Shadows and Smoke

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Shadows and Smoke Page 20

by Rich X Curtis


  “Are the spies here?” Tarl asked. “I want to speak to the masters of spies.”

  “Don’t we all?” The man said. He wore a uniform shirt, in sand-colored khaki, Tarl had learned it was called. “I’d have some words for those guys.” He sighed. “I just work the desk, pal. You looking for someone in particular?”

  “The leaders of intelligence,” Tarl repeated. “I want to talk to them. To help them. With codes.”

  The man’s brow furrowed. He nodded slowly, as Tarl’s words and accent seemed to sink in. “Most of them are still over at Cockroach Alley.” He clapped his hands. “Have a seat. I’ll find somebody who can help you. Just, just have a seat. Please. I’ll call upstairs.” He folded the paper and squared his shoulders. He picked up the phone and dialed a number.

  Tarl sat in the antechamber in one of the scuffed chairs. The man spoke into the phone, in hushed tones, too fast for Tarl to follow. He nodded, looked up at Tarl, said, “Yessir,” and hung up. He looked at Tarl. “You come alone?”

  Tarl nodded. The man seemed satisfied. “Told them we had a walk-in. Not many of those since the War ended.” He looked at Tarl. “Just sit tight, they’ll be down in a minute.”

  “I will not leave,” Tarl said, to reassure the man, who seemed suddenly very nervous.

  “Good, because they told me to keep you here,” he said, laughing a high, braying laugh. “I left my leg in the Ardennes, so I’m not up to a footrace.”

  A door opened behind him, and a man in a gray suit stepped inside. He was slight, stooped, with round glasses. The man behind the desk began to rise. “Don’t get up, Sergeant. No need.” He glanced at Tarl.

  “Wilson here says you said something about codes. That’s an interesting subject,” the man said, his accent clipped and formal. Tarl gauged him, noting the lines around his eyes, behind the round spectacle lenses. Tarl stood, offering his hand. The man just looked at it. He did not shake it.

  “Are you intelligence?” Tarl asked, knowing it was true. This man was a spymaster. Tarl had met such people before. They evaluated, they sifted, they judged truth and lies. They were like Grandmother or the Boy.

  The man sniffed. “Sometimes,” he said, smiling. The smile did not reach his eyes. Then he cocked his head, as if he’d heard something in Tarl’s question. “Sprechen Sie Deutsch?” he asked.

  Tarl nodded slowly. “I do, but not well,” he said slowly in Germanic. “I’m here to help with codes. I do math, numbers, calculations.” He smiled, his best smile, open and friendly. “Do my bit,” he added in English.

  “How’d you get here?” the man asked, still in German. His diction was strange to Tarl, but he followed. “To this country?”

  “By bus, from the south,” he said, vaguely hoping it would do.

  “From Brazil? Your accent says Brazil. Lots of you boys went that way, so I’m told.” He peered at him, then the man nodded. “A long ride, I’m guessing.” He snapped his fingers and consulted a watch from his pocket, on a long silver chain. He nodded to himself. “Wilson, forget you saw this man.”

  “Yessir,” Wilson said. He kept his eyes down, clearly not wanting to be noticed by this serious man.

  To Tarl, he said, “Smith, was it? Come with me, we’ll have a talk.”

  The man gave his name as Johnson, though he paused right before naming himself, so Tarl suspected a pseudonym. He didn’t mind. This was the right place, the right man, he just had to convince him to let him into the palace. The man led him down a long hallway, full of closed doors.

  “Not many people left here,” he said conversationally. “Most have packed up for the new place. Used to be quite the bustle here, but…” He paused, and looked over his shoulder at Tarl. “Onward and upward.”

  He stopped in front of a door, fishing a key out of his pocket. He unlocked the door, holding it open for Tarl. Tarl nodded and entered ahead of him. It was an office of some sort. There was a metal desk, a metal cabinet and several chests of drawers also in the same gray metal. The drawers had a dial on the front of them, like a safe for valuables. Secrets, then, Tarl realized. He was in the right place.

  Johnson sat behind the desk. He took a short-barreled pipe, dinged and well-used, from a rack on his desk. He struck a match and puffed at it, a purple cloud of smoke wreathing his head. He leaned back in his chair and regarded Tarl. “So,” he said in German, “tell your tale.”

