And nothing would happen.
Would it?
Dukas told himself that he was suffering case-officer jitters. You sent somebody out, he fell off the face of the earth as far as you were concerned, of course you questioned what you were doing. Imagined worst-case scenarios. So what was the worst case here? Dukas frowned. What could possibly be the worst case with an old comm plan that had been unused for seven years? Your man walked into the Orchid House and—
Dukas picked up a folder and got ready to read. He even took out the reading glasses they’d given him at his last physical and that he never used, except that now he was reading all day, day after day, and his eyes felt like hot bullets that had been superglued into their sockets. He started to read about alternative explanations for radio bursts that NSA thought they had detected in western Canada. The prose made him groan. Solar flares! Shifting magnetic fields!
Dukas stared at the telephone. Something was bugging him, and he knew that the something was partly Alan’s mission in Jakarta, but only partly; some of it was this goddamned case itself.
“It smells,” he said out loud. The smell wasn’t strong, and it wasn’t bad, but it was there. Dukas actually put his nose down and sniffed the pages in front of him. The odor was slightly musty, slightly dry and woody. Papery. Dukas thought of some storage site in Maryland or Virginia, somewhere secure but unknown to most people at Langley, a dead end for old Agency folders.
He got up and walked along the corridor and swung into another office, one hand low on the doorway to support himself without stressing his injury. “Hey, Brackman,” he said.
“Yoh.” An overweight black man was tapping a computer keyboard. He didn’t look away from the screen.
“How long has the CIA been using computers?”
“Long time, some of them; no time, a lot of them. Computer illiterates, lot of them.”
“They still doing files on paper in, say, ninety-seven?”
Brackman turned away from the screen and focused on a half-eaten Devil Dog. “Some of the holdouts, sure.” He ate the Devil Dog. “Very conservative place.”
Dukas walked back to his office, poured himself coffee from Triffler’s machine, and sat on his desk, one hand on the telephone and a look on his face as if some source of deep dissatisfaction had been tapped. He fiddled his fingers on the telephone. He chewed his upper lip with his lower teeth. He made a sound with his tongue and the roof of his mouth, Tt-Tt-Tt. He picked up the phone and hit a button and said, “Find out how I get a Nav pilot who’s flying out of Pax River. Call me back.”
Ten minutes later, the phone rang. He’d done nothing more with the folders in that time but had sat at his desk, staring at the wall. “Okay.” He scribbled a number. “Thanks.” He called and was put on to a duty officer who told him that Commander Rose Siciliano was in the air but expected back before lunch. Dukas left a message that she should call him, and then he went back to the folders and slogged; when she called at eleven-fifty, he was sighing and groaning, and the first thing he had to do was reassure Rose that he wasn’t calling about Alan — nothing had happened, everything was fine, there was no news. “What I want you to do is invite Sally Baranowski to dinner,” he said.
“You still haven’t called her?” Rose snapped.
“I’ve been busy, babe, plus — you know—”
“You want me to be there so you won’t be on the spot, right?”
Dukas sighed again. “This isn’t what you think.”
“Oh, right.”
“It’s sort of business.”
“Funny business.”
“No — damn it, babe — it has to do with the case.”
“Alan’s case?”
“Yeah.”
That was different, she said. She’d invite Baranowski, although she wasn’t really running a restaurant. Tonight would be fine, although she’d planned to have a night alone with her kids and then wash her hair. Anything for you, Mike, you coward.
“Six?” he said.
“Six-thirty, and bring some wine and a dessert.”
Dukas had a pizza sent in for his lunch, and at one, unable to control his jitters, he decided to call Alan in Jakarta, and then he decided he couldn’t.
Colonel Lao was a day back from Pakistan when the message about the mark in Jakarta came. He was supposed to be an advisor on urban-rural relations, a subject, in fact, in which he had a good deal of knowledge (his training to be an intelligence chief at a foreign station had been excellent), but one that bored him. He had spent part of the day at a village forty miles from Dar, watching a performance of the Chinese-sponsored theater-for-development troupe’s Hope Is the Village, a play that seemed to him small return for six weeks of work and a good deal of Chinese money. By the time he got back to the office, the message had been on his desk for two hours. It had been rerouted from Beijing, re-encrypted, received and logged at the embassy in Dar, then marked “Most Urgent” and hand-carried to his desk, where it had sat.
Lao looked down at the sealed envelope. What is the use of all the secrecy and all the hurry if I am out wasting my time in a muddy village? he wondered. He ripped open the envelope, found himself angered by an inner envelope and its stamps—“Most Urgent!” “Most Secret!” “Unauthorized Persons DO NOT OPEN!”—and ripped it so savagely that he tore part of the flimsy sheet inside. However, nothing was seriously damaged, and he saw that the message within had the class mark Wealthy Songbird, meaning that it had to do with the frightening but glorious task he had been given — finding his rival, the missing Colonel Chen, and the intelligence funds that had disappeared with him.
He had to do his own decoding, Wealthy Songbird being too secret even for the embassy cryptographers, but the message was short, and his interest in it carried him through the drudgery of it. All that it told him was that a mark had been left on an antique cannon in Jakarta, and that the Jakarta watcher had reported it exactly as if to Chen himself, because of course the watcher knew nothing of Chen or his disappearance or, in fact, anything at all. Lao had a moment’s envy for the watcher in Jakarta, somebody lucky enough not to be caught up in a tangle of ambition, deceit, strategy. Lao sighed.
He opened the Chen files and searched for Jakarta, found it in eleven of them, found the mark that the watcher had seen in the communications plan called American Go. The plan was not Chinese, Lao recognized at once; Chen’s agent in the CIA, George Shreed, must have drafted it, as Lao now knew the agent was named. Who, like Chen, had also disappeared. And who was supposed to have been buried nine days ago in Washington, although that was being checked.
Lao sighed again, wondered if he had caught something in the cold rain in Pakistan. He thought that this was not a real illness but a reaction to the beginning of an operation that would be difficult and long and, quite possibly, disastrous for him.
The immediate question to be answered was, Who had left the mark in Jakarta, and why? Was it Shreed — supposedly dead, but not necessarily so — trying to contact the missing Chen? Chen himself, trying to throw off pursuers like Lao? Some third party, working for both of them? The CIA, using a dead Shreed’s files?