One from Without

by Jack Fuller

  “He said he turned against the war when he realized that the Soviets couldn’t have been happier, seeing us bleed in Vietnam for nothing,” said Rosten.

  “And yet he continued to lure students into the CIA.”

  “He recruited only for Fisherman,” said Rosten. “It seems that, much as he hated communism, Fisherman saw the war the same way Hawthorne did.”

  “Unbelievable,” she said.

  “That day in the vault I was informed that I was a young man of adequate intellect who knew how to do an assignment. Hawthorne assured me that Fisherman valued these qualities, which he associated with the Heartland.”

  “Hawthorne barely knew you,” said Grace.

  “He knew more than you would imagine,” said Rosten. “He told me there had been an extensive investigation. ‘By the way, we looked into that young woman of yours, too,’ he said. ‘Everything suggests that you are both cut from the same cloth.’”

  “This is making me really uncomfortable,” Grace said. “Can we stop?”

  “We’ve only started, I’m afraid.”

  “Did he listen to us in the bed?” she said.

  Rosten had never thought to find out.

  “I told him that the CIA wasn’t the life I imagined,” he said. “He told me that it was the life I could have. ‘You might even find the thing you are meant to write about,’ he said. ‘You know, the right subject covers a lot of inadequacies.’”

  “You must have been devastated. Why didn’t you say something to me?”

  Rosten had not been allowed to. All he could tell her was that he had taken a position in Washington, D.C. Immediately after his graduation they drove there together to look for a place to live. She was ready to stay the summer, but as soon as they arrived, he said he didn’t think that would be a good idea. He was going to be gone a lot. It wouldn’t be fair for her to be stranded alone in an unfamiliar place.

  The flat they found wasn’t much—one large room with a closet of a kitchen that had a long venetian blind in lieu of a door. She found ways of brightening the place, a batik to hang on the wall for a flash of color, fabric to cover the horsehair mattress of the bed that doubled as a couch. She helped him put up shelves of cinder blocks and two-by-tens and then watched him arrange the books.

  When he had them all in place, he stepped back and said, “What do you think?”

  “It’s you,” she said.

  Then Sunday came and he drove her to National Airport for her trip to North Dakota. She wrote him every day from her father’s farm. He sent her only two letters in return. The second said that he would be going into intensive training and had to break off contact. Those were the words he used. How cold they must have seemed to her.

  Sometimes at night in bed, the pain that his silence was surely causing her came over him, pulling him back to the Tom Rosten she had known. They had taken away all the other touch points by which he had formerly located himself—clothes, family, the long hair Grace had liked to stroke. In place of these were compartments, secret boxes, in one of which, he was given to understand, he would one day come to find exactly what his country needed of him.

  When the cloistered phase of training concluded, he finally wrote her again. She was back in New Haven, and he was careful to have his letters posted from somewhere he was not. She must have sensed that he was lost to her, but they settled on getting together in Washington on a date certain in early fall.

  He met her at Union Station, carrying a travel bag himself, and took her to a big, anonymous hotel off Scott Circle that smelled of cigarettes and disinfectant. She wanted to know why they didn’t stay at the apartment. He said he it was to be a vacation, and they did behave like tourists: the White House, the Capitol Building, the I. M. Pei East Wing on Pennsylvania Avenue. She wanted to take the FBI tour, but the Bureau was in one compartment and he was in another. He told her he had heard that the tour was too boring for words. Because of the location of the hotel he chose, every day they ended on 16th Street, where they passed the shuttered, haunted house of the Soviet Embassy.

  When they returned to Union Station, she talked of a next visit. He said he would need to clear a date. But their time together had made him realize that he needed to break it off, this time for good. Being with her, he felt himself sliding back into what he had been, imagining they could be like the other couples on the tours—heedless, happy, of little use.

  After Thanksgiving she wrote him to say that she had gone down to Washington and found his apartment vacant. The manager had told her he had moved out after only a couple of months, walking away from the deposit. Rosten had the Agency reseal the letter and send it back Addressee Unknown. By then he had been given his assignment. All that was left of what he and Grace had thought they’d had together was collateral damage.