  “I am a mathematician,” Tarl said. “My work…mostly about applying cybernetics to number theory.” This was something they had trained him in to better recognize prospects for the Work. If a world was on a path to creating a Mind, the Center needed to know, and to know they needed to ensure Seekers could detect this. There were only a few paths that led to this, so knowing those general principles and their nuances was important. He had been drilled extensively.

  Johnson looked him over. “Your German has an accent,” he said. He raised his eyebrows. “Spanish?”

  Tarl nodded. “I was born in Spain, yes, but we moved to Romania when I was a child. My family. I am not German,” he said. “But I know things the Germans knew, I think.”

  “We have Germans working for us. Better us than with the Reds, right? We don’t ask too many questions.” He looked him over. “But we do ask some questions. That’s my job, mostly, these days. Since I started riding a desk.” He waved at the wall behind him, which Tarl saw was hung with photographs. Men in uniform, in cities and one in an open car, a jeep, those were called. Also a small medallion, shaped like a star, hung on a formal red, blue, and white ribbon, in a frame. The medal was gray, polished to a high sheen. “You were with the Wehrmacht?”

  Tarl shook his head, knowing this for the Kaiserreich’s guard. “The star,” Tarl noted, changing the subject. “It is a medal? A commendation?” He had seen such things.

  The man nodded. “Normandy,” he said. He tapped his pipe into a metal plate. “Silver Star,” he said, and Tarl could hear the pride in his voice, well-masked but there. “Cleanest uniform in the regiment.”

  Tarl laughed, knowing this for humor. He smiled. Something nagged at him about the medal. He looked at Johnson. “I just want to help. This country is building computers, machines that think? I want to help. Do my bit.” He pointed at a photograph. Three men in front of a small open vehicle, a tall mountain behind them. "This is in Germany?"

  Johnson looked at the photo. His face darkened slightly, then he smiled. “Bavaria. My unit cleaned up after the war there. Lots of paperwork." He looked back at Tarl. "You know Germany?"

  "Only a little," Tarl said quickly. "It looks pretty there, in the mountain places."

  "It was. That's the Eagle's Nest, right there. Did you know he had a fortress up there? It was huge. Full of stolen knick-knacks." He shook his head. "So, machines that think, eh?” Johnson laughed. “Never heard them called that before. They're just adding machines really.” He peered over his pipe at Tarl. “I'll pass you on to the technical boys. They’ll want to know more, but they won’t pry too much. Some things they don’t want to know, basically. Especially after what you boys got up to.” He leveled his gaze at Tarl. “You know what you’re getting into, though, right?”

  Tarl met his gaze, puzzled.

  “If they find out you’re lying or playing some game,” Johnson said, “they’ll have plenty of questions. Hard questions. And the witch-hunters, the counterintel boys, are always watching. Keeps us honest.”

  Spy hunters, he meant. Tarl nodded. He was only half listening. He had passed the first test. Do not trust them, he realized, was good advice. Good for any world, he told himself. She had been adamant, there at the last. Do not trust the Center. Do not trust the spies or the spy hunters.

  She had said something else, there towards the end of his time with her, as his perceptions had wavered and dimmed, receding into an infinite point, as if down the longest of tunnels. He had asked her name, and she had told him, but he hadn’t heard it, or knew that he had heard it. He looked at the medal. It had five poi
nts. They looked sharp. Her name. He had asked it, and she had told him, tears in her eyes. Silver, she’d said. My name is Silver.

  —

  Tarl learned the US Intelligence service quickly. It was, he realized, like all bureaucracies, full of vain, ambitious people, eager to make names for themselves. Most of them were patriots, which was just another kind of vanity, he reasoned. It meant he could manipulate them.

  At first, they sent him to a kind of school in one of their northern states. It was a camp atmosphere, with a common mess hall and barracks for the various groups of students. They kept him isolated from the other Europeans. A gruff sergeant by the name of Winchell told him to keep his origins quiet. “Nobody cares where you from, or what you did in the War,” he said, handing Tarl a wrapped paper parcel which contained a musty set of green fatigues, underwear, and black leather boots. “Here,” he said, grinning big yellow teeth at Tarl, “Nobody wants to know.”

