The Source Read Online Free Page B

basin under
the dam. He’d been picked up five miles down-river from Perchorsk, floating on his back in calm waters but gradually drifting toward falls which must surely have killed him. If that had happened … nothing remarkable about it: a logger and spare-time prospector, one Mikhail Simonov, falls in a river, is exhausted by the cold and drowns. An accident which could happen to anyone; he wasn’t the first and wouldn’t be the last. The West could make up its own mind about the truth of it, if they ever found out about it at all.
    But Simmons hadn’t drowned; “sympathetic” people had been out looking for him ever since his failure to return to the logging camp; they’d found him, cared for him, given him into the hands of agents who’d got him out through an escape route tried and true. And Jazz himself remembering only the scantiest details of it, brief, blurry snatches from the few occasions when he’d been conscious. A lucky man. Indeed a very lucky man …
    His days were uncomplicated during that long period of recuperation. Uncomfortable but uncomplicated. He would wake up to slowly increasing pain, a pain which seemed to stem from his very veins as much as from any identifiable limb or organ. Immobile, his lower half encased and (he suspected) in some sort of traction, his left arm splinted and swathed and his head similarly wrapped, waking up was like moving from some darkly surreal land to an equally weird world of grey shadows and soft external movements.
    Light came in through the bandages, but it was like trying to see through inches of snow or a heavily frosted window. His entire face had been very badly bruised, apparently, but the doctors had managed to save his eyes. Now he must rest them, and the rest of his body, too. Simmons had never been vain; he didn’t ask about his face. But he did wonder about it. That was only natural.
    His dreams disturbed him most, those dreams he
could never quite remember, except that they were deeply troubled and full of anxiety and accusation. He would worry about them and puzzle over them in the period between waking and the pain starting, but after that his only concern would be the pain. At least they’d given him a button he could press to let them know he was awake. “Them”: the angels of this peculiar hell on earth, his doctor and his Debriefing Officer.
    They would come, shadows through the snow of his bandages; the doctor would feel his pulse (never more than that) and cluck like a worried hen; the Debriefing Officer would say: “Easy now, Mike, easy!” And in would go the needle. It didn’t put him out, just took away the pain and made it easy to talk. He talked not only because the DO wanted him to and because he knew he must, but also out of sheer gratitude. That’s how bad the pain could get.
    He’d been told this much: that while he was badly banged about he wasn’t beyond repair. There’d been some surgery and more to come, but the worst of it was over. The pain-killer they’d used had been highly addictive and now they had to wean him off it, but his dosage was coming down and soon he’d be on pills alone, by which time the pain wouldn’t be nearly so bad. Meanwhile the DO had to get everything he knew—every last iota of information—out of him, and he had to be sure he was getting the truth. The “damned Johnnie-Red” might have inserted stuff in there that wasn’t real, “don’tcha know.” With the methods they used these days they could alter a man’s memory, his entire perception of things, “the damned boundahs!” Jazz hadn’t known there were people who still talked like that.
    And so, to ensure they were digging out the “gen stuff,” they’d started right back at the beginning before Simmons had ever been recruited by the Secret Service, indeed before he’d been born