Angel Eyes (58 page)

Then a fragment of a recent conversation surfaced. How do you find time to get all those recipes in memory? she had asked Valeri. And he had replied, I get some help. There's a ghost in the machine.

Irina approached the computer again, and this time pressed the Reveal Codes key. Nothing. She frowned. She had been so sure that Valeri's "ghost" would have been in Reveal Codes, an "invisible" mark held in the text.

Text!

What an idiot I am, she thought. She cleared the screen, retrieved the first text file in the directory. A menu for "Southern Fried Chicken" came up. Irina hit the Reveal Codes, and there it was, hanging at the very top of the screen: three consecutive signs for Underline that had no business being there.

She went back to the text. Then, holding her breath, she hit the Underline key three times in succession. Nothing. Damn! Now what? Those three Underlines must mean something.

She returned to the Reveal Codes screen, hit the Underline key three times. The "Please Wait" message appeared in the lower left-hand corner of the screen. That meant the computer was pulling an unusually large file out of the hard-drive memory. Irina's heart skipped a beat.

A moment later the computer began to spew out an enormous list of food menus. The file kept scrolling until Irina hit the Scroll Lock key. Then the screen held steady.

Irina studied the menu but could find nothing amiss with it. It was what it appeared to be: a menu for some kind of frozen dessert. In disgust, she depressed the Scroll Lock key. But instead of continuing to scroll, the screen went black and again the message "Please Wait" appeared.

Times, dates, places, names. When the new text came up on the screen, Irina's heart leaped in her chest because she was looking at what appeared to be the inner workings of White Star.

"With Hitasura's men all over the city looking for us, I can't afford a face-to-face rendezvous," Big Ezoe had said early that morning. "There is a way to get information from my informants. It's safe and utterly undetectable."

Koi was in Shibuya. It was just after eleven at night. Still, she was surrounded by such masses of people that she could not see the street. The sky was a yellow-gray, the air as opaque as miso soup, and it came as no surprise when the electronic pollution billboard near the NHK Building-one of fifteen in Tokyo-monitoring the levels of carbon monoxide, nitrogen, and sulphur oxides, began to issue an alert, advising children, the elderly, and the infirm to stay indoors.

"I refuse to sit in my office or in my car, waiting for a Hitasura hit team to blow me apart," Big Ezoe had said. "Hitasura is not so old-fashioned that he will kill me only with his own sword. That's for the old days, and the old days are alive only on movie screens."

Not his sword, Koi thought. His gun. What a world, she thought. If honor was dead, what use was living?

Outside the Seed Building, Koi stopped at the public message center. This was her third pass since she had come here by a circuitous route. She had doubled back many times, using the subways and the crowds in the streets to keep herself free of the hit team Hitasura had sent after her.

The public message center consisted of six CTR monitors connected to a sophisticated interactive computer program. Using an electronic pen, she touched the box marked read. The screen changed, showing a list of four functions. She touched number 2, which read: message TO your friends with secret word. The screen asked her to enter the code word. On each pass before this, nothing had happened. She wrote kami with the electronic pen, the code word Big Ezoe had told her about, and the screen changed once again. This time a handwritten message appeared. It said: "Deke, the tattooer. Shinjuku."

Koi immediately touched the Eraser bar, and the message disappeared into the electronic heart of the machine. A moment later Koi, too, disappeared-into the electronic heart of the city.

*

''The first thing I want to ask you," the ???? said when Irina slipped into the pool with him, ''is whether Volkov is with you.'' He had taken her out to the middle of the pool where the listening devices could not pick up their speech.

"I came alone this time," Irina said, staring at him.

''Do you know where Volkov is? "

"No. He doesn't tell me everything."

The ???? looked at her curiously for some time.

''What is it?'' Irina said, uncomfortable beneath the intensity of that otherworldy gaze.

''I am wondering what you see in him.''

"In Mars?"

"Yes."

Irina noticed that Arbat was restless, but she swam back and forth at the other end of the pool, as if she had no intention of coming near them.

"I said that I wouldn't lie to you," Irina said, "and I meant it. I have no family. Mars does. He's made me part of it, and I like that. It makes me feel secure."

"I don't understand."

"Wasn't I making myself clear?"

