Firechild (22 page)

Startled, she glanced at him and shrank from the level malevolence in his dark-circled eyes.

“I am flying to Moscow tomorrow,” he told her. “You will receive orders to follow as soon as that can be arranged. I doubt that you’ll ever be sent back.”

“Your own withdrawal is probably advisable.” She tried not to show her own old antagonism. “Since it seems you are under such heavy surveillance.”

“Advisable?” A savage-toned explosion. “It’s the end of my career!”

“Not necessarily—”

“You’re a bungling failure, comrade.” He cut her off, speaking with a bitter force. “You lack the tradecraft we expected in you. The hard fact is, you have led us into a whole string of failures. You induced us to trust that snake Scorpio. You let him murder our best informer at EnGene, and then escape with documents you had promised us. You have failed to eliminate Bell craft’s brother, or Belcraft’s genetic monster. In sum, you have become a stupid tool of the
Americanski. “

Glancing again, she caught a glint of satisfaction in his quick, feral eyes.

“On my advice,” he finished, “the Center is recalling you for a final accounting. If the story of your blundering has made a stupid fool of me, if I’m going to the wall for it, I do not intend to go alone.”

She took time to pass a delivery truck and regain control before she could trust herself to speak. “Boris, part of what you say may seem true. Our craft depends; on luck as well as on skill. Luck is often bad, a fact I think the Center ought to understand.”

“Don’t depend on it. We do expect occasional miscalculations. But, comrade, your own bad luck, if you want to call it that, has been remarkably consistent.”

“I’ll let you speak for your own career.” She managed to smile into his cold hostility. “I have news, however, for the Center. News that I have not failed.”

“Da?”
An ironic snort. “Make your boasts to Bogdanov.”

“When I do, he’ll send me here again to finish up my work.”

“Not likely. A klutz who never learned the trade. Why should you be trusted again?”

“Because I have made progress. I recently established a new contact. A man who was employed at EnGene before the disaster. He knew Scorpio and Carboni—he was in fact perhaps the best friend Carboni had. It was a warning from Carboni that enabled him to escape the disaster. He is close to General Clegg, in a position which gives him freedom of movement inside the military perimeter and excellent access to confidential information.”

“Who is this unexpected ally?”

“Comrade, that is extremely sensitive information.” She paused to enjoy his baffled mixture of doubt and wrath. “I see no reason to reveal it now. Or to you at any time, not if you are to be replaced as my superior.”

“Not yet replaced.” She felt his cold eyes probing as if to disrobe her. “I can still warn my friends at the Center of your skill with all these cunning fabrications that have allowed you to wallow in the luxuries of a Romanoff czarina.”

She drove on, not looking at him.

“I’ll be seeing Bogdanov before you return.” His tone turned grittily sardonic. “Have you other such incredible facts to report?”

“I believe Scorpio should receive attention.” To steady her voice, she drew a deep breath. “It’s true he should never have been trusted. I never liked him, but he was sent to me as a faithful and efficient agent. He is now at large, I don’t know where.

“He killed Carboni. It is possible that he escaped with Carboni’s photocopies of Belcraft’s research notes. I believe he also has another document the Center will be eager to recover. That’s the letter Belcraft wrote his brother in Fort Madison just before the disaster. We have traced Scorpio there. I think he got into the brother’s office to take the letter—and then booby-trapped the brother’s house.

“A stupid beast! He lacks brains to understand whatever the letter and the photocopies may reveal, but our efforts to obtain them must have let him know their value. If he should sell them to somebody who knows genetic engineering, the result might be a new Enfield disaster, spreading—I’m afraid to think how far. I imagine the Center will want Scorpio hunted down.”

“Da?”
He mocked her. “Comrade, do you expect Bogdanov to swallow such fantastic fiction—and choose you to be the exterminator?”

“Boris, I’d rather leave killing to you.” She contrived to smile. “As for myself, I expect more appealing missions.”

Watching for road signs, she made him wait.

“You see,” she resumed at last, “my informer on Clegg’s staff has been passing on new information that I think will be of great interest to the Center.”

