Читать книгу Night Trap - Gordon Kent, Gordon Kent - Страница 26

Ouspenskaya slipped into the Director’s office after a single knock. The receptionist was gone, the building quiet except for the duty crews on the second floor, and here and there some manager like the Director plugging away. He knew she was coming.

“Well? What is urgent?” His cold was worse.

“Efremov.”

“Yes?”

She sat down. Her hands were trembling. She was truly wretched, for something monstrous had obtruded into this place, this idea she had of Moscow and being Russian, as if an obscene animal had dragged its slime across her foot. “Five days ago, a gang attacked an office in the Stitkin Building here in Moscow. Twenty-nine dead.”

“I remember.” He guessed at once; his voice showed it.

“The office was Efremov’s latest front operation. Venux, Inc. To run the four agents I told you of.”

“Oh, my God.” He was breathing through his mouth like an adenoidal child, looking absurd and feeling dreadful. “My God,” he said again as he saw it all. “They wiped out the entire operation.”

She nodded. “A hired job. Ex-military all over it.”

“Maybe it’s a fake—”

She shook her head. “What do you think, the Army did it? No, no! It’s just what we’re doing to ourselves! Efremov disappears; somebody wipes out his best operation—every clerk, every computer operator; they burned the place out—files, disks, shredder, everything! We’re already four days late; the police treated it as ordinary crime—‘ordinary,’ ah!—and our people didn’t go in until I sent them an hour ago. There’s already been looting of what’s left. What kind of people are we becoming?”

“You think—the father of the girlfriend? Mafia?”

“I don’t know. For what? Revenge?” She shrugged. “I’m having Papa Malenkov brought in. No pussy-footing. I’ve told them to rough him up and see what he says. Let him know we’re not the Moscow police.” She shook her head. “But it doesn’t add up. If it’s a message to us, why hit a disguised operation that we don’t know about? If it’s a message to Efremov, where is he? Is he dead? Then what’s the point?” She wiped her cheeks, sank back. What she was suffering was grief, grief for a lost ideal. “Maybe he’s dead. But maybe he isn’t. And if he isn’t—”

“If he isn’t—Maybe he did it. Eh? You say this operation was new—a few months. Nine? Nine. So—maybe, that long ago, he was planning—something?”

“It seems far-fetched. But Efremov could be very cute if he wanted to. He liked to cover his tracks, even long before—mmm—current conditions.”

The Director made a face. “Say it. Long before perestroika. My God! The good old days.” He made a sound, something between a laugh and a groan. “My God, Ouspenskaya, what a ball of shit it’s all turned into! Any idea where Efremov would go?”

“None.”

“Out of the country?”

“I suppose.”

“You’ve checked the various agencies that—of course you have. All right, he was clever, he was an old campaigner, he could have gone over any border he wanted. I’m only brainstorming, mind you—improvising; I’m sure he’s dead, in fact. But let’s say, for argument’s sake, he isn’t. Presumably he had money abroad. Well. So, he destroys the organization that handles his best agents. To deny us? Of course, a nice joke, one ‘in your eye,’ as they say. He never liked me, I might say. You, I always thought he had his eye on. No? Well, there you are. I’m a bureaucrat, not a human relations specialist. Presumably he plans to take himself to somebody else, with his star agents as his salesman’s samples—eh? So he destroys everything and everybody who can track those agents. Well, that makes a grisly kind of sense. So who does he go to? The Americans? Not likely; he really despised the Americans. Notice I talk of him in the past tense, as if he were dead.” He made the laughing groan again, trying to break through her mood. Failing, he said, “Please, Ouspenskaya!” He came around the desk, stood in front of her, patted her shoulder. He only made things worse: she began to weep. The Director poured a glass of water from his carafe (made in Sweden) and held it out to her.

“There’s something else,” she said.

“Oh, shit.” He retreated behind his desk.

“I’m sure there’s a discrepancy between his claims for eighty agents and the agents themselves. I haven’t got proof yet, but there’s too much organization, too much system manipulation, and not enough information. I think some of the eighty are dummies.”

He leaned his forehead on one hand. “Not all of them. Efremov got wonderful information from real agents!”

“I have an idea, Director.”

“Good, because I certainly don’t.”

“There is probably more in the computers than we can tease out. We need specialists. The computer was installed ages ago by East Germans who would not even be seen speaking to us now. Let’s go to the Americans.”

