Azrael (6 page)

“It would be stretching things to look into this even if your mother came to us herself ...”

Trotter said, “What are you, nuts?”

Rines said, “I was playing her, Trotter. Did you think I’d chase a lead to Cronus off?”

Damn well better not, Trotter thought, but said nothing.

Regina Hudson was frankly pleading now. “There must be
some
way you could look into this. Judging from my mother’s actions, the threat has to be directed, at least part of it, at my brother and me. For an official report, I could make it a blatant kidnapping threat.”

“I wouldn’t have you lie, even if there were to be an official report.”

Regina Hudson sat up straight in her chair, and for the first time Trotter got a good look at her face. Cold, angry, and lovely. And, if what he was thinking was right, she was, in a way more fundamental than biology, his sister. He’d made a promise to himself to help them, the other children of Cronus, whenever he had a chance. His father’s testing him had been a waste of time. There was no way to keep Trotter out of this one.

There was more to the tape. Miss Hudson said, “I see,” and started to get to her feet. “Sorry to have wasted your time.”

Rines’s voice was very quiet. “I didn’t say we couldn’t help you.”

She sat back down and looked at him.

“I just said there would be no official report.”

“I don’t understand,” she said. She was interested, though.

“No,” Rines conceded, “and you won’t, for a while. I
might
be able to help you. Just might. I can’t make any promises, but you have to make me some.”

“Such as?” Trotter was glad to see that scared as she was, she had brains enough not to give the store away. Most people at this point would say, “Anything,” and mean it.

“The big one is this: No matter what happens, no matter if we can help you or not, none of this is to go any further. It won’t appear in a Hudson newspaper, or anybody else’s. No media of any kind. You won’t tell anybody privately. Without my permission you won’t tell anybody anything for any reason.”

She leaned back again, giving Trotter another look at her face as she thought it over. It tasted bad, but she swallowed it.

“All right,” she said.

“Good. And you’ll have to promise to do what we ask you. If we do.”

“What happens if I say no?”

“It wasn’t a threat, Miss Hudson, just a precaution. If at any point you feel you can’t go along with something we think needs to be done, we call the whole thing off with no hard feelings. You’ll still be bound by your promise, of course.”

Trotter said, “You’re a sadist, Rines, wringing that kind of promise out of a journalist.”

“I wanted to see how much she meant it. She went along.”

And on the TV screen, that was exactly what she was doing. While she was still nodding assent Rines said, “How long are you going to be in Washington?”

“Three or four days yet. I’m on a story. I’m the editor of the hometown paper, you know.”

Rines nodded.

“Well, the Congressman from our district, Farosky, is on that congressional advisory committee.”

“There are dozens of them, Miss Hudson.”

She smiled for the first time. Very nice. “Not to Kirkester, Mr. Rines. There’s only the one Congressman Farosky is on, the one that’s to report to the President on the ‘sense of the Nation and the Congress on the proper priorities for the forthcoming summit.’

“So I’m doing a feature on Farosky and the committee as an excuse to come here and see you. I’m staying at the Estmoor.”

“I’ll get back to you before you leave town, Miss Hudson. Thank you for trusting me with this.”

She thanked him very prettily for listening and walked out of camera range.

Rines switched off the tape and brought the lights up. The Congressman looked at Trotter and said, “Well, son, what do you think?”

G
ENERAL DMITRI IVANOV BORZOV
threw water on the stones and heard it hiss at him. He went back to the wooden bench, smoothed the wrinkles from the doubled-over towel and sat. He checked the temperature—ninety-seven degrees. He wondered, not for the first time, why water that temperature, or a mere three degrees hotter, would boil angrily and scald the skin while water-laden air of the same temperature relaxed him and cleared his mind.