“I know you, Ostrov!”

She saw that she was getting to him now.

“Still the scheming whore you always were.” His dark, fat face had turned even darker, and his high voice shook. “You’ve no command of tradecraft. You have built a career on cunning invention, the way your gangster father did. You lied to make yourself the mistress of that .senile capitalist and get your red-painted talons into his fortune.”

She shrugged at his anger.

“In any case, comrade—” He turned the word to mockery. “Your cunning schemes have overtaken you. Here at last, with all your false promises of secret files and private letters and genetic wonder weapons, you have led me and the whole Center into a trap. In Moscow, I shall warn the Center not to swallow this strange tale of some mysterious new informer whom only you can contact. A tale I’ll make sure they don’t believe.”

“Comrade, I’m sure you’ll try.” She returned his derision. “You’re aware, however, that the Center has its own records of my training and the use I have made of it. When your friend Bogdanov hears what this man has told me—”

“He’ll send you off for psychiatric care.”

“You haven’t heard what I’ve learned. Here’s the gist of it.”

She let him wait while she bent to turn up the air conditioner fan, trying to get his odor out of the car.

“You may report it to Bogdanov in any way you like.” She grinned into his glowering. “The Americans have recaptured this genetic creation. My contact describes it as female. A most astonishing creature!”

She turned again to relish his reaction.

“Described as a fat pink worm when first seen, it has grown and changed in a way that is hard to believe—”

“I’ll see to it that Bogdanov does not believe.”

Carefully, she ignored his raspy mutter.

“This brother captured the creature but later released it for some reason he seems unable to explain. Later, it was sheltered and cared for by a criminal hiding in the abandoned area around the dead city. The Americans spotted them from the air. The convict was wounded and recaptured. The creature was picked up outside the military perimeter, along with the brother.”

“Comrade, your dramatic imagination fascinates me. I recall that you were an actress on the Moscow stage before your gangster father was exposed.”

“Thank you, comrade.” She gave him her brightest smile. “There is even more to the story. Facts that won’t get stupid sneers from Bogdanov. You see, the Americans released the brother, hoping he would lead them to the creature. He was allowed to return to his home in Iowa, where he no doubt expected to find that letter.”

“Which we should have recovered.”

“True.” She made a wry face. “I did have his office searched. The letter had already been removed. Scorpio, evidently, had been there first, to take the letter and set his booby-trap—a device that demolished Saxon Belcraft’s home.

“Yet—I don’t know why—he persists. He appears to care more for the creature than for his own career. It seems that they are able to communicate by some means not yet discovered. In flight from the Americans, the creature fell into a disused water well. She might have died there, but she was somehow able to call Belcraft back from the hospital to pull her out.”

“Da?
An actress inventing fairy tales—”

“You may believe what you like. The facts will speak for me. Center can soon confirm that American intelligence was able to keep up with Belcraft’s travels. They reached the scene at the moment of the rescue. He and the creature have been recaptured.

“She is now being held in a special cell in a guarded laboratory inside the military perimeter. In the time since she was first described, she has grown and changed remarkably, taking on the appearance of a human child a few years old. She seems highly intelligent. She has learned Spanish from her criminal protector—reported to be a Mexican alien.

“The Americans are trying to discover precisely what she is and what she knows. Her mental powers seem to make her dangerous. In spite of that hazard, however, they regard her as a valuable prize. They don’t intend to let her escape again.

“They are hoping, of course, to learn the technology used for her creation. The same technology, they believe, that set off the Enfield contagion. The American general, Clegg, hopes to turn it into a super-weapon.

“A critical situation. Yet we still have time for action.

The creature knows very little English. She has no technical vocabulary in any language. So far, she has refused to speak at all, except to inquire about Belcraft and her convict friend—his name is Torres.

“She begs to see them. Up to this point, however, she has been isolated in that laboratory cell, under observation through one-way glass. I understand that she looks as harmless as any little child, but until they know what she can do, they hold her friends as hostages.

