Deep Cover (34 page)

“What about Europe? West Germany?”

“I can't conceive of any reason to bomb Europe, can you? And the prevailing winds are westerly so you'd have the same problem—fallout over Russia. What's left? The third-world countries? Israel? None of them's big enough to justify using nuclear ICBMs.”

“You've just about ruled out everything.”

“It narrows down to home base. They're going to have to shoot at targets in the United States. NORAD, maybe, the big SAC bases, the Pentagon, that kind of thing. It'll leave the nuclear subs and a good deal of other firepower but it'll damage this country's military strength enough to discourage the United States from shooting at Russia, because the United States would lose. Besides, NORAD will see the missiles coming
in, they'll know where they were launched from—they'll know they're not Russian missiles. They'll be confused; they won't know who to hit back at. What can they do? Bombard Tucson with hydrogen warheads?”

“Why not?”

“Once these missiles are fired Tucson's arsenal will be exhausted. Why bomb it then? No, all they can do is pick up the pieces and start an investigation to find out what happened down here. By that time we'll all have to be out of the country—probably in Mexico on our way back to Russia. It's either that or kill all of us and Dangerfield's only one man, he can't wipe out three hundred of us.”

“Once they get us all out of the country and in one group they can kill us easily enough.”

“But once we're that far they'd have no reason to. As soon as we're beyond the reach of the American authorities we're no longer a threat to Moscow.”

“You've got it all worked out, haven't you? But I still don't see it the way you do. I still feel like a punchcard that's been programmed to do a job without knowing why. We're supposed to think it's necessary just because a stranger comes in and says it's necessary.”

“It's not a hoax. I checked with Moscow—Dangerfield's legitimate.”

“I never thought he wasn't. That's not the point.”

They had crawled two blocks in the traffic and a truck in front of them was gnashing its gears; they got stuck at the light.

In a different tone Nicole said, “I'm frightened out of my wits.” She turned and reached across the seat and put her hand on his thigh. “Ramsey?”

“Stop it. Christ you've got a one-track mind.”

The light changed and he put the car in gear and whipped it brutally out into the left-hand lane, nearly clipping the tailgate of the stalled truck. The car behind him screeched and he heard the angry yelp of its horn. When he was clear of the traffic snarl he floored the accelerator and took the Pennington Avenue turn too fast, clipping the curb and rocking the car violently on its springs. Nicole was laughing unpleasantly
and when he pulled into the courthouse parking area he slapped her viciously across the face.

She stopped laughing but her mouth was still twisted with mockery; it turned itself inward now; she was bitter with herself. “Of all the impotent bastards in the world I had to pick you to fall for.”

“One of these days I'll ream you out,” he said in a weary mutter. “You God damned supercilious bitch.”

Her face didn't change but after a while she said, “Look at us. We're both insane, you know we are. We're utterly mad.”

“Aagh,” he said, disbelieving it, dismissing it.

“We are. You can deny it to me but you can't deny it to yourself, can you? We've been living lies for twenty years, and they've eaten us away like acid. How can we be expected to tell the difference between lies and truth after all that? We're examples of the legal definition of insanity: we simply do not know right from wrong.”

“Get a grip on yourself. You can't afford to fall apart now. Do you know what Dangerfield would do if he heard you talking like this?”

“I'm not sure I really care. We've been falling apart for twenty years. But up to now we could hold ourselves together with the hope that they'd never decide to activate us. Now they've removed that and we haven't got a damn thing left.”

“You're talking treason,” he said, not as if it mattered.

“Of course. Whatever we do it's treason—treason to one side or the other.”

“Don't worry about sides for Christ's sake. Worry about your own skin.”

“That's all you've ever worried about, isn't it?”

He said, “Don't tell me you're any different.”

“I suppose I'm not. I won't martyr myself to save the world. But I don't want to die.”

“Then just do what they tell us to do.” He got out of the car and slammed the door.

She caught up with him halfway to the courthouse. “We are, you know,” she said. “We're both quite mad.”

Chapter Thirteen

She was sitting at the desk absently sorting the letters that had come in the morning's delivery. A few of them required the Senator's personal attention and those she put in his In box. The rest were letters from citizens, many of them from states other than Arizona, most of them concerning Phaeton Three. She stacked them in pro and con piles; someone in the Washington office would be doing the same thing with the mail there.

It didn't require her concentrated attention; her thoughts were adrift, stirring with drowsy eroticism. Even when she was not with him now she was thinking of him. He had become all too important to her and it was no good; she didn't belong to herself. For his sake she had to break it off. For the past hour she had tried to put up reasons she could give him for
ending it but her mind kept twisting them and she kept finding reasons why she should not break it off.

When other men had approached her she had sized them up coolly and only dated them when she felt sure they had nothing permanent in mind; the others she had chilled quickly and effectively. But now she didn't know what to do.

She didn't want to work, to speak with anyone else. She didn't want to do anything except be with him, to watch him wash and shave and dress and eat—and to sleep with him. She had caught herself thinking:
He is my world and I want to be his.
Her breasts ached; she felt light-headed; she looked at the clock and then she closed her eyes and said very softly and without great conviction, “No.”

When Douglass and Nicole came into the office she was startled but she knew immediately why they had come before either of them spoke a word.

Douglass said, “Are you alone here?”

“Yes.”

“Where is everybody?”

“I don't know where Les Suffield is. The Senator and Jaime Spode went out to the base a little while ago.”

