Code to Zero (23 page)

Fuel shoots into the combustion chamber of a rocket engine at a speed of about 100 feet per second. Burning begins the instant the fluids meet. The heat of the flame soon evaporates the liquids. Pressure rises to several hundred pounds per square inch, and the temperature soars to 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

Bern said to Billie, “You’re in love with Luke, aren’t you.”

They were sitting in her car outside his building. She did not want to go in: she was impatient to get home to Larry and Becky-Ma.

“In love?” she said evasively. “Am I?” She was not sure how much she wanted to share with her ex-husband. They were friends, but not intimate.

“It’s okay,” he said. “I realized long ago that you should have married Luke. I don’t think you ever stopped loving him. You loved me, too, but in a different way.”

That was true. Her love for Bern was a gentle, calm feeling. With him she had never felt the hurricane of passion that engulfed her when she was with Luke. And when she asked herself what she felt for Harold—the easy affection or the whirlwind of excitement—the answer was depressingly obvious. Thinking about Harold gave her a pleasant but mild sense of pleasure. She had little experience of men—the only ones she had slept with were Luke and Bern—but instinct told her that with Harold she would never have the feeling Luke gave her of a sexual craving that left her weak and helpless with desire.

“Luke’s married,” she said. “To a beautiful woman.” She thought for a moment. “Is Elspeth sexy?”

Bern frowned. “Hard to say. She could be, with the right guy. To me she seemed cold, but she never had eyes for anyone but Luke.”

“Not that it matters. Luke is the faithful type. He’d stay with her if she was an iceberg, just out of a sense of duty.” She paused. “There’s something I have to say to you.”

“Okay.”

“Thank you. For not saying ‘I told you so.’ I sure appreciate your restraint.”

Bern laughed. “You’re thinking about our great quarrel.”

She nodded. “You said my work would be used to brainwash people. Now your prediction has come true.”

“All the same, I was wrong. Your work had to be done. We need to understand the human brain. People may use knowledge to do evil, but we can’t hold up scientific progress. But, listen, do you have a theory about what Anthony is up to?”

“Best I could come up with: I imagine Luke discovered a spy down there at Cape Canaveral and came to Washington to tell the Pentagon about it. But the spy is really a double agent, working for us, so Anthony is desperate to protect the guy.”

Bern shook his head. “Not good enough. Anthony could have dealt with that simply by telling Luke that the spy was a double. He didn’t have to wipe his memory.”

“I guess you’re right. And Anthony
shot
at Luke a few hours ago. I know this secret agent work tends to go to men’s heads, but I can’t believe the CIA would actually kill an American citizen to protect a double agent.”

“Sure they would,” Bern said. “But it wouldn’t have been necessary. Anthony could just have trusted Luke.”

“Do you have a better theory?”

“No.”

Billie shrugged. “I’m not sure it matters anymore. Anthony has deceived and betrayed his friends—who cares why? Whatever strange
purpose has driven him to this, we’ve lost him. And he was a good friend.”

“Life sucks,” Bern said. He kissed her cheek and got out of the car. “If you hear from Luke tomorrow, call me.”

“Okay.”

Bern walked into the building, and Billie drove off.

She crossed the Memorial Bridge, skirted the National Cemetery, and zigzagged through the suburban streets to her home. She reversed into the driveway, a habit she had developed because she was usually in a hurry when leaving. She entered the house, hung her coat on the hall stand, and went straight upstairs, unbuttoning her dress and pulling it off over her head as she did so. She threw it over a chair, kicked off her shoes, and went to check on Larry.

When she saw the empty bed, she screamed.

She looked in the bathroom, then Becky-Ma’s room. “Larry!” she yelled at the top of her voice. “Where are you?” She ran downstairs and went into every room. She left the house in her underwear and looked in the garage and the yard. Going back inside, she went into every room again, opening closets and checking under beds, looking into every space large enough to hold a seven-year-old.

He was gone.

