lowered himself down into the darkness beneath it and huddled himself up against one of the concrete supporting piers to wait.

  He didn’t hear anyone approaching, but sooner than he had expected, a voice from along the gully called his name softly—there had been no reason for using pseudonyms in the camp. “Here,” he replied. There was a scuffling, and Hamashad materialized beside him.

  “Any problems?” Hamashad whispered.

  “No. Everything went okay. Just a lot of bruises. How about inside?”

  “Everything went as planned. You are officially locked up for the night.”

  “Great.”

  Having two groups blundering about in this terrain trying to find each other in the dark would have been asking for trouble. The Israelis were due to collect them right here. And just a few seconds after Hamashad arrived, a voice from the other direction, but surprisingly close, murmured “Bluejay,” which was the challenge that Hamashad had given Brett to use if Hamashad failed to appear for any reason.

  Hamashad called back “Redfish” in a stage whisper, and three figures that must have been there all the time detached themselves from the shadows and joined them.

  “Is everything okay?” one of them inquired.

  “Fine,” Hamashad said. “I’m Pierrot. This is Mustapha.”

  “You’ve gone to a lot of trouble,” Brett muttered.

  “We must move quickly. A lot is happening. My name is Zvi. This is Haim, that is Benjamin.”

  Brett nodded in the darkness. “Hi.”

  The third figure, the one who had been called Benjamin, peered closely at Brett, as if straining to make out his features in the weak light. Then he said, “You’ll never guess who else I am.” The voice was American.

  • • •

  Inside the KGB residency at the Soviet embassy at Damascus, Lieutenant Colonel Sergei Chelenko was troubled and suspicious. Something had gone very wrong with the ground operation at Glinka, and although Brazhnikov, who was in command there, was capable of communicating, he wouldn’t say what. Meanwhile, the strike force in Armenia was still standing by, and its commanding pfficer was demanding to know what was going on. While Lieutenant Kugav busied himself with updating logs and report files, Chelenko paced over to the corkboard to peruse the sequence of messages again.

  First, at around noon, Stavisky, Brazhnikov’s second-in-command, had radioed a worried report that Brazhnikov and Lieutenant Dorkiev had disappeared and not been heard from for over two hours. The circumstances that Stavisky had described sounded mysterious: a Syrian airliner had taken off from the airstrip at Glinka, and later returned. Chelenko had no explanation.

  And then Brazhnikov himself had come through suddenly—not on his own radio, since he wasn’t with Stavisky—asking for information on Syrian aircraft registrations; and then he had signed off after giving an unauthorized call frequency, before Chelenko could talk to him and without giving any further information at all.

  Baffled but with no real choice, Chelenko had obtained the information from the aeronautical authorities, and then transmitted it to Brazhnikov. But again the Major had signed off abruptly—he had cut Chelenko off in midsentence! Brazhnikov hadn’t responded to further calls, and a check with Stavisky had shown that Brazhnikov and Dorkiev still hadn’t been seen.

  And now the latest. Stavisky and the three men with him had heard from Brazhnikov and were moving to rendezvous with him and Dorkiev at a point that Stavisky had given Chelenko the coordinates of. Chelenko had checked on the map, and found it to be out on a line of hillsides about five kilometers on the other side of the guerrilla camp, out in the middle of a remote area that Brazhnikov had no business being in at all. Chelenko could only conclude that either Brazhnikov had taken leave of his senses, or something very odd was going on. And to somebody of Chelenko’s turn of mind, “odd” meant “wrong”; and anything that was wrong was dangerous.

  He turned away from the board and walked back to where Kugav was sitting. “Get the communications room to give you a channel to Moscow and keep it open,” he ordered. “Have them find General Goryanin and put him on. They’re to tell him that we have a peculiar situation that I wish to discuss with him.”

  “Yes sir.”

  Chelenko went over to the map and stared at it. He might have to order the force in Armenia to move quickly, he decided, but just at this moment he had no idea why or against what. It was always a good idea to get blessings from higher up in situations like this—or at least, some kind of tacit understanding. That was something that Brazhnikov needed to learn. It wasn’t going to do his career prospects any good, running off and trying to be independent. He was in the wrong army for that.

  • • •

  After all that had been happening, Mel hadn’t realized how much the uncertainty had been gnawing him inside. It hit him with a relief that seemed explosive, when Jacob called a challenge from the guard point on the rim of the hollow, a voice responded, and a few seconds later five figures dropped down inside. Mel felt his breath catch and his eyes mist over in the shadows. It was Brett! It was, it was… He threw an arm around Brett’s shoulder and hugged him, lost for the moment for words. It took a moment for Brett to realize who it was.

