The Red Horseman (7 page)

“I’m sorry, but he doesn’t work here
anymore.”

“Say again.”

She shrugged. “He doesn’t work here now.
He’s gone.”

“Did he quit or what?”

“I don’t know. He didn’t come in last
Wednesday. Or maybe Wednesday was his last day.
Anyway, I heard

him say he transferred to another government
agency. Can someone else help you?”

Toad Tarkington leaned his elbows on the counter
and gave her a shy grin. “He was in one of our
baseball Pools and won a hundred bucks.”

“Maybe he’ll call you-was

“He doesn’t know he won, We don’t roll
for the numbers on the grid until Friday.”

She smiled and shrugged. “I’m sorry. Maybe
if you call personnel

“I’ll try that,” Toad said. “In the meantime,
I need a little work done. I need someone to check the
CIA data base.

“Mabel can help you. Right over there.- She
Pointed.

Mabel’s terminal was in a corner. Toad
removed a sheet of Paper from a manila envelope
stamped top secret and laid it in front of her.
On it were two names: Paul R. Tanana and
Rodney D. Hicks. “Please see if these
two are on the CIA data base,” Toad
asked.

Mabel apparently knew her way around a
computer.

Thirty seconds later she spoke. “No.”

“Nothing?” Toad asked, “Nada.”

“Not employees?”

“Nope.”

“How about the FBI data base? Can you access
it?”

“It’ll take a bit,” she murmured as she
whacked keys.

Toad watched the words and letters on the screen come
and go, come and go. Last week when Harper played with the
computer Toad had other things on his mind, Today he
was interested.

All this high-tech before it came along you would have just
looked in the telephone directory.

The telephone book!

Toad spotted a directory under the desk and
reached for it He should have done this Yesterday.

“I don’t have any Roger Hicks,” Mabel
told him.

have a Robert Hicks and a Rose Hicks and
two R. Hicks.”

Toad flipped pages, “Could You Print out
what you have on the R- Hicks entries?”

“Sure. And You don’t have to look in the phone
book.

We have access to the phone company’s files. If
they have an account with the phone company, weeaggI see
it. Maybe if You could tell me what
You’re looking for?”

“Whatever I can get,” Tarkington said. He
put the book back on the bottom shelf of the desk
phone

“Check Tanana, then the Virginia Department
Of Motor Vehicles And how about the Visa and
MasterCard lists. I’ll take anything.”

But he already knew what the answers were going to be.

When Mabel gave him the printouts there it was in
blackand-white. Each man had both Visa and
MasterCard credit cards, but they had never made
any charges on the cards.

These accounts were less than a month old. The
driver’s licenses were real, but the addresses
weren’t. Burke, Virginia, had no such street
as Wood Duck Drive, where Tanana’s
license said he lived. Hicks’ address was
equally bogus. The telephone company had never
heard of either man.

So the identities were fake.

“Anything else?” Mabel asked. She was still on
the right side of thirty and had a cute, intelligent
face.

“Well,” said Toad Tarkington, and grinned
conspiratorially. “There is one little thing.
Richard Harper won a hundred bucks in our
baseball pool this weekend and we don’t know where
to get in touch with him.

Could you check him on the CIA data base?”

“That isn’t official business,” Mabel told
him primly.

“I know. But I’ll bet Richard would like the
hundred.”

“Commander, we’re not supposed . . .”

Toad gazed into her eyes and gave her an
undiluted dose of the ol’ Tarkington charm that had
melted panties on three continents. “Call me
Toad. All my friends do.”

Mabel swallowed once and lowered her eyes.
“Okay,” she said and turned back to the keyboard.
She punched keys.

“Here it is,” she told him. “He transferred
to the CIA computer facility at Langley. His
office phone number is 775-060 1.”

“Lemme write that down,” Toad said, and did
so on a piece of scratch paper he snagged from beside
the terminal.

“Thanks a lot, Mabel. I’ll tell
Richard he owes you a lunch.

“You were right,” Toad told his boss.
“Tanana and Hicks are fake identities.”

lake Grafton just nodded.

“How’d you know?”

Jake shrugged. “They wanted us to see that
ID.”

“And the analyst who worked on the photo of Herb
Ten they, Richard Harper, now works at the CIA.
As of this past Wednesday or Thursday.”

“So he was probably the leak,” Jake said.

“Yessir.” Toad found a seat. “What are
we going to do now?”

“I don’t know,” Jake said.

Toad frowned.

“If YOU have any suggestions, let’s hear
them.”