He paused, a tissue halfway to his nose.

“The Americans know everything about computers,” she went on. She was more cheerful, talking about what could be done. “We tell them that Efremov has bolted and that one of his agents is American. That will make them hot, you know. Then we tell them there is more in the computer but we can’t winkle it out. We will let their specialists into the computer if they will replace the system with IBM machines when they are done. And give us whatever they find of Efremov’s. We lose nothing. And they will take care of Efremov for us.”

He stared at her.

“I am sick of using low-end technology!” she shouted. “And I want a new telephone, too!”

He swiveled to look out the window. The rain was still streaming down. He balled a damp tissue between his palms, rolling it back and forth, back and forth, at last dropped it into the plastic bag, then got up and left the office. She heard the water run in his private bathroom. The toilet flushed. He came out wiping his hands on a handkerchief.

“Not yet,” he said.

She hitched forward in her chair. “I was approached by an American at the Venice Conference. A very obvious move—in fact, she said so. ‘Now that the Cold War is over,’ and so on. I know I could make the contact!”

“Of course you could make a contact; I could make a contact; who couldn’t? You’re not thinking clearly, Ouspenskaya. No, letting the Americans into Efremov’s computer files would be obscene. Just now. Not that I wouldn’t do it if I was absolutely sure he was alive and working for somebody else.”

“He has been responsible for killing twenty-nine of his own people. And he is a traitor!”

“You don’t know that! Did you report this approach at the Venice Conference?”

“Of course.”

“Who was it?”

“A woman. It’s all in my report.”

He hesitated for that millisecond that betrays suspicion, then glanced at her almost apologetically. He was thinking Those American women—you hear strange things—they do things with other women—He moved uncomfortably; he felt out of place in this new and more dangerous world. He cleared his throat. “What did she offer you?”

“It wasn’t an offer. An idea—a Soviet-American thinktank. American money. I would participate at a high level.”

“A little obvious, maybe?”

“She said as much—pointed out that three SVRR generals were touring US military bases as we spoke.”

He made a little throat-clearing sound, a sign of hesitation—this hint of possibly irregular sex embarrassed him—and said gently, “Who is she?”

“She works for George Shreed. She made that quite clear enough.” She laughed, throatily. “Quite clear. What is it Americans call it—’name-pushing’?”

“Name-dropping, I believe. George Shreed. Well, well.” Shreed was more or less his opposite number in the CIA, at least so placed that the Director looked upon him as almost a rival in the same bureaucracy. Competitiveness tingled, despite his cold. “People like Shreed never dared reach into my directorate before. It’s a new world.”

“One in which a Colonel murders twenty-nine of his own people and betrays his country. For money! I know it! I feel it! The bastard!”

The Director groaned. He was sure that Ouspenskaya would resist any seduction from an immoral American woman. Wouldn’t she? He had managed to clear one nostril. He breathed through it for some seconds. “Did I tell you Gronski left with twenty-four hours’ notice ‘to enter the private sector’? What private sector? Money—the new socialist ideal. Well. All right, renew the contact with Shreed’s woman. Prepare the ground, but do nothing. File a report on everything you do. Put everything in writing for me. Get together with somebody who knows the computer and draft a plan for clearing it, then have them squeeze every drop of data out of it. I want every individual who has worked for Efremov in the last five years interviewed on polygraph—right down to the clerks. You run this, Ouspenskaya. If there are dummy agents he was taking money for, I want details. The individuals won’t know about it; they’ll think everything was straight. If they had suspicions, maybe he paid one or two off. But he was so good I’ll bet nobody got suspicious. But somewhere in the records there will be glitches. You can’t run ghosts and not have it show up.”

She stood. “You go to bed.”

He groaned. As she turned to go, he said, “Get what you can on the four agents who were being run out of the place that was attacked. You’ll have to go back to before he compartmentalized them. Maybe even back before we computerized. A big job.”

“I want to nail him like a new Christ.”

“Yes, but don’t want it so much that you overlook things that will exonerate him. Remember—maybe he’s dead. Maybe he’s under a new pouring of concrete somewhere. Maybe he’s innocent.”

“He isn’t!”

He ignored that. “I want everything on those four agents. Especially the American. I think we can do something with that.”

She didn’t ask him what.