Pohl, Frederik - The Siege of Eternity

But Hilda was reprieved when Daisy's screen buzzed at her again. It only took a moment, then she turned and looked blankly at Hilda.

"Funny thing," she said. "It's that Spanish business. The police got an anonymous phone tip, and when they checked it out they found a munitions dump-all kinds of stuff. Even mininukes. The funny part is, our assets in the Basque community in California? They think it was the Basques themselves that phoned it in." She shook her head. "Listen, Hilda, it's crazy around here today, but how about you and I having lunch one of these days? You know, girl talk. I want to tell you more about dear Richard. ..."

There wasn't going to be any way of avoiding a lunch and girl talk, but Hilda was firmly determined to avoid dear Richard. No friend of Daisy Fennell's would do, even for an occasional bed partner. But it would be nice to have somebody, Hilda thought. . . .

Back in her office, Cadet Merla Tepp was waiting. She stood up as Hilda came in. "You called for me, Brigadier. If it's about my application to be your aide-"

Hilda waved that aside. "What it's about," she said, "is the fact that there were born-again pickets at Camp Smolley yesterday. Looks like they came from the kind of groups you were investigating. How did they know?"

Tepp said promptly, "There was a rumor when I was investigating them that they had a lead into the Bureau."

"Did they?"

"I don't think so, Brigadier. I think they were just bragging. The woman who claimed to have it was picked up in the raids, and I'm pretty sure she's still serving time-that was for the arsons in the California schoolbook warehouses. I didn't interrogate her myself, but I've seen the transcripts. What the interrogators concluded was that she was lying. There probably wasn't a real body in place here, but there might have been a leak in the electronics."

"Thanks," Hilda said. "You can go."

The woman tarried. "Ma'am? About being your aide-"

"Go," Hilda ordered. "We'll talk about it later."

And perhaps they would, she thought; she was certainly going to need more help here. But there were things that had to be done first. She put through a call to the electronics man, to tell him that someone seemed to be able to tap into Bureau business. She called Personnel to produce a list of candidates to replace Captain Terman. What she needed, she thought, was a field-grade officer who knew enough about biology and technology to shake up die teams at Camp Smolley-or at least knew enough to know who to requisition as his operations officers. She was studying the personnel files of the first three candidates when Agent Dannerman appeared at her door.

She turned to scowl at him, and he was scowling back at her. "What's happening with the other one?" he demanded.

She elected not to bother with reprimanding him for walking uninvited into her office. "He's on a classified mission, out of the country-"

"I know it's a classified mission, and I know it's out of the country. It's in goddam Ukraine, where Rosaleen Artzybachova is."

"And it's none of your business, Danno. How'd you even know about it?"

"Christ. Hilda, the Pats talk to each other, you know. He took one of them with him!"

She sighed and shook her head. "It's not your operation, and it's classified."

"Tell me one thing," he insisted. "What's he supposed to do with her when he finds her. Rescue her? Or cut her head off?"

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

It was the first time Pat Adcock had ever traveled on a passport-actually, on two different passports-that were not her own, and it was certainly the first time she had had to do any of that cloak-and-dagger hsst!-here-are-the-papers! stuff. It made her nervous. On the way to Frankfurt she slept as much as she could. She knew that, with the wig and a lot more makeup than she had ever worn before, she didn't really look a lot like herself; but she didn't want to test it by talking too much to her seatmates. She worried about making her connections, but when she walked into the lobby of the airport hotel there was Dannerman, smoking a large cigar and studying a German paper, just as he was supposed to be. "Liebchen!" he cried. "Ma cherie!" And as he flung his arms around her and gave her a surely unnecessarily big kiss-his stiff German beard scratched her cheek, and the son of a bitch tasted horribly of cigar smoke-he whispered in her ear, "Give me the passport and tickets."

She did-quite openly, because the Bureau spooks who briefed her had had no confidence in her ability to be surreptitious, and, although she watched carefully, she didn't see what he did with them. All she saw was that he picked up his briefcase from the armchair, tossed his newspaper down, put out his cigar and offered his arm. And as they left the lobby she looked back and saw that, yes, just as had been planned, somebody was casually picking up the paper, along with whatever Dannerman had slipped into it, as though simply to see what the day's soccer results were like.

On the Aeroflot flight to Kiev she hoped to feign sleep again, but Dannerman was having none of it. Probably it was the suppressed actor in the man, she thought irritably. He was playing his part to the hilt. Then it was champagne for the two of them, because the honey-blonde flight attendants were glad to make the flight as comfortable as possible for Herr Doktor Heinrich Sholtz, the statistician from the Gesellschaft fur Mathematik und Datenverarbeitung mbH, who was combining business and honeymooning with his pretty (though surely a bit long in the tooth?) French bride, Yvette; and how charming it was that neither of them spoke the other's language, and so they could converse only in English. The second bottle of champagne (Georgian, of course, but still) came with the compliments of the captain, with his best wishes for the newlyweds. It went well with the pale pink caviar.

It wasn't such an awful assignment after all, Pat conceded to herself. In fact, the whole thing was turning into an adventure. Flushed with the wine, enjoying playing her cloak-and-dagger part, she thought of the three other Pats who had been passed over. She admitted to herself that she had been a little jealous of them. Sure, they had suffered privation and fear and even pain, but they were the ones who had had the excitement, too, had been to places where no other human had ever gone, had met alien creatures-all that-while all she herself had had to talk about was boredom and aggravation in the Bureau's jail. It was only fair that she get some of the thrilling stuff now, while they were condemned to stay at home because the Bureau didn't want to risk—

Didn't want to risk—

Abruptly Pat set the champagne glass down. Dannerman turned solicitously to her. "Is something wrong, Yvette?"

"Not really, Heinrich," she managed to say, but it was untrue. What was wrong was that she had suddenly realized what it was that the Bureau didn't want to risk. It was what the other Pats and the other Dannerman knew, those little facts about their captivity somewhere in space that the Bureau was not prepared to share, just yet, with the rest of the world. If these terrorists should capture them, they would surely find ways to make them tell everything they knew.

While if she and Dan were captured, even the most painful interrogation was bound to fail, because there wasn't anything of that sort that those two could tell. But that would not keep the terrorists from trying.

Pat had never been in Eastern Europe before. For that matter, she hadn't been in any part of Europe frequently enough to know it; her overseas traveling had been limited to the usual Grand Tour-Singapore, Japan, the PRC-that had been Uncle Cubby's graduation present, plus an occasional weekend seminar. For the seminars you flew in and you flew out, and there wasn't much sightseeing in between. You spent your time in colloquia and cocktail parties with your astronomical colleagues. If you found an hour or two for a quick peek at whatever the local attraction happened to be in whatever otherwise indistinguishable city that particular meeting chanced to be held in, you counted yourself a lucky tourist.