Quantum

25

Bart Cooper arrived at the CIA’s George Bush Center for Intelligence a little after ten o’clock having avoided the daily rush-hour traffic. Setting his own work hours was one of his perks as a consultant to the Agency, the latest in a long line of titles he’d held in an intelligence career that started when he became an OSS field operative during the Second World War. He’d risen in rank as the Agency grew, and fought on the front lines of America’s Cold War. Cooper had survived scandals, various downsizing programs, and micromanaging congressional oversight. And now, he seemed to have survived retirement in his role as adviser to the Director of Central Intelligence. At a robust seventy-seven, he served as counselor emeritus to Jackson Barnett, the current DCI, who valued Cooper for his broad perspective.

After parking in the same spot he’d been assigned back in the sixties, Cooper cleared the main building’s security and took the elevator up to the executive level. The place was filled with its usual buzz of activity as information from around the world was gathered, sifted, analyzed, processed, digested, and eventually regurgitated for the elected officials who would decide what it meant. Some things never changed.

‘Morning, Bart,’ Sally Kirsch, Jackson Barnett’s executive secretary, said as Cooper stepped into the office pantry to get himself a cup of coffee.

‘Hi, Sally. How are things in the Far East today?’

‘No better than yesterday, and Africa is heating up again.’

Cooper sighed at the thought of another military coup in some sub-Saharan country launching yet another round of intertribal genocide. ‘There are times when I yearn for the old days, when we would just send a team out and pop these guys.’

‘You’re kidding, aren’t you?’

Cooper just smiled and left with a mug of black coffee.

When he reached his office, he set the mug down on the desk and hung his blazer on the rack. His in-basket contained the files that Barnett wanted him to peruse. Most of them dealt with operational concepts — Cooper’s forte — while the remainder were a mixed bag of analysis that somebody, somewhere, wanted a seasoned eye to give the once-over. He wasn’t on the front lines anymore, but Cooper was thankful that Barnett valued his insights enough to let him keep his hand in the game. He was the last of the old guard, a cold warrior whose tenure ran back as far as the days of Wild Bill Donovan and Allen Dulles.

He sat down and wiggled the mouse on his desk, awakening his computer from its electronic slumber. The black screen flickered back to life, rendering the CIA logo against a field of light blue. A small box on the bottom center of the screen waited for him to type in his password. Cooper keyed in the thirteen random characters and pressed ENTER.

‘Ohayo gozamasu, Cooper-san,’ the computer announced in a voice that sounded a lot like Toshiro Mifune.

‘Ohayo, computer-san,’ Cooper replied.

Every day, the computer greeted Cooper in the language of one of the countries he’d worked in during his years as a field agent, never voicing the same greeting twice in a month.

Cooper clicked on his calendar and saw that he had a meeting with the Deputy Director in Charge of Operations at 1:30. He then checked his E-mail: a few general-broadcast announcements, a response from Barnett regarding the China-Korea situation, and something generated by the central computer regarding a flagged file.

‘I don’t recall making a search request,’ Cooper mused as he selected the last piece of mail for viewing.

The OSS designator in the file number identified it as something dating back to the Second World War, part of the CIA’s inheritance from the Office of Strategic Services. Cooper was the last remaining veteran of the OSS still active with the Agency. While stationed in Germany immediately following the war, Cooper was tasked with weeding out Nazis from the stream of German refugees seeking to emigrate to the United States.

The body of the message contained only a line of blue, underscored text. Cooper selected the hypertext link, and his computer responded by loading an article that the system had culled from the day’s electronic edition of the Ann Arbor News.

Cooper printed a copy of the article, then closed the window and pulled the single sheet from the printer. After rereading the article for the third time, Cooper scanned the phone list tacked to his wall and dialed the number he was looking for.

‘Research, this is Connie,’ a whiskey-throated woman answered.

‘Morning, Connie. It’s Bart.’

‘Bart Cooper?’ her voice softened with surprise. ‘It’s been a while. How they treating you upstairs?’

‘Same as always, with the great respect due one of my numerous years of service.’

‘Sounds like the same old song and dance we get down here,’ Connie said with a laugh. ‘What can I do for you?’

‘I need some research done on an old case.’

‘How old?’

‘Old, as in before your time.’

‘A request like that isn’t research; it’s archaeology.’

‘I know,’ he said, laughing. ‘But please, I need everything you can find on a Johann Wolff. He was a German physicist, worked on the Nazi A-bomb project during the war.’

‘What’s the story?’

‘They just found his body up in Michigan, fifty years after he disappeared. Looks like murder.’

‘A murdered German physicist. How intriguing.’

‘Might be. See what you can dig up. Full package: German Intelligence, Immigration. The works. You can start with file OSS-one seven nine three two. Also, see if you can get anything from our friends at Lubyanka — they got most of the Gestapo’s records out of Berlin.’

‘I’ll see what I can do. Any rush on this?’

‘No, it’s just to satisfy my own curiosity. You see, Wolff was one of the German scientists I vetted after the war — I wrote that OSS file I just told you about. Based on what I could find at the time, I cleared him to immigrate into the U.S. Still, I have a few questions about Wolff that I’d like to resolve.’