“It looks safe,” Chapel said, putting away his phone.
Hollingshead took the little black book — the one-time pad — from his coat pocket and set it down on the glass table. Even from across the room Chapel thought it still reeked of seawater. That was probably an effect of how odorless the rest of the room was. He ran a finger along the floor and brought it up to his eyes and found no dust at all. When Hollingshead had said the room had been swept, Chapel hadn’t considered that he might have been using the term literally. “Exactly how small can they make a bug these days?” Chapel asked.
“The size of a grain of rice,” Hollingshead told him. “Even here in the Pentagon we can’t completely eliminate the possibility of being overheard. But this room is, ah, the very best we can do. Needless to say, nothing we discuss here can be spoken of outside these walls.”
“Of course,” Chapel agreed.
Hollingshead nodded. Then he glanced at his watch. “We’re waiting on a third. Someone with information we need. They’ll be here in a few minutes, but first — I need you to tell me something. Tell me everything you know about the Dead Hand.”
Chapel opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again. He sat down at the table. “Well, two things, I suppose. I know what it is.”
“Go on.”
Chapel shrugged. “A computer system. The Soviets built it back in the eighties in a secret location south of Moscow. It was supposed to be one of the biggest and most complex computers in the world, at least for the time. It was wired into their nuclear arsenal, with links to every missile silo they had.”
“And its purpose?” Hollingshead asked.
Chapel nodded. “It was called the Dead Hand because it was supposed to be similar to the dead man’s switch on a train — a switch the train’s driver has to keep constantly touching or the train won’t go. If the driver has a heart attack or something, he’ll let go of that switch and the train will automatically stop. Except the Dead Hand was designed for the opposite purpose. It was designed to constantly monitor the region around Moscow. If the Kremlin were destroyed — say, by an American nuclear attack — the Dead Hand would turn itself on. And then it would launch every missile the Soviets had at the United States. It was designed so that even if we successfully decapitated the Soviet command structure, they could still have their revenge and make sure we didn’t survive World War III. A completely automated retaliation system.”
Hollingshead fiddled with the one-time pad on the table in front of him. “Like the Lernaean Hydra, wouldn’t you say? You cut off the head, and a new one grows back — it only gets more dangerous. The ultimate deterrent. We wouldn’t dare attack Moscow, knowing the price we would pay.”
“That was the theory,” Chapel said.
“You said you knew two things,” Hollingshead prompted. “What was the other?”
“I know it doesn’t really exist.” Chapel sat up straight in his chair. “It was a ruse. Nobody sane would ever build something like that — a machine that could destroy an entire country with no human input. The possibility of a computer error could never be ruled out. The Soviets floated the story of the Dead Hand as a kind of engineered urban legend. They wanted us to think it existed. But of course after the fall of the Soviet Union, when Russia became our ally, the story wasn’t necessary anymore. A number of Russian officials have denied categorically that the Dead Hand was ever more than a thought experiment — they claim it was never built, and never got past the drawing board.”
Hollingshead nodded. He wasn’t meeting Chapel’s eye, which was a bad thing, usually. “You know two things,” he said. “One of them is correct.”
“You don’t mean—”
“Son, this may come as a surprise to you, but when you say nobody sane would ever create such a thing, well, that group doesn’t include the leadership of the Soviet Union in the 1980s. They were paranoid enough to build the damn thing. It is very real, and it was designed for exactly the purpose you describe. It went online in 1983.”
Chapel felt like the temperature in the room had just dropped twenty degrees. “And if we’re sitting here talking about it—”
“It went online in 1983, and it has been functional ever since. It’s still there, still doing its job. Ready to launch every missile in the Russian arsenal at the United States, at a moment’s notice. Nobody ever turned it off.”
“You’re kidding me. This thing is still active? It’s a loaded gun pointed right at our heads, and it’s still active?”
“Yes,” Hollingshead said. “Even though the politics have changed, the launch codes have not.” The director sighed deeply. “It’s an existential threat to the United States, to the, ah, well, the entire world, actually.” He gave a wan smile. “If that many nuclear warheads exploded all at once, it really wouldn’t matter where they landed. The resulting fallout and nuclear winter would mean the end of the world.”
Chapel couldn’t speak.
Hollingshead pushed the one-time pad away from him, into the middle of the table. “Now you know everything I know about the Dead Hand. Fortunately, we have another source of intelligence available to us.” He glanced at his watch again. “She should be waiting out in the hall, if you would be good enough to get the door.”
Chapel stood up and reached for the doorknob. “She?” he asked. “It’s a woman? You don’t mean—”
He turned the knob and opened the door and there she was.
Nadia.
The Asian woman from the party yacht. The one who had saved his life.
“Jim,” she said, and gave him a warm smile. “You’re looking much better than the last time I saw you. I’m so glad.”
She held out a hand. It took him a second to collect himself enough to shake it. “Please,” he said, “come in.”
She walked into the room, and Chapel closed the door behind her.
She didn’t look exactly like he remembered her. For one thing, she wasn’t wearing a thin sundress and basically nothing else. Instead she had put on a black business suit over a white blouse. The skirt was maybe two inches shorter than would be considered conservative, but she would have passed for a civilian staffer outside in the halls of the Pentagon. She had cut her hair a little shorter. On the boat she had worn subtle but elaborate makeup, but now she had on only a dark red shade of lipstick and maybe a touch of eye shadow.
She was, though, every bit as striking as she had been the last time he saw her, when she was wearing nothing but panties and sharing a cramped shower stall with him.
She was empty-handed. No briefcase, no purse. The director indicated with a gesture that she should take a seat. That meant she had to walk past Chapel. Her perfume — very light, very clean — trailed through the air after her.
“The two of you have met, of course,” Hollingshead said. “Though I imagine you were not, ah, properly introduced.”
Chapel realized he was still standing by the door, and the two of them were looking at him expectantly. Hollingshead gestured at a chair across from Nadia, and Chapel took it. He hadn’t realized how exhausted he was until he sat down.
“Captain James Chapel, United States Military Intelligence,” Hollingshead said, “please meet Nadezhda Yaroslavovna Asimova, Federal Service for Technic and Export Control of the Russian Federation.”
“Nadia to friends,” she said, with a smile. “Which I hope already includes the both of you.”
Chapel tried to smile back. He was worried if he moved his mouth too much, his jaw might drop and hit the floor.
He forced himself to recover a little professionalism. “FSTEK,” he said. “Technic and Export Control — that’s the group that oversees information security and technology transfer. Part of the Russian intelligence community.” He sat up straighter in his chair. “Forgive me for using a loaded term — but we don’t get a lot of Russian spies here in the Pentagon.”