“I’m afraid for her, Boris.” Anya’s resentments were half forgotten. “This Clegg is an evil-tempered sadist who abuses his family and bulldozes his men. The mind of a Hitler! Perhaps the same sort of mad genius. He has built a powerful clandestine organization to support his crazy quest for total control of America, perhaps of the world.

“I’m afraid for her, but more afraid of what Clegg’s investigators may learn. If he gets that weapon—”

Shivering a little, she shut off the air conditioner fan.

“That will be the substance of my report to the Center.” She turned to glance cheerily at Shuvalov. “I think Bogdanov and his own superiors will send me back here, with instructions to continue contacts with this new source and take whatever action seems necessary to stop Clegg from getting any total weapon. If they refuse to believe me, I doubt that the failure will help the future of their careers—or your own.”

She had got her malice back.

“Comrade, what do you think?”

28

The Shadow

Men

S
he had been too long in the cold wet dark of the
hoyo,
too long with no food and no air. The pit’s jagged walls bit so hard she couldn’t breathe, and her life light had dimmed. The good Sax had been too far away when she found him, so far she was afraid he could never come to help. Even when she felt the rope in her face, she had no strength to reach for it—not till she felt the strong white light of his love at the top of the
hoyo.

That brought back a spark of her life. The hard rock jaws cut skin off her arms, but she moved enough to lock her hands and her teeth on the rope and cling tight when she felt Sax pull, but cruel rock held her fast. The rope hurt her teeth and the rope began to slip through her hands, but the white shine of Sax gave her new life.

She hung on. He hauled her up, scraping past the rough wet walls. He would warm her and find food for her and carry her far away from
los gringos malos
that had hurt
el pobre Panchito.
She felt very glad, till suddenly the red fog clotted above her in the
hoyo, so
thick it dimmed the bright love of Sax.

Los gringos
again, coming in their ugly
helicoptero.
Sax had not seen them. He kept hauling and hauling on the rope. She wanted to tell him to drop the rope and run, but she had no strength or breath to call a warning, no way to reach his mind. She kept her grip locked, till he had dragged her out into the redness and the roar of the chopper.

She felt his fear that she was dead, but still she had no breath. The feel of danger came down like red rain upon her. She heard the great bray of the gringo machine, commanding him not to move, and felt the sickness in him when he knew they were going to take her.

The chopper came down to the ground and the yelling gringos ran around them. She couldn’t feel their minds, couldn’t see inside them, because they had no love that she could touch. They were red clouds of evil, red shadow men. All she could see was what they did.

They struck Sax with a gun when he wouldn’t drop her on the ground. She felt the spinning dimness in his head. They put cruel irons on his wrists, and cursed him with ugly gringo words and dragged him into the chopper. It roared into the air, and she lost him in the redness when they carried him away.

They had no irons small enough for her, but they cut pieces of the rope to tie her ankles and her arms. They threw her on the ground and pointed guns at her head and let her gasp for air in the foul hot wind of the machine while they waited for another machine. They wanted to keep her far from Sax.

When the chopper came, they threw her on its rough floor and carried her back across the fence, to a place near the terrible
polvo,
the dust that had killed Vic and the whole city called Enfield. There they took away the dress Panchito had found for her—torn to rags now. They laid her on a hard table in a tiny, white-walled room. They found irons to fit and locked them on her ankles and her wrists to keep her there, lying naked under a hot glare of light.

A dull-red danger-cloud hung in one high corner of the room. It was behind her head, where perhaps they hoped she wouldn’t see it. It was thick and cold and evil. When she searched inside the cloud, she found a gun barrel jutting through the wall. Beyond it, she discovered another tiny room, clogged with thicker fog. Two men stood behind the ugly killing machine, watching her through mirrors in the wall.

In spite of all the red-feeling badness, she felt sorry for some of the men around her in the room, because they were afraid. She felt them shiver when they had to touch her, heard the quivering in their voices, felt the chill of fear deep inside their shadow-shapes. Afraid of her, they thought she might bring them the deadly
polvo
to kindle its killing fire again and turn them all to crumbling dust.