The Second Saladin

12

The pit is usually kept in half-dark and the supervisors, perhaps sensing they are not needed or wanted, look down on the analysts from a bank of brightly lit windows. They look like monks or angels, just pure dark silhouettes against the light. But down on the floor, nothing disturbs: by tradition there is no talking between the analysts — each sits in his or her cubicle, bent over a video display terminal, face illuminated in the weird glow of the screen, fingers clicking dryly.

It’s a funny place for a war — or maybe not. Anyway, it is a war zone, a combat theater of operations: here the real battles are fought, the private Thermopylaes and Agin-courts and Trafalgars of the Central Intelligence Agency, in electraglow (greenish) in sans serif letters on a TV screen plugged into an electric typewriter, observed by grim young men who rarely smile. Agents half the world away never dream that their shadow selves float in the currents of destiny in the great memory of the Langley computers.

It is a simple proposition: analysts are warriors. Given a terminal with access to the database, then given a mission by the upstairs people, they simply hunt for ways to make things happen. They look for links, oddities, chinks in armor; they look for irregularities, eccentricities, quirks, obsessions; they look for proofs, patterns, fates, tendencies. They comb, they cull, they sift and file. The good ones are calm and bright and, most importantly, literal-minded. They just have a brain for this kind of thing, a symbiosis with the software based on the sure knowledge that the machine is never ironic, never witty, never clever: it always says just what it means and does just what it is told; it has no quaint personality, but at the same time its etiquette is remorseless and its willingness to forgive nonexistent.

Down here also there are champions. Some men just do better than others, by gifts of genes or drive, by luck, by nerve. Miles Lanahan was one such. It was said he could do more with less data than any man in the pit. He became a kind of legend himself, and got so good, made them so scared of his talent, that he actually rose from the pit and entered the real world, the operational realm. It had not happened before in the pit’s living memory. The current champion, however, was Michael Bluestein.

Michael Bluestein, twenty-four, had been a math major at MIT; he had the lazy genius, that unerring sureness of touch that scared everybody too. He also worked like a horse. On the same Sunday afternoon that Chardy struggled to come to terms with Johanna while evading Miles, Michael Bluestein sat in jeans and a polo shirt (Sunday shift cavalierly ignores the unstated dress code — another tradition) in the semidarkness in his cubicle in front of his VDT, nursing a sore left index finger — he played first-base on a softball team (his teammates thought he worked at the Pentagon, which he encouraged because he caught such shit if he mentioned the Agency) and the day before, at practice, he had jammed it, pulling a low throw from the dirt. Now, stuff flowed across his screen, plucked up from the Ongoing Ops file on a random basis by the machine for his delectation, for his best effort. The stuff was Kurdish poetry.

Not that Bluestein was a fan of poetry: he didn’t know T. S. Eliot from Elliot Maddox. But there was a big scam going on up at Security, and a sense of crisis had suffused the entire apparatus. Bluestein, not immune to these vibrations, could feel it. He didn’t exactly know what, he didn’t have to know exactly what. You just took so much on trust. Upstairs said: Kurdish, go through our data on Kurds, exhume our tangled relations, and look for traces of a particular Kurd, one Ulu Beg.

Funny, there wasn’t much. Only the legendary Melman Report, the postmortem on Saladin II, and since Bluestein wasn’t Blue Level cleared yet, he couldn’t get the code to call it up. But there was very little else to go on; nobody knew much about the Kurds, or maybe some of the stuff was missing from the records. There was no pre-mission dope on Saladin II, none of the working papers or feasibility studies were there. Mildly odd, but not unheard of. There was also no critique scenario of the operation, pinpointing why it went sour. Again, mildly odd, but not unheard of. It wasn’t that he couldn’t get any more. If they gave you the codes, you could get anything and when they wanted you to check something, they gave you the codes. The dope just wasn’t there.

But there were public documents, material acquired randomly, perhaps as part of Saladin II’s planning, perhaps as part of the postmortem, and never examined terribly closely before. Political pamphlets, position papers, volumes of poetry (the Kurds are extremely poetic), posters, the text of an appeal to the U.N. in 1968 accusing the Iraqis of genocide, the notes of Baathist (reform party) meetings, Command Council decrees, hymns, the usual detritus of a failed political movement, all of it begrudgingly translated into English and programmed into the machine for textual examination.

Bluestein looked at the poem before him. Surely the translation was a poor one, for even allowing for his lack of enthusiasm for the material and even allowing for the Islamic tendency toward flowery, overstated rhetoric, it was simply awful.

ran one bit of doggerel.

Just awful. Only one image arrested him: that “lions of black times” business, although it sounded something like a Roger Zelazny novel, sword and sorcery jazz. At any rate, it certainly was melodramatic.

