"How much, General?"
"All of it."
"Even the plane, sir?"
Coppersmith swiveled his chair around so that he could look straight at her. "When we use a man like that, Sarah, we have to bring him all the way in. Tell him everything you know. You know everything I know. Everything. His life is going to depend on it."
"Even the camera?"
Coppersmith nodded. "Of course. We're giving him Atomsk. Do you understand — giving it to him? He'll worry about it from now on."
Captain Lomax felt the weight of weeks slipping from her. Ever since the first reports had come through, they had been pure nightmare. The story was tantalizing, strange, terrifying in its implications of the unknown; but even worse than knowledge was the secrecy. She had gone to sleep fearing she would speak in her dream; she had crossed streets afraid that a car might hit her, hurt her, make her delirious, so that she would say the unmentionable word — Atomsk.
The news came in from three different directions, but in each case it bore the name: the city of Atomsk. The first report was handed in by the Chinese. A military officer from Nationalist intelligence brought a special memorandum to the American Ambassador in Nanking. The original Chinese report was beautifully brush-written. The accompanying English-language text was typed with a purple ribbon on wretched paper. The story was simple:
One of the spies of the Generalissimo had been sent to reconnoiter Russian dealings with the Chinese Communists. He found himself on the track of something strangely interesting. Pretending to be a simple coolie, he blundered his way into an underground Russian city in Eastern Siberia. The name of the city was given in Chinese as Ya-t'ung-ssu-k'e and in Russian letters as ATOMCK — Atomsk. The Russians had been suspicious of him and had made him drink a glass of milky-colored water which caused him to become ill. But he escaped and got back to the Nationalist lines in Mukden, just before Mukden fell. The spy died before he could be flown out.
He had only one specific message: "Gauze nets of silly beast, suction two or four."