The Valkyrie Project, page 5
The charged-particle beam required enormous amounts of electricity and could only be fired in a straight, line-of-sight trajectory. But it could shoot down in an instant any ICBM that came its way. It could render the Minuteman rockets, B-52s, and Polaris submarines all but useless. It was the ultimate defensive weapon.
The United States, making up for the neglect of the Carter administration, was now spending a hundred million dollars on charged-particle beam research. A working model had been built and successfully tested in a laboratory in California.
The Soviet Union had one already deployed, a weapon a mile and a half long powered by a huge nuclear reactor, at Saryshagan in Kazakhistan, near the Chinese border. Another one, more compact, was being built southwest of Moscow. Those would deal with missiles fired from the Indian Ocean or Pacific. To reduce risk to an absolute minimum, the Kremlin marshals needed a charged-particle beam weapon that could cover the North American and North Atlantic missile approaches. If Laidlaw’s educated guess was correct, they would have one in place soon.
“You did bring up Iceland?” Laidlaw asked.
“Wish I hadn’t,” Thorn said. “Now he thinks I’m as nutty as you two.”
“It’s not so preposterous,” Mendelsohn said. “When the Murmansk fleet is out, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden are functionally behind Russian lines.”
“If Baxter did believe the Redskies were looking for a CPB site up there, which he made maximum clear he does not,” said Thorn, “he might buy Finland—”
“Too far east,” said Mendelsohn.
“I know,” Thorn said. “He might buy Spitzbergen Island—”
“The Norwegians would resist,” Mendelsohn said. “The available electricity there is a small fraction of what would be required.”
“I know,” said Thorn. “But Baxter won’t buy Iceland. He won’t buy the Reds making moves on a member nation of NATO, especially one where we have a big air base.”
“The illogicality of Iceland,” said Mendelsohn, “is what makes it so logical.”
“I know,” said Thorn. “But I am not dealing with logical people or even illogical people. I’m dealing with the White House. And the deputy is getting tired of my little jaunts over there. He may put me on a short leash after this one.”
“You can’t get any higher than Baxter?” Laidlaw asked.
“I’m not even sure I can get to him again,” Thorn said.
“Then we’ve no recourse but the end run,” Laidlaw said.
“Which brings us back to your interesting Mr. Spencer,” said Mendelsohn. He pulled the file folder toward him, arching his brow as though he were about to undertake a critical examination of some painting.
“Give me that back, Freddy,” said Thorn. “I’m the one who gives the no-go or go.”
Thorn turned first to the photographs in the file, frowning slightly at the first one of Spencer, whistling when he came to one of Spencer’s wife. It was an agency telephoto shot, taken of the two of them at a beach. Laidlaw glanced at the background of the photograph, deciding with only a moment’s calculation that it had been taken at Cape Cod or the eastern end of Long Island.
“Turn to his reports,” he said, when Thorn lingered just a trifle too long over Mrs. Spencer. “They’re divorced. She’s irrelevant.”
Thorn did so, grunting. Laidlaw chided himself silently. In the spy business, nothing was irrelevant. Certainly not beautiful women.
“This guy’s been useful,” Thorn said, dropping the papers back into Spencer’s file. “Really useful.”
“That is why he’s been brought along this far,” said Laidlaw.
“This was really good stuff,” said Thorn, thumping on the papers for emphasis. “The Mexican oil find in Tobasco. The Libyan-IRA connection. Fingering that Canadian turncoat in Beirut. How many actual agents have stuff like this in their records?”
“Journalists make the best spies,” said Laidlaw. “It’s in their nature.”
Mendelsohn lit one of his long cigarettes—for some reason, he smoked Virginia Slims—and then smiled his eerie smile.
“Everything Spencer gave us he subsequently put into print in his newspapers,” Mendelsohn said. “I don’t believe he left out a fact. Not a semicolon.”
“Mr. Spencer’s penchant for publishing strengthens his cover,” said Laidlaw, lighting his pipe in defense against Mendelsohn’s cigarette smoke. “He has excellent credibility with the Icelanders. At some point, they’re going to have to be convinced of this. They won’t believe us. Spencer, they might.”