He had asked a scientist about it once, a biologist. A brilliant man, but a dissident. A Jew. Borzov had asked him in the midst of an interrogation. The general had found that the occasional innocuous question could get more out of a suspect than a beating could. It was time for such a question, and Borzov had just gotten the sauna (from a store in Finland—all the luxury items enjoyed by ranking Soviet officials were imported from the West into Finland), which he enjoyed immensely, so he had asked.

And the subject had explained, eagerly, grateful at last to be able to talk about something scientific, suspecting, perhaps, that he might never again get the chance. Once his mouth was open, he continued to talk, with only the mildest encouragement, and the friends who had been smuggling his anti-State lies to the West had been caught.

Unfortunately, Borzov had forgotten the explanation. He could, he supposed, visit the asylum to which the scientist had been committed and have him explain again. The place was nearby, and follow-up interrogations, months or even years later, were frequently profitable.

Borzov decided to let it go. He was an old man now. He looked down at his body, as well as he could see it without his eyeglasses. The skin that had once been red with health and covered heavy muscles was now white with grayish spots, hanging in folds where it didn’t cling like a thin coat of paint to tendons and bones, covering them but failing to hide them.

And the bones moved so slowly now. It took the heat of the sauna to free them, melt them enough to get him through another day. He had thought of having another sauna installed in his headquarters, so that he could refresh himself at midday, but he had decided against it, settling for a simple shower stall. He had always set an example of Marxist austerity to his men. And he had never acknowledged a need of any sort, other than the needs of the State. A personal need was a weakness, and a man in Borzov’s position dared show no weakness. What power Borzov had, and he had a considerable amount, had been bought with fear. But power is just one by-product of fear. The other is hatred. Borzov had survived since the days of Stalin by never letting anyone forget the power long enough to give vent to the hatred. Chairmen came and went, cold war chased détente in an endless circle. Borzov stayed. Quiet but strong. Ever ready to serve the State.

A buzzer rasped. It was time to leave the sauna. The general wrapped a towel around his middle and stepped out onto the tile floor. The Finns would now rush out into the snow and roll naked in it while other madmen beat them with boughs. General Borzov found a lukewarm shower cold enough. All he wanted was something to wash the sweat from him. He wanted to keep as much of the warmth in him as he could.

Even in the days of the muscles, Dmitri Borzov’s full height hadn’t been impressive, but every morning he put on his uniform (and if Borzov was clothed at all, it was his uniform he was wearing), stood before the mirror and drew himself up to it. His spine protested, but yielded to the muscles that were left. The day it didn’t would be the day he retired.

The black Chaika limousine was waiting in front of the building. The driver stood at attention near the rear door as exhaust fumes, cloud-white in the chill of Moscow’s early autumn, billowed around her legs. She saluted and held the door open.

Borzov shook off a helping hand and got in. Normally, he would lean back and think. Many officials justified the need for a limousine by saying they worked on their papers in transit. Borzov had never asked for a limousine, and he carried no papers home with him. There was altogether too much committed to paper to please him. The Americans, the British, and those who worked for them could read what was written on papers. He worked during his morning ride, but he worked in the one place in the world he was sure the security was all in order—his own mind.

He would repair to the comfort of it in a moment, but first he had to speak to the driver.

“Your name, Comrade Sergeant,” he said.

“Maria Malnikova, C-comrade General.”

“Are you nervous?” he demanded.

He had noted, not from interest but because he noticed everything, that while the sergeant was not an attractive woman, she had thick, lustrous yellow hair. She was needlessly pushing it down with one hand.

“Keep your hands on the wheel,” he told her crossly, “and don’t be nervous.”

“I-I’m not, Comrade General.”

“Nonsense, your voice is trembling. They have told you all about Borzov the ogre, and you are afraid.” He didn’t give her a chance to deny it. “You shouldn’t be. It is not natural for you. Nervous women do not rise to your rank so young. How old are you?

“Twenty-eight, Comrade General.”

“Have you driven for me before?”

“No, Comrade General. I have replaced Sergeant Brumel, who is to become an officer. To keep the rotation even.”

