And now this maculate bedraggled bitch had come to cast a pall over his dream of redeeming patriotic service.
Perhaps, though, the situation wasn’t so bad as it seemed at first. Gideon Sorrow wasn’t one to confide in a woman, and the fact that she seemed to know of their connection didn’t mean that she understood its nature.
“Now that you mention it, I do believe I have heard the name Gideon Sorrow,” said David D. Castle, putting on a thoughtful expression. “Wasn’t he in international finance, or something of the sort?”
“Bet your boots, buster. That he was. Also he was your controller.”
“Controller?”
“As in ‘I tell you what to do, and you do it, or else you’re up Shit Creek without a paddle.'” She smiled demurely. “I’m your new controller.”
For some time Vice-President Castle stared at Ilse Freemann with empty eyes. Only the soft drumming of his fingers on the desk blotter gave sign that he had not lapsed into catatonic paralysis. A dozen thoughts rattled through a mind suddenly incapable of putting them through the wringer of logic. All were variations on the cornered animal’s instinct to fight or flee.
Ilse Freemann crossed her legs. Heavy-veined, coarse-grained, and bare, they were nearly as thick at the ankles as at the calves. Every moment, it seemed, revealed some new grotesquerie about the woman. Castle averted his gaze.
“You may dismiss all those ugly thoughts parading through your mind,” Ms. Freemann said sweetly. “Our dossier on you goes back nearly forty years, and there’s enough there to get you hanged for high crimes and misdemeanors. If you disregard my instructions, I shall most regretfully have to turn it over to the FBI-most regretfully because we have invested an enormous amount of time, money, and thought in your career. We would hate to lose you just as you succeed to a position in which you can perform incalculably valuable services for the Soviet Union, which for years has spared neither money nor wise counsel to promote your political career.
“You may also forget about expiatory suicide-you don’t have the guts for it-or about somehow getting rid of me, or running away to a safe haven where you can begin a new life, or making a public confession of your sins. I have studied your life in boring detail, and I know more about your character than your mother ever did Your greatest weakness is that you love comfort, and any of the alternatives to continuing to work with us-a cold slab in the morgue, life imprisonment for murder, exile, or trial and execution for treason-would be too uncomfortable to bear. Think about it.”
David D. Castle thought about it. He thought for quite some time. Finally he said: “What do you want?”
Ilse Freemann smiled for the first time, showing irregular, tobacco-stained teeth. “That’s more like it, David. Actually, we were reluctant to activate you, considering the danger of exposure of your cover. After all, the big prize is the presidency, isn’t it? But in this case we have no choice. After the successive tragedies of the annihilation of Moscow and the defeat of our fleet in Texas, the Soviet Union is in dire peril. The factories, universities and institutes, libraries and records, raw materials stockpiles, and above all the trained scientists and technicians -all the elements, in short, that gave the Soviet Union its vast superiority over the Americans-have suddenly vanished in a mushroom cloud. And that’s only the damage we can quantify.
“Worse has been the damage to Russian morale of the aborted Texas campaign. By hindsight, based on new intelligence, our military leaders realize now that a determined second strike, by air power and naval infantry, would have subdued the Texans in short order. Our naval commanders lost their nerve, our country lost the conquest of Texas, and our people are rapidly losing their confidence in the communist system. Unless we move fast, the masses are likely to become ugly and rise against us.”
“I can’t believe it!” said Castle.
“You’d better believe it-it’s true.”
“No, no-I wasn’t commenting on your assertion, Ms. Freemann. I was merely expressing my astonishment that, for the first time in history, the CIA’s monthly estimate I received yesterday, reporting substantially what you have just told me, actually represents reality rather than wishful thinking.”
Ilse Freemann nodded grimly. “It can’t have been hard for even the CIA to arrive at the truth. The Moscow district was to the Soviet Union what the entire East Coast, from Boston to Washington, D.C., is to the United States. It’s all gone, and now we’ve got to get back in the game, and fast, or we’re done for.”
Despite the Texas fiasco, Ms. Freemann went on, the Soviet Union’s armed forces were still in excellent shape. For years they had been widely dispersed- mostly on garrison duty in Eastern and Western Europe, South America and Africa-and their morale was still high. The infrastructure that supported the armed forces, however, was practically wiped out.
Three areas in particular had been bombed back to the technological stone age by the Moscow blast: nuclear-electrical technology, computers-personal and mainframe-and telephone land lines invulnerable to electronic snooping by NSA and GCHQ.
“And you expect me to obtain these technologies for you?” scoffed David D. Castle. “Are you aware, my dear woman, that merely to transport the blueprints for these systems would fill a good-size cargo ship?”
“I am aware of practically everything that bears on the security and dominance of the Soviet Union. Of course we don’t expect you to risk your position to do such yeoman work.”
“Well, then?”
“As you say, the specifications, blueprints, materials, samples, and test results would fill a ship, and it will take many, many sympathetic scientists and technicians working in the right places to obtain them.”
“I see. You want to recruit several thousand American scientists to work for the communist cause. Good luck.”
“The thousands of scientists and technicians are already recruited, David. But they aren’t American- yet.”
“I don’t follow.”
“It’s very simple. In the Soviet Union and occupied Europe, we have, as you must have noticed, jailed thousands of ‘dissidents’-scientists, poets, engineers, doctors-for anticommunist activities. The American government, never content to mind its own business, for the past forty years has been agitating for the release of such people. When we require some diplomatic advantage, like a contract for five million tons of American wheat at below-market prices, we release a couple of dissidents, to the vast joy of the State Department. Well, we are about to do it again.
“Right now we need a great deal of what the Americans consider only marginally strategic manufactures- switches, transistors, heavy trucks, turbine blades, and so on-and we’re going to enter negotiations next week to have several hundred of these items taken off the Department of Commerce’s export-embargo list. In return for this concession, we are going to ‘release’ something like three thousand ‘dissidents’-among them many committed members of the Communist Party. Just as we did with the ethnic Germans released by Czechoslovakia in the sixties. The State Department will issue them visas and roll out the red carpet, as usual.”
“Then you will have no need of my services.”
“We may. We are having a senator who espouses Soviet-American friendship introduce a bill that will shorten the waiting period for naturalization to three months. There will be something like four hundred Jews among the dissidents. We can count, therefore, on well over half of the Senate to push for the bill to accelerate the citizenship process. As vice-president, you are president pro tem of the Senate. We shall be depending on you to shepherd the bill through the Senate with all haste, pressuring your friends if necessary, and see that it passes by the necessary majority.”
“Whereupon your ex-‘dissidents’ will get jobs with American industries and start filling that ship with stolen blueprints.”
“Naturally.”
David D. Castle was enormously relieved. He wouldn’t even be called upon to vote, except in the off chance of a tie. If that was all that the Soviet Union required of him, he would do it. After all, security had been much more rigorous lately than in those porous old days of the late twentieth century, when the KGB and GRU ran agents in and out of the United States in relays, known but immune-thanks to the American Civil Liberties Union and its concern for “human rights,” even of those doing their best to subvert the nation. He had” the feeling that it was going to be more difficult than Ms. Ilse Freemann anticipated to fill up that cargo ship. “I will be happy to do whatever I can to facilitate the admission of dissidents from the communist nations to American citizenship.”
“I thought you would be.”
“And now,” said Castle, rising, “I bid you-”
“Sit down, David,” Ms. Freemann commanded. “That dissident thing is just for openers. Now let’s talk about what you’re going to have to do to make lieutenant general.”