“You’re on the right line?”
“Absolutely. I’m going right into the center, that I can tell you. If this chamber or whatever you say it is is in the center, then I’ll get it.”
“How much longer?”
“Well, I can’t say. You said the block was two hundred forty centimeters in diameter, and I’ve gone maybe a third of that. So I’m close. Another two, three hours, I don’t know. We’ll just see.”
He looked into the flame, which was consuming the titanium with a voracious appetite. Even through the density of his lenses he could sense its extraordinary power. Nothing on earth could stand before it; all melted, yielded, liquified, and slid away against the urgency of the heat.
He tried to imagine this little flame grown a million times. He tried to imagine a giant flame, devouring as it flashed across the landscape; he tried to imagine a giant torch cutting its kerf of destruction around the globe, through cities and towns, turning men and women and babies to ashes. He tried to imagine all the death there was, a planet of death. It would be a lone zone that just didn’t stop.
Instead, banal movie images flooded through his head: the mushroom cloud, the wrecked cities, the piles of corpses, the mutated survivors, bands of starving rat people scurrying through the ruins, and now a word from our sponsor, liquid Ivory, for truly smooooth hands.
I can’t see how it would really be, he thought. I just can’t. And the further leap, by which he would admit that such a fate could occur as a direct consequence of his own actions, was entirely beyond him.
It’s not my fault, he told himself. What was I supposed to do, let them kill my kids? Sure, tell me my kids are less important than the world in generaclass="underline" that’s easy for anyone except a dad to say.
He did know it called for an extraordinary man.
And I’m an ordinary one, he concluded. Bomb or no bomb, war or no war, those are my kids!
He looked back to the flame, in its hunger licking its way toward midnight.
“I told you,” Megan told the Three Dumb Men. “How many times do I have to tell you? They claimed they were Israelis. I swear to you I thought they were Israelis. Jews. Just Jews. Are any of you Jewish?”
The Three Dumb Men shook their heads.
“The FBI doesn’t have Jews?” she asked, incredulous. “In this day and age the FBI doesn’t have Jews?”
“You’re changing the subject, Mrs. Thiokol,” said the harshest of them. “We’re under an enormous time constraint here. Please, could we return? You’ve told us of your recruitment, you’ve told us of your mental state, you’ve detailed the information you gave him, you’ve described Ari Gottlieb and this mysterious intelligence officer in the Israeli consulate.”
“That’s all I know. I’ve told you everything I know. Please, I’d tell you anything. But I’ve told you everything.”
It was dark by now, and through the windows she could see lights on in the neighborhood.
“Would anybody like any coffee?” she said.
There was no answer.
“Could I fix myself some coffee?”
“Of course.”
She went to a cabinet where she had a Mr. Coffee machine stored, got it out, fiddled with filters, coffee grounds, water, and finally got the thing to working. She watched the light come on as the coffee began to drip into the pot.
One of the agents went to talk on the phone, then came back.
“Mrs. Thiokol, I’ve directed our counterespionage division to bring our photos by. We’ve also got some photos from the Pentagon for you to look at. We’d like you to try to find the face of the man who recruited you and the face of the man you saw in the consulate, is that all right?”
“I’m horrible at faces,” she said.
“We wish you’d try very hard,” said the man. “As I said, time is very important.”
“What’s going on?”
“It would be difficult to explain at this time, Mrs. Thiokol.”
“It’s something out there, isn’t it? Something because of what I told these people, that’s what’s going on, isn’t it? It involves South Mountain, doesn’t it?”
There was a pause. The Three Dumb Men looked at one another, and finally the eldest of them said, “Yes, it does.”
“Has anyone been killed?”
“I’m afraid so.”
Megan stared at the Mr. Coffee. You ought to be feeling something, she thought. You’ve got blood on your hands, so feel it, all right? But she felt only tired. She just felt exhausted.
“It’s Peter,” she said. “He’s out there, isn’t he? You’d want him out there, wouldn’t you?”
“Uh, yes, I believe Dr. Thiokol is on-site.”
“On-site? Is that your word for it? He’s where the shooting is. He’s an awful coward, you know. He won’t be any good around guns at all. He’s best in some kind of room full of books. That’s what he loves, just to read and think and study and be left alone. He’s so neurotic. They won’t put him near the guns and the danger, will they?”
“Well, Mrs. Thiokol, we really don’t know. Some other people are handling that operation. I don’t know if he’ll be up near the shooting or back where it’s safe. If it comes to it, I suppose he might have to be where there’s firing. And I’m sure, given what’s involved, he won’t be a coward.”
“Maybe that’s what I wanted. Maybe what I really wanted was to get him killed.”
“You’d have to talk to your psychiatrist about that, Mrs. Thiokol. Fred, call counterintel again, those damned books ought to be here by now.”
“I just called them, Leo.”
“Well, call them again, or something, don’t just sit there.”
“All right.”
“The coffee’s ready,” Megan said. “Are you sure you don’t want any coffee?”
“Yes,” one of the Dumb Men said, “I’d like some, please.”
She poured it.
“Mrs. Thiokol, let’s talk about this. How did you contact your friend and how were the materials picked up. Was it through Ari?”
“Only once, just a few weeks ago. He sent me specially. But more commonly we had it set up in New York so that — do you really want to hear this? I mean, it’s just details, you know, the little silly business that seemed so ridiculous to me and—”
“Please, tell us.”
She took a sip of coffee.
“Well, it was so stupid and complicated. They explained it to me very carefully. I checked the Sunday Post. I picked an ad with the name of a chain bookstore in it. Then I dropped a personal ad off for the Post classifieds. Cash, they said, always pay cash. Through a code, I identified the store. Then I rented a car. Oh, and I had to remember to get something plaid. Then I went to the store on the appointed day — it was usually in a mall someplace around the Beltway — and I wrote a number on a scrap of paper, and I put it at page 300 of Gone with the Wind, which I loved when I was a girl and which they always have. And then …”
“Who serviced the drop? Do you know?”
“Well, I was so curious I once stayed to check. A fat nervous-looking middle-aged man. He looked like a slob. He was no—”
The door opened, and several agents, laden with material, began to troop in. The photo books had arrived.
Arbatov drove aimlessly through the traffic, down Route 1 to the Beltway. He almost turned down it, but decided at the last moment not to and was glad of that decision, for when he passed over it, he saw a ribbon of light, signifying a terrible traffic backup, all the car lights frozen solid on the big road.
The Americans, he laughed drunkenly. They build more cars than anybody in the world, and take them out and dump them in terrible traffic jams. The only thing crazier than the Americans were the Russians, who never had traffic jams because they didn’t have cars.