Louise wanted him to stay at home, but he’d left as soon as she’d lain down on the couch and fallen asleep. “Hey, take it easy,” Zimmerman said, reaching for him, but Rencke pulled away. “Where are my things?”
“It was Mr. McGarveys call. We put everything in the safe room. Are you okay?” “What about the stuff in my car?” “We’ve got that, too,”
Zimmerman said. “Would you mind telling me what you’ve been working on? We burned a couple of your disks trying to find out.” Rencke glanced at his monitors. “We didn’t dare touch them,” Zimmerman said.
“The whole place would probably blow up.” The chief of computer services was a slightly built man with thinning gray hair and a pencil-thin mustache. He was very bright, although his real strength was administration: “If you can direct the gee ks you can run the system,” he said, not unkindly. “It’s too early,” Rencke mumbled.
“Lavender, you know. Bad. Getting badder.” There was light spilling over some of the walls in his head, like the sun on the horizon, or like the blue glow from the core of a swimming pool reactor. That in itself was a thought: a chain reaction building like a chain letter.
What if there were impurities in the core? What if just the right impurities were added, would the results tell what was going on inside.
Like an alloy. “Bring my things back,” he said, absently. He took off his jacket, tossed it toward a chair, which it missed, then started bringing his search engines back on-line one at a time.
Even now when his head was fragmenting he could appreciate the simple beauty of his programs. His machines had no opinions except for an appreciation of a deft touch on the keyboard. They didn’t care about his background, about how he looked, his clothes, his hair, his mannerisms, which he knew were sometimes odd, out of the ordinary. They did things for him without question or judgment. When he looked up it was a few minutes after six and he was surprised to see that someone had brought back all of his files. The table was piled, the floor was littered and several satellite shots of downtown Moscow were pinned to the divider. Zimmerman was gone and McGarvey stood in the doorway in his place. He seemed tired to Rencke, maybe even a little battered and bruised, as if he, too, had been in a car accident. He looked sad, the thought popped into Rencke’s head. “Oh, wow, Mac,” Rencke said. “What are you doing here?” “Trying to find out what the hell is happening to a friend of mine. His name is Otto Rencke. You haven’t seen him, have you?” Rencke turned back to face his monitor. He was inside the SVR’s Washington embassy computer center. He touched the escape key and the monitor went blank. His narrow shoulders were hunched forward. He was aware of the aches and pains from his accident; he wasn’t taking the pills the doctor had given him. He wanted his head screwed on as straight as possible under the circumstances. For the first time ever he didn’t know what to say to Mac. Something terrible was about to happen, and he had no idea how to explain it to anyone. Even his own thoughts were so compartmentalized that his brain was a jumble; a jagged mishmash of garishly colored shards of glass. He remembered when Mac had come to him the first time here in Washington, in Georgetown, at the Holy Rood house. The CIA had dumped them both. Mac had gone to ground in Switzerland, and Otto had hidden out in the open at home. Neither one of them had been doing much of any significance.
But then Mac had come calling with a little problem that had wound up with the deaths of Baranov and the Company’s DDO, John Lyman Trotter, Jr. But more than that, Mac’s coming back had legitimized Otto. Given him a fresh purpose for his life. It was a gift that he could never repay. Not in a thousand years, not in ten thousand million years of trying. He could see McGarvey’s reflection in the blank screen of his monitor. “I’m busy, what do you want?”
“I want to know what’s going on?” “What do you mean?” “Louise called.
She’s worried. You should be at home.” Rencke shrugged. “How about that.” He spoke to the computer screen. “My girlfriend calls, and the DCI comes running. What are you really doing down here?” “The Russians have been looking for one of their people from the old days.
They’ve asked Interpol and the DGSE for help. He disappeared in August, and you requested his file not too long after that. You’ve got Liz involved now, and Karl is worried that you’re going to fry his entire system. Put all of us out of work.” Rencke had been holding a pent-up breath. He blew it out all at once as if he was trying to fog up his monitor. His fingers flew over the keyboard, burying the program he’d been working with to a place where it could not be retrieved by anyone but himself. “It’s lavender, didn’t I tell you?”
He glanced at the extremely high-altitude Moscow photos on the wall, then turned to McGarvey. “I’m down here in my lair doing my job, just like you hired me to do, ya know,” he grumbled. “But I can’t do it like this. People coming and going, screwing with me.” Some of the files on the table lay open, some of them displayed the old KGB’s sword-and-shield logo. Post-it notes were stuck to some of the pages.
“The hospital was boring,” he said, looking away again. “Nothing to do. The nurses were as bad as Louise. She’s trying, ya know, but trying too hard. Sometimes it drives you crazy, ya know?” He grinned and shook his head. It was the best he could do, but he was bleeding inside. Hemorrhaging. “She should be at work. We should all be at work. Twenty-four, seven.” McGarvey cleared a spot on the table and perched on the edge. Otto kept trying to avoid eye contact, but McGarvey was patient. As if he had all the time in the world.
“Sometimes it’s easier to see than other times. Then Zimmerman comes in here and wipes out everything I was trying to do. Tossed some of it, cause I can’t find a whole bunch of stuff. Shelved the rest. I lost good time here.” His left hand rested on the keyboard, as if he were making reassuring contact with an old, troubled friend. “His name is Nikolayev,” McGarvey said. “The Russians haven’t been able to find him, and neither has Interpol. He was one of Baranov’s Department Viktor experts. I think maybe you’ve found him.” Rencke shook his head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You requested his file.” “No.” “Jay Newby said you did,” McGarvey said, suddenly angry. His patience was wearing thin. “What the hell are you playing at, Otto?” Rencke’s eyes were wide. “If I pulled his file, it had to be something routine. Probably the Interpol request.
But I don’t remember, Mac. Honest injun.” He waved his arms. “Circle the wagons, but I’m on the inside, kimo sabe, not on the outside.”
“You’re lying-” “No!” Rencke cried. “Liz is just looking down your track to write the history. She wants to be her father’s biographer.