“You say you took it from his hand, not the woman’s.” A statement, not a question.
“A mistake on my part for which I make no excuses,” Vatutin said with dignity, which struck both men as slightly odd.
“And the camera?”
“It was found attached magnetically to the inside of the service panel on his refrigerator.”
“You didn’t find it the first time you searched the apartment, I see. And it had no fingerprints on it. And your visual record of Filitov does not show him using it. So if he tells me that you planted both the film and the camera on him, how am I supposed to convince the Minister that he’s the one doing the lying?”
Vatutin was surprised by the tone of the question. “You believe that he is a spy after all?”
“What I believe is of no importance. I find the existence of the diary troubling, but you would not believe the breaches of security I have to deal with, especially at the higher levels. The more important people become, the less important they think the rules are. You know who Filitov is. He’s more than just a hero, Comrade. He is famous throughout the Soviet Union—Old Misha, the Hero of Stalingrad. He fought at Minsk, at Vyasma, outside Moscow when we stopped the fascists, the Kharkov disaster, then the fighting retreat to Stalingrad, then the counterattack—”
“I have read his file,” Vatutin said neutrally.
“He is a symbol to the entire Army. You cannot execute a symbol on evidence as equivocal as this, Vatutin. All you have are these photographic frames, with no objective evidence that he shot them.”
“We have not yet interrogated him.”
“And you think that will be easy?” Ignat’yev rolled his eyes. His laugh was a harsh bark. “Do you know how tough this man is? This man killed Germans while he was on fire! This man looked at death a thousand times and pissed on it!”
“I can get what I want out of him,” Vatutin insisted quietly.
“Torture, is it? Are you mad? Keep in mind that the Taman Guards Motor-Rifle Division is based a few kilometers from here. You think the Red Army will sit still while you torture one of its heroes? Stalin is dead, Comrade Colonel, and so is Beriya.”
“We can extract the information without doing physical harm,” Vatutin said. That was one of RGB’s most closely guarded secrets.
“Rubbish!”
“In that case, General, what do you recommend?” Vatutin asked, knowing the answer.
“Let me take over the case. We’ll see to it that he never betrays the Rodina again, you can be sure of that,” Ignat’yev promised.
“And save the Army the embarrassment, of course.”
“We would save embarrassment for everyone, not the least you, Comrade Colonel, for fucking up this so-called investigation.”
Well, that’s about what I expected. A little bluster and a few threats, mixed with a little sympathy and comradeliness. Vatutin saw that he had a way out, but that the safety it promised also promised to end his advancement. The handwritten message from the Chairman had made that clear enough. He was trapped between two enemies, and though he could still win the approval of one, the largest goal involved the largest risk. He could retreat from the true objective of the investigation, and stay a colonel the rest of his life, or he could do what he’d hoped to do when he began—without any political motives, Vatutin remembered bleakly—and risk disgrace. The decision was paradoxically an easy one. Vatutin was a “Two” man—
“It is my case. The Chairman has given it to me to run, and I will run it in my way. Thank you for your advice, Comrade General.”
Ignat’yev appraised the man and the statement. It wasn’t often that he encountered integrity, and it saddened him in a vague, distant way that he could not congratulate the man who demonstrated this rarest of qualities. But loyalty to the Soviet Army came first.
“As you wish. I expect to be kept informed of all your activities.” Ignat’yev left without another word.
Vatutin sat at his desk for a few minutes, appraising his own position. Then he called for his car. Twenty minutes later he was at Lefortovo. “Impossible,” the doctor told him before he had even asked the question.
“What?”
“You want to put this man into the sensory-deprivation tank, don’t you?”
“Of course.”
“It would probably kill him. I don’t think you want to do that, and I am sure that I will not risk my project on something like this.”
“It’s my case, and I’ll run it—”
“Comrade Colonel, the man in question is over seventy years old. I have his medical file here. He has all the symptoms of moderate cardiovascular disease—normal at this age, of course—and a history of respiratory problems. The onset of the first anxiety period would explode his heart like a balloon. I can almost guarantee it.”
“What do you mean—explode his heart—”
“Excuse me—it’s difficult to explain medical terms to the layman. His coronary arteries are coated with moderate amounts of plaque. It happens to all of us; it comes from the food we eat. His arteries are more blocked than yours or mine because of his age, and also, because of his age, the arteries are less flexible than those of a younger person. If his heart rate goes too high, the plaque deposits will dislodge and cause a blockage. That’s what a heart attack is, Colonel, a blockage of a coronary artery. Part of the heart muscle dies, the heart stops entirely or becomes arrhythmic; in either case it ceases to pump blood, and the whole patient dies. Is that clear? Use of the tank will almost certainly induce a heart attack in the subject, and that attack will almost certainly be fatal. If not a heart attack, there is the somewhat lesser probability of a massive stroke—or both could happen. No, Comrade Colonel, we cannot use the tank for this man. I do not think that you wish to kill him before you get your information.”
“What about other physical measures?” Vatutin asked quietly. My God, what if I can’t. . . ?
“If you’re certain that he’s guilty, you can shoot him at once and be done with it,” the physician observed. “But any gross physical abuse is likely to kill the patient.”
And all because of a goddamned door lock, Colonel Vatutin told himself.
It was an ugly rocket, the sort of thing that a child might draw or a fireworks company might build, though either would know better than to put it on top of an airplane instead of its proper place, underneath. But it was atop the airplane, as the runway’s perimeter lights showed in the darkness.
The airplane was the famous SR-71 Blackbird, Lockheed’s Mach-three reconnaissance aircraft. This one had been flown in from Kadena Air Force Base on the western rim of the Pacific two days before. It rolled down the runway at Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada, before the twin flames of its afterburning engines. Fuel that leaked from the SR-71’s tanks—the Blackbird leaked a lot—was ignited by the heat, much to the entertainment of the tower crew. The pilot pulled back on the stick at the appropriate time, and the Blackbird’s nose came up. He held the stick back for longer than usual, pointing the bird into a steep forty-five-degree climb on full burner, and in a moment all that was left on the ground was a thundering memory. The last view the people had was of the twin angry dots of the engines, and soon these disappeared through the clouds that wafted by at ten thousand feet.
The Blackbird kept going up. The air-traffic controllers at Las Vegas noted the blip on their screens, saw that it was barely moving laterally, though its altitude readout was changing as rapidly as the wheels of the slot machines on the airport concourse. They shared a look—another Air Force hot dog—then they went back to work.
The Blackbird was now passing through sixty thousand feet, and leveled off to head southeast toward the White Sands Missile Range. The pilot checked his fuel—there was plenty—and relaxed after the exhilarating climb. The engineers had been right. The missile sitting on the aircraft’s back hadn’t mattered at all. By the time he’d gotten to fly the Blackbird, the purpose of the back mount had been overtaken by events. Designed to hold a single-engine photoreconnaissance drone, the fittings had been removed from nearly all the SR-71s, but not this one, for reasons that were not clear from the aircraft’s maintenance book. The drone had originally been designed to go places the Blackbird could not, but it had become redundant on discovery of the fact that there was nowhere the SR-71 could not go in safety, as the pilot regularly proved on flights from Kadena. The only limit on the aircraft was fuel, and that didn’t play today.