“You mean,” said Arlene with a nice hand squeeze, “you forgot that you didn’t forget. We celebrated me raw, darling, on the couch in your living room.” Pause. Then, genuinely mystified: “What was that thing with all the rivets in it that looked like Darth Vader’s armor? You never did say.”
He chuckled, returning the squeeze. “Now I remember. Bless that couch. The thing you call armor was a piece of ducting. Six-oh-six-one alloy.
Just something for the house,” he lied. Actually it was the new boundary-layer duct for the Mini-Imp, a single-place sportplane with the potential to outrun anything in its class and land like dandelion fluff, given the mods he’d sketched for Kyle Corbett four years ago in the Snake Pit library. Arlene had never seen the little screamer under those tarps in his garage, and would never see it until he’d towed the finished product to Ithaca and bolted the wings on for test flights. Maybe not then, either. He and Corbett had barely begun the extracurricular project, starting to cobble the whole thing together in Medina’s garage two nights a week, before Corbett’s accident.
For a long time now, Medina had wondered if it was an accident. It could’ve been an on-purpose. A deliberate bug-out. If so, it was just possible that CIA knew, meaning Weston. And now, of course, there was no way to find out what had really happened to Corbett. Long ago, he had given Medina the number of that post office box in Depew, near Buffalo, but two months after the accident Medina had driven to Depew. Through the little window Medina had seen that the only letter in that post office box had been the one he’d sent, with no return address. It had been there three months later, too. Corbett had never picked it up, so the chances were the man was dead. If only there were some way to send a message without being obvious!
Arlene sighed, a sound full of contentment. Nice girl, really, with a sharp mind that belied the impression she gave of being always half asleep. “Why don’t I come to your place again next week, Raoul? I could park in your garage,” she said. “God knows who might spot my car, everybody in Elmira knows George.”
She couldn’t know it, but there was no room in that garage for a car. “Oh, I almost forgot,” he said; “The company’s sending me down south next week, honey. Something about floppy-disk drives, pain in the ass but I’ll be back in ten days. Less, maybe.” The good people of Elmira still bought the legend that the Snake Pit manufactured components for home computers. And yes, he was going south, all right! All the way to the decommissioned strip near Regocijo, in Mexico’s state of Durango. The people in the Bulgarian trade mission, Weston had assured him, were a direct pipeline to the KGB; and of the three swap sites he would offer in Mexico, no matter which one they chose, he could get there from Regocijo in one hop. Which was why he would be flying Blue Sky Three down there as soon as she was all gussied up to masquerade as Black Stealth One. Pretty sharp thinking on somebody’s part to have the craft in place two months ahead of time, even before he had anything worked out with the so-called Bulgarians.
His flight in the hellbug to the secure hangar near Los Alamos in New Mexico would take several days, of course, slow as these birds were. Plenty of time to think this all over. Presently he sat up, yawning, and they racked the seats upright, Arlene touching up her face and hair as he drove her back to the Mart parking lot. She stroked his neck, both to tease and to remind him, but was careful not to do anything dumb as he dropped her off because, as she often said, you never knew who might be watching. Man, if she only knew!
Medina got back home before the Carson show, turning the audio up so he could hear it in the garage. The Imp was practically ready for trials, lacking only the boundary-layer ducts and it would fly fine without those, but with them it could take off at a speed hardly faster than a man could runmaybe. Staring at his handiwork from the doorway, he realized that he’d been putting off those final touches. He should rent hangar space at Ithaca or Binghamton and trailer the little sucker up there right away, clean out the garage, give Arlene a place to park.
Because when he got into this Bulgarian bullshit, sure as hell someone would be sniffing around his house. He didn’t want Ben Ullmer to know he’d been shaving the Imp’s hardware so close to outright Snake Pit specs. And it was important to remember that Ben was NSA, whatever else he might be. If Medina ever had to go private, an Imp that could take off on a dime might just be his only hole card. Keeping it here, with spooks flitting around, would be like sending them an open signal.
It was at that moment when Medina realized what he had to do. Not much time to compose the message, and it had to say exactly the right things without saying too much, and it might not be taken seriously even if it was received. It would take a while, the delay was built in, but perhaps he could force a delay in the preparation of those wet wings for the hellbug. Screw it up when the work was half done, maybe; buy a week or so that way. It would be easy enough to do, everybody pulled a fumducker now and then, even a master A and P mechanic. But there was another word for doing it deliberately, especially when CIA folks were breathing down his neck.
The word was sabotage.
FIVE
“From any other source,” Pyotr Karotkin muttered, “I should discount this as a ruse. In some ways, Sasha is a complete shavki. “The term meant “shit-eating dog,” and was reserved in the KGB for low-level incompetents. It was true that few professionals would send vital intelligence by way of embassy groundskeepers. As Karotkin spoke, he nodded toward the object on his desk, and a pale reflection of the overhead fluorescents gleamed from the skin stretched like rawhide over his hairless skull.
Leonid Suslov, watching the rawhide gleam, hated those fluorescents. Perhaps, he thought, Karotkin hated them too. But no one in Washington’s Soviet Embassy harbored more suspicions of windows than Karotkin, rezident for the KGB’s Intelligence Directorate. This windowless room had been Karotkin’s own choice, between other rooms crammed with data collection equipment.
Suslov, rezident for Directorate “T” which handled scientific data collection, greatly preferred the view from his own office. From there he could see down Massachusetts Avenue with the White House and other sensitive buildings clearly visible in the near distance. Since the Americans had been such idiots as to permit the new embassy compound to be built on high ground, they should have expected thickets of Suslov’s electronic ears to sprout from the embassy roof.
But Sasha’s bombshell had not trickled in by coaxial cable from the roof. It had come, as always, over the wall; the act of a shavki, indeed; but an astonishingly successful one. Suslov reached for the object, which lay in a sealed bag on Karotkin’s desk, and shifted his bifocals to study it closely. Suslov ran field-grade agents to satisfy the shopping list, but he did not run Sasha. Sasha ran himself, and did it in a manner unique in Suslov’s experience.
“In any case, this is not ours to discount, Pyotr Borisovitch,” Suslov replied, noting that Sasha had not sprayed crimson paint evenly over the object in the bag. Enough to be seen, however, in daylight, though crimson looked black at night. It was perfectly round, of high-impact plastic, with the appearance of a borscht jar lid. Its center portion, unlike Sasha’s earlier missiles of information, was hinged. “I see Sasha has gone high-tech.”