Trinity factor, p.20
Trinity Factor, page 20
“Our cover wouldn’t stand that close a scrutiny,” he had said to her.
“Cover?” she had asked weakly.
“And what would those friends think when we were ordered to leave suddenly?”
“Leave?” she had asked.
He turned left on Mercury Boulevard, and headed across the bridge, sighing deeply as he drove. He was tired, but it was a good tired that made him want to do nothing more than go home, have something to eat, take a quick bath, and then go to bed.
Jada’s feelings were obvious, but what about his? They were Soviet spies in an Allied country. They had been sent here to assassinate two men. That mission had very nearly ended in total disaster. It was only pure blind luck that they had managed to escape.
He shook his head in irritation. He was as guilty as Jada of playing “Let’s Pretend.”
Dammit, he too liked the feeling of belonging. He liked their little house, and the radio, and the fridge. He didn’t particularly care for his job at the shipyards, but the war would soon be over, and he had even caught himself, from time to time, wondering about going back to school, maybe getting a degree in engineering.
It was another of the things he had never mentioned to Jada. It would have been like adding fuel to an already furiously burning fire.
Germany, Canaris, Oster, and the Abwehr seemed like a million miles and as many years ago to him. But curiously, Major Runkov, Moscow, and their GRU training seemed even more remote.
Across the bridge he continued along Highway 17, which led back into Portsmouth, and for just a moment as he sped through the night he toyed with the idea of ignoring the locker key, turning around, and going home. But his speed did not waver, nor did he.
The Portsmouth Depot, downtown, was nearly deserted at this time of night, and Badim had no trouble locating the correct locker. Inside he found a small, plain brown cardboard suitcase, secured with a cheap brass lock, and when he hefted it he was surprised at its weight. It was heavy, almost as if it was filled with rock or bricks.
Outside he carefully laid the case beside him on the front seat, and then headed for home, resisting the temptation to open it right then.
He knew that they were not being ordered home. Without looking at the contents of the suitcase, he knew their assignment had finally come through. But how Jada was going to take it was, at this moment, more worrisome to him than the actual job.
He crossed over the James River again, the shipyards directly across the harbor, and beyond them Forts Monroe and Wool, which guarded Hampton Roads, were brightly lit.
Work went on, he thought. The war went on. And so did their mission.
Jada would have to understand about their assignment. Understand that the past six months had not been a fairy tale, but had been nothing more than a carefully engineered cover for them. A waiting period until their real work began.
It was shortly after 1:00 A.M. when he finally pulled into the graveled driveway, killed the engine, and went up the walk to their small bungalow, the suitcase in his left hand.
He came up on the porch and the door opened. Jada stood there wearing a pale pink bathrobe and an intense expression on her face. “I was worried about you.”
“Sorry,” he said, brushing past her and coming into the tiny but comfortably furnished living room. The radio was on, playing soft music, and the tea things were on the small coffee table by the couch.
“Where’ve you been?”
“Portsmouth,” he said over his shoulder. “Had to pick this up.” He pushed the tea things aside, and laid the suitcase on the coffee table. “Close the door and lock it.”
“What is it?”
He turned around to face her. She still stood by the open door, her face drawn, almost haggard-looking. At that moment he loved her more than he thought it was ever humanly possible to love another person. But there was the mission.
“Close the door, Larissa,” he said gently, but the use of that name caused her to reel back, almost as if she had been hit.
Her eyes went from his, down to the suitcase lying on the coffee table, and then back to his again, as her right hand came up to her mouth.
“The door, Larissa,” he said again, and after a long moment she complied, her motions mechanical.
When she turned back there was genuine fear in her eyes. “What is in the suitcase, Alek?” she asked, using his Russian name.
“I don’t know. Our assignment, I suppose.”
“I …” she started to say, but her eyes were suddenly filled with tears. “I knew it couldn’t last,” she said. “But the war is almost over, Alek. You said so yourself.”
He resisted the almost overwhelming urge to go to her. She would have to be made to understand about the mission. Instead he dug a pocket knife out of his pocket, opened it to the largest blade, and then turned and knelt down on the floor in front of the coffee table, pulling the suitcase toward him.
He easily pried the cheap lock out of its frame, set the knife down, undid both latches, and opened the lid. The suitcase was filled with Bibles—twenty of them stacked neatly in two rows of five each, two deep. For a moment he just looked at them until he spotted the inspirational message attached to the inside of the lid. It was headed: THE SOUTHWESTERN AMERICAN BIBLE CO., DALLAS, TEXAS.
Beneath that was the inscription, “Remember sons and daughters of God, the words of our Lord, Psalm 94:1. ‘Lord God, to whom vengeance belongs, let your glory shine out. Arise and judge the earth, sentence the proud to the penalties they deserve.’”
Badim smiled to himself, remembering the Bible lessons he and Jada had been given prior to this assignment. He had not questioned the extraordinary nature of study, assuming all along that it was for a purpose. Now he understood. They were going to become Bible salesmen. It was just one of many covers they had been given.
