James P. Hogan (17 page)

“Keeping my hand in. It’s nice to know you can still do it.” Foleda lifted a hand from the wheel to make a throwingaway gesture. “Anyhow, every once in a while I get tired of it: It can get to you – haying those creeps behind you everywhere you go.”

“Do you do this kind of thing when Myra’s with you, too?”

“Would you believe me if I told you that she showed me how to do it?”

Barbara gave him a curious look. “You know, I would. Why, is it true?”

“Yes. Her brother used to do stunts for movies when she was a kid.”

“Didn’t they cover it when you took field training?”

“Oh sure, but Myra’s way is better.”

They left the road to cut across the parking lot of a shopping mall, and exited into a lane at the back. “Are we still going to make it on time?” Barbara asked, glancing at the clock in the dashboard.

“Probably sooner than we would have if we’d gone the other way, from the look of how they had that road dug up,” Foleda said. “This leads to another route to Langley. It’s worth knowing.” They were en route for the CIA’s headquarters. A man by the name of Robert Litherland had called from there to say that the CIA had picked up something that would be of interest to Foleda’s department, but didn’t elect to go into further detail. However, since Gerald Kehrn from Defense was also going to be there, Foleda guessed it had something to do with
Tereshkova
.

“Anyhow,” Barbara prompted, “before this sudden urge seized you to recapture lost youth, you were saying…”

“Oh yes, about Lew McCain and the Air Force woman. The impression I got when Uncle Phil and I talked to Volst was that State and the Soviets are playing a cat-and-mouse game over the whole thing. It took us long enough to even come clean and admit we’re missing two people. We want communications contact, and until the Soviets give it to us, our people will only refer to the cover identities. But the Soviets are rejecting that as ludicrous. They want the real names and positions, and an admission that it was all official and we goofed.”

“But they’re not going public?”

“Not so far, anyway. That’s something they can afford to keep in reserve. Meanwhile, we don’t know what’s happening with our two people. We don’t even know for sure where they are.”

Barbara sighed and stared out at the procession of well-kept, older-style clapboard homes with screened porches, bright-painted shutters, and glimpses of lawns sheltered in privacy behind barricades of flowering shrubbery. “Lew can take care of himself, I don’t doubt,” she said distantly after a while. “I feel more for that Air Force woman, Bryce. It’s a sorry way to wind up when all she wanted to do was be a scientist.” Foleda grunted – either noncommittally or in sympathy; it was difficult to tell. Barbara looked across at him. “What kind of a person is she? Did you find out much when you talked to Colonel Raymond up at Hanscom?”

“Some. She’s from a family with something of a military tradition, mainly Navy. Born over in Tacoma, Washington State. Her father was an engineering officer on nuclear subs, and her mother was a Navy brat, too – raised around bases from Scotland to Japan even before she married Bryce’s father. So the mother was used to getting along without a man around. Raymond figures that was what gave Bryce her stubborn streak.”

“Stubborn, eh? That might not be too bad a thing in this situation.”

“Maybe so, maybe not,” Foleda said. “Raymond and I couldn’t make our minds up. Apparently she’s good as a scientist, but defensive about it to the verge of fanaticism – you know, the ethical purity of science, objectivity, honesty, that kind of stuff.”

“Uh-huh. So?”

“It makes her more than a little disdainful toward things like politics and the reasons why this kind of job needs to be done. Raymond says it can make her difficult enough to work with sometimes, even when she’s on the same side. In other words, she won’t take easily to the idea of knuckling under to people she feels inwardly are her intellectual inferiors. That sounds like good news. But if she came up against an interrogator from the same mold, and it turned into a battle of will, it could backfire. Let’s just hope it isn’t getting her a harder time than is necessary.”

The story at the CIA was that a prominent Russian scientist, director of a major research and communications establishment, wanted to defect. He had approached an American called Melvin Bowers at a scientific conference in Japan, and Bowers had initially contacted the embassy in Tokyo. Now Bowers was back in the US.

Foleda sat back and tapped absently at his tooth with a thumbnail while he stared at the map of the Soviet Union being presented on a wallscreen. His brow creased beneath his wiry, short-cropped hair. “Where’s this place, again?” he asked after a thoughtful silence.