  Now, all these many years later, he touched the back of her hand with his fingers.

  “I went down the wrong path, Grace,” he told her. His mouth was dry, but at least he had begun.

  2

  For weeks, Gunderman struggled with the fact that he could see what the hacker had done inside the database but could not figure out how he had gotten there. Then suddenly his overnight processor served up an algorithm. How anything so clear could come from the jumbled, unpredictable mush of dreams, he never knew. For weeks he had been stuck, then this came, not words or numbers but an object in three dimensions, sharp-edged and obvious, like a building by Mies. When applied to the database, the algorithm would grind away, repeating the same steps over and over again as it crawled along, feeling with its digits until it found the wormhole where the intruder had entered.

  Maggie’s breath fluttered through her lips in an unsteady cadence as Gunderman snuck out of bed as carefully as a cheating man might sneak into it. In the warmth of the car, speeding down the expressway, he could not believe the solution was as simple as it was. All he could remember of his dream was “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” music from Fantasia, which he had not seen since he was a child. He did not have to go his Wise Man to figure out the meaning of that. It was a warning. If they did not deal with the problem properly, it would split into two problems, then four, then eight, sixteen. He needed to go to Rosten.

  “‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’!” Rosten said.

  His rage shocked Gunderman. He heard himself speaking faster, louder.

  “Stop!” said Rosten. “Control-alt-delete.”

  Gunderman took a breath and tried to slow down.

  “I have an algorithm,” he said. “We can go to the audit chairman with both the problem and a plan. Otherwise trouble will increase geometrically, like Mickey Mouse’s brooms.”

  “Grow up,” said Rosten.

  “I’m not saying tell the public,” Gunderman said. “Just the Audit Committee chairman.”

  “Teddy Diamond is in trouble at his own company.”

  “Unless we do something, this will metastasize,” said Gunderman.

  “So it’s not brooms,” said Rosten. “It’s cancer.”

  Metaphors were Gunderman’s enemies. Code was his only friend.

  “Teddy Diamond is a professional,” he said.

  “I’ll tell you what he would do,” said Rosten. “Run for cover, just like you’re doing. He’d demand an independent investigation. By the time he got done, everybody in the fucking world would know that our system is a sieve.”

  “Actually, it let something in, not let something out,” said Gunderman. Warm air whispered in the ducts under the ceiling tile. The hush was unbearable. He finally broke it. “Every system made by man has bugs,” he said. “You just have to deal with them. That’s all I’m trying to say.”

  “You think this algorithm of yours will show us something?” said Rosten.

  “It will find the breach in the firewall.”

  “That might lead somewhere, I guess,” said Rosten. “Bring it to Lawton. See what he thinks. But leave Teddy Diamond the hell out of it.”

  At least it was a start.
One logical step at a time, just like writing code. Gunderman found Lawton deep in his terminal.

  “I’ve checked the accounts of the senior executives and a few others,” Lawton said. “You’re past due on an electric bill, by the way.”

  “I guess I’ve been distracted,” Gunderman said.

  “Then I looked at the top people at our bigger clients,” said Lawton. As he spoke, his mouth barely opened. Gunderman had to move closer to hear. “Not a single data set out of whack. An overdraft here, a missed payment there, but by the next cycle everything squared up again.”

  Lawton was wearing a sweater, even though warm air blew down on them. Suddenly a shiver went through him.

  “You want to believe it was a transient event,” Lawton said. “You want to think you’ll wake up in the morning and feel foolish for having been afraid.”

  “I woke up with an answer,” said Gunderman.

  “But the thing is still there. You can feel it,” said Lawton.

  The chill came on again, and Gunderman felt something go through his own body, too. You wanted to believe that you were basically all right. You wanted to believe that those close to you were all right, too. You weren’t looking for two standard deviations to the positive. Just something a little to the right of the mean.

