The room was to be his home for the next week, and already he wondered how he could possibly survive.
CHAPTER 11
Ed Montefiore was young enough to have begun his working life in computers; old enough to have risen to the top of his nameless section of the Ministry of Defence.
The fact that he was known — as far as anybody in his position could be known — as a computer wizard was a matter of economics rather than specialized aptitude. He had an instinct, a talent, a gift which enabled him to fix any kind of machine. It did not matter if the particular design was new to him, it did not even matter if he was unaware of the machine’s purpose — if it was broken, he could lay his hands on it, commune with the ghosts of the men who had built that machine and all the others like it, and discover what was wrong. When Montefiore had found the fault he would correct it easily and quickly if he was in the mood to do so, at other times he would simply explain what needed to be done, then walk away satisfied. He had not been exercising his special ability for very long when he ceased physical repair work altogether. There was more money in finding and diagnosing faults than in putting them right.
And of all the fields in which his talents could be applied the computer business, Montefiore saw, was going to be the most lucrative. He spent several years troubleshooting for major consultancies, jetting across the world at an hour’s notice, curing computers or linked groups of computers of illnesses the resident engineering teams had been unable to deal with, accumulating money, and living like a prince between assignments.
It was just when the life was beginning to pall on him that the Ministry made its first oblique approaches concerning the MENTOR project. As an individual, Montefiore was repelled by the idea of a vast computer complex which held in its multiple-data banks every item of information — military, social, financial, criminal, industrial — which the government needed for the control of the country’s affairs. But as a man with a wild talent which demanded a new dimension of challenge he was able to throw himself into the project without reservation. He had no interest in the design or manufacturing work — MENTOR’s components were relatively conventional and became remarkable only in aggregate — but keeping the huge discrete body in coordinated good health had brought something like fulfilment. It had also brought him promotion, responsibility, and a certain kind of power. No human brain could absorb more than a minute fraction of the data stored by MENTOR but Montefiore was the only man with unlimited access, and he understood how to be selective. He knew everything that was worth knowing.
The item of knowledge uppermost in his mind, as he stood at the window of his office, was that something very big was happening. An hour earlier the Minister’s secretary had phoned in person with a simple message — Montefiore was to remain in his office until further contacted. There was nothing too unusual about the communication itself, but it had come through on the red telephone. Montefiore had once calculated that if his red telephone ever rang the odds would be that ICBMs would soon be climbing through the upper reaches of the atmosphere. McKenzie’s words had put his mind at ease to a certain extent. They had, however, left him with a sense of foreboding.
Montefiore was of medium height, with thick muscular shoulders, and a boyish face. His chin was small, but with a set which denoted determination rather than weakness. He surveyed himself in the mirror above the white-painted fireplace and gloomily resolved to drink less beer for a few weeks, then began to wonder if the ringing of the red telephone had presaged the end of his, and everybody’s, beer-drinking days. He went back to the window and was frowning down at the slow-moving tops of buses when his secretary came through on the intercom and announced that Mr. McKenzie and Brigadier Finch were on their way in. Finch was head of a small group of men whose official title was the Strategic Advisory Committee and who, among other things, were empowered to advise on the pressing of certain buttons. Montefiore was not even supposed to know of Finch’s connection with the SAC, and the pang of dismay the Brigadier’s name inspired made him wish he had preserved his ignorance.
The two men silently entered the room carrying metal-rimmed briefcases, shook hands with minimal formality. Both were “clients” of MENTOR’s unique information service and were well known to Montefiore. They invariably treated him with extreme courtesy but their very correctness always served to remind him that all the magics of his electronic cabal were powerless against the class barrier. He had a lower middle-class background, theirs was upper middle-class, and nothing was changed by the fact that nobody spoke of those things in the Britain of the Cockney emancipation. McKenzie, tall and florid, pointed at the randomizer switch on Montefiore’s desk. Montefiore nodded and moved the switch, activating an electronic device which would prevent even an ordinary telephone from functioning properly within its field. No recordings could be made of anything that was about to be said.
“What’s the problem, Gerard?” Montefiore made a point of using Christian names, and had vowed to himself that if any of his high-level clients objected he would complete the reductio ad absurdum by walking out of the MENTOR project and refusing to return until his right to address Trevor as Trevor was officially ratified.
“A very serious one,” McKenzie said, taking the unusual course of staring Montefiore straight in the eye as he spoke. He opened his case, took out photocopies of some densely written pages and sketches, and set them on the desk. “Read that.”
“All right, Gerard.” Montefiore scanned the sheets with professional speed, and his sense of imminent disaster was replaced by a strange elation. “How much of this do you believe?”
“Believe? Belief doesn’t come into it. The point is that the mathematics on those pages has been checked and verified.”
“Oh? Who by?”
“Sproale.”
Montefiore tapped his teeth thoughtfully. “If Sproale says it’s all right… How about the machine?” He examined the sketches again.
“Both Rawson and Vialls say the machine can be built and will… do what is claimed for it.”
“And the question you want me to answer, Gerard, is — has it been built?”
“We want the man who wrote this letter,” Finch said restlessly. He was a lean man, aggressively athletic for one in his fifties, and wore his dark pinstripes like a uniform. He was also, Montefiore knew, the MENTOR client with whom his familiarity rankled most.
“It amounts to the same thing, Roger.” Montefiore gave the most unmilitary salute he could devise. “I imagine that when we find this man he’ll answer all the questions put to him.”
Finch’s eyes went dead. “This is a matter of extreme urgency.”
“I get the hint, Roger.” Montefiore had been adding to his own excitement by avoiding immediate consideration of the problem, but now he began the pleasurable task of establishing parameters. “What information have we on this man? What do we know? First of all, that he is a man — the handwriting makes it clear we aren’t dealing with a woman, unless it’s a woman who is prepared to go a long way to cover up her tracks.”
“What does that mean?” Finch made an irritated movement, as though slapping his thigh with an imaginary cane.
“A woman might have forced a man to write it all out for her, then killed him,” Montefiore said reasonably.
“Nonsense!”
“All right, Roger. You are directing me, in this national crisis, not to consider any of this country’s thirty million women as a suspect?”
“Now, now, Ed,” McKenzie said, and Montefiore noted with satisfaction the use of his own Christian name. “You know perfectly well that we never poach on your preserves. And I am sure you appreciate better than anyone else that here, in this single assignment, is the justification for every penny spent on MENTOR.”