The Second Saladin

by Stephen Hunter

  As he moved through the streets, wary in the crowd, eyes down, moving tentatively on his stubby legs, pausing now and then for a furtive glance about, a sense of déjà vu flooded through him. He had lived this moment before. But when, where? A dream? It had the quality of dream to it: the details, the seething streets, the young flesh all about, carnival rhythms, glossy goods on display. He associated it all with music, and could almost hear the tune. It played in his skull. South American? Asian? No, no, it had a Teutonic ring to it: it was the “Horst Wessel Song,” sung by valiant hordes of young athletes strutting through the streets on a glorious and torchlit spring night in the year 1934 in the city of Danzig. He was eight, with his father. He was a Pole then, but also a Jew, in a Polish city that was also a German city. Very much the same feeling then as now. So much animal strength about. So much color and muscle. Perhaps it was these odd lamps strung through Washington which had about them the earthy quality of torchlight. He could see no banners and remembered from those days the gammadion cross festooning everything, hanging everywhere. It had no evil association then to his young eyes; he found it a curiosity. He asked his dark father, who watched the parade bleakly.

  “It’s a German thing,” his father had said. “Pay it no heed.” It was the first time his father had drawn a distinction between himself and others. It filled the young boy with unease. The man the boy became remembered in crisp detail that moment: the sense of unease overcoming innocence. A signal moment in a young life, perhaps the first moment he realized his future would not be European. And he remembered his father, who got them out in ’37, giving up a career in the university.

  Danzig stood in the street, and felt in a totalitarian shadow once again. He glanced at his watch—a Patek Philippe, beautifully elegant, gold—and saw that he had three hours before meeting Chardy. He looked about nervously for sanctuary and located it at once—a movie theater down M Street. He walked swiftly to it and was pleased to find it uncrowded. He paid his admission—at last he thought somebody recognized him, because the girl gave him the oddest look—and ducked inside. Only then did he realize where he’d come.

  No man sat next to another in here, in the darkness no man would look at another. On the screen, in blinding lucidity, so big and tangled that he could make almost no sense of it, a giant mouth sucked a giant penis, riding the shaft up and down. He could not tell if the lips were male or female; he wondered if it mattered. Moans and cheesy music issued from the screen. Danzig sat down, terribly embarrassed.

  Yet at once he began to feel safe; in here, certainly, nobody would pay any attention to him.

  53

  Miles, Chardy had said, it has to be you. You have to go in and fish it out.

  Now he was by the first checkpoint, Badge Control, had traveled the length of the D Corridor and reached the elevator. He passed several sets of guards patrolling the halls even now, after hours; they’d smile politely and look straight to the ID he wore around his neck on a chain. He waited until the elevator arrived, stepped in it. He descended in silence, feeling the subtle suction of gravity. He could see the green light flicking through the floors. Finally he touched bottom and the doors opened to deposit him in another green hall where guards waited.

  “Hi,” he said, overplaying the breeziness, and they looked at him with barely concealed uninterest. “Lanahan, Operations. Headed to the pit.”

  Their eyes locked on the image of himself annealed into the plastic of his badge, then to the letters around the edge which designated his rights of passage, then up to the living face, then back to the picture.

  “You’ve got to sign, Mr. Lanahan.”

  “Sign? You didn’t used to—”

  “They changed it last month, sir,” the younger guard said evenly.

  “They’re always changing things, aren’t they?” Miles said, scrawling his name on a card.

  “Just a second,” said the guard. He took the card, inserted it into a device that drew it up by roller and spat it back just a second later.

  “The machine says you’re all right. Here—” With some ceremony the guard reached into a drawer and removed a new necklace, whose centerpiece was a blank plastic card. He handed it over. “It’s coated with alloy. If you wander into the wrong section, the sensors will pick you up and off go the alarms.”

  The prospect of alarms did not fill Miles with joy. He smiled weakly as he dipped to accept the new jewelry and turned to face a double set of doors, which opened with a lazy pneumatic gush to reveal another long corridor down which he now propelled himself. The walls were blank; he knew he walked the tunnel adjacent to the pit. Then at last he came to the entrance, which had not changed since his years there: desks at which sat the Computer Control officer and his staff flanking the door itself, a revolving affair, by which one was transported from this world to that.

  This late no supergrade would be around; indeed, the man calling the shots was Miles’s age, or younger, who’d drawn his turn at night duty. He looked vaguely familiar and when he saw Miles approaching, he stood with a smile.

  “Mr. Lanahan!”

  It occurred to Miles that he must be some kind of a hero to the people in the pit; first, because he’d done so well down there, with his Hun-like mind especially suited to working with green symbols in electraglow, in a great cool space in which no wind would ever stir; and secondly because he’d done the impossible: he’d got out, joined the mainstream. He was already case officer on a big operation too!

  “Hi,” he said.

  “Bluestein. Michael Bluestein. I was just breaking in your last couple of months.”

  “Oh, yeah. Thought I recognized you.”

  Next to Miles, Bluestein was a giant, a blondish freckled giant. Miles had never seen a Jew who looked so Protestant—to the blue eyes, in fact, and the large bony hands and wrists. Bluestein grabbed Miles’s hand, pumping it, at the same time swallowing it.

