Mirror Image

CHAPTER TWELVE

When he was a boy growing up in the early 1950s, in the small town of Naryan-Mar on the Arctic Ocean, Sergei Orlov thought he would never treasure a sight more than he did the orange glow of the hearth in his parents' home as he trudged through the snow carrying two or three fish tucked in his canvas sack, caught in the small lake near his home. For Orlov, the glowing fireplace wasn't just a beacon in the cold, dark night. it was a bright and hopeful sign of life in a cold and barren wasteland.

Circling the earth in the late 1970s, flying five Soyuz missions that ranged from eight to eighteen days and commanding the last three, General Sergei Orlov saw something even more memorable. It was not something new. Dozens of cosmonauts had seen the earth from space. But whether they had described our world as a blue bubble, a beautiful marble, or a Christmas-tree ornament, they all agreed that seeing it gave them a new outlook on life. Political ideologies were no match for the power of that fragile globe. Space travelers realized that if humans had a destiny, it was not to fight for control of their home but to cherish its peace and warmth as they journeyed to the stars.

And then you return to earth, Orlov thought as he stepped from the number 44 bus on Nevsky Prospekt. The resolve and inspiration weaken as you're asked to do things in the name of country which you can't refuse. Russians don't refuse. Orlov's grandfather was a Czarist, yet he fought the White Russians during the Revolution. His father didn't refuse when he fought in the Second Ukrainian Front during the Second World War. It was for them, and not for Brezhnev, that he had trained a new generation of cosmonauts to spy on the United States and NATO forces from space as well as to work on new chemical poisons in zero gravity. He was trained to see the world not as the home of all humans but as a thing to be peeled and cut up and devoured in the name of a man called Lenin.

Then there are the parts coveted by men like Minister Dogin, he thought as he walked briskly along the boulevard. Though it was still early, workers were already arriving at the Hermitage to prepare it for the daily crush of tourists.

Though the Minister was affable enough, and seemed consumed by an almost narcotic contentedness when discussing Russian history, particularly the Stalin years, his worldview was out of step with the times. And when Dogin made his monthly trips to St. Petersburg, it seemed that the Minister's memories of the Soviet years became more and more idealized.

Then there were men like Rossky, who didn't appear to have any worldview. They simply enjoyed power and control. Orlov had been alarmed by Assistant Security Director Glinka's surreptitious call to the apartment. Glinka knew how to play both sides of the fence, but Orlov believed him when he said that Rossky's activities over the past twenty-four hours had been unusually secretive. It started when Rossky insisted on handling, himself, the trivial investigation of an intrusion alert the day before. It was followed by unlogged and coded computer communications to an operative in the field, not telling anyone where he was going, and mysterious dealings with a local coroner.

I've been ordered to work with Rossky, Orlov told himself, but I won't let him run rogue operations. Whether Rossky liked it or not, he would toe the line or he would be restricted to a desk job. As long as Rossky had Interior Minister Dogin's support, threatening him would be difficult. But Orlov had overcome difficulties before. He bore the scars to prove it, and was willing to bear more if need be. He had learned English so that he could travel as a goodwill ambassador when, in fact, he was busy acquiring and sneaking home books just so he could see what the rest of the world was thinking and reading.

Orlov raised the collar of his off-white trench coat against the knifing wind and tucked his black rimmed glasses into his pocket. They always fogged when he came back outside from the over— or underheated bus, and he didn't have time to fuss with them. As if it weren't frustrating enough to need them at all, these eyes that had once been keen enough to pick out the Great Wall of China from nearly three hundred miles in space.

Despite the problem with Rossky, Orlov's full-lipped mouth was relaxed, his high forehead unwrinkled beneath the brim of his gray fedora. His striking brown eyes, high cheekbones, and dark complexion were, like his adventurous spirit, a part of his Asiatic heritage— Manchu. His great grandfather had once told him that his family was part of the first wave of warriors that had poured through China and Russia in the seventeenth century. Orlov didn't know how the old man could place them so precisely. But it suited him to think that he was descended from a pioneering people, benevolent despite having been conquerors.

Standing just under five-foot-seven, Orlov had the narrow shoulders and slender build that had made him an ideal, resilient cosmonaut. Though his record as a fighter pilot had been flawless, Orlov carried physical and mental mementoes from his years in space. He walked with a permanent limp, due to a left leg and hip badly broken when his parachute failed to deploy in what turned out to be his last mission. His right arm was severely scarred when he pulled a cosmonaut-in-training from the wreck of a MiG-27 Flogger-D. He had pegs inserted in his hip to enable him to walk, but declined to undergo plastic surgery on the arm. He liked the way his wife oooohed and ohhhhhed whenever she saw her poor singed bird.

