Despite himself, Jim Brescoll smiled. Tercot was playing true to type. Clinically impersonal in his judgments, coolly rational in his conclusions. For him this was all just an interesting applications puzzle—except for his comment concerning the “parasitic vermin.”
“Did Kwok know about the ‘disappearances’ of the prototype quantum code devices?” asked Phil Lawton of DIA. At that, a silence descended over the room, but Lawton persisted. “Look, if we’ve got somebody out there able to kill people, and steal our devices by remote control, we need to investigate the possibility that the two might be connected.”
“They weren’t stolen,” said Michelson, a physicist from W Group. “As quantum code devices become more powerful, they seem to somehow become more self-consuming. If anything, they may be vanishing down some sort of informational black hole. But we just don’t know.”
“Are you implying that Kwok simply ‘vanished,’ too?” Lawton asked, frowning. “I don’t buy it.”
“The quantum code devices are classified far higher than Kwok was ever cleared for,” the deputy director replied. “There’s no way he could have known about them, and there’s no proof that anyone’s done anything by ‘remote control.’”
But Lawton didn’t look satisfied, which was understandable. Jim wasn’t fully happy with that explanation himself. No, Kwok hadn’t been cleared on any of the information on machine disappearances, but he was tangentially involved. And now Ben Cho was unknowingly—what? Investigating the disappearance of the disappearance investigator? Even if there were no “remote controller” out there, what kind of danger might he be facing?
Brescoll was surprised at how quickly Rollwagen moved to wrap up the conference, bringing up a few more minor issues and quickly dealing with them.
As the meeting broke up around him, the deputy director shook his head. Informational black holes. That was like the stuff in Kwok’s holo-cast, about reality being a bustable simulation. Nobody really believed in any of that, did they?
But what if those wild theories turned out to be more plausible than anyone suspected? Rollwagen had been quick to shut down the discussion. Might the director know something he didn’t? How highly classified was it, if even her deputy director wasn’t privy to it?
Well, he didn’t feel comfortable asking her. All the more so since Rollwagen was busy at the moment, what with Retticker bending her ear about the possible threat Tercot’s work posed to “our covert action capacities and our national security as a whole.” Rollwagen assured the general that she would ride herd on Tercot, and that Interpol would be kept in the dark, except where they might provide useful information.
Finally, the director’s conversations ended. Still Jim Brescoll said nothing to her. Instead he headed back to his office in silence, several paces behind her retreating back. Entering his sanctum, the deputy director closed the door behind him, berating himself that he was becoming as caught up in his own thoughts as Tercot. If he continued along this track, it was only a matter of time before he too began seeing the NSA as a legacy of the Knights Templar.
He also felt more empathy than he ever thought he would for Ben Cho and his “need-to-know” situation. If someone at the highest level was keeping information from him—was trying to use even the deputy director as their cat’s paw—then what he didn’t know might not only hurt him, but lots of other people, too.
Yes, he thought. Might just be time for another fly-fishing expedition.
RITUAL EXCHANGE
SANTA CRUZ
Cherise LeMoyne held the memorial for Jaron Kwok’s ashes on the patio of her home. The early autumn afternoon was sunny, with a clear view down redwood- and eucalyptus-lined hillsides. Below, the city of Santa Cruz lay spread out upon the river plain. On the far side of town its boardwalk and beach ended in blue ocean stretching away to the horizon.
Ben Cho’s disposition wasn’t nearly as bright and sunny as the day. Bad enough that somebody in China had been willing to kill for a dead man’s ashes. Worse that, so soon after memorializing Reyna, he had again been forced to play guardian to ashen relics—Jaron’s ashes, this time, housed in an antique iron urn he’d bought for them in a little back-alley shop in the Tsim Sha Tsui district of Kowloon. Lately it seemed as if the only people he could allow himself to care about, in any simple and straightforward way, were all dead.
And why not? The living could take care of themselves. Kwok’s widow certainly could. She’d shown a distinct lack of gratitude for his efforts, almost as if she held him personally responsible for the loss of Jaron.
“Thank you so damn much,” Cherise had said when he presented Jaron’s ashes to her. “The moment he got caught up with you spy types, I knew this is where it would end.”
The angry blond professor had looked as if she were about to hurl the urn of ashes at him, and probably would have, had the elderly Chinese-American couple—Kwok’s parents, seated on the broad apron of the raised stone fireplace—not leapt up and interposed themselves. Trying to calm the younger woman down, LeMoyne’s mother-in-law led her back toward the green leather couch.
“Down at the Peace Center, they showed me Jaron’s holo-cast!” Kwok’s widow yelled over her shoulder. “You and your information war burned him up like a file full of outdated secrets! You’re supposed to be one of his old college friends, but who are you spying on now?”
Ben had wanted to say something, wanted to convince Cherise that she was wrong about him. But he couldn’t. He just stared numbly at the photographs that stood on the fireplace mantel near him. In one, Cherise hugged a large marmalade-tuxedo cat, orange but for the white about its throat and paws like dress gloves, spats, and a cravat. In the other photo, a couple—Cherise and Jaron—stood atop a moon bridge arching over a pond, in front of the white veil of an artificial waterfall. The picture and frame looked as if they had only recently been brought out and dusted off.
