“Quizon. But Quizon wouldn’t betray us.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Not if he’s as tapped as I think he is. Someone had to talk too much. It has to be Quizon.”

  “But Quizon isn’t that important.”

  “He’s a link. Just one more link. But when Tinkertoy started making its connections, it never connected Quizon, even though Quizon was the control officer for Manning.”

  “You mean that someone has manipulated Tinkertoy?”

  “What does Mrs. Neumann think?”

  “Everything you suggest,” Hanley began vaguely. He paused. How could he convey this sense of being lost as though the underpinnings of the Section he had built and nurtured for twenty years were coming undone?

  “Everything you suggest can’t be true,” Hanley said with weakness in his voice.

  “If it’s not, then Manning isn’t dead and Felker isn’t and Cacciato isn’t. You don’t trust Tinkertoy now, and neither does Mrs. Neumann.” Devereaux spoke softly but his voice was plain, flat, and the very plainness made the words fall one by one, like a bell tolling. “The computer is fouling and you’ve had six months to find out why and you can’t. So you’ve put me back in the field to do the job backward.”

  “And to find out why Manning was killed.”

  “Yes.” For a moment, there was only the crackle of the line. “And why he had to be killed now.”

  Hanley was suddenly startled; his senses were alert; adrenaline rushed through him. Something in the tone of Devereaux’s voice had changed.

  “Now? You mean time has to be a factor, too?”

  “Yes,” Devereaux said. “It’s the only part of the whole thing that would make any sense.”

  “But how much time is there?”

  “I don’t know,” Devereaux said. “But it can’t be very much. Until whatever is supposed to happen happens. Or they wouldn’t have taken Manning out.”

  19

  SIMEON

  Simeon moved slowly along the brown canvas wall division set up in the large room. The Pompidou Centre museum was not crowded; the exhibit had not excited much interest. On the walls were photographs taken nearly forty years before, showing the landings of the Allied crafts at Normandy and the subsequent celebrations in the little villages along the coast liberated after five years under the Nazi heel. June 6, 1944; Simeon had remembered the day, had remembered the news coming over the wireless from the BBC. He had thought it was a trick until the adults had begun to celebrate around him in that apartment in Paris, when his father brought out a hidden cache of cognac and even offered him a drink. They had been so absurdly happy; his father had said, again and again, “Vive les américains.”

  Vive les américains.

  Simeon smiled, his grotesque clown’s face an odd counterpoint to the grim black-and-white photograph mounted on the gray mat before him. It was a photograph of the part of the Normandy coastline called Omaha Beach. The bodies of young men, twisted in death, had been captured by the photographer.

  Simeon grunted, his hands behind his back, and turned into the next room.

  It was empty. In the entire room was only a single photograph, blown up to gigantic proportions. The photograph was of an American soldier bending over at the waist, burdened by his tools of war, his combat uniform caked with mud, his face made old by what he had seen and done, offering a candy bar to a child in neat but ragged clothes who carried a small American flag in her hand.

  What genius of public relations or propaganda had decided on that? Simeon smiled again. The exhibit amused him with its crude idealism, with the sense of the romantic adventure conveyed in the stirring sentences that captioned each pathetic photograph. Idealism and the fervor of war; everything fades at last, and what is left but these souvenirs?

  Simeon thought then of his son, David, who lived in Rouen. David once argued with him about the horror of nuclear war in Europe. David did not remember his father’s war. David could afford idealism because his memory was uncrowded by remembrances of war.

  Simeon had come to the museum in the remains of the old Beaubourg quarter because of the agreed signal that morning. When he had left his apartment building, there had been a letter in his mailbox. Inside the envelope was a postal card picturing the hideous bright bulk of the modern museum that squatted in the ruins near the old Halles district.

  The time of the meeting was always the same, but not the place. The museum was immense, stretching up several floors to a rooftop restaurant. It was for Simeon to search the building, bottom to top, while they decided if he was alone and that contact could be made.

  Now, in this empty room near the back of the third-floor exhibit, he saw the other man.

  The other man wore an old-fashioned black coat and a large black hat, like an English butler. He crossed the room slowly and came beside Simeon and stared at the same photograph. The other man smelled of onions and liquor; his breath was foul, even as his face was bloated beneath the black hat.

  “What did your signal mean?” His French was flawed, and Simeon had difficulty understanding him at times.

  “Just what it means,” Simeon said. “We had eighteen CIA agents marked in place. And now there is this one from R Section. I don’t know who he is or why he has come. Except it must be about Manning and Madame Clermont.”

  “This is a complication. Does it involve us?”

  Simeon smiled. “Is that for you to tell me or for me to tell you?”

  “There is no levity in this.”

  “There is no levity in the Russian soul,” Simeon said. For that moment, his innate contempt for the people he dealt with was betrayed. He had never been to the Soviet Union but he felt that he could draw an accurate picture of Russian life just from talking to these secretive, paranoid, moody people who had streamed through Paris over the years on behalf of their country.

  “Does this man present a threat to us?”

