The House of Thunder (46 page)
“And you. What about you, McGee? Where do you fit in? And is your name really McGee?”
“No,” he said. “My name’s Dimitri Nicolnikov. I was born a Russian, to parents in Kiev, thirty-seven years ago. Jeff McGee is my Willawauk name. You see, I was one of the first Willawauk kids, though that was in the early days of the program, when they took young teenagers and tried to make deep-cover agents out of them in three or four years of training. Before they started working solely with kids obtained at the age of three or four. And I’m one of the few who ever turned double agent on them. Although they don’t know it as yet.”
“They will when they find all the bodies you left behind.”
“We’ll be long gone by then.”
“You’re so confident.”
“I’ve got to be,” he said, giving her a thin smile. “The alternative is unthinkable.”
Again, Susan was aware of the man’s singular strength, which was one of the things that had made her fall in love with him.
Am I still in love with him? she wondered.
Yes.
No.
Maybe.
“How old were you when you underwent training in Willawauk?”
“Like I said, that was before they started taking them so young and spending so many years on them. The recruits then were twelve or thirteen. I was there from the age of thirteen to the age of eighteen.”
“So you finished the training almost twenty years ago. Why weren’t you seeded into the U.S.? Why were you still in Willawauk when I showed up?”
Before he could answer her, the traffic ahead began to slow down on the dark road. Brake lights flashed on the trucks as they lumbered to a halt.
McGee tapped the Chevy’s brakes.
“What’s going on?” Susan asked, suddenly wary.
“It’s the Batum checkpoint.”
“What’s that?”
“A travel-pass inspection station just north of the city of Batum. That’s where we’re going to catch a boat out of the country.”
“You make it sound as simple as just going away on a holiday,” she said.
“It could turn out like that,” he said, “if our luck holds just a little longer.”
The traffic was inching ahead now, as each vehicle stopped at the checkpoint, each driver passing his papers to a uniformed guard. The guard was armed with a submachine gun that was slung over his left shoulder.
Another uniformed guard was opening the doors on the back of some of the trucks, shining a flashlight inside.
“What’re they looking for?” Susan asked.
“I don’t know. This isn’t usually part of the procedure at the Batum checkpoint.”
“Are they looking for us?”
“I doubt it. I don’t expect them to find out we’re gone from Willawauk until closer to midnight. At least an hour from now. Whatever these men are searching for, it doesn’t seem to be all that important. They’re being casual about it.”
Another truck was passed. The line of traffic moved forward. There were now three trucks in front of the Chevy.
“They’re probably just hoping to catch a black market operator with contraband goods,” McGee said. “If it was us they were looking for, there’d be a hell of a lot more of them swarming around, and they’d be a lot more thorough with their searches.”
“We’re that important?”
“You better believe it,” he said worriedly. “If they lose you, they lose one of the potentially biggest intelligence coups of all time.”
Another truck was waved through the checkpoint.
McGee said, “If they could break you and pick your mind clean, they’d get enough information to tip the East-West balance of power permanently in the direction of the East. You’re very important to them, dear lady. And as soon as they realize that I’ve gone double on them, they’ll want me almost as bad as they’ll want to get you back. Maybe they’ll even want me worse, because they’ll
have
to find out how many of their deep-cover agents in the U.S. have been compromised.”
have
to find out how many of their deep-cover agents in the U.S. have been compromised.”
“And how many of them
have
you compromised?”
have
you compromised?”
“All of them,” he said, grinning.
Then it was their turn to face the checkpoint guard. McGee turned down the window and passed out two sets of papers. The inspection was perfunctory; the papers were coming back through the window almost as soon as they had been handed out.
McGee thanked the guard, whose attention was already turned to the truck behind them. Then they headed into Batum, and McGee rolled up his window as he drove.
“Black market sweep, like I thought,” he said.
As they drove into the outskirts of the small port city, Susan said, “If you were a graduate of Willawauk at eighteen, why weren’t you seeded into the U.S. nineteen years ago?”
“I was. I earned my college degrees there, a medical degree with a specialty in behavioral modification medicine. But by the time I had obtained an important job with connections to the U.S. defense establishment, I was no longer a faithful Russian. Remember, in those days, recruits were chosen at the age of thirteen. They weren’t yet putting three-year-olds into the Willawauk program. I had lived twelve years of ordinary life in Russia, before my training was begun, so I had a basis for comparing the U.S. and the Soviet systems. I had no trouble changing sides. I acquired a love for freedom. I went to the FBI and told them all about myself and all about Willawauk. At first, for a couple of years, they used me as a conduit for phony data which helped screw up Soviet planning. Then, five years ago, it was decided that I would go back to the USSR as a double agent. I was ‘arrested’ by the FBI. There was a big trial, during which I refused to utter one word. The papers called me the ‘Silent Spy.’ ”
“My God, I remember! It was a big story back then.”
“It was widely advertised that, even though caught red-handed in the transmission of classified information, I refused even to state what country I was from. Everyone knew it was Russia, of course, but I played this impressively stoic role. Pleased the hell out of the KGB.”
“Which was the idea.”