The ???? shook his head. "It's just that I can't see any way that the KGB can make you feel secure."

"Oh, you're talking about Valeri."

"Valeri who?"

Irina laughed. "Valeri Denysovich Bondasenko, colonel in the KGB's Second Chief Directorate, Chief of Department N, in charge of counterintelligence against the nationalist underground organization, White Star."

For a breathless moment nothing seemed to move, not Arbat, not the Hero, not the water in which they floated. In the silence that built itself like a spiderweb in the room, Irina imagined that a black abyss of immense proportions had opened up beneath her, and that she was in the process of falling into it.

"What have I said?"

Her heart beat on, seemingly the only motion in a place where even time had given up the ghost.

At last, when the silence had become so agonizing that Irina was about to scream, the Hero said, "Who told you about Department N?"

"Why, Mars did."

"And he said that Comrade Bondasenko was in charge of it?"

"No. Mars showed me a document. It was a charter, I think. Department N's internal KGB charter. It named Valeri as the department's chief."

"You don't know." The Hero closed his eyes. "Mother of God." Arbat, perhaps in response to his inner turmoil, popped up next to him, but she wisely kept silent. She looked at Irina with what could only be described as astonishment.

"What is it?" Irina said in a strangled voice.

The Hero looked at her, and Irina did not know whether she saw pity or anger in his eyes. Perhaps it was both, or neither, perhaps it was some other emotion, one that he had learned in the space between the stars. "How best to put this," he said slowly. "I suppose," he said, continuing his inner dialogue, "there is no best way. There is only to do it." Arbat clicked briefly, and he nodded. "Irina, the monitoring that is done on me here is scientific, but it is also overseen by the KGB. Lara and Tatiana are KGB. They are my handlers as well as my companions. Twice a week I am interrogated by a high-ranking colonel in the KGB."

"Do you want me to see if I can stop it? Perhaps Mars-"

"Irina, Mars is the KGB."

For a moment Irina was certain that she had misheard him. Then it occurred to her that he was making a joke. But there was no smile on his grave face, and Arbat was silently watching her from the other side of the pool.

"You're joking," she said, feeling more and more foolish. "It's impossible. Mars showed me documents that-"

"They were false," the ???? said forcefully. "Or I should say, more accurately, they were falsified. I've no doubt the document itself is the real Department N charter. It's the name of its chief that's been changed. The original bears the name: Mars Petrovich Volkov, Colonel, Second Chief Directorate.''

"No! It's impossible!"

"I'll call for Lara and Tatiana. Let them verif-"

"No!" She could see the truth in his eyes, his fear for her. "Don't move! Don't do a thing!"

Irina remembered the night she and Mars had gone to see the performance of Chekhov's Three Sisters, Mars saying to her, The actress, Natasha something, isn't it? And then, later, when he had come upon her here in Star Town after she'd followed Natasha to the Hero's building from Moscow, and wondered why she'd been following Natasha, Irina had asked him. You know her? And Mars had said. Certainty. I know everyone who goes into that building.

Irina hung suspended. Beneath her the abyss waited only for her to finish her fall, to close over her, suffocating her in its immense black belly.

God in Heaven! She was trembling all over. Abruptly, she began to gag, and the ???? turned her, hoisting her up so that she vomited onto the coping of the pool.

He gave a piercing whistle and, almost immediately, Lara appeared. "Your Comrade Volkov has claimed another victim," the ???? said to her.

Lara came to the side of the pool, pulled Irina out. She lay her by the side, then went to get materials to clean up the mess.

''Are you all right?'' the ???? asked Irina.

Arbat poked her head out of the water, pressing her bottle snout against Irina's shoulder.

"No," Irina said. "I'm not in the least all right." She sat up as Lara knelt beside her. She opened her mouth, but the Hero put his forefinger across his lips, pointed to his ear as if to say, Remember the listening devices.

Lara turned on a portable wet-vac. The noise ate up the silence of the room.

"How long have you been working for the KGB?'' Irina asked the young woman.

"All my life," Lara said. "Tatiana, as well. We were orphans, wards of the state. We were raised by the KGB, trained in their schools."

"How long have you been working for Mars?"

