The Second Saladin (47 page)

Jerry made another face. “Whenever an item is transmitted, it’s automatically recorded in a master directory by slug line. When the master directory reaches a certain level, all the stuff is automatically transferred to tape. But when that happens, at the same time the Extel printer generates this”—the metal notebook—“printout. Then later we index by months of the year.”

“So it’s chronological?”

“Yeah, but the machine gives you other breakdowns too. The idea is to be able to get your hands on something fast.”

“Sure, I realize that.”

“It’s got a listing by target, by geographical zone, by—”

“What about alphabetically?”

“You mean by the code group?”

“That’s right.”

“Yeah, it does that. Let me—” He flipped through the thick notebook.

“Yeah, here it is. It’s—”

“Jerry, look for
shoe.”

Jerry looked at him. “You’ve got something exceedingly strange going on, Miles. I never heard of—”

“Jerry, when a Deputy Director tells you to check
something out, you don’t exactly tell him he’s full of shit.”

“Well, I’ve been here a long—”

“It might not be shoe, S-H-O-E. It might be H-S-U, a Chinese word of the same pronunciation. Or it could be, well, I suppose it—”

Jerry pushed through the printouts. He halted.

Miles bent forward, over the desk. He could smell Jerry’s cheap cologne and the plastic, oceans of plastic, in the calm air. Jerry’s finger pointed to the middle of the page and had come to rest at a designation for the ninth disc. It said, C
ODE
S
ERIES
P-R-O to H-S-U.

“I don’t like it. No, I don’t. I don’t like it at all,” said Leo Bennis, driving tensely through the late night traffic as they turned off Key Bridge onto M Street in Georgetown.

Chardy agreed by inserting the magazine into the grip housing of the Ingram. He’d already checked that the bulky silencer was screwed on tight. He unfolded the metal stock, then folded it again, purely to familiarize himself. The entire weapon weighed less than six pounds, yet it could spit its load of thirty-two .380s in four seconds in almost absolute silence. The Bureau people loved it; Chardy hated it and would have given anything for an AK-47 or an M-16, a piece he could trust.

“There are really only two possibilities,” Leo said tonelessly. “Either Danzig just flipped out and bolted on his own, in which case he’s walking the streets like a madman and will be picked up by morning; or, more likely, the man inside got to him somehow and has lured him out. In which case we’ll find out soon too—find the body.”

“How does the safety work?”

“There’s two. A lever in the trigger guard, just in front
of the trigger. And the bolt handle: by twisting it a quarter turn you put the piece on safe.”

Chardy cocked the weapon.

“Be careful with that thing,” Leo said.

“They kick much on you?” he asked.

“Not hardly. There’s not enough powder in that pistol slug. Paul, I think you’re going to have to re-join the operation. You tell ’em you’re out of the hospital, you’re okay. You go back to Danzig’s and see what the hell is going on. You could put some questions to the Security people. Sam’ll probably be there too. Shit, it just occurs to me they’re going to raise hell looking for Lanahan. We can—”

“What’s the trigger? About fifteen pounds?”

“No, it’s much lighter. They vary: some of ’em go off if you look at them. That’s why I said to go easy with it. But it should be about ten pounds unless some hotdog has messed with the spring. I wonder how long he’s been gone? He could have been gone
hours
and they only noticed forty-five minutes ago. Paul, I’ll head back—”

A Pontiac jumped into the lane ahead, then careened to a halt at the light and Leo had to pump his own brake hard.

“Jerk. Goddammit! Look at this terrible traffic. You can’t drive in this city anymore.”

“It’s okay, Leo,” Chardy said. He opened the door. “Paul!”

“See you, Leo.” He hung in the door as a car swooped by them.

“Paul, they need us back there, they—”

“They want
you
back, Leo,” Chardy said. “You work for them. I don’t.” He smiled, and stepped into the dark, the machine pistol and a radio unit hidden in his gathered coat.

A
fter a long drive they dropped Ulu Beg at a Metro station in a suburb of Washington. It had been a silent trip, through twilight across farm fields, then over a great American engineering marvel, a huge bridge, and then into the city, but now Speshnev turned to him from the front seat.