Becky-Ma came out of her bedroom, fear written on her lined face. “What’s happening?” she said shakily.

“Where’s Larry?” Billie shouted.

“In his bed, I thought,” she said, her voice becoming a moan of misery as she realized what had happened.

Billie stood still for a moment, breathing hard, fighting down panic. Then she went into Larry’s bedroom and studied it.

The room was tidy, with no signs of struggle. Checking his closet, she saw the blue teddy-bear pajamas he had worn last night neatly folded on a shelf. The clothes she had set out for school today had gone. Whatever had happened, he had got dressed before leaving. It looked as if he had gone with someone he trusted.

Anthony.

At first she felt relief. Anthony would not harm Larry. But then she thought again. Wouldn’t he? She would have said Anthony would not harm Luke, but he had shot at him. There was no telling anymore what Anthony would do. At the very least, Larry must have been frightened, to be woken up so early and made to get dressed and leave the house without seeing his mother.

She had to get him back fast.

She ran downstairs to call Anthony. Before she got to the phone, it rang. She snatched it up. “Yes?”

“This is Anthony.”

“How could you do it?” she screamed. “How could you be so cruel?”

“I have to know where Luke is,” he said coolly. “It’s unimaginably important.”

“He’s gone—” She stopped herself. If she gave him the information, she would have no weapons left.

“Gone where?”

She took a breath. “Where’s Larry?”

“He’s with me. He’s fine, don’t worry.”

That enraged her. “How could I not worry, you dumb prick!”

“Just tell me what I need to know, and everything will be all right.”

She wanted to believe him, to blurt out the answer and trust him to bring Larry home, but she resisted the temptation fiercely.“Listen to me. When I see my son, I’ll tell you where Luke is.”

“Don’t you trust me?”

“Is that a joke?”

He sighed. “Okay. Meet me at the Jefferson Memorial.”

She felt a small surge of triumph. “When?”

“Seven o’clock.”

She checked her watch. It was after six. “I’ll be there.”

“Billie. . . .”

“What?”

“Be alone.”

“Yeah.” She hung up.

Becky-Ma was standing by her side, looking frail and old. “What is it?” she said. “What’s going on?”

Billie tried to give an impression of calm. “Larry’s with Anthony. He must have come in and got him while you were asleep. I’m going to pick him up now. We can stop worrying.”

She went upstairs and threw on some clothes. Then she picked up the dressing-table chair and placed it in front of the wardrobe. Standing on the chair, she took a small suitcase from on top of the wardrobe. She placed the case on the bed and opened it.

She unwrapped a cloth to reveal a .45 Colt Automatic.

They had all been issued Colts in the war. She had kept hers as a souvenir, but some instinct made her clean and oil it regularly. Once you had been shot at, you were never comfortable unless you had a firearm someplace, she guessed.

She pressed the thumb release on the left side of the grip, behind the trigger, and drew the magazine out of the handle. There was a box of bullets in the case. She loaded seven into the magazine, pushing them in one by one against the spring, then slid the magazine back into the handle until she felt it lock. She worked the slide to chamber a round.

She turned around to see Becky-Ma standing in the doorway, staring at the gun.

She looked back at her mother in silence for a moment.

Then she ran out of the house and jumped into her car.

The first stage contains approximately 25,000 kilograms of fuel. This will be used up in two minutes and 35 seconds.

Bern’s Lincoln Continental was a joy to drive, a sleek, long-legged car that cruised at a hundred, effortlessly flying over the deserted roads of sleeping Virginia. In getting out of Washington, Luke felt he was leaving the nightmare behind, and his early-hours journey had the exhilarating air of an escape.

It was still dark when he arrived at Newport News and pulled into the small parking lot next to the closed airport building. No lights showed except the solitary bulb of a phone booth next to the entrance. He turned off his engine and listened to the silence. The night was clear, and the airfield was starlit. The parked planes seemed peculiarly still, like horses asleep on their feet.

