“Of me?”
“No. Of myself. I didn’t want this to happen.”
“Why?”
“Because I didn’t want anything intense—I can’t play games of ships that go bump in the night, but I can’t do it the other way either.” She shook her head with abrupt impatience. “Now I’m the one who’s not making sense—but there are things I just can’t put into words.”
“It’s all right.” He was smiling gently and he slid his hand slowly and lightly up her arm and felt her shudder; her lids became drowsily heavy, a humid lowering that seemed to express both desire and regret, and when she spoke his name her voice underwent a subtle thickening modulation. He embraced her, gathering her hair in his hand at the back of her neck, feeling her tremors and the warmth of her legs and breasts. They kissed slowly and this time her mouth opened against his, luxurious, and he tasted the flick of her tongue.
“Maybe I had better go.”
“No.” Her answer was very grave. “Please stay? Please?”
They made love on the bed with long languor. She was warm and lovely and he had a vivid sense of déjà vu, as if it were a union of long custom between them, as if they had already known the intimate secrets of each other’s bodies. There was no awkwardness and no urgency but only the gentle pleasures of caress and coupling that led without haste to the high rigid pain of ecstatic climax. But afterward when they lay close together, so close her two eyes blended into one, she seemed afraid again and when he tasted her lips he felt the startling salt dampness of her tears.
Chapter Seven
Leon Belsky had picked the motel for escape routes rather than comfort. He had taken a room in the rear with several exits close at hand—the rear windows of bathroom and bedroom gave access to a tree-tangled trailer court that was flanked by auto junk yards into which a man could easily fade.
He had rented the beige Ford under the name of Meldon Kemp and checked into the motel under the same name. Then he had left it to make his contacts.
The room was spacious and cold with cheap blond furniture. Belsky absorbed it with a single glance when he returned to it at midnight. He opened the suitcase on the luggage stand to appraise the telltales he had left—documents lying in slight disarray with the corner of the top sheet touching the middle letter of the word “finance” on the sheet below. The letter head was that of an industrial-relations concern in San Francisco. The two-page letter was addressed to Meldon Kemp in Los Angeles and was full of names and figures. It looked like the kind of commercial code of instructions and information marketed in the intercompany espionage game. Actually the message was spurious, but they would always go for documents immediately and if they had time they would take photos, which meant disturbing the arrangement of the papers.
No one had been at them; the room had not been searched. Outside he could hear the big trucks roar by on the freeway and the lament of a distant siren. He dialed nine for an outside line and then a seven-digit number; it was answered on the first ring and Belsky said, “Hello, this is Dangerfield.”
“Sorry, I think you must have the wrong number.” It was Douglass’ voice, feigning impatience. Belsky said, “I’m at the New Executive, Room Twelve. Call me back within ten minutes.”
“That’s okay.”
Belsky took the multiband transistor radio out of his suitcase and opened the back of it to expose the high-speed cassette recorder and the telegrapher’s key. He took out a notepad and coded a brief message in dots and dashes. Before he was finished the phone rang.
“Dangerfield?” It was Douglass again.
“Yes. We’re on an open line.”
“I know.”
“How are we set?”
“Two of them can’t make it tomorrow. One’s in Washington and one’s in Phoenix and they’ll both be tied up. The rest can make it.”
“When do you go on duty?”
“Eight.”
“Anyone in your group go to work earlier than that?”
“No.”
“We’d better meet at five in the morning, then.”
“That early?” Douglass didn’t bother to keep the irritation out of his voice.
“You people have gone soft, haven’t you?” Belsky said.
“What did you expect?”
“It’s the only time I can give you. Get them there.” Belsky hung up and resumed coding the report in his notepad. He knew how Douglass would handle it; it was standard operating procedure: dial each number, let it ring once, hang up. For the recipients the single ring was a signal to look at their watches. Five minutes later Douglass would dial the same series of numbers again, and again let each ring once. It was a simple code: the five-minute interval between rings indicated a five-o’clock meeting; the place was prearranged.
When he finished coding the report to Moscow he connected the telegrapher’s key to the cassette recorder’s input terminals and tapped out the cipher onto a slow tape. He hooked the radio’s transmission antenna into the room’s television-aerial socket and connected the output terminals of the tape deck to the microphone jack of the transmitter, checked the transmission frequency setting and turned his wrist to look at his watch. Twenty-two minutes past the hour he pressed the send key and switched on the cassette recorder. It had been rigged to a high playback speed, so that the signal went out in an instantaneous pulse, a burst far above audible range.
He repeated the impulse twice within thirty seconds and then began to dismantle the equipment. A Red submarine lying off the coast of Baja California would have picked up the signal and relayed it to a trawler in the North Pacific, from which the signal would again be amplified and rebroadcast to a KGB receiving station in Kamchatka. None of the relay stations possessed copies of the master code and therefore the content of the message would be known to no one but sender and final recipient.
Belsky ripped the top four sheets off his notepad to make sure there were no indentations on the pages below. He burned the loose sheets over the toilet and flushed the ashes down.
After he bathed he lay on the bed, reviewed the day’s events and made his evaluations. He had to activate the teams as quickly as possible and that left no time for the retraining they required; he would have to reassert discipline immediately and the best tools for that purpose were fear and humiliation.
When he was satisfied with his plan, he allowed himself to catnap.
At three o’clock he dressed and drove into the city and found a curbside telephone booth under the overhanging illuminated sign of a savings-and-loan office; he chose the spot because neon lights would jam most electronic bugs.
When Hathaway answered Belsky said, “I’m at 989-2612. Get to a pay phone and call me.” He hung up and stood beside the booth waiting for the telephone to ring and watched insects swarm under the intersection’s hard blue mercury lights. He was moved to remark the contrast between this desert springtime and the dark Asian winter which still gripped the steppes at home.
A passenger in a passing car threw out an empty paper cup and the wind scudded it to the curb and the telephone rang.
“Mr. Dangerfield? Hathaway.”
Belsky said, “They’ll start arriving at five o’clock. Have you got everything ready?”
“Yes, sir. We’ve spent three hours going over the place and it’s clean.”
“All right,” Belsky said. “Keep your people alert. I’ll get there before five but if any of them arrive ahead of me hold them in the front room until I come in. I’ll want a complete search of every arrival, down to the skin. Explain that to your team.”
“Yes, sir. Looking for anything in particular?”
“Weapons and bugs.”
Belsky rang off and drove down the avenue to an all-night diner with a bright neon American flag above its massive Fat Boy sign. The place had been invaded by a crowd of motorcyclists and the plastic tabletops were thick with crash helmets. But the late hour seemed to have subdued even these predators, and Belsky was undisturbed at his counter place except for a plump girl who took the stool beside him and ate four doughnuts with single-minded concentration. The motorcycle toughs trooped out after a few minutes and he heard the arrogant thundering of their bikes. Belsky felt that a society so decadent as to permit the continued existence of anarchic bands of killer-terrorists was doomed to self-destruction. He was not given to political introspection but certain things were self-evident and one of them was the abiding need for discipline within groups of any size. That was true of the Illegals especially.