James P. Hogan (5 page)

Earnshaw came back down the ladder, and Paula plugged a lead from the unit into another meter to program it from the first. Then she disconnected it and handed it to Earnshaw. Now they each had a device that would mimic a valid response signal. Earnshaw picked up his toolbox and approached the doorway. A light on his unit flickered as he went through, indicating that it had been interrogated and had responded. Paula came after him, and hers did the same. Now they were committed. They followed the wall on the far side of the doorway for a short distance and stopped at a switch panel, where they set down their equipment and tools. Paula removed the coverplate and began loosening connections inside, while Earnshaw squatted down and made a play of searching in the toolbox while he checked the layout of the surroundings against what they had been led to expect. Two men walked by, talking, then turned a corner and disappeared. A woman came out of a door and went off in the other direction.

Paula fought to keep her hands steady and look as if she were working normally. The method they had used was far from foolproof, and it was possible, even now, that they had triggered an alarm, although there were no whooping sirens or flashing lights to indicate the fact. If the computer that the badge-readers talked to was programmed to check each individual’s movements from place to place, for example – which it possessed all the information to do – it would just have deduced that the same person had passed through the same point three times without going back again. Or perhaps the system used a one-time code for every badge, where the response changed according to a predetermined formula every time it was used. In a top-security environment, precautions like that would be routine. But the whole essence of the new plan was to avoid having to penetrate into such areas, and this location had been selected for the operation precisely because nothing of other-than-domestic significance went on there. In those circumstances, the Washington experts had pronounced – probably keeping their crossed fingers out of sight behind their backs, Paula had come to suspect only when it was too late – automatic tracking would be unlikely. As long as there was nothing to indicate that anyone had gone where they weren’t supposed to, and that no visitors were about to wander off and get lost, the computer would be happy.

Earnshaw seemed satisfied after surveying the surroundings. “Let’s go,” he whispered. They had an hour and fifteen minutes.

Leaving a sign saying, in Russian, danger – high voltage, below the opened switch panel, they picked up their things again and followed a corridor out of the foyer to a metal-railed staircase. A flight down brought them to a landing overlooking a machinery bay, with a catwalk leading off and running along above it on one side. They went on down to where a narrow passage led the other way at the bottom of the stairs. A man in a white coat appeared out of the passage, stood aside and nodded perfunctorily as they passed, then went on up without giving them a second glance.

They entered the passage. After a short distance, one side opened into a gallery full of ducts, piping, structural members, and cable runs, with a bank of electrical cabinets standing in a line along one wall. The passage continued on, but they left it and picked their way through the gallery to a set of steps leading down into a shallow bay, partly screened from the corridor by the clutter of machinery they had climbed through. Three sides of the bay consisted of banks of plain metal boxes containing environmental monitoring and control computers, along with conduits bringing in signals from sensors and instruments in thousands of different locations. Although the place was normally unmanned, it contained a bench for use by service engineers when they came to perform checks or repairs. At one end of the bench was an instrument panel containing test meters, switches, a keyboard and display screen, and fitted with various supply sockets. One of these sockets was a standard type provided for the engineers to plug portable computers into to access the maintenance department’s database for reference data – with the complexity of modern systems, carrying the requisite manuals around would have required a wheelbarrow. And it was inside the maintenance department’s section of the databank that Magician had hidden the backup copy of Tangerine – the file that the whole operation was aimed at recovering.

Earnshaw took out the final section of the “camera” from his toolbox. It was, in fact, a specially designed microcomputer, with a plug that matched the standard Russian data socket. Paula pulled a stool from under the bench and sat down. She plugged in the set, connected the power lead, and activated a search routine to begin testing access routes into the system. She worked quickly, nervously, pausing to study a response on the set’s miniature screen, thinking for a second, entering a command – wanting to get it over with. Earnshaw stood behind, silent, watching the approach into the bay. There were maintenance points like this all over
Tereshkova,
but this one was more secluded than most. That was why they had picked it.

Paula bit her lip with suppressed tension as a hunch yielded a positive response. The maintenance department’s system used a fairly straightforward method of access codes, which was to be expected, since it contained relatively insensitive information. As another line of code appeared, opening the executive level of the file manager, she breathed a silent prayer of gratitude for Magician’s presence of mind in choosing
this
system to hide the file in. Or had it been simply because he worked in the maintenance department? Breaking into one of the higher-security systems, such as the research department’s, or the information bank kept by
Tereshkova
’s branch of the KGB, would have been impossible in the time available.

She attempted a direct request for the file. It failed. The initiating address pointer had been erased to make it invisible. She obtained a sector table, located the header she wanted, and commanded a forced read. The system acknowledged that it had the file, but demanded an access validation to release it. She supplied the code she had been given. There was a pause. Then a new line appeared, requesting an output-destination spec. “I think we’re getting there!” Paula hissed up at Earnshaw.

He turned and hunched down to peer over her shoulder. She entered another line and sat watching the screen tensely. A delay of perhaps two seconds dragged by. Then a confirmation appeared. In the same instant a line in English appeared below:

GP
700 “
TANGERINE
”;
STAT
OK
:
READY
TO
READ
.
MEM
DES
?
FILE
DES
?
READ
ACC
?

Paula shifted the keyboard from Cyrillic alphabet to English and complete the dialogue. A final, single-word line confirmed:

COPYING

She sat back, closed her eyes, and exhaled a long, silent breath of relief. Earnshaw’s fingers closed around her arm and squeezed reassuringly. She blinked and peered at the screen again, as if to make sure. The word was still there, glowing solid and jubilant. It meant that Magician’s file was being copied through to create a duplicate inside the high-density memory-crystal arrays contained in their portable device. The copying would take just a matter of seconds, and then the original inside the maintenance department’s databank would be destroyed. All that would be left then would be to get the copy home.