Gerald Kehrn operated a control on a panel inset below the edge of the table. For once, to Foleda’s relief, he was managing to keep reasonably still this morning, and not having to get up and walk about all the time. On the map, a light-cursor moved to seek out a point located in the Vilyuisk Mountain region, in a desolate part of Siberia between the Olenek and Lena rivers. A moment later, one of the auxiliary screens beside the main one showed an enlarged satellite picture of a fenced-in cluster of buildings and other constructions scattered among a forest of communications antennas. A pattern of rectangular buildings arrayed in monotonous, barrack-like lines was partly visible outside the fence on one side, while an open expanse of wet-looking terrain broken by patches of scrub and an occasional tree rose toward a ridge of hills on the other.

“It’s called Sokhotsk, ‘” Kehrn said. “Located on the Central Siberian Plateau about two hundred miles southwest of a city called Zhigansk. We know it’s a major node in the Soviet military-and emergency-communications network; also, it’s one of their primary space-operations groundlink stations.”

Litherland, a solidly built CIA man in his late thirties, with collar-length blond hair and broad, linebacker shoulders, was sprawled casually in his chair in the center in a way that contrasted with Kehrn’s tense, upright posture. He tossed up a hand loosely to interject, “There’s more going on at that place than we’ve figured – something very big and very classified. That’s why Cabman could be extremely useful.” In the eternal double-talk that pervaded the intelligence world, “Cabman” was the code name that had been given to Professor Dyashkin.

“Is that the nearest town – the one two hundred miles away?” Foleda asked, still studying the display.

“There’s a small industrial town called Nizhni Zaliski about ten miles north,” Kehrn replied. “About five thousand people. But it doesn’t have much connection with Sokhotsk. It was built for the workers of a new mining and construction project over the mountains from Sokhotsk.”

“How far from Sokhotsk is this project?”

“Aw, six to ten miles, I’d guess.” Kehrn glanced at Litherland. Litherland confirmed with a nod.

“Over the mountains,” Foleda said.

“Yes.” Kehrn looked puzzled. “Is it important?”

Foleda shrugged. “Who knows? Just trying to get the picture.” He looked at Barbara. “Did you have any other points, Barb?”

She glanced at her notes. “Is Bowers okay?”

“Yes, how about this Professor Bowers from California?” Foleda asked. “Are we happy he’s clean?”

Litherland nodded. “First-rate record. He’s had top clearance for government work for six years. Stable, married, no personal problems, and a history of everything okay in the family. We’re running a check on anything that may have changed since his last review.”

“Is he available if we need to talk to him?” Foleda asked.

“He’s staying in the area, for the time being,” Litherland confirmed. “Fifteen minutes from here.”

Foleda nodded, satisfied. He glanced first at Kehrn, then at Barbara for possible further questions or comments, then looked back at Litherland. “Okay. So, Robert, what can you tell us about Comrade Professor Igor Lukich Dyashkin, alias Cabman?”

Litherland called a databank record onto the tabletop screenpad that everyone had before them. A heading
CABMAN
:
SUMMARY
PERSONAL
PROFILE
: appeared at the top, and below it the name. Underneath, a picture appeared in the upper left corner of a man in his late forties, fresh-faced with a straight mouth, candid stare, and boyishly cut hair parted conventionally on the left. Beside the picture was a summary of height, weight, and other personal statistics. After a couple of seconds, a synthetic voice began reciting details of Dyashkin’s history, which appeared as text in the space below, line by line, as each was narrated.

Born April 6, 1964, Tula, USSR.

Father: Anton Konstantmovitch, b. Leningrad, 1935, production engineer.

Mother: Natasha Pavlovich, nee Sepirov, b. Odessa, 1939, civil servant.

1973 Moved with family to Orel.

1979 Joined Komsomol, Young Communist League, @ high school.

1982 Admitted Kharkov University. Graduated 1987, electrical/electronic engineering.

1987-1994 Soviet Navy, Two years postgraduate studies, Naval Technical Institute, Leningrad. One year posting to satellite tracking station, Archangel. Two years Pacific Fleet communications, based Vladivostok. Discharged with honor, second lieutenant.

1994 Naval Underwater Research Laboratory, Sevastopol, work on submarine communications. Awarded doctorate in communications systems, 1996.

