“Here’s the trick. Pashin thinks he’s me. He had to become me to beat me, that’s his game. It’s obvious, really. He dropped his patronymic in November of ‘eighty-two because that was the month I published my famous piece in Foreign Affairs about how a well-based MX could give us more than parity. That’s when he starts: he’s working through my life, processing my information, trying to become me to destroy me. He’s obsessing on me, looking for my code. He wants to crack my code. So he starts with something stupid. He gets rid of his middle name. Why? Because numbers are important to me, so they’re important to him. And that left him with twelve letters in his name. Just like mine. ARKADY PASHIN becomes PETER THIOKOL.”
He looked at them. Their faces were dumb.
“And twelve letters just happens to be the length of a Category F PAL code. That’s the kind of perverse correspondence that would appeal to him. So if you give each of the letters in my name a simple arithmetic value, with A as one and Z as twenty-six, you get a twelve-unit entry code that stands for me.” He gave a little chuckle, and his fingers tapped the numbers in.
He pushed Enter.
The opening was gigantic, or so it seemed. It was big enough for a man to get his hand into.
“Yes,” croaked the general. “Yes, now, move aside.”
Jack Hummel felt himself being shoved aside.
“Now, yes,” said the general, “now we are there.”
Jack saw him bend and plunge his arm into the deep gash in the metal he had opened.
“Yes,” he said, his face enflamed with the effort of it. “Yes, I’m in the gap, I can feel the damned thing, Yasotay, I can feel it, ah, oh, I can’t quite get a grasp on — Yasotay, is there a man here with small hands, extremely small, a woman’s-size hands?”
Yasotay spoke quickly in Russian to an NCO, and there was a brief conference and a name was called out and—
Sirens started howling. Lights began flashing.
Jack Hummel jumped, turned in panic; he felt the men around him panic.
“Now, now, Mr. Hummel,” came the reassuring voice of the general. “It’s nothing to worry about.”
Suddenly, the room was filled with the laconic yet lovely voice of a woman.
“Warning,” she said in her slow, unhurried prerecorded voice, “there has been an unsuccessful attempt at access.”
“He’s up there,” the general said to Alex. “My old friend Peter Thiokol, he’s up there, trying to get inside. Peter, you’ll never make it, my friend,” the general said.
STRIKE ONE, the computer said.
“It didn’t work,” said Skazy.
“No, it didn’t,” said Peter.
“You’re sure you did it right?” asked Puller, his voice suddenly older and weaker. “You didn’t—”
“No, no, the code isn’t right. We try again.”
He crouched, and his fingers flew back to the keys.
“So maybe he’s an arrogant son of a bitch and he’s not quite willing to give up totally on his own identity. Not quite. So he’s got the twelve numbers, but they’re the numbers that correspond to his name, the egotistical bastard.”
He computed swiftly, and typed it in.
Then he pressed Enter.
She was called Betty. She was the voice of the computer. She spoke from perfect preordained wisdom. She knew everything except fear and passion.
“Warning,” she repeated. “There has been a second attempt at access.”
“He thought of everything, didn’t he, Alex?” said the general. “You see, it warns them when interlopers are coming. It gives silo personnel plenty of time to call SAC, and if they are in danger of being overrun, they can either fire the missile or dispose of their keys. He is so very, very smart, Peter. So very smart. A genius.”
STRIKE TWO, the computer told him.
Peter let his breath slide out in a hiss of compressed disappointment. He sought to replace it but couldn’t get anything in because his chest was so tight.
WARNING, the computer told him, ONE MORE STRIKE AND YOU’RE OUT.
“It didn’t work either,” said Skazy with something like a whimper.
Puller had sat down by himself. He said nothing. Around them soldiers stood stupidly.
“We could still try to hit the bird as it goes out the silo,” said Skazy. “We could rig our 60s and hit it in a crossfire and—”
“Major,” said Peter, “it’s titanium. No bullet, no explosive is going to bring it down.”
“Shit,” said Skazy. “Well, get the C-4. Get all the C-4 we’ve got, well try to blow the door open. Then, if we’ve still got some time, we’ll call in some real heavy air strikes and maybe—”
“No,” said Peter. “No, forget it.”
He stared at the keys. He’d always been the smartest boy in the class. Everywhere. Every time. All his life.
“Pashin really wants to become me,” he said again, almost in astonishment. Then he gave a little laugh, rich with contempt. He thought about his wife and threw his worst secret out for them.
“He thinks that’s his strength, his pathological edge. But it’s not. It’s his weakness. It’s how he’s overreached. You know, he wanted to become me so bad that he fucked my wife. Yeah, the man in the silo, the man one hundred feet below us now, this very second, this Comrade General Pashin, having her fucked wasn’t enough for him.”
“Peter,” said Puller, something twisted in his voice, as if he were confronting a man on the cusp of breakdown.
But Peter rushed on, now unable to stop.
“That was the last thing,” he told the horrified men, and the broken timber of his voice held them. “He had her drugged and he fucked her two weeks ago in Virginia. He became me through Megan. He had her, the motherfucker. So let’s do this. If you mathematically split the difference between the value of the two names encrypted into numbers, then you define the actual merge: you define exactly where he becomes me and where he fucked my wife and where he wants to fuck us all.” He gave another little laugh, as if he were genuinely amused.
Okay, Russian, he thought. Let’s party. Heaven is falling.
Peter knelt, quickly typed in twelve numbers.
He turned to Skazy.
“Piece of cake,” he said.
He pressed Enter.
Betty spoke again in her seductive voice. She sounded like a lover, rich and throaty — full of confidence on a hot summer’s afternoon in sweaty sheets, her words cutting through the siren and the pulsing red light.
“Warning,” she cooed, “access has been achieved.”
Yasotay looked at the general and the general looked back at Yasotay and there was just a moment of panic.
Then a man raced in.
“They’ve opened the elevator shaft!” he cried.
“He’s through the doors,” said the general. “Goddamn him, Peter Thiokol, goddamn him.”
It was ten till midnight.
Gregor asked the KGB security man at the front desk if Comrade Klimov was about.
“He just went downstairs,” said the man. “Just a second, comrade. I can call down to the Wine Cellar and—”
“No, no,” said Gregor. “No, that’s all right. I’ll go on down after him.” He smiled weakly and the KGB man looked at him suspiciously, then consulted his list.
“You’re late.”
“I was in conference,” said Gregor. He stepped past the man, into the stairwell which was dark and curved away, out of sight toward the cellar. It was very quiet. He licked his lips. Pausing, he reached into his pocket, took out the vodka, and for courage took a deep swallow, feeling its nuclear fire as it went down. For courage, he said. Oh, please, for courage. He screwed it shut, put it away. Gingerly, he headed down, twisting ever so gently as the stairs wound around on themselves.