He had been up more than twenty-four hours, and he felt desperately weary, but his mind was racing. He was in love with Billie. Now that he was two hundred miles away from her, he could admit that to himself. But what did it mean? Had he always loved her? Or was it a one-day infatuation, a repeat of the crush he had developed so quickly back in 1941? And what about Elspeth? Why had he married her? He had asked Billie that, and she had refused to answer. “I’ll ask Elspeth,” he had said.

He checked his watch. He had more than an hour until takeoff. There was plenty of time. He got out of the car and went to the phone booth.

She picked up fast, as if she was already awake. The hotel operator advised her that the phone charge would be added to her bill, and she said: “Sure, sure, put him on.”

Suddenly he felt awkward. “Uh, good morning, Elspeth.”

“I’m so glad you called!” she said. “I’ve been out of my mind with worry—what’s happening?”

“I don’t know where to begin.”

“Are you okay?”

“Yes, I’m fine now. Basically, Anthony caused me to lose my memory, by giving me a combination of electric shock and drugs.”

“Good God. Why would he do a thing like that?”

“He says I’m a Soviet spy.”

“That’s absurd.”

“It’s what he told Billie.”

“So you’ve been with Billie?”

Luke heard the note of hostility in Elspeth’s voice. “She’s been kind,” he said defensively. He recalled that he had asked Elspeth to come to Washington and help him, but she had refused.

Elspeth changed the subject. “Where are you calling from?”

He hesitated. His enemies might easily have tapped Elspeth’s phone. “I don’t really want to say, in case someone is listening.”

“All right, I understand. What are you going to do next?”

“I need to find out what it was that Anthony wanted me to forget.”

“How will you do that?”

“I’d rather not say over the phone.”

Her voice betrayed exasperation. “Well, I’m sorry you can’t tell me anything.”

“Matter of fact, I called to ask you some things.”

“Okay, fire away.”

“Why can’t we have children?”

“We don’t know. Last year, you went to a fertility specialist, but he couldn’t find anything wrong. A few weeks ago, I saw a woman doctor in Atlanta. She ran some tests. We’re waiting for the results.”

“Would you tell me how we came to get married?”

“I seduced you.”

“How?”

“I pretended to have soap in my eye, in order to make you kiss me. It’s the oldest trick in the book, and I’m embarrassed that you fell for it.”

He could not tell whether she was being amusing, or cynical, or both. “Tell me what the circumstances were, how I proposed.”

“Well, I didn’t see you for years, then we met again in 1954, in Washington,” she began. “I was still with the CIA. You were working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, but you flew in for Peg’s wedding. We were seated together at the breakfast.” She paused, remembering, and he waited patiently. When she resumed, her voice had softened. “We talked and talked—it was as if thirteen years had never happened, and we were still a couple of college kids with all of life in front of us. I had to leave early—I was conductor of the Sixteenth Street Youth Orchestra, and we had a rehearsal. You came with me. . . .”

The children in the orchestra were all poor, and most of them were black. The rehearsal took place at a church hall in a slum neighbourhood. The instruments were begged, borrowed, and bought from pawnshops. They were rehearsing the overture from a Mozart opera,
The Marriage of Figaro.
Against the odds, they played well.

Elspeth was the reason. She was an exacting teacher, noticing every false note and rhythmic misstep, but she corrected her pupils with infinite patience. A tall figure in a yellow dress, she conducted the orchestra with enormous verve, her red hair flying, her long, elegant hands drawing the music from them with passionate gestures.

The rehearsal lasted two hours, and Luke sat through the whole thing, mesmerized. He could see that all the boys were in love with Elspeth and all the girls wanted to be like her.

“These children have as much music in them as any rich kid with a Steinway in the drawing room,” she said in the car afterwards. “But I get into lots of trouble.”

“Why, for God’s sake?”

