The Second Saladin

by Stephen Hunter

  Was Frenchy Catholic? He certainly had the Catholic sense of guilt, binding and cruel, and the huge need to confess.

  Lanahan was Frenchy’s confessor. He sat in a dark booth and listened to Frenchy through the screen.

  Forgive me, Miles, for I have sinned.

  Make a contrition, son. Confess your sins.

  Yes, Father, I will say a hundred Hail Marys.

  No. Tell us your secrets. Your deepest, your darkest secrets.

  But Lanahan drew back. He was no priest. He was an ex-computer analyst who’d bluffed his way into the pit and was trying to dig out a traitor.

  Maybe I ought to say a hundred Hail Marys, he thought, for he had no other plan.

  He looked at the codes.

  Frenchy wants Paul to see something. Frenchy has planned it so that Paul will look at this list of letters and see something. Yet what? There are no words, for if there were words, anybody could see them and Frenchy’s worked it out so that only Paul can see them.

  What is there about Paul that’s unique? What would give Chardy an advantage, looking through this list of codes? What would Chardy see that no other man would?

  He felt he was getting close. He sat back, tried to concentrate on Chardy, call up and examine his components. Chardy, hero, special-operations cowboy, toting guns and gear around the dusty corners of the world. Chardy, athlete, banging through jump shots and driving lay-ups. Chardy, fool, cuckolded and used cruelly by a woman. Chardy, suicide, tendencies toward self-destruction. Chardy, Chicago boy, coming off the same streets Miles came off of, attending the same parochial schools, going to the same churches. Chardy, Irishman, moody and sulky and brutal. Chard—

  Then Miles had it.

  Danzig stood at the bottom of the stairwell. He opened the door and looked into the parking garage and felt a sudden, suffocating loss of confidence. Enormous weight seemed to crush down on him; he could not breathe and just for a moment he thought he might be having a heart attack.

  Yet it passed. Still, he felt almost physically ill with fear, in a blasphemed place. He could not go back; he was terrified to go forward. He could feel the sweat damp and heavy in his shirt and was aware with what great difficulty the air came into his lungs. At last he stepped through the final door.

  It was so simple. Frenchy, you’re smart. No matter what you did, Frenchy, no matter what you became in your weakness, let no man ever say you are not smart.

  What would Chardy see that no other man would?

  Chardy would see Hungarian. Chardy was half-Hungarian and had grown up with a mad Hungarian doctor for a father, a raving anticommunist with a failed practice and a one-bedroom apartment on the North Side of Chicago.

  Lanahan swiftly ended the directory. He looked behind him, down the rows of cubicles in the dark space. At last he saw a free machine on a different system. He rose, walked through the darkness to it. He could hear the other operators clicking away, each sealed into his machine, each fighting his private little war.

  Miles sat at the empty machine, which was linked into a different computer system, and quickly punched:

  Fe Lan

  There rose before him a language directory. He filed down through the listings until he reached HUNG.

  Fe Hung, he ordered.

  A concise word-list and phrase catalogue of Hungarian—placed in the machine’s memory in case an analyst who didn’t speak the language came across a word in it and needed translation fast—sailed up before Lanahan. He looked at it quickly, then clicked the machine off.

  He walked back to his own terminal. Why did he feel he was being observed?

  He was so close now; if he could just bluff it through another two or three minutes.

  He sat back at his own terminal, called up the SHU directory and looked again at the code groupings.

  Fe Egy, Miles ordered.

  Egy: one.

  Another directory rose.

  Miles glanced through it until he found the proper code.

  Fe Ketto, he ordered.

  Fetch two.

  Another directory.

  Fe Harom

  Another.

  Fe Negy

  Another.

  FE OT

  One, two, three, four, five. He was in the fifth directory now. Where would it end? He was within a directory within a directory within a directory within a directory within a directory. Was this a Möbius strip of a code, an Escher drawing of a code, that would go on forever, twisty and clever?

  The screen went blank.

  The machine stared at him, mutely stupid.

  Long moments lagged. Had the whole thing collapsed? He knew he’d have no time to dig this deep into it again.

