The Miko - 02 (19 page)

After a long, long time he began to pray to a God he did not know or understand but to whom he now turned for solace and the continuation of life.

[The shape of the army]

C
. GORDON MINCK, HEAD
of Red Station, sat a dizzying eight feet above floor level, his hydraulic crane-lift chair set at maximum. There was nothing much between him and the fall straight down to the hardwood floor, and that was the way Minck liked it; he thought best and most creatively when there was a sense of danger.

His was the only office in the building—six short blocks from the White House—without wall-to-wall carpeting. That was because Minck wanted nothing in here to dampen sound. He was a fanatic on the keenness of the six senses—had been for years, ever since he had graduated at the top of his unit from the elite Fairchild Academy tucked away in rural Virginia. Most of those who made it through its awesomely grueling curriculum called the place the Bonebreaker.

Minck was continually asked the importance of the sixth sense and his answer was always the same, “Intuition is everything.” While many of his fellow station leaders spent more and more time at their increasingly sophisticated computer consoles, Minck spent less and less.

And he could see the difference. These other men were becoming gray worms, their lined, worried faces lit by the green phosphor light, racked by increasingly debilitating headaches until, made aware of the insidiously malignant effects of the consoles, they began to hire assistants to relay the computer information to them. They apparently were not disturbed overmuch by the need to replace these assistants every six months or so, or by the rising budgetary expense of the maximum security sanatorium housing them within a stone’s throw of the National Zoo, an enormous sprawling mansion over two hundred years old and designated a National Landmark. Every year the Smithsonian attempted to get it opened to the public, being ignorant of its real purpose, and every year they were denied.

There were no computer terminals anywhere in Minck’s offices; they were strictly
verboten.
However, there were a number of printout stations, one of which was in his spacious office. Two of the walls below the sixteen-foot ceiling were given over to enormous rectangular panels that resembled windows more than anything else. This was deliberate. In fact, they were giant projection screens composed of a particular chemical amalgam able to “take” the rear-projected holograms, so that they blossomed to life with an astonishing reality. The holograms, of course, changed from time to time but mostly, as now, they were of two views of Moscow: of Dzerzhinsky Square, to be more accurate, the great, open plaza dotted with bundled, astrakhaned pedestrians and, in the street behind them, one black Zil limousine caught as it entered the black, blobby hole in the forbidding facade of the structure known with fear throughout the world as Lubyanka Prison and headquarters for the KGB.

On the other wall was the second view of the square. Minck knew for a fact that some of the cells within Lubyanka looked out on this other building across the square, where children strolled with their parents, hand in hand, too young yet to know or comprehend how close they really were to the one true embodiment of evil left on earth.

Minck was gazing meditatively now at this second edifice. Once again he opened up his mind, his memories, trying to find any trace of the hatred, the fear he had once experienced upon looking out at this same view. Oh, not so expansive of course. The slitted windows in the outer cells in Lubyanka were not those of a hotel.

But Minck remembered. It had been winter then, the sky grayed with clouds stretched like sinews. Lights were always on in the vast city as night swept in off the frozen steppes to the north for its eighteen-hour stay. And everywhere the noise of the city was muffled by the ubiquitous snow, turning even the most normal of sounds strange and unreal, increasing Minck’s sense of disassociation. How he had come to hate the snow, for it had brought him to Lubyanka, his wrists manacled. Snow had hidden the icy patch in the street on which he had skidded. He would have eluded them otherwise without doubt, for they were mathematically minded, drilled to precision, but, as with all KGB underlings, lacking the concept of intuition.

Intuition equaled freedom in Minck’s mind. And his intuition would have saved him that chill night in Moscow. Except for the snow.
Snyeg,
the Russians called it. In any language he hated it.

He continued to stare at the building that had been his last look at Moscow before they pulled him from the holding cell and began the “interviews.” From then on his home was a windowless space of not more than fifteen square feet, with a plywood cot bolted to the wall and a hole down which to wash his waste products. The stench was appalling, as was the cold. Heat was unheard of in the inner cells.

Sightless, like a rat in the dark, Minck fought to retain his senses against the numbing effects his interviewers were inducing in him. And to that end he conjured up in his mind memories of the view from his holding cell, for a time certain that it was the last sliver of the world he would ever see.

He observed the young Russian couples walking, the families trudging through the last of the spring snows—for these holograms revolved with the seasons—and felt the clear space within him, the embers of passionate hate and terror that consumed him, that, for the instant before he crossed over the border into neutral territory, had caused him to pause, to consider wildly returning and killing them all singlehanded.

And like a careful cowboy on a dry and dusty plain, Minck kicked over these glowing ashes, nurturing the essence of that hate: Protorov. He gave his whole attention to the crenellated building in the hologram that had come to mean even more to him than its sinister sister structure across the square: the Moscow Children’s World department store.

His eyes closed in easy meditation. His finger depressed one of a series of studs recessed into the left arm of his chair.

“Tanya,” he said softly into the void of the room, “two directives. One: get that Doctor Kidd—what’s his Christian name? Timothy?—on the phone. If he’s not at the Park Avenue office, try Mount Sinai Hospital. Get him out of rounds.”

“What pseudonym shall we use as imprimatur?” The voice that emerged from the hidden speaker system was husky, with just a trace of a foreign slur.

“Oh, let’s be ingenious today, shall we? Use the Department of International Export Tariffs.”

“Very good.”

“Second,” Minck said, “since our time seems to be rapidly running out, invade ARRTS and call up the file on Linnear NMN Nicholas.”