“We want to talk to you about that,” Nicole said.

“Yes. About Senator Forrester,” Ronnie said.

“About his inspection tour of Davis Monthan,” Ramsey Douglass said, and that did surprise her. She looked at him more closely. His silken glance was intended to inspire fear; his eyes saw everything, knew everything. Douglass closed the outer door softly, like an alderman. Nicole said in her abrasive matter-of-fact voice, “Is this place bugged?”

“I have no idea,” Ronnie said. “I wouldn't know where to look.”

“I would,” Douglass said, and went around the room looking behind things and under things.

Nicole pulled a chair out and sat down near the desk. “You really light up for the good Senator, don't you?”

Ronnie didn't answer but kept her eyes on Douglass. He put the floorlamp down and came to the desk and unscrewed
the mouthpiece and earpiece of the telephone receiver to look at its insides. Ronnie felt tiny drops of sweat burst out, beading her hairline and prickling the roots.

Nicole spoke as if Ronnie weren't in the room. “She's always been independent and proud, stuffed full of romantic sentimentality. When that type falls in love with a man she really falls.”

Douglass said abstractedly, “You don't often find a woman with more sense than temperament.” He pried back an edge of the felt bottom-cover of the desk lamp and peered inside.

Of course they were trying to unnerve her; it was a ritual with them. But even knowing what they were doing wasn't enough to immunize her. The words they spoke were banal and trite and she had said them all to herself anyway; she was angry now because it was enough to have to suffer this self-inflicted agony, it was too much to have to discuss it.

Douglass said, “Shove back a minute.”

She pushed her chair back on its casters and Douglass crouched to take the drawers out of the desk and investigate its insides and undersurfaces.

Nicole said, “You can't offer him anything, love, and you can't ask him to wait. The only thing you can do is walk nobly out of his life. Why make it hard for yourself?”

“I know all this,” Ronnie said. “I'd already decided to break it off.”

“Isn't that ducky.” Douglass' voice was muffled because his head was under the kneehole of the desk.

Ronnie said, “Look, you don't need rubber hoses. I'll behave.” She felt washed out but there was a kind of relief: she had needed this confrontation, she hadn't had the strength to make the decision alone. “I'll end it today.”

Nicole said, “No you won't.”

“Come again?”

“You'll string him along a while.”

“But it will be easier to cut it off clean—I'll just clear out my desk and go. I'll telephone him and tell him it was no good, I'm leaving Tucson and going somewhere else to get a job.”

“That's just what you won't do,” Douglass said, straightening up and dusting his hands. “I think it's clean.”

Nicole said, “How about the walls? Through-the-wall listening devices?”

“It's an old building. These walls are thick. Anyhow you've got the County Supervisor's anteroom on one side and the license-issuing office on the other—too much traffic in and out, nobody'd fix anything to those walls. It could be spotted too easily.”

“If you're satisfied, then.”

Ronnie said, “I wish you'd explain yourselves. You sound as if you don't want me to break it off at all. I don't understand.”

“You'll break it off,” Ramsey Douglass said, “when we tell you to break it off. I'd have thought by now you'd have learned to obey orders.”

She didn't need reminding and of course they knew that. She had fallen in love with an outsider and she had married him against orders; she had been young and her defiance had been strengthened by passion. Phil had been a native-born American; he'd known nothing of Amergrad. She had told him nothing, given him no clues, he'd never suspected a thing. But possibly they had been right; there was always the possibility of a slip of the tongue. Still, didn't all of them run that risk? But they had forced her to watch while they slowly beat him to death with bludgeons behind the bowling alley.

Douglass said, “The cells have been activated. The man has come from Moscow.”

She sat erect. “What?”

“We've been ordered up. To do the job we're here for.” Douglass' lips had been upturned in his sour smile but now they went flat and lifeless. “So you see in any case you'll be leaving soon enough. They'll have to evacuate us when the job's been done.”

It was beyond her capacity to absorb; she drooped in the chair like a loose sack of laundry and sweat trickled down
between her breasts. Her face crumpled and collapsed slowly into defeat and she covered it with her hands. She was beyond tears but when Nicole spoke her rigid body jerked galvanically.

“Pull yourself together. We haven't got time for you to have another breakdown.” Nicole's voice was gentler than usual. The wizened face turned toward Douglass and when Ronnie looked up she saw on Nicole's features an expression of black fury. It did not seem personally directed against Douglass: it was simply an unreasoning rage and Ronnie realized in that moment that they were all caught by the knowledge that everything had been ended for them by the whim of a faceless man twenty thousand miles away.

The fact that they were all in the same trap somehow made it possible to bear. She said, “All right. You have instructions for me.”

Douglass and Nicole exchanged glances. Nicole nodded as if thoroughly fatigued.

Douglass said, “We haven't been told when it's to take place. I suppose they think it's none of our business, our job's just to swing the hammers, we don't have to know what the building's going to be. But we're supposed to isolate the base. It'll be a very tricky caper and we're going to have our hands full enough without your Senator crawling all over the base tripping over us. He's got clearance to go everywhere in the complexes with his hand-picked scientist and his Navajo detective and if any of them spots our preliminary maneuvers it could blow the whole thing open. So that's your job: distract him, discourage him, pressure him to lay off. He's got to be kept away until it's over and done with. I can't tell you how long that'll be but they wouldn't set this up too far in advance; there'd be too much risk of leakage. A week, maybe only a few days.”