Henry McGee smiled.
Skarda frowned. “There is no joke here. Everything has been cleaned and examined. This Marie Dreiser is in a Roman hospital. She is of no importance to us. The last important thing is the American agent, this Devereaux, who has the tape. He is in Brussels and he will be dealt with, and the tape will be retrieved before the Americans can have one of their famous, unpredictable debates about returning it and change their minds.”
“And I’ll be tagged as the hit man,” Henry McGee said.
“Of course. Everything legal and logical. We and the Americans must not engage in mistrust. Let them look for you, not for us.”
“Glasnost,” Henry McGee said.
“It is quite genuine, I assure you.”
“Sure.”
“Lithuania. It is a concession to us. It shows how genuine we are in the bargain — we cannot give them too much, or they will be overly suspicious.”
“You gave away the program called Skarda.”
“And Skarda is genuine, believe me. I devised it.”
“So why give them secrets?”
“When you have a healthy man, a man with a strong heart and lungs, and you see his perfect health in every way, in his confidence and his smile, you cannot believe for a moment that he is dying from a cancer.”
“Skarda is a healthy man.”
The wizened man nodded. “And Skarda is a cancer.”
“What is the cancer?”
Skarda couldn’t help himself. He was so clever.
“Skarda works at one level in programming, but the program itself is encoded to work at the level of the American programs to rewrite a program. Do you understand that?”
“Vaguely. Sounds like a lot of shit, but if you believe it, fine.”
Skarda glared. “A lot of shit. Let me tell you about a lot of shit. Glasnost and perestroika are genuine. We must reduce our arms, our mutual wariness. But the Americans are so unpredictable and so suspicious. They still push too hard. They put too much money into research, into their ridiculous concepts like the Strategic Defense Initiative. What can we do when we have so many problems? The Americans must convince themselves of their dangerousness.”
“And you’re going to convince them?”
“They must convince themselves.”
“How do they do that?”
“What if a missile, an ordinary nuclear missile with a nonnuclear warhead, were being tested next month in Utah?”
“Utah?”
“Next month,” Skarda said. “On December twentieth. Five days before Christmas.”
“Sentimental time,” Henry said.
Skarda grinned now, and it was as ghastly as his frown. “What if this missile changed course at the command of its own computer network and landed on a place like Quebec City?”
Henry thought about it. “An American missile.”
“That lands on a Canadian city.”
“That cannot be explained except for a system malfunction. Some malfunction in computer command. But steps and steps away from Skarda and your simple little computer defense shield. My, my. You are a genius, no doubt about it.”
The compliment pleased the old man. He nodded at the bright pupil and did not see the gleam in the small, black eyes. The gleam had not been there a moment before, but it was heating up now.
Henry said, “The Americans suddenly get into one of their numbing debates about weapons systems and who pulls the trigger and all that other horseshit. And the Canadians are mad and probably even the Frenchies, because there’s so many Frenchies in Quebec. Well, it sure sounds wonderful to me, Skarda, really wonderful.”
Skarda reached for the button under his desk. The interview was over.
Henry saw it was over. No trade, no getting out of it, no yin-and-yanging anymore.
He leaped across the fragile desk, breaking it, and put his hands around Skarda’s neck and broke it as if Skarda were a bird.
Skarda’s eyes bulged as he felt the hands, heard for one moment the snap of bones, heard nothing after that.
The crash brought clatter on the stairs. Henry ran to the door just as the fat spy opened it, and kicked him in the groin. The fat leather spy went down with a strangled moan, and the pistol fell on the bare wooden floor. Henry picked it up as the next one came into the room. He fired point-blank, and the second man’s nose widened into a bloody clot before it disappeared. He fell back against a third man coming up the stairs.
Grandmother had her Uzi at the bottom of the stairs, and the bullets sprayed the neatly patterned walls.
Henry ran to the window he had measured a moment before, and broke the glass and jumped. He cushioned his fall on the snow-covered lawn by bending both knees and rolling with the fall.
Grandmother poked the Uzi out the broken window and fired. Her rounds made the snow dance.
Henry kept rolling and then was on his feet, crashing through a wooden gate that led into a connected garden. The machine gun chattered behind him, but he didn’t think about it, thought about running and making his feet fall smoothly on the snow and not slipping and not making a mistake like running into a dead end.
The dit-dit-dit of the machine gun was lost in the heaviness of snow on the quiet neighborhood.
Henry leaped to catch the top of a nine-foot brick wall. He pulled himself up against the bricks and reached the top of the wall. He looked down into yet another snowy garden and saw the face of a growling German shepherd. He stared at the dog. The dog took a step back and then forward again.
Henry leaped down into the garden.
He bared his teeth and raised his hand. “Get the fuck outta my way,” Henry said to the dog as though it might be a reasoning animal. The dog unexpectedly wagged its tail and took two steps back, growling all the way.
Henry opened a wooden gate in the wall opposite and then the dog charged, but it was too late. It slammed into the gate as it closed.
He ran from yard to yard. The chatter of the machine gun had ceased, and they were probably running around, trying to find their cars, organize a search.… Henry smiled at the thought.
When he reached Norrebrogade with its wide road and pedestrian crowds, he slowed down.
He had left the tape at the airport, the tape with the last words of Viktor Rusinov and the recorded voice of the radio man aboard the Leo Tolstoy.
Too bad he couldn’t tape Skarda, but that was unexpected. He had in mind all along just to buy himself insurance with the tape, maybe make a trade, maybe not, see what way the wind was blowing. It had smelled bad to Henry from the first, from the moment they had set him up with the fat leather spy and the booga-booga stuff on the Leo Tolstoy. They had wanted him to dangle out there for some reason and now he knew what it was. They believed all along that Henry had betrayed them, and they wanted to use Henry to make the chase after Michael seem genuine. But they had known Michael would go to Rome with the tape, and they had expected him.
Smart Skarda.
Henry grinned so hard that a passing girl stared at him, but he didn’t see her.
He was inside himself. Trying to see what kind of a deal he could finally make with Devereaux. Thinking about the girl, the German girl, down in Rome, thinking about how he could maybe use her in this.
40
Evelyn Jaynes was uncomfortably sober — no more than three or four tots of Famous Grouse whiskey had crossed his lips since breakfast — but the story was enough to keep him that way.