A Song Called Youth (28 page)

“But why not you, Besson?” Jenkins asked. “Is the SA really much better than Hitler?”

“Why not me, because I am not one to march in parades—even clandestine parades! I watch them from my window. When my wife . . . died . . . she . . . ” He stared out the window, tried to swallow the sorrow. “That part of Paris is poisoned now. We will not use the big bombs, they agreed, eh? So they use the
leetle
nuclear bombs. What do they call them?”

“Tactical.” Hard-Eyes said.

“Yes. They only burn up a square kilometer, eh? Three square kilometers on the edge of Paris, one inside. Poisoned with radiation! So—it is okay to poison us only a
petite
amount, bit by bit? That is like choosing to torture a man to death instead of killing him cleanly . . . ” He stood up abruptly, upsetting his chair, and walked stiffly out into the misting rain, without so much as an
au revoir.

Hard-Eyes hugged himself, feeling cold.

“It’s crazy, staying in this town,” Jenkins said. But he said it musingly. There was no implication in it.

Hard-Eyes nodded, wondering, Why
are
we doing it? And the answer came: So that the world means something.

The boy came into the café and asked the shopkeeper if he could put a poster in the window. The shopkeeper shook his head, once, and hooked a thumb at the door. The boy made a great show of writing down the address of the shop.

Hard-Eyes thought, Surely it hasn’t come to that, surely not so soon . . . 

But when they came to the café the next day, hoping to find Besson there, the café keeper was sorrowfully boarding up the windows. Someone had smashed out the glass, and on the wall beside the broken café window was spray-painted, in French, H
E
C
OLLABORATES
W
ITH THE
E
NEMIES OF
F
RANCE!

So they walked back to the hostel Steinfeld’s people had put them in and said nothing on the way. They passed a supermarket, gutted and burned out in the lootings, and the posters were everywhere.

• 12 •

In Manhattan, and in the “A” building of the Second Alliance International Security Corporation, across the street from the Worldtalk Building, John Swenson typed up a coded communication to a man named Purchase. He told his terminal to send the communication to Purchase’s terminal, across the street and up forty floors. The communication was a message within a message within a message. To a man who was an agent within an agent, within an agency. Message
one
told Worldtalk that SAISC’s security preplanning for the Eighth International Congress of Orbital Manufacturers was complete. Message
two,
hidden within the signals for the first, was from the SA’s Second Circle, the ruling committee, to Purchase the SA agent. So far as the SAISC knew, Purchase was one of eighteen Worldtalk executives with greater and lesser degrees of loyalty to the Second Alliance. Message
three,
secreted within the second, was from Swenson the NR agent to Purchase the NR agent. Warning him that SAISC was making plans to implement a full corporate takeover of Worldtalk—the world’s biggest public relations firm and potentially the most powerful tool for propaganda known to modern man . . . 

Swenson sighed and wondered if he had done well to send it through an SAISC terminal. How closely was Sackville-West monitoring everything that went out? There was no such thing as an unbreakable code. He looked at his watch. Ellen Mae ought to be alone in her office about now. He picked up a sheet of computer printouts and walked down the hall. Her door was open. He knocked on the frame and went in.

“What have we got here?” Ellen Mae Crandall asked, in her most musical voice, as Swenson laid the printout on her desk. “You could have
sent
it,” she added, nodding toward her desk terminal. She smiled. She’d said it to give him his opening.

Swenson said smiling softly, “Maybe it’s because any excuse to see you personally . . . ” He shrugged. Ellen Mae blushed, really blushed, by God, and he wondered if he’d gone too far.

She looked hastily at the report. “Oh, the FirStep Colony. Is this from Praeger?” She frowned. “Why didn’t he send it to me directly?”

“He sent it to Colony Intelligence Director—which as of this morning is yours truly.”

“Oh, I forgot! There’s so much, without Rick, to keep track of . . . ” She sighed. Playing helpless female now.

He put his hand on her arm, telling himself to ignore the arm’s slight excess of black hairs, and said, “He’s going to be back with us soon.”

She swallowed, flustered, but gave no sign she wanted him to take his hand away.

