"I, er-I apologize," he said. "I think you may have something. Certainly your conclusions warrant further investigation. We should contact the others and tell them about it as soon as possible."
Chapter Twenty-Three
"She what?! "
Hunt caught Caldwell’s arm and drew him to a halt halfway along the corridor leading toward Caldwell’s office at the top of the Navcomms Headquarters Building.
"He told her to give him a call next time she was in New York to see her mother," Caldwell said. "So I told her to take some vacation and go see her mother." He lifted Hunt’s fingers from the sleeve of his jacket and resumed walking.
Hunt stood rooted to the spot for a second, then came to life once more and caught up in a few hurried paces. "What in hell? . . . You can’t do that! She happens to be very special to me."
"She also happens to be my assistant."
"But. . . . what’s she supposed to do when she sees him-read poetry? Gregg, you can’t do that. You’ve got to get her out of it."
"You’re sounding like a maiden aunt," Caldwell said. "I didn’t do anything. She set it up herself, and I didn’t see any reason not to use the chance. It might turn up something useful."
"Her job description never said anything about playing Mata Hari. It’s a blatant and inexcusable exploitation of personnel beyond the limits of their contractual obligations to the Division."
"Nonsense. It’s a career-development opportunity. Her job description stresses initiative and creativity, and that’s what it is."
"What kind of career? That guy’s only got one track in his head. Look, it may come as kind of a surprise, but I don’t go for the idea of her being another boy-scout badge for him to stitch on his shirt. Maybe I’m being old-fashioned, but I didn’t think that that was what working for UNSA was all about."
"Stop overreacting. Nobody said a word about anything like that. It could be a chance to fill in some of the details we’re missing. The opportunity came out of the blue, and she grabbed it."
"I’ve heard enough details already from Karen. Okay, we know the rules, and Lyn knows the rules, but he doesn’t know the rules. What do you think he’s going to do-sit down and fill out a questionnaire?"
"Lyn can handle it."
"You can’t let her do it."
"I can’t stop her. She’s on vacation, seeing her mother."
"Then I want to take some special leave, starting right now. I’ve got personal emergency matters to attend to in New York."
"Denied. You’ve got too much to do here that’s more important."
They fell silent as they passed through the outer office and into Caldwell’s inner sanctum. Caldwell’s secretary looked up from dictating a memo to an audiotranscriber and nodded a greeting.
"Gregg, this is going too far," Hunt began again when they got inside. "There’s-"
"There’s more to it than you think," Caldwell told him. "I’ve heard enough from Norman Pacey and the CIA to know that the opportunity was worth seizing when it presented itself. Lyn knew it too." He draped his jacket on a hanger by the door, walked around the other side of his desk, and dumped the briefcase that he had been carrying down on top of it. "There’s a hell of a lot about Sverenssen that we never deamed of and a lot more we don’t know that we’d like to. So stop being neurotic, sit down and listen for five minutes, and I’ll give you a summary."
Hunt emitted a long sigh of capitulation, threw out his hands in resignation, and slumped down into one of the chairs. "We’re going to need a lot more than five minutes, Gregg," he said as Caldwell sat down facing him. "You wait till you hear about the things we found out yesterday from the Thuriens."
Four and a half thousand miles from Houston, Norman Pacey was sitting on a bench by the side of the Serpentine lake in London’s Hyde Park. Strollers in open-necked shirts and summery dresses making the best of the first warm days of the year added a dash of color to the surrounding greenery topped by distant frontages of dignified and imposing buildings that had not changed appreciably in fifty years. That was all they had ever wanted, he thought to himself as he took in the sights and sounds around him. All that people the world over had ever wanted was to live their lives, pay their way, and be left alone. So how had the few with different aspirations always been able to command the power to impose themselves and their systems? Which was the greater evil-one fanatic with a cause, or a hundred men free enough not to care about causes? But caring about freedom enough to defend it made it a cause and its defenders fanatics. For ten thousand years mankind had wrestled with the problem and not found an answer.
A shadow fell across the ground, and Mikolai Sobroskin sat down on the bench next to him. He was wearing a heavy suit and necktie despite the fine weather, and his head was glistening with beads of perspiration in the sunlight. "A refreshing contrast to Giordano Bruno," he commented. "What an improvement it would be if the maria were really seas."
Pacey turned his head from staring across the lake and grinned. "And maybe a few trees, huh? I think UNSA has got its work cut out for a while with the proposals for cooling down Venus and oxygenating Mars. Luna’s way down the list. Even if it weren’t, I’m not sure that anybody has come up with any good ideas for what they could do about it. But who knows? One day, maybe."
The Russian sighed. "Perhaps we had such knowledge in the palm of our hand. We threw it away. Do you realize that we have witnessed what could be the greatest crime in human history? And perhaps the world will never know."
Pacey nodded, waited for a second to assume a more businesslike manner, and asked, "So? . . . What’s the news?"
Sobroskin drew a handkerchief from his breast pocket and dabbed his head. "You were right about the coded signals from Gistar when you suspected that they were in response to an independent transmitting facility established by us," he replied.
Pacey nodded without showing surprise. He knew that already from what Caldwell and Lyn Garland had revealed in Washington, but he couldn’t say so. "Have you found out how Verikoff and Sverenssen fit in?" he asked.
"I think so," Sobroskin said. "They seem to be part of a global operation of some sort that was committed to shutting down communications of any kind between this planet and Thurien. They used the same methods. Verikoff is a member of a powerful faction that strongly opposed the Soviet attempt to open another channel. Their reasons were the same as the UN’s. As it turned out, they were taken by surprise before they could organize an effective block, and some transmissions were sent. Like Sverenssen, Verikoff was instrumental in causing additional messages to be sent secretly, designed to frustrate the exercise. At least we think so. . . . We can’t prove it."
Pacey nodded again. He knew that too. "Do you know what they said?" he inquired out of curiosity, although he had read Caldwell’s transcripts from Thurien.
"No, but I can guess. These people knew in advance that the relay to Gistar would deactivate. That says to me that they must have been responsible. Presumably they arranged it months ago with an independent launching organization, or maybe a part of UNSA that they knew they could trust. . . . I don’t know. But my guess is that their strategy was to delay the proceedings via both channels until the relay was put out of action permanently."
Pacey stared across the lake to an enclosed area of water on the far side in which crowds of children were swimming and playing in the sun. The sounds of shouting and laughter drifted across intermittently on the breeze. Apart from the confirmation of Verikoff’s involvement, he hadn’t learned anything new so far. "What do you make of it?" he asked without turning his head.