“Of course. After the trial, I received a long prison sentence, but I didn’t serve much time. Less than a month. I was quickly traded to the USSR for an American agent whom they were holding. When I was brought back to Moscow, I was welcomed as a hero for maintaining the secret of the Willawauk training program and the deep-cover network. I was the famous Silent Spy. I was eventually sent back to work at my old alma mater, which was what the CIA had hoped would happen.”
“And ever since, you’ve been passing information the other way, to the U.S.”
“Yes,” he said. “I’ve got two contacts in Batum, two fishermen who have limited-profit deals with the government, so they own their own boats. They’re Georgians, of course. This is Georgian SSR that we’re traveling through, and a lot of Georgians despise the central government in Moscow. I pass information to my fishermen, and they pass it along to Turkish fishermen with whom they rendezvous in the middle of the Black Sea. And thereafter, it somehow winds up with the CIA. One of those fishermen is going to pass us along to the Turks the same way he passes classified documents. At least, I
hope
he’ll do it.”
hope
he’ll do it.”
Access to the Batum docks was restricted; all ships, including the fishing boats, could be reached only by passing through one of several checkpoints. There were guarded gates that accepted trucks loaded with cargo, and there was one gate that accepted only military vehicles and personnel, and there were gates to accommodate dock workers, sailors, and others who were obliged to approach on foot; Susan and McGee went to one of the latter.
At night the wharves were poorly lighted, gloomy, except around the security checkpoints, where floodlights simulated the glare of noon. The walk-through gate was overseen by two uniformed guards, both armed with Kalisnikovs; they were involved in an animated conversation that could be heard even outside the hut in which they sat. Neither guard bestirred himself from that small, warm place; neither wanted to bother conducting a close inspection. McGee passed both his and Susan’s forged papers through the sliding window. The older of the two guards examined the documents perfunctorily and quickly passed them back, not once pausing in the discussion he was having with his compatriot.
The chainlike gate, crowned with wickedly pointed barbed wire, swung open automatically when one of the guards in the hut touched the proper button. McGee and Susan walked onto the docks, uncontested, and the gate swung shut behind them.
Susan held on to McGee’s arm, and they walked into the gloom, toward rows of large dark buildings that blocked their view of the harbor.
“Now what?” Susan whispered.
“Now we go to the fishermen’s wharf and look for a boat called the Golden Net,” McGee said.
“It seems so easy,” she said.
“Too easy,” he said worriedly.
He glanced back at the checkpoint through which they had just passed, and his face was drawn with apprehension.
Leonid Golodkin was master of the
Golden
Net, a hundred-foot fishing trawler with immense cold-storage capacity. He was a ruddy, rough-hewn man with a hard-edged, leathery face and big hands.
Golden
Net, a hundred-foot fishing trawler with immense cold-storage capacity. He was a ruddy, rough-hewn man with a hard-edged, leathery face and big hands.
Summoned by one of his crewmen, he came to the railing at the gangway, where McGee and Susan waited in the weak yellow glow of a dock lamp. Golodkin was scowling. He and Jeff McGee began to converse in rapid, emotional Russian.
Susan couldn’t understand what they were saying, but she had no difficulty understanding Captain Golodkin’s mood. The big man was angry and frightened.
Ordinarily, when McGee had information to pass to Golodkin for transfer to Turkish fishermen on the high sea, those documents were forwarded through a black market vodka dealer who operated in Batum, two blocks from the wharves. McGee and Golodkin rarely met face-to-face, and McGee
never
came to the boat. Until tonight.
never
came to the boat. Until tonight.
Golodkin nervously scanned the docks, apparently searching for curious onlookers, agents of the secret police. For a long, dreadful moment, Susan thought he was going to refuse to let them come aboard. Then, reluctantly, Golodkin swung back the hinged section of railing at the top of the gangway and hurried them through the open boarding gate. Now that he had grudgingly decided to take them in, he was clearly impatient to get them below-decks, out of sight.
They crossed the afterdeck to a spiral, metal staircase and went below. They followed Golodkin along a cold, musty, dimly lighted corridor, and Susan wondered if she would ever again be in a place that wasn’t somehow alien and forbidding.
The captain’s quarters at the end of the corridor were unquestionably foreign, even though the room was warm and well lighted by three lamps. There was a desk—on which stood a half-filled brandy snifter—a bookcase with glass doors, a liquor cabinet, and four chairs, including the one behind the desk. A sleeping alcove was separated from the main cabin by a drawn curtain.
Golodkin motioned them to two of the chairs, and McGee and Susan sat down.
Directing Susan’s attention to the brandy, McGee said, “Would you like a glass of that?”
She was shivering. The mere thought of brandy warmed her. “Yeah,” she said. “It would sure hit the spot right now.”
In Russian, McGee asked Golodkin for brandy, but before the captain could respond, the curtains rustled in front of the alcove, drawing everyone’s attention. Rustled ... and parted. Dr. Leon Viteski stepped into the main cabin. He was holding a silencer-equipped pistol, and he was smiling.
A shockwave passed through Susan. Angry about being betrayed again, furious about being manipulated through yet another charade, Susan looked at McGee, hating herself for having trusted him.
But McGee appeared to be just as surprised as she was. At the sight of Viteski, Jeff started to rise from his chair, reaching into his coat pocket for his own pistol.
Captain Golodkin stopped him from drawing the weapon and took it away from him.
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