  Lawton held his arms tight across his chest.

  “Maybe you should go to the doctor,” Gunderman said.

  “Tell me what you’ve got,” said Lawton.

  Gunderman walked him through it. “I still have to write the code,” he said.

  “Do it,” said Lawton.

  Making sure the algorithm captured what Gunderman was searching for meant that it kicked out a lot of false positives. These he had to deal with one by one. If it had been an ordinary situation, he would have taken time to automate the part being played now by the processor in his skull. But it was all right. If he didn’t keep his brain occupied, it might take him to places he did not want to go.

  The algorithm ground away 24/7, popping lines of suspicious computer language onto Gunderman’s screen, but more than a week into it, nothing had turned up but odd bits of foreign matter that the security programs had disabled—unsuccessful viruses, worms, Trojan horses, and scraps of executable code that had probably come in on a zip drive somebody had picked up as a tchotchke at a conference. Sticking one of those into your laptop was like putting into your mouth a piece of gum you had scraped off the bottom of your shoe.

  The sun had been down for hours. The office was quiet, and yet Gunderman could not focus. There was nothing to do but to go home and hope that in the morning there would be light.

  Maggie was in the kitchen when he came in the back door.

  “Hi,” he said.

  She said something that sounded like a word.

  “How was your day?” he said.

  “She’s not speaking to me,” Maggie said.

  “Not speaking about anything in particular?” he said.

  “Not speaking as in mute,” she said.

  “Should I attempt to make contact?” he said.

  “We’ll work it out,” she said.

  Megan remained upstairs while he and Maggie ate dinner. Their only conversation concerned the passing of the salt. When the TV came on for whatever Thursday’s programs were, he went up to change. Along the way he knocked on Megan’s door. Hearing no complaint, he turned the knob and poked in his head.

  “Hi,” he said.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “You OK?” he said.

  “Ask her,” she said.

  “Love you,” he said.

  “I know,” she said.

  He fell asleep even before the news. Maggie had to shake him awake to go to bed. As they went through their ablutions, he was deep into the problem again. Maggie did not seem to care where he was.

  The next morning his overnight processor had done it again. The algorithm hadn’t missed the answer. It had found it: There was no breach in the fire wall. He popped out of bed. Maggie stirred but did not wake. He hurried his toast and cereal and sped downtown. Lawton was already in his office. He had a little color in his face and was no longer shivering like one of the homeless. When Gunderman revealed what had come to him, he did not need to provide his reasoning. Lawton grasped it immediately. Now the question was how to put it to Rosten.

  “We’ve defined the set,” Gunderman said as they stood before him.

  “I don’t want a set,” said Rosten. “I want the hacker.”

  “The set of those who could have done it,” said Gunderman. “See, now we have something to tell Teddy Diamond. The hacker is one of us.”

  “Somebody who is very bitter,” said Lawton, looking as though he could actually taste it.

  “Are you bitter, Dell?” said Rosten. “If you are, you know what you can do.”

  Lawton said nothing. He simply walked out.

  “What got into him?” Rosten said.

  Gunderman wanted to believe it was the pressure that was turning Rosten hard.

  “Let’s stick to the evidence, OK?” Rosten said. “Has there been any change in the pattern of complaints about inaccurate data in individual credit reports?”

  “That’s a silence I don’t think we should put much faith in,” said Gunderman. “Somebody has tampered, and he can probably do it again.”

  Rosten looked past him.

  “Tell Dell I’m sorry,” he said.

  “He’s just been trying to view things objectively,” Gunderman said. “It isn’t easy.”

  “The fear,” Rosten said.

  “It is affecting all of us,” said Gunderman.

  Rosten smoothed the neatly piled papers on his desk with both palms as if somebody had crumpled them.

  “Do you think he’d be willing to have lunch with me?” he said.

  “I think you should ask him.”

  He wasn’t sure Rosten heard.

  “You do agree that at the moment we have nothing to report,” Rosten said.