  “Jesus goddam Christ! What in hell are you doing here as well?”

  “Dave didn’t tell you?” Feeling as he did at that moment, Mel forgot all about code names and such.

  “No.”

  “He was having trouble enough getting over seeing me,” Dave said.

  “Does everyone in America know everyone else?” Ehud asked curiously.

  Dave noticed that there were more forms scattered around in the darkness than there should have been. “Who else is here?” he asked.

  “Russians—Yuri’s other four guys showed up,” Mel told him.

  “Okay.”

  Brett was staring uncomprehendingly. “Russians? I don’t understand. What are they doing here? It’s just taken me months to get awa
y from them.”

  “It’s not the way you probably think,” Mel said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  Mel paused to collect his words. “Look,” he said, “this is going to have to be quick, but we ll explain it all later. Just answer the questions for now, okay?”

  Obviously Mel knew more than he did. Brett nodded. “Shoot.”

  “It was Hermann Oberwald who recruited you, right?”

  “I didn’t know he was working for the Soviets at the time. I thought—”

  “What did he tell you?”

  “That the world situation wasn’t safe enough to be left in the hands of crazies… on both sides. And you know how I used to feel about things like that—it was what I wanted to hear.”

  “Okay, and?…”

  “He said he was part of an international organization of people who were above all that. Rational, sane… you know the kind of thing. So being the dumb shit that I am, I bought it. It was only later that I figured out it was a front…” Brett’s voice trailed off as he saw the point that Mel had been making. “You mean it wasn’t a Soviet front?”

  “That’s right,” Mel said, nodding. “You made the same mistake we all did: you assumed, with a little bit of help, that it was the Soviets.”

  Brett looked nonplussed. “But who else are you saying it could have been?”

  “Believe me, that’s a long story. I’m not even gonna try and get into it. But what I need to know is why they needed you to supply space-defense secrets. I mean, somebody like Oberwald could get anything he wanted. Why did he need you?”

  “That’s the whole point of what I’ve been trying to communicate out through Hamashad,” Brett said, his voice straining now with urgency.

  “Who?”

  “The guy who’s with Mossad—the one I just came out with.”

  “Okay.”

  “With people like Oberwald in it, I couldn’t risk tipping off the wrong side. The Constitutionals were the only people I felt I could trust.”

  Mel nodded. “Yes, I see that. But what was it? What was it that you wanted to tell them?”

  “Supplying information isn’t what Oberwald wanted me to do. Hell, I’m a programmer, not a goddam mailman. He got me to alter it!”

  Mel shook his head. “What do you mean, ‘alter it’?”

  “His line was that space-based beam weapons are too powerful, totally destabilizing. In the hands of an evangelical government, that would be all they’d need to bring down the Armageddon and cry hallelujah.”

  Mel nodded rapidly in the darkness. “Sure, I know the line. So what did you do?”

  Brett spread his hands. “I thought it was an organization of rational-thinking, high-principled people with influence, who’d bring some sanity into the mess. I—”

  “Yes, sure, sure, I understand all that, Brett. Nobody’s blaming you. I just want to know what you did.”

  “They convinced me that the only way the world would be safe once the U.S. space-weaponry system was deployed would be if they had the option to override it—to veto a fire command. In other words, to switch it off.” Brett drew a long breath. “So that’s what I put into it for them.”

  “You what?”

  “There’s some code that I buried inside the fire-control executive software that they can activate remotely. It recognizes a pattern that goes in through the target-tracking radar, not through the command links where all the security precautions are.”

  Mel was looking bemused. He tried to think back to his own software days. “But how could it go undetected? I mean, a chunk of illegitimate code that isn’t supposed to be there ‘ would be the first thing the debug would pick up.”

  Brett was shaking his head already. “It depends how the debug is written. I wrote the debug routine that was used to test that part of the software. It only tells you what it’s been told to tell you is in there. If there’s something in there that it’s been told not to tell you about, you’ll never know.”

  The only way to find out what was in a program was to write another program to look at it and tell you. But the second program could be written to have blind spots.

  Mel gaped at him, glassy-eyed. What Brett was saying was that the people who controlled both sides of the world had the ability to switch off the West’s space-defense system at will. And the full meaning of it all finally became clear in its horrifying completeness.

  Apart from the inner core of the elite who were responsible, this tiny group of Americans, Russians, and Israelis in a remote part of Syria were, right at that moment, very probably the only people anywhere who possessed all the information.

  The two halves of the key had finally come together.

