Ahern, Jerry - The Quest

Ever since the business in Texas, Varakov had realized that Natalia had betrayed Karamatsov somehow, and that Karamatsov was not quite right in the head anymore, perhaps because of it. The aftermath of the debacle and the loss of Samuel Chambers had shown a ruthlessness in Karamatsov that Varakov had always suspected, but never imagined in its scope. He had executed several of his own men for allowing the escape; he had used his forces to kill every suspected member of the Texas militia—a bloodbath Varakov had not seen the likes of since the purges of the thirties under Stalin.

A soldier’s stock in trade was bloodletting, but there was a difference between warfare and murder. Karamatsov was a murderer, pure and simple, Varakov thought. And the thought made him wonder all the more about Natalia. Had something happened?

Varakov leaned over the railing, calling out to his secretary below, “Cancel my appointments for this afternoon. Call up my car and driver. I have business to attend to. If something must be signed and you think it should be signed, then forge my name. Hurry.” He trusted the girl; that was part of being a human being, he had always thought, trusting those who deserved trust and distrusting those who would stab you in the back and smile over your still warm body. He distrusted Karamatsov for exactly that reason, and he found his palms sweating as he started down the low, broad steps from the mezzanine overlooking the main gallery. He was worried about Natalia, the beautiful Natalia, the superlative agent, the tough fighter, the gentle girl—his dead brother’s only daughter.

Chapter 14

Sarah Rourke sat up in bed, startled, then a smile crossed her lips as the strong sunlight bathed her face in its warmth. She remembered the previous night. After her collapse on the kitchen floor, she had revived, finding that Mary Mulliner had fed, bathed, and bedded not only her niece Millie, but Michael and Annie as well. Mary Mulliner had offered Sarah a home for as long as she had wanted it. Sarah smiled, throwing back the sheet, and stared at her feet. She wiggled her toes and stood up, and the borrowed yellow nightgown fell to the floor past her ankles. Slippers were beside the bed, but she didn’t remember them from the previous night. She stepped into them, walked across the small bedroom of the country farmhouse to the full length mirror on the inside of the door. She looked at herself. She had showered and washed her hair before going to bed. She ran her hands through her hair now, letting it fall to her shoulders. She turned around, staring at her unfamiliar image. She had not worn anything besides jeans in—she couldn’t remember how long and was too happy to try.

There was a long robe across the bottom of the bed, yellow like the nightgown, and she put it on, belted it around her waist. She realized for the first time that she had lost weight these many weeks since the night of the war. She walked to the door, opened it, and stepped into a hallway. A staircase was at the end—she remembered that—and she started toward it, then stopped as she passed a half-open doorway. Michael and Annie were sleeping in a huge double bed, sunlight streaming across it. Annie was not sucking her thumb, for a change, and Michael peaceful and smiling, rolled over, stretched and hunched down against his pillow.

Sarah leaned against the doorframe and stared at the sunlight. The wind through the slightly open window blew the white curtain wildly. “Thank you,” she said if anyone were listening. She wanted to see the outside, and turned and ran down the stairs, almost tripping in the unfamiliar slippers and the floor-length gown. She saw Mary Mulliner in the living room, but passed her, and went to the front door, opened it, and ran onto the porch. The sky—the sky—there was a breeze blowing, a dog barking and, for the first time in weeks, that sound didn’t terrify her. She stared up at the sky and heard herself laughing, threw her head back, her arms outstretched. It was as if there were some beautiful music playing, she thought, then she stopped laughing, turned and saw Mary Mulliner and her teenage son staring at her, standing behind her on the porch. The older woman just said, “I understand you—least I think I do, Sarah.” Sarah Rourke turned to the woman and hugged her.

Chapter 15

Varakov sat in the back seat of his staff car, a Lincoln Continental expropriated from a parking lot near what had been the United States Federal Building in downtown Chicago. There had been, he reflected, that one more urgent reason for sending Vladmir Karamatsov to the southeast, more urgent he felt than the brigands and the Resistance.

After Texas, Karamatsov had moved directly to Florida, working through Cuban liaisons to determine what the exact nature of the launches at Cape Canaveral from the space center there had been the night of the war.

All the missiles the U.S. had launched, Varakov understood, had been accounted for. These launches were the only exceptions and that worried Kremlin leadership. It worried Varakov because it hinted that somehow the Americans had prepared for the possibility of war and, despite the crushing losses, perhaps had some new weapon no one had dreamed of—up in space now perhaps. He stared up at the gray Chicago sky through his back seat window. He wondered. During the exchanges, each side’s hunter-killer satellites had destroyed spy satellites of the other side. Nothing remained in orbit except the hunter-killers and the Soviet space platform—which was now useless, Varakov thought, since the Soviet Union had no time, money, or desire to explore the reaches of space—surviving after the war would take all the efforts the people of the Soviet Union could muster.

If the Americans had put some mysterious weapons system in orbit, there remained no way of detecting it. The Soviet manned platform was in a polar orbit, and all the Americans would have needed to do was place their vehicles in an orbit out of range of the platform, perhaps around the South Pole regions. He was not an astronomer or a missile scientist; he didn’t know nor could he guess. He thought that perhaps it was some doomsday device, placed in orbit to detonate after a specific period of time if some radio signal were not received to scrub the mission—some gigantic burst that would blow away the atmosphere, the final retribution for the Soviet attack. The thought unsettled him. He had survived much, always because he had willed himself to do so—this he could not impose his will against. There had been a mysterious reference found in a looseleaf notebook in an Air Force Intelligence installation: the words “Eden Project” and the drawing of an upward vectoring rocket ship beside it. Nothing else. Varakov wondered if the words Eden Project and the mysterious multiple launchings from Cape Canaveral were related. This was Karamatsov’s prime and secret reason for being in the southeast.

Intelligence also indicated that apparently one official of the National Aeronautics and Space Administrations—NASA—survived, an official with the level of responsibility that he might know what exactly had been launched that night. He was a chief public information officer for NASA, the name in the file had been James R. Colfax. Varakov recalled the man had been an astronaut, then moved into administration with NASA after a heart condition had disqualified him for space flight. He had piloted one of the space shuttles the Americans had been so proud of. This Colfax, Varakov thought, he would know.

He had been making a speaking tour, recruiting for NASA at the time of the war and had a home somewhere in Georgia in the mountains. If he would be anywhere he could be “officially” found, he would be there, Varakov had reasoned. People and animals were of little difference. A wounded animal goes to its burrow or nest or cave; a man whose world is destroyed goes to his home—it was the same.