“I’m called a nigger lover,” she said. “And it’s pretty much ended my career at the CIA.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Anyone who treats Negroes like human beings is suspected of being a
communist. So I’ll never be more than a secretary. Not that it’s a great loss. Women never get higher than case officer anyway.”

She took him to her place, a small, uncluttered apartment with a few pieces of angular modern furniture. Luke made martinis and Elspeth started to cook spaghetti in the tiny kitchen. Luke told her about his job.

“I’m so happy for you,” she said with generous enthusiasm. “You always wanted to explore outer space. Even back at Harvard, when we were dating, you used to talk about it.”

He smiled. “And in those days, most people thought it was a foolish dream of science-fiction writers.”

“I guess we still can’t be sure it will happen.”

“I think we can,” he said seriously. “The big problems were all solved by German scientists in the war. The Germans built rockets that could be fired in Holland and land on London.”

“I was there, I remember—we called them buzz-bombs.” She shuddered briefly. “One nearly killed me. I was walking to my office in the middle of an air raid, because I had to brief an agent who was to be dropped into Belgium a few hours later. I heard a bomb go off behind me. It makes a horrible noise like
crump,
then there’s the sound of breaking glass and masonry collapsing, and a kind of wind full of dust and little bits of stone. I knew that if I turned around to look, I’d panic and throw myself to the ground, and just curl up in a ball with my eyes shut. So I looked straight ahead and kept walking.”

Luke was moved by the picture of the young Elspeth walking through the dark streets as the bombs fell around her, and he felt grateful that she had survived. “Brave woman,” he murmured.

She shrugged. “I didn’t feel brave, just scared.”

“What did you think about?”

“Can’t you guess?”

He recalled that whenever she was idle she thought about math. “Prime numbers?” he hazarded.

She laughed. “Fibonacci’s numbers.”

Luke nodded. The mathematician Fibonacci had imagined a pair of rabbits which produced two offspring every month, offspring which
began to breed at the same rate one month after birth, and asked how many pairs of rabbits there would be after a year. The answer was 144, but the number of pairs of rabbits each month was the most famous sequence of numbers in mathematics: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144. You could always work out the next number by adding up the previous two.

Elspeth said, “By the time I got to my office, I had worked out the fortieth Fibonacci number.”

“Do you remember what it is?”

“Of course: one hundred and two million, three hundred and thirty-four thousand, one hundred and five. So, our missiles are based on the German buzz-bombs?”

“Yes, their V2 rocket, to be exact.” Luke was not supposed to talk about his work, but this was Elspeth, and anyway, she probably had a higher security rating than he did. “We’re building a rocket that can take off in Arizona and explode in Moscow. And, if we can do that, we can fly to the moon.”

“So it’s just the same thing on a larger scale?”

She showed more interest in rocketry than any other girl he had ever met. “Yes. We need larger engines, more efficient fuel, better guidance systems, that kind of thing. None of these problems are insurmountable. Plus, those German scientists are working for us now.”

“I think I heard that.” She changed the subject. “And what about life in general? Are you dating someone?”

“Not right now.” He had dated several girls since his breakup with Billie nine years ago, and had slept with some of them, but the truth—which he did not want to tell Elspeth—was that none had meant much.

There had been one woman he might have loved, a tall girl with brown eyes and wild hair. She had the kind of energy and joie de vivre that he loved about Billie. He had met her at Harvard while he was doing his doctorate. Late one evening, as they strolled together through Harvard Yard, she had taken his hands and said, “I have a husband.” Then she had kissed him and walked away. That was the nearest he had come to giving his heart.

“How about you?” he asked Elspeth. “Peg’s married, Billie’s already getting divorced—you’ve got some catching up to do.”

“Oh, you know about us government girls.” The phrase was a newspaper cliché. So many young women worked for the government in Washington that they outnumbered single men by five to one. Consequently they were stereotyped as sexually frustrated and desperate for dates. Luke did not believe Elspeth was like that, but if she wanted to evade his question, she was entitled.

