Russian Spring (21 page)

Jerry was reeling under this verbal assault. “All right, all right, so
ESA
paid my way to Paris and made me a job offer,” he said. “Is that some kind of crime?”

Barker shrugged. “It
could
be construed as conspiracy to violate the National Security Act if we were really reaching for something to nail your ass with,” he said. “But we don’t have to reach that far to nail you if you force us to, Reed. Oh no, you had to go and make it easy for us by shacking up with a Russian agent!”

That was finally too much for Jerry. “That’s ridiculous!” Jerry snapped. “Sonya’s no spy!”

Barker rolled his eyes toward the ceiling. “I see, Reed,” he said, “you know that for a fact, do you? Why I’ll bet the lady even told you so herself!”

“She’s a translator for Red Star in Brussels,” Jerry insisted. “You could check it out.”

“Are you for real? You really think we
didn’t
check her out?”

“So then—”

“Jesus Christ, Reed, what do you think the Russians do, pin signs on their agents’ asses that say ‘Fuck me, I’m the
KGB
’?”

“You have proof that Sonya works for the
KGB
?” Jerry demanded.

“We don’t need proof, Reed. Use your head. Her
cover story
is that she works for Red Star! Don’t you know what that means?”

“Uh. . . . it’s some kind of Russian trading company, isn’t it?” Jerry said.

“Yes, Reed, it is indeed, as you say, some kind of Russian trading company,” Al Barker told him in the weary, exasperated voice of a teacher confronting yet one more unprepared student. “It is, in fact,
the
Russian trading company and an arm of the Soviet government whose mission is to penetrate, buy up, and subvert as much of the Common European economy as possible and to move technology East. Whether it is a
KGB
subsidiary on Moscow’s organizational charts these days or vice versa is a moot point.”

“So just because Sonya works in their Brussels office that makes her an agent?” Jerry snapped. “I think maybe you’ve been reading too many spy novels. The whole idea’s silly anyway. I mean, what would a Russian spy want out of me in the first place?”

“What does
ESA
want out of you, Reed?”

“They want me to go to work for them, that’s all. . . .”

“On Project Icarus, isn’t that right, Reed?” Barker said quietly.

“How did you know—” Jerry caught himself short. “I guess that’s a stupid question, isn’t it?” he said in a much smaller voice.

Al Barker favored him with a wintry little smile. “That’s the smartest thing you’ve said so far, Reed,” he said. “Your job will be to help them build a spacetug that will take their Daedalus to
GEO
using your sat-sled experience. . . .”

“Well, yes,” Jerry admitted, “but it’s not a military project, and there aren’t any Russians—”

“You know that for a fact, do you?”

“Well, no, not exactly, I mean . . .”

Barker got to his feet and started pacing in small circles, forcing Jerry to crane his neck to follow him. “Would you say that you’re a patriotic American, Jerry?” he said in an abrupt change of tone.

“Well, yeah, sure. . . .”

“Know much history?”

“Some.”

“Well then maybe you know that the United States saved Western Europe’s goddamn ass from the Nazis and then protected the ungrateful fuckers from the Communists for fifty years until they were ready to stand on their own two feet,” Barker said. “And when they were good and ready, when they had their Common Europe together, when they held trillions of dollars of American debt that we ran up protecting them, they made their sleazy deal with the Russians and froze us out in the economic cold.”

“I don’t understand what all this has to do with—”

“It’s really quite simple, Jerry. We’re way ahead in space-weapon technology, and they’re trying to play catch-up in their usual manner by stealing the technology from us.”

“What does all this have to do with me?” Jerry protested disingenuously, but beginning to become all too aware of where this was going.

Al Barker sat down behind the desk again, his little history lesson over, and resumed his previous persona. “Everything,” he said. “Forget your goddamn love life. Because even if Sonya Ivanovna Gagarin really
is
the innocent little translator you think she is, we
still
can’t let you stay here, because we can’t let you help transfer any sat-sled technology to
ESA
either. They coo like doves now, but do you really expect us to hand stuff like that over to
any
potential adversary?”

“That’s why you’re insisting that I sign the affidavit that I won’t take the
ESA
offer?”

