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“With luck I’ll never have to use one of these damn things,” said Monk.

“Aye, sir, that’s what they all say. Then the luck runs out. Best to know how, if you have to.”

At the start of the third week Monk was introduced to his communicator. A surprisingly young man called Danny came up from London.

“It’s a perfectly ordinary laptop computer,” he explained. And it was. No larger than a normal book, the top when raised revealed a screen on its underside, and the keypad, whose two halves could be lifted up, spread apart, and relocked to become a full-sized typewriter-style keyboard. It was the sort of thing eight executives out of ten now carried in their attaché cases.

“The floppy disk”—Danny held up what looked like a credit card and waved it under Monk’s nose before inserting it into the side of the laptop—“carries the normal range of information needed by a businessman of the kind that you will be. If anyone interferes with it, all they will get is commercial information of zero interest to anyone but the owner.”

“So?” asked Monk. He realized this disarmingly young man was one of those born long after his time who had been weaned on computers and found their inner workings much easier than Egyptian hieroglyphics. Monk would have picked the Egyptians any day.

“Now this,” said Danny, holding up another card, “is what?”

“It’s a Visa card,” said Monk.

“Look again.”

Monk examined the thin sheet of plastic with its “smart” magnetic strip along the back.

“Okay, it looks like a Visa card.”

“It will even act as a Visa card,” said Danny, “but don’t use it as such. Just in case some piece of duff technology wipes it by mistake. Keep it safe, wherever you live, preferably hidden from prying eyes, and use it only when necessary.”

“What does it do?” asked Monk.

“A lot. It encodes anything you want to type. It has memorized a hundred one-time pads, whatever they may be. That’s not my field, but I gather they are unbreakable.”

“They are,” said Monk, glad to hear at least one phrase he recognized. It made him feel better.

Danny ejected the original floppy disk and inserted the Visa card in its place.

“Now, the laptop is powered by a lithium-ion battery with enough power to reach the satellite. Even if you have a regular circuit available, use the battery in case of a drop or surge in the domestic current. Use the circuit to recharge the battery. Now, switch it on.”

He pointed to the power/off switch and Monk did so.

“Type your message to Sir Nigel onto the screen, in clear language.”

Monk typed a twenty-word message to confirm safe arrival and first contact made.

“Now touch this key here. It says something different, but it gives the order to encode.”

Monk touched the key. Nothing happened. His words stayed on the screen.

“Now touch power/off.”

The words vanished.

“They have vanished forever,” said Danny. “They have been completely erased from the computer’s memory. In the code of a one-time pad, they are inside Virgil the Visa, waiting to be transmitted. Now switch the laptop back on again.”

Monk did so. The screen illuminated but remained blank.

“Touch this one. It says something else, but when Virgil is inserted it means ‘transmit/receive.’ Now you just leave it on. Twice a day a satellite will swing over the horizon. As it approaches the place you are in, it is programmed to beam a message downward. The down call is on the same frequency as Virgil, but it takes a nanosecond and it’s in code. What it is saying is, Are you there, baby? Virgil hears this call, identifies Mother, acknowledges, and transmits your message. We call it handshaking.”

“That’s it?”

“Not quite. If Mother has a message for Virgil,
she
will transmit. Virgil will receive it, all in the one-time pad code. Then Mother passes over the horizon and vanishes. She will already have passed on your message to the receiving base, wherever that may be. I don’t know and I don’t need to know.”

“Do I have to stay with the machine while it does all this?” asked Monk.

“Certainly not. You can be out and about. When you come back, you find the screen still glowing. Just touch this button. It doesn’t say ‘decrypt’ but that’s what it does if Virgil is inside there. What Virgil will do is decode your message from home. Learn it, hit power/off, and you erase it. Forever.

“Now, one last thing. If you really want to blow Virgil’s little brain to pieces, you hit these four numbers in sequence.” He showed Monk the four, written on a slip of card. “So never punch in those four numbers unless you want to return Virgil to just a Visa card with no other function.”

They spent two days going through the procedures over and over again, until Monk was touch perfect. Then Danny left, for whatever world of silicon chips he dwelt in.

