Ultimate Issue (13 page)

“That’s John,” she said.

“He’s not a pilot then?” asked Daventry.

“How do you know?” She looked surprised

“No wings on his uniform.”

“I never noticed,” she said.

At the door she turned to him. “I really am most grateful to you for coming over,” she said.

“That’s all right, Serena, but there really wasn’t any need for panic. You mustn’t start imagining things. It’ll all get sorted out.”

It was as much for his own sake that he wanted to put her mind at rest.

“Gerald,” she said.

He froze. For some reason he was taken aback at her using his first name.

“You will stand by me, won’t you? You will help me if they come for me?”

Her eyes were wide, pleading.

“If you have any legal problems, well, phone me,” he said, and fled.

“Thank you again,” she called after him, as he went down the stairs. In the hallway he became aware for the first time of a strong aroma of curry. Ron must be having a cook up, he thought.

He stood in the street, troubled. Whatever he was get

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tiny involved in, it did not fit the nice regular, predestined pattern of his life. Personally or professionally.

He also wondered why, if she had a photo of the American, he hadn’t seen a single picture of her diplomatic fiance. Or perhaps she kept that in the more intimate surroundings of her bedroom.

Daventry hurried down to the junction of Mortimer Street to get a cab, never noticing that one of the men in the black Chrysler had photographed him several times with a long-lensed camera

“He was only up there fifteen minutes,” remarked the man who had taken the pictures. “You think he fucked her?” He unscrewed the telephoto lens and put it in its case. It was an expensive piece of government property.

Unterberg didn’t particularly like the OSI photographer.

But all he said was “I don’t think Mr. Daventry works that fast, Alvin.”

Saturday, July 1,1961

London

“WBRB YOU followed?” was the first thing Laurie asked. “No.” Verago frowned. “I mean, I don’t know. I didn’t look. Who should be following me?”

“I thought you might know by now,” she replied.

She was tense, almost nervous.

He took the glass she offered him. “Know exactly what?”

Her beautiful antique whisky still tasted superb, and she looked as good as ever, but over her shoulder, on the shelf, the ceramic jester intruded. Last time he had just been an ornament, now he jarred. His hunched back, his big nose, the lewd grin, there was something obscene about him.

She saw his reaction. “You don’t like Smiley?”

“Not my favorite.”

“He’s very special,” she said.

Verago raised his tumbler, “Skol. I’d rather look at you. You’re prettier than General Croxford, and you got much better legs than Lieutenant Jensen. Even when

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you’re being aN mysterious.” The second swallow was even more warni ng. “What are you trying to tell me?”

She sat in the armchair opposite him, so near and yet so far.

“Tony,” she said gravely, “have you got any idea what you’re into?”

“You fin me in.”

She hesitated. She tapped her cigarette nervously on the ashtray that rested by her arm. Then she stubbed it out. She seemed to have reached a decision.

“I’ve found out something. About you. You’re under surveillance, Tony. Everywhere you go. Everything you do. Everybody you see. You’re on the list.”

If she expected him to be shaken, she was wron&

“I see” was all he said

“A blue file came into the colonel’s office. Blue for top secret. The OSI’s marked your card.”

He still sat impassive.

“You watch yourself,” she added.

“Maybe you ought to,” said Verago.

She raised her eyebrows.

“You ten me I’m being shadowed. That they know everything I do, everywhere I go. So you let me come here, right to your apartment.” His lip curled. “What’s the matter, you tired of your job?” She flinched, and he went on. “You know you can’t get away with it. They’ll know you saw me. Maybe they’ve even bugged this place. Maybe he’s recording every damn wordl”

He scowled at Smiley.

“They don’t need to listen.” She paused. “You see, I tell them everything.”

He picked up his whisky glass and took a hasty sip. It still tasted nice, but he felt he had had enough.

“Everything,” she repeated.

“You tell the OSI?” he croaked.

“I report everything.” She got up and, without asking, refilled his glass. “I,ike the other night when you stayed here. And I’ll report tomorrow that you came around. And that we slept together afterward.”