Crazies. Wild-eyed Moslem fanatics. Imagine writing something so inflammatory, so pointlessly stupid.

Were the Kurds opening a terrorist franchise? Was that what this one was about? Bluestein shook his head. He tended to be moderate and orderly — he was a mathematician, after all — and the rawness of passion, its bald fury and literary artlessness somewhat offended him.

Bluestein had read enough. He cleared a line and typed EN on the screen, directing the computer to remove this one and pick out something new from the Kurdish file.

Another poem! They need an English major, not a math star, thought Bluestein. What was he supposed to make of it, anyhow? The preliminary note explained that this item was from a 1958 edition of Roja Nu, a letterpress literary, cultural, and political journal put out in Beirut by Celadet and Kamuran Bedir-Kahn between 1956 and 1963. Its author was identified in the note as — well, well, well! — U. Beg, later a Kurdish guerrilla. U. Beg?

Bluestein sighed heavily, and began to scroll the piece across his screen, trying to make sense of it. It’s only words, he thought. He mistrusted words; give him numbers any time, and to hell with the Theory of Uncertainty. U. Beg is nothing special. More of the same: standard revolutionary garbage, full of flatulent zeal, outrage, the language soaring off into the realm of the ridiculous.

And on and on it went. Spare me, please. Give me North Vietnamese agricultural production tables or Libyan import quotas or the price of oranges in Marrakech or the detonation sequence in Soviet intermediate range ballistic missiles. What can they want, what do they expect? Get an English major, for Christ’s sakes; and Bluestein knew, because he dated one once, fierce and goofy and promiscuous and dramatic; she’d hurt him very badly.

He swiftly sent the item back into the computer memory and diddled up another from the Kurdish file, and while he waited for it to arrive he nursed his aching finger. His legs ached a little too; he was very tall, and they didn’t quite fit in the cubicle without bending in places where they oughtn’t bend. He wiggled the finger. Broken? No, probably not. He could bend it; it wasn’t swollen too badly.

A new item trundled up across the screen. Poetry? Blessedly, no. The prelim note explained that it was an anonymous propaganda bulletin issuing from HEZ, a radical Kurdish underground group in Iraq, dated June of 1975, just a few months after Saladin II was closed down. It was predictably vitriolic, a torrent of abuse directed at the United States in general and one of its public figures in particular.

Bluestein had read a hundred of them and doubtless would read a hundred more. Pity the people in Translation who sit there all day long and work the stuff into English, so that it can be programmed into the computer memory. Don’t they ever get tired? Bluestein supposed they did not; it was their job, after all. He knew they were all from the National Security Agency over at Fort Meade and must be grinds. Dreadful, uncreative work, and the way they were pouring it out meant somebody had lit a fire over there too, more evidence that this thing was big and that it had people worried. Yost Ver Steeg, the Security chief. It was his name on the system-time authorization forms, and he must have had some clout if he could get this stuff on-systemed this fast, and take up hundreds of pit hours in poring through it. But what could even this Yost Ver Steeg expect? Miracles? It didn’t matter how hard you worked, how many computer hours were invested: the principle involved was the famous one involving poultry — i.e., chicken shit and chicken salad and the impossibility of transmogrifying one substance into the other. Like this grim denunciation he was reading — it proved only that there was hate in the world. We already knew that, thought Bluestein. That’s why we’re here, for God’s sake. So the Third World hates the First. It should surprise nobody and it proves nothing.

Bluestein scanned the green letters, the columns of type flying across the screen. How long is this one, how long will it go on, what the hell is he looking for, why are they so scared, why is this so big, who is Yost Ver Steeg, why doesn’t my finger stop hurting, why did Shelly Naskins dump me three years ago, when is that going to stop hurting and —

Bluestein halted.

Something just went click.

He looked very closely at the words before him, almost saying them aloud, feeling their weight, lipping their shape.

“… a merchant of honey, who offered us sweet promises” — this was an American somebody in HEZ was describing — “and scents of delight. Vet he sold bitter, dead kernels that became bones under the earth.”

Bluestein sat back.

It was the same.

Could it be a coincidence? No, not by any law of probability. Could it be a quote, an allusion? No, if this were a famous line, the preliminary note would have said so.

U. Beg, you bastard, he thought, you wrote the second version, too. You were quoting yourself.

And who was U. Beg talking about?

Bluestein checked, just to make sure, and then he began to dig through his directory for Yost Ver Steeg’s emergency code. And a single image jumped into his head: it had nothing to do with Kurds or kernels or honey or bones. It was a picture of a huge, gleaming plate of chicken salad.