Toad shrugged. “I’m just the hired help around
here, Admiral. You’re the guy getting the big
bucks.”

“Someone thought this out very carefully,- Jake said after
a moment.

“They wanted to scare us, and they did, but there was the
Possibility that we could be induced to impale ourselves
on our own swords. So they came equipped with
fake identities and bogus Langley passes.

And they drove leisurely from my house
to Your house to give me time to call you or catch
up. “I didn’t check the passes, was Toad
said.

“Oh, they’re as fake as the driver’s licenses
and credit cards. You can bet on it. And if I
charged off to the front office with this wild tale about
CIA employees threatening us and demanded that
General Brown go after someone’s head, I would have
merely discredited myself, made myself look like a
fool. And put General Brown in a difficult
Position.”

“Too bad we didn’t take photos of those
clowns.”

was Umm.”

“So what are You going to do?” Toad asked again.

“I’ll have to think about it. If I go to General
Brown I’m going to have to tell him about that Herb
Tenney photo, and I don’t know that that’s a good
idea. We still don’t know a goddamn thing.”

“The CIA’S reaction to the Photo Proves that
they helped Keren depart for eternity.”

“If those two worked for the CIA. What if
Tanana and Hicks were Mossad agents trying
to make me suspicious of the CIAT’

“We’re going to have to tell General
Brown just to cover our fannies,” Toad said.

“Maybe. And that may make General Brown
overly suspicious of the CIA, which might have been the
Mossad’s goal when they gave us that photo. If
it was the Mossad.

The whole thing’s a mare’s nest. A military that
stops believing its intelligence service is
fumbling around in the dark. As if we had a lot of
light now . . .”

Toad was thinking of Judith Farrell.
Grafton had implied before that Farrell might have
been intentionally trying to harm the United States, but
Toad had automatically rejected it. Now he
began to consider the possibility seriously.

“I’ll bet someone at Langley would like to know
where we got that photo,” Jake muttered.

But if that was the case, wouldn’t that be the first
priority? Why the simple intimidation attempt?
It didn’t compute. If it were the CIA.

But the Mossad angle was even more unlikely.

What was wrong here? He was missing something. It was
right in front of him and he couldn’t see it. But
what?

His eyes came to rest on Tarkington, who was
staring at him. Toad looked away
guiltily.

What? He went over it again, from Judith
Farrell’s meeting with Toad all the way through this
morning’s verification of the false identities of the
agents.

Toad said something.

“What?”

“It’s like Rubik’s Cube, isn’t it?”
Toad repeated.

Rubik’s Cube had a solution, although the
solution was complex and one needed a good sense of
spatial relationships to figure it out. Jake
Grafton had spent a miserable week wrestling with a
cube some years back when Amy gave him one for
Christmas. Finally his next-door neighbor showed
him how the trick was done.

The problems Jake had learned to solve had much
simpler solutions: one usually became apparent when
you backed off and looked at the forest instead of the
individual trees.

Okay, Jake thought, by the numbers–One: if
someone at Langley knows about the photo, why
isn’t he trying to discover where and how I acquired
it?

Maybe he is but I don’t know about
it.

Unlikely, Jake decided. He and
Tarkington were the only people who knew the answers. And
Rita and Judith Farrell.

But they don’t know about Rita. They might know
about Judith Farrell or have an agent in the
Mossad, but that would be a complex solution, only
acceptable if there are no simple ones. There must be
a simple explanation.

Two: the person who sent the goons on Friday
night isn’t curious.

Why not? Because he already knows.

How?

Jake Grafton’s eyes focused and he
looked again at Toad, who was watching him askance.

“No,” Jake said.

“No?”

“Not like Rubik’s Cube.”

The admiral Pufled around a sheet of paper and
picked up a pencil. On it he wrote “This
office is bugged.

Toad came over and looked at the words. “You
think?”

he murmured.

Jake nodded. He got up, removed
his

Jacket and draped it over the back of his chair,
loosened his tie and began to look- Toad started on
the other side of the room.

In five minutes they had ruled out the obvious,
a micro Phone behind a painting or under a desk.
“Let’s go for a walk,” Jake suggested.

“It’s nothing obvious,- Jake told Toad as
they walked toward the cafeteria.

“Nothing conventional. If it was, the sweeps would
have discovered it.”

The office was swept for listening devices twice
a week at random intervals.

“Maybe it’s the telephone. We’ll have to take
that apart.

And how about the window vibrator?,” Toad
suggested.

This device used elevator music to vibrate
the glass pane and foil any Parabolic listening
device aimed at the window.

“What if it isn’t a real vibrator?”