  “I was here the night you blew the whistle on that Israeli tunnel. Do you remember?”

  Lanahan remembered.

  “You proved the Israelis had built a listening tunnel up close to the Soviet cipher room in the Berne embassy. You tracked down the actual building permits they’d used in their cover project, if I remember correctly.”

  “I predicted, based on the data, where the permits could be found,” Lanahan, stickler for accuracy, corrected. But Bluestein was right. Because with Lanahan’s break, American operatives in subsequent weeks had been able to tap into the Israeli land lines, helping themselves to anything the Israelis got. It was a great source for six months, free of charge. And when the Israelis, said to be so good in the trade, tried to sell them the same dope, they could never understand why the Americans said no. And all because Lanahan, sitting at a terminal ten thousand miles away, had happened to come across a low-graded report from an English free-lancer claiming he’d observed in a Berne cafe an Israeli national with whom he’d been at Oxford years ago when the chap had taken a first in mine engineering.

  Lanahan nodded, remembering the evening of glory two years ago. He hadn’t had much glory since.

  “I was very lucky that night.”

  “I had a lucky night—a lucky Sunday actually—a few months back. I—”

  “Of course you really make your own luck. The better you are, the luckier you get. Right?”

  Bluestein smiled.

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes, it’s really true.”

  This was going to be easy. Lanahan puffed with confidence.

  “I’m on a funny one for some upstairs people. I wanted to run a ’seventy-four disc, see what I can shake out of it.”

  “We’re slow tonight. I can get somebody to do it for you.”

  “No, don’t bother, it won’t take long. And maybe I just miss the keys a little too.”

  “No problem. I’ll call the Disc Vault and set it up.”

  “Great,” Miles said.

  “Just let me see your Form Twelve,” Bluestein said, smiling down at Lan
ahan.

  My what? thought Lanahan, and began to panic.

  “How long now?” asked Chardy.

  “Only about twenty minutes,” said Leo Bennis.

  “It feels like hours.”

  “You were supposed to be Mr. Cool.”

  “That was years ago. Even then I was never any good at waiting. I always wanted to do something.”

  He put down the binoculars with which he had been studying the western facade of the Langley complex. The buildings looked like computer cards, six stories tall, the windows a latticework of irregularly lit slots. It looked like the cover of a ’50s sci-fi novel, some dream city, some clean future glinting in the night. Government theater: floodlights poured glare up across the skin of the place, hyping up the drama with stark shadows. It was difficult to read the architecture from here, the relationship of the buildings, even with all the lights, but he could see all that he needed to see; for on the other side of the road from the parking lot where he waited was a broad walk that led into the base of the building, to two quite common-looking glass doors and a lighted corridor. It was the Computer Services entrance in the C Wing, and it was through this entrance that Miles Lanahan had so recently disappeared. All the rest—the hulking buildings, the elaborate landscaping, the canopied public entrance on the south side, the central courtyard—was pointless for now. Chardy stared at the glass doors through the trees.

  “Well, it’s going to be a long one,” said Bennis. “He’s got to dig through a lot of stuff.”

  “If he gets in.”

  “He’ll get in. Miles will surprise you.”

  “This isn’t the parish hall.”

  “He knows what it is, Paul.”

  They sat in the front seat of a van inside the Agency parking lot. It was a warm summer night and rain had come, spatting against the windshield.

  “I wonder if it’s raining in Baltimore,” said Bennis. “I hope the Oriole game isn’t washed out.”

  “Twenty-five minutes now,” Chardy said.

  “Paul, if you see him now, he’s screwed up. He’s been kicked out and the whole thing’s messed up.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” said Chardy. He did not like being here, so close, inside the fence. He’d never been a headquarters man to begin with, and now they were practically parked on the roof. Yet there had been no other choice. They had brought Miles to the very door—they had him covered the whole way, a team of three units, radio-linked to each other and the hospital, each carrying the Bureau’s favorite new toy, the .380 Ingram MAC-11 machine pistol, complete with silencer.

  Now it was the altar boy’s show; now all he had to do was get in there and fish the name out. Then they’d bust the man, and roll it all up and it would all be over.

  Chardy looked at his watch again.

  Thirty minutes.

  Come on, Miles. Come on, priest’s boy. You’re on the bull’s-eye now.

  A buzz. Chardy jumped, disoriented. Bennis picked the radiophone off the dashboard.

  “Candelabra Control, this is Horsepipe One,” he said.

  He listened.

  “Yes,” he said, “all right, I understand. Can you get units onto the street? And call metro. Sure, I agree.”

  “What’s going on?” asked Chardy, hearing the urgency in Leo’s voice.

  “It’s Danzig. They just intercepted an Emergency Code off Miles’s security channel. He’s bolted. Danzig’s taken off. He’s out on his own.”

  “Form Twelve?” said Lanahan. “Aw, Christ.” He tried to look hurt.

  “Miles, it’s the rule. They had a security shake-up recently. All kinds of new games.”

  “You mean I have to go all the way back to Building A?”

