The pickup was made in a way that was both unique and routine. The shopping mall was quite ordinary, a roofed-over promenade of ninety-three shops, plus a cluster of five small-screen theaters. There were six shoe stores, and three for jewelry. In keeping with the western location of the place, there was a sporting-goods store that catered to sportsmen, and had a wall full of Winchester Model 70 hunting rifles, something one does not often see in the East. Three up-scale men’s clothing establishments dotted the concourse, along with seven for women. One of the latter adjoined the gun-shop.
That suited the owner of Eve’s Leaves, since the gunshop had an elaborate burglar-alarm system; this, combined with the mall’s own security staff, allowed her to maintain a sizable stock of exclusive women’s fashions without an overly expensive insurance package. The shop had started shakily enough—the fashions of Paris, Rome, and New York do not translate well west of the Mississippi River, except perhaps along the Pacific Coast—but much of the academic community came from both coasts, and clung to their ways. It didn’t take much exposure at the country clubs for Anne Klein II to become a hot item even in the Rocky Mountains.
Ann strolled into the shop. She was a very easy customer to fit, the owner knew. A perfect six, she put the clothing on only to see how it looked. She never needed any alterations, which made life easy on everyone and allowed the owner to discount what she bought by five percent. In addition to being easy to fit, she also spent a lot of her money here, never less than $200 per visit. She was a regular, coming in every six weeks or so. The owner didn’t know what she did, though she looked and acted like a doctor. So precise, so careful about everything. Oddly, she paid cash, the other reason for the discount she got, since credit card companies got a percentage of the sales figure in return for a guarantee of payment. This returned the five percent to the owner, and then some. It was a pity, she thought, that all of her customers couldn’t be like this. Ann had brown bedroom eyes and hair, the latter shoulder-length and slightly wavy. Willowy, with a petite figure. The other odd thing was that she didn’t ever seem to use perfume of any kind; that’s what made the owner think she was a doctor. That and the hours she came in—never when it was crowded, as though she were entirely her own boss. That had to be true, and the “doctor” dressed the part. This appealed to the owner. Every time she moved about, you could see the purpose in her stride.
She picked up the skirt and blouse combination, leaving for the dressing rooms in the back. Though the store owner didn’t know it, Ann always used the same dressing cubicle. While in there, she unzipped her skirt, unbuttoned her blouse, but before she put the new set on, she reached under the plain wooden shelf that you could sit on and removed a cassette of microfilm that had been taped there the evening before. This went into her purse. Next she dressed and paraded outside to the mirrors.
How can American women wear this garbage? Tania Bisyarina asked her smiling image in the mirror. A captain in Directorate S of the First Chief (also known as the “Foreign”) Directorate of the KGB, she reported to Directorate T, which oversees scientific espionage and works in cooperation with the State Committee for Science and Technology. Like Edward Foley, she “ran” a single agent. That agent’s code name was Livia.
The cost of the outfit was two hundred seventy-three dollars, and Captain Bisyarina paid in cash. She told herself that she’d have to remember to wear this outfit the next time she came back, even if it did look like rubbish.
“See you soon, Ann,” the shop owner called to her. That was the only name by which she was known in Santa Fe. The Captain turned and waved back. The owner was a pleasant-enough woman, for all her stupidity. Like any good intelligence officer, the Captain looked and acted quite ordinary. In the context of this area, that meant dressing in what passed for a moderately fashionable way, driving a decent but not flashy car, and living in a style that denoted comfort short of actual wealth. In this sense, America was an easy target. If you had the right lifestyle, nobody questioned where it came from. Getting across the border had been almost a comic exercise. All the time she’d spent getting her documents and background “legend” exactly right, and all the Border Patrol had done was to have a dog sniff the car for drugs—she’d come in over the Mexican border at El Paso—and wave her through with a smile. And for that—she smiled to herself eight months later now—I actually got excited.
It took forty minutes for her to drive home, checking as always to be sure that she didn’t have anyone following her, and once there she developed the film and made her copies; not quite the same way Foley did, but close enough not to matter. In this case she had photographs of actual government documents. She placed the developed film in a small projector and focused the frame on the white paint of her bedroom wall. Bisyarina had a technical education, one of the reasons for her current assignment, and knew a little about how to evaluate what she’d just received. She was sure it would make her seniors happy.
The next morning she made her drop, and the photographs traveled across the border into Mexico on a tractor-trailer rig belonging to a long-haul concern based in Austin. It was delivering oil-drilling machinery. By the end of the day the photos would be in the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City. The day after that, in Cuba, where they would be placed on an Aeroflot flight direct to Moscow.
7.
Catalysts
“SO, Colonel, what is your assessment?” Filitov asked.
“Comrade, Bright Star may be the most important program in the Soviet Union,” Bondarenko said with conviction. He handed over forty handwritten pages. “Here is the first draft of my report. I did that on the airplane. I’ll have a proper copy typed today, but I thought that you’d—”
“You thought correctly. I understand that they ran a test . . .”
“Thirty-six hours ago. I saw the test, and I was allowed to inspect much of the equipment both before and after. I was profoundly impressed with the installation and the people who run it. If I may be permitted, General Pokryshkin is an outstanding officer, and the perfect man for that post. He is decidedly not a careerist, but rather a progressive officer of the finest type. To manage the academics on that hilltop is no easy task—”
Misha grunted agreement. “I know about academicians. Are you telling me he has them organized like a military unit?”
“No, Comrade Colonel, but Pokryshkin has learned how to keep them relatively happy and productive at the same time. There is a sense of . . . a sense of mission at Bright Star that one rarely encounters even in the officer corps. I do not say this lightly, Mikhail Semyonovich. I was most impressed by all aspects of the operation. Perhaps it is the same at the space facilities. I have heard such, but having never been there, I cannot draw the comparison.”
“And the systems themselves?”
“Bright Star is not yet a weapon. There are still technical difficulties. Pokryshkin identified and explained them at length to me. For the moment, this is still nothing more than an experimental program, but the most important breakthroughs have been made. In several years, it will be a weapon of enormous potential.”
“What of its cost?” Misha asked. That drew a shrug.
“Impossible to estimate. It will be costly, but the expensive part of the program, the research and development phase, is largely completed. The actual production and engineering costs should be less than one might expect—for the weapon itself, that is. I cannot evaluate the costs of the support equipment, the radars, and surveillance satellites. That was not part of my brief in any case.” Besides, like soldiers all over the world, he thought in terms of mission, not cost.
“And the system reliability?”
“That will be a problem, but a manageable one. The individual lasers are complex and difficult to maintain. On the other hand, by building more than the site actually needs, we could easily cycle them through a regular maintenance program, and always have the necessary number on-line. In fact, this is the method proposed by the chief project engineer.”
“So they’ve solved the power-output problem, then?”
“My draft report describes that in rough terms. My final paper will be more specific.”
Misha allowed himself a smile. “So that even I can understand it?”