Wichita
“Harry, come on! You’re missing Walter!”
“Walter? I thought he retired.”
“He’s on for this. Hurry!”
“Hold on. Hold on. Here I am. Turn up the sound.”
“I swear you’re getting deaf. I swear it.”
“If you’d shut up for a minute, maybe I could hear the darned TV!”
“Don’t yell at me, Harry! First time Walter’s on all year and you have to start an argument.”
“Just turn up the sound and sit down.”
“…and for that story, we switch to Roger Mudd, in Moscow.”
“It’s three A.M. here in Moscow, Walter, and the city is asleep. But the lights in the Kremlin offices where the upcoming space shot is being monitored are burning intensely…”
“Is that happening now, Harry?”
“Can’tcha see? It says, ‘Live by Satellite.’ ”
“…and in the Russian cosmodrome of Tyuratam, final preparations for the rocket’s lift-off are being made in the glow of floodlamps…”
“Is that a real Russian rocket?”
“Sure it is.”
“Gee, it looks just like one of ours.”
Chapter 40
Maria Kirtchatovska Markova watched the sky slowly brighten with dawn as she lay wide awake beside her husband’s sprawled, sleeping form.
Even with his beard and his hair turning silver, when he slept he looked like a baby: his face was unlined, except for the smile crinkles around the corners of his eyes, his mouth was open slightly, his breathing deep and regular.
Her eyes burned with sleeplessness. All night long she had lain in bed, rigid with tension, worrying about the future. The American was doomed, she knew that. He was nothing more than a pawn in the power struggle taking place within the Kremlin. But if Stoner was a pawn, Maria herself—and Kirill—were even less. They could both be swept away with the brush of a careless hand.
I must protect him, she knew. I must protect us both.
Slowly, carefully, she lifted the bedcovers enough to slip out of bed. The floor felt cold to her feet, but she barely noticed it. She went to the window, felt the summer sunlight warm on her face.
“Maria?” Markov’s sleep-fogged voice called.
She didn’t answer.
“What are you doing?”
Turning, she saw that he was sitting up in the bed. His faded green nightshirt was twisted ludicrously around his torso, but the sight brought no laughter to Maria’s lips.
“I’m watching the sunrise,” she said. “It’s quite beautiful.”
Markov reached for a cigarette from the pack on the bedside table.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, lighting it. “Why are you up at this ungodly hour?”
She shrugged. There was no sense talking to him about it. He would only get angry and climb up on his high horse and make silly pronouncements.
Markov got out of bed and came to the window beside her.
“You haven’t slept all night, have you? Your eyes are all red.”
“They launch the rocket this morning,” she said.
“Yes.” Markov puffed on the cigarette and gazed out the window. From this side of the building the launching pad couldn’t be seen.
“Strange to think,” he went on, “that Stoner will be safer once he’s in space than he’s been on the ground.”
Maria said nothing.
Her husband mused, “At least there are no assassins in outer space.”
She still said nothing.
He looked down at her, his eyes searching. “Maria Kirtchatovska, he will be safe in that rocket, won’t he?”
“Yes,” she answered automatically. “Of course.”
Taking her by the shoulders, Markov said in a near whisper, “Maria, he is my friend. I don’t want any harm to come to him.”
“There’s nothing I can do to harm him,” she said.
“But you can help him.”
“No, I can’t.”
“Is he still in danger, Maria?”
She pulled away from him.
But he grabbed her again, harder. “Maria! If there’s any chance at all for us to live together, you must be honest with me. Is he still in danger?”
“It’s not in our hands, Kirill,” she said, trying to avoid his eyes. “There’s nothing we can do about it.”
“About what?” His voice was becoming frantic.
“I don’t know!” she said, pleading. “The decisions that are being made—Kirill, we shouldn’t even be thinking about it! It doesn’t concern us!”
“Yes, it does!” His voice was so intense it cut through her. “If you let them kill Stoner you’re also letting them kill us.”
“Kir, I can’t…”
“What are they going to do?” he demanded.
“I don’t know.”
“But they are going to do something?”
“There are…factions, at the very highest levels of authority.”
“You must find out what they plan to do, Maria. Before we let him get into that rocket!”
“It won’t be the rocket,” she said. “That much I know. They don’t want the rocket launch to fail, not in front of worldwide television coverage.”
“Then what?”
“How can I know, Kir? If I even hinted at trying to find out, it could mean…I can’t do it, Kir. I can’t.”
He circled his arms around her and held her close. Instead of bellowing, his voice became gentle, almost passionate. “You must, Maria. It’s the only hope for us, for all of us. You must find out what they plan to do to him. And quickly.”
Their voices woke Jo. She couldn’t make out words through the thin walls separating the second-floor rooms, but she could tell from the rhythms of the voices that it was Russian being spoken. Heatedly.
Jo showered and dressed quickly. It wasn’t until she stood in front of the foggy mirror over her sink to put on lipstick that she realized her hands were trembling.
She was the first downstairs in the common room. The cook and her helper—both pale-skinned Russians, wives of technicians—had already set the table for breakfast and filled the kitchen with the steamy aroma of hot cereal, eggs, ham and the thin, limp local equivalent of crepes.
Markov came downstairs, looking as tense as a bow-string pulled taut, followed by his dumpy, sour-faced wife. Jo realized it was their voices that had awakened her. In a few minutes the two Chinese scientists came down, then Zworkin and two of his aides. No one spoke much. Anxiety crackled through the air like high-voltage electricity.
Jo couldn’t eat. She sipped at a cup of coffee as the team from the launch complex pulled up outside in their van. A half-dozen technicians in white coveralls clumped into the common room, spoke a few words in Russian with Zworkin, then headed upstairs.
Jo followed after them. As she climbed the stairs she realized that Markov was just behind her.
“My hands are shaking,” she said to him.
“Yes,” he replied. Nothing more.
Stoner was out in the hallway, also in coveralls that the Russians had furnished. The technical team surrounded him like a phalanx of bodyguards, like an escort of white-robed priests.
“I’m to go with him,” Markov muttered, pushing his way past Jo.
“Kirill!” Stoner said with a happy grin. “Good morning. Will you kindly tell these guys that I’m ready to go? What’re we standing around here for? Let’s get the show on the road.”
Markov spoke in Russian and the technicians laughed and nodded to one another. They started for the stairs. Jo started to move aside for them, then saw that Zworkin and all the others had clustered at the bottom of the steps, craning their necks upward.