“Look, you don’t have to—”
“To go back to my people? John and I went over that. I have to. I’m a
Russian—no matter how good my English
is, no matter how much I can sound or look like an American. I’m a
Russian. What I feel for John, what I feel for you as my friend—that will
never change. But being what I am won’t change either.”
“You know you’re fighting on the wrong side,” Rubenstein told her,
suddenly feeling himself not smiling.
“If I said the same thing to you, would you believe me? I don’t mean
believe that I believed it, but believe it inside yourself?”
“No,” Rubenstein said flatly.
‘Then the same answer ior you, Paul. No. My people have done a great deal
of harm, but so have yours. With good men like my uncle, perhaps I can do
something—* to-”
“Make the world safe for Communism?” He laughed.
She laughed, too, saying through her laughter, “You’re not the same
barefoot boy from the Big Apple that I met long ago, Paul.”
He was deadly serious when he said to her, “And you’re not the same person
you pretended to be then. I’ll tell you what your problem is. You grew up
believing in one set of ideals and you’ve been realizing what you believed
in all that time was wrong. Karamatsov was the Communist, the embodiment
of—”
“I won’t listen anymore, Paul.” She smiled,*touching her fingers to his
lips.
“All right.” He smiled, kissing her forehead as she leaned against his
chest for a moment. “Just think what a team you and John would make,” he
told her then.
She looked up at him, her eyes wet. “Fighting? Always fighting? Brigands
or some other enemies?”
“That’s not what I meant. You can find other ways to
be invincible together.” He laughed because he’d sounded so serious, so
philosophical.
“He—he can’t. And I can’t.”
“What if he never finds Sarah?”
“He will,” she told him flatly.
Paul said again, “What if he never finds Sarah? Would you marry him?”
“That’s none of your business, Paul,” she said, then smiled.
“I know it isn’t—but would you?”
“Yes,” she said softly, then started to fumble in her bag. She took out a
cigarette and a lighter, then plunged the tip of the cigarette into the
flame with what looked to Rubenstein like a vengeance.
“Stay where you are. Raise your hands and you will not be harmed!”
Rubenstein looked ahead of them—a half-dozen Russian soldiers, greatcoats
stained with snow, and at their head a man he guessed was an officer. “You
are under arrest. Lay down your arms!”
She said it in English—he guessed so he could understand. “I am Major
Natalia Tiemerovna,”—Rubenstein thought he detected her voice catch for an
instant before she added, “of the Committee for State Security of the
Soviet.”
Ill
Varakov pushed the button for his window to roll down—it was warm now, so
much warmer than it had been.
He glanced at his driver; this driver was not as good a man as Leon had
been. Varakov exhaled hard, waiting as the Soviet fighter homber taxied
across the field.
He decided to get out. “You will wait for me here.” He opened the door. “I
can get out myself.”
“Yes, Comrade General,” the driver answered, turning around.
Varakov smiled. There was no reason to act gruffly toward the young man
simply because he was not Leon. “You may smoke if you wish, Corporal,”
Varakov added, stepping outside, then slamming the door.
Varakov snorted, stretched, and started walking toward the slowing-down
taxiing aircraft.
Was there a doomsday project that the United States had launched? Was an
end finally coming? he asked himself.
He had avoided philosophy—meticulously. Philosophy and generalship were
not compatible; they never had been.
He had lived a full life—full because of his achievements, because of the
friendships he had made, because of the daughter he had raised—not his
daughter, but his brother’s daughter, Natalia.
He had done that well, he thought. The thing with Karamatsov behind her,
she would grow away from it. She would meet another man. Or had she met
him already, the American Rourke?
He shook his head.
He worried over Natalia, and the people like her, the new Russia he had
fought all his life to make survive, to make triumphant. “Doomsday,” he
murmured, thinking once again about the Eden Project.
The plane stopped, the passengers’ doorway opening immediately. Uniformed
Soviet soldiers rolled a ramp toward it; and already framed in the
doorway, civilian clothes as rumpled as though he had slept in them, his
blond hair tousled in the breeze, stood Rozhdestvenskiy.
