Bill Granger
The Shattered Eye
For Larraine, who led me to Paris and shared the adventures we found there.
EPIGRAPH
The world has joked incessantly
for over fifty centuries
And every joke that’s possible
has long ago been made.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Certain realities are reflected in this book.
In 1968, across Paris and in other parts of France, a fierce student-worker uprising against, among other things, the rigidity of the French educational system nearly toppled the government of Charles de Gaulle. The leftist revolt was eventually crushed, but reforms demanded by the students were enacted. The center of the revolt was in the Latin Quarter of the fifth arrondissement (or district) of Paris, which is one of the oldest neighborhoods in the ancient city. It is the site of the Sorbonne.
In spring 1981, thirteen years after those revolts, the French elected François Mitterand as the first leftist president of the Fifth Republic. In fact, the Mitterand government was the first leftist regime to control France since the Popular Front of Léon Blum in 1936.
Certain war games and “scenarios” developed by computer programs speculate on the question of what the French armed response would be to an invasion of Western Europe by ground and air forces of the Warsaw Pact countries. This question was fully described in A History of the Third World War by General Sir John Hackett of the British army. At the present time, the question has not been resolved.
Computers are utilized by all the intelligence agencies of the United States.
The National Security Agency, as one of the intelligence services, is the hardware and software supplier of specialized goods to the various other services in the intelligence network.
British Intelligence has abandoned the old section names of MI-5 and MI-6. The new nomenclature is “secret.”
The Frunze War College of the Soviet Union is located in the southwest district of Moscow.
Terror movements in Europe are many and widespread, operating chiefly in the Basque region of Spain, in Italy, in northern Ireland, and in principal cities, such as Paris. It is supposed by U.S. Intelligence authorities that some of these movements are controlled and/or supplied by the Soviet Union.
In spring 1982, terror threats were made against the life of François Mitterand and acts of assassination and sabotage were performed in Paris and in the region south of Paris.
By late 1982, the military and economic alliance of the United States and Western Europe (called NATO) had become very unstable. While the U.S. debated pulling its troops from the NATO line, Europeans from Germany and Sweden to Great Britain publicly protested the U.S. decision to deploy new nuclear weapons. Further jeopardizing this economic alliance was Europe’s decision to participate in the building of a Soviet gas pipeline to the West, while, at the same time, the U.S. initiated various trade wars designed to punish European steel firms that were dealing with the USSR.
Each spring, the students of the Sorbonne in the Latin Quarter commemorate “the events” of 1968 with petty acts of vandalism and with marches in the narrow streets of the old district.
Finally, the agents portrayed in this book reveal that the Central Intelligence Agency faked certain reports to the American government during the Vietnam War. These charges have been publicly aired and debated.
Despite these realities, this book is a work of fiction.
PART ONE
Memento
We passionately long that there may be another life in which we shall be similar to what we are here below. But we do pause to reflect that, even without waiting for that other life, in this life, after a few years we are unfaithful to what we have been, to what we wished to remain immortally.
1
Mrs. Neumann did not knock at the door to Hanley’s bare office before she entered, and she did not speak to him until she was settled on the government-issue metal chair in front of his desk. The temperature in the office hovered just about sixty degrees Fahrenheit, as always, and Mrs. Neumann, as always, wore the thick brown sweater she kept in her own office for her private meetings with the chief of operations of the R Section. It was just after nine-thirty in the morning on January 9, and Mrs. Neumann and her staff had been struggling with the knot of the problem for the past six days.
“Tinkertoy is puzzled,” Mrs. Neumann said in her raspy whisper. For emphasis, she struck one large hand on the computer printout sheets that filled her generous lap. After the meeting with Hanley, a meeting without notes written or recordings made, the printouts would be shredded in the large machine in the central corridor.
“A computer cannot be puzzled. It is a machine.” Hanley spoke precisely and waited for a reply, his clean, colorless fingers resting on the polished Formica top of the gun-metal-gray desk.
Mrs. Neumann had unlimited access to him because she never wasted his time, no matter how odd her manner or way of conveying information. It was pointless to ask her questions at the beginning of these conversations because she never arrived at her point sooner than she intended.
She was a large woman with big bones and a thickening waist; her bones seemed to stretch her healthy, leathery skin. She had expansive gestures and wore old-fashioned cotton dresses, like a farm woman from another century. Her massive head was crowned by thick black, spiky hair, cut short, and she had once told Marge in the computer analysis section that her husband cut it for her twice a month. Despite years of practice, he had never become an expert barber.
She spoke at last. “It’s in the raw data. The raw data we’ve been getting from the field in the past four months is the puzzler,” she said. “Or rather…”
“Or rather what?”
Mrs. Neumann stared at Hanley for a moment, and Hanley tapped his fingers on the desk top. They both understood her look. She was about to bring up something he either would not understand or would not want to hear.
“It has to do with those created indices,” she said finally.
Hanley sighed. He hated the words. He hated the computer called Tinkertoy. And he hated the nagging edge of this problem that would not be solved and would not become worse and would not go away.
“You’re talking about the…indices…in your job file or memory bank or whatever you call it?”
“The additional ones, Hanley, the ones that weren’t there before.”
“That you believe weren’t there before.”
“Dammit, Hanley, the ones that make connections between entries that I know were never made.”
“That you don’t remember making,” Hanley said.
“My memory is just fine,” she said.
“Of course.”
Three months ago, Mrs. Neumann had slammed into his office with a loud complaint: Someone in Section had tampered with her work files. She had been storing complicated variables in a separate memory file of the computer in order to relate certain types of data — to make cross-checks of minor bits of information. And now someone had tapped into her files and built up these false indices.
Hanley had called in the National Security Agency — the policeman of the intelligence services — to make a careful and routine check of personnel in computer analysis. They had found nothing, and Hanley had not been surprised. He had assumed that Mrs. Neumann had accidentally punched some incorrect entries into Tinkertoy and then gone back over them without remembering to erase them from the computer memory. Mrs. Neumann had not been mollified; her suspicions remained. “The trouble with all of you is that you don’t know a damned thing about computers,” she had said at the time. Everyone agreed with her on that.