As if they were telepathically linked: “We’ve talked long enough,” said Corbett, “but I have to know more, with exact map coordinates. I want you to call me in an hour from somewhere else. I won’t be here but I’ve already got my alternate number. Only the last five digits are different. Got it?”
“On an open line? I’m not sure you should”
“Just listen,” said Corbett, maddeningly calm. “We take the last digit of Mr. Depew’s old address number, if you remember it.”
That post office box! “Ri-i-ight,” said Medina, grinning in spite of himself. The number had been “six.”
“I’m gonna give you some simple arithmetic using that last digit as a baseline. First number: subtract one. Second number: add three. What the hell are you laughing at?”
“This is so goddamn amateurish, man,” Medina cackled, “I swear it’s almost fun.”
“Hold that thought,” growled the dead man in Aguascalientes, and continued before the operator could cut them off. When the lank youth returned with a carload of friends a few minutes later, they found the telephone abandoned.
Medina had to write a check and talk like hell, but an hour later his jacket swayed with its load of quarters as he bought a ticket to see the only local movie that wasn’t besieged by Friday night crowds. There would be no background noises around the pay phone in there, and the place had four exits. As he stuffed the first quarter in, he began to laugh. The reason the movie wasn’t mobbed was because the place showed old classics. Tonight’s feature, with Robert Ryan and Harry Belafonte, was The Odds Against Tomorrow. If he believed in omens, Medina thought, he’d be running for the exit.
Medina did not believe in omens. He believed in Swiss francs; he believed that the element of surprise might work very well for a dead man who placed himself properly while other men watched an airplane crash in the ocean; and he was starting to believe it could be wonderfully profitable to meet Kyle Corbett at Regocijo.
NINE
Once a month, though on no set schedule, Sasha spent an evening isolated in his basement workshop and quietly briefed the cat. Like most men in the intelligence community, he had heard rumors of his own existencehad even known when believers first dubbed him “Sasha”for years. Before Ivan the Terrible distinguished himself by getting noisily trapped in Sasha’s garbage can one night in 1982, the solitary self-briefings had always heightened Sasha’s sense of alienation. An agent run by any government could at least depend on a case officer to hear his troubles. In this sense, Sasha was not an agent at all, but very much an operative.
He had long ago given up the notion of sharing his secret with any human, but Ivan the Terrible, grown from a scrawny young delinquent into a sleek gray tiger-stripe torn, was a cat who knew how to listen without making value judgments. Sasha had found himself whispering to the cat one night across a pair of ruled yellow pads and an open tin of Chicken of the Sea, and his self-briefing went uncommonly well, and Ivan seemed to enjoy the attention even after the tuna was gone. While stirring the ashes of his notes that night, Sasha had resolved to pick up one of the latest CCI bug-finders. It seemed vanishingly unlikely that his basement would be bugged, but a commercially available Mantis unit would remove all doubt about audio bugging. To be exposed while talking with a house cat, after years of flawless espionage, was the kind of cosmic joke that inevitably would be retold throughout spookdom. Sasha went to considerable trouble so that he could talk espionage to that cat because, by God, it worked.
On this evening, Sasha finished his old business and then, after scribbling on the left-hand pad, proposed his next move. “Scenario: I tell them about the swap and give them the Regocijo site, too,” he murmured to Ivan, who merely flexed a forepaw and watched the pencil intently. Perhaps it reminded him of a mousetail. “That gives them one intact aircraft, if they’re competent. But”he moved the pencil to the other pad“that eventually could narrow the search pattern for me.”
That second pad contained only a list of names, a list that had narrowed by necessity over the years. The list included all, and only, the men who could have passed all of those messages over embassy walls. The length, and the complications, of that list had been Sasha’s initial reason for these monthly self-briefings; with a memory that was less than absolutely perfect, he knew he must refresh it by writing and updating that list periodically, with careful rethinking on the validity of each name, then destroying his notes. The idea of keeping such files in the house on paper or hard disk was more than horrifying: it was obscene. Sasha felt no comfort knowing that the list of names, once over a page long, had become easier to remember. For the list could not grow longer, only shorter, as men died or left the field on which this global game was played.
The fundamental problem for Sasha, as a player, was that CIA had two moles in Dzerzhinsky Square. Only their case officers knew their identities. Neither was aware of the other’s existence in the KGB, but either of them might one day gain access to the KGB file on Sasha. In which case, CIA and NSA would soon know everything in that file. Therefore, with the list now truncated to less than a dozen, it was absolutely crucial that every morsel of Sasha’s revelations be known to a select listeach of whom might be taken for Sasha.
Some of those names made him smile. Helms, who’d been hounded out of the top slot: no longer on the list, but he’d been on the early ones. No matter that it was ridiculous to even consider it; for a time, Helms could have done what Sasha was doing.
Charles Foy, whose entry into the middle echelons of NSA had been thought political, years before. But Foy had risen by shrewdness and tenacityand he’d known every secret Sasha had exposed. Definitely still on the list. And Foy’s deputy, Sheppard? Impossible to know with certainty, but Sheppard might have had access to every datum over the years. He belonged on the list. Aldrich, however, had come into NSA too late to have access to the early stuff. Sasha mildly regretted keeping that name off the list.
Colby, up through the ranks and stepping on toes as he climbed, first a protege of Helms but finally his nemesis. No longer on the list. Too bad; some people on both sides might once have bought that one.
Randolph: a long and checkered career in CIA, one of the few who’d gone through the ranks to the very top. It could be Abraham Randolph still. Weston, next down the line, had been around the Company almost as long as Randolph and might be slightly more believable. Weston could have divulged thousands of critical items. What a useful irony that the man who had made a pastime of searching for Soviet moles in the CIA could still be Sasha himself! Unruh, privy to most of Weston’s operations, was as unlikely as Sheppard but still a possibility.
And Maule and McEachern in CIA, as well as Elerath and Vasilik in NSA: two now near retirement, the other two still candidates for a few more years. And who could tell when an embolism or a drunk driver might shorten the list at random?
“Can’t do it, Ivan; at least four candidates who don’t yet have the need to know. And in three cases there’s no compelling reason why they ever will.” The cat yawned and tucked its forepaws under its breast. “Play it close to the vest, hm? You’re right, I can’t let them narrow the search any further. The Blue Sky craft is better than nothing.”
He continued to stare at the cat, which closed its eyes and began to purr. It did not show interest when he began to scribble again, lining out, rewriting, speaking disjointed phrases now and then.
It bestowed only a bored glance when Sasha, tapping on the pad, said, “Scenario: I report Black Stealth One as described by witnesses to be a flying wing, a vertol at that, with some means of becoming literally invisible. No more, no less. I tell them it must meet those criteria to be the real thing. Everybody on the list has the need to know those details, even those of us who haven’t actually seen it.”