“I’m sorry …”
“Now comes the tricky part.” The doctor put on his headset. He had to make some adjustments on his control board. “Svetlana . . .” he whispered into the microphone.
She didn’t hear it at first, and it was some time before her senses were able to tell her that there was something crying out to be noticed.
Svetlana . . . the voice called to her. Or was it her imagination . . . ?
Her head twisted around, looking for whatever it was.
Svetlana . . . it whispered again. She held her breath as long as she could, commanded her body to be still, but it betrayed her yet again. Her heart raced, and the pounding blood in her ears blanked out the sound, if it was a sound. She let out a despairing moan, wondering if she had imagined the voice, wondering if it was only getting worse . . . or might there be some hope . . . ?
Svetlana . . . Slightly more than a whisper, enough to detect emotional content. The voice was so sad, so disappointed. Svetlana, what have you done?
“I didn’t, I didn’t—” she sputtered, and still could not hear her own voice as she called out from the grave. She was rewarded with renewed silence. After what seemed an hour she screamed: “Please, please come back to me!”
Svetlana, the voice repeated finally, what have you done . . . ?
“I’m sorry . . .” she repeated in a voice choked with tears.
“What have you done?” it asked again. “What about the film … ?”
“Yes!” she answered, and in moments she told all.
“Time eleven hours, forty-one minutes. The exercise is concluded.” The doctor switched off the tape recorder. Next he flicked the lights in the pool room on and off a few times. One of the divers in the tank waved acknowledgment and jabbed a needle into Subject Vaneyeva’s arm. As soon as her body went completely limp, she was taken out. The doctor left the control room and went down to see her.
She was lying on a gurney when he got there, the wetsuit already taken off. He sat beside the unconscious form and held her hand as the technician jabbed her with a mild stimulant. She was a pretty one, the doctor thought as her breathing picked up. He waved the technician out of the room, leaving the two of them alone.
“Hello, Svetlana,” he said in his gentlest voice. The blue eyes opened, saw the lights on the ceiling, and the walls. Then her head turned toward him.
He knew he was indulging himself, but he’d worked long into the night and the next day on this case, and this was probably the most important application of his program to date. The naked woman leaped off the table into his arms and nearly strangled him with a hug. It wasn’t because he was particularly good-looking, the doctor knew, just that he was a human being, and she wanted to touch one. Her body was still slick with oil as her tears fell on his white laboratory coat. She would never commit another crime against the State, not after this. It was too bad that she’d have to go to a labor camp. Such a waste, he thought as he examined her. Perhaps he could do something about that. After ten minutes she was sedated again, and he left her asleep.
“I gave her a drug called Versed. It’s a new Western one, an amnesiac.”
“Why one of those?” Vatutin asked.
“I give you another option, Comrade Colonel. When she wakes up later this morning, she will remember very little. Versed acts like scopolamine, but is more effective. She will remember no firm details, and very little else that happened to her. It will all seem to be a fearful dream. Versed is also an hypnotic. For example, I can go back to her now and make a suggestion that she will not remember anything, but that she may never betray the State again. There is roughly an eighty-percent probability that both suggestions will never be violated.”
“You’re joking!”
“Comrade, one effect of this technique is that she has condemned herself more forcefully than the State ever could. She feels more remorse now for her actions than she would before a firing squad. Surely you have read 1984? It might have been a dream when Orwell wrote it, but with modern technology, we can do it. The trick is not breaking the person from without, but doing it from within.”
“You mean we can use her now . . . ?”
11.
Procedures
HE’S not going to make it.” Ortiz had gotten the embassy doctor, an Army surgeon whose real job was to assist in the treatment of wounded Afghans. Churkin’s lungs were too badly damaged to fight off the pneumonia that had developed during his transit. “He probably won’t last out the day. Sorry, just too much damage. A day sooner and maybe we might have saved him, but . . .” The doctor shook his head. “I’d like to get a preacher to him, but that’s probably a waste of time.”
“Can he talk?”
“Not much. You can try. It won’t hurt him any more than he already is. He’ll be conscious for a few more hours, then he’s just going to fade out.”
“Thanks for the try, doc,” Ortiz said. He almost sighed with relief, but the shame of such a gesture stopped him cold. What would they have done with a live one? Give him back? Keep him? Trade him? he asked himself. He wondered why the Archer had brought him out at all. “Well,” he said to himself, and entered the room.
Two hours later he emerged. Then Ortiz drove down to the embassy, where the canteen served beer. He made his report to Langley, then over the next five hours, sitting alone at a corner table he left only for refills, he got himself thoroughly and morosely drunk.
Ed Foley could not allow himself that luxury. One of his couriers had disappeared three days earlier. Another had left her desk at GOSPLAN and returned two days later. Then, only this morning, his man in the dry-cleaners had called in sick. He’d sent a warning to the kid at the baths, but didn’t know if it had gotten to him or not. This was not mere trouble in his CARDINAL network, it was a disaster. The whole point of using Svetlana Vaneyeva was her supposed immunity from KGB’s more forceful measures, and he’d depended on several days’ resistance from her to get his people moved. Warning orders for the CARDINAL breakout had arrived but were still awaiting delivery. There was no sense in spooking the man before things were fully ready. After that, it should be a simple matter for Colonel Filitov to come up with an excuse to visit the Leningrad Military District headquarters—something he did every six months or so—and get him out.
If that works, Foley reminded himself. It had been done only twice that he knew of, and as well as it had gone before . . . there were no certainties, were there? Not hardly. It was time to leave. He and his wife needed time off, time away from all this. Their next post was supposed to be on the training staff at “the Farm” on the York River. But these thoughts didn’t help him with his current problem.
He wondered if he should alert CARDINAL anyway, warn him to be more careful—but then he might destroy the data that Langley was screaming for, and the data was paramount. That was the rule, a rule that Filitov knew and understood, supposedly as well as Foley did. But spies were more than objects that provided information, weren’t they?
Field officers like Foley and his wife were supposed to regard them as valuable but expendable assets, to distance themselves from their agents, to treat them kindly when possible but ruthlessly when necessary. To treat them like children, really, with a mixture of indulgence and discipline. But they weren’t children. CARDINAL was older than his own father, had been an agent when Foley was in second grade! Could he not show loyalty to Filitov? Of course not. He had to protect him.
But how?
Counterespionage operations were often nothing more than police work, and as a result of this, Colonel Vatutin knew as much about the business of investigation as the best men in the Moscow Militia. Svetlana had given him the manager of the dry-cleaning shop, and after two perfunctory days of surveillance, he’d decided to bring the man in for interrogation. They didn’t use the tank on him. The Colonel still did not trust the technique, and besides, there was no need to go easy on him. It annoyed Vatutin that Vaneyeva now had a chance to remain free—free, after working for enemies of the State! Somebody wanted to use her as a bargaining chip for something or other with the Central Committee, but that was not the Colonel’s concern. Now the dry-cleaner had given him a description of another member of this endless chain.