“Perhaps our eavesdropper has a Parabolic
antenna aimed at the window,” Jake said, “and is
unscrambling the tape with a powerful computer, like a
Cray?”

“That’s a possibility,”

about it. –Are Toad admitted after he thought You
sure about the bug?”

“No,” Jake told him. “But a listening
device would explain a lot. And not some simple
piece of Radio Shack junk. Something
computerized, something so sophisticated we don’t
see it for what it is.”

“If they’re using that window as a sounding board,
about all we can do is put another music source
near the window, like a portable radio, and complicate
the signal. But I think we should search that office
until we find a bug or can swear there isn’t
one.”

“Go down to the maintenance office and get tools.
Screwdrivers, pliers, wrenches, and a voltage
meter.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

“And a pipe wrench.”

They started on the telephone. They disassembled the
plastic box and tested the microphone in the headset
and com’in the desk unit to see if it really went dead
when the phone was on the hook. It worked as they thought it
should.

Next the light fixtures were removed
from their sockets and examined, then reinstalled. The
soundproof ceiling tiles were taken down and the overhead
and tile framework examined. They moved the
furniture and rolled back the carpet. Nothing.

The heating and cooling duct vents were dirty but
innocent.

Toad pointed toward the polished walnut molding
that framed the door and window and edged the walls.

Jake examined the trim. He rated it because he
was the deputy director of the DIA. The nails that
held the wood in place were covered with varnish.

He shook his head at Toad and pointed toward the
radiator.

The old steam radiator was no longer in use, but
the steam pipes were still installed. They used the pipe
wrench on the ring nuts.

And there it was.

With the nuts off the steam intake and outlet pipes,
they wrestled the radiator out a half inch or so, just
enough to reveal the insulated wire that went through the inlet
pipe.

So the whole radiator was a sounding board.
Inside the cast-iron unit there must be a sensing
unit, more likely two or three of them. The
signals went out through the wire to God knows
where, and there the readings were tape recorded. An
analysis of the tape using the known vibration
characteristics of the radiator would produce an
electronic signal that could be Processed
into speech.

There was nothing for an electronic sweep to find.
‘allyet whoever had installed this unit had merely
to run the signal through his computer to hear everything said
inside the office.

Jake used the pipe wrench to Pound a hole in the
wall.

The pipe made a left turn inside the wall.

“Come on.

Out in the corridor Toad was ready to pound
another hole in the drywall when Jake stopped
him. “Let’s find the telephone switchboxes.
They probably have it routed through the phone system.
Go call the telephone repair people and get someone
up here on the double.

The telephone switching boxes were in the basement.

The system technician opened one of the boxes and
Jake drew back in amazement. Hundreds of
wires. “How do you know which is which?”

“Well, sir, just tell me the phone number and
I’ll show You the connection.”

“I don’t know the phone number.”

well, everything coming into this box has a number.”

Now Jake understood. Somewhere in the building there
was a tape recorder or recorders-a monitoring
station hooked UP to a telephone. All the
eavesdropper had to do was telephone the proper
number, punch in a code and the monitoring station would
obediently belch forth all its data, which could then be
Processed by a computer into speech.

The technician was still talking. “dis — – they
built this building during World War II and have been
hooking up telephones ever since. The last big
telephone update we did we added more lines and
used the old ones where we could.

But there’s no blueprints or diagrams or
anything like that.

It’s.fucking spaghetti.”

They could establish what line it was, of course,
by trial and error.

Some of the lines were undoubtedly not sup posed to be
hooked up. But why bother? “Thanks, anyway,”
Jake said. “I appreciate you showing us this.”

Back in Jake’s office Toad Tarkington
cut the wire going into the radiator.

“They know everything,” he said disgustedly.

“Apparently.”

“They even got the conversation about binary
chemicals.”

“Yep. And one of those goons alluded to it
Friday night.

He said what a terrible thing it would be if Amy
died of heart failure.

I should have known right then. Goddamnit!”

The more he thought about the situation the angrier he
became.

“Goddamn those bastards!”

General Albert Sidney Brown didn’t get
angry, he went ballistic. He listened to Jake
tell him about the bug in the radiator with an air of
disbelief and growing bewilderment, brut when Toad
used the pipe wrench to disassemble the adiator in the
general’s plush corner office and he saw his
wire, he went into an apoplectic rage. He
spluttered, his face turned a deep crimson.
When he recovered slightly he began to curse.
He gave a rich performance at a fullthroated
volume that would have done the crustiest drill
instructor proud.