  The screen’s emptiness mocked him.

  Then a message with a long tail dragged into view:

  This material will appear only on your screen if searched for. It will be stored with service level designators priority code a (advance) category c (standing item). It cannot be destroyed or altered. We will begin transmission upon receipt of six-letter security code.

  Enter six-letter security code here

  In all his hours before the screen, Miles had never seen a communication like this one. Service Level Designator? Now what the hell did that mean? Priority Code, Category Code?

  But he knew he’d tapped the mother lode.

  Enter six-letter security code here

  He stared at it. Another hurdle, a last one. Oh, come on, Frenchy, Jesus, Frenchy, you hid it so good. God, Frenchy, you must have been a clever bastard. Miles reached across the years to love Frenchy Short, who was so smart. Burying it so deep, so well; and now there was only this last obstacle.

  Enter six-letter security code here

  Oh, Frenchy. Miles stared at it. Six letters between himself and Frenchy.

  He tried to concentrate.

  Was it SHOES, or some variation on the HSU-SHU axis? No, not enough letters, unless you rolled them up into one.

  He instructed the machine:

  Fe Shuhsu

  His fingers stroked the send command button, but he did not depress it.

  Do it, he told himself.

  But he could not.

  If he was wrong, he might lose the whole chain, he might be back up top, back up at HSU again. He might be forced to dig through all the levels. And also, suppose—it was a good supposition—suppose there was some sort of alarm mechanism built into the system? That is, if you tried to penetrate this final level and displayed a kind of tentativeness, an awkwardness, a hesitancy, suppose the machine was programmed to recognize these inadequacies for the profile of a thief, recognize your guilt? The machine was notoriously literal-minded: it had no imagination, no capacity for sympathy; its ethics were coldly binary. It would blow the whistle on you.

  Sitting there, Miles knew the machine would betray him if he disappointed it.

  This awareness almost paralyzed him. He suddenly hated the thing. He stared at it and was afraid.

  Enter six-letter security code here?

  “Mr. Lanahan?”

  He looked up, startled.

  It was Bluestein.

  “How are you coming?”

  “Ah, oh, all right. Surprising how long it takes you to get it back, though.”

  “I’m afraid we’re going to pull that disc pretty soon. The other systems are beginning to top up and the stuff from upstairs is really pouring in. We need the system space. You know how it is.”

  “I see,” said Miles.

  “It’s not that I want to play the hard guy; it’s that—”

  “Sure.”

  Miles thought: Come on, altar boy. Come on, little priest. Come on you stinking pimply suck-ass: Do something! Say something!

  “Just a minute more, okay, Mike? I just have to wrap this.”

  “Miles, people are waiting and—”

  “I’ll owe you one. I always pay off. I can help you. A lot. You know what I mean? I can help you upstairs. Cover for me.”

  “Miles,
I just can’t. I gave you a big break and—”

  “Mike, just let me say one thing. I appreciate what you did for me. I really do. You’re a decent guy. I won’t give you any trouble.”

  “Thanks, Miles. I really appreciate your co-op—”

  “And I’ll go to your supervisor first thing Monday morning to tell him you violated security procedure, Mike.”

  Miles smiled at him evenly.

  “Form Twelve, Mike. I’m in here without a Form Twelve, Mike. You could be in big—”

  “Goddamn you. You little—”

  “Just back off, Jewboy. Just back the fuck off, and you get your career back. Otherwise, you’re on your way to Siberia.”

  He glared at him in smug triumph. Miles could really be quite evil—he had the capacity for it—and he watched the tall young man buckle under the pressure.

  “Five more minutes, Miles. Goddamn you, they said you were a prick!”

  He rushed off into the dark.

  Miles turned back to the screen. He could not escape it.

  Enter six-letter security code here

  Frenchy, you son-of-a-bitch. You old bastard.

  Old Frenchy. Smart old Frenchy.

  Then it arrived, from nowhere.

