“I don’t understand this.”
“Neither do I.”
“I can’t use crap like this, a bunch of crap out of the computer that even you people don’t understand.”
“Use?”
“For stroking, goddammit, what do you think this is all about? That goddamn character over at Office of Budget has got us taking a six-million dollar cut in operations this year so he can give it to his pals in Langley. Where the hell do we make a cut like that? And when I go up to the Hill to do some politicking, those boys don’t want to hear a bunch of crap about a rogue computer.”
Budget. Always the Old Man’s prime concern. Budget was power, power to balance the interest of R Section against the interests of Langley — the Central Intelligence Agency. The Old Man had played a dangerous game for the past two years. He had judiciously begun to leak secrets of the Section to members of the oversight subcommittee that watched Section’s operations. And, as the Old Man said, he couldn’t give them crap about a computer search, because he didn’t even understand it.
“Reed had one other link as well,” Hanley said.
“Damn.”
“The Rome business.”
“Damn. That doesn’t make any goddamn sense.”
Hanley closed his eyes for a moment; when he opened them, everything remained — the room, the silence, the polished desk in front of him.
Four days earlier, there had been a foul-up at the embassy in Rome.
The embassy, at the end of Via Veneto, had received a routine transmission and passed it along to the R Section station chief, who worked out of an apartment at number 7, Via Icilio, on the Monte Aventino in a fashionable neighborhood just across the Tiber from the Vatican.
The Section did not share quarters in any of the American embassies. That space was reserved for the CIA. The Section, as a relative newcomer to the intelligence services of the Unites States, maintained the elaborate fiction that it did not, in fact, exist. The peculiar arrangement in Rome was typicaclass="underline" Embassy personnel separated cables for the two intelligence sections, sending one set to the first-floor CIA offices in the embassy and the second group to the R Section man across the city.
This time, a bored cipher clerk (GS 11) in the basement of the embassy, thinking of his planned assignation that night with the younger daughter of the American ambassador (who had a reputation for such things), did not listen carefully to the open-code message he received. While he enciphered it, his daydreaming eyes saw the word Alphabet, which was code for R Section, and he routed it to the apartment on Via Icilio.
And not to the operations chief of the Central Intelligence Agency in Rome, for whom it was intended.
The missent message was simple: “Felker probe double X priority. Alphabetman placed at Frog.”
R Section agent at Paris on operation. The search for Felker assumes a double X priority.
And now Mrs. Neumann saw the incident at Rome link up to the computer search for the name of Reed, the dead Soviet agent found in England.
“Maddening,” Hanley said.
“But did this link just hang there dangling in the wind?” the Old Man asked.
“In the computer. Yes. No marking link, no reason to relate them…”
“Well, the business of us sending someone to Paris, that might have explained the linkup.”
“No. We could eliminate the part of the message and the link still turned up. You see, it isn’t a link per se, but a sorting mechanism. The way you would mark some cards red and some cards black. Press black and all the black cards turn up, whether they’re linked or not — the similarity between them is in the actual sorting category.”
“I don’t understand that.”
“Someone — someone or some group or something — with access to Tinkertoy wants us to make these connections. Madame Clermont and the business at Lakenheath and this business with Felker and that bit of news we got out of the Helsinki door in the winter — about the Warsaw Pact games against Western Europe…”
“That linked as well?”
“Yes. You see, it has all the elements of separate chords in a conspiracy. Are the Soviets going to move to the West? Are they going to threaten to do so? And why should we be informed of it in this roundabout way through these tricks of Tinkertoy?”
“The Soviets?”
“Why would the Opposition want us to be on guard against them?”
“Well, what do your geniuses in computer analysis say?”
“We haven’t told them yet. Mrs. Neumann told me all this yesterday afternoon.”
“What are you going to do with it?”
“I don’t know. I thought you might have an idea.”
“I don’t know a damned thing about computers.”
“Yes. And I know so little. Mrs. Neumann says there are very few possibilities and each raises new questions. And if they are really links, why wasn’t the supporting information entered into Tinkertoy? And if the computer has been fouled, who fouled it? One of us? Or has the tap come from outside?”
“Is that possible?”
“A boy in Chicago tapped into a university computer. Industrial spies tap into competitors’ computers all the time. Security is not secure. We construct the most elaborate security systems and then man them with GS 5s who make less than eighteen thousand dollars a year. In theory, Tinkertoy is untappable. But that is theory.”
“What if we shut it down?”
“What would that do, except to hobble ourselves because of a theory that the computer is tapped?”
“The computer has got us by the nuts, is that it?”
Hanley considered the observation. After a pause, he said, “Yes, That’s it. We don’t know the difference between good information and bad without Tinkertoy. And perhaps we cannot trust Tinkertoy.”
“What do you want to do?” He said this quietly. The Old Man relit his pipe.
“I thought we ought to warn Manning. If there is danger.”
“Danger? From what? That French whore? Danger of the clap is all.”
“It’s a delicate matter.”
“Getting her into the sack again after fifteen years of adiós is always delicate.”
Hanley waited while the Old Man chuckled. Joke, Hanley thought sadly; it is just a joke.
“I had thought about Devereaux,” Hanley said at last, scarcely aware he was speaking aloud.
“About what?”
“Paris. Manning. As a backup. After the first time we used Manning, we sent him to Vietnam and Devereaux broke him in there. They both spoke French. Quizon—”
“Quizon is our stringer at Paris.”
“—is an old man. I don’t know. I had a premonition.”
“Premonition? You’re talking like an old woman, Hanley. Devereaux was just a fucking agent, just one fucking man.”
“The human factor,” Hanley said. “I thought it would have been…worth the effort.”
“You’re jumping from one to another. You’re talking about Devereaux and then about Tinkertoy and this Paris business. There’s no connection.”
“That’s because I’m not logical like Tinkertoy,” Hanley said.
“Why should Manning be warned? And how the hell can you warn him without bringing up all this other stuff about Tinkertoy? He doesn’t have a need-to-know on that.”
“It was a thought.”
“Are you going to say ‘be careful’?”
It was exactly what Hanley had said the last night he saw Manning. Be careful. Poor old Hanley, poor mundane Hanley. Devereaux would have been amused by his old-maid caution.
“Look, Hanley, you’ve got this Devereaux business too much on your mind. He’s the one who resigned.”
“He would never come into the Section.”
“It was his choice.”