PUZZLE
PALACE
Roger isn’t a
soldier. He’s not much of a patriot, either: he signed up with the
CIA after college, in the aftermath of the Church Commission
hearings in the early seventies. The Company was out of the
assassination business, just a bureaucratic engine rolling out
National Security assessments: that’s fine by Roger. Only now, five
years later, he’s no longer able to roll along, casually
disengaged, like a car in neutral bowling down a shallow incline
toward his retirement, pension, and a gold watch. He puts the file
down on his desk and, with a shaking hand, pulls an illicit
cigarette from the pack he keeps in his drawer. He lights it and
leans back for a moment to draw breath, force relaxation, staring
at smoke rolling in the air beneath the merciless light until his
hand stops shaking.
Most people think
spies are afraid of guns, or KGB guards, or barbed wire, but in
point of fact the most dangerous thing they face is paper. Papers
carry secrets. Papers carry death warrants. Papers like this one,
this folio with its blurry eighteen-year-old faked missile
photographs and estimates of time/survivor curves and pervasive
psychosis ratios, can give you nightmares, dragging you awake
screaming in the middle of the night. It’s one of a series of
highly classified pieces of paper that he is summarizing for the
eyes of the National Security Council and the president-elect—if
his head of department and the DDCIA approve it—and here he is,
having to calm his nerves with a cigarette before he turns the next
page.
After a few minutes,
Roger’s hand is still. He leaves his cigarette in the eagle-headed
ashtray and picks up the intelligence report again. It’s a summary,
itself the distillation of thousands of pages and hundreds of
photographs. It’s barely twenty pages long: as of 1963, its date of
preparation, the CIA knew very little about Project Koschei. Just
the bare skeleton, and rumors from a highly placed spy. And their
own equivalent project, of course. Lacking the Soviet lead in that
particular field, the USAF fielded the silverplate white elephants
of the NB-39 project: twelve atomic-powered bombers armed with
XK-PLUTO, ready to tackle Project Koschei should the Soviets show
signs of unsealing the bunker. Three hundred megatons of H-bombs
pointed at a single target, and nobody was certain it would be
enough to do the job.
And then there was
the hard-to-conceal fiasco in Antarctica. Egg on face: a
subterranean nuclear test program in international territory! If
nothing else, it had been enough to stop JFK running for a second
term. The test program was a bad excuse: but it was far better than
confessing what had really happened to the 501st Airborne Division
on the cold plateau beyond Mount Erebus. The plateau that the
public didn’t know about, that didn’t show up on the maps issued by
the geological survey departments of those governments party to the
Dresden Agreement of 1931—an arrangement that even Hitler had stuck
to. The plateau that had swallowed more U-2 spy planes than the
Soviet Union, more surface expeditions than darkest
Africa.
Shit. How the hell am I going to put this together for
him?
Roger’s spent the
past five hours staring at this twenty-page report, trying to think
of a way of summarizing their drily quan tifiable terror in words
that will give the reader power over them, the power to think the
unthinkable: but it’s proving difficult. The new man in the White
House is straight-talking, demands straight answers. He’s pious
enough not to believe in the supernatural, confident enough that
just listening to one of his speeches is an uplifting experience if
you can close your eyes and believe in morning in America. There is
probably no way of explaining Project Koschei, or XK-PLUTO, or
MK-NIGHTMARE, or the gates, without watering them down into just
another weapons system—which they are not. Weapons may have deadly
or hideous effects, but they acquire moral character from the
actions of those who use them. Whereas these projects are indelibly
stained by a patina of ancient evil . . .
He hopes that if the
balloon ever does go up, if the sirens wail, he and Andrea and
Jason will be left behind to face the nuclear fire. It’ll be a
merciful death compared with what he suspect lurks out there, in
the unexplored vastness beyond the gates. The vastness that made
Nixon cancel the manned space program, leaving just the standing
joke of a white-elephant shuttle, when he realized just how
hideously dangerous the space race might become. The darkness that
broke Jimmy Carter’s faith and turned Lyndon B. Johnson into an
alcoholic.
He stands up,
nervously shifts from one foot to the other. Looks round at the
walls of his cubicle. For a moment the cigarette smoldering on the
edge of his ashtray catches his attention: wisps of blue-grey smoke
coil like lazy dragons in the air above it, writhing in a strange
cuneiform text. He blinks, and they’re gone, and the skin on the
small of his back prickles as if someone had pissed on his
grave.
“Shit.” Finally, a
spoken word in the silence. His hand is shaking as he stubs the
cigarette out. Mustn’t let this get to
me. He glances at the wall. It’s nineteen hundred hours; too
late, too late. He should go home, Andy will be worrying herself
sick.
In the end it’s all
too much. He slides the thin folder into the safe behind his chair,
turns the locking handle and spins the dial, then signs himself out
of the reading room and goes through the usual exit
search.
During the
thirty-mile drive home, he spits out of the window, trying to rid
his mouth of the taste of Auschwitz ashes.