Already this Sunday morning he had filmed, again with this abiding sense of completion, the cracked seashell of the battle station's outer casing and the tanks for the lasing gases. And the computer. Now he was above the last telltale image, the mirror shield and the lancelike long nozzle. Shown on television — which was obviously what the Americans planned — to the rest of the world, that little cluster of pieces could not fail to represent themselves for what they were. They were not the bits of a telescope or a weather satellite; they were the components of an orbiting laser battle station, the first of twelve. Enlargements of the tiny strips of film would tell, reveal, inform, accuse, shock, horrify—
— and make Filip Kedrov the most famous face on television and a hero and a very rich American citizen.
Someone glanced up at the catwalk and saw him. Filip's hand twitched on the clipboard and he stopped pressing the remote control. Smile, smile, you silly bugger, he instructed himself.
He smiled. The detached, confident, almost-finished-almost-rich part of his mind, controlling what he did and felt, rescued him from his own assault of nerves. He pressed the frogs humped back, and it croaked. The technician below him laughed and waved. Someone else looked up, grinning. The guards would look up only if he stayed too long. He pressed the remote control. Fifteen, sixteen… twenty-one, twenty-two, moving the clipboard slightly after each shot to draw the frog's gaze across the expanse of the workbenches, from mirror's edge to laser's tail. He moved his hand through a practiced, measured, even arc; moving the frog's bulging eye, moving — twenty-four, — six, — eight… go, go now— He picked up the clipboard and held it against his chest. Finished, this part of the story, this part of the building work. He remembered once more his father's snapshots, Mother posed by the concrete mixer, her thin cotton dress swollen with Filip's imminent arrival. Now it was as if he had a record of his new life, the one he had built for himself in America, on those tiny strips of film stored safely in his garage, in the cans of paint. Everything the Americans had demanded, desired, wanted. They could refuse him nothing now. Now they would have to come.
Success flushed through him, a wave that excited yet somehow lulled and calmed him. The detached part of his mind remembered to press the frog so that it croaked its farewell. His shoes clicked along the gantry above the workshop. The clipboard was now under his arm, and his other hand was out of his pocket, away from the remote control. Success, a sense of triumph as quick and shallow as the feeling after winning a race at school or scoring in a soccer match, continued to rush through him like a scalding drink.
He glanced down at the frog, at the ID clipped to his pocket, just above the round yellow badge that instructed everyone to smile. He had every right to be in the main assembly workshop, of course — and that, too, added to the sense of exhilaration, the beauty and self-satisfaction of the completed task. He had been made responsible for the transfer of the lasing gases to their tanks. He had even helped to write the computer program for the operation.
And his luck had not simply been there, and held; it had improved once they had gotten the camera to him, once he had begun his task. Even the military and their security had hardly impeded him, once he'd gotten into his stride, so to speak.
He was unwary and unworried about his dreamlike state of euphoria. His job was finished, and well finished. Behind Mother, they were completing the plumbing and the wiring for the new flat. Would they let him live in Manhattan? He grinned. The number of times his parents had made him and his sister look at that series of boring, slowly changing snapshots! His shoes clattered down the ladder at the end of the catwalk. He would be able to get into the old town, Tyuratam, and get his last signal off, that evening. Before he did so, he had to store the film cassette with its companions, wrapping it in polyethylene and sinking it out of sight inside an old can of paint.
Filip Kedrov, Cactus Plant, nodded to two technicians who were wheeling an auxiliary power unit through the open doors of one of the main stockrooms. He nodded and smiled to the bored, unsuspicious GRU guard as he passed him, hardly registering the harmless rifle slung across his chest, then stepped through a personnel door into a cold, narrow corridor. A long line of bulky outdoor clothing hung from pegs above a line of boots. He found his own overcoat, scarf, boots, gloves and donned them.
He smiled to himself, hardly concerned with the importance of what he had done, except insofar as it impinged on his personal circumstances.
Impinged? Changed — utterly changed his circumstances. It was all that mattered. America. Money and America, money to live in America, to enjoy America. The thoughts chased in his head as he wrapped his scarf around his already cold cheeks and made for the exit.
He opened the outer door on the below-zero day and the high, pale sky. Manhattan. It was as if the famous skyline, which he had seen in films the scientific and technical staff were allowed to watch, lay before him now. Yes, Manhattan. He would request an apartment on the east side of Central Park — yes…
He blinked, and the buildings retreated from the pale Sunday morning, into the near future. A few days away, that was all. He would send that final signal. Tightness gripped his chest and stomach once more. It was so close! Come and fetch me, my American friends. Pay up!
Lines of high, tinted-glass towers. Fifth Avenue, Sixth. He would at last be leaving that block of workers' flats in front of which his mother had stood so proudly.
He made for the technicians' parking lot.
Before he reached his old, third-hand gray Moskvitch, his mood changed. The glow vanished, as if the outside temperature had robbed his body of all its heat. He was shivering with fear. Not simply in reaction to what he had done, now that it was over…:
… it was because of the two men in the car parked near the entrance to the parking lot. He knew they were the same two men, in the same car, who had followed him to work that morning. He had been so careful of late, so scrupulous in looking for any surveillance, all the time believing himself to be safe. Now he knew he wasn't. He fumbled his key into the stiff, cold lock. His gloved hand was shaking. He had managed to forget them, forget that he had been followed to work. His quick breathing clouded the car's window. He felt his stomach become watery, then tightly knotted. He wasn't imagining it. He couldn't cling to the fiction that he was mistaken, not now that he was about to summon them to come for him. He had to admit the truth — he was being watched.
"He's going on TV tomorrow — Monday," John Calvin announced heavily. "I've just had the ambassador here to inform me of the fact. The guy was almost laughing."
The President seemed not to have grasped the significance of Cactus Plant's final signal. The director of the CIA fumbled emotionally and mentally to catch Calvin's mood. The transcript of the signal from Baikonur lay on the President's desk like a piece of old and abandoned legislation, as unimportant as someone's grocery list. The director had hurried from Langley to the White House with it, his mood one or unqualified triumph. An edge of danger, of course, because of the drastic shortening of the time factor, but a real sense that they could win. But Calvin seemed concerned only with his television encounter with the Soviet president. They had to hurry. Kedrov was spooked, there was no doubt of that. This was the last signal. He might already have gone into hiding, and roused a search for him by the GRU. Time squeezed down and narrowed in every direction. Yet to Calvin it seemed less important than—
Four days away. Calvin already knew that, though — from the Soviet ambassador, of all people.
"Monday," Calvin repeated with a deep sigh that threatened to become both a groan and an accusation.