He picked the top left Bible out of the suitcase and quickly thumbed to the Ninety-fourth Psalm, the facing page of which was a picture, printed on very thick paper, of Jesus Christ looking down on a pastoral scene from a thundercloud. The page was loosely bound in the book, and came out easily. On the back was printed the psalm, and the message from the Bible company that this lovely rendering of our Lord was suitable for framing and its removal would in no way detract from the worth of the Good Book.
Jada had come up behind him and stood looking over his shoulder. “They’re Bibles,” she said.
“It’s our orders,” Badim corrected her, glancing up. “Get me a razor blade.”
She was confused. “What?”
“A razor blade, Jada. And then make a pot of coffee.”
She turned and went down the hall into the bathroom while Badim opened each of the twenty Bibles, working left to right through the rows, taking the suitable-for-framing Ninety-fourth Psalm picture out of each.
When he was finished Jada was back with the double-edged razor blade and she handed it to him. “Don’t cut yourself,” she said automatically.
He had set the suitcase aside, and stacked the twenty pictures in a neat pile. Taking the top one, he carefully slit the edge at the top right corner with the razor blade, and in a few seconds he had it apart. Written on the inside of the front half, in German, were their orders, with no signature other than the initials S. R.—Sergei Runkov.
Within ten minutes he had the other nineteen pictures slit apart and lying in order on the living room floor. Their orders covered three of the pages, while on many of the others were complicated diagrams, and on one, a map showing an area of New Mexico from Santa Fe down to the Mexican border.
Jada had made coffee, and she came back into the living room with a mug of it for him.
“Where are they sending us now?” she asked dully.
He took the cup from her, and looked up. “Albuquerque, New Mexico. Apparently to sabotage the atomic bomb test, although I’m not quite clear yet how he expects me to do it. But it’s all here. Or at least most of it is. We’ll get more information later.”
“I don’t know if I’m going to be much help,” she said.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said absently, his mind on their orders. There had been a leak once before … it had probably come from their contact at the War Department garage. This time it was going to be different.
But something Jada had just said suddenly penetrated his understanding, and he looked up at her again. There was an odd expression in her eyes. “What did you say?”
She sighed deeply. “I’m not going to be much help to you, especially a few months from now. When is the test shot scheduled?”
“June, or possibly as late as July, according to these,” Badim said. “What are you talking about?”
“I went to see a doctor last week,” she said, almost timidly, and he jumped to his feet.
“What is it, Larissa? What’s wrong? Are you sick?”
She shook her head. “No, Aleksandr, I’m not sick. I’m pregnant.”
26
SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO
Michael Lovelace sat in the back of a plain brown grocery delivery van parked across Letrado Street from the small stucco bungalow, trying to convince himself that this time it was going to be different. But he was having a rough go of it.
He had not felt this out of touch, inept, or disillusioned about his work since he was a young man, learning for the first time that people were generally not interested in the truth, but only in power.
The adage “Keeping up with the Joneses” meant nothing more than keeping up with the next man’s buying power.
Politics was power. The military was power. Knowledge was power only in that if you knew more than the next guy, you had the edge on him.
For eight months he had been sitting in restaurants, on tops of buildings, in railway depots, and outside factories waiting to catch a glimpse of the man he had seen on the roof of the train.
He was searching for the truth, but no one really cared, although he was being supported for his efforts. He was out of the way. And that’s the way they wanted it.
For eight months he had been bitterly disappointed exactly seventeen times. And unless this lead panned out, it would make eighteen.
He had been given an almost absolute power to control and command as many Counter Intelligence Corpsmen as he needed … so long as he stayed out of everyone’s way. And over the past few months he had done everything humanly possible to catch the man and woman, but with no results.
There had not even been so much as a hint of what had happened to them beyond New York City.
The police departments in every major U.S. city had copies of the sketches that Gillingham had come up with, along with a physical description of the man that had been gleaned from the coroner’s report in Boston, as well as the details he himself had added.
He had seen the man hanging onto the side of the train outside Springer. He had seen him in the bright moonlight. Had even managed to fire two shots, high and to the left because he had not wanted to risk hitting anyone inside the train.
And then when the assassin had crawled back up on the roof of the train, Lovelace had been certain he had won.
He could see the man now. He could see the muzzle flash. Could feel the hot, sharp, numbing pain in his arm. Could see his car skidding to the right, into the ditch, up on the other side and then over.
The next day they had learned that a car had been stolen from a farmhouse near Springer. One week later the car was found in Oklahoma City. Two days after that they had determined that a woman matching the girl in the sketch had rented a car. And ten days later the rental car had been found abandoned in New York City.
After that, nothing.
Lovelace sat back from the peephole in the rear door of the van and lit a cigarette, inhaling deeply.
Groves had been apologetic … hell, even solicitous … after the incident on the train. Hoover’s complaints against him had suddenly stopped, but so had any further information from Willis. And President Roosevelt himself had called Lovelace to the Oval Office to offer congratulations on stopping the assassination attempt.