It was Justine’s first day on the job and she was uncomfortable as a cat on a hot tin roof. For more than three years she had been more or less happily ensconced in her own one-woman company, delivering free-lance advertising concepts to medium-range accounts. While she had not amassed a fortune, her talents were such that even in an uncertain economy she had managed to do quite well.

Of course from time to time she had received offers to join agencies, but the comfort of working for herself had always outweighed the increased security that working for someone else would give her.

But meeting Rick Millar had begun to change all that. Just over six weeks ago Mary Kate Sims had phoned Justine in frantic need of a project designer. Mary Kate worked for Millar, Soames & Robberts, one of the newer agencies with a high profile and even higher net yearly bookings. Two of their best designers were down with the flu and would Justine be a dear and fill in on the American Airlines project? It was a rush job, but Mary Kate said she could guarantee Justine a sizable bonus for on-time delivery.

Justine took the project, working on it eighteen hours a day for almost a week. But ten days later, into three or four of her own projects—one of which was giving her fits—she had forgotten all about Mary Kate and her American Airlines package.

Until the call from Rick Millar, the head of the agency. Apparently American had loved Justine’s idea so much they were turning what had been a New York regional into a national campaign. The firm of Millar, Soames & Robberts had received a sizable bonus and a long-term contract with American.

Rick said that he had loved Justine’s idea before the agency had submitted it to American. Justine did not know whether or not to believe him. He made a lunch date with her.

The following week they met at La Côte Basque, a superb French restaurant that Justine had read about several times in
Gourmet
but had never actually been to.

Yet the delicious food was the least memorable aspect of those several hours because, as it turned out, Millar had more on his mind than just wanting to meet her.

“Justine,” he said, over drinks, “I’m basically a people-oriented person in business as well as in my private life. I believe in creating an atmosphere that allows my employees to work at full throttle.

“But more than that, I allow certain individuals to cut across departmental boundaries when their talents warrant it.” He took a sip of his bourbon. “I think you’re such a person. A job with us wouldn’t be all that different for you than having your own business.” He grinned. “Except of course that you’d make a ton of money and build your rep among the high-level accounts that much quicker.”

Justine put her drink aside for the moment, her heart hammering. “Are you giving me a direct job offer?”

Millar nodded.

“Isn’t this supposed to come over the Grand Marnier soufflé or something?”

He laughed. “I’m a maverick in every way.”

She watched him for a time. He was fairly young, perhaps just forty. His hair was thick and long enough to reach his collar. Streaked blond, brushed straight back, it could just as easily belong to a surfer from Redondo Beach. He had a good hard face with the hint of crow’s feet at the corners of his intelligent, wide set blue-green eyes. He had the kind of nose that made you think of Mercedes, pink gins, and polo along the carefully manicured greensward of the Connecticut shore. He should have had a cable-knit sweater spread on his back. But his manner belied all that.

“I can see the wheels turning in there,” he said as they were served the first course of fresh bluepoint oysters. He grinned again, a sunny, somehow reassuring expression that showed good white teeth. “I wasn’t born into money. I worked hard to get where I am today.”

But she found that she had little appetite, because she knew that she was going to take him up on his offer. Dreams like this one rarely came along in life. Though the idea turned her edgy, she had learned early to grab them before they slipped irretrievably by.

In fact, she had been so keyed up about the job that she had asked Rick if she could start on the following day. Friday, instead of waiting through the weekend. With Nicholas just gone she had had no plans, and three idle days, waiting, was too much for her patience. So it was that she had shown up just past eight—a full hour before she had to—at Madison Avenue and Fifty-fourth Street. The offices of Millar, Soames & Robberts were three guttering twenty-first-century floors of the sleekest furnishings money could buy, with floor-to-ceiling windows in every executive office, and mechanical and production departments that would surely make her work a snap—she had been so used to doing everything herself. Now, as Rick had said to her over lunch, she could concentrate on ideas, allowing others to complete her sketches.

Rick himself introduced Justine to Min, her secretary. She was no more than twenty and, with the patch of green in her dark hair, seemed to be the agency’s concession to the post-punk era. But Justine soon found out that beneath the wild hair was a sharp brain that understood all the convoluted workings of the organization.

Justine’s office was a floor below Mary Kate’s and, because Mary Kate was a vice president, it was somewhat smaller than her friend’s. But it was light and airy. A fresh-looking coleus with a pink satin
GOOD LUCK
ribbon tacked to it sat on a desk otherwise empty save for a phone. The office was sparsely furnished with, it seemed, an agglomeration of cast-offs.

Rick apologized for the state of the office, saying that the company was in the midst of reorganizing departments and that Min would bring her a stack of furnishing and accessory catalogs “so that things can get straightened out in a couple of weeks.”

She thanked Rick for the plant and, putting it beside the window, sat behind her new desk. Her first call was to Nicholas, in her excitement forgetting that it was the middle of the night in Tokyo. The hotel balked at putting the call through, the officious operator asking if it was an emergency. When she explained to her what the local time was, Justine settled for leaving a message, not knowing of course that he was out wandering through Jan Jan.

But as she cradled the receiver, she experienced a sharp pang of sadness. She had never felt more acutely Nicholas’ absence or her desire for him to return. She had fought with desperation the fear and anxiety welling up inside her when he had told her he was going to work for her father. Were her feelings irrational or real? When it came to her father, she knew that she felt trapped by her emotions. The shape of her life had been dictated by Raphael Tomkin. As a woman in her twenties, she had had love affairs abruptly severed without her knowing; as a teenager, she had seen the devastation his harshness and self-involvement had wreaked on her mother; as a child, she had been rendered fatherless by his business affairs.