So the identities were fake.
“Anything else?” Mabel asked. She was still on the right side of thirty and had a cute, intelligent face.
“Well,” said Toad Tarkington, and grinned conspiratorially. “There is one little thing. Richard Harper won a hundred bucks in our baseball pool this weekend and we don’t know where to get in touch with him. Could you check him on the CIA data base?”
“That isn’t official business,” Mabel told him primly.
“I know. But I’ll bet Richard would like the hundred.”
“Commander, we’re not supposed…”
Toad gazed into her eyes and gave her an undiluted dose of the ol’ Tarkington charm that had melted panties on three continents. “Call me Toad. All my friends do.”
Mabel swallowed once and lowered her eyes. “Okay,” she said and turned back to the keyboard. She punched keys.
“Here it is,” she told him. “He transferred to the CIA computer facility at Langley. His office phone number is 775-0601.”
“Lemme write that down,” Toad said, and did so on a piece of scratch paper he snagged from beside the terminal. “Thanks a lot, Mabel. I’ll tell Richard he owes you a lunch.”
“You were right,” Toad told his boss. “Tanana and Hicks are fake identities.”
Jake Grafton just nodded.
“How’d you know?”
Jake shrugged. “They wanted us to see that ID.”
“And the analyst who worked on the photo of Herb Tenney, Richard Harper, now works at the CIA. As of this past Wednesday or Thursday.”
“So he was probably the leak,” Jake said.
“Yessir.” Toad found a seat. “What are we going to do now?”
“I don’t know,” Jake said.
Toad frowned.
“If you have any suggestions, let’s hear them.”
Toad shrugged. “I’m just the hired help around here, Admiral. You’re the guy getting the big bucks.”
“Someone thought this out very carefully,” Jake said after a moment. “They wanted to scare us, and they did, but there was the possibility that we could be induced to impale ourselves on our own swords. So they came equipped with fake identities and bogus Langley passes. And they drove leisurely from my house to your house to give me time to call you or catch up.”
“I didn’t check the passes,” Toad said.
“Oh, they’re as fake as the driver’s licenses and credit cards. You can bet on it. And if I charged off to the front office with this wild tale about CIA employees threatening us and demanded that General Brown go after someone’s head, I would have merely discredited myself, made myself look like a fool. And put General Brown in a difficult position.”
“Too bad we didn’t take photos of those clowns.”
“Umm.”
“So what are you going to do?” Toad asked again.
“I’ll have to think about it. If I go to General Brown I’m going to have to tell him about that Herb Tenney photo, and I don’t know that that’s a good idea. We still don’t know a goddamn thing.”
“The CIA’s reaction to the photo proves that they helped Keren depart for eternity.”
“If those two worked for the CIA. What if Tanana and Hicks were Mossad agents trying to make me suspicious of the CIA?”
“We’re going to have to tell General Brown just to cover our fannies,” Toad said.
“Maybe. And that may make General Brown overly suspicious of the CIA, which might have been the Mossad’s goal when they gave us that photo. If it was the Mossad. The whole thing’s a mare’s nest. A military that stops believing its intelligence service is fumbling around in the dark. As if we had a lot of light now…”
Toad was thinking of Judith Farrell. Grafton had implied before that Farrell might have been intentionally trying to harm the United States, but Toad had automatically rejected it. Now he began to consider the possibility seriously.
“I’ll bet someone at Langley would like to know where we got that photo,” Jake muttered.
But if that was the case, wouldn’t that be the first priority? Why the simple intimidation attempt? It didn’t compute. If it were the CIA. But the Mossad angle was even more unlikely.
What was wrong here? He was missing something. It was right in front of him and he couldn’t see it. But what?
His eyes came to rest on Tarkington, who was staring at him. Toad looked away guiltily.
What? He went over it again, from Judith Farrell’s meeting with Toad all the way through this morning’s verification of the false identities of the agents.
Toad said something.
“What?”
“It’s like Rubik’s Cube, isn’t it?” Toad repeated.
Rubik’s Cube had a solution, although the solution was complex and one needed a good sense of spatial relationships to figure it out. Jake Grafton had spent a miserable week wrestling with a cube some years back when Amy gave him one for Christmas. Finally his next-door neighbor showed him how the trick was done.
The problems Jake had learned to solve had much simpler solutions: one usually became apparent when you backed off and looked at the forest instead of the individual trees.
Okay, Jake thought, by the numbers — One: if someone at Langley knows about the photo, why isn’t he trying to discover where and how I acquired it?
Maybe he is but I don’t know about it.
Unlikely, Jake decided. He and Tarkington were the only people who knew the answers. And Rita and Judith Farrell. But they don’t know about Rita. They might know about Judith Farrell or have an agent in the Mossad, but that would be a complex solution, only acceptable if there are no simple ones. There must be a simple explanation.
Two: the person who sent the goons on Friday night isn’t curious.
Why not? Because he already knows.
How?
Jake Grafton’s eyes focused and he looked again at Toad, who was watching him askance.
“No,” Jake said.
“No?”
“Not like Rubik’s Cube.”
The admiral pulled around a sheet of paper and picked up a pencil. On it he wrote “This office is bugged.”
Toad came over and looked at the words. “You think?” he murmured.
Jake nodded. He got up, removed his jacket and draped it over the back of his chair, loosened his tie and began to look. Toad started on the other side of the room.
In five minutes they had ruled out the obvious, a microphone behind a painting or under a desk. “Let’s go for a walk,” Jake suggested.
“It’s nothing obvious,” Jake told Toad as they walked toward the cafeteria. “Nothing conventional. If it was, the sweeps would have discovered it.” The office was swept for listening devices twice a week at random intervals.
“Maybe it’s the telephone. We’ll have to take that apart. And how about the window vibrator?” Toad suggested. This device used elevator music to vibrate the glass pane and foil any parabolic listening device aimed at the window. “What if it isn’t a real vibrator?”
“Perhaps our eavesdropper has a parabolic antennae aimed at the window,” Jake said, “and is unscrambling the tape with a powerful computer, like a Cray?”
“That’s a possibility,” Toad admitted after he thought about it. “Are you sure about the bug?”
“No,” Jake told him. “But a listening device would explain a lot. And not some simple piece of Radio Shack junk. Something computerized, something so sophisticated we don’t see it for what it is.”
“If they’re using that window as a sounding board, about all we can do is put another music source near the window, like a portable radio, and complicate the signal. But I think we should search that office until we find a bug or can swear there isn’t one.”
“Go down to the maintenance office and get tools. Screwdrivers, pliers, wrenches, and a voltage meter.”