“You remember it all?”

“I do.”

“It will be easy. The killing is the easiest of all. He’ll be alone this time. You’ll shoot for the head?”

“The face. From very close. I will see brains.”

“May I tell you a joke?”

The Russian and his jokes! A strange fellow, stranger than any of them. Even the young man who’d done the driving turned to listen.

“The man he expects to meet,” Speshnev said, “is Chardy. Delicious, isn’t it? This war criminal flees his own protection to meet the one man in the world he trusts; instead he meets the one man in the world who has willed his death.”

These ironies held little interest to Ulu Beg; he nodded curtly.

The driver climbed out and walked around the car and opened Ulu Beg’s door.

“AH right,” said Speshnev.

Ulu Beg stepped into light rain. The street teemed with Americans. Globular lamps stood about, radiating brown light to illuminate the slant of the falling water. They were at a plaza, near a circle of buses. People streamed toward the station; he could see the trains on a bridge above the entrance. It was all very modern.

“You must not fail,” said the colonel.

“As God wills it,” said Ulu Beg.

The door closed and the car rushed off through the rain. He stood by the curb for a second, watching it melt into the traffic, then pushed his way through the crowd to the station. With the exact change he bought a fare card from a machine and went through turnstiles to be admitted to the trains. He carried his pack in his left hand; inside it was the Skorpion.

Danzig left the theater at 11:30. His brain reeled from the imagery: organs, gigantic and absurd, abstract openings. He thought of wet doorways, of plumbing, of open heart surgery. It had given him a tremendous headache. He’d had to sit through the feature three times. As a narrative the film had an inanity that was almost beyond description: things just occurred in an offhand, casual way, contrived feebly so that the actresses could drop to their knees and suck off the actors every four or five minutes. The acting was amateurish—organ size was evidently the only criterion for casting on this production—and film technique nonexistent. The music was banal; only the photography had been first-rate.

At last he breathed in the air, cool, made clean by the rain which had now stopped. He cut quickly across M Street and headed down a street that he knew would take
him to the river’s edge. Then, really, he had but to walk a mile along the river—away from the police, who surely sought him now, away from prying eyes. It could be dangerous, the bleak streets of the city down by the river. Still, what choice had he? He loved the sense of danger in one respect: he approached it rather than letting it approach him, like an animal in a slaughterhouse pen. He walked on, a pudgy figure, pushing into the night.

At last Lanahan was alone with the machine. In its unlit screen he could see the outline of his own figure, shadowy, imprecise, bent forward with monk’s devotion. Around him he could hear the hum of the fans and the strokes of the other operators.

The Model 1750 Harris Video Display Terminal was twice the size of the earlier model he’d worked with in the pit. It looked to the uninformed eye like a cross between a television set and an electric typewriter, clunky and graceless. But it was his access to the brain, the memory, of Langley.

If he had the codes
.

He flicked the machine—curious, in the jargon they’d never become known by their proper designation, VDT, or by anything reasonable. Rather, to them all, atavistically, they were simply Machines.

The machine warmed for twenty seconds; then a green streak—the first stirring of creation—flashed at light-speed across the screen; then a blip, a bright square called a cursor, arrived in the lower left corner: it was the machine operator’s hand, the expression of his will.

Miles stared at the rectangle of light gleaming at him in the half-dark. His fingers fell to a familiar pose and he felt the keys beneath them.

He typed:

Immediately the machine answered.

Directory Inactive

All right then, you bastard.

He thought for a moment. He’d taken the easy shot, and lost. But let’s not panic. Let’s dope this thing out. We are looking for something hidden years ago. Hidden, but meant to be found if you knew you were looking for it. And meant to be found if you were Paul Chardy. This guy Frenchy Short was said to be smart. And he must have known the machines, the system, if he’d been able to tuck something away.

A play on
shoe
. The shoe fits. Chinese spelling. He’d tried it, it hadn’t worked. But let’s not forget shoes altogether; perhaps one still fits.

