Angel Eyes (67 page)

And, ultimately, Irina had proved her worth to him when her amazing amateur sleuthing had uncovered Natasha Mayakova, the link between the traitor Valeri Denysovich and the Hero.

Damn Valeri Denysovich!

Mars's fist crashed onto the tabletop, making Captain Nikolev start.

"Comrade?"

Mars was already looking over the monitoring of White Star transmissions. "They seem to have sent some kind of distress message into the West." Mars rubbed at his face. "We haven't fully broken their code yet, but we have enough to make some sense out of the garble.'' He looked up at Captain Nikolev. ''Do you think that White Star is desperate enough to ask for direct help from the West?"

"Even if they have," Nikolev said, "who would be foolish enough to respond?"

"Hmm." Mars contemplated the transcripts as if they were tea leaves from which he could divine the future. After a time, he picked up a small interoffice memo, said, "An American diplomatic mission has logged a flight plan into Moscow.''

"So? American diplomatic missions happen all the time."

Mars flipped the memo over to Captain Nikolev. "But take a look at where this particular mission is coming from."

"Tokyo."

"Yes," Mars said. "Interesting, because Tokyo is where the White Star S.O.S. we intercepted was sent to."

Captain Nikolev shrugged. "Could be a coincidence."

Mars took the memo back without saying a word. Captain Nikolev watched him as he clipped the memo to the transmission transcripts. In a moment Mars raised his head. "The mobile units are standing by?"

"Yes, comrade."

"The moment Miss Ponomareva's car begins to move, I want to know about it. If I'm sleeping, wake me. If I'm eating, pull the fork from my hand. Clear?"

"Absolutely, comrade."

The Hotel Rossiya, an enormous twenty-story structure built in an undistinguished style that in Russia passed for modern, took up the south side of an entire block of Razin Street. The street was named after a well-known Cossack leader, a scourge of czars, and somehow it seemed appropriate to the state to house so many tourists here.

Irina went into the front entrance to the Rossiya and, as Tatiana had instructed her to do, went up to the front desk and asked if there were any messages for Mrs. Kubysheva.

There were.

Irina took the plain white envelope, went across the lobby, up the stairs into one of the many restaurants in the hotel. Locating the rest room, she went in, locked herself in a stall.

She slit open the envelope, read it twice through. Her heart was hammering so hard in her chest that, when the door to the rest room swung open, she wondered how the ladies who came in didn't hear it.

Memorizing the instructions, Irina tore the paper and envelope into tiny bits, threw them into the toilet. She flushed twice, making certain that not one scrap of paper was left in the bowl. In the rest room she rinsed her hands, but she did not look at herself in the gilt-edged mirrors.

She went out of the Rossiya by a side entrance. The onion domes of the Cathedral of St. Basil dominated the near distance. She was not far from the Kremlin, and she shuddered as if it were winter, and she without her fur-lined coat.

The instructions had urged her to go by foot and by bus, and Irina scrupulously heeded this advice. Sensibly, she did not want to look around to see if she was being followed, but she found herself staring like a cat into windowpanes, the glass of passing cars and trams, in order to catch the reflections of as many of those around her as she could see.

She made a circuit of trolleybuses, using routes that paralleled one another, ending up essentially where she had begun. Then she set off by foot and, at length, came to the far end of Red Square. The Moskva was dark and muddy, and the sky was so full of clouds that she could not see her reflection in the water as she crossed over the Moskvoretsky Bridge. That was all right with her. It seemed, anyway, as if another Irina Ponomareva was engaged in this terrifying espionage enterprise.

Past Dobryninskaya Square she came at last to the Zamoskvorechye, the District Beyond the Moskva. She saw the Intourist buses, exhausts bluing the heavy gray sky, and on Bolshaya Polyanka Street, the lovely facade of the Church of St. Gregory of Neocasarea.

In the sanctuary, Irina prayed for Valeri, for herself, but especially for Odysseus. The lies of the Intourist guides fell on her ears like acid. The tourists shuffled behind the guide like sheep to the slaughter.

