The blinking red light on the answering machine, which indicated there were messages, caught her eye.
She stepped to the phone in her dancer’s duckwalk, rewound the tape, depressed the play button, and turned back toward the bathroom.
Her mother’s voice stopped her in her tracks like a gunshot. “Hello, hon, it’s me,” Sarah said from the answering machine in her feeble rasp. “I’m not feeling real well tonight. Actually, I’m feeling awful.”
Melanie was stunned. A chill ran through her, and for the briefest instant she reacted as if her mother were still alive, making a mental note to return the call. Then she realized that the morning the doctor called, she left for New Hampshire without checking messages from the previous night; the night she had spent with Tim? Tom? Whomever.
“I’m leaving you a letter honey,” Sarah’s voice went on. “You’ll be shocked when you read it. I apologize, and I hope you’ll forgive me.” The words came in hurried phrases separated by Sarah’s labored breathing. “Something else you should know,” she resumed. “Something that’s not in the letter. It won’t mean much to you now, but it will after you read it. There’s a lot more I want to say, but I’m very tired, Mel. So, just remember the name Deschin — Aleksei Deschin.” She repeated it, then spelled it out, adding, “And always remember I love you. Bye.”
Melanie’s heart pounded in her chest — pounded so hard she could hear it. She buzzed with elation. Then she thought to herself, I love you, too, Mother.
Chapter Nineteen
More than a week had passed.
In Geneva, Switzerland, U.S. Disarmament Negotiator Philip Keating and his staff had taken up residence at Maison de Saussure, just off Route de Lausanne on Lake Geneva. The eighteenth-century mansion was designed by French architect Francoise Blondel who, in the early seventeen hundreds, designed the ancillary buildings of Versailles. The magnificent estate was a short drive from the United Nations Palace in Ariana Park in the north end of the city where the talks would be held.
Keating checked in twice daily with President Hilliard — the question of the Soviet Heron missile still unresolved.
Most of the fifteen NATO representatives, Gisela Pomerantz among them, and their retinues had arrived.
An international pool of media correspondents had followed. They were headquartered just off Avenue De Ferney in the International Conference Center, from where official briefings would be issued.
Soviet Negotiator Mikhail Pykonen had arrived from Moscow fresh from a meeting with Premier Kaparov and Minister of Culture Aleksei Deschin. Pykonen was secure in the knowledge that Theodor Churcher’s threat to inform the Americans about SLOW BURN, the secret missile base, had been thwarted. And he was fully confident of leaving Geneva with a world-dominating, first strike nuclear advantage for his country.
The week had been filled with formal dinners, inaugural ceremonies, and an official meeting of the two superpower negotiators.
The trading off of nuclear hardware, the bargaining of warhead for warhead, the retreat from Armageddon, or so Phil Keating thought, was about to begin.
Six days ago, after the meeting in the Oval Office during which the President had caught him unprepared on the status of the Soviet Heron missile, Jake Boulton had gone directly to Langley. His hide was still smarting from the President’s lashing when he met with his DDO and DDI and other top members of his staff in the French Room, his private conference area, and did some lashing of his own. Soon after he had finished, the agency issued a KIQ directive which when decoded read:
Z152726ZFEB
TOP SECRET KUBARK
FR: DCI
TO: CONCERNED AGENCIES
INFO: KIQ FLASH PRIORITY
STATUE SOVIET SS16-A MISSILE SYSTEM CODE-NAMED HERON
UNRESOLVED. IMPERATIVE GENERATE HARD EVIDENCE SYSTEM DEPLOYED OR SCRAPED. DEPLOYMENT ASSUMES
SEAGOING BASE. REPORT ANY SUSPECT SOVIET NAVAL ACTIVITY, RELATED SHIP MOVEMENT, OR UNEXPLAINED
OCEANOGRAPHIC PHENOMENA LANGLEY IMMED. PERTINENCE
AT DISCRETION OF DCI NOT INVESTIGATOR.
In Pensacola, Florida, Navy Lieutenant Jon Lowell, along with all other ASW personnel with top secret security clearances, had signed off on the KIQ directive within twelve hours of it being issued. But none had any reason to think it significant.
Lowell spent his off-duty hours in K building’s TSZ organizing a data search for the tanker he had spotted on the sat-pix. The one that always appeared in Cienfuegos harbor a week after he and Arnsbarger tracked the Soviet Foxtrot in their Viking.
From the photos, Lowell established at what hour the ship had arrived in port, then worked backwards to determine approximately when it had sailed through the network of hydrophones ringing the Soviet Naval Base. This narrowed the search to eleven hydrophone tapes that covered the one-hour-forty-eight-minute window he had established.
Now he faced the task of determining which of the many acoustic signatures on the tapes was the target ship. He had no idea that the one he was after belonged to a tanker of Liberian registry named — the Kira.
In New York City, there was not a single Deschin, Aleksei or otherwise, listed in the massive telephone directory which was the first place Melanie Winslow had gone after hearing her mother’s voice on the answering machine.
She took the rest of the week off, and spent the time on the telephone and in the library.
In the Genealogy Department at the Main Branch of the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street she learned that the name Deschin probably had Eastern European roots. And that it was most likely an amalgamation of two other names which might have been “Desznev” and “Chinova.”
Her numerous calls to the Pentagon in search of information about a World War II special operative in Italy, code-named Gillette Blue, were met with paranoid evasiveness, bureaucratic buck-passing, and wisecracks. Even the name Aleksei Deschin elicited uncomprehending silences. Indeed, there are ninety members on the Soviet Council of Ministers and four hundred on the Central Committee. Their names are not the sort of information Pentagon clerks assigned to WWII archives commit to memory. Nor from the information Melanie supplied did the clerks have any reason to connect the name to the Soviet Union, or the upper echelons of its government. Indeed, as one said, “I’d love to help you lady, but for all I know Aleksei Deschin’s jockeying a cab in Newark.”
Driven by an inborn human force, an unquenchable need to know herself, to know those people who had given her life, the need that has seen fortunes and lifetimes spent searching, Melanie became determined to find her real father if at all possible.
Her only solid lead — that Aleksei Deschin had attended the University of Rome prior to the war — came from her mother’s letter.
It had been years since she had taken a vacation, and almost five since she had lived in Paris with the French journalist who had been her second husband. Obtaining a month’s leave from the dance company, she fetched her passport from a safety deposit box, turned a chunk of her savings into traveler’s checks, and started packing.
In Glen Cove, New York, a seaside community on Long Island’s North Shore about twenty-five miles east of Manhattan, Valery Gorodin had spent the week at the Soviet estate on Dosoris Lane.