By the end of the third week at Castle Forbes, all the instructors pronounced themselves satisfied. Monk saw them leave.

“Is there a phone I could use?” Monk asked that evening as he, Ciaran, and Mitch sat in the drawing room after supper.

Mitch looked up from the chessboard where he was being trounced by Ciaran and nodded toward the telephone in the corner.

“A private one,” said Monk.

Ciaran also raised his head, and both former soldiers looked at him.

“Sure,” said Ciaran, “use the one in the study.”

Monk sat among the books and hunting prints in Lord Forbes’s private den and dialed an overseas number. It rang in a small frame house in Crozet, south-central Virginia, where the sun was low over the Blue Ridge Mountains, five hours behind Scotland. Someone answered at the tenth ring and a woman’s voice said, “Hello?”

He could imagine the small but cozy living room where a log fire would burn through the winter and the light always gleamed from the surfaces of her cherished, highly polished wedding furniture.

“Hi, Mom, it’s Jason.”

The frail voice rose with pleasure.

“Jason. Where are you, son?”

“I’ve been traveling, Mom. How’s Dad?”

Since the stroke his father had spent much of his time in his rocking chair out on the stoop, staring at the small town and the forested mountains beyond where, forty years earlier and able to trek all day, he had taken his firstborn son hunting and fishing.

“He’s fine. He’s dozing on the porch right now. It’s hot. It’s been a long, hot summer. I’ll tell him you called. He’ll be pleased. Will you be coming to visit soon? It’s been so long.”

There were two brothers and a sister, long gone from the small home, one brother an insurance adjuster, the other a real estate broker along the Chesapeake, his sister married to a country doctor and raising a family. All in Virginia. They visited frequently. He was the absent one.

“Soon as I can make it, Mom. That’s a promise.”

“You’re going away again, aren’t you son?”

He knew what she meant by “away.” She had known about Vietnam before he got word he was shipping out and used to call him in Washington before the foreign journeys as if she sensed something she could not possibly know. Something about mothers ... three thousand miles and she could sense the danger.

“I’ll be back. Then I’ll come visit.”

“Take care of yourself, Jason.”

He held the phone and stared through the windows at the stars over Scotland. He should have gone home more often. They were both old now. He should have made the time. If he came back from Russia he would make the time.

“I’ll be fine, Mom, I’ll be fine.”

There was a pause, as if neither knew what to say.

“I love you, Mom. Tell Dad I love you both.”

He put the phone down. Two hours later Sir Nigel Irvine read the transcript at his home in Dorset. On the following morning Ciaran and Mitch drove Monk back to the Aberdeen airport and escorted him on the southbound flight.

He spent five days in London, staying with Sir Nigel Irvine at the Montcalm, a quiet and discreet hotel tucked away in a Nash terrace behind Marble Arch. During those days the old spymaster explained in detail what Monk should do. Finally, there was nothing more but to say good-bye. Irvine slipped him a piece of paper.

“If ever that wonderful hi-tech communications system goes down, there’s a chap here who might get a message out. Last resort of course. Well, good-bye, Jason. I’ll not come to Heathrow. Hate airports. I think you can do it, you know. Yes, dammit, I really think you might.”

Ciaran and Mitch drove him to Heathrow and took him as far as the security checkpoint. Then each held out his hand.

“Good luck, Boss,” they said.

It was an uneventful flight. No one knew that he looked nothing like the Jason Monk who had flown into Terminal Four nearly a month earlier. No one knew he was not the man on his passport. He was nodded through.

Five hours later, with his watch adjusted three more hours forward, he approached passport control at Sheremetyevo Airport, Moscow. His visa was in order, apparently applied for and granted at the Russian Embassy in Washington. He was passed through.

At Customs he filled out the lengthy currency-declaration form and humped his single suitcase onto the examination table. The Customs man looked at it, then gestured to the attaché case.

“Open,” he said in English.

Nodding and smiling, the eager American businessman, Monk did so. The officer poked through his papers, then held up the laptop. He looked at it approvingly, said, “Nice,” and put it back. There was a quick chalk mark on each case, and he turned to his next customer.

