The Devil's Alternative

governments. From London the telex would send its scrambled, uninterceptible message down to a forest of aerials outside Cheltenham, better known for its horse races and woman’s college. From there the words would be converted automatically into an unbreakable one-off code and beamed out over a sleeping Europe to an aerial on the embassy roof. Four seconds after they were typed in London, they would emerge, in clear, on the telex in the basement of the old sugar magnate’s house in Moscow.

There, the cipher clerk turned to Munro, standing by his side.

“It’s the Master himself,” he said, reading the code tag on the incoming message. “There must be a flap on.”

Sir Nigel had to tell Munro the burden of Kirov’s message to President Matthews of only three hours earlier. Without that knowledge, Munro could not ask the Nightingale for the answer to Matthews’s question: Why?

The telex rattled for several minutes. Munro read the message that spewed out, with horror.

“I can’t do that,” he told the impassive clerk over whose shoulder he was reading. When the message from London was ended, he told the clerk:

“Reply as follows: ‘Not repeat not possible obtain this sort of answer in tune scale.’ Send it.”

The interchange between Sir Nigel Irvine and Adam Munro went on for fifteen minutes. There is a method of contacting N at short notice, suggested London. Yes, but only in case of dire emergency, replied Munro. This qualifies one hundred times as emergency, chattered the machine from London. But N could not begin to inquire in less than several days, pointed out Munro. Next regular Politburo meeting not due until Thursday following. What about records of last Thursday’s meeting? asked London. Freya was not hijacked last Thursday, retorted Munro. Finally Sir Nigel did what he hoped he would not have to do.

“Regret,” tapped the machine, “prime ministerial order not refusable. Unless attempt made avert this disaster, operation to bring out N to West cannot proceed.”

Munro looked down at the stream of paper coming out of the telex with disbelief. For the first time he was caught in the net of his own attempts to keep his love for the agent he ran from his superiors in London. Sir Nigel Irvine thought the Nightingale was an embittered Russian turncoat called Anatoly Krivoi, right-hand man to the warmonger Vishnayev.

“Make to London,” he told the clerk dully, “the following: ‘Will try this night stop decline to accept responsibility if N refuses or is unmasked during attempt stop.’ ”

The reply from the Master was brief: “Agree. Proceed.” It was half past one in Moscow, and very cold.

Half past six in Washington, and the dusk was settling over the sweep of lawns beyond the bulletproof windows behind the President’s chair, causing the lamps to be switched on. The group in the Oval Office was wailing: waiting for Chancellor Busch, waiting for an unknown agent in Moscow, waiting for a masked terrorist of unknown origins sitting on a million-ton bomb off Europe with a detonator in his hand. Waiting for the chance of a third alternative.

The phone rang and it was for Stanislaw Poklewski. He lis­tened, held a hand over the mouthpiece, and told the President it was from the Navy Department in answer to his query of an hour earlier.

There was one U.S. Navy vessel in the area of the Freya. She had been paying a courtesy visit to the Danish coastal city of Esbjerg, and was on her way back to join her squadron of the Standing Naval Force Atlantic, or STANFORLANT, then cruising on patrol west of Norway. She was well off the Danish coast, steaming north by west to rejoin her NATO allies.

“Divert to Freya’s area,” said the President.

Poklewski passed the Commander in Chiefs order back to the Navy Department, which soon began to make signals via STANFORLANT headquarters to the American warship.

Just after one in the morning, the U.S.S. Moran, halfway between Denmark and the Orkney Islands, put her helm about, opened her engines to full power, and then began rac­ing through the moonlight southward for the English Chan­nel. She was a guided-missile ship of almost eight thousand tons, which, although heavier than the British light cruiser Argyll, was classified as a destroyer, or DD. Moving at full power in a calm sea, she was making close to thirty knots to bring her to her station five miles from the Freya at eight A.M.

There were few cars in the parking lot of the Mojarsky Ho­tel, just off the roundabout at the far end of Kutuzovsky Prospekt. Those that were there were dark, uninhabited, save two.

Munro watched the lights of the other car flicker and dim, then climbed from his own vehicle and walked across to it. When he climbed into the passenger seat beside her, Valen­tina was alarmed and trembling.

“What is it, Adam? Why did you call me at the apartment? The call must have been recorded.”

He put his arm around her, feeling the trembling through her coat.

“It was from a call box,” he said, “and only concerned Gregor’s inability to attend your dinner party. No one will suspect anything.”

“At two in the morning?” she remonstrated. “No one makes calls like that at two in the morning. I was seen to leave the apartment compound by the night watchman. He will report it.”

“Darling, I’m sorry. Listen.”

He told her of the visit by Ambassador Kirov to President Matthews the previous evening; of the news being passed to London; of the demand to him that he try to find out why the Kremlin was taking such an attitude over Mishkin and Lazareff.

“I don’t know,” she said simply. “I haven’t the faintest idea. Perhaps because those animals murdered Captain Rudenko, a man with a wife and children.”

“Valentina, we have listened to the Politburo these past nine months. The Treaty of Dublin is vital to your people. Why would Rudin put it in jeopardy over these two men?”

“He has not done so,” answered Valentina. “It is possible for the West to control the oil slick if the ship blows up. The costs can be met. The West is rich.”

“Darling, there are twenty-rune seamen aboard that ship. They, too, have wives and children. Twenty-nine men’s lives against the imprisonment of two. There has to be another and more serious reason.”

“I don’t know,” she repeated. “It has not been mentioned in Politburo meetings. You know that also.”

Munro stared miserably through the windshield. He had hoped against hope she might have an answer for Washing­ton, something she had heard inside the Central Committee building. Finally he decided he had to tell her.

When he had finished, she stared through the darkness with round eyes. He caught a hint of tears in the dying light of the moon.

“They promised,” she whispered. “They promised they would bring me and Sasha out, in a fortnight, from Rumania.”

“They’ve gone back on their word,” he confessed. “They want this last favor.”

She placed her forehead on her gloved hands, supported by the steering wheel.

“They will catch me,” she mumbled. “I am so frightened.”

“They won’t catch you.” He tried to reassure her. “The KGB acts much more slowly than people think, and the higher their suspect is placed, the more slowly they have to act. If you can get this piece of information for President Matthews, I think I can persuade them to get you out in a few days, you and Sasha, instead of two weeks. Please try, my love. It’s our only chance left of ever being together.”

Valentina stared through the glass.

“There was a Politburo meeting this evening,” she said fi­nally. “I was not there. It was a special meeting, out of se­quence. Normally on Friday evenings they are all going to the country. Transcription begins tomorrow—that is, to­day—at ten in the morning. The staff have to give up their weekend to get it ready for Monday. Perhaps they mentioned the matter.”

“Could you get in to see the notes, listen to the tapes?” he asked.”

“In the middle of the night? There would be questions asked.”

“Make an excuse, darling. Any excuse. You want to start and finish your work early, so as to get away.”

“I will try,” she said eventually. “I will try—for you, Adam, not for those men in London.”

“I know those men in London,” said Adam Munro. “They will bring you and Sasha out if you help them now. This will be the last risk, truly the last.”