  “I don’t know. I report to you and you pay me for my reports. You and I both know the complexity of the next…operation. Perhaps this American agent will help us, or perhaps not.”

  “What do you want to do with him?”

  “Find out more about him. Watch him for a time. Let him be afraid of me. Let me see if he conspires with Madame Clermont.”

  “Are you worried by her?”

  “Not as long as I can control her,” Simeon said. “The problem is in understanding what game she actually plays.”

  “These are not games,” the Russian said severely, like a reproving parent.

  “No. Not for you. You must struggle in deadly earnest to even survive,” Simeon said with a smile. His eyes were mocking because the words had come too fast for the Russian to translate. “You don’t understand, do you?”

  “Does it satisfy you to mock me?” the Russian said. “Then be satisfied for a time. But remember that the events of June 6 cannot be delayed. And if this American is in a position to hurt our plans…”

  “Then he will be taken care of. Yes, your pedantic warning is noted,” Simeon said. “Isn’t it ironic to have this exhibit now? No one attends. Everyone has forgotten the war. Everyone wants to remember how long peace has lasted.”

  “We do not forget the war,” the Soviet said. “Not in Russia.”

  Simeon smiled still, his face mocking the other man. “No. You do not forget it; the Soviets have long memories but learn nothing.”

  “I do not understand.”

  “Nothing,” said Simeon, still smiling. “I said nothing.”

  “Do you mock the cause?”

  “Of course,” Simeon said. “There is no cause, or I am my own cause. As long as your pay is generous, your cause is just to me.”

  “You are too cynical not to believe…”

  “In what? In a Communist god or a Christian one? In France, in la patrie? Vive la France, is that what you wish me to say, to wrap myself in the tricolor, to march on the Champs on Bastille Day? No, life is too short for causes, little one.” And in that moment, he thought of his father opening the cognac hidden for five years against the Boches in the grimy little apartment on the outskirts of Paris. What did he come to celebrate finally but his own death in the same miserable conditions he had lived under during the war?

  And he thought of David, an absurd and touching pacifist. Simeon was the only generation of realism between the patriotism of his father and the pacifism contained in his son.

  “No causes,” Simeon repeated, not to the Soviet but to himself. To the memory of his father.

  To his son.

  20

  GARISHENKO

  The war game had ended three hours before and the machines had been shut down and everyone had left the bunker for bed or for a postmortem in the officers’ and faculty lounge of the Frunze War College located in the basement of the main building.

  Only Alexei Garishenko remained, slumped at his desk, staring at the bottle of vodka that had been drained an hour before. He had no energy, he had an overwhelming sense of dread. The room was dark; there was a single light still illuminating the remains of the operations room beyond his private quarters. He did not even hear Warnov enter the room.

  Warnov sat down in the British officer’s chair across from his desk and crossed his legs. Warnov lit a cigarette, pulling the smoke slowly through his thin lips and letting it escape just as slowly through his nostrils. His eyes were shaped like almonds and were as flat as a cat’s eyes. His fingers were narrow, stained yellow by tobacco. He stared at the slumped figure of Garishenko without speaking for a long time.

  “Why don’t you come over to the college with me? We can have a drink and something to eat.”

  “I’ve drunk enough,” Garishenko said. “Nothing works on me anymore. This damned headache; I can’t get rid of it.”

  “It was a game. You were well prepared, but it was a game,” Warnov said.

  “It was more than that,” Garishenko replied slowly. His voice was the voice of a sleeper. The darkness of the room without windows seemed to shroud it. “You know that.”

  “I know what I am told to know,” Warnov said. “Do you deny that the victory was logical?”

  “Yes. I deny it. Nothing in the West indicates what Naya supposed. France did not enter the war until it was too late; the British suddenly sued for peace after the Americans bombed Gorki from the Lakenheath base. That’s absurd; worse, it is fatally wrong.”

  “The computer is the mirror of the reality we give it,” Warnov said. “If you do not trust its judgment, then you question your own judgment.”

  “Naya was wrong,” Garishenko said. “You know it, the Game Master knows it. It was wrong, it was not logical.”

  “What did the Americans say when they sold us Naya? ‘Garbage in and garbage out.’ It is true, Alexei.”

  “Dammit. There was something wrong. But you chose to believe it because you wanted to believe it. And now? What now? Will you act?”

  “I cannot say.”

  “You know this is a prelude. Every war game involving Western Europe was a prelude for action.”

  “Was there war? Was there ever a shot fired against the West in all the years since 1945?”

  Garishenko knocked the bottle off his desk onto the soft carpet of the floor. The room was soundless except for the hum of a generator that penetrated the air-conditioning ducts. Garishenko had not been outside these rooms for thirteen days; had spring come to Moscow?

  “A last spring,” he said slowly, like a man awaking from a nightmare.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “This dreadful game.” He glanced up. “Do they believe it, Warnov? Are they celebrating their victory now in the lounge? Are they speaking of how easy it was to invade Europe and make it a Soviet sphere? Do they believe that the English surrendered or that the French were so easily bluffed or that the West Germans were so defenseless?”

