“Of course, Leonard. It goes without saying.”
“I know, but do it anyway.”
On the way out, Charlene, his secretary, chalked him out on the status board for an inspection visit to the Lynchburg facility. She was new from the pool. “Shall I transfer your calls down there, sir?” she asked.
“Unless the Russians invade Poland, make my excuses until morning,” Janos said. It had been his standard joke for years. She didn’t crack a smile. McGarvey had told him to watch himself. Not to trust anyone. Anyone at all. They’d be working under the old rules on this one. Janos figured Charlene was high on his list of those not to trust.
He got his car from the parking lot, drove off the agency’s grounds, then took the George Washington Parkway over to the Beltway and down to Interstate 66. The day was pleasant. He rolled down his window, lit a cigarette, and turned the car radio up. They were playing Tchaikovsky, one of the few things Russian Janos could honestly enjoy, though over the past few years even that passion had begun to abate. To say it was Russian wasn’t to make it automatically bad in his mind.
He thought about Pat. She said they were becoming comfortable. He agreed with her, though for him it wasn’t a point of pride, as it was for her. She liked McGarvey, but this morning before Janos left the house she had come out to the garage in her robe and slippers to face him eye-to-eye. “Janos, tell me you are not going back into the field for Kirk, or for anyone else.” He had lied to his wife, the thought lingered on the long trip south, but as he entered Ft. McGillis the old feelings of excitement and self-preservation had begun to sharpen his wits. He was glad to be back in the field.
“Oh shit,” the officer of the day, Lieutenant Charles Guthrie, said, jumping up as Janos walked in. “Captain Treitman isn’t here this afternoon, Mr. Plónski.”
“I know, but that doesn’t really matter, does it.” On the way down Janos had mentally prepared for his inspection tour. The safest place to conceal a snowflake, after all, is in a blizzard. “We’ll just do a few line items, and then I’ll get out of your hair.”
“Yes, sir,” the young lieutenant groaned.
The entire small post was nestled in a heavily wooded area of rolling hills. Lynchburg itself was a few miles to the south, and Appomattox Court House, where Lee surrendered to Grant to end the Civil War, was not too far to the east. Most of the installation’s buildings were constructed of red brick with white Colonial wood trim. From the standpoint of a record-keeping facility, the post was inefficient. The records themselves were kept in a dozen warehouse-type buildings in cardboard bins on steel shelving that rose almost twenty feet toward the very high ceilings. Here, there was no such thing as electronic retrieval. It was thought that the files, as sensitive as they still might be, had aged sufficiently so that their rapid retrieval wasn’t necessary. Since Janos became director of records, that had changed. Now, unlike the old days when a few antiquated clerks ran the entire post, there were a dozen young administration types who were constantly being drilled to keep on their toes. The solution, of course, was to reduce the material to computer memory. But the amount of data was so vast, so complicated, and so sensitive that no one dared suggest such an undertaking. Some things were better left undone. The funds that such a project would drain were better spent elsewhere. The main administration building contained a couple of offices; incoming-records processing, in which arriving cartons of material were opened, sorted, graded, and cataloged according to their national security sensitivity and classification, given a retrieval code, and finally placed on the appropriate shelf in the appropriate warehouse; and the reading room, which contained the brains of the system.
Janos followed the lieutenant down the corridor that opened onto the reading room, which stretched across the entire rear of the building. Fully half the large room was taken up by rows of chest-high oak cabinets in which were contained the heart of the retrieval and cross-referencing systems. Laid out much like a library’s card catalog, the filed information was given a number akin to a Dewey decimal system classification in which each document or file was located by building, shelf, and slot, and was also referenced to dates, subjects, and case officers. A few chairs and tables were grouped at one end of the room, and at the back was a short counter from which the runners were dispatched to the various warehouses.
It was fairly quiet this afternoon. Only a couple of tables were occupied. Case officers doing their homework for the DDO, who was a stickler for details during planning. Janos knew neither of them, though he’d seen them around. He knew the type. They were the same as him … or at least the same as he used to be. One of them looked up and nodded as he passed, the other was buried in his files.
“Is there something specific you’ll be wanting this afternoon, sir?” Guthrie asked.
They had come to an empty table. Janos put down his briefcase. He smiled as Mary Prentiss, the chief duty clerk, came from behind the counter. She was one of four capable civilians Janos had hired. He’d got her from the staff of an angry U.S. senator.
“I’m going to pick out a few random case histories for your people to track down,” he said to Guthrie. “Nothing important.”
“What nasty tricks have you got up your sleeve today?” Mary said, smiling. She was in her thirties, somewhat too athletically built to be pretty, and was married, though no one had actually ever seen her husband.
“Leonard is gone for the day …” Guthrie started.
“Well, I think we can manage for Mr. Plónski,” Mary said, ignoring him. “Is there anything specific you need, Janos, to make you come all the way down here?”
In many ways she reminded Janos of his own wife. They both were capable women who sometimes displayed a hard edge. He’d learned early on to relax around them, let them do the work, not fight them. In the end he usually got what he wanted.
“I like to watch you work, Mary,” he said, shrugging. “Maybe we’ll look at a few case histories. Maybe we’ll see how well you’ve taken care of the jackets. Maybe we’ll see how fast your crew can perform for you.”
“You won’t be needing me, then, sir?” the lieutenant asked hopefully.
“No,” Mary said to him before Janos had a chance to reply. “We’ll handle it.”
The lieutenant went back to the front office. Treitman didn’t like civilians messing around on his turf. He’d get a full report from Guthrie.
“He’s okay as long as he’s shuffling army forms around. Back here he’s a disaster,” Mary said.
At least, Janos thought, the lieutenant didn’t actually believe he owned the base, as Treitman did, or the records, as Mary did. She was good, but she was worse than the bookworms; she felt she had a proprietary interest in every scrap of paper here. She would be behind the same counter twenty years from now, he figured. A fixture.
“Let’s get started, then,” Janos said, opening his briefcase. He took out a legal-size tablet and a pen, but before he closed the lid he made sure she had gotten a good look inside at the several fat case files he had purposely brought with him. Two of them were marked with a diagonal orange stripe, indicating they contained secret material.
“Anything for me in there?” she asked.
Janos looked up. “No.” He locked his briefcase, then moved directly across to the first row of the card catalogs under Case Officers, A — C.
Mary came up next to him as he opened the first drawer and at random picked out a card for Albright, Edward J. Three terse lines gave a clinical history of his life; date of birth, place of birth, education, service record, employment covers, and finally date of death, in this case April 19, 1959. The body of the card contained the code names of the operations in which Albright had been involved, followed by a three-digit building number, a three-digit row number, and a two-letter three-digit address for each particular jacket. The card was nearly filled on both sides. Albright, it seemed, had been a very busy man.