  Winchell was right. Nobody seemed to want to know. They had interviewed him in D.C., two pleasant young men in gray suits with striped ties. Johnson had watched, tapping his pipe in an ashtray occasionally and reading the newspaper. He hadn’t even seemed to be listening as Tarl told his story.

  He had been in Eastern Europe, he told them, in the Balkans. He’d been a student in Romania, but he’d been at Stalingrad, he said, having studied there right before the German invasion. In reality, all he studied were newspapers from the city library, and pieced this fiction together from their accounts of the war. He was conscripted, and sent to the front lines without a rifle. Then his unit was overrun and they almost captured him. He had run, he said, and kept running. He’d hid, but they had turned him in. His professors had informed on him, he said, when the Germans took their part of the city. They said he knew math and cryptography. Codes.

  His name was on a list. A German officer, he lied, had interviewed him. He was balding, with a black uniform and skulls on the lapels. He cribbed this detail from the newspaper accounts. His story was that they then sent him to Berlin, where he’d worked with them on cracking Soviet codes in the last months of the war. A small office near the Reichstag. He shook his head when they asked for names. “I don’t remember.” he said. He could tell they thought he was lying, but they didn’t press him.

  When Berlin fell he fled south he told them, crossing into Austria with three other officers in a radio truck. They bought their way onto a Turkish freighter to Brazil with stolen cash. His crossing had taken 3 weeks. They asked him his companions' names, and again, he declined.

  The gray-suited men looked at Johnson, who eyed Tarl cooly, then shrugged. He nodded at them, and they continued. He related how he’d hitchhiked to the north, which took months, finally reaching D.C., where he walked in.

  The men in the gray suits had nodded and were affable enough. They spoke surprise German to him, and he nodded and replied in that language. They had no Romanian interpreters, they said, shrugging, but they asked him some questions about that country, which he fielded as best he could.

  They put him up in a hotel. There didn’t seem to be any guards, but he assumed there were. He didn’t press his luck and stayed in, listening to the radio. The news was mostly unintelligible to him. The Soviets had detonated an atomic weapon, it seemed. He listened to music, trying to find the style that Rosa had liked, but there was only swing and jazz music, which was too discordant for him. He indulged himself and took a bath in the hotel’s tub. The water was hot and seemed endless. He soaked and then dressed again in his worn suit.

  A knock at the door revealed a servant with a tray. Food. A strip of cooked flesh, a mound of something white with gravy, carrots and small cabbages. An icy bottle of beer. He ate it all, drank the beer, and then went to bed. He lay awake for a long while, listening to the city sounds out the window. So many vehicles. After a while, he slept.

  The morning repeated a similar scene, only with different food. He ate quickly, drinking the coffee, which reminded him of his time in the fields of the red-robed priests. He’d had coffee there, as they believed it made workers more productive. He found he still enjoyed it, though this stuff was weak compared to the thick black sludge they’d given the field workers. A man in a gray suit collected him with a knock at his door, and walked him back to the gray stone building and down into a cellar room.

  There, waiting, were two more men in gray suits, smoking cigarettes. There was a box on the table in front of them, stiff cardboard coated with a shiny wax, it seemed, scuffed and dented. A sigil was emblazoned on the box, a five-pointed star. English words he didn’t know were also printed there in stenciled letters and numbers.

  The closest man stubbed out his cigarette. He introduced himself as Mr. Green, and this was Mr. White. Tarl decided they were code names and nodded politely.

  “We will test your technical skills,” Mr. White said. “I was a university math professor before the late distractions.” He gave a small smile. “I will want you to do some problems with me on the board, get a sense of your schooling.” He indicated the blackboard easel.

  Tarl tensed. Math was math, it was true, but symbology was variable across threads. He knew this from the various salvage operations he’d been on. “I am mostly…” he paused, as if struggling for words, “…teach myself.” He smiled his Dumb Tarl smile. “Maybe I don’t know same symbols you use. But I will try.” Neera and her team of Archivists had drilled all the Seekers on various known symbology systems. They seemed to dominate clusters of threads like languages did. This one, he knew, was based on Greek and Semite numbers. They called them Arabs here, but the numerals were familiar to him. The equation operators were straightforward, and he had already familiarized himself with some of them. But higher math worried him. There would be variations from what he knew.

