He returned to Russia when his studies were completed, just in time to see his parents marched off to a workcamp in one of the Stalinist purges. Russian science at the time was securely in the hands of a fraud named Lysenko, whose approach to genetics and heredity was that there was no such thing as genetics and heredity. Believing that an organism could alter and perfect itself in its own lifetime might have made for good Communist politics, but it was awful science. It was twenty years before Russia's agriculture program began to recover from the hole Lysenkoism had dug for it.
Still, while he was a zero as a scientist, Lysenko was a very astute politician and when Vassily Karbenko's father challenged his scientific know-nothingism, it was the senior Karbenko and his wife who were marched off to Siberia.
Ordinarily, this kind of blot on the family record should have ruined whatever chance young Vassily had to move up in the Soviet system. But Stalin himself was soon gone, shot by some of his most trusted advisers, and almost as a reaction to that, Vassily Karbenko found himself riding a wave of promotions through the Soviet spy system, aided by his friendship for a minor party bureaucrat who had inexplicably risen to become the Soviet premier. Along the way, Vassily found out that his parents, like mil-
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lions of others, had been executed in Russian slave camps.
Karbenko had not yet adopted his cowboy style of dressing. That came when he was assigned to the United States in the early 1970's.
It could have been one of the tragedies of his life to find, when he got to America, that there were very few real cowboys left and none of them were like those in the movies he had grown up with.
But by this time, he had come to a new realization. In the 1970's, spies were the cowboys of the world. Working for a government, yes, but basically on their own, responsible in the end for what they did and not how they did it.
Karbenko was a very good spy and a very dedicated Russian. But he still wore his cowboy suits, like a display of mourning clothes, for a world he had been born too late to enter.
Karbenko heard footsteps coming along the footbridge toward him and he tilted up the corner of his hat to notice the Russian ambassador to the United States heavily puffing his fat way toward him.
Anatoly Duvicevski sat next to Karbenko, took a handkerchief from the breast pocket of his well-cut single-breasted suit, and mopped the sweat from his brow.
"You aren't exactly difficult to spot in that costume, Karbenko," said Duvicevski. He made no effort to hide the disapproval in his voice.
"The fellow down to the right, reading the newspaper. He's one of them. There's another in the telephone booth at the end of the bridge to the
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left," Karbenko said. "The one you passed without noticing."
Duvicevski glanced left and right.
"So the Americans know we're meeting," he said.
"But of course they know we're meeting, Comrade," Karbenko said. He drawled the "comrade" so it sounded like "pardner." "If the Americans can't hold a secret meeting in Washington, why should we be able to? It comes down to the fact that this is a nice day and this is a pretty spot for a meeting. The air is fresh and the birds are singing. Should we meet in a stuffy office somewhere and inhale each other's cigar smoke? And for what purpose? Because they will still know that we met."
Duvicevski grunted. Karbenko reassured him by clapping a large bony hand on his knee.
"So what happened?" he asked the still-sweating ambassador whose face had broken out in a second round of sweat.
"I just left the President. He explained Project Omega to me."
"Explain it to me," said Karbenko.
"It is a Doomsday plan that the Americans thought of in the fifties. It was supposed to go into action if they lost an atomic war but it has gone into action now and they do not know how to stop it."
"We have two diplomats dead," Karbenko said. "How many more targets are there ?"
"Just two," said Duvicevski. He looked at the Russian spy with narrowed eyes. "The ambassador to England and the premier."
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Karbenko whistled. "You have already so advised the Kremlin ?"
"Of course," said Duvicevski. "The premier is under special security guard. And all types of extra personnel have been assigned to protect the ambassador in London."
"How has the Kremlin received this news?" Karbenko asked.
"All our forces around the world are being put on standby, for a full combat alert. I understand there is now the highest level strategy meetings going on to determine whether or not to publicly blame the United States for these two dead ambassadors."
"What do you think?"
"I think if anything happens to our premier, some hothead in the Kremlin will push the button that will begin World War III. If that happens, you and I will be dead here in Washington, Karbenko."
"Did the President say anything else?"
"He offered us the use of some 'special personnel' he called them, to protect the premier and the ambassador. Of course, I turned him down. I assured him we could protect our people ourselves."
Karbenko thought for a moment.
"What kind of special personnel?" he asked.
"He did not say."
The two men sat silently, staring out over the bridge railing at the greasy waters of the Potomac. It was typical of what was wrong, and right, with America, Karbenko thought. A beautiful natural gem of a river that had been turned into a garbage dump and an oil slick because no
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one had thought to protect it. And now, it was finally being reclaimed by a massive expenditure of time and effort and money. No other civilized country in the world would have let the river get so bad. And no other country in the world, faced with so bad and dying a river, could have been able to mount the effort and the resources to reclaim it. America was a land of violent pendulum swings and much of the national energy was spent correcting excessive movements in one direction or another.
"Do you believe him ?" Karbenko finally asked.
"Do you take me for a fool? Of course not. Who would believe so childish a story?"
"I do," said Karbenko,
The sweating little egg of a man turned toward .the tall raw-boned Soviet spy.
"You aren't serious, Vassily."
"Look at it for a moment. If they just wanted to knock off some of our ambassadors, would they have used people we could trace to the CIA? People who've been drawing CIA money for twenty years? There are mercenaries all over the world that anybody could hire for such jobs. And no one would be the wiser. No. The story is too preposterous not to be true."
Duvicevski popped a cough drop into his mouth.
"You believe the President?" he asked.
"Yes," said Karbenko. He smiled. "Didn't he once say he'd never lie to us ?"