The Second Saladin

54

After a long drive they dropped Ulu Beg at a Metro station in a suburb of Washington. It had been a silent trip, through twilight across farm fields, then over a great American engineering marvel, a huge bridge, and then into the city, but now Speshnev turned to him from the front seat.

“You remember it all?”

“I do.”

“It will be easy. The killing is the easiest of all. He’ll be alone this time. You’ll shoot for the head?”

“The face. From very close. I will see brains.”

“May I tell you a joke?”

The Russian and his jokes! A strange fellow, stranger than any of them. Even the young man who’d done the driving turned to listen.

“The man he expects to meet,” Speshnev said, “is Chardy. Delicious, isn’t it? This war criminal flees his own protection to meet the one man in the world he trusts; instead he meets the one man in the world who has willed his death.”

These ironies held little interest to Ulu Beg; he nodded curtly.

The driver climbed out and walked around the car and opened Ulu Beg’s door.

“AH right,” said Speshnev.

Ulu Beg stepped into light rain. The street teemed with Americans. Globular lamps stood about, radiating brown light to illuminate the slant of the falling water. They were at a plaza, near a circle of buses. People streamed toward the station; he could see the trains on a bridge above the entrance. It was all very modern.

“You must not fail,” said the colonel.

“As God wills it,” said Ulu Beg.

The door closed and the car rushed off through the rain. He stood by the curb for a second, watching it melt into the traffic, then pushed his way through the crowd to the station. With the exact change he bought a fare card from a machine and went through turnstiles to be admitted to the trains. He carried his pack in his left hand; inside it was the Skorpion.

Danzig left the theater at 11:30. His brain reeled from the imagery: organs, gigantic and absurd, abstract openings. He thought of wet doorways, of plumbing, of open heart surgery. It had given him a tremendous headache. He’d had to sit through the feature three times. As a narrative the film had an inanity that was almost beyond description: things just occurred in an offhand, casual way, contrived feebly so that the actresses could drop to their knees and suck off the actors every four or five minutes. The acting was amateurish — organ size was evidently the only criterion for casting on this production — and film technique nonexistent. The music was banal; only the photography had been first-rate.

At last he breathed in the air, cool, made clean by the rain which had now stopped. He cut quickly across M Street and headed down a street that he knew would take him to the river’s edge. Then, really, he had but to walk a mile along the river — away from the police, who surely sought him now, away from prying eyes. It could be dangerous, the bleak streets of the city down by the river. Still, what choice had he? He loved the sense of danger in one respect: he approached it rather than letting it approach him, like an animal in a slaughterhouse pen. He walked on, a pudgy figure, pushing into the night.

At last Lanahan was alone with the machine. In its unlit screen he could see the outline of his own figure, shadowy, imprecise, bent forward with monk’s devotion. Around him he could hear the hum of the fans and the strokes of the other operators.

The Model 1750 Harris Video Display Terminal was twice the size of the earlier model he’d worked with in the pit. It looked to the uninformed eye like a cross between a television set and an electric typewriter, clunky and graceless. But it was his access to the brain, the memory, of Langley.

If he had the codes.

He flicked the machine — curious, in the jargon they’d never become known by their proper designation, VDT, or by anything reasonable. Rather, to them all, atavistically, they were simply Machines.

The machine warmed for twenty seconds; then a green streak — the first stirring of creation — flashed at light-speed across the screen; then a blip, a bright square called a cursor, arrived in the lower left corner: it was the machine operator’s hand, the expression of his will.

Miles stared at the rectangle of light gleaming at him in the half-dark. His fingers fell to a familiar pose and he felt the keys beneath them.

He typed:

Fe Hsu, meaning, fetch the directory coded HSU.

Immediately the machine answered.

Directory Inactive

All right then, you bastard.

