“What’s wrong now?” Hanley asked.
“All right. This new data — Tinkertoy has been giving me a correlation coefficient that—”
He held up his hand. “You’ve lost me again, Mrs. Neumann.” He said it with a slight smile that was not pleasant, as though he were a teacher admonishing a child who skipped words in his reading.
“It’s not that hard, Hanley. I wish you’d pay a little more attention to Tinkertoy.”
“I am from another age, a noncomputer age…”
“When spies were spies and men were men,” she said. “Dammit, Hanley, I’m no older than you.”
“Perhaps I am old-fashioned.”
“Perhaps you can afford to be,” she said in her raspy whisper.
“In any event,” he said, “you are in charge of computer analysis, not me. So give me an analysis. In an approximation of plain English.”
“Do you remember on 9 December when we picked up that flutter out of British intelligence through our London station?”
“From Auntie?” He used the British operation’s slang term for itself. “That was about Auntie running a little operation at Mildenhall air force base?”
“Right. Our base in East Anglia.”
“Actually, it is their base, I believe. They allow us to use it.”
“What the hell are the British going to fly out there? Spitfires? The British air force is paper.”
“No political commentary please, Mrs. Neumann.”
“All right. We took all their garbage and fed it into Tinkertoy. All routine. Then on 14 December, Tinkertoy gets fed Quizon’s crapola from Paris about new government postings and we dump it in. Nothing special from Quizon, but that doesn’t surprise me — we never get anything but press clippings from the Paris papers from that old fool.”
“Quizon has been with the Section for a long time.”
“Too damned long.” She paused and shifted her thoughts. “The point is that yesterday I was working from some of those indices. The ones that someone had put into my file when I complained before.”
Another sigh. Hanley realized he wished he were out of this room, strolling down Fourteenth Street, away from this woman and her problem, which Hanley could not quite comprehend.
“So I entered one of those phony indices—”
“I thought you had cleared them from memory.”
“I want to know who’s been screwing around with my computer,” Mrs. Neumann said. “Well, do you know what Tinkertoy gave me? The numbers were fantastic.” She glanced at the look on Hanley’s face and hurried ahead. “Anyway, I had this great idea right away. You know I was puzzled about the data those indices were throwing together because it didn’t seem to mean anything to me. There were things in there like troop movements, but also odd things like indication codes on some individuals. It was like a bowl of popcorn with apples in it — I mean, what the hell do the apples have to do with popcorn?”
“Popcorn?”
“So I asked Tinkertoy to print out all the separate data items that had gone into those indices. And I worked a couple of hours last night going through all the stuff Tinkertoy threw at me, and then it hit me—”
“Overtime? Mrs. Neumann, we need authorization for overtime now. You know that.”
“Damn overtime, listen to me. That index selected out — you can say related, if you want — only three names of individuals. Three goddamn names, Hanley.”
Hanley stared at her.
“Two were British agents, the two agents at Lakenheath-Mildenhall. And one other. A French woman, an official in the Mitterand government. Madame Jeanne Clermont.”
“But I don’t really understand any—”
“Let me finish,” she said sternly. “What do we have? We’ve got someone who thinks Madame Clermont and this Lakenheath business are linked in some way important enough to make them want to enter my files — enter my files, Hanley — and play around inside Tinkertoy to find out how they relate to troop-movement figures or—”
“Troop movements. Mrs. Neumann, we have been through all this before. We’ve had the NSA run checks on everyone at the highest level. I thought we had agreed there is no evidence to support your idea that a mythical someone has tampered with Tinkertoy. Mrs. Neumann, we can’t keep going back and forth over the same ground. We all become a little paranoid, it goes with the business, but you agreed that those ‘created indices’ you complained about must have been an accident.”
“I said that you people didn’t understand anything about computers.”
“Mrs. Neumann, what is the importance of any of this, outside of your obviously firm-rooted paranoia?”
She made a face at him but continued: “Well, it struck me funny because you had talked to me about this Madame Clermont person. Before you sent Manning across. I don’t know. I don’t suppose it would have bothered me that much until we kept getting some other strange stuff coming out of Tinkertoy.”
“Maybe it’s a mistake.”
“Tinkertoy doesn’t make mistakes.”
“Someone made a random entry sequence that coincidentally matched another entry sequence,” Hanley said.
“Yes. I thought of that.”
“Well? Who was it, if it wasn’t you?”
“I don’t know.”
“You should know that.”
“I know I should know that, but I don’t. I went back over the entries, and there isn’t any access code.”
“Well, how did the stuff get into the machine?”
“Magic.”
Hanley looked up with a sour expression pursing his lips.
Mrs. Neumann flashed him a broad smile. “I was kidding.”
“There isn’t anything funny.”
“But there is. Someone can get into Tinkertoy. And now we’re getting more of this crazy stuff. Troop strengths along the Czech corridor, you know, the spring games of the Warsaw Pact countries? They’re doubled. I’m sure of it.”
“What do you mean?”
“Hanley, I had a request from the Baltic desk for some figures on Polish armored strength in the northern sector, near Gdansk. So I punched it into Tinkertoy.”
“Yes?” Hanley asked hurriedly.
“Well, when they came up with some of those troop strengths, something rang a bell up here.” She touched her spiky hair.
“What bell?”
“About a year ago I had some reason to find out the strength of the Ninth Armored of the Polish army, and I remember distinctly the figure of two hundred forty-eight tank units.”
“So?”
“Now Tinkertoy flashed it out four hundred ninety-six. Exactly double. In one year.”
“Is that possible?”
“You tell me.”
“Well, where did the new information come from?”
“That’s it, Hanley.” Her eyes were gleaming. “Tinkertoy said it was there all the time, made in the original report by Taurus in Krakow.” Taurus was the Section R agent in Poland.
“Well, then it must be right.”
“But it isn’t, Hanley, I remember the number. It was two hundred forty-eight, not four hundred ninety-six. Exactly double.”
“Your memory is fallible.”
“Just as yours is, but I do remember some things, and I know I remembered that number, don’t ask me why. And the number is wrong now. Then I went through all the troop strengths in Warsaw Pact, and the figures were incredible. If Tinkertoy is right, the Opposition is putting together a war machine for a hell of a lot more than some troop maneuvers or war games.”
For the first time, Hanley felt a chill seeping through her words. He did not understand computers but he understood Mrs. Neumann’s plain words: a war machine.