felt, rescued him from his own assault of nerves. He pressed the frogs humped back, and it croaked. The technician below him laughed and waved. Someone else looked up, grinning. The guards would look up only if he stayed too long. He pressed the remote control. Fifteen, sixteen… twenty-one, twenty-two, moving the clipboard slightly after each shot to draw the frog's gaze across the expanse of the workbenches, from mirror's edge to laser's tail. He moved his hand through a practiced, measured, even arc; moving the frog's bulging eye, moving — twenty-four, — six, — eight… go, go now— He picked up the clipboard and held it against his chest. Finished, this part of the story, this part of the building work. He remembered once more his father's snapshots, Mother posed by the concrete mixer, her thin cotton dress swollen with Filip's imminent arrival. Now it was as if he had a record of his new life, the one he had built for himself in America, on those tiny strips of film stored safely in his garage, in the cans of paint. Everything the Americans had demanded, desired, wanted. They could refuse him nothing now. Now they would have to come.
Success flushed through him, a wave that excited yet somehow lulled and calmed him. The detached part of his mind remembered to press the frog so that it croaked its farewell. His shoes clicked along the gantry above the workshop. The clipboard was now under his arm, and his other hand was out of his pocket, away from the remote control. Success, a sense of triumph as quick and shallow as the feeling after winning a race at school or scoring in a soccer match, continued to rush through him like a scalding drink.
He glanced down at the frog, at the ID clipped to his pocket, just above the round yellow badge that instructed everyone to smile. He had every right to be in the main assembly workshop, of course — and that, too, added to the sense of exhilaration, the beauty and self-satisfaction of the completed task. He had been made responsible for the transfer of the lasing gases to their tanks. He had even helped to write the computer program for the operation.
And his luck had not simply been there, and held; it had improved once they had gotten the camera to him, once he had begun his task. Even the military and their security had hardly impeded him, once he'd gotten into his stride, so to speak.
He was unwary and unworried about his dreamlike state of euphoria. His job was finished, and well finished. Behind Mother, they were completing the plumbing and the wiring for the new flat. Would they let him live in Manhattan? He grinned. The number of times his parents had made him and his sister look at that series of boring, slowly changing snapshots! His shoes clattered down the ladder at the end of the catwalk. He would be able to get into the old town, Tyuratam, and get his last signal off, that evening. Before he did so, he had to store the film cassette with its companions, wrapping it in polyethylene and sinking it out of sight inside an old can of paint.
Filip Kedrov, Cactus Plant, nodded to two technicians who were wheeling an auxiliary power unit through the open doors of one of the main stockrooms. He nodded and smiled to the bored, unsuspicious GRU guard as he passed him, hardly registering the harmless rifle slung across his chest, then stepped through a personnel door into a cold, narrow corridor. A long line of bulky outdoor clothing hung from pegs above a line of boots. He found his own overcoat, scarf, boots, gloves and donned them.
He smiled to himself, hardly concerned with the importance of what he had done, except insofar as it impinged on his personal circumstances.
Impinged? Changed — utterly changed his circumstances. It was all that mattered. America. Money and America, money to live in America, to enjoy America. The thoughts chased in his head as he wrapped his scarf around his already cold cheeks and made for the exit.
He opened the outer door on the below-zero day and the high, pale sky. Manhattan. It was as if the famous skyline, which he had seen in films the scientific and technical staff were allowed to watch, lay before him now. Yes, Manhattan. He would request an apartment on the east side of Central Park — yes…
He blinked, and the buildings retreated from the pale Sunday morning, into the near future. A few days away, that was all. He would send that final signal. Tightness gripped his chest and stomach once more. It was so close! Come and fetch me, my American friends. Pay up!
Lines of high, tinted-glass towers. Fifth Avenue, Sixth. He would at last be leaving that block of workers' flats in front of which his mother had stood so proudly.
He made for the technicians' parking lot.
Before he reached his old, third-hand gray Moskvitch, his mood changed. The glow vanished, as if the outside temperature had robbed his body of all its heat. He was shivering with fear. Not simply in reaction to what he had done, now that it was over…:
… it was because of the two men in the car parked near the entrance to the parking lot. He knew they were the same two men, in the same car, who had followed him to work that morning. He had been so careful of late, so scrupulous in looking for any surveillance, all the time believing himself to be safe. Now he knew he wasn't. He fumbled his key into the stiff, cold lock. His gloved hand was shaking. He had managed to forget them, forget that he had been followed to work. His quick breathing clouded the car's window. He felt his stomach become watery, then tightly knotted. He wasn't imagining it. He couldn't cling to the fiction that he was mistaken, not now that he was about to summon them to come for him. He had to admit the truth — he
'He's going on TV tomorrow — Monday,' John Calvin announced heavily. 'I've just had the ambassador here to inform me of the fact. The guy was almost laughing.'
The President seemed not to have grasped the significance of Cactus Plant's final signal. The director of the CIA fumbled emotionally and mentally to catch Calvin's mood. The transcript of the signal from Baikonur lay on the President's desk like a piece of old and abandoned legislation, as unimportant as someone's grocery list. The director had hurried from Langley to the White House with it, his mood one or unqualified triumph. An edge of danger, of course, because of the drastic shortening of the time factor, but a real sense that they could win. But Calvin seemed concerned only with his television encounter with the Soviet president. They had to hurry. Kedrov was spooked, there was no doubt of that. This was the last signal. He might already have gone into hiding, and roused a search for him by the GRU. Time squeezed down and narrowed in every direction. Yet to Calvin it seemed less important than—
Four days away. Calvin already knew that, though — from the Soviet ambassador, of all people.
'Monday,' Calvin repeated with a deep sigh that threatened to become both a groan and an accusation.
The director looked up from the briefcase still balanced on his knees.
'We still have time to get our agent out,' he began.
'The guy's off and running!' the President accused.
'Mr. President, if you study his signal, he's confirmed where to pick him up. He knows how our people will come, what to expect. He can estimate times, that kind of—'
'Thursday! While we're all in Geneva, Bill, they're going to put the first of their laser battle stations into orbit, under the guise of a satellite placement mission and a linkup in orbit with
'We
'Bill, you're asking me to stake this country's future on a Russian technician on your payroll.'
'He was always our only chance,' the director replied softly, firmly. What had Calvin expected, some miracle? He was unnerved by the timetable, by the proximity of the signing of the treaty and the launch of the laser weapon. It was tight, yes, dangerous without doubt — but it could be done.
'What does he have, Bill? Films, rolls of film. Is that going to be enough to convince the world it's being given the biggest shaft in history?' Calvin's confidence of voice, East Coast with Harvard overtones, had deserted him. It had begun to complain, almost to whine. His hand waved without vigor, dismissing Kedrov and his films and the glimpse of hope they offered. He shook his head. 'It isn't going to be enough, Bill,' he murmured vaguely.
The director brushed the dottle from his cold pipe off the leather of his briefcase. He pondered for some time, weighing the President's mood and his own words. Then he looked up and said, 'Sir, you approved all of this. You believed, as I did, as Dick Gunther did, that this was the only way of obtaining proof in the time we had — four weeks maximum.' He spread his hands. He reached up and took the Cactus Plant signal by its edge, pulling it from the desk onto his lap. He smoothed the paper. Calvin's shoes paced across the eagle and the scroll woven into the center of the deep-green carpet of the Oval Office. The director cleared his throat. From somewhere outside the thick green glass of the windows, he heard muffled church bells.
'The timetable's more crucial,' the director continued, 'because we now know it's Thursday for the launch.