Barker shook his head. “You lost that option when you made Coldwater call me in,” he said. “I’m not willing to trust you that far, Reed. The bottom line now is that you must return to the United States within forty-eight hours or face the consequences.”

“What consequences?” Jerry demanded.

“Permanent loss of passport. Revocation of your security clearance and the dead certainty that you’ll never be able to get another even at the lowest level, meaning you’ll never work in any space program ever again. Criminal prosecution under the National Security Act.”

Something inside Jerry Reed snapped. He had listened to Barker call him a jerk and an asshole and call the woman he loved a spy, and he had never been allowed to catch his breath long enough to even defend himself coherently. But now Barker was
really
insulting his intelligence, and that somehow finally loosened Jerry’s tongue.

“What’re you trying to do, Barker,” he blurted without thinking, “
force
me to defect?”

The word seemed to burn his tongue even as he uttered it. Oh my
God, what have I said? he thought. But Al Barker seemed at least as taken aback as he was. “What are you talking about, Reed?” he said in a worried tone, and all at once it seemed that he was on the defensive.

Perhaps it was love that made Jerry brave. Perhaps it was the look on Barker’s face. Perhaps it was that things had slowed down long enough for him really to consider the dreadful logic of the situation.

“You’re telling me that you’ll lift my passport if I don’t go back to the States within forty-eight hours—”

“It’s no longer a valid document now, Reed, as far as we’re concerned—”

“—but you’re telling me that I’ll be prosecuted if I do.”

“Hey, hey, don’t get me wrong,” Barker said quickly, “you forget all this ever happened and be a good boy, Reed, and there won’t be any prosecution.”

“And you’ll guarantee that in writing?”

Al Barker squinted at him owlishly. It seemed to Jerry that there was another new expression on his face, perhaps one of grudging respect this time. “Okay, sure, why not?” he said slowly. “I think we can go that far. . . .”

“And what about my security clearance?” Jerry said.

“What about it, Reed?”

“Will you guarantee in writing that I can keep it?” Jerry said, knowing all too well what the answer had to be.

Barker studied his face with an unreadable expression and said nothing.

“Well . . . ?”

Barker shrugged, and for the first time averted his gaze. “I’m afraid I don’t have that authority,” he admitted very quietly. “But I’d be willing to recommend it to the people who do.”

“Yeah, sure,” Jerry said. “I thought so.”

“Thought what, Reed?”

“I’ve got two real choices, right? I can turn in my passport and go back to the States, where my security clearance will be lifted, and where I’ll be fired by Rockwell and never be hirable for anything connected with the space program again. . . .  Or I can . . .  stay here, take the
ESA
job, and . . .  and . . .”

“
Defect
,” Barker said, staring right at Jerry now. “Because make no mistake about it, Reed, if you accept employment with
ESA
, that
is
what you’ll be doing. Don’t kid yourself. You won’t be able to change your mind. You’d be arrested the moment your foot hit American soil.”

“Shit,” Jerry sighed.

Something in Barker’s expression softened. He leaned forward across the desk, shook his head, and for a moment it seemed to Jerry as if the man were about to reach out to touch him.

“Look, son,” Barker said almost tenderly, “you don’t really want to do that, now do you? You don’t really want to betray your country. You don’t want to spend the rest of your life in exile. You don’t want to never see your native land again. You don’t want the folks back home to call you a
traitor
, now do you?”

“No,” Jerry whispered miserably.

“I thought not,” Barker said softly.

“But . . . but if I go back now, what will I be going back to?” Jerry said plaintively. “I’ll never be able to work in the space program again, will I?”

Barker studied the plastic wood-grain of the desktop. “With your background, you’ll be able to get a decent job, Reed. Civil aircraft design, maybe, or the auto industry. Hey, you know, I’ve got an old buddy pretty high up at Piper, might even be able to do something for you there.  . . .”

“You don’t understand, Mr. Barker, you really don’t understand. . . .”

“I understand one thing, Reed,” Barker said, not entirely unsympathetically, or so it seemed to Jerry. “You’ve put yourself in a position where you’ve got to choose between your career and your Russian girl friend and your country. You’re stuck with it, son. I don’t envy you, but there it is.”

