Deep Cover (15 page)

“I know where you were born,” Belsky said. “Get your clothes on—I'm in a hurry, we want to make landfall before daylight.”

“Daylight tomorrow, you mean. Not today, unless you want my boat to sprout wings. If you're in such a hurry why don't you fly?”

“Too many people watch the incoming flights over there. Japan Defense Agency, CIA, Chinese—the whole world lives in Japanese airports. In this part of the world there are too many people who'd recognize me.”

“Yet you're going over
there. ”

“Japan's the hot spot. A Caucasian like me sticks out. In America I'm just another middle-aged businessman. Come on, hurry up.”

Migachev sàt down to lace his boots. “We've plenty of time. Help yourself to the food.”

Belsky ate standing up—black bread, herring, a cup of
koumiss.
“Aren't you ready yet?”

“I'm ready. Let's go.” Migachev had put on a heavy turt-leneck sweater over his undershirt, a topcoat over that, a heavy greatcoat over that, and a flowing oilskin slicker on top. He wore fleece-lined gloves inside his mittens and three pairs of socks inside his oversize waterproof boots.

“We're not going to the North Pole,” Belsky said.

“The bridge on my boat is open.”

Belsky grunted. “Let's go. Are my things aboard?”

“Yes, of course.” Migachev warmed his mittens over the stove and turned off the lamp. Belsky followed him through the door by ear until he was beyond the end of the dockhouse and could orient himself by the city lights. Migachev's boots crunched the snow with loud hollow whacks. It was low tide; the water was six meters below, and Belsky moved with care—it would have been easy to slip off the dock. Migachev went down the ladder first and lighted a kerosene lamp on the boat.
Belsky climbed down, testing each rung before he put his weight on it. The boat was a twenty-meter fisherman—
sixty-five-footer
, he corrected himself doggedly. It had twin diesels, too much engine for such a boat, specially installed for Migachev's clandestine runs across the Sea of Japan. In outward appearance she was clumsy, disreputable, an old-fashioned fishing boat in need of paint, but beneath the waterline her hull was sleek over a deep-ocean keel, shaped for speed.

They went out of harbor on one engine. It growled sonorously; the boat's movement was sluggish until they cleared the last channel buoy and moved beyond earshot of land. Then Migachev cut in the second engine and opened them up. The fisherman jumped forward, riding high on her keel, making twenty-seven knots. The linesman came astern from his lookout post in the bow and took the wheel from Migachev, who turned and said, “We can go below now.”

Belsky was enjoying the cold salt wind but Migachev was wet and miserable and went below without waiting an answer. Belsky followed him into the cramped cabin. He had to stoop to clear the transom when he entered. There was a tart chop to the sea and he had to keep hold of the bulkhead to avoid being pitched off his feet.

Migachev sat down on the lower bunk, nearest the heat of the engines. “Those are your things.” Migachev pointed to the suitcase and the objects laid out on the opposite bunk. The suitcase was Samsonite, the clothing American with San Francisco and Fresno shop labels. Belsky already had with him the English tweed suit and overcoat he would wear on the Japanese leg of the journey.

Migachev said, “It will take about twenty-six hours to Komatsu. We should arrive about three o'clock tomorrow morning. You can catch a bus into Fukui, it's only seventy kilometers, and the train to Kyoto arriving at eight-fifteen. You have a reservation on the ten-o'clock flight out of Kyoto for Honolulu and Los Angeles.”

Belsky examined the documents. There were three passports, all bearing different names. Two were American, the third Swiss. The Swiss passport in the name of Heinrich
Wiedemann, textile merchant, he would use to board the JAL plane at Kyoto and to clear American customs and immigration at Los Angeles—because, curiously, the Americans tended to inspect foreign visitors from friendly European countries with less care than they exercised in inspecting their own people.

Belsky had a look at the rest—visa, Social Security card, Fresno voter's registration, California driver's license, birth and baptismal certificates, school and university diplomas, an Air Force discharge, the lot—and then he climbed into the upper bunk and went promptly to sleep.