“He covered that stupid cod war,” said Thorn, turning to that page of the file.
“He was the only American journalist to do so from the Icelandic side,” Laidlaw said. “Many of them think his articles were what persuaded us to lean on our British friends to get out.”
“Probably were,” said Thorn.
“The gentleman,” said Mendelsohn, “is in less than sound health.”
“Extremely unsound health,” said Laidlaw, reaching for the proper paper in the file. “He has dangerously high blood pressure and a severely weakened artery in the brain. It’s inoperable. To complicate things, I think he’s an alcoholic.”
“What if he keels over in the middle of this?” asked Thorn.
“What if someone shoots him in the middle of this?” replied Laidlaw. “We’ll make do.”
“You wish to play him as a wild card,” said Mendelsohn, exhaling the words in an unfolding cloud of smoke.
“We’ve no choice,” Laidlaw said, “with our other problem.”
“The mole,” said Thorn.
“Or moles,” said Laidlaw.
Mendelsohn grimaced. Worse than jargon was cliché. “You’ve no doubt whatsoever about this problem,” he said. Mendelsohn’s questions were seldom uttered as questions.
“We’ve run a tracer through twice and gotten bumps each time,” Laidlaw said. “What happened to Krog was a very large bump. There’s a mole on that end, all right. I’m wondering if there’s one on this end.”
“I’d love to shut it down, good buddy,” said Thorn. “The whole enchilada. Especially Whelan. He’s put half the damn country on the payroll. But there’s that sonofabitching Icelandic election. Anyway, if we lone-eagle this guy, who’ll be his control?”
“I will,” said Laidlaw, “from here. Iceland has first-rate telephone service. We can use the military if there’s really serious mayday.”
“I want a backup,” said Thorn.
“Karin Nielsen,” said Laidlaw.
Mendelsohn arched his eyebrows while lowering his eyelids disdainfully. He disliked the use of women in espionage, except as decoys, or whores.
Thorn rubbed his square jaw with his meaty hand. “No one knows I’ve got her stashed in Oslo,” he said. “She’s even off the active roster. But I was saving her for really hot stuff.”
“This is,” said Laidlaw, “really hot stuff.” He made a face as disdainful as Mendelsohn’s.
Thorn rubbed his jaw some more. “Okay,” he said. “If we go with this guy, you can have Karin. I just have this feeling he’d drag her into the sack and they’d go off the job for a few weeks. I mean, this guy’s a regular jackrabbit. How do we know he won’t just take his expense money and spend it boozing and getting laid? Damn country’s supposed to have some of the best-looking women in the world. The guy knows he’s going to die. What a way to go.”
“He’s been going that way here in Washington for three months now,” said Laidlaw. “He’s tired of it. That’s why he came to us.”
Thorn scratched the top of his head.
“Will he buy this Iceland gig?” he asked.
“I hope so,” said Laidlaw, “although I presume he’ll be disinclined to it. I fear he’s seeking a grander gesture. He considers his precarious health an asset. I think he expects to be parachuted into the Kremlin.”
Mendelsohn groaned. “Life is but a stage,” he said and lit another cigarette. “Death, too.”
Thorn looked at his watch—an Eddie Bauer sportsman’s underwater model—and pushed back his chair.
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s see if we have an asset.”
Spencer crossed the Potomac into Virginia over Chain Bridge, turning his BMW onto the hilly road to McLean. The trees were still leafy enough to obscure the mansions from the commoners using the highway, giving the feeling of a country forest, not a suburb ten miles from the White House. It was a warm and perfect autumn afternoon, all golden and red against a cloudless blue sky. He reminded himself he should savor such days but could not keep his mind on the weather. He was driving faster than usual, jerking and spurting around the curves, spurred on for once not by escape but by anticipation. For the first time in months, his thoughts had found something happier than the moment.