  How do I play this? he thought. What the hell is a Form 12?

  “I’m sorry, Miles. I really am. It’s the rule.”

  “Jesus, you got a Russian in here or something?” Bluestein laughed. “You know how they like to brace us up every so often.”

  “Sure. Three years ago they tried a fingerprint ID device. It kept breaking down though. Okay, back to Building A.”

  “I’m really sorry. You can see my position?”

  Is he giving? Miles wondered.

  “It’s not your fault,” Miles said, not moving an inch. “I should have checked on the new regs. No problem. The hike’ll keep me humble.”

  “Christ,” Bluestein said bitterly, “it’s not as if they do anything with the Twelves. They just sit in Dunne’s office until he throws them out.”

  “It’s okay, Bluestein. Really it is.”

  “It’s such a stupid, stupid rule,” Bluestein said. “They think them up, up there, just to justify their super-grades.”

  “It’s a good rule. You can’t be too careful. Ninety percent of this business is security.”

  “How long you figure you’d be on?”

  “It depends. Real short—or maybe an hour. I don’t know.”

  “Just hustle, okay? It’d be my ass if somebody makes a stink.”

  “Don’t you worry about it,” said Miles. “Nobody’s going to make a stink,” and he leaned back, waiting for the man to punch the entrance code.

  “Miles. You’re back.”

  “I am. Relax, Jerry—not for good.”

  “Ah.”

  “No, I’ll just be in your hair for a minute or so.”

  “What is it?”

  Lanahan was in an office off the dark pit called the Disc Vault and the man he addressed was the Disc Librarian. Over the shoulder of the DL he could see the racks of discs, their plastic purity blinding in the brightness of this clean and odorless room.

  “I hear you’re doing real well, Miles.”

  “Not so bad, Jerry.”

  “I never thought you’d do it. I still don’t know how you did it. You just kept pushing and pushing.”

  “I’ll teach you my secret some day. I’m looking for a ’seventy-four disc.”

  “Fighting somebody’s old war?”

  “Something like that.”

  “That’s when we were just gearing up on the system. I think it went on-line in late ’seventy-three. That’s so long ago I wasn’t even here.”

  “Can you help me dig it out?”

  Jerry was florid and bitter, a reddish man of fierce ambition who’d never gotten anywhere. He stank of disappointment. He was plateaued out down here, his career aground in Computer Services. He looked down on Miles with something less than enthusiasm.

  “The little priest. You really brought it off. You really got lucky.”

  “I never missed mass when I was a kid. That’s why I’m smiled on. Come on, Jer, help me, okay?”

  “Christ, Miles.” He fished through some bookshelves behind him and came at last to a metal notebook, the disc index. He opened it, flipping through the pages.

  “There’s a lot of stuff here.”

  Miles nodded.

  “You’ll have to be more specific. Miles, there’s a hundred discs here from ’seventy-four. From Operations—I think they called it Plans back then—from Economic Research, from Cartography, from Satellites, from Security. I assume you want the Operations stuff.”

  “What was the first disc archive set up? The very first?”

  “Operations—Plans. That was the heart of it. Then later, other divisions and directorates went on-line.”

  “Yes, Operations then.”

  “Ahhh—”

  Goddammit. He’d told them it would never work. A dozen discs—that’s still nearly the entire New York Library system.

  “Well?”

  “Am I breaking any laws if I ask you how it’s indexed?”

  Jerry looked at him.

  “It sounds to me like you’re just fishing, Miles.”

  “Come on, Jerry. Give me a break.”

  Jerry made another face. “Whenever an item is transmitted, it’s automatically recorded in a master directory by slug line. When the master directory reaches a certain level, all the stuff is automatically tran
sferred to tape. But when that happens, at the same time the Extel printer generates this”—the metal notebook—“printout. Then later we index by months of the year.”

  “So it’s chronological?”

  “Yeah, but the machine gives you other breakdowns too. The idea is to be able to get your hands on something fast.”

  “Sure, I realize that.”

  “It’s got a listing by target, by geographical zone, by—”

  “What about alphabetically?”

  “You mean by the code group?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Yeah, it does that. Let me—” He flipped through the thick notebook.

  “Yeah, here it is. It’s—”

  “Jerry, look for shoe.”

  Jerry looked at him. “You’ve got something exceedingly strange going on, Miles. I never heard of—”

  “Jerry, when a Deputy Director tells you to check something out, you don’t exactly tell him he’s full of shit.”

  “Well, I’ve been here a long—”

  “It might not be shoe, S-H-O-E. It might be H-S-U, a Chinese word of the same pronunciation. Or it could be, well, I suppose it—”

  Jerry pushed through the printouts. He halted.

  Miles bent forward, over the desk. He could smell Jerry’s cheap cologne and the plastic, oceans of plastic, in the calm air. Jerry’s finger pointed to the middle of the page and had come to rest at a designation for the ninth disc. It said, CODE SERIES P-R-O to H-S-U.

  “I don’t like it. No, I don’t. I don’t like it at all,” said Leo Bennis, driving tensely through the late night traffic as they turned off Key Bridge onto M Street in Georgetown.