Purchase was right about her, Swenson thought.

She glanced over the report. “What’s, um, the gist of this?”

He straightened, and put his hands in his jacket pocket. “There isn’t a lot to it. They can’t get anything but short transmissions out, and fewer of those lately, with the Russians sending out their scrambling signal. Rimpler is possibly cracking under pressure. He’s unstable anyway. He’s got a lot of popular support but among the technickis there are two other men Praeger thinks he can put in to replace Rimpler. On the technicki level, of course. Rimpler’s daughter is a problem . . . ”

She wasn’t listening, she was staring straight ahead with a patently artificial look of having remembered something important. “Oh, my gosh.”

Oh, my gosh?
Swenson thought. Aloud he said, “Something wrong?”

“I’ve just realized I’ve got to get a full report on this to Rick, tomorrow. I’ve told him he shouldn’t work, but he—well, you know how he is. You can’t keep him away from it. If he were in a hospital maybe we could, you know, encourage him to take it easy, the doctors have some kind of authority there. But he’s out at Cloudy Peak Farm, and he’s just like Daddy was—once he gets on the farm, he’s the Farmer and no one can say a word to him!”

Swenson chuckled, and thought, maybe the polite chuckling all the time is the hardest part of all.

She went on, “I promised him I’d get this to him—you know, my own analysis. But I don’t think I can do it alone, and with everything else . . . ” She turned to him as if she’d just thought of it. “John, do you think you could come out to the farm tonight? We could work late, so I could have it in the morning . . . ”

“I’d be honored.” he said, and in a way it was true.

And this time he was careful not to put his hand on her arm. It was all still a question of timing.

“Security will pick us up at six, at the front door.” she said briskly, turning all studiedly businesslike.

“I’ll be there with bells on,” he said, knowing she liked old-fashioned expressions. He smiled at her and went back to his office. And couldn’t suppress a stab of pity for her . . . 

As the helicopter settled down over Cloudy Peak Farm, Swenson hung on to the straps and closed his eyes. He didn’t mind flying—it was coming down or going up to begin the flying that scared him. It wasn’t the sky, it was the ground. The ground could be hostile to flying things. It smashed them, if they weren’t careful.

And he’d already seen the Crandall’s farm on the helicopter’s first circling approach . . . A river cut a purple trail through the moonlit trees. The moonlight showed a great swatch of lawn, the glistening snail tracks of two steel fences, and the cluster of trees around the main house. Smaller servants’ houses huddled to one side. Behind the house a barn, according to rumor, sheltered a few cows, a couple of sheep, horses—but it wasn’t really an actual farm anymore. It was “a combination of pastoral religious retreat and Second Alliance planning center,” to use Purchase’s phrase.

He felt a sudden queasy hollowness in the pit of his stomach that told him the helicopter was dipping, spiraling down. In his mind’s eye he saw it crash; saw himself burning alive in the wreckage.

He felt a cold sweat break out on his forehead and told himself fervently, “This is stupid,” and then realized he’d said it aloud. But the thudding chop of the blades had blotted it out.

If they asked me now, he thought, right now, right this second, who I am, what my business is, I might blurt the the truth.
My real name is John Stisky and I’m working undercover for the NR, the New Resistance, an organization that wants to destroy you, all of you . . . Now, what do you think of that? Because the fear made him mad, made him want to blurt everything. Tell them more than they asked. Tell them and tell them—

Thud.
A disappointed whine as the engine cut. He opened his eyes—and drew back, startled by a man with eyes like a falcon, a beak of a nose, and a slash for a mouth, looking right at him, staring. Swenson almost said,
My real name is John Stisky and—

And then falcon-face said, “You all right, sir?”

Swenson looked at the man’s flat-black Security uniform, and panic passed. Just an SA Security guard. “I’m fine. I’m not so good at flying. A little dizzy for a moment—problem with the balance in the inner ear. Only happens when the altitude drops too quickly. No problem.”