He thought for a moment. He’d taken the easy shot, and lost. But let’s not panic. Let’s dope this thing out. We are looking for something hidden years ago. Hidden, but meant to be found if you knew you were looking for it. And meant to be found if you were Paul Chardy. This guy Frenchy Short was said to be smart. And he must have known the machines, the system, if he’d been able to tuck something away.

A play on shoe. The shoe fits. Chinese spelling. He’d tried it, it hadn’t worked. But let’s not forget shoes altogether; perhaps one still fits.

Fe Shu, Miles tried.

The machine paused. No answer.

Christ, suppose it was a secret directory, and when tapped it signaled a security monitor? Such directories were rumored to exist, yet no analyst had ever found one.

The screen was blank.

Then:

Improper Code Prefix

Damn, wrong number.

He had a headache now, and an eruption on his forehead throbbed. Miles rubbed at it with a small finger. Already his back ached; it had been a long time since he’d made his living in a machine cubicle. He’d been in daylight too long, ruining his machine vision.

Think, damn you, think.

FE SHU, he tried again, making certain to leave only one space between the command and the code, for in a moment of rush or confusion he thought he might have left two — or none — the first time through, and the machines — this is why he loved them so — were monstrously petty and literal and absolutely unbending and would forgive no breach of etiquette.

The directory began to scroll up across the screen.

Danzig could see it now — ahead, along the water, beyond the neo-baroque mass of the Watergate buildings. He was alone on an esplanade at the riverbank. Across the flat calm water lay Theodore Roosevelt Island; above its trees he could see Rosslyn skyscrapers. He looked ahead; could he see a flicker on a hill that would be Kennedy’s grave site, a memento mori for the evening? Or was it his imagination? He hurried through the night, on a walk by the water, among trees.

The rain had stopped and back where the river was wider, near the arches of the Key Bridge, the lights from a boat winked. Danzig could not but wonder who was out there. He’d patrolled the Potomac occasionally with a neurotic chief executive — much liquor and endless, aimless, righteous monologues, lasting almost until dawn. But Danzig’s thoughts turned quickly from history to — for the first time in many weeks — sex. He had an image of a beautiful blond woman, elegant, a Georgetowner of statuesque proportions and great enthusiasms — just the two of them alone aboard a mahogany yacht in the Potomac, setting the boat to rocking with their exertions. He paused; from behind a shredding of the clouds came the moon, its satiny light playing on the river. A scene of astonishing allure for Danzig: black bank, black sky, silver moon on the water — a Hollywood scene. He paused, then halted.

He had many years ago abandoned all belief in the unearthly. Man was too venal, too evil. Reality demanded fealty only to the here and now. Yet this sudden image of sheer, painful beauty, coming as it did immediately after visions of the sexual and the historical, placed before him at the ultimate moment of his life: surely now, this meant something.

But even as he paused to absorb it, it began to fall apart. The clouds reclaimed the moon; the glinting sea returned to a more authentic identity as a sluggish river; the yacht under the bridge resolved itself, as he studied it, into a houseboat.

Danzig checked his watch. He had plenty of time. Chardy was probably already there.

He rushed through the night. On the other side of Rock Creek Parkway he could see the white edifice looming up, something on the Egyptian scale, arc-lit for drama, like a monument. Its balcony hung almost to the river, over the road. He hurried along, amazed at how dark and silent it all was.

He passed under the balcony, and felt indoors. He continued to the midpoint of the building where a door had been cut in the blank brick of the foundation, recessed in a notch in the wall. Danzig crossed the parkway and climbed three steps to the door. He paused.

Suppose it was locked?

No, Chardy said it was open.

Danzig’s hand checked the handle.

He pulled it open and stepped inside.

Their efficiency never astonished Ulu Beg. They could do so much; they knew so much. He took it by now as second nature, simply accepted it. It was as if he were operating in their country, not in America.

He had gotten off at the Foggy Bottom stop. But he had not left the platform, hurried up the steps to the way out with the other passengers. He paused, on a stone bench. He was in a huge, honeycombed vault that curved over his head. It blazed with the drama of lights and shadows. Shortly, another train came along. A few people got out; a few got on. That was the 11:45 from Rosslyn; it was the last train. Ulu Beg took a quick look through the vaulted space. People paraded out. Nobody paid him attention.