Varakov walked the few extra yards toward+he foot of the steps.
Rozhdestvenskiy was already halfway down them.
“Did you learn anything, Colonel?”
The younger man stopped. “I learned it all, Comrade General—all of it.”
Then he turned away for an instant, to shout up into the plane. “Those six
cartons of documents—the seals are to remain untouched, unbroken. They
are to be delivered to my car—immediately.”
Varakov glanced down the airfield. There was a black American Cadillac
waiting, and Varakov assumed it was Rozhdestvenskiy’s car. As the younger
officer reached the base of the steps, Varakov extended his right hand—
not in greeting, but to Rozhdestvenskiy’s left forearm, to hold him there
a moment. “Is there a doomsday device?
What is it?”
“Not a device, Comrade General,” Rozhdestvenskiy said, not smiling. “And I
cannot tell you any more; those are the orders of the Politburo.” Then
Rozhdestvenskiy added, “I am sorry, sir.”
He shrugged off the hand and walked away.
Varakov watched as the first of the red-sealed packing crates was carried
down and past him.
The old man’s feet hurt.
Glancing at his Rolex, Rourke wiped the steam of the shower away from the
crystal.
It was nearly noon, the woman having let him oversleep—or perhaps just
the fact of sleeping in a bed in a normal-seeming home had done it to him.
During the night he had dreamed—about Sarah, about Michael and Annie . . .
and about Natalia.
He could not remember the dreams, and he was grateful for that. Dreams
were something that could not be controlled, an alien environment that
merely happened out of the subconscious. Desires, fears—all of them things
he could not manipulate to his own choosing. They had always annoyed
him—and if anything did, slightly frightened him.
He turned the water straight cold, the hairs on his chest grayer, he
noticed, his body leaner. He shut off the water, opening the shower
curtain, snatching the towel, and beginning to dry himself before stepping
out into the neat and very feminine-looking bathroom. He glanced once
between the shower curtain and the plastic liner; on the lip of the tub
was one of his stainless-steel Detonics .s, none the worse for wear
apparently.
He noted the bruise on his shoulder in the partially steamed-over mirror,
the bruise from his fall from the plane to the road surface. He flexed
that arm to work out the stiffness. It would heal, he diagnosed. He
smiled—no doctor worth his salt trusted self-diagnosis, but under the
circumstances . . .
Martha Bogen was making him breakfast, despite the hour, so meanwhile
Rourke took the Harley from the garage where it had been locked overnight,
and following her directions, headed toward the nearest gas station.
He turned the machine now, his hair blowing in the warm breeze coming down
the mountain slope, his blue shirt sleeves rolled up, both of the Detonics
.s stuffed inside the waistband of his trousers under the shirt. He
could see the gas station ahead. There was one car at the self-service
island so Rourke turned to the full-service island, shutting down.
He let out the kickstand and dismounted. A smiling attendant in a blue
workshirt with the name, “AI,” stitched over the heart came from inside
the service bays; there was a car inside getting an oil change.
‘Till ‘er up?”
“Yeah. I’ve got an auxiliary tank—fill that, too,” Rourke rasped.
“Check your oil?”
“Yeah. Check my oil.” Rourke nodded. He looked at his bike. Miraculously,
after the air crash, then the skid on the icy mountain roads, there were
no visible scratches, no visible damage.
“Y’all related to someone round here?” The attendant smiled.
Rourke shrugged mentally. “Yeah. My sister’s Martha Bogen. My name’s Abe.”
v
“Well . . . hey, Abe.” The attendant smiled. “I’m happy for Martha. It
woulda been sad.”
Rourke started to ask why, then nodded. “Yeah—sure would,” he agreed.
“Nice lookin’ machine y’all got here,” Al said.
“Thanks.” Rourke nodded. “Nice looking town. Cold as a witch’s—Real cold
outside. You got funny weather.”
“Yeah. Just a little pocket here, I guess. We was always fixin’ to get
together with them fellers at the National Weather Service and maybe find
out why, but never did get around to it.”
Pointedly, Rourke said, “Well, there’s always tomorrow,” and smiled.
“Hey, there you go.” Al laughed. “All set.” He