There was something familiar about that second picture, but before he could put his finger on it more immediate matters distracted him. Jaron’s mother was still trying to calm Cherise, but the younger woman was having none of it.
“I don’t care!” she said, too loudly. “That’s probably why they chose him!”
Jaron Kwok’s father had hustled Ben toward the door, muttering about how they’d all been through a lot, that Cherise wasn’t at her best, but he was sure she’d be doing better by the time the memorial service came around. Hearing her burst into tears on the couch beside her mother-in-law, Ben allowed himself to be hurried through the front door and away from the house.
Halfway to his rental car he’d realized he had left behind the travel case in which he’d brought the urn. He considered going back for it, but decided against it. To hell with that. To hell with telling her what happened to Hui, too. Ben got in his car and drove away, recalling Jaron’s description of his parents as “sweet, but clueless.” That description didn’t seem to fit the people who had just extricated him from a nasty situation.
A day had passed, and at least things had calmed down. Looking out past Cherise’s carefully landscaped yard toward the trees, city, and ocean beyond, he listened to the drone of bees among the flowers and the droning voices of those who were eulogizing Jaron. Ben was still jet-lagged enough by his return from Hong Kong that the quiet murmurings made him drowsy. He had to fight to stay awake.
Two of the eulogizers were old friends of Jaron’s, but most of the speakers, and most of the small crowd in attendance, appeared to be Cherise’s colleagues from the University of California campus. As he listened to the words of those who knew Jaron better and more recently than he had, Ben’s memories of his one-time college roommate were reawakened, his old impressions confirmed. The Jaron he—and they—knew was brilliant and hard-working, but stubbornly independent. Intellectually competitive. Not someone to suffer fools gladly.
Ben’s heart pounded a little harder when he saw Cherise, dressed in a black silk sheath and cape, stand up from her chair. He hoped
she wouldn’t again make him a target of her private pain—this time in a much more public setting. He was relieved to see that, as she walked toward the red-and-black lacquer table where the dark iron cinerary urn sat on its tripod legs, Cherise seemed controlled, little inclined toward any open display of the deeper emotions that might be moving her.
She stood beside the table and placed her left hand on the double-dragon lid of the urn, while with her right hand she pulled notes from the pocket of her dress. In her black attire, her face framed by asymmetrically cut straight blond hair hanging long on the right side of her head but shaved short on the left, she seemed to Ben both severe and vulnerable.
“On his desk,” she began, “Jaron kept a small statuette of a godlike man and a sphinx—a statuette that he picked up at a gift shop in the New York Public Library. The sentence inscribed on the statuette reads ‘But above all things/Truth beareth away the victory.’ Truth always meant more to Jaron than anything else.
“The truth is never easy, and sometimes Jaron was not an easy person. Maybe because he worked harder than anyone else I have ever known at being true to himself, and to the world too, in his dealings with it—even if the world wasn’t always true in its dealings with him. Jaron was willing to risk anything, even death, to get at truth. I’m sure it was in that quest he met his end. So, even in death, he bears away the victory.
“Thank you all for coming today, and testifying to the truth of who Jaron Kwok was.”
She put the notes back in her pocket. The small crowd broke up then, into individuals offering their condolences to Jaron’s parents and to Cherise. Even after nearly everyone else had adjourned for food and conversation inside, Ben still found himself staring away at the view, into the blue, so preoccupied that, when Cherise placed her hand on his left arm just above the elbow, the only thing that kept him from jumping was his own exhaustion.
“I’m sorry for the way I acted yesterday,” she said, and she seemed sincere. “Jaron and I had been apart for over a year before this happened. We were going to be divorced soon. I didn’t expect this to hit me so hard. But it has.”
“I understand. When I lost my wife, I had no idea how it would affect me. People tried to tell me, but there’s no way to really share it, or prepare for it. Griefs are incommensurable.”
Cherise looked at him oddly, as if the use of that last word, especially in this context, surprised her.
“That’s a mathematical term, isn’t it?” she asked. “You’re a mathematician?”
“Computer scientist—and more physicist than I’d like, these days. Trying to make sense of all the latest in quantum computing.”
“That’s what I don’t get,” Cherise said, flicking her hair away from the right side of her face. “Jaron mentioned to me once that you were his backstop, his understudy on this damned NSA thing. But he was an intellectual historian. Something of a linguist too, I guess. He was just an amateur when it came to computer science.”
With that she paused and stared at him expectantly, but Ben didn’t know what to say.
“Maybe,” he replied lamely. “But I do wish I had some of his facility with languages.”
“Not that it ever helped him to get the professorships or tenure he trained for all his life,” she replied. “He always felt as if the academic world had ignored his talents, you know—out of spite and prejudice. I don’t see what a tenured specialist like yourself would have in common with him at all, other than the fact that you were roommates in college.”
