Aces Abroad

Polyakov was not surprised by the long silence at the other end. "It's you, isn't it?"

He was pleased. The Dancer retained enough tradecraft to keep the telephone conversations bland. "Didn't I promise that I would give-you a visit someday?"

"What do you want?"

"To meet, what else? To see you."

"This is hardly the place-"

"There's a cab waiting out front. It'll be easy to spot. It's the only one at the moment."

"I'll be down in a few minutes."

Polyakov hung up and hurried out to the cab, not forgetting to nod to the concierge again.

"Any luck?"

"Enough. Thank you."

He slipped into the cab and closed the door. His heart was pounding. My God, he thought, I'm like a teenager waiting for a girl!

Before long the door opened. Immediately Polyakov was awash in. the Dancer's scent. He extended his hand in the Western fashion. "Dr. Tachyon, I presume."

The driver was a young Uzbek from the Embassy whose professional specialty was economic analysis, but whose greatest virtue was his ability to keep his mouth shut. His total lack of interest in Polyakov's activities and the challenge of navigating London's busy streets allowed Polyakov and Tachyon some privacy.

Polyakov's wild card had no face, so he had never been suspected of being an ace or joker. That, and the fact that he had only used his powers twice:

The first time was in the long, brutal winter of 1946-47, the winter following the release of the virus. Polyakov was a senior lieutenant then, having spent the Great Patriotic War as a zampolit, or political officer, at the munitions factories in the Urals. When the Nazis surrendered, Moscow Center assigned him to the counterinsurgency forces fighting Ukrainian nationalists-the "men from the forests" who had fought with the Nazis and had no intentions of giving up. (In fact they continued fighting until 1952.)

Polyakov's boss there was a thug named Suvin, who confessed drunkenly one night that he had been an executioner in the Lubiyanka during the Purge. Suvin had developed a real taste for torture; Polyakov wondered if that was the only possible response to a job that daily required one to shoot a fellow Party member in the back of the neck. One evening Polyakov brought in a Ukrainian teenager, a boy, for questioning. Suvin had been drinking and began to beat a confession out of the kid, which was a waste of time: the boy had already confessed to stealing food. But Suvin wanted to link him to the rebels.

Polyakov remembered, mostly, that he had been tired. Like everyone in the Soviet Union in that year, including those at the very highest levels, he was often hungry. It was the fatigue, he thought shamefully now, not human compassion, that made him leap at Suvin and shove him aside. Suvin turned on him and they fought. From underneath the other man, Polyakov managed to get his hands on his throat. There was no chance he could choke him… yet Suvin suddenly turned red-dangerously red-and literally burst into flames.

The young prisoner was unconscious and knew nothing. Since fatalities in the war zone were routinely ascribed to enemy action, the bully Suvin was officially reported to have died "heroically" of "extreme thoracic trauma" and "burns," euphemisms for being fried to a cinder. The incident terrified Polyakov. At first he didn't even realize what had happened; information on the wild card virus was restricted. But eventually he realized that he had a power… that he was an ace. And he swore never to use the power again.

He had only broken that promise once.

By the autumn of 1955, Georgy Vladimirovich Polyakov, now a captain in the "organs," was using the legend of a junior Tass reporter in West Berlin. Aces and jokers were much in the news in those days. The Tass men monitored the Washington hearings with horror-it reminded some of them of the Purge-and delight. The mighty American aces were being neutralized by their own countrymen!

It was known that some aces and their Takisian puppet master (as Pravda described him) had fled the U.S. following the first HUAC hearings. They became high-priority targets for the Eighth Directorate, the KGB department responsible for Western Europe. Tachyon in particular was a personal target for Polyakov. Perhaps the Takisian held some clue to the secret of the wild card virus… something to explain it… something to make it go away. When he heard that the Takisian was on the skids in Hamburg, he was off.

Since Polyakov had made prior "research" trips to Hamburg's red-light district, he knew which brothels were likely to cater to an unusual client such as Tachyon. He found the alien in the third establishment he tried. It was near dawn; the Takisian was drunk, passed out, and out of money. Tachyon should have been grateful: the Germans as a race had little liking for drunken indigents; masters of Hamburg whorehouses had even less. Tachyon would have been lucky to have been dumped in the canal… alive.

Polyakov had him taken to a safe house in East Berlin, where, after a prolonged argument among the rezidenti, he was supplied with controlled amounts of alcohol and women while he slowly regained his health… and while Polyakov and at least a dozen others questioned him. Even Shelepin himself took time out from his plotting back in Moscow to visit.

Within three weeks it was clear that Tachyon had nothing left to give. More likely, Polyakov suspected, the Takisian had -regained sufficient strength to withstand any further interrogation. Nevertheless, he had supplied them with so much data on the American aces, on Takisian history and science, and on the wild card virus itself, that Polyakov halfexpected his superiors to give the alien a medal and a pension.

They did almost as much. Like the German rocket engineers captured after the war, Tachyon's ultimate fate was to be quietly repatriated

… in this case to West Berlin. They transferred Polyakov to the illegals residence there at the same time, hoping for residual contacts, and allowing both men a simultaneous introduction to the city. Because of East Berlin, they would never be friends. Because of their time in the western sector, they could never be total enemies.

"In forty years on this world I've learned to alter my expectations every day," Tachyon told him. " I honestly thought you were dead."

"Soon enough I will be," Polyakov said. "But you look better now that you did in Berlin. The years truly pass slowly for your kind."

"Too slowly at times." They rode in silence for a while, each pretending to enjoy the scenery while each ordered his memories of the other.

"Why are you here?" Tachyon asked. "To collect on a debt."

Tachyon nodded slightly, a gesture that showed how thoroughly assimilated he had become. "That's what I thought."

"You knew it would happen one day."

"Of course! Please don't misunderstand! My people honor their commitments. You saved my life. You have a right to anything I can give you." Then he smiled tightly. "This one time."

"How close are you to Senator Gregg Hartma

"He's a senior member of this tour, so I've had some contact with him. Obviously not much lately, following that terrible business in Berlin."

"What do you think of him… as a man?"

"I don't know him well enough to judge. He's a politician, and as a rule I despise politicians. In that sense he strikes me as the best of a bad lot. He seems to be genuine in his support for jokers, for example. This is probably not an issue in your country, but it's a very emotional one in America, comparable to abortion rights." He paused. "I doubt very much he would be susceptible to any kind of… arrangement, if that's what you're asking."

"I see you've taken up reading spy novels," Polyakov said. "I'm more interested in… let's call it a political analysis. Is it possible that he will become president of the United States?"