By the local calendar and clock it was early Tuesday afternoon by the time Belsky cleared Customs at Los Angeles International Airport and made his way to a telephone booth. Migachev had given him the number.

“Westlake Publishers, may I help you?”

“My name is Dangerfield,” Belsky said. “I believe you have a message for me.”

“Hold on a moment, please?”

The girl's voice was replaced by a man's. “Mr. Dangerfield? Right on schedule, sir. Have a good trip?”

“I think you've got something for me.”

“Where are you calling from, Mr. Dangerfield?”

“Los Angeles airport.”

“Then it's an open line. We might meet for lunch—do you know Flagg's? The taxi driver can find it, near the Beverly Wilshire. I'll meet you there in half an hour. There'll be a table in my name—Tucker Stark. Satisfactory?”

“No. Meet me at American Airlines here at the airport. The front entrance.”

“Ah, that's somewhat irregular, Mr. Dangerfield. I'd prefer not to—”

“I have a plane to catch, Mr. Stark.” Belsky hung up and went outside.

He confirmed his ticket and checked his bag and by the time he was finished standing in lines the contact was there at the front door. Belsky recognized the man from the photos in his
dossier: Tidsov, cover name Tucker Stark, chief of the Los Angeles
rezidentsia.
As soon as he knew he had been spotted Tidsov walked into the building and turned toward the concession area carrying a leather suitcase, one of those squat soft bags designed to fit under an airplane seat. Tidsov put it into a twenty-four-hour storage locker, deposited a coin and locked it, and came away with the key in his pocket. Belsky watched him without actually looking at him more than once; he followed with the corners of his vision while Tidsov went into a telephone booth and closed the door. Three minutes later a blond man wandered past the phone booth and Tidsov stepped out of it and left the building without glancing at Belsky; meanwhile the blond man stepped into the phone booth Tidsov had just vacated, emerged momentarily, walked directly to the bank of lockers, inserted a key and withdrew the leather flight bag from the locker. The blond man carried the bag out through the glass-doored entrance and Belsky turned to watch covertly while the blond man exchanged glances with Tidsov. Then the two men separated and walked away in opposite directions.

A simple charade, probably unnecessary. The
rezidentsia
had a safe line but there was no telling who had a tap on the airport public phones; it wasn't as if Los Angeles International were an obscure filling station. The FBI might have had a routine tap and the phone call from Belsky just might have stirred up enough interest for them to send someone to observe the meeting place. If so, they would have witnessed, to all observable intents, a drop. If the FBI followed the blond man and grabbed the suitcase to find out what was in it, they would probably find old clothes.

Belsky waited near the paperback stand and then took off his topcoat and stood looking mildly exasperated, a man who didn't want his arm burdened. Finally his eye settled on the lockers and he allowed his expression to change, and he walked resolutely toward the lockers, found an open one—the one the suitcase had occupied—put his coat inside and spent a quarter and pocketed the key.

He had forty-five minutes before his flight; he looked at
camera displays and magazines and bought an
Examiner
and had a beer in the bar. When his flight was called he walked right past the lockers and then snapped his fingers with sudden obvious realization and went back to claim his coat. When he unlocked the door and reached inside he peeled away the envelope that Tidsov had taped under the locker ceiling; he concealed it in the folds of the coat and walked to his plane.

It was an hour's flight to Tucson. When the
FASTEN SEAT BELT
sign was extinguished Belsky went back to the lavatory and locked himself in. The envelope and its single sheet of paper were made of phosphor-treated flashpaper; he committed the message to memory in the time it took to read it, held it over the aluminum toilet bowl and set fire to it. By the time it had fallen into the bowl it had been consumed and he flushed the ash residue down and went back to his seat. The stewardess was passing out snacks, and Belsky smiled at her.

