Chardy looked down at the water.
“I think,” he said, “they’ve only let me see a little of the operation. I think it’s much bigger than they’ve let me know. I haven’t worked it out just yet — just what they’re up to, just how much more they know than they say they know. They’ve got me working with some jerk without a human twitch in his body and an Ivy League drone and a dreamy kid. It’s got to be bigger. I just know it is. And somebody’s watching.”
Sam, he thought. Sam, I bet you’re there.
“It’s safe to talk here?” she said.
“If they really want to nail you, they can do it, no matter what. But they don’t have much respect for me now. So it’s safe.”
“You gave me such an awful night, Paul.”
“I’m sorry.”
“What choice do I really have?”
“None. If you care for him.”
“I hate the fact we don’t have a choice.”
“I hate it too. But that’s the game.”
The wind was quite strong; he turned against it, looked the other way down the curving river. He could see the rower, fighting his way back to the boathouse.
“You hurt us so bad, Paul. Oh, you hurt us, Paul.”
“Things happen,” Chardy said. “You do your best and sometimes it’s not nearly enough. I just got into something I couldn’t handle. I’d give anything, my life, to have it to do over again. But I can’t do anything about it.”
The wind had really become strong now, and he could see it pushing up small waves in the river.
“Don’t they believe in spring in Boston?” he said.
“Not till June.”
“Has he gotten to you? Has anybody reached you?”
“No.”
“Can you think of what he might do? Is there a Kurdish community, an exile community, where he might go? Are there people who might help him? Where can we look for him? What can we expect?”
“There’s no Kurdish community, Paul. A few Kurds, I suppose. Paul, there’s something I have to tell you. Something else. It was something I wanted to put into the book, but I couldn’t. It’s something I just wanted to forget, to bury away. But it comes back on me, Paul. It comes back at odd moments. I think it’s made me a little crazy.”
Chardy turned to look at her.
“Okay,” he said. “Tell me.”
“We went into the clearing after the helicopters left. We thought we could help people.” She giggled in an odd way. “And we did. Most of them were … blown apart. You’ve been in wars; you’d know.”
“It’s—”
“It was like a meat shop. The bullet holes were burning, had burned through people. There was a smell of cooked meat. Paul, one of his boys was still alive. He had a bullet in his stomach that was burning. He was crying terribly. He was crying for his father. Ulu Beg knelt and told him that he loved him and kissed him on the lips and shot him through the temple with that gun you gave him. Then he walked around, shooting other people in pain. His own son, then maybe fifteen, maybe twenty others. They were all screaming.”
Chardy was shaking his head slowly, breathing with difficulty.
“That was what it cost to become involved with the Americans, Paul. Not only the death of his family, his tribe, his way of life, but that he was required to kill his own child.”
Chardy could say nothing.
“We’ve got to save him,” she said.
“Somehow we’ll do it,” he said.
12
The pit is usually kept in half-dark and the supervisors, perhaps sensing they are not needed or wanted, look down on the analysts from a bank of brightly lit windows. They look like monks or angels, just pure dark silhouettes against the light. But down on the floor, nothing disturbs: by tradition there is no talking between the analysts — each sits in his or her cubicle, bent over a video display terminal, face illuminated in the weird glow of the screen, fingers clicking dryly.
It’s a funny place for a war — or maybe not. Anyway, it is a war zone, a combat theater of operations: here the real battles are fought, the private Thermopylaes and Agin-courts and Trafalgars of the Central Intelligence Agency, in electraglow (greenish) in sans serif letters on a TV screen plugged into an electric typewriter, observed by grim young men who rarely smile. Agents half the world away never dream that their shadow selves float in the currents of destiny in the great memory of the Langley computers.
It is a simple proposition: analysts are warriors. Given a terminal with access to the database, then given a mission by the upstairs people, they simply hunt for ways to make things happen. They look for links, oddities, chinks in armor; they look for irregularities, eccentricities, quirks, obsessions; they look for proofs, patterns, fates, tendencies. They comb, they cull, they sift and file. The good ones are calm and bright and, most importantly, literal-minded. They just have a brain for this kind of thing, a symbiosis with the software based on the sure knowledge that the machine is never ironic, never witty, never clever: it always says just what it means and does just what it is told; it has no quaint personality, but at the same time its etiquette is remorseless and its willingness to forgive nonexistent.
Down here also there are champions. Some men just do better than others, by gifts of genes or drive, by luck, by nerve. Miles Lanahan was one such. It was said he could do more with less data than any man in the pit. He became a kind of legend himself, and got so good, made them so scared of his talent, that he actually rose from the pit and entered the real world, the operational realm. It had not happened before in the pit’s living memory. The current champion, however, was Michael Bluestein.
Michael Bluestein, twenty-four, had been a math major at MIT; he had the lazy genius, that unerring sureness of touch that scared everybody too. He also worked like a horse. On the same Sunday afternoon that Chardy struggled to come to terms with Johanna while evading Miles, Michael Bluestein sat in jeans and a polo shirt (Sunday shift cavalierly ignores the unstated dress code — another tradition) in the semidarkness in his cubicle in front of his VDT, nursing a sore left index finger — he played first-base on a softball team (his teammates thought he worked at the Pentagon, which he encouraged because he caught such shit if he mentioned the Agency) and the day before, at practice, he had jammed it, pulling a low throw from the dirt. Now, stuff flowed across his screen, plucked up from the Ongoing Ops file on a random basis by the machine for his delectation, for his best effort. The stuff was Kurdish poetry.
Not that Bluestein was a fan of poetry: he didn’t know T. S. Eliot from Elliot Maddox. But there was a big scam going on up at Security, and a sense of crisis had suffused the entire apparatus. Bluestein, not immune to these vibrations, could feel it. He didn’t exactly know what, he didn’t have to know exactly what. You just took so much on trust. Upstairs said: Kurdish, go through our data on Kurds, exhume our tangled relations, and look for traces of a particular Kurd, one Ulu Beg.
Funny, there wasn’t much. Only the legendary Melman Report, the postmortem on Saladin II, and since Bluestein wasn’t Blue Level cleared yet, he couldn’t get the code to call it up. But there was very little else to go on; nobody knew much about the Kurds, or maybe some of the stuff was missing from the records. There was no pre-mission dope on Saladin II, none of the working papers or feasibility studies were there. Mildly odd, but not unheard of. There was also no critique scenario of the operation, pinpointing why it went sour. Again, mildly odd, but not unheard of. It wasn’t that he couldn’t get any more. If they gave you the codes, you could get anything and when they wanted you to check something, they gave you the codes. The dope just wasn’t there.