Sniveling with joy, Gregor lurched out of the bar. The night air was fresh and clean; it smelled of triumph. He needed a drink to celebrate. He looked, saw a liquor store open down the block. But when he got there and stepped into its fluorescent brightness, he found he had only three dollars.
“Vodka. A pint, how much?” he demanded.
“Russian stuff’s best,” the clerk said. “Stolichnaya, four twenty-five. Absolut, five fifty. Then, there’s—”
So Gregor, as he had that morning, bought something called Vodka City, an American concoction which, quickly sampled outside, had the mere strength of a small woman’s slap to it and didn’t quite amplify the joy he felt hugely enough.
Well, no matter. Any vodka being better than no vodka, he took several more hits on it as he ran back to his car, which had picked up a fresh parking ticket. Merrily, he crumpled the ticket into a ball and sent it sailing into the street. He climbed in, and drove to Alexandria.
It took twenty minutes and several more bolts of the drink before he pulled into her parking lot. He’d left it this morning in the dark and now he returned in the dark: full circle. From despair to triumph, his course magically assured by superior cunning and tactics. He slid the vodka into his coat pocket and raced to the foyer. There he took the elevator up and all but flew down the hall.
He knocked.
She threw the door open.
“Gregor!”
God, what a lovely woman! Molly, as usual, wore a muu-muu, but her meaty shoulders gave her the odd look of a professional football player. She’d applied two great vivid smears of blue eye shadow; her hair was waved and exquisite; and she wore, at the end of her stocky legs, two gold lame strapped high-heeled slippers. Her toenails were painted pink.
“I wanted to look beautiful for this evening,” she said.
“You do, my dear. Oh, you do, you look glorious.”
She took his hand and pulled him into the room. He was so eager, his heart was beating like a metronome. He had an erection like an SS-24. He was set to blast off. The room was candlelit; he could see a bottle of wine on the table in the rear and two beautiful dinner settings.
“I thought we had something to celebrate,” she said.
“We do! We do! This means I can stay forever!”
“Please sit down darling,” she said. “May I pour you some champagne?”
“Champagne! Yes! God, wonderful!” The champagne would combine with the vodka to incredible sensations.
He sat in the big easy chair in the dim living room. She returned immediately with an unopened bottle and a glass.
“Now, darling. I’m all ears,” he said, smiling in the face of her extraordinary radiance, sucking all the pleasure from the moment he could.
She sat opposite from him.
“Now, Gregor,” she said, “there is one little thing I should tell you before I begin. One widdle ting.” The baby talk brought a foolish, girlish smile to her plump face. “Puwheeze don’t be angry with me.”
“I forgive you anything,” he said. “I absolve you of all your sins. You can do no wrong. You’re an angel, a dear, a saint.” He took her surprisingly tiny little hand and looked into her eyes. Odd he’d never really noticed before now, she didn’t even have cheekbones. Her face was a white pillow with eyes.
“I am also,” she said, “a special agent in the Counter-Espionage Division of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.” She smiled.
He thought it was a hilarious joke.
“Oh, Molly, you’re such a character,” he said, laughing, and then he noticed that the reason the room was so dark was that there were so many other people in it, and he was so swiftly gobbled up by men in suits, it stunned him. The lights came on. An agent walked from the bedroom and snuffed the candles. Others emerged from closets, the bathroom. It was like the terrible moment at the theater when the play is over, the lights come up, and you see you’ve only been in a drafty old building all along.
Molly stood.
“Okay, Nick,” she said. “He’s all yours.” She turned to him. “Sorry, honey. Life’s sometimes tough. You’re a pretty good guy, but Jesus, you’re a shitty spy.”
Molly disappeared into the bedroom, and a middle-aged man sat across from him.
“And so,” he said, “we meet at last, Gregor Ivanovich Arbatov. Name’s Mahoney. Nick Mahoney. I’ve been a close observer of you for two years now. Say, isn’t that Molly a peach? One of the best. She’s really terrif, huh?”
“I–I—”
“Now, Greg old guy. We got us a problem.”
Gregor stared at him, stupefied.
“Can I have a drink?”
“Sorry, Greg. Need you sober. Oh, Jesus, do we ever need you sober.”
Gregor looked at him.
“Greg, we got us a real, pure-D mess. A grade-A, godawful, major league mess.”
He looked at his watch.
“You ever heard of a guy named Arkady Pashin?”
“I—”
“Of course you have. Well, right about now, Arkady Pashin is the most powerful man in the world. He’s sitting inside an American missile installation fifty miles outside of Washington and he’s about to start the Big One. Shoot off a bird that will start the last dance. He’s got some Spetsnaz jokers along with him to see that he gets his way. You’ve heard of Spetsnaz?”
Gregor swallowed. “Raiders. Cutthroats. Heroes. The very best killers, it is said. But why?”
“Well, evidently he’s trying to goad your people into a first strike while there’s still weapons parity. He’s going to fire a ten-warhead bus targeted against your command and control network, and he knows you guys will launch on warning. Presto, bingo, World War Three. He knew he could never get it by the Politburo. So he just did it, you know? Can you feature that? I mean, you kind of have to admire the guy’s gumption.”
Gregor said nothing. Yet it sounded like Pashin.
“Ever hear of some kind of nutsy outfit called Pamyat?”
“Memory,” said Gregor. “Lunatics. The ones who hate Gorbachev and glasnost and INF and everything modern and hopeful and wish to return to the years of Stalin. Yes. They frighten all of us.”
“Yeah, well, it appears your pal Pashin is a charter member. He’s got a great memory, that’s for sure. Well, the long and the short of it is that we have about eight hundred of our best boys up there, just about to jump off for what looks like a very busy evening, to try to stop this guy from—”
“But the world will end when you retaliate,” Gregor said in horror.
“There you go,” said Nick Mahoney with a phony smile. “Our strategic people think there’s another wrinkle. That it’s not enough for Comrade Pashin to twit your people into a first strike, but that he’s also got to do a little something to give your team a big advantage in the seven-minute envelope between launch and detonation. So that when our birds fly, they fly poorly, they are uncoordinated, they are clumsily handled. Hell, brother, they may not even fly at all. You ever hear of this doctrine the intellectuals call ‘decapitation’?”
Gregor looked at him.
“As in cutting the head off. And the head of this country is in the very city you’re sitting outside of right now.” He smiled.
“Yep, Greg. We figure your pal Pashin’s gonna detonate a nuclear bomb tonight. In an hour or so. Right here in D.C. Bye-bye White House, Joint Chiefs of Staff. Pentagon War Room, CIA. NSA, National Bureau of Standards even. Bye-bye the whole shooting match. Bye-bye a couple of million sleeping dreamers.”
He smiled at Gregor.
“Now, the question is, where would he get a bomb? I mean, if he doesn’t have a Russian missile silo or a missile sub at his command, where does he get a bomb? Does he buy it at Eddie Bauer’s?”