"Tatiana and I are part of the team Comrade Volkov put together when he was given the assignment of finding out what went on during the EVA event." She kept on scrubbing. "Not long ago Odysseus was able to procure for us our KGB dossiers. Tatiana and I discovered who we were, who our parents had been. Tatiana is Estonian. Her parents were killed in a nuclear accident of suspicious origin. The KGB file mentions negligence, a complete cover-up of the incident.'' She sponged more soapy water onto the coping, worked the wet-vac back and forth. "As for me, I'm Ukrainian. My parents were sent to the Perm political prison in the Urals.''

"What was their crime?" Irina asked.

''I don't know,'' Lara said. "Their dossiers say that the KGB arrested them for espionage for talking to American diplomatic personnel, but that is a euphemistic catchall charge. It means nothing in itself. Perhaps my parents didn't know why they were arrested, either. Perhaps it was because my father was a professor of political science and held strong views at odds with the state. Or perhaps the state just needed more wards to bring up as they saw fit. The truth in these matters is impossible to determine, so I try not to dwell on it.''

"Do you at least know whether they are alive or dead?"

"No. No one knows."

"But someone must," Irina said.

''I think Comrade Volkov knows,'' the Hero interjected. ''But he's not telling."

Irina said to Lara, "You're awfully open about all this."

"Not to everyone." Lara finished her cleanup, but kept the wet-vac running.

The Hero said, ''I think to some extent Lara and Tatiana have been changed by their proximity to me."

Lara nodded. "We find it prudent not to report everything that we hear at our weekly debriefings.''

Irina said to the Hero, "I see that you have been quietly assembling your own team.''

"In a way," the Hero said. "Volkov thought he could win my confidence by disconnecting all the listening devices in the room. But he was wearing a body mike. The next time he came, I forced him into the pool, and while he was with me, Lara made a copy of the cassette he had on him. Would you care to hear it? There are all sorts of-"

It was then that Irina felt an icy stab through her heart, a wave of panic so strong that all the blood drained from her face.

"Irina, what is it?"

She looked into the Hero's eyes, pale now with anxiety. "Oh, Odysseus, you don't know what I've been doing. I've been spying on Natasha Mayakova. I've told Mars everything. How Natasha has been secretly meeting with Valeri; how I followed Natasha here after she and Valeri met. My God, what have I done?"

In the ringing silence that ensued, only the wet-vac's drone could be heard. Then the Hero turned to Lara, said, "Make the call."

Her eyes were wide; she was clearly startled. "Are you certain?"

"Now."

Lara obeyed.

When Natasha failed to make their next scheduled rendezvous, Valeri drove out to Arkhangelskoe as fast as he could without attracting attention. He did not take his usual route, and he made sure he wasn't being followed.

All the way out to the insane asylum he thought of the sinking feeling he had gotten as he waited for Natasha in the lobby of the old Moscow Arts Theater. It was still with him, and it was accelerating.

Natasha was absolutely reliable. On the one occasion when she could not make their rendezvous, she had used the dead-letter drop at the International Post Office in Kohisomolskaya Square he had described to her. Before every rendezvous, Valeri went to the post office box there to make sure there was no message from her. There had been none today, and she hadn't made the scheduled rendezvous. He could not ask about her at the old Moscow Arts Theater without calling attention to himself, so he had left, fearing the worst. Then, at the public phone bank at the post office, he had called her apartment. A man had answered in an officious voice. His blood turned to ice, Valeri put down the receiver as if it had turned into a serpent.

All the way out to Arkhangelskoe, Valeri was thinking like a chess player, three, four, five steps ahead. He was moderately successful in keeping his mind free of Natasha, because surely she was lost to him now, and there were larger issues at stake, something Natasha knew and accepted when he had recruited her. Because her beliefs coincided with his, she had made herself into a professional. But, as he well knew, even professionals had their breaking points.

It was a question of time now.

If the KGB had picked her up-which it appeared they had-they would break her, no question. It was merely a matter of how long before she broke. There was no blame here. Valeri knew that were he in Natasha's position, he too would eventually break, tell them everything he knew, everything they wanted to hear. There would be no shame in it, only the secret knowledge of how many more lives would be saved by holding out that much longer before the will gave out and the damaging information began to flow.