Nadia laughed to show she hadn’t taken offense and rolled her eyes. “You make us sound so glamorous! Boring stuff, of no interest, truly. We make sure all the Kremlin’s computers have proper antivirus software and oversee sales of Russian information technology to other countries. I am little more than a glorified file clerk back home.”
Chapel shook his head. He turned to stare at Hollingshead for a while. “Sir,” he said, “are you telling me that you had a Russian agent shadowing me on my last mission?” He couldn’t believe it.
“A Russian agent who saved your life,” Hollingshead pointed out.
“I did what I could to help, that is all,” Nadia said.
Chapel stood up out of his chair and paced around the room. “I’m sorry, I seem to have missed something here. You two are acting like this is all perfectly normal. That an agent of a foreign power was sent — without my knowledge — to accompany me on a top secret mission.” He almost asked if Angel had known — but maybe Nadia still didn’t know about Angel. Maybe that one fact had been kept from her.
On the boat she had known his name. She had known how deep he was diving, and she had known how important the one-time pad was. It seemed she’d been better informed than he was.
“Son,” Hollingshead said, his eyes flashing a warning, “please sit down.”
Chapel went to his chair, but he didn’t sit. He rested his hands on the back of the chair because he felt like he might fall down. “This is not how we do things—”
“It is today,” Hollingshead said, and the warning in his eyes was very close to turning into flinty anger. “Agent Asimova has vital intelligence to share with us. And that mission you were on — I wasn’t the one who planned it.”
Chapel was definitely about to fall down. He sat before that could happen.
“It was Agent Asimova who told us where to find that one-time pad. And why we would want to recover it.”
“Nadia, please,” she said. “Call me Nadia.”
Hollingshead was silent for a second. Then he turned to face Nadia and gave her his warmest, most grandfatherly look. It was a good one — he’d cultivated it for years. “Nadia, thank you. I believe you’re here today to brief us on the Dead Hand system. If Captain Chapel is done with his outburst, maybe you could begin.”
“Of course,” she said. “Jim?”
Chapel rested his head on one hand. “I’m listening,” he said.
Nadia fidgeted as she spoke. Chapel couldn’t really blame her for being nervous — how would he feel, after all, if he were invited to give a speech at the Kremlin? He could sense from her body language that it was more than that, however. She was excited to give this presentation. Clearly it was something she’d been involved with for a long time.
“There are three principal components of the Perimeter system. That is, what you call the Dead Hand. The Russian name for it is ‘Perimetr,’ because it guards the entire border of what was the Soviet Union.”
She got up from her chair and paced behind the table. “I was hoping I would have a whiteboard, or perhaps I could give you a PowerPoint slideshow…”
Hollingshead gave her an apologetic smile. “For security reasons we need to keep this as an oral briefing,” he said.
“Konyechno. I mean — of course,” she said. She took a deep breath and launched in.
“As I said, three parts. The first is a shortwave radio station located just outside of Moscow. Station UVB-76, or MDZhB, as it is called now. You may have heard of this station, I believe it is called ‘the Russian Buzzer’ in amateur radio circles. It broadcasts a continuous buzz tone, at a rate of twenty-five tones per minute, and it does so twenty-four hours a day, every day, as it has since the 1980s. This is in effect an ‘all-clear’ signal. Its meaning is simple: Moscow still stands. As long as this signal is broadcast, Perimeter remains dormant and is completely safe.
“The second component is an array of sensors buried throughout Russian territory. There are approximately one hundred and fifty acoustic pickups, seventy-five air pressure monitoring scoops, and fifty electric eye sensors spread across the various republics that formerly comprised the Union. They are all dedicated to one function, which is to register the particular signature of a nuclear explosion anywhere inside the former borders.”
“That sounds like some pretty delicate equipment,” Hollingshead asked. “If it was installed thirty years ago, are you sure it’s still functional?”
“The numbers I listed,” Nadia explained, “are our best estimate of how many of the sensors remain intact. Approximately ten times as many were originally built.”
“Just an estimate?” Chapel asked. “You don’t know for sure?”
A flash of deep worry passed across Nadia’s eyes. “I will… elaborate in a moment. First, I need to tell you about the third, and most vital, component of the system. This is a computer complex located in a hardened bunker south of Moscow. The computer is one hundred percent automatic, requiring no operators or maintenance to keep it running. It has its own dedicated radiothermic power plant and multiple redundancies in its circuits in case any of them ever burn out or are damaged. The system exists at a sort of minimal state, performing only self-diagnostic functions on a daily basis, as long as the shortwave signal is continuous. Only if that signal stops will Perimeter awaken. If it does, its first action will be to query the array of sensors. If there is no result, Perimeter takes no action. If, however, it detects the signature of a nuclear blast, it will automatically send a signal to every nuclear weapon in the Russian arsenal. Our weapons are hardwired to receive this signal — upon reception they can and will arm and launch themselves without human action and despite any attempt at human interference. The system was designed to resist tampering or sabotage and eliminate human error from the decision to launch.”
Hollingshead pushed his glasses up onto his forehead and rubbed at his eyes. “You can imagine how we must feel about this.”
“I imagine,” Nadia said, “that you feel frightened by it. That was the intention of its designers.”
“I think ‘outraged’ is the more, ah, appropriate term. Ms. Asimova, your leaders have built a veritable sword of Damocles and dangled it over our heads. Though it sounds like there are some basic fail-safes built in, thank God. The shortwave signal from Moscow keeps the whole thing asleep.”
Nadia sat down hard in her chair. “Except when it fails.” She put both her hands on the glass tabletop and pressed down on them, as if she were trying to keep them from shaking. “It has happened twice. Both times in 2010. Once for a full twenty-four hours, and then again for only a few minutes, the buzz tone fell silent. The cause—”
“Wait a minute,” Chapel said. “Your people let this thing lapse, the one thing preventing the end of—”
“Please,” Nadia said, holding up her hands to implore for peace. “The signal has remained active ever since that time. The failure was a human error. The problem here is that the men in charge of this buzz tone do not understand what it is they guard. They do not know about Perimeter. They did not know that when they were derelict in their duty, they put the whole world at risk.”
Chapel could feel his jaw fall open. “Nobody told them?”
Nadia looked sheepish. “It is a secret. Secrets in my country are… like a sacred thing.”
Hollingshead cleared his throat. “The sensor, ah, array,” he pointed out. “Another fail-safe there. It detects what, again?”
“Sound, light, and atmospheric overpressure,” Nadia said.