2003 Married Anita Leonidovich Penkev, administrator with Aeroflot. Marriage subsequently dissolved, 2011.-

2005 Professor of Communications Engineering, Moscow State University. Also, permanent consultant to Ministry of Space Sciences on strategic military command networks. Admitted to Soviet Academy of Sciences, 2010.

2015 to present, Director of Operations at Sokhotsk facility.

Foleda continued studying the text for a while after the voice had stopped speaking. Then he looked up and gazed at the far wall. “Seems pretty solid,” he murmured. “Do we have any leads on why he might want to come over?”

“We’re not sure,” Litherland said frankly. “He does have something of a reputation as a ladies’ man – it seems that screwing around too much was what got him divorced. He could have upset some of the prudes among the high-ups – but that hardly seems sufficient. Obviously it’s something to go into when we start talking to him.”

“Yes, exactly,” Barbara said, as if she had been waiting for them to get to that. “How are we going to do that? Where is he now?”

“Back in Siberia, as far as we know,” Litherland said.

“So, how do we talk to him?” Foleda asked.

Kehrn answered. “That was part of what was inside the folder that he slipped to Melvin Bowers in Japan, It contained a number code that he’s proposing to use to communicate to us directly, via the NSA system.”

“You mean straight into our communications net?” Barbara checked. “None of the usual things like drops for our embassy in Moscow?”

“He’s three thousand miles away from Moscow,” Kehrn reminded her. “And besides, what does he need melodrama methods for? He’s got a billion rubles’ worth of some of the most sophisticated communications equipment in the world sitting right there.”

“Okay… so how is he proposing to use it?” Foleda was beginning to look uncomfortable.

“He’s in a position to initiate all kinds of transmissions worldwide that NSA listens in on all the time,” Kehrn said, shrugging. “Now that we know what code he’s proposing to use, we just wait for anything that comes in addressed to us.”

“And can we reply the same way?” Barbara asked.

“Sure, why not?”

“How hard is this code of his?” Foleda asked.

“Grade-school,” Kehrn admitted. “He’s a professor, not a spy.”

“So we know their code-breakers will read it.”

“So, they fish it out of the air,” Kehrn agreed. “But even if they know what we say, it doesn’t follow that they understand what it means. And on top of that, they won’t have any way of knowing who we’re saying it to.”

Foleda looked more uncomfortable. “It’s another technical gimmick,” he said. “We’ve seen enough already. First we had a ‘foolproof’ way of getting the Tangerine file down from Mermaid. But we never got any file, and Magician wound up in Lubyanka prison. Then we sent two people up after it with another gizmo that was the wonder of the age. We still don’t have the file, they never came back, and this time we don’t even know where they are. Now you want me to buy into this.”

Kehrn tugged at his mustache, then leaped to his feet and paced across the floor. He turned in front of the large screen still showing the map. “But this time, believe me, Bernard, it really is different,” he insisted. “I’ve been through the details personally, and I’m satisfied. This time we don’t have to send anyone anywhere. All the guy wants to do is talk. We just listen. And when we want to say something back, all we have to do is squirt it out through one of the computers at Fort Meade on a regular beam that we transmit all the time, anyway. All the risks are on the other side this time.”

“It sounds like too many things I’ve listened to before,” Foleda answered.

“But Cabman’s out where the reindeer are, in the middle of Siberia,” Kehrn said. “What else are we supposed to do?”

“Hmph,” Foleda began tapping his tooth again, and stared moodily at the pad in front of him, studying the face of Dyashkin once more and then shifting his gaze back to the satellite picture of the Sokhotsk ground-station. Finally he looked away again and asked Litherland, “Why are you people involving UDIA, anyway? This kind of thing is routine for the CIA. You must figure we have some stake in it.”

Kehrn moved forward from the screen and rubbed his palms together agitatedly, “You’re right. Where it involves UDIA, Bernard, is that Sokhotsk is the ground-station that handles the main communications beam up to Mermaid, where our two people might still be.”

Litherland added, “And if Cabman is looking for favors, he’ll be expecting us to ask for some evidence that he’s genuine. Maybe we can persuade him to try and find out something about what happened to your people. It seems worth a shot.”