He walked quickly to the end of the chamber, to the sheer wall into which the tunnels were cut. He looked back and saw nothing. A few people lingered on the balcony above, but they were a hundred feet away and moving out toward the door.

In the train tunnel there was a walkway, gated off from the platform with a No TRESPASSING sign. Ulu Beg climbed quickly over it and began to walk the catwalk along the tracks into the tunnel. The darkness swallowed him. A few lights blinked ahead. He reached a metal door set in the wall. It said, 102 ELEVATOR.

It was padlocked. He removed the key from his pocket and opened the lock. He stepped into the corridor, found the ladder, and began to climb down to the tunnel.

Keeping the Ingram securely wrapped in his jacket, Chardy walked for a block or two until he was sure he had lost Leo Bennis. Then, certain, he stepped again into the busy street to snag a cab. He stood in the brown light until one at last halted for him.

He climbed in.

“Where to?”

Chardy had a great advantage over Leo Bennis and the others of the Bureau in the matter of Danzig’s destination. He knew now the secret of it. Since the object of the Russian operation was to protect the identity of a highly placed CIA officer working for them, it followed that the Russians operating in Washington did so with the special benefit of this man’s knowledge. In short, they would be aware of and could take advantage of CIA arrangements.

So Chardy did not have to penetrate the Russian mind, on which he was no expert, but only to consult his own memory. He knew, for example, of five crash safe-houses, in the jargon, where an agent in trouble might head for safety if a D.C.-based operation went badly wrong. He reasoned that if the Russians wanted to lure Danzig into circumstances where the killing could be accomplished with a minimum of interference, a maximum of control, then certainly they would select one of the five.

But which?

Two were houses — old estates out in NW, spots private enough, except that both were heavily wired with recording devices so that nothing could transpire without leaving its traces. Clearly no good here.

Of the remaining three sites, one again was a sure no-go: the basement of a strip bar in the smutty Fourteenth Street area — its purpose was to offer refuge to an agent should some sex-related burn blow up in his face and necessitate a place to hide from the cops fast. But Fourteenth Street would be jammed with Johns and hustlers this time of night.

This left, really, only two choices.

The first was an apartment on Capitol Hill — but chancy, chancy: the Hill always had lots of people roaring around, and this was a Saturday night anyway, party night up there, with horny aides and pretty women and drunken congressmen all over the place.

It was a possibility. The apartment was on an out-of-the-way street and had a separate entrance — but …

“Where to, mister?” the cabby said again.

The last possibility was the fourth level, the lowest, of the parking lot under Kennedy Center. It was a deserted arena, unwired, with three or four no-visibility approaches, reserved for VIPs so they wouldn’t have to mingle with the common people. He knew that even six years ago when they were building the Metro system there’d been a plan to run a tunnel from the Foggy Bottom Station a half-mile down New Hampshire Avenue through to the fourth level.

Chardy looked at his watch. It was nearly midnight. “Kennedy Center,” he said.

“You must be wrong, mister,” said the cabby. “It’s dark by now. The shows are all over. It’s all closed down.”

“I think I’ll go anyway, if you don’t mind,” said Chardy. He could feel the cool grip of the machine pistol under the coat. His show was just about to begin.

It was a short directory. The codes fled by Miles’s eyes in a green blur. Suddenly he hit an end.

No Mo, the machine said: no more.

He went uneasily up through what he’d already slid down through. It was all nonsense, random letter groupings.

ABR………2395873

TYW………3478230

Codes, all codes, letters and numbers, in all maybe fifty of them. He could call each one up and see what it said, but that would take hours.

One of them meant something.

Twice, security monitors had wandered by to peer at him.

Miles stared at the letters. It was gibberish. He was guessing.

