A simple charade, probably unnecessary. The rezidentsia had a safe line but there was no telling who had a tap on the airport public phones; it wasn’t as if Los Angeles International were an obscure filling station. The FBI might have had a routine tap and the phone call from Belsky just might have stirred up enough interest for them to send someone to observe the meeting place. If so, they would have witnessed, to all observable intents, a drop. If the FBI followed the blond man and grabbed the suitcase to find out what was in it, they would probably find old clothes.
Belsky waited near the paperback stand and then took off his topcoat and stood looking mildly exasperated, a man who didn’t want his arm burdened. Finally his eye settled on the lockers and he allowed his expression to change, and he walked resolutely toward the lockers, found an open one—the one the suitcase had occupied—put his coat inside and spent a quarter and pocketed the key.
He had forty-five minutes before his flight; he looked at camera displays and magazines and bought an Examiner and had a beer in the bar. When his flight was called he walked right past the lockers and then snapped his fingers with sudden obvious realization and went back to claim his coat. When he unlocked the door and reached inside he peeled away the envelope that Tidsov had taped under the locker ceiling; he concealed it in the folds of the coat and walked to his plane.
It was an hour’s flight to Tucson. When the FASTEN SEAT BELT sign was extinguished Belsky went back to the lavatory and locked himself in. The envelope and its single sheet of paper were made of phosphor-treated flashpaper; he committed the message to memory in the time it took to read it, held it over the aluminum toilet bowl and set fire to it. By the time it had fallen into the bowl it had been consumed and he flushed the ash residue down and went back to his seat. The stewardess was passing out snacks, and Belsky smiled at her.
PRIORITY UTMOST
DANGERFIELD LA IA 2APR 1435 PST PANAM 363
VIA WESTLAKE PUBLISHER
KGB 1
CYPHER 1528 SG
SENT 2115 GMT WP ACKNOWLEDGE
MESSAGE BEGINS X TENTATIVE CONFIRMATION TARTAR INTENT X DATE UNCERTAIN BUT NOT LESS THAN 7 DAYS NOR MORE THAN 30 DAYS X TARTAR POLITBURO STILL UNDECIDED AS TO FINAL COMMITMENT BUT ASSUME TARTAR ATTACK X IN VIEW OF SHORT TIME AVAILABLE DISCARD PLAN Z X EXECUTE PLAN B X ACCELERATE IMMEDIATE ACTIVATION OF PLAYERS X STAND BY TO EXECUTE PLAN B3 ON SIGNAL POSSIBLY WITHIN 120 HOURS X VR X MESSAGE ENDS 17639 42 2474
Chapter Five
Lieutenant Colonel Fred Winslow picked a ball-point pen out of the desk caddy and began to scrawl his OK and initials across the mimeographed duty roster but the pen wouldn’t write and he had to scratch it savagely across the corner of an envelope to get the ink flowing. He made a noise and took off his reading glasses and wiped them, and scowled abstractedly across the small office at the place in the far wall where a window ought to be. There were only photographs: the Commander in Chief, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the Secretary of the Air Force, the Air Force Chief of Staff. No window. The office was sixty feet underground and the light came from recessed fluorescent fixtures in the ceiling and there was only one way to tell whether it was day or night—the twenty-four-hour clock above the door. Now and then Winslow entertained the fantasy of installing a sixty-foot periscope and a four-by-five window to go with it.
According to the clock it was getting on to six o’clock and time to go home. He wandered into his tiny lavatory, buttoned his collar, hoisted his tie up from half-mast and inserted it neatly between the second and third buttons of his uniform shirt. The face in the mirror was round and mild, the eyes large and timid, the loose thatch of hair across his high forehead getting distressingly gray. He really looked as if he must have been middle-aged since birth: the kind of man who had been given a briefcase for his eleventh birthday and a book of crossword puzzles for his forty-third. Celia always laughed: It’s the perfect image for you, darling, why change it? But Winslow remembered the adventuresome anticipations of his youth.
Nick Conrad put his head into the office. ‘‘Fred? Colonel Ryan’s up in the Wing Commander’s HQ, wants a word with you before you go off.”
Winslow took his blue jacket down from the hanger. “What’s the flap?”
“No flap.” Conrad had sharp points on all his bones. A narrow feral face and waxy brown hair that came to a widow’s peak, and a major’s gold leaves on his neat uniform. He lit a cigarette and blew smoke out his nose. “Christ what a week.”
“Why?”
“The whole load. Yesterday I had to pull OD and tonight I’ll be’ here till midnight distributing the new codes.” The doomsday codes were changed every four days—next week it would be Saturday, the week after that Wednesday. The envelopes came down from Colorado by plane under guard and wherever they went there had to be two officers in attendance—the courier from NORAD and the ICBM wing’s Electronics Warfare Officer, Conrad. There were forty-two code envelopes and each had to be hand-delivered to its station by the two officers: two to each of the eighteen silos and the rest to command personnel. At the same time last week’s envelopes had to be picked up and destroyed under supervision. It made for a long dreary evening.
Conrad was still holding the door and Winslow headed for it but the phone rang and he had to turn back. It was Celia. “Darling, I know it’s short notice, but Ramsey Douglass happened to phone just now and said he has to see us. I invited him for dinner—I hope you don’t mind?”
Winslow closed his eyes. “All right.”
“There’s a letter from Barbara.”
“Fine.”
“She seems to have a boyfriend.”
“A boyfriend. For Christ’s sake she’s fourteen years old.”
“Never too early.” Celia chuckled.
“I’m on my way out, but Colonel Ryan wants to see me. I may be a few minutes late.”
“That’s all right, Ramsey’s not coming till eight. Bye, darling.”
He hung up and walked past Conrad into the corridor. “We appear to have a dinner guest.”
“Bon appétit.”
“Ramsey Douglass.”
Conrad lifted his eyebrows and scratched his angular nose. “I hope it’s just social.”
Winslow sensed anger in the Wing Commander’s office when he entered. Colonel Bill Ryan, the base commander, sat rumpled in a steel-and-plastic armchair and only waved wearily by way of greeting. Major Pete Chandler, big and crew-cut and hiding behind enormous mirrored sunglasses, was on his feet at one side of the room and only grunted at Winslow. Pete Chandler was chief Security Officer for the complex.
Wing Commander Colonel Clarence “Bud” Sims was behind his desk with both elbows on the blotter, his glasses perched on top of his head. They had left dents on the sides of his nose and he was rubbing it wearily with thumb and forefinger. Sims was heavy-handed, direct, unsophisticated, painfully sincere. He said, “Thanks for dropping by, Fred. We’ll only keep you a minute. Colonel Ryan’s got a problem.”