Summit (4 page)

But the arguments mattered to Schmidt. He fought them as if his life depended on the outcome. He pounded the table; he shook his finger at Fedorchuk; he got up and paced through the dark apartment. But he didn't leave. And eventually he started to weaken.

* * *

Someday she will lose. But for now she has the strength, born of terror and that awful hatred, to defeat this creature. That, really, is not the hardest part.

He is beneath her again. His face is bloody; his arms have lost the strength to hold her off. His eyes are frightened. She can rummage at will through his mind, and she finds much more there to feed her hatred. He beats his wife and enjoys it
.
He collects pornography. He thinks Hitler has been greatly misunderstood.

It doesn't matter now.

She is through hitting him. It doesn't express her hatred well enough. Only one thing can do that. She puts her hands around his neck. She squeezes.

His red face turns redder. His eyes bulge. His body thrashes beneath her. His hands clutch at her. But there is nothing left. He is hers.

And this is the hardest part. To stop while the hatred is still strong, to keep your hands from twisting the last breath out of his wretched body. It is like holding back from an orgasm. But it must be done. She has no power over him if he is dead. And the power is all that matters.

So she forces her hands to pull back from the neck, just enough to let him gasp and cough and realize how close he is to death. And now she sees something beyond fear in those eyes—the dull acceptance of the enslaved. It is what this battle has been about. "All right," she whispers.

She hears the sound of distant voices.

* * *

Something was happening to him, Dieter Schmidt realized. He should have left long ago, but he hadn't. And now part of him wanted to keep arguing, to make this KGB flunky see reason—but that part seemed to be shriveling inside him, like a tumor that had been miraculously cured. He fought against the cure, but he finally realized that this was perverse. Why fight against health, against reason? Finally there was no strength left to fight; there was only a kind of exhausted understanding. He has experienced something brutal. He has experienced something wonderful.

He is a new man.

* * *

Fedorchuk gazed at Dieter Schmidt. His face was bathed in sweat, and his eyes were dull. "This is not what I expected," Schmidt whispered.

"I know," Fedorchuk replied, almost gently. "But what you expected would not have been a good idea. Don't you agree?"

Schmidt seemed to consider. "I agree," he said at last. "What now?"

"Now? Nothing. Your life goes on as before. Return to Germany, take up your new job. If we need your help, we will be in touch. This has been enough for one day."

"Yes," Schmidt said. "Shall I go, then?"

Fedorchuk poured some vodka into the glasses on the table. "Have a drink first. A toast to your new life."

Schmidt took his glass and swallowed the vodka, gasping at its strength.

He'll get used to it, Fedorchuk thought. He'll get used to a lot of things. He'll have to. "You can go now," Fedorchuk said.

The German put his glass down, then got up and walked heavily out of the dim apartment. Fedorchuk watched him leave, then poured himself another drink.

* * *

She leaves him, lying motionless on the bed
.
She stares at him from the doorway for a long moment, then closes the door on him and on the hatred. Only then does she feel the exhaustion, the pain, the horror. It is time to get out.

Time to walk back along the endless corridor, past the doors that hide so many other secret horrors. She thinks about each door as she passes it, feels the aching aftermath of every battle she has fought and won. She wonders if the door will open and the battle will begin again. None does—this time.

She staggers down the staircase to the entrance hall, then across it to the front door. She puts her hand on the knob and twists. The door is locked.

She had known it would be. She closes her eyes. This is the most terrifying part. She knows how to make this world exist, she knows how to walk down the corridor, find her enemy, and defeat him; but she does not know how to get out. The door is locked; there is no other, and there is no key. The windows, she knows, are barred. The only escape is through her mind, but by now her mind is barely functioning.

She must try. She cannot stay here, because then the horror would go on forever; then her enemies would surely rise from their beds and come out from behind the closed doors and attack her. Then she would surely wish for a death that surely would not come.

She leans against the door, her forehead touching the cold wood, and she tries to will this door, this world, out of existence. Time passes, but nothing happens—this world will always be there, around her, inside her, her triumph and her torture. There is no escape, there will never be any escape, and at last there is nothing to do but scream and scream and scream.

* * *

It took two shots of the tranquilizer to stop the screaming. And even then she writhed on the cot as if possessed (as she certainly was), her hands clutching at Doctor Chukova's lab coat as if it were her only hope of escape. Each time was worse for her, and Doctor Chukova didn't know what to do about it.

They had rolled the cot outside the pyramid. The earphones and the table-tennis balls and the sensors had been removed. The job was done. As the orderlies rushed the woman off to the clinic, Chukova found some courage and went up to Colonel Rylev. "If you put her through this again, she will die," she said.

Rylev considered her statement for a moment, then turned away, apparently deciding that it wasn't worth a reply. Doctor Chukova stared at him with hatred for the same amount of time, then hurried after her patient.

Chapter 2

Doctor Olga Chukova was a stout woman in her mid-thirties, divorced, childless, and perpetually tired. Her life was not easy, and there was no hope of it improving. But still she kept doing what she had to do, because if she didn't, everything would get unimaginably worse.