Jerry nodded slowly. “There it is,” he whispered.

Al Barker rose slowly from behind the desk, came around to the other side, and actually laid a paternal arm across Jerry’s shoulders. “Tell you what,” he said. “I’m gonna do something I shouldn’t. I’m gonna let you walk out of here with your American passport in your pocket even though I’m really not supposed to. I’m going to give you five days to decide instead of forty-eight hours.”

He took his arm off Jerry’s shoulders. He shrugged. “I’m really leveling with you now, Reed,” he said. “We can’t drag you back to the States by force, and I will indeed catch a certain amount of personal shit if you do defect, you better believe it. But believe this too, Jerry—I don’t want to see an innocent kid like you turned into a traitor to his country by these conscienceless European degenerates, I don’t want to see you forced into a decision you’ll regret till the day you die.”

All at once the walls of the windowless room seemed to be closing in on Jerry, and the air seemed to congeal in his throat, and everything seemed to funnel down into Al Barker’s eyes boring squarely into his.

“Do you believe I’m being straight with you, Reed?” Barker said. “One American to another?”

Jerry looked back at him and felt like crying. “Yeah,” he found himself forced to say through the horrible lump that seemed to have bloomed in his throat like some noxious fungus. “Yeah, I do believe I do.”

It was well past lunchtime before Jerry returned to the hotel room, and by that time Sonya was about a third of the way through the bottle of Russian potato vodka she had ordered from room service in order to nerve herself up to tell him about Pankov’s visit.

There really had never been any question of simply not telling him, for she was going to have to explain the magical extension of her vacation time one way or another. Pankov, in his sweaty amateur incompetence, had failed to provide her with a plausible cover story, and she was not about to do his work for him by dreaming up some stupid lie herself. These things, she had actually found herself thinking after the first drink, are better left to the professionals of the
KGB
.

Besides, there really was no reason not to tell Jerry the truth, now was there? she had decided after the second drink. For after all, he had decided to do exactly what those high Party circles wanted him to do anyway for reasons of his own heart. After the third drink, it seemed to her that the only real problem for anyone was the problem that Pankov had created by coming here in the first place, and after the fourth, she had narrowed the problem down to constructing an opening sentence that would loosen her tongue. By the time Jerry had arrived, she even had the first half of it figured out: “Isn’t it wonderful, Jerry, my boss has extended my vacation time because . . . ”

But all of that was forgotten when Jerry burst into the room. He didn’t seem to notice that the bed was still unmade. He didn’t seem to notice the bottle of vodka in the ice bucket. He didn’t even seem to notice that Sonya was well into it. His eyes were wild and his face seemed ashen, as if
he
were the one who had gotten drunk, and that sobered Sonya up fast.

“You look horrible, Jerry,” she said as he flopped down into the chair across the table from her. “What happened at the Embassy?”

Jerry hooked the vodka bottle out of the ice bucket, poured himself a stiff one, and slugged it down like some muzhik, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. “They won’t let me take the
ESA
job, Sonya,” he said.

“What do you mean, ‘they won’t let you’?” Sonya demanded. “How can they stop you?”

“They’ll prosecute me under something called the National Security Act.”

Sonya stared at him narrowly. “You are not making sense, Jerry,” she said. “If you are working for
ESA
in Europe, how can the American authorities prosecute you for
anything
?”

“Well, I guess they can’t . . . ,” Jerry muttered. “But I don’t want to be a traitor. . . .”

“Traitor to
what?
”

“To my country, goddamnit!”

“What about
me?
” Sonya demanded. “What about
us?
”

Jerry shook his head and gave her a look of perfect agonized befuddlement.

“Poor baby, they’ve got you all confused, haven’t they?” Sonya said, touching her hand to his cheek. She poured both of them fresh drinks. “Let’s have one together, and you can tell me all about it from the beginning.”

Jerry nodded, took a sip of vodka, seemed to shake some clarity back into his mind with a convulsive shrug of his shoulders and a jerk of his neck, and he did.