Death and destruction were never far from her consciousness now, and she was frightened for herself, as if she could no longer recognize her own moral center, let alone the moral centers of those around her. Every step I take down this path, she thought, I am more lost, as I push back the boundaries of what I will and will not do. Will there be no end?

She was finished with her prayers. She walked from the sanctuary into the sacristy. It was quiet here, the droning of the Intourist guide indistinct, far away. The shadows hung like shrouds, thick, embroidered with threads of black among the shades of gray.

Irina started when a robed priest touched her arm. She was about to say something when he put his finger against his lips. His hood hid his face. He beckoned, and she nodded, followed him out of the sacristy, down a dark, musty hall, through a wooden door, down worn stone steps. It became cold and dank. She smelled tallow, fermenting wine, and mold. She sneezed.

At the foot of the stairs the priest pushed back his hood, revealing the strawberry birthmark.

"This way," Sergei said. He did not offer his name, and Irina did not ask.

Sergei took her by a circuitous route through the crypt until they came to the place where he and Valeri had made their temporary camp.

Irina saw the young girl on the makeshift straw pallet.

"My daughter," Valeri Bondasenko said, stepping out of the shadows. "I know you believed that I had no children. A necessary lie. No one knows about her. My daughter's . . . illness could have been used against me."

"Why is she here?"

"The KGB discovered her existence and her whereabouts in one terrible blow."

Irina looked at him. "They made Natasha tell them."

Valeri nodded.

"My God, is she alive or dead?"

"I have no way of knowing."

"Oh, Valeri, I may have killed her. I've been such a fool."

"No, not a fool, koshka. You'd been lied to so much, you just lost your ability to tell fact from fiction." He gave her a rueful smile. "Don't blame yourself, please. You were up against the best. You had no chance to come through this intact."

"You and Mars."

Valerie came closer to her. "Yes."

"But you, " she said. "Why did you have to lie to me?"

"I thought I was protecting you," Valeri said. "At least, that's what I told myself. I had read your dossier; I knew about your family background, what you had suffered at the hands of the KGB. I convinced myself that, though I sought to use you against Mars, I would spare you knowledge about him that would cripple you. I felt that if you were ignorant of who Mars really was, you would be more natural with him."

Valeri shook his head ruefully. "You see, koshka, I've become such a skillful liar that I had no trouble fooling myself. I didn't understand that I was falling in love with you, that each day I was sending you out into incalculable danger. What happened to Natasha-her arrest and interrogation-could have happened to you, had Mars begun to suspect you were spying on him for me. In the beginning I ignored that danger because I was obsessed with destroying Mars." He moved toward her. "Then, at last, I understood what I was doing to you-and to myself."

''Don't,'' Irina said. ''I no longer know whether I want to be close to you. You hurt me deeply, Valeri."

"I didn't mean to. You must believe that."

Irina said nothing.

Valeri said, "You must have forgiven me. You came, didn't you?"

"I came because Odysseus asked me to. He said it was important, that I would have a chance to actively work for freedom. ''

"He was right."

Irina stared at him. "But right now Odysseus is beside the point."

"Is he?" Valeri said. "Why? We are working toward the same end."

"Perhaps it is your methods that I find so offensive. Frankly, from where I stand I don't see all that much difference between you and Mars."

"Mars Volkov has been systematically interrogating Odysseus ever since he came out of his coma. Mars Volkov picked up Natasha Mayakova and subjected her to articulated interrogation. What does that mean? Even I don't know, but it could include beating, starving, sleep deprivation, electric shock, drug inj-"

"Stop it!" Irina put her hands to her ears.

"I 'm just trying to set the record straight.''

Irina's shoulders slumped. "Your efforts are noted."

"Thank you," he said formally.

There was a deep, almost hostile silence between them. Before it went on long enough to become irrevocable, Valeri said, "How did we come to this point, koshka'?"

"You tell me," Irina said wearily.

"Do you want me to say it's my fault? All right. It's my fault. I never should have lied to you. But how could I have known what you'd be like? How could I possibly have trusted you?"

''You don't see it, do you?'' Irina shook her head sadly. ''You condemn yourself with your own words. Look at what your work has made of you, Valeri. You are suspicious of everyone. You can't allow anyone to get close to you for fear they may turn out to be your enemy."