  He commanded:

  Fe Cowboy

  He could see a labyrinth of pillars and acres and acres of the rawest space under a low ceiling. It was an abstraction too, an infinitely open-ended maze. Tunnels and chambers and warrens spilled everywhere in gloomy subterranean abundance. Every fourth or fifth pillar had its own lighted EXIT arrow, stenciled orange, three-quarters of the way up. Did Borges invent this place? Did Kafka? Did Beckett? No, of course not. It was any underground parking garage anyplace in America any time in the ’60s or ’70s or ’80s.

  No trace of human motion met his eyes as they probed the aisles and ranks, though in any of a hundred or a thousand dark places, in shadows, in vent openings, in ducts, in stairwells—in any of them—a man could hide.

  Danzig’s fear blossomed anew, exotic, an ice-blue orchid inside his chest. It seemed a phenomenon of his gastrointestinal system, crippling and weakening his own interior ducts and vents. He wanted to be sick and could feel bile in his throat. His heart was running hard. He fought for air and found it foul with ancient auto exhaust. He steadied himself. He wished he did not have to be so brave.

  The first theory of modern statecraft—so basic, really, it never saw print—was that you paid people to be brave for you. A class of man existed for just such exigencies. Yet here was Danzig, no longer bold by surrogate, required himself to step into the arena.

  I am not brave; few enough are. Soldiers sense this intuitively, as if they can sniff it. Civilian, they sneer in contempt, meaning: coward. Meaning also, in his case: Jew. Kike. They were the elect: courage was their election. They held themselves apart, arrogant, hard. He’d seen the look in their eyes, in Chardy’s too; he’d been reading it in a certain Gentile set of eyes for half a century now.

  Danzig stepped out, hearing the door hush closed on its pneumatic pump and click (lock?) behind him.

  He stepped forward. His shoes echoed under the low ceiling.

  “Chardy? I’m here, Mr. Chardy,” he called.

  Ulu Beg could see him. He had a shot of close to one hundred yards, through a dozen sets of pillars, long for the pistol round that the Skorpion threw.

  “You must be close,” they’d said.

  He began to draw nearer. This was not difficult. The fat man was very frightened and kept yelling for Chardy and it was easy to stay in the shadows and yet feel the voice growing louder and louder. He began to count. He would count to one hundred.

  55

  A sheen of images rose to fill the screen. Numbers.

  Service Level Directory

  3839857495………2094875903

  2884110485………0594847324

  And on and on and on.

  He hit the scroll button and the numbers rolled up, a rising tide of integers that climbed to the top of the screen and then disappeared.

  He kept the button down until the numbers didn’t move.

  MO, it said. More.

  He commanded more:

  Fe Mo

  Yes, more, more. I want MO. Give me MO.

  He descended through a sea of green numbers.

  He felt he had to hold his breath. He dreamed he was swimming in math.

  Am I going insane?

  The marine imagery continued to dominate his imagination as the numbers gurgled past, and he had to FE MO into three more segments of the Service Directory.

  And then it began to slow on him.

  The numbers rolled sluggishly. The system was going to crash on him. The warning light would flash on, high on the wall: sorry, brain temporarily out of order. And it would all be over for Lanahan; he’d never find his way down here again.

  Move, you bastards, move, come on, damn you. His finger on the scroll button was white-knuckled and taut with pain as he pressed. The numbers moved more slowly. They moved so slow he thought he’d die. He’d never make it.

  No Mo

  Touch down. Sea bottom. He was way, way down and he saw nothing.

  Nothing, he’d gone too far. He’d missed a line, the last line from the bottom.

  784092731………Shu

  The shoe fits.

  Miles stared elationlessly at it. A tremor raced through him.

  FE he instructed, and sent the line and the screen blanked out.

  He waited for what seemed the longest time. Had he lost it? Had he fucked up, blown it? Had the Security people been alerted? Yet all was silent. No, it wasn’t. It seemed silent because he was breathing so hard, was so exhausted. Yet now, concentrating, he heard the tapping of other operators on their terminals, the whine of their fans. Nobody stirred.

  Words rose from the bottom of the screen, a slugline and then the message.

  PAUL YOU BASTARD, said Frenchy Short, horribly dead these seven years.