COPYING
COMPLETED
AND
VERIFIED

CONFIRM
SOURCE
ERASURE
?

Paula leaned forward to enter a reply…

She wasn’t sure what it was that registered – a sound, something glimpsed from the corner of her eye, an unconsciously perceived sense of movement? Earnshaw was still down next to her, watching the screen. She turned her head suddenly to look up past him… and gasped out loud in sudden dismay.

“Remain as you are!” the Russian officer snapped, pointing his pistol. Earnshaw’s head jerked around. Paula could do nothing but stare up numbly.

There were four more uniformed guards behind, two of them holding leveled submachine guns. The officer moved a pace forward to the edge of the bay, and looked down. He had a Tartar face beneath the peaked cap, olive-skinned, with narrow eyes and high cheekbones. “Keep your hands in sight,” he instructed. “Now, back slowly against the far wall. Make no sudden moves.”

The night’s rain had freshened the air after a week of early summer heat that had become oppressive, and the scattered clouds left over Washington, D. C., by morning promised a spell of cool relief. Bernard Foleda let the drape fall back across the bedroom window with a satisfied “pom, pom, pom, pom, pom-pom-pom-pom-pom” to the tune of Mozart’s overture to
The Impresario,
and finished knotting his tie. He took the jacket of his suit from the closet, and, draping it over an arm, pom-pommed his way in a gravelly bass-baritone downstairs to breakfast. There was no reason for him to be humming to himself, considering the disaster that had befallen the department in the past week – it was simply a habit born of years. And besides, he had learned a long time ago that when people in his profession started letting the job get to them personally, they tended not to last very much longer.

Myra was sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee in her hand, studying selected items from the morning’s news offerings on a flatscreen pivoted to face her from the worktop opposite. Like him in her fifties, she was a tall, normally full-bodied woman, with a face that had managed to retain its composure and humorous set despite eyes and cheeks still sunken from a five-month illness that had lasted through winter. The skin on the backs of her hands was still loose from her not having fully regained her weight yet, and her dark, neatly trimmed hair showed gray streaks which she hadn’t attempted to disguise by tinting. They had been married for almost thirty years, and unlike the mysterious, withdrawn spy chiefs of the popular movies, Foleda discussed his work with her regularly. He didn’t understand how scriptwriters could expect people like him, on top of everything else, to carry on being furtive and secretive after they got home. Maybe they did it to give themselves an excuse for introducing beautiful women into their plots – usually Chinese, for some obscure reason – who made their livings by coaxing secrets out of semicomatose government officials in between bouts of frenzied lovemaking. If so, Foleda had no objection – the image was good for recruiting.

“The rain’s stopped,” Myra said as Bernard came in and hung his jacket over the back of one of the kitchen chairs. “It looks as if it’s going to be cloudy today. Nice and cool for a change.”

“Yes, I already looked. We could use it.” Bernard walked over to the chef, took out two plates of scrambled eggs, ham, and a hotcake, and pressed a button to start the toaster. His wife poured the coffee while he sat down. The item on the screen was about a Japanese astronaut who had scored a first by achieving escape velocity under his own power with a series of hops and a leap off the surface of Deimos, the smaller of the two moons of Mars. “So maybe the old nursery rhyme isn’t so silly after all, if we just change it slightly,” the commentator babbled cheerfully in a way that Bernard found indistinguishable from banal at that time of morning. “The cow jumped
off
the moon, ho-ho!”

Foleda snorted. “What else do we have?”

Myra touched a button on the handpad lying beside the coffeepot, and a yellow light on the wallpanel by the stove came on to indicate that the house-manager was active. “Cancel,” she said in a slightly raised voice. The picture vanished and was replaced by a selection of options. “Five-three,” Myra instructed, and a new list appeared. “Poland,” she said. A headline replaced the list: more warsaw demonstrations. Myra glanced at Bernard. He nodded. “Yes,” she said at the panel. Then, “X-out, out.” The yellow light went off.

The item concerned Soviet responses to the latest round of protests and strikes in Poland and East Germany. As usual the media were emphasizing the military aspect, with dramatically narrated scenes of troops confronting crowds, NATO units being put on alert – Foleda recognized one shot of rolling tanks as being months old, with no connection to current events at all – and snippets of military and political spokesmen being questioned about the risk of a general European escalation. That was the kind of material that delivered audiences to advertisers, and was only to be expected. Western intelligence had been following the developments behind the present situation since long before the public became aware of them, however, and opinions were that the likelihood of any real shooting was remote.

The Soviets had accelerated their military buildup in the final decades of the previous century. Their intention had not been so much to provoke war, for they had no more desire than anyone else to be devastated again if they could avoid it, but, taking their cue from the woeful performance of the democracies at Munich in response to Hitler’s aggressions, to gamble that, as before, their adversaries would back down without a fight from the
threat
of force. And for a time, as Western pacifists howled for appeasement and rediscovered moral outrage with the realization that every pulpit, podium, lectern, and armchair was just twenty minutes from somebody’s launch site, it had seemed to work. But in the crucial early years of the twenty-first century, the Soviets had wavered when they found themselves faced by the prospect of having to take on not only the West’s military technology, but the larger part of the numerically overwhelming population of Asia as well. Originally the Bomb had redressed the balance between sides whose different political systems resulted in unequal commitments to conventional forces. The irony was that when both sides drew even in terms of Bomb-power,
people
should become the deciding factor to tip the scales. And as Marxism’s original appeal waned in the face of Asia’s rising affluence, the Soviets fell farther behind in the competition for minds and souls. Their moment had gone.