"But you're wrong, koshka. I was close to Natasha Mayakova. My heart breaks for what happened to her. And you, Irina. I love you."

"No, Valeri. I don't believe you know the meaning of the word love. But I don't blame you. Your work comes first, it always has, and I see the necessity of it. Truly, I do. I don't know how I feel about you, and that's all right. I don't think it a good idea to examine that part of me right now-maybe ever.''

"Forever is a long time, koshka."

"Especially in your line of work,'' Irina said. ''And now that it's mine-however temporarily-I suppose we'd better get on with it."

"Then you'll help us?"

"Oh, Valeri, how your face lights up. Like a child at Easter.'' Irina smiled. ''I had forgotten how nice your face is when you're happy."

Valeri gripped her arms. "Irina, I cannot overemphasize the element of danger involved. Mars is out for my blood. He's mobilized the KGB Border Guards to find me."

"If you're trying to frighten me, you're doing a first-class job of it."

"You'll be more careful if you're frightened," Valeri said. "Now listen, you need to get to my apartment. You know the Toshiba lap-top? You must somehow get it out of the apartment."

It was at that moment that Irina almost told him that she had found his ghost in the machine, that she knew much of the inner workings of White Star, including the identity of its leader. But she bit her lip instead, sure that he would not allow her anywhere near his apartment if he knew she had so much critical information inside her head.

"Once I get it out of your apartment, then what?" Irina said. "I can't very well walk around the streets of Moscow carrying an illegal computer."

"Of course not," Valeri said. "Do you have access to a car?"

"Yes."

"Ah, good," Valeri said, breathing a sigh of relief. "At last, the tide seems to be turning in our favor.''

"Don't you just hate Americans?" Mars said.

"I met an American once," Captain Nikolev said. "I was off duty, of course. The Border Guards is not something the state wishes tourists to be aware of. I met him outside the gates to the Kremlin. He seemed a decent chap, really. Full of questions, but he had no real idea of how this country works."

"That's just it!" Mars said hotly. "Americans have no idea how anything works, not politics, not economics, not even social dynamics-especial not social dynamics. They're far too busy rooting around Bloomingdale's and Tiffany's to be of any value to their fellow man.''

"Like Khrushchev, you want to bury them, comrade."

"No, Captain, not bury them," Mars said. "I want to eradicate them."

"Then you've set yourself an impossible task."

Mars looked at him. "Do you really think so? That's interesting, coming from a scholar of history. Rome fell, so did Byzantium. Why not America?"

"To be brutal, comrade, because it is not Democracy that has been found deficient as a form of government, but Communism. The theories of Marx and Engels are simply inadequate. It's a fact, sad though it may be to contemplate. Poland, Hungary, Rumania, Czechoslovakia, East Germany. We've had to relinquish control of our colonies as the Western nations were once obliged to do with theirs.

"And why not? Desperate men must resort to desperate measures. Our own economy is in a shambles; we cannot even feed our own people, corruption and alcoholism are rampant throughout a bureaucracy that is second to none in its bloatedness, self-importance, and obstructionism. We simply have to face facts. The path we have set out on is a dead end."

"And where are we to go then?" Mars said fiercely. "Where will it end? With a Bloomingdale's and Tiffany's opening on Gorky Street? With our women wearing designer blue jeans and sequined jackets?'' His face was livid. ''That is not the solution, to lose ourselves in the mania of Americanization. I reject that despicable notion!"

"In the days of the ancient Britons," Captain Nikolev said, "the lure of Rome was irresistible. It was an endlessly fascinating place."

"A pit full of quicksand," Mars said. "There's the truth."

"If only," Nikolev said with an ironic tone, "we could recognize it." His eyes darted to the electronic console he was manning.

"What is it, Captain?"

"Irina Ponomareva's car," Nikolev said. "It's begun to move."

When Irina got to Valeri's apartment, she circled the block three times, cruising slowly, doing what Valeri had advised her, looking for KGB men who might be staked out, watching the place.

"If they have spared anybody at all, it won't be more than one man," he had told her. "They know I'm not stupid enough to try to get back there."