Calazar looked into Garuth’s eyes and saw again the hardness that he had glimpsed at the moment when Broghuilio had announced the Shapieron’s destruction. It was as Calazar had suspected-a personal score to be settled with Broghuilio. Garuth wanted no outsiders, not even Hunt and his colleagues. It was a strange reaction to find in a Ganymean. He looked at Shilohin and Eesyan and could see that they had read it too. But they would not offend Garuth’s pride and dignity by saying so. And neither would Calazar.
“Very well,” he agreed, nodding. “It will be as you request.”
chapter twenty-nine
Night surrounded the Soviet military jet skimming northward over the ice between Franz Josef Land and the Pole. The clash that had occurred inside the Kremlin and throughout the ruling hierarchy of the Soviet Union was still far from resolved, and the loyalties of the nation’s forces were divided; the flight was therefore being made secretly to minimize risks. While Verikoff sat rigidly between two armed guards at the back of the darkened cabin and the half-dozen other officers dozed or talked in lowered voices in the seats around him, Mikolai Sobroskin stared out at the blackness through the window beside him and thought about the astounding events of the past forty-eight hours.
The aliens didn’t stand up very well under interrogation, he had discovered. At least, the alien Verikoff hadn’t. For that was what Verikoff was-a member of a network of agents from the fully human contingent of Thurien that ran the surveillance operation, and who had been infiltrating Earth’s society all through history. Niels Sverenssen was another. The demilitarization of Earth had been engineered in preparation for their emergence as a ruling elite to be established by the Jevienese, with Sverenssen as planetary overlord. Earth would eventually be deindustrialized to provide a playground for the aristocracy of Jevlen and extensive rural estates as rewards for its more faithful servants. How a planet reduced to this condition would support the portion of its population not required for labor and services had not been explained.
Once this much had been established, the value of Verikoff’s skin had fallen markedly. To save it he had offered to cooperate, and to prove his credibility he had divulged details of the cornmunications link between Jevlen and its operation on Earth, located at Sverenssen’s home in Connecticut and installed by Jevlenese technicians employed by a U.S. construction company set up as a front for some of the Jevienese’s other activities. Through this link Sverenssen had been able to report details of the Thurien attempt to talk to Earth secretly via Farside and had received his
instructions for controlling the Earth end of the dialogue. Sobroskin had detected no hint that Verikoff knew anything about the U.S. channel that Norman Pacey had mentioned. Despite the elaborate Jevlenese information-gathering system, therefore, Sobroskin had concluded that at least that secret had been kept safe.
Sobroskin had decided that the first step toward breaking up the network would have to be the severing of the link through Connecticut while its discovery was still unknown, and the Jevlenese were therefore off guard and vulnerable. Obviously that could only be accomplished with the help of somebody in Washington, and since nobody, not even Verikoff, knew the full extent of the network or who might be among its members, that had meant Norman Pacey. Sobroskin had called “Ivan” at the Soviet embassy and, using a prearranged system of innocuous-sounding phrases, conveyed a message for relaying to Pacey. A call from the U.S. State Department to an office in Moscow eight hours later, stating that hotel reservations had been made for a group of visiting Russian diplomats, confirmed that the message had been received and understood.
“Five minutes to touchdown,” the pilot’s voice sounded from an intercom in the darkness overhead. A low light came on in the cabin, and Sobroskin and the other officers began collecting the cigarette packages, papers, and other items strewn around them, then put on heavy arctic coats in preparation for the cold outside.
Minutes ~ter the plane descended slowly out of the night and settled in the center of a dim pooi of light that marked the landing area of an American scientific research base and arctic weather station. A U.S. Air Force transport stood in the shadows to one side with its engines running and a small group of heavily muffled figures huddled in front of it. The door forward of the cabin swung open, and a set of steps telescoped downward. Sobroskin and his party descended and walked quickly across the ice with Verikoff and the two officers escorting him making up the middle of the group. They halted briefly in front of the waiting Americans.