“What’s the matter?” I asked.
“Gevan, really! I mean isn’t that a little too much?”
“It’s been a cold war so long, Perry, too many people have forgotten it’s a war. We’re leery of dramatics. Too many commy hunts have made the whole bit unfashionable. Warring ideologies are in stasis, Perry. Tell me why?”
“Well... I suppose it’s because if anybody starts anything, we’ll destroy each other.”
“Okay so far. Now assume that in spite of Cuba and the Congo and all the rest of it, they get the idea they’re losing ground in the cold war. Would they give up?”
“I don’t know what you want me to say.”
“Just suppose, Perry, that a year and a half or two years, the Kremlin decided they have to take the risk of turning it into a hot war. What would they do? They would intensify all espionage activities. We know they’ve done that. They would yell about peace, about the impossibility of nuclear war, and their earnest desire to compete economically. They’re doing that. And let’s try to take a shrewd guess about their third step. I think they would commit their most valuable agents, the ones who’ve never been given an assignment, the ones who’ve worked themselves carefully and deeply into our industrial, scientific and military structure. When they’ve pulled enough of our teeth, and gently loosened the rest of them, they can take the most horrible gamble the world has ever seen, and convince those historians who survive that we started it. How many Mottlings, after all the years of waiting, have suddenly been put to work?”
“But what can he...”
“The D4D is part of the guidance and control system for an ICBM which we can assume operational. They’re doubtless being made elsewhere too. Maybe there are even alternate designs. But they stuck Stanley Mottling on this one.”
“What... how could he...”
“First he rides the top production brains out of the picture. Poulson, Fitz, Garroway and the others. He replaces them with fools, stooges and conspirators. Next he corrupts the Colonel, and that is easy because the Colonel is a vain, stupid, greedy little man. On his own I doubt he could figure out how to ream the government. So Mottling maybe made the plausible suggestion of renting outside storage space, then adjusted procedures to give Dolson a freer hand with purchase orders, then had LeFay contact him on the outside and show him the way to wealth and plenty. And one day Dolson found out Mottling owned him, the way a man owns a dog, and Mottling started to use him. Remember, Dolson is contracting officer, inspection officer and shipping officer. Change a few specs, bitch a few dimensions, and you’re in the business of manufacturing intercontinental duds. Dolson could divert the few good ones to Canaveral, or wherever they test them by seeing how they fly.”
“It sounds as if... you really know.”
“When the big guess is right, Perry, all the little mysteries make sense. Ken was a wooden executive, but he was a damn fine engineer. I think he finally caught on. And they had to shut him up quickly.”
“Horrible!” she whispered.
“If they could keep twenty Mottlings busy for one year, they could afford to pull the string, Perry. They’d bang us twenty to one. They’d have some wounds to lick, but we’d be stone cold dead.”
I’d been driving so automatically I had to check landmarks to find out where I was. I recognized a country road that turned off to the right, and remembered it as the way we used to get to the river long ago, the place to take a gal who gave the slightest promise of co-operation, a place of beer and blankets and clumsy ecstasies.
As I turned into the road, I said, “Know this place?”
“If you hadn’t depressed me so much, I’d try to make jokes, like asking you what kind of girl you think I am anyhow. But this doesn’t seem to be the night for jolly patter, Gevan.”
We rode the four miles to the riverbank in silence. There were three other cars parked there, widely spaced, lights out, facing the dark oiled flow of the river. I lighted two cigarettes and gave one to Perry, pleased to find she had the gift of silence and the wisdom to know when it was necessary.
I had been thinking aloud when I had talked to her. It was like the old days. Ideas had always flowed more freely when I had been dictating to her.
It was ironic that it had been Lester who had triggered my conjecture with his innocent use of the word sabotage. It had embarrassed me to bring that idea up when talking to Mort Brice about Mottling. We’re all too afraid of being thought dramatic. We’re terrified of being thought ridiculous.
It all made sense when I began to think of Mottling as a man who had lived a life that was a triumph of misdirection. They would commit such a man only when the gamble became important enough, the same way, long ago, they had finally committed Klaus Fuchs. I could not waste my energy fretting about Mottling’s motives. If I was right, something had twisted him, irreparably, too many years ago. The pipe and shaggy tweed hid an incurable sickness of the soul.
Obviously, Mottling would be provided with all the highly trained people he could use. Others, like Fitch and Dolson, could be corrupted and enlisted and forced to serve. And, because he was of the utmost importance, every effort would be made to keep him well in the clear, above suspicion.
Suddenly I had a frightening appreciation of how careful their planning was. It had to go back at least five years, to a decision made to infiltrate a big heavy-industry corporation being run by a pair of bachelor brothers. A woman was an obvious wedge. A special woman, clever, dedicated, merciless and superbly trained. She needed an identity, so they searched until they found a friendless girl without family, in Cleveland, who matched closely enough in age and size. The real Niki Webb gave up her name and her life, and I succumbed to the wiles of an expert, masterful as a grub worm in a hen run.
Ken and I, at that time, made a hell of a good team. She had a long and intimate chance to appraise me, and perhaps she decided I was too strong and too able. So she arranged her surprise party, after giving Ken the treatment that had been so effective with me. She couldn’t know how it would come out. I might have killed one of them or both of them. The result would have been the same — to make Dean Products more vulnerable by destroying able management. I destroyed it when I walked out. So she married Ken and slowly gutted him, and made room for Mottling to come in when it was time.
But Ken fooled them. He figured it out, and they had to kill him. And it was disconcerting to learn I was no beach bum. They had thrown everything at me, including Niki, and nothing had worked, so they had tried with the truck, and that hadn’t worked.
Now, maybe, they were sweating. I’d stirred up too much. I’d caused them to fold the Dolson swindle, empty the files and kill Dolson’s blonde playmate. They would have to protect all the apparatus they had left. I shuddered.
“Somebody walked over your grave,” Perry said. My eyes had become accustomed to that faint light cast by the reflection of the distant city on the overcast. The rain had stopped again. She sat facing me, her back against the far door, her legs curled on the seat. When she raised her cigarette to her lips, the red glow of inhalation exposed the pleasant girlish structure of her face.
“Wherever the grave is,” I said, “I hope it’s a long time waiting for me.”
“The good die young,” she said with a throaty amusement. “Feel safe.”
In the new silence I was aware of how comfortable I was with her. I felt no need to strut, protest, strike attitudes, invent gambits. She knew me well, so well I could afford the rare luxury of being entirely myself. In the warmth and relaxation of that relationship I grew pleasantly aware of her in a physical way. She was girl-in-the-dark, nubile, fragrant — a slender, quick-minded copper-blonde who had become dear to me long before there was any of this awareness. I felt a special stir of tenderness toward her.