When she was satisfied that her patient would be all right, she left the clinic. She took the metro to the Lenin Library, wandered along Marx Prospekt for a while, and then went to sit in the Alexandrovsky Gardens in the shadow of the Kremlin.

It was twilight, and the air was turning chilly. But that was all right; it was so nice to go outside without feeling the weight of an astrakhan coat on her back that she would put up with a little more cold weather. She sat on a yellow bench near the Obelisk to Revolutionary Thinkers. The trees were just beginning to bud, and the flowers were peeping cautiously out of the ground. The gardens were not crowded. The news kiosks were closing; the last babushki were hurrying their overdressed little charges home for supper before they caught pneumonia; a lone gray-coated militiaman strolled along the path, whistling a Beatles song. The air still held the rancid smell of Russian cigarettes. She closed her eyes and tried to relax. It was impossible.

After a while she heard footsteps approaching, then someone sitting down next to her on the bench. "Olga, my little butterfly, what a pleasant coincidence!" a cheery man's voice said.

"Hello, Volodya," she replied. They both knew that it was not a coincidence. She opened her eyes.

He was a rather handsome man, with dark hair and flashing eyes topped by bushy, Brezhnev-like eyebrows. But in a way, she thought, his physical appearance was the last thing you noticed about him. You were too blinded by the brightness of his personality; you were too busy trying to resist his joyful laughter.

"You look tired, my pet. Did you have a tough day?"

Doctor Chukova didn't answer.

Volodya smiled and changed the subject. "Do you see the obelisk there?"

She nodded.

"Did you know that it was built to celebrate three hundred years of the Romanov dynasty? No? Of course not. These little historical oddities were not brought up in our Komsomol lectures. The Bolsheviks erased the names of the tsars and replaced them with Marx and Engels and the rest. It makes one wonder, doesn't it?"

"About what?"

"About when these names will be erased and the next set inscribed, of course. In another three hundred years? Or is the pace of history accelerating-—will we not have to wait quite so long this time?"

"That is not an appropriate remark, citizen," she murmured.

Volodya grinned and squeezed her arm. "Don't worry, my loyal little comrade, the state cannot watch all of us—at least, not all the time. Thank God for incompetence. So tell me: How was your day?"

She closed her eyes. The western wall of the Kremlin loomed behind her; in the Arsenal building behind that wall the Politburo met and made decisions that determined the future of her nation, perhaps of the world. Volodya had not let go of her arm.

He had come into her life soon after she started work at the Popov Institute. Valentina had been performing her miracles for several months, and the KGB was beginning to realize that she needed constant medical attention. Doctor Chukova quickly found out that taking the job had been a mistake, but like many people she couldn't turn her back on the benefits that came to one who worked for the security organs. And she couldn't turn her back on Valentina.

And so Doctor Chukova had needed laughter and excitement. She was lonely and she was depressed by her job, and every time she looked into a mirror she was staring at middle age, every time she tried to plan for the future she thought of the dissolution of her dreams, the long hard life still to be faced.

Volodya Osipov seemed never to think of the future. He had an engineering job that was too boring even to talk about, and he spent most of his time operating
na lyevo,
buying this, selling that, always managing to stay clear of the authorities. He seemed to have a limitless supply of Bolshoi tickets and restaurant reservations and American condoms; he knew whom to bribe to get medicines that even doctors couldn't obtain; he was the kind of person who kept the Soviet economic system afloat.

And he adored Olga Chukova. He praised her to the skies and gave her French perfume and invented a thousand pet names for her. He made love to her as if she were a goddess. He listened sympathetically to her troubles as she poured them out to him in bed or lying side by side in the Lenin Hills and staring out at the city. And if he didn't make her troubles go away, at least he made their burden a little lighter while he was with her.

And then one day she learned the truth. She tried not to think about that day anymore, but it haunted her dreams nevertheless. It was the day her life ended. She tried to go on in the same way, but soon enough he knew she knew. And it didn't seem to matter to him. He felt no guilt, and she couldn't even bring herself to feel angry at him for feeling no guilt, for ruining her life. He was the way he was.

And now he was sitting next to her, wanting to know what kind of day she had had, and she knew that what she would say to him would be pored over by cipher clerks and junior attaches, then beamed to a satellite and across the ocean for some other bored clerk to glance at and file. But Volodya was smiling at her, and his hand still rested on her arm in that intimate, reassuring way of his, and she knew that she had no choice but to answer his question. Absolutely no choice.

"It was very bad," she whispered.

"It's always so difficult, isn't it?" His voice was filled with sympathy. She was sure it was genuine.

"It's getting worse, Volodya."

"Tell me all about it, my nightingale."

Doctor Chukova half smiled. They were middle-aged lovers, sitting on a park bench on a beautiful spring evening; they were a pair of spies, plotting in the shadow of the Kremlin; she was a nightingale, about to sing. "It was a West German—Dieter Schmidt is his name. He's leaving Moscow soon. But not soon enough."

"The same setup—a potential defector who turns out to be anything but?"

She nodded.

"And your young friend in the pyramid listens in and does whatever it is that she does?"