  I’M GOING TO GIVE YOU TO THE RUSSIANS. BUT THEN YOU ALREADY KNOW THAT IF YOU’RE READING THIS BECAUSE IT’LL MEAN I’M DEAD AND YOU GOT BACK AND YOU’RE TRYING TO PUT THE PIECES TOGETHER.

  PAUL, Frenchy continued (and Miles could see him: hunched over a terminal, typing quickly, typing desperately, watching his own words traipse across the screen; he’d be terrified; he’d be almost shaking with fear, the discovery could happen so easily), HE’S OFFERED ME A DEAL. IT’S EVERYTHING. THE UPPER FLOORS. SECURITY. EASY STREET. PAUL I’M SO TIRED AND THEY’RE GOING TO GET RID OF ME. SO I’VE GOT THIS JOB AND I’M HOME FREE.

  PAUL HE EVEN SAYS IT’S FOR THE BEST. BEST FOR THE AGENCY BEST FOR HIM BEST FOR ME. HE DIDN’T SAY ANYTHING ABOUT YOU. HE SAYS THE COWBOY DAYS ARE ALL OVER.

  Miles read on, to the punchline, and found out who ordered Frenchy Short to blow Saladin II and why.

  Miles stood, clearing the screen, sending Frenchy’s message back to the serene depths where it would be safe forever. He knew he had to reach Chardy now—and fast.

  Danzig thought he saw something move.

  His heart jumped.

  “Chardy! Chardy, I’m here!”

  He ran through a set of pillars, through a shadow—to nothing.

  “Chardy! Chardy! Where are you, Chardy?”

  His echo boomed around the chamber and back at him. His breathing was rushed and hard. The pillars offered a hundred crazy perspectives, each yielding a wall, a far-off duct, a doorway, a ramp, a shadow. Yet no human form stirred. The smell of combustion was rich and rancid and the atmosphere seemed to burn his skin. He fought for more oxygen.

  “Chardy! Chardy!”

  Then Danzig saw a figure half-emerge—freeze—pull back into a shadow.

  At that moment the scope of his betrayal became evident. A great hate filled him—the urge to kill. Kill with his hands. But kill whom? He didn’t know. Then came the terror. It was total and almost annihilating. And next: a suffocating self-pity. He had so much to do, to give, to contribute. I
f only he could tell the man, make him see, reason with him.

  But Ulu Beg stepped fully out of the darkness. He wore jeans and was fair and tall and seemed—strong. Danzig had no other word. The man stared at him. He had his pistol.

  Danzig began to run. He ran crazily from pillar to pillar, back into the chamber, through terrific heat.

  “Help me,” he screamed.

  He looked back once and could see no one, but he knew the man was there. Ahead the world tipped precariously, spun out of clarity as tears or sweat filled his eyes. He sobbed for breath and the air would not come. He ran for the door and knew he’d never make it. But he did.

  He was there. The door was locked. Danzig slid weeping to the floor, clinging to the warm handle, pulling weakly, and the man came out of the shadows and stood not far off. He stood straight and pulled the bolt of his gun.

  “No, please, no,” Danzig cried.

  Then the lights vanished. Danzig cowered in the darkness. A thousand red EXITS glowed.

  “Ulu Beg,” cried Paul Chardy.

  Ulu Beg answered with a burst of gunfire.

  Bluestein looked at him sullenly.

  “All right,” he said. “Now get out of here.”

  Miles didn’t even see him.

  He rushed down the corridor, and turned in his necklace to the guards. He had to wait a century for the elevator. Finally it arrived and he stepped in. The trip up was swift and silent.

  He headed down the last hall, moving swiftly, keeping his eyes down, passing guards. But just before a turn, he heard footsteps He recoiled in panic, backing, testing knobs. One gave—there was always some careless bastard, you could count on it—and Miles slid in. A dark room, some kind of office anteroom encased him.

  Outside, the steps grew to a clatter. He recognized the voices—men from his own operation. Now what the hell were they doing here? What was going on? He knew he could not face them, and let them pass, hearing their excited jabber. When they’d gone he bolted, raced through Badge Control, signed out, and bounded into the parking lot. The air was cooler now. He shivered, looking for the van. It was supposed to be right here. What the—