“All right,” Adkins replied. “No one is safe anymore. But that has to change.” “We’ll give it a try.” When Adkins was gone, McGarvey called Otto Rencke’s extension in the computer center on the third floor. Back like this he was having trouble with people depending on him. Part of the job. But trust gave him an odd feeling between his shoulder blades, as if someone with a high-power rifle was taking a bead on him.
Otto answered on the first ring, his voice sharp, even shrill. “What do you want?” “Good morning, what’s eating your ass?” “I’m busy. What do you want?” “I want to know what you were doing at my house yesterday, and why you just sat in the driveway without ringing the bell.” “Somebody else.” “What?” “Somebody else. I wasn’t out there.
Louise and I spent the entire weekend painting the apartment. And each other.” Otto’s tone of voice softened a little; more like his old self. “Maybe you oughta get security out there, ya know. Don’t want it purple. That’s the color for a shroud. Bad. Bad. Bad dog.
Something might be gainin’ on you, ya know.” “What are you talking about?” “Not ready yet,” Otto replied distantly, as if his mind had suddenly gone elsewhere. “Difficult, delicate. Still pastels, but I don’t know, can’t say. Just look up, Mac; we all gotta keep our eyes really open, ya know. All the time, not just in the night.” Rencke broke the connection, something chiming in the background noises of his office, and McGarvey was mystified. When Otto was in the middle of something he tended to go off to his own little world. But this was different. He had never had this harsh an edge before.
SIX
HE HAD TO WONDER IF WHAT HE HAD ACCOMPLISHED HAD REALLY MATTERED AT ALL, OR IF HIS CAREER HAD BEEN NOTHING BUT A WASTED EFFORT.
The U.S. Intelligence Board meeting ran ten minutes past the lunch hour, but nobody grumbled. There was a sense of accomplishment now that a new DCI was at the helm. McGarvey presented the distinguished service intelligence medals to Whittaker’s people, grabbed a quick sandwich at his desk while dictating letters to Ms. Swanfeld, then returned a few phone calls and did some work on the draft of his opening statement. He spent a couple of contentious hours with Carleton Paterson, who insisted on playing devil’s advocate; acting as he thought Senator Hammond might act, working at every turn to provoke McGarvey into making an angry outburst; say something impolitic. “If it gets too bad, I’ll keep my mouth shut,” McGarvey promised. “I might throttle the senator, but I won’t say a thing.” “Hammond’s not a bad man like Joe McCarthy was,” Paterson said seriously. “He really believes that what he is doing is for the good of the country.” “I know, and I won’t actually choke him to death,” McGarvey said, smiling.
“Not unless I snap.” Paterson gathered his papers and stuffed them into his attache case. “I used to wonder if there was anything behind that super efficient cool, macho exterior of yours. Like maybe a sense of humor.” He shook his head. “I guess I just found out. I suggest you don’t take your wry wit into the hearing chambers. You won’t have a lot of understanding friends there.” “No DCI has.” “True.” After his directorate meetings and his talk with the ambassador to India, he went down to the competition-size pool in the basement gym to do his laps. It was 6:00 P.M. Yemm swam with him, as usual. DCIs were not allowed to drown themselves, even accidentally, especially not on Yemm’s watch. And anyway, Yemm needed the exercise, too. The act of swimming was mindless, just like the treadmill in the mornings, freeing McGarvey’s mind to drift to Otto Rencke, who, despite his eccentricities, or perhaps because of them, was possibly the most valuable man in the Agency. He was able to see things that no one else could. He’d once explained to McGarvey that he had worked on the problem of describing color to a blind Indian mathematician. “Toughest thing I ever did, ya know. Oh, wow, but it was cool.” Using a complicated series of tensor calculus matrices, he was able to first establish neutrality white. Then he separated the equations into their constituent parts; the way white light separates into a rainbow of colors through a prism. “The eighth-order equations were my prism, and in the end Ravi kissed me, and said, “I see. Thank you very much.” “
The same concept in reverse, representing very difficult mathematics by colors, was Otto’s breakthrough. He’d already quantified millions of pieces of seemingly random data and intelligence information into the form of mathematical equations, so now he could reduce the complicated decisions that an intelligence officer had to make into colors.
Pastels were at the edge of his understanding; not strong, not clear.
But lavender, and especially purple stood for very bad situations acts of terrorism, assassinations, even wars. To this point Rencke had never been wrong, not once. When a color showed up he could predict what was coming. They got dressed at seven. On the way down to the car they stopped at the third-floor computer center. This was where Otto usually worked, in the midst of the Agency’s mainframe and three interconnected Cray supercomputers. The huge, dimly lit blue room was kept cooler than the rest of the building. It smelled strongly of electronic equipment, and no one ever wanted to speak above a whisper.
Mysterious forces beyond human ken were in operation here. The computer was like the tabernacle that held the host on a Catholic Church altar; holy of holies. There were niches and alcoves scattered throughout the room, nestled amidst the equipment, where the human operators worked. They hadn’t seen Otto for most of the afternoon, though no one could say exactly when he had left. It was like that down here; he was an elusive figure, like the shadows beneath a shifting pattern of clouds. The niche where he usually worked was a filthy mess of computer printouts, paper cups, milk cartons and McDonald’s wrappers strewn on the floor and on a long worktable; wastepaper baskets overflowing, shredder baskets filled, classified satellite downloads lying everywhere. The infrared and visible light images appeared to be mostly of Eastern Europe and Russia. McGarvey recognized the Baltic coastlines of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia up to Finland, and then the cities of Helsinki, Leningrad and as far east as Moscow. One of the monitors displayed the sword-and-shield logo of the old KGB against a pastel pink background. McGarvey touched enter, and the screen immediately went blank. “Doesn’t look like he wants anyone snooping around,” Yemm said. “Apparently not,” McGarvey replied absently. He stared at the blank screen. He was concerned. There was nothing currently on the front burner about the KGB. But Otto was in the middle of something. What? Time to talk to the Company shrink?
He looked at the piles of classified photographs littering the area.
He didn’t want to lose Otto. Or even worse, he didn’t want Otto to run amok; the entire CIA could suffer. The damage could ultimately be worse than what Aldrich Ames had done to them. He telephoned the computer center night duty supervisor and asked him to clean up the monitor area that Rencke had been using and secure any classified documents he found. “He won’t be happy, Mr. McGarvey.” I’ll talk to him.” On the way home he stared at the heavy traffic on the Parkway, suddenly depressed. It was dark already, and it was supposed to snow again. He shivered even though it was warm in the car. “Do you ever think about getting out of the business, Dick?” he asked. “Every day, boss,” Yemm replied. “Every day.” The answer seemed particularly bitter to McGarvey. But then everyone was in a screwed-up mood lately.