the Third Twin

48

STEVE WAS THRILLED TO SEE JEANNIE SITTING ON THE PATIO, drinking lemonade and talking earnestly to his father as if they were old friends. This is what I want, he thought; I want Jeannie in my life. Then I can deal with anything.

He crossed the lawn from the garage, smiling, and kissed her lips softly. “You two look like conspirators,” he said.

Jeannie explained what they were planning, and Steve allowed himself to feel hopeful again.

Dad said to Jeannie: “I’m not computer-literate. I’ll need help loading your program.”

“I’ll come with you.”

“I’ll bet you don’t have your passport here.”

“I sure don’t.”

“I can’t get you into the data center without identification.”

“I could go home and get it.”

“I’ll come with you,” Steve said to Dad. “I have my passport upstairs. I’m sure I could load the program.”

Dad looked askance at Jeannie.

She nodded. “The process is simple. If there are any glitches you can call me from the data center and I’ll talk you through it.”

“Okay.”

Dad went into the kitchen and brought out the phone. He dialed a number. “Don, this is Charlie. Who won the golf? … I knew you could do it. But I’ll beat you next week, you watch. Listen, I need a favor, kind of unusual. I want to check my son’s medical records from way back when.… Yeah, he’s got some kind of rare condition, not life threatening but serious, and there may be a clue in his early history. Would you arrange security clearance for me to go into the Command Data Center?”

There was a long pause. Steve could not read his father’s face. At last he said: “Thanks, Don, I really appreciate it.”

Steve punched the air and said: “Yes!”

Dad put a finger to his lips, then went on speaking into the phone. “Steve will be with me. We’ll be there in fifteen or twenty minutes, if that’s all right.…Thanks again.” He hung up.

Steve ran up to his room and came back with his passport.

Jeannie had the disks in a small plastic box. She handed them to Steve. “Put the one marked number one in the disk drive and the instructions will come up on the screen.”

He looked at his father. “Ready?”

“Let’s go.”

“Good luck,” Jeannie said.

They got in the Lincoln Mark VIII and drove to the Pentagon. They parked in the biggest parking lot in the world. In the Midwest there were towns smaller than the Pentagon parking lot. They went up a flight of steps to a second-floor entrance.

When he was thirteen Steve had been taken on a visitor’s tour of the place by a tall young man with an impossibly short haircut. The building consisted of five concentric rings linked by ten corridors like the spokes of a wheel. There were five floors and no elevators. He had lost his sense of direction within seconds. The main thing he remembered was that in the middle of the central courtyard was a building called Ground Zero which was a hotdog stand.

Now his father led the way past a closed barbershop, a restaurant, and a metro entrance to a security checkpoint. Steve showed his passport and was signed in as a visitor and given a pass to stick to his shirtfront.

There were relatively few people here on a Saturday evening, and the corridors were deserted but for a few late workers, mostly in uniform, and one or two of the golf carts used for transporting bulky objects and VIPs. Last time he was here Steve had been reassured by the monolithic might of the building: it was all there to protect him. Now he felt differently. Somewhere in this maze of rings and corridors a plot had been hatched, the plot that had created him and his doppelgängers. This bureaucratic haystack existed to hide the truth he sought, and the men and women in crisp army, navy, and air force uniforms were now his foes.

They went along a corridor, up a staircase, and around a ring to another security point. This one took longer. Steve’s full name and address had to be keyed in, and they waited a minute or two for the computer to clear him. For the first time in his life he felt that a security check was aimed at him; he was the one they were looking for. He felt furtive and guilty, although he had done nothing wrong. It was a weird sensation. Criminals must feel like this all the time, he thought. And spies, and smugglers, and unfaithful husbands.

They passed on, turned several more corners, and came to a pair of glass doors. Beyond the doors, a dozen or so young soldiers were sitting in front of computer screens, keying in data, or feeding paper documents into optical character recognition machines. A guard outside the door checked Steve’s passport yet again, then let them in.

The room was carpeted and quiet, windowless and softly lit, with the characterless atmosphere of purified air. The operation was being run by a colonel, a gray-haired man with a pencil-line mustache. He did not know Steve’s father, but he was expecting them. His tone was brisk as he directed them to the terminal they would use: perhaps he regarded their visit as a nuisance.

Dad told him: “We need to search the medical records of babies born in military hospitals around twenty-two years ago.”

“Those records are not held here.”

Steve’s heart sank. Surely they could not be defeated that easily?

“Where are they held?”

“In St. Louis.”

“Can’t you access them from here?”

“You need priority clearance to use the data link. You don’t have that.”

“I didn’t anticipate this problem, Colonel,” Dad said testily. “Do you want me to call General Krohner again? He may not thank us for bothering him unnecessarily on a Saturday night, but I will if you insist.”

The colonel weighed a minor breach of rules against the risk of irritating a general. “I guess that’ll be okay. The line isn’t being used, and we need to test it sometime this weekend.”

“Thank you.”

The colonel called over a woman in lieutenant’s uniform and introduced her as Caroline Gambol. She was about fifty, overweight, and corseted, with the manner of a headmistress. Dad repeated what he had told the colonel.

Lieutenant Gambol said: “Are you aware that those records are governed by the privacy act, sir?”

“Yes, and we have authorization.”

She sat at the terminal and touched the keyboard. After a few minutes she said: “What kind of search do you want to run?”

“We have our own search program.”

“Yes, sir. I’ll be glad to load that for you.”

Dad looked at Steve. Steve shrugged and handed the woman the floppy disks.

As she was loading the program she looked curiously at Steve. “Who wrote this software?”

“A professor at Jones Falls.”

“It’s very clever,” she said. “I’ve never seen anything quite like it.” She looked at the colonel, who was watching over her shoulder. “Have you, sir?”

He shook his head.

“It’s loaded. Shall I run the search?”

“Go ahead.”

Lieutenant Gambol pressed Enter.