  You wanted to be able to read people, but they lived beyond the point where the system goes chaotic. They flipped from one orbit to another.

  “I’m not going to be writing a memo to file,” said Gunderman, “if that’s what you mean.”

  “Of course not,” said Rosten, going at those papers again. The conversation was over.

  There was supposed to be a big snow coming in, but Gunderman went out anyway, heading east to the other side of Lake Shore Drive. He walked past the empty boat slips, across the bridge over the frozen river, then to Navy Pier, which was crowded with children. He watched a marionette show. He walked under the lowering sky to the end of the pier, where he stared out over the ice toward Michigan. Eventually he made his way back to the Dome in time to beat the leading edge of the storm.

  With the holiday weekend starting the next day and the commute threatened by weather, the secretaries’ desks were already empty, leaving him unobserved and unjudged. No phones buzzed. No BlackBerry ringtones revealed the musical tastes of their owners. Suddenly a form loomed up. They collided.

  “Sorry about that,” said the young number cruncher, half into his topcoat and as big as a linebacker. “Didn’t think anybody else was still here. I was finishing the final deck for the board presentation. At least I hope it’s final. What’s your excuse?”

  The young ones were heedless of seniority. They never called you mister or sir. But the fact was, the kid was in the loop, and Gunderman clearly wasn’t.

  “Board presentation?” Gunderman said.

  “To me, it’s just another deadline,” said the young man.

  “This is a deck laying out the deal?” said Gunderman.

  “What else is there these days?” said the young man, slipping the rest of the way into his sleeve. “I’ve got to catch a train. You should bail, too. Nobody’s taking names.”

  When Gunderman reached his desk, the lines of symbols on the screen had not changed since he’d left. He dialed Lawton.

 
; “He’s sorry,” Gunderman said. “He was out of line, and he knows it. Maybe he’s said that to you himself already.”

  “He hasn’t,” said Lawton.

  “He asked me to tell you,” said Gunderman. “He said he was going to invite you to lunch.”

  “I should have told him off,” said Lawton.

  “Don’t do it,” said Gunderman. “Take the weekend. I mean, think about your medical insurance.”

  “A few minutes ago I learned that somebody has altered my account, too.” Lawton said.

  3

  As Rosten went through his training, he did not hear a word from or about Ernest Fisherman. He began to doubt Hawthorne’s story about the great man handpicking him. Clearly, to the trainers there was nothing chosen about him. This only made him work harder, just as he had done in college among the prep schoolers. In the war games the Agency trainees played against veteran FBI agents, whom his trainers called “the Sisters,” Rosten eluded tails, passed messages unseen, and with impressive accuracy identified photos of the Sisters who had been on him. He came to imagine that he might have a gift that would get him posted somewhere behind the Wall, but when assignment time arrived, the lead instructor told him his first station would be London.

  “What’s in London?” he said.

  “For you the most remarkable individual you will ever meet,” said the lead instructor. “Frankly, I don’t understand why he chose you. I suggested several others. But you were the one he wanted. We need men like Ernest Fisherman. Correction. We need one man like him. And for some reason he needs you.”

  Rosten’s orders directed him to report to the Embassy on Grosvenor Square. His passport was unmarked when he arrived at Heathrow; he had never been abroad. Coming out of the airport, he got into a taxi. Rosten knew its steering wheel would be on the right, but once they got into traffic, he felt as though he had stepped into a mirror.

  The next morning, armed with a cartoonish map from the front desk, he walked. At every corner he checked the sidewalk for the sign that said, “Look Left” or “Look Right.” Eventually he found the modern concrete box of the Embassy, which did not fit with the old opulence around it. On the way in he passed a statue of Eisenhower in military uniform, hands on hips, watched over by a huge American eagle on the roof. A young Marine guard checked his orders and credentials and directed him to the security office, where a dour lady checked them again. Eventually she satisfied herself and sent him to an office upstairs. He supposed there would be papers to sign, an ID photo to be taken, perhaps a briefing on local customs.