The House of Thunder (38 page)

Confusion and suspicion roiled in her again. “Even in a year, they couldn’t possibly have built that entire town. Besides, don’t tell me they’d go to all that trouble just to pump me about the work being done at Milestone.”

“You’re right,” he said. “Willawauk was built in the early 1950s. It was designed to be a perfect model of an average, American small town, and it’s constantly being modernized and refined.”

“But why? Why a model American town here in the middle of the USSR?”

“Willawauk is a training facility,” McGee said. “It’s where Soviet deep-cover agents are trained to think like Americans, to
be
Americans.”

“What’s a ... deep-cover agent?” she asked as McGee swung the Chevy into the outer lane and passed a lumbering, exhaust-belching truck of stolid Soviet make.

“Every year,” McGee said, “between three and four hundred children, exceptionally bright three- and four-year-olds, are chosen to come to Willawauk. They’re taken from their parents, who are not told what the child has been chosen for and who will never see their child again. The kids are assigned new foster parents in Willawauk. From that moment on, two things happen to them. First, they go through intense, daily indoctrination sessions designed to turn them into fanatical Soviet Communists. And believe me, I don’t use the word ‘fanatical’ lightly. Most of those kids are transformed into fanatics who make the Ayatollah Khomeini’s followers seem like sober, reasonable Oxford professors. There’s a two-hour indoctrination session every morning of their lives; worse, subliminal indoctrination tapes are played during the night, while they sleep.”

“Sounds like they’re creating a small army of child robots,” Susan said.

“That’s precisely what they’re doing. Child robots, spy robots. Anyway, secondly, the kids are taught to live like Americans, to think like Americans, and to be Americans—at least on the surface. They must be able to pass for patriotic Americans without ever revealing their underlying, fanatical devotion to the Soviet cause. Only American English is spoken in Willawauk. These children grow up without knowing a word of Russian. All books are in English. All the movies are American movies. Television shows are taped from the three American networks and from various independent stations—all kinds of shows, including entertainment, sports, news—and are then replayed to every house in Willawauk on a closed-circuit TV system. These kids grow up with the same media backgrounds, with the same experiences as real American kids. Each group of trainees shares social touchstones with its corresponding generation of true Americans. Finally, after many years of this, when the Willawauk children are saturated with U.S. culture, when the day-to-day minutiae of U.S. life is deeply ingrained in them, they are infiltrated into the U.S. with impeccable documents—usually between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one. Some of them are placed in colleges and universities with the aid of superbly forged family histories and high school records that, when supported by a network of Soviet sympathizers within the U.S., cannot be disputed. The infiltrators find jobs in a variety of industries, many of them in government, and they spend ten, fifteen, twenty, or more years slowly working up into positions of power and authority. Some of them will never be called upon to do any dirty work for their Soviet superiors; they will live and die as patriotic Americans—even though in their hearts, where they truly exist, they know they are good Russians. Others will be used for sabotage and espionage. Are used, all the time.”

“My God,” Susan said, “the expense of such a program! The maniacal effort it would take to establish and maintain it is almost beyond conception. Is it really worth the expenditures?”

“The Soviet government thinks so,” McGee said. “And there have been some astonishing successes. They have people placed in sensitive positions within the U.S. aerospace industry. They have Willawauk graduates in the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force; not more than a few hundred, of course, but several of those have become high-ranking officers over the years. There are Willawauk graduates in the U.S. media establishment, which provides them with a perfect platform from which to sow disinformation. From the Soviet point of view, the best thing of all is that one U.S. senator, two congressmen, one state governor, and a score of other influential American political figures are Willawauk people.”

“Good God!”

Her own anger and fear were temporarily forgotten as the enormity of the entire plot became clear to her.