Fe Shu
, Miles tried.

The machine paused. No answer.

Christ, suppose it was a secret directory, and when tapped it signaled a security monitor? Such directories were rumored to exist, yet no analyst had ever found one.

The screen was blank.

Then:

Improper Code Prefix

Damn, wrong number.

He had a headache now, and an eruption on his forehead throbbed. Miles rubbed at it with a small finger. Already his back ached; it had been a long time since he’d
made his living in a machine cubicle. He’d been in daylight too long, ruining his machine vision.

Think, damn you, think.

FE SHU, he tried again, making certain to leave only one space between the command and the code, for in a moment of rush or confusion he thought he might have left two—or none—the first time through, and the machines—this is why he loved them so—were monstrously petty and literal and absolutely unbending and would forgive no breach of etiquette.

The directory began to scroll up across the screen.

Danzig could see it now—ahead, along the water, beyond the neo-baroque mass of the Watergate buildings. He was alone on an esplanade at the riverbank. Across the flat calm water lay Theodore Roosevelt Island; above its trees he could see Rosslyn skyscrapers. He looked ahead; could he see a flicker on a hill that would be Kennedy’s grave site, a
memento mori
for the evening? Or was it his imagination? He hurried through the night, on a walk by the water, among trees.

The rain had stopped and back where the river was wider, near the arches of the Key Bridge, the lights from a boat winked. Danzig could not but wonder who was out there. He’d patrolled the Potomac occasionally with a neurotic chief executive—much liquor and endless, aimless, righteous monologues, lasting almost until dawn. But Danzig’s thoughts turned quickly from history to—for the first time in many weeks—sex. He had an image of a beautiful blond woman, elegant, a Georgetowner of statuesque proportions and great enthusiasms—just the two of them alone aboard a mahogany yacht in the Potomac, setting the boat to rocking with their exertions. He paused; from behind a shredding of the clouds came the moon, its satiny light playing on the river. A scene of astonishing
allure for Danzig: black bank, black sky, silver moon on the water—a Hollywood scene. He paused, then halted.

He had many years ago abandoned all belief in the unearthly. Man was too venal, too evil. Reality demanded fealty only to the here and now. Yet this sudden image of sheer, painful beauty, coming as it did immediately after visions of the sexual and the historical, placed before him at the ultimate moment of his life: surely now, this meant something.

But even as he paused to absorb it, it began to fall apart. The clouds reclaimed the moon; the glinting sea returned to a more authentic identity as a sluggish river; the yacht under the bridge resolved itself, as he studied it, into a houseboat.

Danzig checked his watch. He had plenty of time. Chardy was probably already there.

He rushed through the night. On the other side of Rock Creek Parkway he could see the white edifice looming up, something on the Egyptian scale, arc-lit for drama, like a monument. Its balcony hung almost to the river, over the road. He hurried along, amazed at how dark and silent it all was.

He passed under the balcony, and felt indoors. He continued to the midpoint of the building where a door had been cut in the blank brick of the foundation, recessed in a notch in the wall. Danzig crossed the parkway and climbed three steps to the door. He paused.

Suppose it was locked?

No, Chardy said it was open.

Danzig’s hand checked the handle.

He pulled it open and stepped inside.

Their efficiency never astonished Ulu Beg. They could do so much; they
knew
so much. He took it by now as
second nature, simply accepted it. It was as if he were operating in their country, not in America.

He had gotten off at the Foggy Bottom stop. But he had not left the platform, hurried up the steps to the way out with the other passengers. He paused, on a stone bench. He was in a huge, honeycombed vault that curved over his head. It blazed with the drama of lights and shadows. Shortly, another train came along. A few people got out; a few got on. That was the 11:45 from Rosslyn; it was the last train. Ulu Beg took a quick look through the vaulted space. People paraded out. Nobody paid him attention.

He walked quickly to the end of the chamber, to the sheer wall into which the tunnels were cut. He looked back and saw nothing. A few people lingered on the balcony above, but they were a hundred feet away and moving out toward the door.