Only when Brown began to wind down did Jake
signal to Toad to cut the wire. If the
CIA had someone listening he wanted them to know they
had just pissed on and royally pissed off the very upper
echelons of the American military. If they cared.

Then the general got on the phone. Sixty
seconds after he hung up, the DIA’S security
officer, an army colonel, was standing in front of
Brown’s desk. The general led him to the radiator
and showed him the wire.

By this point Brown’s mood had coalesced
into cold fury.

“I want to know how many of these goddamn listening
devices are in this agency’s offices. I want
all the sensors and wire and telephone equipment
removed. And take out these–he whacked the
radiator with Toad’s pipe wrench-“fucking
antique radiators. I want to know why these
bugs weren’t detected by your staff. I want to know
what it’s gonna take to make sure something like this
doesn’t happen again. And when you have finished with all
of that, You and your entire staff are going to stand in this
office and swear me a blood oath that there are no more
goddamn bugs in any of our Spaces.”

The colonel left in a hurry. Brown then
eyed Jake Grafton without warmth.

“You and I are going to have a little chat,
Admiral. And not in this damned building. Get your
hat and let’s go see if we can find someplace
private.”

They ended up in an exclusive restaurant in
Alexandria, Virginia, after a silent ride in
Brown’s limo. Brown aPparently knew the
owner, who admitted him after he Pounded on the
door. After listening to Brown’s request she
escorted the two officers to the far back corner of the
empty dining room.

“I know You don’t open until five, but could
we please get coffee?”

“Of course, General,” the lady said. “Make
Yourself comfortable and we’ll bring it out in a few
minutes.”

“I appreciate Your hospitality, Mrs.
Horowitz.”

She smiled and left for the kitchen.

“Well?”

Jake told his boss everything, from Judith
Farrell’s meeting with Toad to the discovery of the
bug- The recitation took thirty minutes and was
broken only by the delivery of a Pot Of coffee and
two cups. Brown listened without interruptions. When
Jake finished the general said,
“Admiral, I’ll lay it on the line with you. You
should have reported the contact by a foreign agent to me as
soon as Possible. You fucked up.”

“Yessir.”

“you fuck up again, You’ll be a civilian
by noon the next day.

Brown refilld his coffee cup and stirred it with a
spoon.

A slow grin twisted his lips. “Tell me again
about sticking the pistol in that CIA weenie’s face.

When they had finished dissecting Jake’s
adventure, General Brown began to talk of the
CIA and the personalities of the men who ran it.
Finally he became philosophical:

“All intelligence services are
bureaucracies, of course.

The output is always mangled to some extent as it
goes through the pipe.

But when the people in the intelligence business start
editing the raw data to support their policy
recommendations, the output becomes fiction. It’s
worse than worthless-it’s fantasy as fact, so
it’s just plain dangerous. Policyrnakers think
they’re getting the big picture and they’re making the
decisions, but in reality the decision-making
function has been appropriated by the person editing
the data. The elected policymaker is being
manipulated.

He becomes a mere rubber stamp.”

“Do you think that is what’s happening at the CIA
now?” Jake Grafton asked.

Brown grimaced. “Historically the heads of
intelligence services have usually stood right by the
throne, Often in Europe the spymasters were the
second most powerful men in the government. But not in
the United States. The cloakand-dagger boys have
always put the fear of God in our elected
politicians, and rightfully so. Are they
manipulating our government, now, here?”

He leaned across the table toward Jake. “They
missed the collapse of communism. The biggest
political event on this planet since World War
II and they missed it. Apparently not a soul at
Langley ever predicted it or suggested it as a
possibility. They said the Soviet economy was
three times larger than it was. They said the
Soviet military was much stronger, more capable, more
combat-ready than turned out to be the case. They
sat there looking at a society in meltdown and
never saw a wisp of smoke. The fact
is that for the last five years you could have gotten a
better picture of what was happening inside the
Soviet Union by reading the New York Times
than you could from reading the CIA intelligence
analyses. But was that intentional?

“These damned CIA briefings and intelligence
reports give me a queasy feeling,” Brown
continued after a moment’s pause. “Nothing I can put
my finger on–the stuff is too slickly written
for that. Maybe that’s the trouble.

Maybe it’s too comstick, every mousehole
carefully papered over. I don’t know. I just get
this feeling. I’d really like to see the raw
intelligence, all of it.

“What I think … what I think we’re
looking at in Russia is merely an interlude
between dictatorships, like the 1917 republic after
they toppled the czar. The problems are too big, the
people are bigots intolerant of dissent and diversity,
they are too easily swayed by demagogues spouting
bullshit and hate, they readily swallow any hint
of a conspiracy, they despise anyone with a ruble more
than they’ve got.

