LITMIR.BIZ

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ourselves,” he said, “I admire your suspicious nature. Tell me what you think. I won’t necessarily believe you.”

      She stared at the distant window. “I surprise myself by having no suspicions. Odd. I think I don’t know enough yet. But that makes me suspicious, because I have been looking into the man’s life for two days and it is all—bland. Like the creation of a perfect bureaucrat. And why not? Colonel Efremov has a splendid record, some might say brilliant; he has no ‘past,’ no quirks, no secret life except the girlfriend. Still—” Her voice trailed off. “He has decentralized his work over the past four years. One might say it is an example of perestroika. Or one might say it is the opposite—obfuscation. He has divided his agents into somewhat irregular groups for purposes of administration and created his own sub-sections to handle them. Nothing wrong, exactly, but—he has followed the CIA model of creating false entities, companies on the new free-market model, and using them to mask his organizations. Nothing wrong, but they are a little difficult to track.”

      “Accountability?” the Director said hoarsely.

      “Financing, to be sure.”

      “False agents?” The Director sounded heart-broken.

      “I have no evidence of such a thing. But—!” She stood up. “Suppose the girl’s gangster father learned something, maybe from her, maybe with his taps, maybe somewhere else—let’s say that he learned that his daughter’s KGB colonel—sorry, SVRR colonel—was making money from his elaborate administrative structure. Let us just say he learned that we are paying for agents who don’t exist. He confronts Efremov. He says, ‘Do such-and-such for me, or I tell your bosses.’”

      “‘Such-and-such’?”

      “Oh—information about KGB—SVRR—penetration of foreign businesses, or a lever on contracts, or—my God, you know how illegal money is made as well as I!”

      The Director blew his nose. “Proceed.”

      “And Efremov says no, or he tries to exercise some power of his own, and Papa has him killed. Or, another scenario, Efremov kills himself!”

      “Rather Lermontov, that.”

      “I agree. Or he leaves the country.”

      The Director rubbed his already red eyes. “Or he could be lying in a stalled car in the snow beside a back road he took by mistake on the way to his dacha.” He looked at her between his fingers. “We mustn’t overlook the accidental.” He studied her face. “There’s something more. Come on.”

      She shook her head vigorously; her brown hair bounced back and forth. “Only an anomaly. Nine months ago, he set up another of his entities to support four agents. For him, perfectly normal procedure—except that all his other entities support twelve to fifteen agents.”

      “That doesn’t seem much to me.”

      “His best four agents. You know how he liked to brag—keeping a secret and bragging at the same time. Like those note cards he always had in his pocket, writing down the most important things he was doing that day: something a rank beginner would know better than to do. He would brag of something that one of his agents had brought him, then cover his tracks by hiding the nationality or some such. In fact he was deliberately transparent about some things—their jobs, for example. I knew that he’d an agent who was on the maintenance staff at NATO in Brussels, for example. Also somebody in the American military. Those and two others had been set up in this new entity.”

      “The others?”

      She shook her head. “One I think was a woman. That’s all I can tell at this point in time. If you’d allow me some expert support to go into his computer—”

      He shook his head. “Keep it in the house.” He spat into his tissue and looked at the result. “Maybe he’ll turn up. Maybe he’s just sulking someplace. Maybe he’s dead.” The contents of the tissue made him even gloomier. “Maybe it’s we who are dead, hmm? Moscow, the city of the dead? I would have been reprimanded for treason for saying that once. Now, I wish there was somebody to reprimand me.”

      1038 Zulu. Mid-Atlantic.

      He reported to a lieutenant commander in the inboard intel center. Peretz was a slouching, slightly bald man his father’s age who had sick-looking circles under his eyes and a constant air of gloom.

      “You Mick Craik’s son?”

      “Yes, sir.”

      “Siddown, siddown. Your father and I go way back. In fact, the first squadron I served with.” Peretz wore glasses and used them like an academic, looking over the tops or pointing them for emphasis. Now, he pulled them down his nose and stared at Alan. “I understand you fly.”

      “Yes, sir.”

      “Gonna stay with it?”

      “I want to.”

      Peretz made a face, half-grotesque; his gloom was a mask for a sardonic sense of humor, Alan realized. He pushed his glasses up. “What do the flyboys call you?”

      “Spy.”

      “Could be worse. ‘Dickhead’ is a favorite. You get along?”

      “I think so.”

      Peretz nodded, a rapid head movement that made his shoulders bob. Looking at his hands, he said, “You know the other battle group found us last night.”

      “Oh, shit.”

      Peretz looked up at him. His eyes were shrewd and perhaps amused. “Did you do a wide radar sweep just before you made the stack last night?”

      Alan flushed. “We weren’t in EMCON.”

      “JFK thought somebody found them last night. They were sure we’d be on them.” He looked up from his fingers. “No report was made.”

      “No, sir.”

      “You didn’t know you’d flashed them?”

      Alan hesitated. Should he protect Rafe? He thought that Peretz was trying to teach him something, that this was between two intel officers, the flyers not part of it. He took a chance. “I caught two bananas south of Pico and ID’d one as the Kennedy. Was I right?”

      Peretz nodded. He seemed fascinated by his own fingertips, even sniffed them from time to time. “How come you didn’t give us a blast?”

      “Are we in trouble over this?”

      “We? You mean, you and your pilot? Naw. This is between Kennedy’s 10 and me and the gatepost.”

      “I thought the admiral would be pissed.”

      “He is. But you’re too young to feed to an admiral. He wouldn’t get any satisfaction from reaming you out; admirals want commanders or higher.” Peretz grinned at his hands. “A Brit wrote after World War II that flag officers are best thought of as old ladies who need very careful handling.” He raised his eyebrows and glanced at Alan. “Keep it in mind.”

      “I didn’t report it because my mission commander—let’s say he ruled the mission was over.”

      Peretz swung forward, hands on knees. “Okay. Learning time. You had important information and you didn’t do with it what you’re supposed to. It’s no good saying to yourself it’s his call and he’ll take the heat. You going to do this in a combat situation? You’re an intelligence officer—you have a responsibility. I don’t care how much you like to fly! Information, information! You let us down. You let yourself down.” He leaned back. “And I’d have done the same thing.” He smiled. “You must be pretty good with that TACCO rig, to pick them up like that.”

      “It was iffy.”

      Peretz nodded. “As a TACCO,

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