He hunted for a shoe of some sort in the three letter groupings — a SHO or a SHU or even another HSU.

Yet there wasn’t any.

He stared blankly at the letters.

Come on, think, he told himself. Frenchy wants it found, wants Paul to find it. He tried to guess how Frenchy might have gamed it out. Frenchy was off on a job that involved the betrayal of his oldest friend, his brother of a hundred narrow scrapes. Frenchy for some reason felt he had to do it; the offer was too good to say no to. Frenchy was getting old; he was worried about losing his job, about ending up on the outside at fifty with no marketable skills, no resume, no anything. So, yes, he’d sell Chardy out. But the loathing, the guilt, must have chewed him up. So he decides to hedge his bet. Chardy at least deserves that. He passes to Chardy the clue that will bring him here, to this chair, to look at this directory. It’s a funny thing to do, isn’t it? Or is it? Chardy had said only, “It’s a thing an old agent would do.” What did he mean? Then Lanahan knew what he meant: if Frenchy got fouled up on this job, if the job came apart, and Frenchy with it, knowing that he’d left his message back home for Paul would be helpful. To Paul? Not really. To Frenchy. It would help him die.

Lanahan saw now how Frenchy had doped it out. It was a way to face the chopper with some measure of peace.

He wants you to find it! He wants you to find it!

His eyes scanned the letters.

BDY………578309

BBB………580093

REQ………230958

Come on, Miles thought, come on! He felt his limbs boil with a tremendous restlessness. He wanted to walk, to run. If only he could get a drink of water.

Shoe? Would Frenchy stick with the shoe gimmick? It had gotten him this far, hadn’t it? Or would Frenchy have switched to something else?

Think, think!

Frenchy wants it found. Frenchy Short, all those years ago, sick with grief at what he’s about to do, probably not understanding it all himself, but imagining reaching out to Chardy with this last gift, this expiation.

Was Frenchy Catholic? He certainly had the Catholic sense of guilt, binding and cruel, and the huge need to confess.

Lanahan was Frenchy’s confessor. He sat in a dark booth and listened to Frenchy through the screen.

Forgive me, Miles, for I have sinned.

Make a contrition, son. Confess your sins.

Yes, Father, I will say a hundred Hail Marys.

No. Tell us your secrets. Your deepest, your darkest secrets.

But Lanahan drew back. He was no priest. He was an ex-computer analyst who’d bluffed his way into the pit and was trying to dig out a traitor.

Maybe I ought to say a hundred Hail Marys, he thought, for he had no other plan.

He looked at the codes.

Frenchy wants Paul to see something. Frenchy has planned it so that Paul will look at this list of letters and see something. Yet what? There are no words, for if there were words, anybody could see them and Frenchy’s worked it out so that only Paul can see them.

What is there about Paul that’s unique? What would give Chardy an advantage, looking through this list of codes? What would Chardy see that no other man would?

He felt he was getting close. He sat back, tried to concentrate on Chardy, call up and examine his components. Chardy, hero, special-operations cowboy, toting guns and gear around the dusty corners of the world. Chardy, athlete, banging through jump shots and driving lay-ups. Chardy, fool, cuckolded and used cruelly by a woman. Chardy, suicide, tendencies toward self-destruction. Chardy, Chicago boy, coming off the same streets Miles came off of, attending the same parochial schools, going to the same churches. Chardy, Irishman, moody and sulky and brutal. Chard —

Then Miles had it.

Danzig stood at the bottom of the stairwell. He opened the door and looked into the parking garage and felt a sudden, suffocating loss of confidence. Enormous weight seemed to crush down on him; he could not breathe and just for a moment he thought he might be having a heart attack.

Yet it passed. Still, he felt almost physically ill with fear, in a blasphemed place. He could not go back; he was terrified to go forward. He could feel the sweat damp and heavy in his shirt and was aware with what great difficulty the air came into his lungs. At last he stepped through the final door.

