“Make that Forty-second and Madison,” she told the driver.
He swore and swung the cab under the nose of a bus and down another canyon. “Tell me when you change your mind again.”
Amy ignored him and noticed that her fists were clenched tightly in her lap. She took out a cigarette and fumbled with the lighter. The cab screeched to a halt. “You’re there, lady.”
She paid the driver and got out, not daring to look back. After stamping out the cigarette she began walking east on Forty-second Street, unbuttoning her coat and avoiding the eyes of the women who occupied the doorways. Eventually finding one empty, she leaned against the doorjamb wondering what she was supposed to do next. The man’s car stopped right in front of her. Amy forced a smile to her face. He was sitting in the back, pulling down the window to stare straight at her, a lecherous grin on his face.
Drive on, she pleaded silently.
He got out of the car and walked over to her, showed her his police shield. “Come with me, miss,” he said, looking her up and down.
“What for? Why are you picking on me?”
He took her arm and threw her into the backseat of the car, then got in beside her, holding his thigh tight against hers. He stank of sweat and stale beer. “Drive, Junior,” he told the man in front.
“What’s your name, honey?” he asked.
“Eileen. Where…”
“Eileen what?”
“Eileen McCarthy.”
“How long have you been a whore?”
“Not long. Look…”
“You’re gorgeous naked.”
Now she knew. More fun than the electric chair, she’d told Fuchs.
“Wasted on that egghead, I thought,” he said, placing his hand on her thigh.
“He was rather sweet,” she said, frantically trying to think of something that would stop him.
He guffawed. “Yeah? So am I, so am I. Look, honey,” he said, suddenly tightening his grip on her thigh, “we can take you in and you’ll get twenty-four hours in the slammer and a fifty-dollar fine, or you can give me twenty-five dollars’ worth of your time and be back on the street in half an hour. Your choice.”
They were entering Central Park. There was no way out of it, no way at all. If she was taken in, they’d find the gun and the envelope and her real name. “Okay, I’m yours,” she said.
He smiled that smile. “You know where, Junior,” he told his partner.
A few minutes later they turned off the road and coasted down a slope and into the trees. “Junior’ll make sure we have some privacy,” he said, and the young driver, with one disinterested glance at her, got out of the car and walked away.
“Look,” she said, but he was already opening up her blouse, squeezing a breast as if he was testing the ripeness of a peach. She felt her hand brush the metal clasp of her bag, and for a second almost succumbed to the urge to pull out the gun. But somehow it helped just knowing it was there, knowing that she could blow his head off if she wanted to.
He wasn’t gentle but at least it was quick. She pulled up her skirt and buttoned up her blouse, not daring to look him in the face.
“I’m pretty sweet too, eh?” he said.
“Can I go now?” she asked quietly.
“We’ll take you back.”
“I’d rather walk.”
“Your choice. I’ll see you again, Eileen.”
She got out of the car, clasping her handbag, and walked away, passing Junior. At least it had been only one of them.
After walking for several minutes she suddenly felt weak and sat down on the grass, her back against a tree. She wanted to cry but she couldn’t. She wanted to be angry with the cop, but he really had thought she was a hooker. She’d been so goddamn clever. “I didn’t want him to see my face” — she could hear herself say it, so cool and collected and pleased with herself. Well, he’d seen it now.
With an effort she pulled herself to her feet and walked out of the Park at Columbus Circle. Then she took a cab to Penn Station and caught a train back home to Washington with minutes to spare.
In the washroom at the end of the car she stripped and washed herself. She stood still, her arms astride the basin, looking at her face in the mirror.
Ten years, she thought, ten years of deception. Deceiving others, and maybe herself as well. She was thirty-three years old. No husband, no children, no country. No future.
Remembering the manila envelope, she took it from her bag and opened it. Inside there was a single sheet of paper, and on it a complicated diagram surrounded by notes written in her and Fuchs’s native tongue. At the head of the sheet were two heavily underlined words — “Die Atombombe.”
Conception
One
Josef Stalin stared gloomily out of the limousine window at the rain-swept Moscow streets. It was only eleven o’clock, but the city seemed already to have put itself to bed, and the swish of the limousine’s tyres seemed to echo in the emptiness. His eyes returned again to the piece of paper that rested on his knees, this diagram drawn by a German scientist in far-off America. Just one sheet of paper. There has to be some way of speeding up the process.
But deep down he feared that there wasn’t, that this time the odds were stacked against him. Ten years earlier he’d told the Party of the German danger, had spelled out what needed to be done to prevent the Soviet State from being crushed. It had been close, closer than even the Germans knew, but he’d done it. This, though, was something altogether different. Some things could not be simply commanded, no matter how great a sacrifice was made.
Eighteen months, the GRU told him. The American bomb would be ready in eighteen months, ready for the “peace.” The Soviet Union would have less than three years to match the American achievement while war weariness and the sentimental attachment to the “Grand Alliance” remorselessly ebbed away. A collision course was set. He’d had no illusions about the Germans, he had none about the Americans. A bare twelve months ago the taking of half of Europe had promised an impregnable buffer, and now it seemed almost irrelevant.
He felt a surge of self-pity. Were all his achievements to be reduced to nothing by this single sheet of paper? It was not long since he’d told Beria that he almost felt sorry for Churchill and the English, whose world was being dragged out from under them, who would soon be no more than the curators of an island museum. But was Churchill, with his pathetic faith in American generosity, the only deluded one? He himself had talked to the American generals at Tehran, and it had been like talking to the Germans at the time of the Pact. The stench of raw arrogance. The moment the Germans and Japanese were beaten the Americans would be everywhere, easing out the British and French, buying up the biggest empire the world had ever seen, brandishing their new bomb. Russia would be alone again. And defenseless. He slammed his fist on the seat, making the chauffeur jump. There must be some way of speeding up the process.
The limousine swept through the Spassky Gate and into the Kremlin, which was ablaze with lights now that the air-raid precautions had been lifted. He was, as usual, an hour late for the council meeting and felt able to expend some of his frustration on a brisk walk to the chamber overlooking the Alexandrov Gardens. Perhaps, he thought to himself as he climbed the stairs, but any lingering hopes were erased by the twin rows of gloomy faces lining the table. He wasted no time on preliminaries.
“Well, Andrei Andreyevich?” he barked as he eased himself into his chair.