“And it’s rare that a Willawauk graduate can be turned into a double agent, serving the Americans. Willawauk people are just too well programmed, too fanatical to become turncoats. The hospital at Willawauk, where you were kept, serves the town as a fully equipped medical center, much better than hospitals in many other parts of the USSR, but it’s also a center for research into behavioral modification and mind control. Its discoveries in those areas have helped to make the Willawauk kids into the most tightly controlled, most devoted and reliable espionage web in the world.”

“And you. What about you, McGee? Where do you fit in? And is your name really McGee?”

“No,” he said. “My name’s Dimitri Nicolnikov. I was born a Russian, to parents in Kiev, thirty-seven years ago. Jeff McGee is my Willawauk name. You see, I was one of the first Willawauk kids, though that was in the early days of the program, when they took young teenagers and tried to make deep-cover agents out of them in three or four years of training. Before they started working solely with kids obtained at the age of three or four. And I’m one of the few who ever turned double agent on them. Although they don’t know it as yet.”

“They will when they find all the bodies you left behind.”

“We’ll be long gone by then.”

“You’re so confident.”

“I’ve got to be,” he said, giving her a thin smile. “The alternative is unthinkable.”

Again, Susan was aware of the man’s singular strength, which was one of the things that had made her fall in love with him.

Am I still in love with him? she wondered.

Yes.

No.

Maybe.

“How old were you when you underwent training in Willawauk?”

“Like I said, that was before they started taking them so young and spending so many years on them. The recruits then were twelve or thirteen. I was there from the age of thirteen to the age of eighteen.”

“So you finished the training almost twenty years ago. Why weren’t you seeded into the U.S.? Why were you still in Willawauk when I showed up?”

Before he could answer her, the traffic ahead began to slow down on the dark road. Brake lights flashed on the trucks as they lumbered to a halt.

McGee tapped the Chevy’s brakes.

“What’s going on?” Susan asked, suddenly wary.

“It’s the Batum checkpoint.”

“What’s that?”

“A travel-pass inspection station just north of the city of Batum. That’s where we’re going to catch a boat out of the country.”

“You make it sound as simple as just going away on a holiday,” she said.

“It could turn out like that,” he said, “if our luck holds just a little longer.”

The traffic was inching ahead now, as each vehicle stopped at the checkpoint, each driver passing his papers to a uniformed guard. The guard was armed with a submachine gun that was slung over his left shoulder.

Another uniformed guard was opening the doors on the back of some of the trucks, shining a flashlight inside.

“What’re they looking for?” Susan asked.

“I don’t know. This isn’t usually part of the procedure at the Batum checkpoint.”

“Are they looking for us?”

“I doubt it. I don’t expect them to find out we’re gone from Willawauk until closer to midnight. At least an hour from now. Whatever these men are searching for, it doesn’t seem to be all that important. They’re being casual about it.”

Another truck was passed. The line of traffic moved forward. There were now three trucks in front of the Chevy.

“They’re probably just hoping to catch a black market operator with contraband goods,” McGee said. “If it was us they were looking for, there’d be a hell of a lot more of them swarming around, and they’d be a lot more thorough with their searches.”

“We’re that important?”

“You better believe it,” he said worriedly. “If they lose you, they lose one of the potentially biggest intelligence coups of all time.”

Another truck was waved through the checkpoint.

McGee said, “If they could break you and pick your mind clean, they’d get enough information to tip the East-West balance of power permanently in the direction of the East. You’re very important to them, dear lady. And as soon as they realize that I’ve gone double on them, they’ll want me almost as bad as they’ll want to get you back. Maybe they’ll even want me worse, because they’ll
have
to find out how many of their deep-cover agents in the U.S. have been compromised.”

“And how many of them
have
you compromised?”

“All of them,” he said, grinning.

Then it was their turn to face the checkpoint guard. McGee turned down the window and passed out two sets of papers. The inspection was perfunctory; the papers were coming back through the window almost as soon as they had been handed out.

McGee thanked the guard, whose attention was already turned to the truck behind them. Then they headed into Batum, and McGee rolled up his window as he drove.