He had gone for the CIA interview, which was cursory, and then stayed at their invitation for several more, which were not. They had kept him an hour after that filling out forms. Yet at the end they could only shrug and tell him he would have to wait—possibly for weeks. He had been on the verge of flinging himself and his hopes into the whiskey jug again when just two days later the call had come: the cheerfully officious voice of a high-ranking secretary. Could he meet with Mr. Laidlaw at his home in McLean the following afternoon?
Chesley had been horrified—as only Chesley could be horrified—when she first learned of his CIA work. She threatened to leave him if he did it again. In the midst of a screaming fight over it, she threatened to tell his news bureau. The result would have been a loss of his press credentials and his probable firing.
It angered Spencer that this should be so. Aside from minor expenses, he had never accepted any fee for these services. He had never let his association alter the character or the accuracy of his reporting. He knew newsmen who turned the truth upside down and stretched it six miles sideways to suit their prejudices. Half the British journalists Spencer knew were on their government’s payroll. All the Soviet ones were. Spencer’s only interest had been in helping his country even the odds a little. Yet it was grounds for the sack. The “free press” forever.
Spencer had no idea what the agency would offer him, if it offered him anything at all. He had been told only that the best he could look forward to was some temporary work in which he would go on the roster as a consultant. Spencer told them temporary work would be ideal, but the young bureaucrat conducting that interview had no ear for irony.
Spencer had already obtained a six months’ leave of absence from his job. He told his bureau chief what the man already knew—that he had serious health, personal, and drinking problems. He needed time to work things out. He needed help. Would the company object? The bureau chief, as Spencer had expected, responded positively and with great relief. What the newspaper business would not forgive on the sneak, it forgave from the confessed and the repentant. The man gave Spencer his six months’ leave with pay.
Following directions, he turned off the Dolley Madison Highway at Langley, passing by the main CIA entrance and continuing for another mile and a half. Then, as directed, he turned onto a side road barely wider than a driveway. The house, when he came to it, was as described: white, very large, with four pillars, set in heavy woods out of sight of any of its neighbors. There were a few signs of neglect about the place. The shiny Mercedes-Benz on the gravel drive indicated they were not to be attributed to a lack of funds. The owner, presumably, was a man preoccupied with other things.
Laidlaw answered the door, introducing himself. He looked wealthy and professorial—and a little eccentric. He had a book in his hand, Richard Nixon’s The Real War.
Spencer followed him to the rear of the house where they entered Laidlaw’s study, a large but cluttered room with bookcases lining two of the walls and enormous multipaned windows filling the others. They seated themselves in leather chairs to the side of Laidlaw’s desk. The stack of magazines on the low, dusty table in front of them had a copy of Atlas World Press Review on top.
After a few minutes of easy pleasantries, Laidlaw moved abruptly to the point. They would like to accept his offer. “Would you be willing to go to Iceland?”
Spencer was stunned. His mind had been full of the dusty streets of Teheran, the humid lush of Havana, a hundred other places. When drunk, he saw himself a figure in history. An American Roland. Iceland? He had not been there since 1976. The cod war had ended then, and there had been nothing for him there but the cod war, though he liked the strange little country and, before his affliction, had thought of taking a vacation there.
Laidlaw was that rare person who sat perfectly still, a quintessential example of repose but for the blink of his light blue eyes.
“I was hoping I might be of more use to you than that,” Spencer said.
“Oh, there’s a great deal you can accomplish for us,” said Laidlaw with another quick smile. He shifted his position in the chair and then was motionless again. “Everyone is always so quick to belittle Iceland. You wrote that yourself in one of your dispatches.”
“You read those?”
“Yours is a thick and interesting file, Mr. Spencer. Your articles, by the by, were extremely useful. They attracted the attention of the White House, as so little does, and encouraged some high-level twisting of the British arm. Quite frankly, I don’t know where we would have been without your stories. We’d been warning for months that Iceland meant its threat to pull out of NATO if the British persisted, but, as happens so often, no one paid us any mind.”
“The British are very contemptuous of small countries. They were willing to destroy Iceland’s entire economy just to protect fifteen thousand fishing jobs.”