He brushed the man’s hands away from his safety belt, unbuckled it himself, and stood. His knees wobbled and then found their strength. He took a deep breath and stepped out and down, needlessly ducking his head under the slowly spinning blades. He stood in wet ankle-deep grass and felt the relief rush over him, and once more he was John Swenson, deep in character, when Ellen Mae put her hand on his arm and led him to the house. “Are you all right, John?”

“Sure.” He smiled sheepishly. “I’m not much for chopper flights.”

“Maybe a glass of wine and some dinner. We can work after dinner.”

“Now you’re talking.”

She squeezed his arm, pleased at his familiarity, and he thought, I’m doing it right.

Memo from Frank Purchase to Quincy Witcher—High Encryption
Protocol.

Subject: John Stisky

. . . was a priest of the Holy Roman Church assigned to the Diocese of Managua, Nicaragua. Within three weeks of arriving in Managua he came into conflict with his immediate superior, Father Gostello (see attached transcript of recorded fone interviews), when he requested leave to participate in a demonstration at the American Embassy protesting the occupying American army’s refusal to consider a timetable for electing a new Nicaraguan governing body; Stisky defied Gostello and attended the demonstration. He was arrested in the course of a riot, and in jail met Father Encendez. Fr. Encendez had been four times censured by the Church for unauthorized political activity in the wake of Pope Peter’s encyclicals denouncing Church involvement in progressive political causes. Encendez was later dismissed from the priesthood (as a move of conciliation to the occupying American Forces), when he published an article in an American news printout alleging that General Lonington, Director of the Nicaraguan Occupation, was “connected with anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic organizations and had in his boyhood several times attended meetings of the Ku Klux Klan-related Council of Conservative Citizens . . . may have been instrumental, as a young lieutenant, in helping Nazi war criminals escape an Interpol investigating team.” Encendez continued his organizing after leaving the priesthood and in April was found shot to death in a muddy ditch ten miles south of Managua. Stisky pressed for an investigation and charged that Lonington had business connections with the Second Alliance Corporation. Crandall’s church had already begun recruiting in Managua, and was the only American church organization allowed free rein there; Stisky pointed out that Lonington was a member of that church, and he demanded Lonington’s removal. Stisky was subsequently defrocked . . . No conclusive evidence indicating a homosexual relationship between Stisky and Encendez, but Stisky’s college records show that for several months he was a member of the New York University League of Bisexuals . . . He left the university to enter the seminary in 1994 . . . Stisky’s father was Jewish, his mother half-Jewish, but both his parents were atheists, and conceptual artists. His swing toward the Church might be considered an intellectual rebellion against both his parents’ philosophy and their chaotic lifestyle . . . His relationships with women typically are abbreviated and stormy . . . He received psychiatric treatment for a nervous breakdown in July, spending two months in Fairweather Rehabilitation Center . . . his instability is a double-edge sword. It is connected with his extreme motivation—his hostile feelings for the SA are as heartfelt as any I’ve encountered—and his tendency to slip into quasi-pathological sub-characters. The latter tendency, when trained, is clearly useful in an undercover operative but adds to his unpredictability. Stisky is essentially a gifted amateur. Nevertheless, in the course of his chance meeting with Ellen Mae Crandall, last August sixth, she showed a marked interest in him . . .

“I think we could break it down in three steps.” Claire told her father. They were sitting in the living room of Professor Rimpler’s apartment. Rimpler sat across from her, slumped over the dialed-up hump of the floor he used as a coffee table. There was a tray of liquors in crystal decanters on the table hump; the walls were dialed to light green, the light was adjusted to resemble the indirect shafting of sun through forest boughs. Claire sat on a confoam chair, her hands clasping her knees, watching her father with growing distress, thinking,
He’s coming apart.
“The first step,” she went on, trying desperately to engage his attention, “is to talk to this man Molt. He was one of their chief organizers. We can convince him that we’re on his side. Second, we release him and he goes to the technickis and speaks for us. Third, to show our good will, we make some concessions. We release the looters from detention, we do double-checks on the field strength around technicki quarters to make sure they aren’t getting extra radiation—I mean, why not? The whole thing’ll defuse.”

“What makes you think we’re on their side?” her father asked, casually.