He looked toward the front of the van, where the CIC driver, his head back against the door frame, was sound asleep, and he had to smile.
One hundred creeps with one hundred copies of the sketches, all working from Los Alamos in ever-widening circles, in search of … who, or what? Assassins or saboteurs or will-o’-the-wisps?
“They won’t give up, Mr. President,” he had said, and Roosevelt, who had looked definitely ill, had taken off his glasses and wiped the lenses with his handkerchief.
When he had them back on his nose, he had peered over the huge desk at Lovelace. “You do not believe they have left the country then, captain?”
“No, sir,” Lovelace had said.
“Extraordinary,” the President had replied softly. He had taken a cigarette out of a plain silver case and fixed it in an ornately carved bone holder, but before he lit it he gazed thoughtfully at Lovelace. “Nor do you believe the man and woman are Nazis.”
“No, sir, I do not.”
“I take it you believe them to be Soviet citizens—am I correct in that as well? Something to do with a Russian-made fuse on that submarine?”
“Yes, Mr. President,” Lovelace had said, sitting forward, but Roosevelt had waved him back.
“Undoubtedly then you have no plans to give up your search once we’ve finished in Europe.”
“No, sir.”
“Nor, I take it, will you give up until they are caught.”
“Then, sir, or when the bomb is successfully tested.”
“Admirable, captain, simply admirable. I wish I had more men like you around me.”
Roosevelt had had a charisma that was impossible to deny. The man was the President of the United States. Yet Lovelace had found himself leaving the Oval Office that day a deeply confused and disturbed man. On the one hand he had felt almost like a high school football player charged up for the Saturday afternoon game after a pep rally. While at the same time he had the gut feeling that some vital piece of information was being held from him. Something that would change everything. Something that would have a profound effect on his work.
The pep rally enthusiasm, however, had been ground away by the events—or lack of them—over the past months. His confidence had begun to erode so that he was finding it difficult to believe any longer that given enough time and manpower and persistence and luck, the man and woman would be found.
They had scoured New York. They had turned Washington, D.C., and then Boston and Cape Cod upside down through the fall and into the winter, with no luck. Finally, two months ago in mid-February, Lovelace had finally moved his operation down to Los Alamos.
The bomb was rapidly nearing completion, and the test shot was expected sometime in the summer. July Fourth was a date he had heard mentioned more than once.
The test site had been selected from a half-dozen that ranged from desert areas in California to sandbars off the coast of Texas and the San Luis Valley region near the Great Sand Dunes National Monument in Colorado.
Oppenheimer and some of the others on the project had finally settled on the northern portion of the Alamogordo Bombing Range near the town of Socorro, New Mexico, 140 miles south of the laboratory at Los Alamos.
That remote section had a number of advantages, among them the fact that it was already owned by the government, its relative proximity to the lab, and finally its isolation.
The engineering problems of constructing the pumps and barriers for the separation of the uranium isotope had been solved, and bomb material was beginning to come from the plant at Oak Ridge.
The reactors and plutonium separation facilities at Hanford, Washington, were operational now, and bomb material was beginning to come from that plant as well.
At Los Alamos, the thousands of technical problems were being solved for the test shot, among them bomb casings and recovery vessels, blast monitoring devices, detonator timers, and a unique design for TNT charges shaped like lenses that would implode in such a fashion that the nuclear material would be compressed into a critical mass within a millionth of a second, which it was hoped would create a chain reaction and blast.
The stage was set. The players were all assembling on the desert. And yet Lovelace was frightened. Worried not only about the man and woman who had disappeared from New York without a trace after nearly succeeding in killing Groves and Oppenheimer, but deeply worried about the fact that this was probably a Russian operation and that no one seemed to care, or want to know.
He stubbed his cigarette out on the floor and as he leaned forward to peer out of the peephole at the house across the street, he told himself for the thousandth time that he was doing everything that could be done. In three months, no matter what else happened, his job would be finished.
An old pickup truck was just pulling into the driveway across the street, and Lovelace’s stomach tightened into a knot. A man was driving. A woman was in the passenger seat. Her hair was long and light brown.
“Wake up, you stupid bastard,” Lovelace said over his shoulder, and the driver grunted.
The man was getting out of the pickup truck, his back to Lovelace. He wore a brown jacket and his hair was dark.
Lovelace’s heart was accelerating as he pulled his .38 out of his belt. It was him! Goddammit, he was sure of it!
“Let’s go,” he said to the driver, and he flipped the handle down, shoved the door open, and jumped out on the street just as the man was going around the front of the truck.
“Hold it!” Lovelace shouted, as he raced across the street.
For a moment he could not see the man on the far side of the truck, and his hands were sweating as he raced to the right, running in a crouch.
Bells started ringing from somewhere downtown, but it did not register on him, as the woman opened her door and stepped out onto the driveway. She was holding something in her right hand.
“Drop it!” Lovelace screamed, as he leaped over the curb and started to raise his pistol with both hands.