“So you wrote, Mr. Spencer. Very useful.” Laidlaw had ever so delicately led him from his path.
“Mr. Laidlaw, I don’t think you understand what I had in mind when I contacted your agency,” Spencer said, staring down at the table top. “I’m not interested in just helping you out a little on the side, like before. I … my motivation …”
“You’re referring to the state of your health.”
Spencer lifted his eyes to Laidlaw’s. “I have a terminal illness,” he said.
“So you acknowledged on the questionnaire,” Laidlaw said. “Though your condition is not absolutely, inescapably terminal. Highly dangerous, but not a closed book.”
He pressed his palms together and leaned forward in his chair without shifting his steady gaze. His round spectacles made him quite owlish. “Mr. Spencer,” he continued, “if what you had in mind was strapping hand grenades to your body and seeking an audience with some despot, then you’d best hire yourself out to a terrorist group. We are not in the business of assisting suicides. If anything, we would view your physical condition as a liability, as we would—as we do—your, uh, drinking habits. You’ve been quite helpful in the past, but at the moment you would have to be classified as something of a risk. Quite frankly, your generous offer was met with little interest or enthusiasm. We, the agency, were going to turn you down, I’m afraid. Until we thought of Iceland. We don’t even have approval for that yet. Although I don’t think there will be any problem.”
Spencer wanted a drink, suddenly and desperately. However this interview concluded, he decided he would stop for a quick whiskey in Georgetown on the way home. Maybe two. “I just want to make a contribution,” he said. “I’d like to do something meaningful.”
“We view everything we do as meaningful,” Laidlaw said. “We think Iceland extremely important. The Soviets’ northern fleet has more than seventy surface ships, don’t you know—more than one hundred submarines. Iceland stands directly in their path. Shall I be melodramatic and take you to my globe?”
It was an enormous globe, very expensive, set in a floor stand in the corner. Spencer shook his head.
“The Soviets,” Laidlaw continued, pausing for emphasis, “think Iceland is very important indeed. There aren’t many embassies in Reykjavik, but half of them are Warsaw Pact. The Russians have nearly a hundred people in their embassy alone. In per capita terms, that’s like their having ten thousand people here in Washington.”
“There are Republicans who think they do,” Spencer said.
Laidlaw made a face.
“What do you want me to do?” Spencer asked, staring down at the table again. He was thinking hard about Iceland. He had hated the weather, but the country had fascinated him, as had the women. Could the CIA really be all that worried about Iceland? The United States had the air base at Keflavik to lose. And there really were a lot of Russians there.
Laidlaw looked at his watch. It was gold, very expensive-looking, but he wore it on an old leather strap. “It’s just past three o’clock,” he said. “On weekend afternoons I like to indulge myself with an occasional martini. Would you join me? Or would you prefer scotch? I’m not sure what we have.”
“A martini would be very nice right now.”
Spencer remained in his chair until Laidlaw had left the room, then rose and began walking about it. The view from the windows was filled with hills and trees. Iceland was forbidding, barren mountains and mossy hills, rocks and swift-running glacier streams. No trees, or at least very, very few of them. His gunboat captain in the cod war had said his favorite place in the world was Hawaii. It was just like Iceland, except that it had warmth and trees.
Iceland. At the time, he had even thought it might be an interesting place to die, to greet eternity, an eternal sort of place. What had prompted that gloomy thought? Would he indeed die there?
The sounds Laidlaw made with his drink preparations were distant. Casually, Spencer went to the man’s desk. There was nothing amid the clutter that seemed to have anything to do with Iceland. One file had a green cover sheet marked “EXDIS,” the word “Valkyrie” appearing beneath. He opened it quickly and glanced at a few pages. The language was quite technical. There were diagrams and illustrations of what looked to be some sort of laser. What a dull job.
He could hear a martini shaker. Laidlaw had old-fashioned habits. Moving to one of the bookcases, Spencer was astonished to find only the ordinary—classics, a few not very recent bestsellers. Nothing that would be very edifying or useful to someone like Laidlaw. And they were dusty.
