He might, or might not, have known what K-Eighty-Eight was. He was supposed to have only a rough idea of the projects he found space for, but it would certainly have been easier for him to make specific guesses than for most people. Or, if it was felt he ought to take the risk, he could have taken steps to find out. In any case, he had known what kind of man, and how important a project, he could deliver over the border.
That, again, was secondary. What mattered most was this:
A month after Lucas Martino had disappeared over the border, Francis Heywood had taken a transatlantic plane from Washington, where he had been on a liaison mission that might actually have been a cover for almost anything. The plane had reported engine explosions in mid-ocean, sent out a crash distress call, and fallen into the sea. Air rescue teams found some floating wreckage and recovered a few bodies, Francis Heywood’s not among them. The plane had crashed — sonar mapping found its pieces on the bottom. And, at the time, that had been that. Simple engine trouble of some kind. No report whatsoever of Soviet fighter planes sent out to create an incident, and the radio operator sending calm, well-trained messages to the last.
But now Rogers thought of the old business of dropping a man into the water at a prearranged spot, and having a submarine stand by to pick him up.
If you wanted to vary that so the man wouldn’t be missed, then you could crash a whole commercial flight — who’d think it strange to miss one body? — and the submarine could make sure only that one man didn’t drown. It was a little risky, but with the right kind of prearranged crash, and your man set for it, it was well within the kind of chance you took in the business.
He looked at Heywood’s dossier statistics:
Height: 6 feet. Weight: 220. He’d been a heavyset man, with a dark complexion. His age was almost exactly the same as Martino’s. While in Europe, he had learned to speak Italian — presumably with an American accent.
And Rogers wondered just how much Lucas Martino had told him, through three years in the same room. How much the lonely boy from New Jersey had talked about himself. Whether he might not have had a picture of his girl, Edith, on his desk. Or even of a girl called Barbara, for Heywood to have seen every day until it was completely soaked into his memory. Maybe Heywood could have explained what Angela DiFillipo had heard last night on MacDougal Street.
How good an actor was their man? Rogers wondered. How good an actor do you believe a man can be?
God help us, Finch, he thought.
CHAPTER TEN
Young Lucas Martino came to Massachusetts Tech convinced there was something wrong with him, determined to repair it if he could. But as he went through registration, drew his classroom assignments, and struggled to fit himself into a study routine like nothing he had ever met before, he began to realize how difficult that might be.
Tech students were already handpicked on the day they entered. Tech graduates were expected to fill positions at the top. A thousand projects were piled up on the world’s schedules, waiting for men to staff them. Once they were implemented, each project had a thousand other schedules waiting for its completion. Plans made a dozen years ahead of time were ready, each timed, each meshed to another, each dependent on the successful completion of each schedule. If a man were to some day endanger that structure in any way, his weakness had to be located as early as possible.
So Tech instructors were people who never gave a doubtful answer the benefit of the doubt. They did not drive their classes, or waste time in giving any particular student more attention than the next. Tech students were presumed capable of digesting as much of the text as was assigned to them, and of knowing exactly what it meant. The instructors lectured quietly, competently, and ruthlessly, never going back to review a point or, in tests, to shade a mark because an otherwise good student had slipped once.
Lucas admired it as the ideal system for its purpose. The facts were presented, and those who could not grasp them, use them, and fit themselves to the class’s progress, had to be eliminated before they slowed everyone down. It was a natural approach for him, and he had a tendency to be mildly incredulous when someone in the next chair turned to him helplessly, already far behind and with no hope of catching up. In the first few weeks of school, he established himself among his classmates as a cold, unfriendly brain, who acted as if he were somehow better than the rest of them.
His instructors, in that first year, took no notice of him. It was the potential failures that they were paid to pay attention to.Lucas thought no more of that than he had at CCNY, where his teachers had been something close to overenthusiastic. He plunged into the work, not so much attracted to it as to the discovery that he could work — that it was expected of him, that he was given every opportunity to do so, and that the school was organized for people who could think in terms of work and nothing else.It was almost two months before he became accustomed to it enough to lose the first edge of his enthusiasm. Then he could settle down and develop a routine. Then he had time for other things.
But be found that he was isolated. Somehow — he could not quite decide how — he had no friends. When he tried to approach some of his classmates, he found that they either resented him or were too busy. He discovered that most of them took at least half again as long at their assignments as he did, and that none of them were as sure of themselves as he. He puzzled over that — these were Tech students, after all — and learned that most people could be content to know what they were doing only eighty-five per cent of the time. But that did nothing to help him. It only confused him more. He had expected, without question, that here at Tech he would meet a different breed of people. And, as a matter of fact, he had. There were plenty of students who abandoned every other concern when they came here. They slept little, ate hurriedly, and did nothing but study. In classes, they took notes at incredible length, took them back to their rooms at night, and pored over them. Letters from home went unanswered, and side trips into town at night were completely out of the question. Their conversation was a series of discussions about their work, and if any of them had personal problems, these were buried and left to take care of themselves while the grind of study went remorselessly on.
But, Lucas discovered, this did not mean that any of them were either happy or outstandingly familiar with their subjects. It only meant that they were temporary monomaniacs.He wondered, for a while, if he might not be one, too. But that idea didn’t seem to fit the facts. So, once again, he was forced to the conclusion that he was a sort of freak — someone who had, somewhere, missed a step most people took so naturally that they never noticed it. He found himself deeply worried by it, at those odd moments when his mind would let him. Through most of the day, he was completely absorbed in work. But, at night, when he sat in his room with the day’s notes completed and the assignments read, when the current project was completed and he closed his books, then he sat staring blankly at the wall behind his desk and wondered what to do about the botch he’d made of Lucas Martino.