After she had left, he typed something into the Amtel keyboard in front of him, the device that allowed him and his secretary noiselessly to communicate during meetings or phone calls.
“What we’re about to discuss with you has to remain a matter of utmost secrecy.”
I nodded, took a sip of coffee. Some rich French-roast-plus-something-else blend; remarkably good.
“Charles, if you’ll excuse us,” Truslow said. Rossi got up and left the office, closing the door behind him.
“Rossi is our liaison with CIA,” Truslow explained. “He came down from Langley especially to work with you on this.”
“I’m not sure I understand,” I said.
“I got a call from Rossi last night. Given the sensitivity of the project we’ve been hired to do, the Agency, understandably, is concerned about security. They’ve insisted upon implementing their own clearance procedures.”
I nodded.
“It seems a bit excessive to me, too,” Truslow went on. “You’ve been vetted and cleared and all that nonsense. But before you can be cleared fully, Rossi would like to run you through some preliminary stuff. We’re required, by contract with the Central Intelligence Agency, to flutter all outside employees.”
“I see,” I said.
He was referring to the polygraph, the lie detector, to which all Agency employees are subjected a few times in their careers-at the beginning of their service, periodically thereafter, and sometimes after vital operations or in extraordinary cases.
“Ben,” Truslow went on, “you see, as the centerpiece of our investigation, we’d like you to track down Vladimir Orlov, and learn whatever you can about what happened in his meeting with your father-in-law. Orlov may have been playing a double game on Hal Sinclair, and I want to know whether he did or not.”
“Track Orlov down?” I said.
“This is about all I can tell you until you’ve been cleared. Once you’ve been fluttered, we can talk more.” He pressed a button on his desk, and Rossi returned.
Truslow came around the side of his massive desk and clapped Rossi’s shoulder. “I’ll turn you over to Charlie at this point,” he said, and then gripped my hand. “Welcome, friend.”
I could see Truslow turn once again to his Amtel and punch a button on his phone. As I left his office, I caught a last glimpse of him, a brooding, dark figure of intense energy silhouetted against the brilliant morning sunlight.
Charles Rossi drove me, in a dark blue government-issue sedan, across the river to an ultramodern building in the Kendall Square section of Cambridge, near the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Raytheon and Genzyme and all the other high-powered, high-tech corporations.
Leaving the elevator on the fifth floor, we entered a very functional-looking reception area, all chrome and steel and industrial-gray carpeting and blond woods. On the wall that faced us was a drab nameplate that said DEVELOPMENTAL RESEARCH LABORATORIES: AUTHORIZED VISITORS ONLY.
I knew at once this was a CIA-owned operation. Everything about it-the unrevealing name, the anonymity, the forbidding stillness-screamed Agency. I knew CIA ran labs and test facilities in the suburbs outside Washington, and in a building on Water Street in New York City; I hadn’t realized they also had a facility in Cambridge, in the land of MIT, but it made perfect sense.
Saying very little, Rossi led me through a set of large metal doors, which he opened by inserting a magnetic card in a vertical slot. The doors opened, yielding a view of an enormous room containing row upon row of computer terminals. In front of most of them people sat typing.
“Not much to look at, huh?” Rossi observed as we stood at the room’s entrance. “Pretty dull stuff.”
“You should see our firm,” I replied.
He laughed politely. “There’s actually a range of projects going on here. Microdevices, automated cryptography, machine vision, things like that. Are you familiar…?”
“Not terribly,” I admitted.
“Well, take automated cryptography. This is funded by DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration, a part of the Defense Department.”
I nodded as he escorted me toward one terminal, a SPARC-2 workstation, at which a wiry young bearded man seemed to be working furiously. “Now, this terminal is made by Sun Microsystems, and it’s ‘talking’ to a supercomputer, a Thinking Machines Corporation CM-3.”
“I see.”
“Anyway, Keith here is developing plain-text encryption algorithms. That means codes that are, theoretically at least, unbreakable. In simple English, that will allow us to translate, encode top secret information into a form that’ll resemble some innocuous-looking document in English-not nonsense, but real prose. Then, by means of speech recognition, our computers will be able to decrypt it-trapdoor codes, I mean, knapsack codes, that sort of thing.”
I didn’t see, but I nodded anyway. Rossi, however, turned out to be quite observant. “I’m yakking,” he apologized. “Let me put it another way. An agent in the field will be able to encode a classified document into a script for an ordinary news program broadcast over the Voice of America. To anyone listening it won’t sound like anything unusual, but the right computer will be able to decrypt it.”
“Nice.”
“Oh, anyway, there are a number of things we’re working on. Microdevices, for instance, are being designed here-we have them made elsewhere, by a nanofabrication laboratory.”
“And what are they used for?”
He wagged his head back and forth, as if indecisively, and then said, “These are tiny devices made of silicon and xenon, a few angstroms wide, which can, let’s say, be placed undetectably into a computer, serve as a transmitting device. There are far more interesting uses, but I’m not really free to go into it. So, if I may…”
We returned to the white corridor, then entered another secured area, which Rossi accessed by inserting a different magnetic card in the vertical slot. He turned to me and observed simply, “Security.”
Now we were in an entirely white, windowless corridor. A plaque directly in front of us said AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.
Rossi led me down this corridor, through another set of doors, and into a peculiar-looking concrete chamber. At the center of the chamber was a smaller chamber, glass-enclosed, which contained a large white machine, maybe fifteen feet high by ten feet wide. It resembled a large square doughnut. Outside the glass walls was a bank of computer monitors.
“A magnetic resonance imager,” I said. “I’ve seen them in hospitals. But this one looks quite a bit larger.”
“Very good. The MRI you usually see in hospitals might range anywhere from a.5 tesla to a 1.5 tesla-a tesla is a measure of the strength of the magnet inside. Once in a great while you might see a two tesla in highly specialized use. This is a four.”
“Awfully powerful.”
“But quite safe. And modified somewhat. I directed the modification.” Rossi’s eyes roamed the bare concrete room as if distracted.
“Safe for what?”
“You’re looking at a replacement for the old polygraph. A modified MRI will soon be used by the Agency in debriefing intelligence officers, defectors, agents, and so on, to provide a reliable mental ‘fingerprint.’”
“Would you like to explain that?”
“I’m sure you’re aware of the many drawbacks of the old polygraph system.”
I was, but I listened as he explained.
“The old polygraph technique relies on blood pressure cuffs and electrodes that measure galvanic skin responses, sweat, changes in skin temperature, and so on. It’s crude, and it’s only-what?-sixty percent reliable. If that.”
“All right,” I said impatiently.
Rossi continued patiently: “The Soviets didn’t even use the thing, as you may know. They gave seminars on how to beat it. For God’s sake, do you remember the time when twenty-seven Cuban DGI double agents working against us were cleared by CIA flutter?”