Monk took his bags, passed through the glass doors, and emerged into the land to which he had sworn he would never return.

PART 2

CHAPTER 12

THE METROPOL HOTEL WAS STILL WHERE HE REMEMBERED
it, a big cube of gray stone facing the Bolshoi Theatre across the square.

In the reception area Monk approached the desk, introduced himself, and offered his American passport. The clerk checked a computer screen, tapping in the numbers and letters until the confirmation flashed up on the screen. He glanced at the passport, then at Monk, nodded, and gave a professional smile.

Monk’s room was the one he had asked for, acting on the advice of the Russian-speaking soldier Sir Nigel had sent to Moscow four weeks earlier on a reconnaissance trip. It was a corner room on the eighth floor, with a view toward the Kremlin and, more important, a balcony that ran along the length of the building.

Owing to the time difference with London, it was early evening by the time he was settled in and the October dusk was already cold enough for those on the Street who could afford an overcoat to wear one. That night Monk dined inside the hotel and went to sleep early.

The following morning there was a new reception clerk on duty.

“I have a problem,” Monk told him. “I have to go to the U.S. Embassy for them to check my passport. It’s a minor matter, you know, bureaucracy. …”

“Unfortunately, sir, we have to retain visitors’ passports during their stay,” said the clerk.

Monk leaned across the desk and the hundred-dollar bill crinkled in his fingers.

“I understand,” he said soberly, “but you see, that’s the problem. After Moscow I have to travel widely across Europe, and with the passport close to its expiration date, my embassy needs to prepare a replacement. I’d only be gone a couple of hours. …”

The clerk was young, recently married and a baby on the way. He thought how many rubles at the black market rate a hundred-dollar bill would buy him. He glanced left and right.

“Excuse me,” he said, and disappeared behind the glass partition dividing the reception desk from the complex of offices behind it. Five minutes later he was back. He carried the passport.

“Normally, these are only returned upon checkout,” he said. “I must have it back unless you are leaving.”

“Look, as I said, as soon as the Visa Section has finished with it, I’ll bring it right back. When do you go off duty?”

“Two this afternoon.”

“Well, if I can’t make it by then, your colleagues will have it by tea time.”

As the passport came one way, the hundred-dollar bill went the other. Now both were co-conspirators. They nodded, smiled, and parted.

Back in his room, Monk hung the Do Not Disturb Notice and locked the door. In the bathroom the dye-solvent described on the label as eyewash. liquid came out of his toilet case and he ran a bowl of warm water.

The cluster of tight gray curls belonging to Dr. Philip Peters disappeared, to be replaced by the blond hair of Jason Monk. The moustache gave way before the razor blade and the smoked glasses that masked the weak eyes of the academic went into a trash can down the hall.

The passport he withdrew from his attaché case was in his own name with his own photograph, and bore the entry stamp of the airport’s immigration officer, copied from the one brought back by Irvine’s soldier from his earlier mission but with the appropriate date. Inside the flyleaf was a duplicate currency—declaration form, also bearing the forged stamp of the currency desk.

At midmorning Monk descended to the ground floor, crossed the vaulted atrium, and left by the door facing away from the reception desk. There was a rank of licensed taxis outside the Metropol and Monk took one, by now speaking fluent Russian.

“Olympic Penta,” he said. The driver knew the hotel, nodded, and set off.

The entire Olympic complex, built for the 1980 games, lies due north of the center of the city, just outside the Sadovaya Spasskaya or Garden Ring Road. The stadium still towered over the surrounding buildings, and in is shadow was the German-built Penta Hotel. Monk had himself deposited under the marquee, paid off the cab, and entered the lobby. When the cab was gone he left the hotel and walked the rest of the way. It was only a quarter of a mile.

The whole area south of the stadium had degenerated into that atmosphere of drabness that prevails when upkeep and maintenance become too much trouble. The Communist-era buildings housing a dozen embassies, offices, and some restaurants carried a patina of summer dust that would turn to crust in the coming cold. Bits of paper and Styrofoam fluttered along the streets.