  “They celebrate their little victories,” Warnov said slowly. “You have done well, Alexei. They think that to defeat you is to defeat reality; they think that you are the world of the West, contained in your person, contained in all you have placed inside Naya. Naya is the West standing against us, threatening us; Naya has been defeated and you have been defeated, and because of your ego you cannot believe this has happened.”

  “It will not be so easy for you.”

  “What?”

  “When you send the tanks across Germany. When it is flesh against flesh and machine against machine. It will not be so easy.”

  “No struggle is easy, but the prize of our ideal…”

  “No. Not ideals. In twenty years, we will have bound the rest of Europe to us as surely as the East is bound. In twenty years, they will be ours; they will burn our gas and our oil and they will be grateful for it. The American day passes in Europe. But we must be so impatient, we must have war.”

  “Perhaps not. Perhaps it is only preparation,” Warnov said.

  “No. The Kabul game was not preparation; the Paris game is not preparation. The war has already begun, and you know it and so do I.”

  “General Garishenko,” Warnov said, again with softness. But the voice of the other man was broken with pain, a sense of grief and bitterness.

  But Garishenko could not be consoled. He was a soldier and could not cry; he was a man of reason, of intellect; what he saw clearly he could not deny.

  It was too late.

  The generals had chosen to believe the computer and to see the game as reality.

  The war had begun but the shots were silent for a little time, while the thought of inevitable victory settled into their minds. Tomorrow or in June or the next month, it would begin. And then, Garishenko thought, in the noise of death, no one would be able to admit they had been wrong.

  21

  MRS. NEUMANN

  Mrs. Neumann had guarded the thought all day, telling no one in computer analysis, not even Marge, who had become her best friend there in the past two years. The secret thrilled her because it was so unexpected.

  Hanley had been dour as always, and they had gone over the same dreary ground at the morning conference on The Problem. It was now referred to in capital letters.

  “Why do I keep feeding Tinkertoy this garbage? Garbage in and garbage out, you’ve been told that enough times.”

  She had been given two new names and new links.

  “Yes, Mrs. Neumann, you and everyone in CompAn have told me the same things,” Hanley said testily.

  “Who are these people? More information from Quizon culled from the French newspapers?”

  “No. Quizon is not the source.”

  “Then who is?”

  “I can’t say.”

  “Oh, damn and double damn,” she said, realizing her own nerves were on edge. The months since Tinkertoy began fouling had cost her tranquility; she had fretted over the machine as she might worry about a child slow to learn to read.

  “Mrs. Neumann.” Hanley had leaned forward over his desk gravely, folding his colorless fingers together in vague imitation of sincerity and frankness. All of his gestures seemed acquired, as though he had studied them for a long time and picked them up step by step and used them frequently, but without confidence and without certainty that their purpose was served.

  “There are no coincidences,” he had begun “We always assume that. Why has Tinkertoy made these links over the last six months? Why do your geniuses—I beg your pardon, your people—make these rash conclusions from Tinkertoy’s ideas? Are the Warsaw Pact countries about to erupt again? Will there be a new Poland? Or will there be war in the West? All the scenarios are provided from what Tinkertoy tells us. ‘Garbage in and garbage out.’ Yes. But what was the garbage? Or is it garbage at all? Are you right in your assumptions? Can we go to the National Security Council with your conclusions, based on calculations made by Tinkertoy? Obviously, we have told them some things but we cannot tell them all.”

  “They’re on alert; what more can we do?”

  “Find the truth,” Hanley had said.

  “But what is the source of this new data? I need sources.”

  “Why, Mrs. Neumann?”

  “Because we always have a source code for the data.”

  Hanley had stared at her. “I don’t understand that.”

  “There are access codes to Tinkertoy and source codes. Access shows point of origin of computer information—from me, from Marge, from National Computer Center in Roanoke, wherever. And access leads to source—access and source meet and…”

  And then she had stopped speaking and she had stared at Hanley with her mouth open. She had gone into a reverie in which she was no longer in the small, cold room deep in the bowels of the Agriculture building explaining elements of Tinkertoy to a man who did not understand. She was in Tinkertoy in that moment; she thought finally she understood everything that had gone wrong.

  If anything had gone wrong.

  “Mrs. Neumann? Are you all right?”

  “It couldn’t be that simple,” she had said at last, still entranced by her vision.

  “What couldn’t be?”

  “Of course, we never went back over the data for source after it was established. Marge punched the garbage in. It was from Quizon, part of it.…”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Don’t you see?”

  “Mrs. Neumann…”

  “It doesn’t matter, Hanley,” she had said, snapping into the present again. She got up from the single straight chair in front of the metal desk and pulled the loose sweater around her. So damned cold in here, she thought again; he’s crazy.

  “Everything matters. What’s this about access and source?”

  She had smiled then. It was so rare an event that Hanley was startled by it and leaned back in his chair as though she had struck him. “I’m going to put Tinkertoy through a few paces this evening,” she had said. “After the others are gone. I want to be absolutely certain about this.”