  CHAPTER 67

  In Tel Aviv it was almost 8:00 p.m., corresponding to 1:00 in the afternoon, East Coast American time. At an address used as a safe house by the Israeli intelligence service, Stephanie sat in a comfortably furnished lounge with balcony looking out over the city, watching the U.S. inauguration ceremony coming in live from Washington. With her were two women from the Israeli secret-service team that had been detailed to watch over her while she remained in the country.

  No reason had yet been given for asking her to remain behind after McCormick and the rest of the party returned home. She could only assume that it had something to do with Mel or Dave Fenner. However, she had seen and heard nothing of Mel since her middle-of-the-night departure from Kemmel’s house in Cairo a week previously, and there had been no response from Dave to the message she had left by telephone for “Benjamin” upon her arrival in Israel. McCormick had broadcast the code phrase from Mustapha as requested, which meant that Dave would now be involved in whatever was happening as a consequence; and after what had happened in Egypt, God alone knew what Mel had gotten himself mixed up in. So until one or the other of them chose to make his presence known to her, there was nothing she could do.

  A more worrisome thought was that perhaps she hadn’t been extricated from the business in Egypt quite as cleanly as she’d been led to believe, and somewhere behind the scenes wheels were turning slowly but inexorably that would eventually catch up with her. If so, she concluded resignedly, there wasn’t anything she could do about that, either. She was now totally a pawn of events outside her control. For once, trying to guess what Eva would have done was no use at all.

  On the screen, the crowd was filling the square in front of the Capitol steps. Henry Newell and Theo McCormick were visible to one side of the group congregating at the top, the Chief Justice had appeared, ready to receive the oaths of office, and in the background it seemed that every congressman, woman, state official, and party worker from the United States must have gathered to witness the culmination of all their efforts. It made her feel all the more out of it not to be there, and without even knowing why.

  She realized that the two Israeli secret-service women had been talking while she was thinking. “What do you think, Eva?” one of them asked her. “Will this amendment that everyone has been talking about make so much difference to the world?”

  “It’s not the amendment that matters,” Stephanie replied. “That’s just words on paper. What matters is that it expresses the collective mood of a people.” She nodded toward the TV screen. “That’s what you’re seeing there. And yes, I think that will make a difference.”

  On the screen, a hush had come over the crowd, and Henry Newell stepped forward and raised his hand. The shot switched to a closeup, and in that moment the expression on one man’s face embodied the will of a nation passing from adolescence to maturity, a nation that was taking charge of itself.

  “I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of president of the United States, and will to the best of my ability…”

  • • •

  At that precise moment, the Ilyushin that had been flying on a southerly bearing twenty miles off the Maryland coast completed a starboard turn which brought its nose around to point directly at Washington,
one hundred and thirty miles westward. A pair of long doors extending for half the length of the fuselage hinged open on its underside, and moments later a black cigar-shaped object fell away, its stub wings already unfolding. A finger of flame leaped from its tail as the motor ignited, accelerating the missile up through supersonic speed in a few seconds. As the first streaked away, a second missile dropped from the aircraft’s belly, fired, and followed after it.

  Within ten seconds the computers of the North Eastern Air Defense Region had extracted the anomaly from the datastreams pouring in from the surveillance radars on the East Coast, sounded an audible alarm, and presented flashing warning signals on the display screens to alert the operators. Alerts also went out automatically to USAF Defense Command Headquarters, the Operations Room of the recently created Strategic Defense Command, and the Situation Office in the Pentagon.

  One of the air-defense radar crew was the first to realize what was happening. “Holy Christy they’re missiles!” He began flipping switches frantically. “Get me CP on that! Alert Stingray, Code Red.” Activity erupted on all sides, lamps flashing, bells clanging. Bodies jerked upright in chairs at consoles; somebody sent a styrofoam cup of coffee flying across the floor. “Bravo Two, we have gremlins, range two-zero, bearing orie-two-one decimal three, altitude thirty thousand, descending, speed increasing at nine-zero-zero on course two-six-five decimal one… Update on five, Charlie Two… Wilco, go to red on Dagger… Holy shit!…”

  “Bring Angels three-two-nine to alert and advise.”

  “We have confirmation on Zebra Seven, Stingray.”

  “Give me an ETT on Washington…”

  The Duty Officer Commanding appeared, white-faced. “What’s happening?”

  “Fucking missiles, two of ’em—going straight for Washington!”

  “How far off target?”

  “If it is Washington, less than six minutes.”

  • • •

  General Goryanin listened incredulously to what Colonel Chelenko was saying as his voice babbled over the satellite link from Damascus. “They’re certain that the aircraft is a camouflaged launching platform. That’s what the missiles were for. If it left here at ten o’clock this morning on the same route as the regular flight, it would be right off the North American coast by now. That means that Washington has to be the target.”