“Tell me,” he said. His voice was quiet.
“Six hundred and fifty thousand troops,” she said. “Two thousand six hundred and seventy-five tanks. Nineteen — that’s one nine — armored divisions alone composed of mixed elements of the Czech, Polish, Hungarian, and Bulgarian forces, and—”
“Mrs. Neumann, that’s impossible. There can’t be so many troops for a war game.”
“Right, Hanley, now you’re getting it.”
“But Tinkertoy can’t be right.”
“Every piece of data in Tinkertoy supports itself. Tinkertoy analyzes that the troop strengths indicate we should put NATO up on red alert status, code two. Now.”
“But what do you think?” He realized his voice had assumed a pleading tone.
“Hanley, I’m in computers, you got other geniuses here to do the heavy thinking. I just give them the stuff to think with.” She paused and looked across the government-issue desk at the middle-aged man with the pursed lips and dour expression. “I put in this name again, this Jeanne Clermont. I wanted all the readouts on her. Interesting woman, Hanley — a middle-class sort of background but she scored well in tests, went to the University of Paris at the Sorbonne. Became a revolutionary, of course — this was 1967. And in 1968, our William Manning uses her to get the stuff on the Reds there…And now she’s in the Mitterand government.”
“I know all this,” Hanley said in his dry way.
“I’m just saying, Hanley, that a person like that could be hooked up with all kinds of funny business.”
“Funny business?”
“She was with the Reds once, with those terror people, maybe she still loves them. The trouble with this business, I’ve told you before, is that you get people like that wandering in, making friends, and you never know what they’re going to get into.”
“I don’t understand the point of this, Mrs. Neumann. Will you be clear? What do you suspect about Tinkertoy?”
“Garbage in, garbage out.”
“Dammit, Mrs. Neumann. We always have had troop strength estimates for the Eastern Bloc. That’s what we do.” He let the sarcasm seep out. “We are in the business of intelligence.”
“But what if it were changed?”
“But what if it wasn’t changed?”
“Exactly.”
“You are driving me mad. You are telling me that if there are changes in the data in Tinkertoy, it has something to do with this other change, the one where somebody allegedly and supposedly and all that — somebody somehow called up the names of Jeanne Clermont and these two British agents for some reason that even you don’t understand.”
“Now you’ve got it, Hanley,” Mrs. Neumann said, smiling with a mother’s pride written on her large face.
“But what do I have exactly?”
“I don’t know, man. That’s what the hell I’ve been trying to tell you and those idiots at NSA for the last four months — I just don’t know. You think there’s some answer in all this, that I should just pluck it out. Well, dammit, Hanley, I don’t know any more.”
And then Hanley realized the chill he felt had nothing to do with the temperature in the little room inside R Section. Tinkertoy could not be fixed. Tinkertoy could not be tapped. It had been set up that way.
But could Tinkertoy ever be wrong?
2
William Manning put down Le Monde and dropped two ten-franc brass coins on the black tabletop to pay for the croissants and coffee. It was just after ten-thirty in the morning and business in the brasserie was slow. On the other side of the shop, two young men who might have been Sorbonne students were playing the electronic pinball machine with deadly seriousness.
The game involved an invasion of creatures from space who were destroyed systematically as the players fired rockets on a screen. Each “kill” was marked by an electronic sound like an explosion; the explosions reverberated in the brasserie, but no one seemed to notice them.
Behind the zinc counter, the proprietor polished the copper finish of the espresso machine while engaged in a long, raging argument with a fat woman at the cash register who might have been his wife — they argued with intimacy. In front of the counter, the sole waiter lounged, reading the tables in the morning racing sheet.
Manning had entered the place twenty minutes earlier and catalogued all these elements of life there. Then he had selected the table by the rain-spattered window, even though it was chilly outside and the cold could be felt through the thin layer of glass. From his window he could watch the entrance to the English-language book shop across the way. He knew there was no other exit from the shop; in any case, the woman he had followed for three weeks had no reason to think he was watching her or that she needed a way to escape his surveillance. In a few minutes, when she left the shop, it would be over in any case. One way or another.
Thirty-one days before, Manning had arrived in Paris on the Concorde flight from Dulles airport outside Washington. Time for an assignment was never unlimited in the Section; but this was a delicate matter, and even Hanley could provide no guidelines. “Be careful,” he had said at last, as Manning prepared to fly to Paris; “Be careful,” as though that would prepare Manning for everything.
He had surveyed the newspaper records for mention of her; he had talked long into the night with Herbert Quizon, the freelance agent who had immersed himself in the details of her life for the past fifteen years. But no matter how much preparation there had been, nothing readied him for the first sight of her, emerging from the Métro station at the St. Michel entrance, bundled against the February cold in a black coat. None of it prepared him for the pain at seeing her again.
Manning had not spoken of the pain, even to Quizon. He was a thorough agent, a bit wearied by the work of the last fifteen years, but a “good man” in Hanley’s patronizing evaluation. He had followed her to Mass on Sunday at Notre-Dame. He would not have guessed that she practiced religion; he could not remember that she had taken part in Catholic rituals before. Not when he had first known her.
He had followed her with discretion, with a certain dogged skill that was noted in his records back in the Section. In fact, Manning had been code-named “Shadow” by the whimsical clerk in processing who had charge of such matters. Shadow had once observed at close hand, for sixteen months, the staff and cabinet of Ian Smith of the former country of Rhodesia. He never knew what use had been made of his information; he had never wanted to know. He was a man in perpetual shade, always at the edge of events, always the watcher and never the man watched. Until now, until he had to act against Jeanne Clermont again.
It was not difficult to perform surveillance on her. She had settled into a premature middle age that was as predictable as the hour of sunrise. Her habits were the crabbed habits of a spinster, but he refused to think of her by that ugly English word. She was Jeanne Clermont, as she had been to him fifteen years before; as she was now.
Twice in the past month he had broken into her apartment on the fourth floor of the old building at Number 12, rue Mazarine. He had carefully combed through the scattering of books and private papers and photographs that completed Manning’s knowledge of her life in the past fifteen years. He had even found the little schoolgirl diary she still kept; the entries were without color, without use for him. Yet, slowly, with infinite care and patience, he broke into all the elements of her past life kept in the little apartment with the tall ceilings and the narrow windows. All her secrets were broken.
The second break-in had come less than three days before; it had shaken him, nearly to the point where Manning wanted to quit the assignment, to tell Hanley and Quizon that it was no use, to lie that she had a lover, that she knew he had once betrayed her, that the vague scheme would not work. The secret had been buried in an old schoolbook on the bottom shelf of the bookcase in her bedroom. It was a faded black-and-white photograph. Jeanne had forgotten it, no doubt, because the book was covered with dust. Manning had forgotten it as well, and it struck him like a blow.