She had that mocking smile again. “Because isn’t that what we’re going to do?”

“I ” he began, and stopped, confused.

It amused her.

“You should see yourself, Tony,” she exclaimed. “Mouth open, as if the ceiling’s fallen in on you. Relax.”

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She bent down and kissed him. Her lipstick tasted nice. “I’m only saving the government money,” she added. “They’d know all about us anyway, so I got in first. I like to help them keep the files up to date.”

She lit a fresh cigarette and exhaled a cloud of smoke.

“Maybe with any luck they’ll ask me to spy on you.”

“And will you?” he asked coldly.

“Of course.” She smiled. “Every little inch.”

She settled back in the armchair and stretched like a cat. It accentuated the contours of her breasts under the tightness of her silk shirt.

“Shocked, are you, Tony?”

“It’s a little hard to take. You forget I’m just a simple country lawyer.”

“Oh, yeah,” she remarked sardonically.

“Anyway, just how much do you feed back?”

“Exactly what I want,” she replied. “Okay?”

He got up and walked over to the window. Nobody seemed to be watching the apartment block as far as he could see. Nobody was loitering in a doorway, no car stood with two occupants never taking their eyes off the building.

“I told you,” called Laurie. “They probably followed you here, but as soon as they saw where you were going, they called it off because they knew I’d be a good girl.”

She was standing up too. He wanted her, badly. He walked toward her and kissed her, long and hard.

“I hope you can stay tonight,” she whispered in his ear.

“I I ought to get back to the base,” he murmured, and he knew that was true, but he also knew he didn’t care at that moment. “I’ve got lots to do.”

“Stay,” she urged. “They’ll be pretty disappointed if you don’t, I suspect.”

She pressed him to her body.

“So will 1,” she added.

“Well,” said Verago, and started unbuttoning her silk shirt, “I hate disappointing people.”

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Sunday, July 2, 1961 Probe

kE ugly misshapen plane, with its curious outgrowth on top of its fuselage, flew 26,000 feet above Czechoslovakia, the thirty-strong double crew at action stations.

Inside the aircraft, a transformed Super Constellation few unauthorized people ever got close to, seven and a half tons of special, most secret electronic equipment was listening, watching, recording, supervised by the men in flight suits.

Some were air force personnel, others civilian technicians. None of them ever talked about their job, but they had a cover story. They were “meteorologists.” They chased the weather. All they were interested in, they said, were cloud formations, high-pressure zones, depressions, wind, and rain.

The WV-2E was doing a dangerous job. The only guns she carried were the side arms some of the aircrew wore. She had no defense against attack, other than some electronic gadgets to confuse and mislead enemy radar.

And it didn’t fool the thirty men crouched at their posts. They knew that, thousands of feet below, invisible eyes were following them. That on radar consoles and flight-plotting screens, they were being trailed. That was the mission. To test reaction.

This night, July 2, 1961, O for Oboe’s mission was another move in a mutual chess game in the skies over Europe. For high above the British Isles, a Tupolev TU-16 was being tracked by NATO’s silent defences.

The Badger, cruising at 31,000 feet, had had a busy night, scouting across East Anglia, making electronic recordings of the U.S. bases dotted about the Hat countryside, and was now swinging northwest for a quick peep at Holy Loch and a few other interesting locations on the way.

The twin-engined turbo prop TU-16’s crew of ten had made the flight before. To them, like the men of the WV2E, it was almost routine.

Lately, of course, there had been a certain unease

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among some of the flyers on the illicit long-distance ferret missions.

Like spies on the ground, the game had a set protocol. CIA men did not, on the whole, kill KGB men in Paris or Rome or London. Nor did the KGB, its rival professional colleagues. That kind of viciousness only led to reprisals and cost both sides valuable operatives. It was messy and, in the long run, unproductive.

By the same token, ferrets on both sides were generally allowed to do their snooping unhindered, providing the ground rules were obeyed.

A couple of U2s had overstepped them and never returned home. So not long afterward a Myasishchev M ~ Molot strategic radar plane disappeared somewhere over the Atlantic. The message was mutually understood.