It was so simple. Frenchy, you’re smart. No matter what you did, Frenchy, no matter what you became in your weakness, let no man ever say you are not smart.

What would Chardy see that no other man would?

Chardy would see Hungarian. Chardy was half-Hungarian and had grown up with a mad Hungarian doctor for a father, a raving anticommunist with a failed practice and a one-bedroom apartment on the North Side of Chicago.

Lanahan swiftly ended the directory. He looked behind him, down the rows of cubicles in the dark space. At last he saw a free machine on a different system. He rose, walked through the darkness to it. He could hear the other operators clicking away, each sealed into his machine, each fighting his private little war.

Miles sat at the empty machine, which was linked into a different computer system, and quickly punched:

Fe Lan

There rose before him a language directory. He filed down through the listings until he reached HUNG.

Fe Hung, he ordered.

A concise word-list and phrase catalogue of Hungarian — placed in the machine’s memory in case an analyst who didn’t speak the language came across a word in it and needed translation fast — sailed up before Lanahan. He looked at it quickly, then clicked the machine off.

He walked back to his own terminal. Why did he feel he was being observed?

He was so close now; if he could just bluff it through another two or three minutes.

He sat back at his own terminal, called up the SHU directory and looked again at the code groupings.

Fe Egy, Miles ordered.

Egy: one.

Another directory rose.

Miles glanced through it until he found the proper code.

Fe Ketto, he ordered.

Fetch two.

Another directory.

Fe Harom

Another.

Fe Negy

Another.

FE OT

One, two, three, four, five. He was in the fifth directory now. Where would it end? He was within a directory within a directory within a directory within a directory within a directory. Was this a Möbius strip of a code, an Escher drawing of a code, that would go on forever, twisty and clever?

The screen went blank.

The machine stared at him, mutely stupid.

Long moments lagged. Had the whole thing collapsed? He knew he’d have no time to dig this deep into it again.

The screen’s emptiness mocked him.

Then a message with a long tail dragged into view:

This material will appear only on your screen if searched for. It will be stored with service level designators priority code a (advance) category c (standing item). It cannot be destroyed or altered. We will begin transmission upon receipt of six-letter security code.

Enter six-letter security code here

In all his hours before the screen, Miles had never seen a communication like this one. Service Level Designator? Now what the hell did that mean? Priority Code, Category Code?

But he knew he’d tapped the mother lode.

Enter six-letter security code here

He stared at it. Another hurdle, a last one. Oh, come on, Frenchy, Jesus, Frenchy, you hid it so good. God, Frenchy, you must have been a clever bastard. Miles reached across the years to love Frenchy Short, who was so smart. Burying it so deep, so well; and now there was only this last obstacle.

Enter six-letter security code here

Oh, Frenchy. Miles stared at it. Six letters between himself and Frenchy.

He tried to concentrate.

Was it SHOES, or some variation on the HSU-SHU axis? No, not enough letters, unless you rolled them up into one.

He instructed the machine:

Fe Shuhsu

His fingers stroked the send command button, but he did not depress it.

Do it, he told himself.

But he could not.

If he was wrong, he might lose the whole chain, he might be back up top, back up at HSU again. He might be forced to dig through all the levels. And also, suppose — it was a good supposition — suppose there was some sort of alarm mechanism built into the system? That is, if you tried to penetrate this final level and displayed a kind of tentativeness, an awkwardness, a hesitancy, suppose the machine was programmed to recognize these inadequacies for the profile of a thief, recognize your guilt? The machine was notoriously literal-minded: it had no imagination, no capacity for sympathy; its ethics were coldly binary. It would blow the whistle on you.

Sitting there, Miles knew the machine would betray him if he disappointed it.

This awareness almost paralyzed him. He suddenly hated the thing. He stared at it and was afraid.

Enter six-letter security code here?

“Mr. Lanahan?”

He looked up, startled.

It was Bluestein.

“How are you coming?”

“Ah, oh, all right. Surprising how long it takes you to get it back, though.”