She asked him to watch the stove while she freshened up. There was a big pan of spaghetti and a smaller one of bubbling tomato sauce. He took off his jacket and tie, then stirred the sauce with a wooden spoon. The martini had made him mellow, the food smelled good, and he was with a woman he really liked. He felt happy.

He heard Elspeth call out, with an uncharacteristic note of helplessness: “Luke—could you come here?”

He stepped into the bathroom. Elspeth’s dress hung on the back of the door, and she stood in a strapless peach-colored brassiere and matching half-slip, stockings, and shoes. Although she was wearing more clothes than if she had been on the beach, Luke found it unbearably sexy to see her in her underwear. Her hand was to her face. “I got soap in my eye, damn it,” she said. “Would you try to wash it out?”

Luke ran cold water into the washbasin. “Bend down, get your face close to the bowl,” he said, encouraging her with his left hand between her shoulder blades. The pale skin of her back was soft and warm to his touch. He cupped water in his right hand and raised it to her eye.

“That helps,” she said.

He rinsed her eye again and again until she said the stinging had stopped. Then he stood her upright and patted her face dry with a clean towel. “Your eye is a little bloodshot, but I guess it’s okay,” he said.

“I must look a mess.”

“No.” He looked hard at her. Her eye was red and her hair on that side was wet in patches, but nevertheless she was as stunning as she had been on the day he first set eyes on her, more than a decade ago. “You’re absolutely beautiful.”

Her head was still tilted up, though he had stopped drying her face. Her lips were parted in a smile. It was the easiest thing in the world to kiss her. She kissed him back, hesitantly at first, then she put her hands behind his neck and pulled his face to hers and kissed him hard.

Her bra pressed against his chest. It should have been sexy, but the wiring was so stiff that it scratched his chest through the fine cotton of his shirt. After a moment he pulled away, feeling foolish. “What?” she said.

He lightly touched the brassiere and said with a grin, “It hurts.”

“You poor thing,” she said with mock pity.

She reached behind her back and unfastened the bra with a swift movement. It fell to the floor.

He had touched her breasts a few times, all those years ago, but he had never seen them. They were white and round, and the pale nipples were puckered with excitement. She put her arms around his neck and pressed her body to his. Her breasts were soft and warm. “There,” she said. “That’s how it should feel.”

After a while he picked her up, stepped into the bedroom, and laid her on the bed. She kicked off her shoes. He touched the waistband of her half-slip and said, “May I?”

She giggled. “Oh, Luke, you’re so polite!”

He grinned. It was kind of silly, but he did not know how else to be. She lifted her hips and he pulled off the slip. Her peach panties matched the rest of her underwear.

“Don’t ask,” she said. “Just take them off.”

When they made love it was slow and intense. She kept pulling his head to hers and kissing his face while he moved in and out of her. “I’ve wanted this for so long,” she whispered into his ear, and then she cried out with pleasure, several times, and lay back, exhausted.

Soon Elspeth fell into a deep sleep, but Luke lay awake, thinking about his life.

He had always wanted a family. For him, happiness was a big, noisy house full of children and friends and pets. Yet here he was, thirty-three and single, and the years seemed to go by faster and faster. Since the war, his career had been his priority, he told himself. He had gone back to
college, making up for the lost years. But that was not the real reason he was unmarried. The truth was that only two women had ever touched his heart—Billie and Elspeth. Billie had deceived him, but Elspeth was here beside him. He looked at her voluptuous body in the faint glow of the lights of Dupont Circle outside. Could there be anything better than spending every night like this, with a girl who was smart, brave as a lion, wonderful with children, and—on top of all that—stunningly beautiful?

At daybreak he got up and made coffee. He brought it into the bedroom on a tray and found Elspeth sitting up in bed, looking sleepily delectable. She smiled happily at him.

“I have something to ask you,” he said. He sat on the edge of the bed and took her hand. “Will you marry me?”

Her smile disappeared and she looked troubled. “Oh, my God,” she said. “Can I think about it?”