The House of Thunder (47 page)
“Leonid,” McGee said in an accusatory tone. Then he said something in Russian that Susan couldn’t understand.
“Don’t blame poor Leonid,” Dr. Viteski said. “He had no choice but to play along with us. Now sit down, please.”
McGee hesitated, then sat. He glanced at Susan, saw doubt in her eyes, and said, “I didn’t know.”
She wanted to believe him. His face was ashen, and there was fear in his eyes, and he looked like a man who had suddenly come eye-to-eye with Death.
But
he’s a good
actor
, she reminded herself. For days, he had deceived her; he might
still
be deceiving her.
But
he’s a good
actor
, she reminded herself. For days, he had deceived her; he might
still
be deceiving her.
Viteski walked around the desk and sat in the captain’s chair.
Golodkin stood by the door, his face unreadable.
“We’ve known about you for two and a half years,” Viteski told McGee.
McGee’s pale face reddened. His embarrassment appeared to be genuine.
“And we’ve known about your contact with Leonid almost as long as we’ve known about you,” Viteski said. “The good captain has been working with us ever since we discovered that he was one of your couriers.”
McGee looked at Golodkin.
The captain flushed and shuffled his feet.
“Leonid?” McGee said.
Golodkin frowned, shrugged, and said something in Russian.
Susan watched Jeff McGee as McGee watched the captain. He seemed truly abashed.
“Leonid had no choice but to betray you,” Viteski told McGee. “We have a strong grip on him. His family, of course. He doesn’t like the fact that we’ve turned him into a double agent, but he knows we hold his reins. He’s been quite useful, and I’m sure he’ll be useful unmasking other agents in the future.”
McGee said, “For two years or more, every time I passed documents to Leonid—”
“—he passed them directly to us,” Viteski said. “We tinkered with them, edited them, inserted false data to mislead the CIA, then returned your packages to Leonid.
Then
he passed them to the Turks.”
Then
he passed them to the Turks.”
“Shit,” McGee said bitterly.
Viteski laughed. He picked up the brandy glass and sipped the amber liquid.
Susan watched both men, and she grew increasingly uneasy. She began to think this wasn’t just another charade. She began to think that McGee really
had
meant to take her to safety and that he
had
been betrayed. Which meant that both of them had lost their last best chance of gaining freedom.
had
meant to take her to safety and that he
had
been betrayed. Which meant that both of them had lost their last best chance of gaining freedom.
To Viteski, McGee said, “If you knew I was going to try to rescue Susan, why didn’t you stop me before I took her out of that House of Thunder mock-up, before I shattered the illusion?”
Viteski tasted the brandy again. “We’d already decided that she couldn’t be broken. She just wasn’t responding satisfactorily to the program.
You
saw that.”
You
saw that.”
“I was half out of my mind with fear,” Susan said.
Viteski looked at her and nodded. “Yes.
Half
out of your mind. And that was as far as you were going to get, I believe. You weren’t going to break down. You’re too tough for that, my dear. At worst, you would have withdrawn into some semicatatonic state. But not a breakdown. Not you. So we decided to scrap the program and go with the contingency plan.”
Half
out of your mind. And that was as far as you were going to get, I believe. You weren’t going to break down. You’re too tough for that, my dear. At worst, you would have withdrawn into some semicatatonic state. But not a breakdown. Not you. So we decided to scrap the program and go with the contingency plan.”
“What
contingency plan?” McGee asked.
contingency plan?” McGee asked.
Viteski looked at Leonid Golodkin and spoke rapidly in Russian.
Golodkin nodded and left the room.
“What did you mean by that?” McGee asked.
Viteski didn’t respond. He merely smiled and picked up the brandy snifter again.
To McGee, Susan said, “What’s going on?”
“I don’t know,” McGee said.
He held out his hand, and after only a brief hesitation, Susan took it. He gave her a smile of encouragement, but it was tissue-thin, unconvincing. Behind the smile, she saw fear.
Viteski said, “This is excellent brandy. Must be black market stuff. You can’t buy anything this good over the counter—unless you can get into one of the stores reserved for high Party officials. I’ll have to ask the good captain for the name of his dealer.”
The door opened, and Leonid Golodkin came in. Two people entered behind him.
One of the newcomers was Jeffrey McGee.
The other was Susan Thorton.
Two more look-alikes.
They were even dressed the same as Jeff and Susan.
Susan’s veins seemed to crystallize into fragile tubes of ice as she stared at her own duplicate.
The fake Susan smiled. The resemblance was uncanny.
His face bloodless, his eyes haunted, the real Jeff McGee glared at Leon Viteski and said, “What the hell is this?”
“The contingency plan,” Viteski said. “We had it in reserve right from the start, though we didn’t tell you, of course.”
The fake Susan spoke to the real Susan: “It’s absolutely fascinating to be in the same room with you at last.”
Shocked, Susan said, “She sounds exactly like me!”
The fake McGee said, “We’ve been working with tapes of your voices for nearly a year.” He sounded exactly like the real McGee.