“No, not much, I guess,” Ben agreed, remembering. “Then again, maybe too much. Maybe if we were less alike, we would have gotten along better as roommates. I know it’s not the right thing to say at his memorial, but there were lots of times I just wanted to smack the sucker.” To Ben’s surprise, Cherise smiled broadly at that. Emboldened, he continued. “The only thing we really shared during college, besides living space for a few months, was a fondness for using a Fahrney ‘etniop’ or ‘mirror-pointe’ keyboard.”
“I remember not being able to use Jaron’s computers,” Cherise said, nodding, “because he’d moved half a dozen of the keys around and reprogrammed them. He said the arrangement was much more efficient than the conventional one.”
“Right,” Ben said, lifting his hands as if typing on an invisible keyboard. “The Fahrney approach is a compromise between the Dvorak and qwerty systems. For the left hand it moves the e and t down to the home row and moves the d and f to where e and t were on the upper row. On the right hand it moves the n up to the home row and j down to where n was, and also moves i, o, and p down to the home row and k, l, and semicolon up to where i, o, and p used to be. Letter transposition—just like basic crypto stuff, but for the sake of efficiency rather than secrecy.”
“That interest in cryptography,” Cherise said, “is all I can think of that you two might have shared after college.”
“Right. But the stuff he published in his articles was all sixteenth and early seventeenth century. Not my area.”
“Remaking himself as a ‘cryptanalyst’ is probably what got him into all this to begin with,” Cherise said, looking away. “I didn’t approve of him getting involved with the NSA. Maybe you gathered that, from our encounter yesterday.”
Ben nodded. How could he not have noticed?
“His work took him too close to the CIA and their torture-tactic connections, for my taste,” she said, casting him a sidelong glance. “The whole crypto-industrial complex, searching for terrorists under every bush. It was so unlike Jaron. On campus, in the old days, he was a political activist, even a radical! He used to sign his college newspaper columns ‘Kwok X’! How could he, of all people, let himself get caught up with spy types? How did he even get security clearance? That’s what I want to know.”
“He was an outside employee,” Ben said with a shrug. “Under contract, like me. But I’ve met people inside the agency who know as well as anyone that even an eagle can’t fly with only a right wing.”
She gave him that odd look again, as if he’d once more surprised her.
“Really?”
“Sure. I remember one of Jaron’s columns about that, too, now that you mention it. About the difference between a nationalist and a patriot. About how a patriot tries to hold his country to its own highest standards, tries to help it live up to its own stated ideals—and doesn’t think the constitution should be run through the shredder just because it might be politically expedient. Even inside the NSA, there are people who’d strongly agree with that.”
“Yeah, that sounds like the Jaron I knew, back then,” she said, sounding wistful.
“Maybe he still believed it. Maybe that was part of his quest for truth.”
“How do you mean?”
“When you came up to me,” he said, turning fully toward her, “I was thinking maybe that ‘godlike man and sphinx’ you mentioned might be a reference to Oedipus.”
“The archetypal seeker after truth—no matter what the cost,” Cherise said, thoughtful, looking not so much outward as inward. “Jaron was fond of tragedies. Oedipus Rex, Hamlet, Death of a Salesman. He thought all of them had detectives in them.”
“He thought of Oedipus as a detective?”
“As the first detective. A guy who went from being king to being blind and homeless for his trouble. Not a happy precedent.”
“No, but maybe an accurate one. While I was looking into Jaron’s death and gathering his personal effects in Hong Kong, I met a police detective. She said the truth might set you free, but it won’t make you safe.”
“And it will probably make you miserable before doing much of anything else.”
“Yes,” Ben said, looking away again toward the city on the plain, “but maybe that’s what Jaron was up to. He was an investigator. A detective trying to find out the truth. No matter who hired him, or what they hired him for. I just wish I knew what he was supposed to be going after. It would make my own work easier.”
“And just what, exa
ctly,” Cherise said, suspicion rising slightly in her voice, “is the ‘work’ you’re supposed to be doing?”
“I’m not exactly sure. I was his backup on this project, but I haven’t been given much in the way of specifics about what Jaron was doing—never the whole story. So far, only what might be relevant to the computing side of things. I’m not sure whether I’ve been brought in to continue his work, or to investigate what happened to him. Probably both.”
Cherise turned and together they began to walk slowly toward the house and the sunny room where everyone else was eating and talking.
“So,” she said, her footsteps stopping again almost as soon as they began, “what do you think caused Jaron’s death? Did he get drunk and set himself on fire? Was it an accident? A suicide? Did something finally push him over the edge? Or did someone give him a shove—and make his death look like an accident, in the best spy-versus-spy style?”
He sensed that she was growing morose and personally political again, but he didn’t know how to divert her from that course. They began to walk once more.
“I can’t say for sure whether it was any of those things. I don’t think it was suicide.”
“Nor do I,” Cherise said, her voice unwavering. Ben wished he could feel as sure about that as she sounded.
“I don’t even know that he’s dead, at least not with absolute certainty.”
Almost immediately, he regretted what he had said. Cherise stopped and stared hard at him.
“Then whose ashes have you so kindly bestowed on me in that urn?”
“They’re his,” Ben replied, well aware that she wasn’t going to let this go. “But I don’t know if they’re ashes, actually. I have some speculations, but no hard evidence yet. Insufficient data, so to speak.”
Cherise laughed.
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