“So I have not told you. Do you remember the War, Comrade Sergeant? No, of course, you couldn’t. It was over a decade before you were born. I formed many habits during the War. One was a respect for fuel. I learned to spill my lifeblood itself rather than waste gasoline, and a commitment that strong is not easily changed, even when the times do.

“So, Comrade Sergeant, when the rotation selects you to drive for me again, turn the motor off while you wait for me. It pains me to see a car burning fuel without accomplishing anything.”

“I will, Comrade General. I am sorry.”

“You could not know; I had yet to tell you. No blame attaches.”

“Thank you, Comrade General.”

“Just remember what I have said. You drive very well.”

Borzov could see her ears redden. He allowed himself a flash of amusement, then leaned back against the cushions and began to think.

H
IS THOUGHTS WERE DEVOTED
to one project for the entire trip, but they did him little good. He was glad to feel the car stop (the sergeant switched off the engine when it did), letting him know he had arrived at Dzerzhinski Square. Borzov entered and went downstairs to his office.

The office was another habit Borzov had formed during the War, working in a small, dark room many levels below the street. It had been a precaution against air raids. But he had come to like it. The basements of Lubyanka had been where the most strenuous interrogations had taken place, and when Borzov had something to do with them, it was convenient to have his office nearby, where he could go in peace to digest the results. He had steadfastly refused to move upstairs, and when the KGB built the branch headquarters, a modern monstrosity on a ring road skirting the capital, Borzov had nearly resigned.

He needn’t have worried. Plenty of work was still done here. It was convenient to so many other organizations. And even with the advent of new techniques and new drugs, making interrogation just as profitable but with less physical labor, the basement rooms had not been entirely decommissioned.

He went to his desk and called Communications for progress on the American newspaper operation. Only with his request would the reports be printed. An armed courier rushed them to the general’s office where he read, then destroyed, them. The whole procedure had taken less than three minutes, and the papers themselves had been in existence less than that. Borzov was pleased, as he always was when things went smoothly.

Things were not going smoothly in America. The woman was being stubborn. She had been given warnings, and she had ignored them. There was no doubt the warnings had been received. The American madman—Azrael in coded dispatches, by his own choice—was perfection, as always. No one suspected that the children had been eliminated by anything but blind chance. Except that woman.
She
knew. And still she defied him.

It made Borzov angry in the most fundamental way. It bothered him even more than the mysterious setbacks of recent years, the foiling of the Liz Fane kidnapping or the defection of Bulanin, Borzov’s top man in England. The Americans had been responsible for those in some way Borzov had yet to fully understand.

He could, however, accept it. Even the greatest of chess masters lost from time to time.

But this was different. This was as if he had spent hours developing a strategy, and just as he was about to put his opponent in check, his queen had tried to sneak off the board.

Ordinarily, of course, someone who tried to ignore his assignment without at least having brains enough actually to defect would be doused, painfully, before becoming anything more than a minor annoyance.

The times were not ordinary. Soviet-American relations were on the brink of entering a new phase, and that phase must be carefully shaped. American and Soviet officials had started a round of talks that would proceed, on and off, with cancellations for minor upsets or “spectacular” breakthroughs when the politics of one or the other of the countries demanded, for the next several years. But the talks themselves meant less than nothing. The real decisions would be made by the American people.

Borzov sometimes wondered if the American people believed as much in the efficacy of American Democracy as he did. Because Borzov had known since the War that especially in matters of foreign policy, once most of the people were convinced on an issue, the government had no choice but to go along.

The key to the mind of America was the press. The press controlled access to the people in America, the way the government did here. The press had gotten America into war with Spain; it had driven them from the war in Vietnam. It had toppled a president with scandal and undercut his successors with ridicule.

Most of all, it hid the secret.

The American media were full of Armageddon, Nuclear Holocaust, The End of the World. It had made offending the Soviet Union seem the act of a madman, as witness the editorials every time a president risked it.