PRIORITY UTMOST

DANGERFIELD LA IA 2APR 1435 PST PANAM 363

VIA WESTLAKE PUBLISHER

KGB 1

CYPHER 1528 SG

SENT 2115 GMT WP ACKNOWLEDGE

MESSAGE BEGINS X TENTATIVE CONFIRMATION TARTAR INTENT X DATE UNCERTAIN BUT NOT LESS THAN 7 DAYS NOR MORE THAN 30 DAYS X TARTAR POLITBURO STILL UNDECIDED AS TO FINAL COMMITMENT BUT ASSUME TARTAR ATTACK X IN VIEW OF SHORT TIME AVAILABLE DISCARD PLAN Z X EXECUTE PLAN B X ACCELERATE IMMEDIATE ACTIVATION OF PLAYERS X STAND BY TO EXECUTE PLAN B3 ON SIGNAL POSSIBLY WITHIN 120 HOURS X VR X MESSAGE ENDS 17639 42 2474

Chapter Five

Lieutenant Colonel Fred Winslow picked a ball-point pen out of the desk caddy and began to scrawl his OK and initials across the mimeographed duty roster but the pen wouldn't write and he had to scratch it savagely across the corner of an envelope to get the ink flowing. He made a noise and took off his reading glasses and wiped them, and scowled abstractedly across the small office at the place in the far wall where a window ought to be. There were only photographs: the Commander in Chief, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the Secretary of the Air Force, the Air Force Chief of Staff. No window. The office was sixty feet underground and the light came from recessed fluorescent fixtures in the ceiling and there was only one way to tell whether it was day or night—the twenty-four-hour clock above the door. Now and then Winslow entertained
the fantasy of installing a sixty-foot periscope and a four-by-five window to go with it.

According to the clock it was getting on to six o'clock and time to go home. He wandered into his tiny lavatory, buttoned his collar, hoisted his tie up from half-mast and inserted it neatly between the second and third buttons of his uniform shirt. The face in the mirror was round and mild, the eyes large and timid, the loose thatch of hair across his high forehead getting distressingly gray. He really looked as if he must have been middle-aged since birth: the kind of man who had been given a briefcase for his eleventh birthday and a book of crossword puzzles for his forty-third. Celia always laughed:
It's the perfect image for you, darling, why change it?
But Winslow remembered the adventuresome anticipations of his youth.

Nick Conrad put his head into the office. ‘‘Fred? Colonel Ryan's up in the Wing Commander's HQ, wants a word with you before you go off.”

Winslow took his blue jacket down from the hanger. “What's the flap?”

“No flap.” Conrad had sharp points on all his bones. A narrow feral face and waxy brown hair that came to a widow's peak, and a major's gold leaves on his neat uniform. He lit a cigarette and blew smoke out his nose. “Christ what a week.”

“Why?”

“The whole load. Yesterday I had to pull OD and tonight I'll be' here till midnight distributing the new codes.” The doomsday codes were changed every four days—next week it would be Saturday, the week after that Wednesday. The envelopes came down from Colorado by plane under guard and wherever they went there had to be two officers in attendance—the courier from NORAD and the ICBM wing's Electronics Warfare Officer, Conrad. There were forty-two code envelopes and each had to be hand-delivered to its station by the two officers: two to each of the eighteen silos and the rest to command personnel. At the same time last week's envelopes had to be picked up and destroyed under supervision. It made for a long dreary evening.

Conrad was still holding the door and Winslow headed for
it but the phone rang and he had to turn back. It was Celia. “Darling, I know it's short notice, but Ramsey Douglass happened to phone just now and said he has to see us. I invited him for dinner—I hope you don't mind?”

Winslow closed his eyes. “All right.”

“There's a letter from Barbara.”

“Fine.”

“She seems to have a boyfriend.”

“A boyfriend. For Christ's sake she's fourteen years old.”

“Never too early.” Celia chuckled.

“I'm on my way out, but Colonel Ryan wants to see me. I may be a few minutes late.”

“That's all right, Ramsey's not coming till eight. Bye, darling.”