Viteski smiled at the doppelgängers with what appeared to be paternal pride. Then, to the real McGee, he said, “You’ll be shot and dumped overboard in the middle of the Black Sea. These two will go back to the U.S. in your places. Our Susan will start working at Milestone again.” He turned to Susan and said, “My dear, it would have been most helpful if we could have broken you. It would have given us a head start. Nevertheless, we’ll still get most of what we wanted by placing your look-alike in your office at Milestone. It’ll just take us a lot longer; that’s all. In a year or so, we’ll have found out everything you could’ve told us. And if our little ruse can last longer than a year, we’ll wind up getting even more data than we could’ve gotten from you.” He turned to Jeff. “We expect your double will find a place in the American intelligence community, perhaps in their behavioral control research, and that’ll give us
another
well-placed mole.”
another
well-placed mole.”
“It won’t work,” McGee said. “They may sound like Susan and me. And your surgeons did a damned good job of making them look like us. But no surgeon can alter fingerprints.”
“True,” Viteski said. “But you see, for people with very high security clearances, the U.S. has a special system of filing and retrieving fingerprints. It’s called SIDEPS, Security ID Protection System. It’s part of a Defense Department computer to which we’ve managed to gain access. We can simply pull the electronic representation of your fingerprints and replace them with electronic representations of the fingerprints of your look-alikes. In this age of centralized computer data storage, it isn’t necessary to change the real prints; we need only change the computer’s memory of what the real prints look like.”
“It’ll work,” Susan said softly, plagued by a mental image of her own body being dumped over the side of the
Golden Net,
into the cold waters of the Black Sea.
Golden Net,
into the cold waters of the Black Sea.
“Of course it’ll work,” Viteski said happily. “In fact, we would have sent the duplicates back to the U.S. even if you had broken and had told us everything we wanted to know.” Viteski finished the brandy in his glass, sighed in appreciation of it, and got to his feet, holding the pistol. “Captain, while I cover these two, please tie their hands securely.”
Golodkin already had the rope. He made McGee and Susan stand while he tied their hands behind their backs.
“Now,” Viteski said, “take them someplace very private and secure.” To McGee and Susan, he said, “Your twins will visit you later. They have a number of questions about your intimate habits, things that will help them perfect their imitations. I suggest that you answer them truthfully because several of the questions are meant to test your veracity; they already know the correct answers to those test questions, and if you don’t respond properly, they’ll slowly cut you to pieces until you’re convinced that cooperation is in your best interests.”
Susan glanced at the McGee look-alike. The man was smiling; it was not a nice smile. He looked like McGee in every respect except one: He did not have McGee’s compassion and sensitivity. He appeared to be quite capable of torturing an adversary into bloody, agonized submission.
Susan shuddered.
“I’ll say goodbye now,” Viteski said. “I’ll be leaving the ship before it gets underway.” He smiled smugly. “Bon voyage.”
Golodkin ushered McGee and Susan into the corridor, while Viteski remained behind in the captain’s cabin with the look-alikes. In cold silence, refusing to reply to anything that McGee said, Leonid Golodkin escorted them to another companionway and drove them down into the bowels of the trawler, to the bottom deck, into the compartments that serviced the cargo holds. The place reeked of fish.
He took them into a small storage locker at the foot of the companionway; it was no larger than four meters on a side. The walls were hung with spare coils of rope; thicker hawsers were coiled and braided in stacks upon the deck. The walls were also racked with tools, including gaffs and skewers. There were four block-and-tackle sets of varying sizes, and crates of spare machine parts.
Golodkin made them sit on the bare deck, which was ice-cold. He tied their feet together, then checked to be sure that the ropes on their hands were tightly knotted. When he left, he turned off the lights and closed the door, plunging them into unrelieved blackness.
“I’m scared,” Susan said.
McGee didn’t reply.
She heard him scuffling about, twisting, wrenching at something.
“Jeff?”
He grunted. He was straining against something in the darkness, beginning to breathe hard.
“What’re you doing?” she asked.
“Ssshh!” he said sharply.
A moment later, hands groped over her, and she almost cried out in surprise before she realized it was McGee. He had freed himself, and now he was feeling for her bonds.
As he unknotted the ropes that bound her hands, he put his mouth against her ear and spoke in the softest whisper possible. “I doubt that anyone’s listening in on us, but we can’t be too careful. Golodkin didn’t tighten my knots that last time; he
loosened
them just a bit.”
loosened
them just a bit.”
Her hands came free of the ropes. She rubbed her chafed wrists. Putting her mouth to Jeff’s ear in the darkness, she said, “How much more will he do to help us?”
“Probably nothing,” McGee whispered. “He’s already taken an enormous risk. From here on, we can count only on ourselves. We won’t be given another chance.”
He moved away from her as she got to her feet. He fumbled in the darkness for a while before he finally found the light switch and flipped it on.
Even before McGee moved away from the switch, Susan knew what he would go after, and she shivered with revulsion.
As she had anticipated, he went straight to the long-handled, fishermen’s gaffs that hung on the wall and pulled two of them out of the spring-clips that held them. The slightly curved hooks at the ends of the gaffs were wickedly sharp; the light glinted on the pointed tips.
Susan took one of the weapons when Jeff handed it to her, but she whispered, “I can’t.”
“You’ve got to.”
“Oh, God.”
“Your life or theirs,” he whispered urgently.
She nodded.
“You can do it,” he said. “And if we’re lucky, it’ll be easy. They won’t be expecting anything. I’m sure they aren’t aware that Golodkin locked us in a room full of handy weapons.”
She watched while he decided upon the best positions from which to launch a surprise attack, and then she stood where he told her.
He turned out the lights again.
It was the deepest darkness she had ever known.
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