“I’m afraid we’re going to pull that disc pretty soon. The other systems are beginning to top up and the stuff from upstairs is really pouring in. We need the system space. You know how it is.”

“I see,” said Miles.

“It’s not that I want to play the hard guy; it’s that—”

“Sure.”

Miles thought: Come on, altar boy. Come on, little priest. Come on you stinking pimply suck-ass: Do something! Say something!

“Just a minute more, okay, Mike? I just have to wrap this.”

“Miles, people are waiting and—”

“I’ll owe you one. I always pay off. I can help you. A lot. You know what I mean? I can help you upstairs. Cover for me.”

“Miles, I just can’t. I gave you a big break and—”

“Mike, just let me say one thing. I appreciate what you did for me. I really do. You’re a decent guy. I won’t give you any trouble.”

“Thanks, Miles. I really appreciate your co-op—”

“And I’ll go to your supervisor first thing Monday morning to tell him you violated security procedure, Mike.”

Miles smiled at him evenly.

“Form Twelve, Mike. I’m in here without a Form Twelve, Mike. You could be in big—”

“Goddamn you. You little—”

“Just back off, Jewboy. Just back the fuck off, and you get your career back. Otherwise, you’re on your way to Siberia.”

He glared at him in smug triumph. Miles could really be quite evil — he had the capacity for it — and he watched the tall young man buckle under the pressure.

“Five more minutes, Miles. Goddamn you, they said you were a prick!”

He rushed off into the dark.

Miles turned back to the screen. He could not escape it.

Enter six-letter security code here

Frenchy, you son-of-a-bitch. You old bastard.

Old Frenchy. Smart old Frenchy.

Then it arrived, from nowhere.

He commanded:

Fe Cowboy

He could see a labyrinth of pillars and acres and acres of the rawest space under a low ceiling. It was an abstraction too, an infinitely open-ended maze. Tunnels and chambers and warrens spilled everywhere in gloomy subterranean abundance. Every fourth or fifth pillar had its own lighted EXIT arrow, stenciled orange, three-quarters of the way up. Did Borges invent this place? Did Kafka? Did Beckett? No, of course not. It was any underground parking garage anyplace in America any time in the ’60s or ’70s or ’80s.

No trace of human motion met his eyes as they probed the aisles and ranks, though in any of a hundred or a thousand dark places, in shadows, in vent openings, in ducts, in stairwells — in any of them — a man could hide.

Danzig’s fear blossomed anew, exotic, an ice-blue orchid inside his chest. It seemed a phenomenon of his gastrointestinal system, crippling and weakening his own interior ducts and vents. He wanted to be sick and could feel bile in his throat. His heart was running hard. He fought for air and found it foul with ancient auto exhaust. He steadied himself. He wished he did not have to be so brave.

The first theory of modern statecraft — so basic, really, it never saw print — was that you paid people to be brave for you. A class of man existed for just such exigencies. Yet here was Danzig, no longer bold by surrogate, required himself to step into the arena.

I am not brave; few enough are. Soldiers sense this intuitively, as if they can sniff it. Civilian, they sneer in contempt, meaning: coward. Meaning also, in his case: Jew. Kike. They were the elect: courage was their election. They held themselves apart, arrogant, hard. He’d seen the look in their eyes, in Chardy’s too; he’d been reading it in a certain Gentile set of eyes for half a century now.

Danzig stepped out, hearing the door hush closed on its pneumatic pump and click (lock?) behind him.

He stepped forward. His shoes echoed under the low ceiling.

“Chardy? I’m here, Mr. Chardy,” he called.

Ulu Beg could see him. He had a shot of close to one hundred yards, through a dozen sets of pillars, long for the pistol round that the Skorpion threw.

“You must be close,” they’d said.

He began to draw nearer. This was not difficult. The fat man was very frightened and kept yelling for Chardy and it was easy to stay in the shadows and yet feel the voice growing louder and louder. He began to count. He would count to one hundred.