“Black market sweep, like I thought,” he said.

As they drove into the outskirts of the small port city, Susan said, “If you were a graduate of Willawauk at eighteen, why weren’t you seeded into the U.S. nineteen years ago?”

“I was. I earned my college degrees there, a medical degree with a specialty in behavioral modification medicine. But by the time I had obtained an important job with connections to the U.S. defense establishment, I was no longer a faithful Russian. Remember, in those days, recruits were chosen at the age of thirteen. They weren’t yet putting three-year-olds into the Willawauk program. I had lived twelve years of ordinary life in Russia, before my training was begun, so I had a basis for comparing the U.S. and the Soviet systems. I had no trouble changing sides. I acquired a love for freedom. I went to the FBI and told them all about myself and all about Willawauk. At first, for a couple of years, they used me as a conduit for phony data which helped screw up Soviet planning. Then, five years ago, it was decided that I would go back to the USSR as a double agent. I was ‘arrested’ by the FBI. There was a big trial, during which I refused to utter one word. The papers called me the ‘Silent Spy.’ ”

“My God, I remember! It was a big story back then.”

“It was widely advertised that, even though caught red-handed in the transmission of classified information, I refused even to state what country I was from. Everyone knew it was Russia, of course, but I played this impressively stoic role. Pleased the hell out of the KGB.”

“Which was the idea.”

“Of course. After the trial, I received a long prison sentence, but I didn’t serve much time. Less than a month. I was quickly traded to the USSR for an American agent whom they were holding. When I was brought back to Moscow, I was welcomed as a hero for maintaining the secret of the Willawauk training program and the deep-cover network. I was the famous Silent Spy. I was eventually sent back to work at my old alma mater, which was what the CIA had hoped would happen.”

“And ever since, you’ve been passing information the other way, to the U.S.”

“Yes,” he said. “I’ve got two contacts in Batum, two fishermen who have limited-profit deals with the government, so they own their own boats. They’re Georgians, of course. This is Georgian SSR that we’re traveling through, and a lot of Georgians despise the central government in Moscow. I pass information to my fishermen, and they pass it along to Turkish fishermen with whom they rendezvous in the middle of the Black Sea. And thereafter, it somehow winds up with the CIA. One of those fishermen is going to pass us along to the Turks the same way he passes classified documents. At least, I
hope
he’ll do it.”

Access to the Batum docks was restricted; all ships, including the fishing boats, could be reached only by passing through one of several checkpoints. There were guarded gates that accepted trucks loaded with cargo, and there was one gate that accepted only military vehicles and personnel, and there were gates to accommodate dock workers, sailors, and others who were obliged to approach on foot; Susan and McGee went to one of the latter.

At night the wharves were poorly lighted, gloomy, except around the security checkpoints, where floodlights simulated the glare of noon. The walk-through gate was overseen by two uniformed guards, both armed with Kalisnikovs; they were involved in an animated conversation that could be heard even outside the hut in which they sat. Neither guard bestirred himself from that small, warm place; neither wanted to bother conducting a close inspection. McGee passed both his and Susan’s forged papers through the sliding window. The older of the two guards examined the documents perfunctorily and quickly passed them back, not once pausing in the discussion he was having with his compatriot.

The chainlike gate, crowned with wickedly pointed barbed wire, swung open automatically when one of the guards in the hut touched the proper button. McGee and Susan walked onto the docks, uncontested, and the gate swung shut behind them.

Susan held on to McGee’s arm, and they walked into the gloom, toward rows of large dark buildings that blocked their view of the harbor.

“Now what?” Susan whispered.

“Now we go to the fishermen’s wharf and look for a boat called the Golden Net,” McGee said.

“It seems so easy,” she said.

“Too easy,” he said worriedly.

He glanced back at the checkpoint through which they had just passed, and his face was drawn with apprehension.