For months now the game had been played strictly by the rules. But then came the RB-47H. She must have done something that annoyed the Russians to get shot down over the Baltic.

It worried some of the men on Oboe as they watched the blips and indicators and radar sweeps on their equipment. They had no idea what the other plane’s mission had been, but its loss served to remind them that game though it was, the pawns died if somebody made the wrong move.

It was usually just a gesture, but that didn’t make the thought of being blown apart by a missile or torn to pieces by twenty-three-millimeter cannon shells any more attractive.

There was another reason why the lost RB-7H was on their minds.

It had been based at Laconbury. And that was Oboe’s home too.

Laconbury

The unhurried, cathedral-like calm of the operations room wasn’t disturbed by the arrival of Brigadier General Croxford.

Thirty feet below the base of Laconbury, nuclear-war proof, this nerve center was manned twentyfour hours a day. And to the Cyclops wing it was the focal point of the universe.

As if to prove it, the clocks on the wall gave the simultaneous times in Omaha, New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Sydney, London, Berlin, and Moscow.

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Omaha time was especially important. A bright-yello~v phone linked them directly with the heart of a mountain in that state. And in that mountain was the voice that could start World War III.

High in his chair, the duty controller, a lieutenant colonel, surveyed his silent cohorts. In front of him was the status board, showing at a glance the instant readiness of the units that would begin that war.

There was a huge electronic map of Europe, little lights blinking on it from time to time, and another large board that had black curtains drawn across it. Every man in the room was cleared to see that board, but, like a holy shrine that must only be uncovered on special occasions, the curtains remained closed.

Behind them, on the board, were the targets. The places on the map that would evaporate in a few minutes after Omaha had given the word.

There were other wall displays. They indicated weather conditions, the status of missions in progress, expected arrivals at the base from others abroad, the names of squadron and flight commanders on standby at that moment.

And there were phones. Batteries of them. Apart from the yellow one, a whole array, in different colors. Duty officers sat at curved consoles, each with a panel of switches and knobs and buttons in front of him, and his own private allocation of phones.

Most of the people in the room were in shirt sleeves. All of them had plastic badges hanging from a button; ordinary ID cards did not gain entry here.

Occasionally a low voice spoke softly into a phone. A computer screen glowed. In one corner teletypes periodically coughed out short messages. Nothing was rushed. Nobody raised his voice. The carpet on the floor was dark blue; the lighting pleasantly subdued; the air, carefully filtered, clear; the temperature just right.

The general quietly walked over to the controller. The lieutenant colonel handed him a situation clipboard. Croxford glanced at it.

“Good.” He nodded, giving it back.

“How long was the Badger overhead?” he asked.

“Just passed by, General. They got him tracked over the Irish Sea right now.”

“Hmm.”

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Croxford looked at the controller’s log. “What’s the status of Oboe?”

The controller leaned forward and tapped a keyboard. Some electronic letters flashed across a screen in front of him.

“Over Austria, sir.”

“No problems?”

“None we know about, General.”

“Who’s the commander?”

“Colonel Mason, sir.”

The controller was puzzled. Croxford usually knew that kind of detail. He was famous for remembering names, knowing every man’s job, even the squadron nicknames of individual pilots. The general must have something on his mind.

“You ever sat on a courtmartial, Bob?” asked Croxford.

It took the controller completely by surprise. “Sir?”

“I asked if you had ever sat on a court.”

“I was on a couple of Specials. In the States.”

“We’re going to have a general soon,” said Croxford.

“Is that so? I heard something mentioned….”

“What did you hear?” Croxford demanded sharply.

One of the duty officers looked up from his console. He couldn’t make out what the old man was saying, but the general didn’t often indulge in chats in the command post. He wished he was closer.

“Just scuttlebutt, General,” the controller said hastily. “Bar talk.”

Croxford grunted. “I don’t want any gossip about it. Is that clear?”

“Understood, sir.”

Croxford prepared to go, then paused. “I want a good board,” he said. “A smart court. You get me?”