Her fingers clattered over the nearly silent keys.
Lydia Neumann had been clever, of course, or she wouldn’t have caught on to the game.
It had been a matter of exaggeration. When the routine reports came in from the field, Marge routinely typed them into Tinkertoy — but with little differences at key junctures. The first report she had altered nearly eighteen months before concerned the strength of the Ninth Polish Armored Division on maneuvers with the First Czech Armored Brigade in the fields thirty miles southeast of Krakow. The observer had passed along the information on troop strength, on tank and artillery numbers and kinds, and the rest of it. Marge had received her instructions through the man called “Courier” that day as well.
“For the next two months,” Courier had explained, “you must double the size of the troop counts along the East-West European border.”
And so seventy-five tanks observed became one hundred fifty observed, and the nineteen new Soviet-made rocket launcher vehicles became thirty-eight. Marge did not understand the need for the obfuscation, then or now. It was merely important, and she had a little thrill each time she fooled Tinkertoy.
Gradually, the disinformation had grown to a patterned structure that still did not make sense to her but was part of a larger scheme, she knew.
And now it was necessary to shift the disinformation around, to bury it inside Tinkertoy by creating new access and source codes that would temporarily blind the investigators. Time, Bill had said: “We need four days at least, and then we can get rid of all the garbage.”
No one would have understood them, Marge thought as her fingers selected the keys in rapid-fire sequence.
They certainly weren’t Communists. They had been to Russia enough and they had tolerated the pathetic attempts of the Soviet officials to show them the glories of the Communist system.
“My God,” Bill had said at one point, “they still have tubes in their radios.”
“And the food,” she had replied. She had hated the food most of all, the heavy rich creams and the sweet-smelling cabbage, and the permanent odor of onions that was everywhere. And the bread. Everyone had said the glory of Moscow was the bread, but she had hated it. It was dark and coarse and it had too many flavors.
No, they weren’t Communists. They weren’t dupes or fools. But peace required all sorts of alliances that were not pleasant at times. “After all,” Bill had told her once, “no one thinks that Roosevelt wasn’t justified in his alliance with Stalin during World War Two. It’s a matter of priorities. Are the Russians going to attack us? Are they going to invade New Jersey? No. But there’s always the chance of accidental war, and that’s what we have to overcome.”
They were dedicated to peace.
And, in time, they found the extra money delivered by Courier to be useful as well. It wasn’t a matter of working for the money — they would have done it for nothing — but the money was not unwelcome.
There was the sense of danger, too, and that attracted them. It was as though they were invisible. They walked through the paces of the humdrum days, they did their work, they made their office friendships, they had friends in at night to share their latest video-tape rental movie, they had ordinary vacations at ordinary places, they went back home to Ohio at least once a year to see the friends and relatives left behind — but in it all, they knew what they really were, and the sense of constantly living a double life put a fine edge on the dull side of their existence.
“It’s like being a spy,” Marge had said once.
“But you are,” Bill had laughed at her. She loved the way he made her feel so girlish at times. He would call her “little girl” at tender moments and she would feel as she had when she was nineteen and had just met him and first loved him.
“No. I don’t mean working for R Section. I mean…what we’re doing. It’s like we’re moving through a foreign country or something. On a secret mission.”
“It is a foreign country. Not the country we thought it was when we were kids, honey.”
And they would talk again about her brother, Bobby, who had been made a quadriplegic in Vietnam, and they would talk about the kids shot down by the Guard at Kent State when they were just kids, and about how they had been radicalized and then recruited to the movement, and finally, how they had accepted a lifetime dedication to work for peace.
The thoughts washed over her memory as part of her brain concentrated on the dull work at hand.
“And now the next step,” she said aloud and looked down at the piece of paper in her hand. It was the new access code she had gotten from Mrs. Neumann, the code that would scramble the identity of the source of the disinformation. Everything in Tinkertoy was double-guarded so that no one could casually penetrate the memory bank from without; but Tinkertoy, like all computers, could be penetrated easily from within.
This was Mrs. Neumann’s own code, the one with the highest priority to access of the computer at all levels.
She typed: “T E 9678/11/LL2918/C ROMEX 4.”
The last digit flashed on the screen and then the screen went blank.
She waited for a moment.
She touched the “Answer” key.
She waited.
The screen remained blank. Even the cursor that marked the part of the screen that was alive was gone from the screen.
In the language of computers, Tinkertoy was down.
Marge got up from the console and went to the light switch and turned the lights on and walked back to the display terminal and stared at it.
She walked around the machine and looked at the wires streaming from the back of it. Then she walked into the next room.
The terminal in the next room was “on.” Tinkertoy wasn’t down after all; the system was still functioning. But something had put down the terminal Marge Andrews worked on.
For the first time, she felt a shiver of fear.
She took the note pad and carried it to the live terminal and sat down quickly and began to tap the same code into the machine:
“T E 9678/11/LL2918/C ROMEX 4.”
The computer swallowed the information when she pressed “Enter.” And then, just as suddenly, it shut down. The cursor disappeared from the screen.
She got up quickly and went to the telephone and dialed the number in Fairfax. There was no time for caution. The phone rang and rang, and finally she heard Bill’s voice.
“She gave us the wrong code. Tinkertoy shut down.”
“Can you get out?”
“I don’t know. I’m scared, Bill.”
“Just leave. Now. Quickly. Just get out.”
She slammed down the receiver and grabbed her purse and started down the hall to the central corridor of the part of the building that housed the R Section.
Her heels clattered on the floor. She had worn a summer dress, a white silky thing that had wilted in the heat of the day. Her hair was not so carefully arranged as it had been that morning.
She opened the doors of the central corridor and saw two security men with weapons drawn and the chief of security.
She walked toward them.
“Hello, John.” She knew the security chief from working late with Mrs. Neumann.
“Mrs. Andrews. The computer put out the emergency signal.”
“I didn’t hear…”
“Mrs. Andrews, no one can leave the building until we determine if the signal is a malfunction.” The security chief was in his early thirties; his face was the blank face of a cop suddenly transformed by duty into a machine. He had joked with Marge in the past, even flirted with her; once, at a Christmas party, he had made a slight pass at her; but now it was as though she did not exist.