  The man looked at him for a long moment and then nodded. “I’m sure we’ll get through it. Won’t take long.” He stood up and took off his jacket, and began writing equations on the board with a piece of chalk.

  It took, Tarl thought, longer than the man indicated, and was thorough, working Tarl up from basic quadratic equations through to linear matrix transformations. He followed along well enough, he thought, only drawing a raised eyebrow from Mr. White once, when he did not understand the meaning of one of his squiggles. He explained, having to back up and provide the context, and then Tarl recognized his error and quickly recovered.

  They brought in coffee and ice water in a glass pitcher and turned to codes. He claimed not to remember details of the Russian codes, what they called them. Mr. Green chided him. “Come on, Smith,” he said. “You’re joining the right team here. All the people you worked with are probably dead. You have nothing to be afraid of.” He smiled a crooked grin. “Uncle Joe can’t reach you here, and Adolf’s dead.”

  He shook his head. “I just knew how to work the adding machine. They give me numbers, and I do the calculations on them.” He mimed pulling down a crank. He knew these machines existed, he’d seen them in shops as he’d crossed the country. Proto-Minds, he thought, or precursors to such devices.

  They looked at each other. Then one shrugged. Green went to the cardboard box and pulled a wooden box out of it, grunting a little with the strain of lifting its weight. He set it gently on the table and stood back. “Know what this is?” He asked.

  Tarl looked it over. “It’s a box,” he said, sipping his coffee.

  Mr. Green smiled and unlatched the lid, flipping it back. It looked like a typer, which Tarl had seen examples of here. But this had a set of three dials recessed into the top, and he glimpsed a board with pegs attached to wires in the front of it, below the keyboard.

  “I think you know,” White said, glancing at Green. “You must have seen these.”

  Tarl shrugged. It was a mechanical encoder, he suspected. Perhaps it decoded messages. He looked away from the thing to the window. Outside, the sun was shining. He thought of Murn. She would be, the Boy had said, more pliant when he returned this time.
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  Tarl looked it over. “This differs from ones I saw,” he said, extemporizing. “They didn’t have this part.” He tapped the part with the lamps and peg-holes in the front. He said that because it looked like that part had been bolted on and was detachable.

  Green and White exchanged glances. “Those were the commercial models, from before the War,” White said, nodding. “They had those?”

  “The Germans?” Tarl asked. “Yes, they had three, of that type.” He smiled. “I didn’t use them,” he said. “But they had a room with three and a team of operators.”

  “A team of three?” Green asked, pouring himself more coffee from the carafe.

  Tarl shook his head. “Six,” he said, “two to a machine.” He guessed that you would need help writing the output of such a device, if there was to be any speed to it. “But I don’t know how they work.”

  “Takes two to tango,” Green said, glancing at his watch. “All right, Smith. We have everything we need for our report. Your bus is here, I think.” He offered his hand. “Welcome aboard.”

  “Bus?” Tarl said, shaking it. White was busy putting the encoder machine away and nodded to him.

  “You’re going north,” White said, grinning. “Little finishing school we have up in the woods for guys like you. Good fishing.”

  “Good fishing,” Tarl echoed. It sounded like a litany. Fish?

  Chapter Fifteen

  India, Agra

  Early 1960s

  Tarl stepped out of the Pan Am jet onto the stairway and sucked in his breath. India in July. Garcia had told him it would be hot here, and humid, but he’d worn his wool suit on the plane because planes were always cold. He figured he could change into the linen suit in the hotel and then get a drink before duty called.

  But of course, he had underestimated how quickly he could get through customs on his regular passport. No ice-cold diplomatic car waiting for him on this trip, he was incognito. He stood in the queue to get his passport stamped and blandly looked at the mirrored glass behind the customs desk. He wondered who among the assembled travelers, airport workers, or customs officials were watching him with more than passing interest. The British? Were they behind the mirrored glass? Or the Indians themselves? It didn’t matter. Smith would retire soon; he’d been living this persona for almost a dozen years now. It was time to start over. The Work was entering a new phase.

 

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