The Devil's Alternative

her. Now we may have to. I will have all our information on those as­pects on their way to you within the hour. What else?”

“This is the hard one, and I scarcely know how to ask it,” said William Matthews. “We believe there has to be an ex­planation of Rudin’s behavior, and until we know it, we are groping in the dark. If I am to handle this crisis, I have to see some daylight. I have to have that explanation. I need to know if there is a third option. I would like you to ask your people to activate the Nightingale one last time and get that answer for me.”

Joan Carpenter was pensive. She had always made it a pol­icy not to interfere with the way Sir Nigel Irvine ran his serv­ice. Unlike several of her predecessors, she had steadily declined to poke around in the intelligence services to satisfy her curiosity. Since coming to office she had doubled the budgets of both her directors, of SIS and MI5, had chosen hard-core professionals for the posts, and had been rewarded by their unswerving loyalty. Secure in that loyalty, she trusted them not to let her down. And neither had.

“I will do what I can,” she said at length. “But we are talk­ing about something in the very heart of the Kremlin, and a matter of hours. If it is possible, it will be done. You have my word on it.”

When the telephone was back in its cradle, she called her husband to tell him not to wait for her, she would be at her desk all night. From the kitchen she ordered a pot of coffee. The practical side of things arranged, she called Sir Julian Flannery at his home, told him simply over the line that a fresh crisis had arisen, and asked him to return at once to the Cabinet Office. Her last call was not on an open line; it was to the duty officer at the head office of the Firm. She asked for Sir Nigel Irvine to be contacted wherever he was, and to be asked to come immediately to No. 10. While waiting, she switched on the office television and caught the start of the nine o’clock BBC news. The long night had begun.

Ludwig Jahn slipped into the booth and sat down, sweating gently. From across the table the Russian regarded him coldly. The plump prison guard could not know that the fear­some Russian was fighting for his own life; the man gave no hint.

He listened impassively as Jahn explained the new pro­cedures, instituted since two that afternoon. In point of fact, Kukushkin had no diplomatic cover; he was hiding out in an SSD safe house in West Berlin as a guest of his East German colleagues.

“So you see,” concluded Jahn, “there is nothing I can do. I could not possibly get you into that corridor. There are three on duty, as a minimum figure, night and day. Passes have to be shown every time one enters the corridor, even by me, and we all know each other. We have worked together for years. No new face would be admitted without a check call to the governor.”

Kukushkin nodded slowly. Jahn felt relief rising in his chest. They would let him go; they would leave him alone; they would not hurt his family. It was over.

“You enter the corridor, of course,” said the Russian. “You may enter the cells.”

“Well, yes, I am the Oberachmeister. At periodic intervals I have to check that they are all right.”

“At night they sleep?”

“Maybe. They have heard about the matter in the North Sea. They lost their radios just after the noon broadcasts, but one of the other prisoners in solitary shouted the news across to them before the corridor was cleared of all other prisoners. Perhaps they will sleep, perhaps not.”

The Russian nodded somberly.

“Then,” he said, “you will do the job yourself.”

Jahn’s jaw dropped.

“No, no,” he babbled. “You don’t understand. I couldn’t use a gun. I couldn’t kill anyone.”

For answer the Russian laid two slim tubes like fountain pens on the table between them.

“Not guns,” he said. “These. Place the open end, here, a few centimeters from the mouth and nose of the sleeping man. Press the button on the side, here. Death occurs within three seconds. Inhalation of hydrogen cyanide gas causes in­stantaneous death. Within an hour the effects are identical to those of cardiac arrest. When it is done, close the cells, return to the staff area, wipe the tubes clean, and place them in the locker of another guard with access to the same pair of cells. Very simple, very clean. And it leaves you in the clear.”

What Kukushkin had laid before the horrified gaze of the senior officer was an updated version of the same sort of poi­son-gas pistols with which the “Wet Affairs” department of the KGB had assassinated the two Ukrainian nationalist lead­ers Stepan Bandera and Lev Rebet in Germany two decades earlier. The principle was still simple, the efficiency of the gas increased by further research. Inside the tubes, glass globules of prussic acid rested. The trigger impelled a spring, which worked on a hammer, which crushed the glass. Simultaneous­ly the acid was vaporized by a compressed-air canister, ac­tivated in the same motion of pressing the trigger button. Impelled by the compressed air, the gas vapor shot out of the tube into the breathing passages in an invisible cloud. An hour later the telltale bitter almond smell of prussic acid was gone, the muscles of the corpse relaxed again; the symptoms were those of heart attack.

No one would believe two simultaneous heart attacks in two young men; a search would be made. The gas guns, found in the locker of a guard, would incriminate the man al­most completely.

“I ... I cant do that,” whispered Jahn.

“But I can, and will, see your entire family in an Arctic la­bor camp for the rest of their lives,” murmured the Russian. “A simple choice, Herr Jahn. The overcoming of your scruples for a brief ten minutes, against all their lives. Think about it.”

Kukushkin took Jahn’s hand, turned it over, and placed the tubes in the palm.

“Think about it,” he said, “but not too long. Then walk into those cells and do it That’s all.”

He slid out of the booth and left. Minutes later Jahn closed his hand around the gas guns, slipped them in his raincoat pocket, and went back to Tegel Jail. At midnight, in three hours, he would relieve the evening-shift supervisor. At one A.M. he would enter the cells and do it. He knew he had no alternative.

As the last rays of the sun left the sky, the Nimrod over the Freya had switched from her daytime f/126 camera to her nighttime f/135 version. Otherwise, nothing had changed. The night-vision camera, peering downward with its infrared sights, could pick out most of what was happening fifteen thousand feet beneath. If the Nimrod’s captain wanted, he could take still pictures with the aid of the f/135’s electronic flash, or throw the switch on his aircraft’s million-candle-power searchlight.

The night camera failed to notice the figure in the anorak, lying prostrate since midafternoon, slowly begin to move, crawling under the inspection catwalk, and from there inch­ing its way back toward the superstructure. When the figure finally crawled over the sill of the half-open doorway and stood up in the interior, no one noticed. At dawn it was sup­posed the body had been thrown into the sea.

The man in the anorak went below to the galley, rubbing hands and shivering repeatedly. In the galley he found one of his colleagues and helped himself to a piping mug of coffee. When he had finished he returned to the bridge and sought out his own clothes, the black tracksuit and sweater he had come aboard with.

“Jeez,” he told the man on the bridge in his American ac­cent, “you sure didn’t miss. I could feel the wadding from those blanks slapping into the back of the windbreaker.”

The bridge watch grinned.

“Andriy said to make it good,” he replied. “It worked. Mishkin and Lazareff are coming out at eight tomorrow morning. By afternoon they’ll be in Tel Aviv.”

“Great,” said the Ukrainian-American. “Let’s hope Andriy’s plan to get us off this ship works as well as the rest.”

“It will,” said the other. “You better get your mask on and give those clothes back to that Yankee in the paint locker. Then grab some sleep. You’re on watch at six in the morn­ing.”

Sir Julian Flannery reconvened the crisis management com­mittee within an hour of his private talk with the Prime Min­ister. She had told him the reason why the situation had changed, but he and Sir Nigel Irvine would be the only ones to know, and they would not talk. The members of the com­mittee would simply need to know that, for reasons of state, the release of Mishkin and Lazareff at dawn might be delayed or canceled, depending on the reaction of the Ger­man Chancellor.

Elsewhere in Whitehall, page after page of data about the Freya, her crew, cargo, and hazard potential were being pho­tographically transmitted direct to Washington.