Orlov smiled as he thought of his precious Masha. Though today's breakfast had been cut short by Glinka's call, the afterglow of being with her still warmed him. More so because it would have to hold him until tomorrow, which was the earliest he'd be seeing her again. As always before he left on a mission, the two of them went through a ritual they'd begun nearly twenty years ago, before he rode his first flaming rocket into space: they held each other tightly and made sure they parted with no unspoken thoughts or anger, nothing they would regret if he failed to return. Masha had come to believe that the day they broke the tradition, he wouldn't come back.

Those days with the Mir and Salyut space stations, he thought, smiling. Years of working with Kizim, Solovyev, Titov, Manarov, and the other cosmonauts who spent weeks and months in space. Enjoying the sterile beauty of the Vostok and Voskhod spacecraft, of the Kvant astronomy module that allowed them to explore the universe. Experiencing the sound and fury of the mighty Energia rockets sending payloads skyward. He missed it all. But eleven months before, the space program was broke and in near collapse, and the forty-nine-year-old officer had agreed to command this place, a hi-tech operations center that was being designed to spy on friends and foes abroad and at home. Ministry of Security Chief Cherkassov had told him he had the calm but detail-oriented nature that was perfect for running a high-pressure intelligence facility like this— though Orlov couldn't help but feel he was being demoted. He'd gone from touching the vault of heaven to being cast underground into hell, and he'd been spoiled by the many humanitarian scientists he had worked with at the Yuri Garaging Space Center outside Moscow. As the Manchu had understood, progress and power should be used to ennoble people, encourage them to make sacrifices, not control and herd them.

But Masha agreed with Cherkassov. She told her husband it was better for someone with his temperament to run the Operations Center instead of someone like Rossky, and she was right about that. Neither the Colonel nor his new best friend, Interior Minister Dogin, seemed to know where the interests of Russia ended and their personal ambitions began.

As Orlov walked briskly along the broad boulevard, the bag lunch and bag dinner his wife had prepared tucked under his arm, he gazed across the river at the Frunze Naval College that housed the dozen soldiers of the Center's special operations force Molot, Hammer.

Masha had been right about Rossky as well. After he told her who his second-in-cornmand was to be— the man who had been involved with their son, Nikita, in the incident in Moscow— Masha told him not to allow Dogin to force Rossky on him. She knew they would clash, while he thought that working on a common project, in such close quarters, would force them to trust and maybe respect one another.

Now reckoning seemed inevitable. What made his wife so smart… and him so naive?

His eyes moved along the structures on the opposite side of the Neva as the slanting sunlight put yellow faces on the stately Academy of Sciences and Museum of Anthropology directly across from him, and threw long, brown shadows behind them. He took a long moment to drink in their beauty before entering the museum and the complex below. Though he was no longer able to see the earth from space, there was still much to savor down here. It bothered him that Rossky and the Minister never stopped to look at the river, the buildings, and especially the art. To them, beauty was merely something to hide under.

Upon entering the museum, Orlov walked toward the Jordan Staircase and the entrance to the secret new arm of the Kremlin, a facility at once practical and idiosyncratic.

The practical side was the Hermitage site itself. It had been chosen over potential locations in Moscow and Volgograd because operatives could he moved in and out inconspicuously with tour groups; because agents could travel easily from here to Scandinavia and Europe; because the Neva would hide and disperse most of the radio waves coming from equipment at the Center; because the working TV studio they'd built gave them access to satellite communications; and most important, because no one would attack the Hermitage.

The idiosyncrasy came from Minister Dogin's devotion to history. The Minister collected old maps, and in his collection were the blueprints of Stalin's wartime headquarters under the Kremlin— rooms that were not only bombproof but led to a private subway tunnel that would have been used to shuttle Stalin from Moscow in the event of an attack. The Minister revered Stalin, and when he, now— President Zhanin, and the head of the Ministry of Security first planned this communications and spy facility for Boris Yeltsin, Dogin insisted on using the layout that worked for Stalin. The design actually worked out well, Orlov felt. As in a submarine, the tight, somewhat claustrophobic quarters helped to keep workers focused on the tasks at hand.

Orlov acknowledged the guard as he passed. The General used the keypad to enter; once inside, he showed the receptionist his ID, despite the fact that she was Masha's cousin and knew him well. Then he made his way through the reception area and down the stairs to the TV studio. At the far end, he punched the day's four-digit code on a keypad and the door popped open. When Orlov shut it behind him, the dark stairwell's single overhead bulb snapped on automatically. He walked down the stairs where another keypad gained him access to the Center. Entering the dimly lit central corridor, he turned to the right and strode toward the office of Colonel Rossky.