The Day Before Midnight

sensations.

He sat in the big easy chair in the dim living room. She returned immediately with an unopened bottle and a glass.

“Now, darling. I’m all ears,” he said, smiling in the face of her extraordinary radiance, sucking all the pleasure from the moment he could.

She sat opposite from him.

“Now, Gregor,” she said, “there is one little thing I should tell you before I begin. One widdle ting.” The baby talk brought a foolish, girlish smile to her plump face. “Puwheeze don’t be angry with me.”

“I forgive you anything,” he said. “I absolve you of all your sins. You can do no wrong. You’re an angel, a dear, a saint.” He took her surprisingly tiny little hand and looked into her eyes. Odd he’d never really noticed before now, she didn’t even have cheekbones. Her face was a white pillow with eyes.

“I am also,” she said, “a special agent in the Counter-Espionage Division of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.” She smiled.

He thought it was a hilarious joke.

“Oh, Molly, you’re such a character,” he said, laughing, and then he noticed that the reason the room was so dark was that there were so many other people in it, and he was so swiftly gobbled up by men in suits, it stunned him. The lights came on. An agent walked from the bedroom and snuffed the candles. Others emerged from closets, the bathroom. It was like the terrible moment at the theater when the play is over, the lights come up, and you see you’ve only been in a drafty old building all along.

Molly stood.

“Okay, Nick,” she said. “He’s all yours.” She turned to him. “Sorry, honey. Life’s sometimes tough. You’re a pretty good guy, but Jesus, you’re a shitty spy.”

Molly disappeared into the bedroom, and a middle-aged man sat across from him.

“And so,” he said, “we meet at last, Gregor Ivanovich Arbatov. Name’s Mahoney. Nick Mahoney. I’ve been a close observer of you for two years now. Say, isn’t that Molly a peach? One of the best. She’s really terrif, huh?”

“I–I—”

“Now, Greg old guy. We got us a problem.”

Gregor stared at him, stupefied.

“Can I have a drink?”

“Sorry, Greg. Need you sober. Oh, Jesus, do we ever need you sober.”

Gregor looked at him.

“Greg, we got us a real, pure-D mess. A grade-A, godawful, major league mess.”

He looked at his watch.

“You ever heard of a guy named Arkady Pashin?”

“I—”

“Of course you have. Well, right about now, Arkady Pashin is the most powerful man in the world. He’s sitting inside an American missile installation fifty miles outside of Washington and he’s about to start the Big One. Shoot off a bird that will start the last dance. He’s got some Spetsnaz jokers along with him to see that he gets his way. You’ve heard of Spetsnaz?”

Gregor swallowed. “Raiders. Cutthroats. Heroes. The very best killers, it is said. But why?”

“Well, evidently he’s trying to goad your people into a first strike while there’s still weapons parity. He’s going to fire a ten-warhead bus targeted against your command and control network, and he knows you guys will launch on warning. Presto, bingo, World War Three. He knew he could never get it by the Politburo. So he just did it, you know? Can you feature that? I mean, you kind of have to admire the guy’s gumption.”

Gregor said nothing. Yet it sounded like Pashin.

“Ever hear of some kind of nutsy outfit called Pamyat?”

“Memory,” said Gregor. “Lunatics. The ones who hate Gorbachev and glasnost and INF and everything modern and hopeful and wish to return to the years of Stalin. Yes. They frighten all of us.”

“Yeah, well, it appears your pal Pashin is a charter member. He’s got a great memory, that’s for sure. Well, the long and the short of it is that we have about eight hundred of our best boys up there, just about to jump off for what looks like a very busy evening, to try to stop this guy from—”

“But the world will end when you retaliate,” Gregor said in horror.

“There you go,” said Nick Mahoney with a phony smile. “Our strategic people think there’s another wrinkle. That it’s not enough for Comrade Pashin to twit your people into a first strike, but that he’s also got to do a little something to give your team a big advantage in the seven-minute envelope between launch and detonation. So that when our birds fly, they fly poorly, they are uncoordinated, they are clumsily handled. Hell, brother, they may not even fly at all. You ever hear of this doctrine the intellectuals call ‘decapitation’?”

Gregor looked at him.

“As in cutting the head off. And the head of this country is in the very city you’re sitting outside of right now.” He smiled.

“Yep, Greg. We figure your pal Pashin’s gonna detonate a nuclear bomb tonight. In an hour or so. Right here in D.C. Bye-bye White House, Joint Chiefs of Staff. Pentagon War Room, CIA. NSA, National Bureau of Standards even. Bye-bye the whole shooting match. Bye-bye a couple of million sleeping dreamers.”

He smiled at Gregor.

“Now, the question is, where would he get a bomb? I mean, if he doesn’t have a Russian missile silo or a missile sub at his command, where does he get a bomb? Does he buy it at Eddie Bauer’s?”

Gregor swallowed. His mouth was awfully dry. If there were going to be a nuclear detonation, wouldn’t it be wiser to get out of there now, while there was still time? Shouldn’t they be evacuating?

“Gregor, do you know where there’s a bomb floating around?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Gregor said.

“Now, that’s not what I hear. In fact, we work real hard at covering your place, and we know the rumors just about as well as you do. We believe there’s a one-kiloton nuclear device in the Soviet Embassy. It’s there under strict GRU control, in case push ever comes to shove and the word goes out for a decapitation mission. That would cut reaction time to the seconds it took some brave boy to walk over to it and push a button.”

Gregor held his breath. The rumors had always been dark, a sort of bleak Slavic joke, horrible black rumors, unbelievable. But they were persistent and had lingered for years.

“See, in the old days,” Mahoney explained, “a bomb weighed a couple of tons. No way anybody was going to smuggle one in. But now we’ve got something called Special Atomic Demolition Munition, weighs one hundred sixty pounds. Delivery system, the big book says, is one strong soldier with a backpack. Now, we figure there’s just such a sweetheart somewhere on Sixteenth Street, four blocks from the White House. What do you think of this, old Greg? Anybody in that building dumb enough to pull the switch on himself?”

Gregor suddenly understood. Now it was clear. Now it made sense.

“Yes, I know such a man. His name is Klimov,” said Gregor. “He is the Deputy Rezident, GRU apparatus, protege and nephew to Pashin.”

The agent nodded.

“Probably another member of Pamyat.”

“It’s worse,” Gregor said. “The bomb would be downstairs. In the code cell, what we call the Wine Cellar. It’s the most secure point in the embassy. Last night my friend Magda Goshgarian was on cipher watch. If Klimov wanted to detonate this bomb, poor Magda alone could not stop him.”

“Yes. They wanted to launch early this morning. But they ran into an eighteen-hour delay. In fact, this morning Pashin sent a short burst of raw noise over the silo radio out into the great beyond to anybody who has a sophisticated radio transmission and receiving system. Like at your embassy. We figure it was some kind of signal to whoever is going to push the button, to tell him to hold off for further instructions. Tonight the show is set for around midnight. If we don’t break in, Pashin will send another signal to whoever it is and — well, the button gets pushed. The bomb in Washington and the missile to Moscow must go off near simultaneously.”

“Yes,” said Gregor. “And now I know why they tried to kill me. They planned so far ahead that they had it set up that this afternoon Klimov tries to kill me with a Spetsnaz ballistic knife. Because with me dead, cipher duty