The average Russian Can’t conceive of a loyal
opposition: the concept doesn’t compute.
That’s the background for the biggest economic
experiment ever tried on this planet, the conversion of a
centralized socialized economy into a free
market one. But the CIA downplays all that. The
folks at the CIA aren’t worried. And no one
over at the White House seems to be in a sweat.
Our politicos have bigger fish to fry, like squabbling
over Clinton’s tax increases and waggling their
fingers at the Japanese.”

Brown rearranged the salt and pepper shakers.
“I’m not sure what the National Security
Adviser thinks. At the CIA briefings sometimes
he acts like he smells a rat, other times he
sits there like he was getting the gospel in Sunday
school.

“What’s happening in the former Soviet Union
right now may turn out to be the seminal event that
determines the course of human life on this
planet for the next century.

The old union is in the midst of total
social and economic collapse.

Nothing works. Nothing! No one knows how to make
a decision. All look to central authority, which
is corrupt, incompetent, self-absorbed. The
republics constitute the most highly
polluted nation on earth. It’s one giant
petrochemical sewer, thousands of square miles of
soil so radioactive that humans can’t survive
on it, social systems that have completely
collapsed. Doctors are poorly trained and
incompetent-they routinely misdiagnose ailments,
sick people go to unbelievably bad hospitals where
they are butchered by quacks, there isn’t enough medicine,
equipment, food, clothes, anything …

“I could go on for hours.” He picked up a
pepper shaker and tapped in on the table, hard. “I
think the pollution is what did in the Communists.

Too many people are getting sick. Best guess is
at least a million people in the old union c
sanitation are sick with radiation poisoning.

Lack of basi and immunizations causes
epidemics of diphtheria, dysentery polio,
influenza-fifty percent of their conscripts are one
in four objected for military service. It’s
estimated only fifteen of the people in uniform could pass
a flight physical. comally can only run a
society for the benefit of the elite at the top for so
long before the whole thing implodes.”

He shrugged and leaned closer, his voice low.

“So what about those nuclear weapons.

CIA hasn’t told us the whole story. You can
bet your pension on that.

Reality has a feet, a texture, that’s
unique.

It’s seasoned with insanity and random chance. This
stuff the CIA is selling hasn’t got that feel.

“You sure?” Jake pressed. sure. The key
is money.

“I wish I was. But no, No one is paying
If nuclear weapons are leaving Russia, sorn
big bucks for them. CIA is looking and says they
can’t find the trail.”

was Jake

“Perhaps we should do some looking on our own, Toad
suggested. I

“HowThat puter expert.”

“Well, we need to draft a com

“You say that like you have one in mind.”

Jake did. He just nodded. n’t like it.”

“CIA, Treasury, and State wo er much.”

“if we find the trail their objections won’t
matt wn said without enthusiasm. comif it’s there
to find,” Bro Jake decided to change the
subject. “What are you going to do about the bugs,
General?” air and stood.

Albert Sidney Brown pushed back his chair
comI’m going to write a report to the president and
send copies to everybody on the list. The CIA will
think I’m a patsy if I don’t. But just the
bugs. Nothing about Nigel Keren or Mossad
photographs or intimidation efforts. You were right
about that. If we run those shitty rags up the
flagpole now, you and I’ll be diving headfirst into a
foxhole to keep from getting squashed.”

The whole mess was pretty bizarre, Jake
Grafton reflected later. It was like climbing a
mountain: the higher you got the worse the visibility
became, the thicker the cloud. And if it was like this at
his level, presumably the president, the man at
the top, couldn’t see his hand in front of his face.
No wonder the government stumbled from crisis
to crisis!

That night Jake and Toad searched the Grafton
house from top to bottom for bugs. They didn’t
find any, which merely increased Jake’s sense of
unease, Then they went over to Tarkington’s house
and turned it inside out. Rita helped. And they
found nothing.

“So what are we gonna do, Admiral?”
Toad asked when they had finished and were
drinking beer in the kitchen.

Rita flipped on the radio and cranked UP
the volume.

,.d ?”

“Yessir. About Herb Tenney and going
to Russia with him and all of this.”

“I dunno,” Jake said. “Any suggestions?-
He glanced at Rita Moravia, Who stood with
her back against the sink, trying to look deadpan.
She wasn’t Supposed to know about the Russian
trip, which was still highly classified. Her hair was
Pulled back and held with a clasp tonight.