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  For Larraine, who led me to Paris and shared the adventures we found there.

  The world has joked incessantly

  for over fifty centuries

  And every joke that’s possible

  has long ago been made.

  —W. S. GILBERT

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Certain realities are reflected in this book.

  In 1968, across Paris and in other parts of France, a fierce student-worker uprising against, among other things, the rigidity of the French educational system nearly toppled the government of Charles de Gaulle. The leftist revolt was eventually crushed, but reforms demanded by the students were enacted. The center of the revolt was in the Latin Quarter of the fifth arrondissement (or district) of Paris, which is one of the oldest neighborhoods in the ancient city. It is the site of the Sorbonne.

  In spring 1981, thirteen years after those revolts, the French elected François Mitterand as the first leftist president of the Fifth Republic. In fact, the Mitterand government was the first leftist regime to control France since the Popular Front of Léon Blum in 1936.

  Certain war games and “scenarios” developed by computer programs speculate on the question of what the French armed response would be to an invasion of Western Europe by ground and air forces of the Warsaw Pact countries. This question was fully described in A History of the Third World War by General Sir John Hackett of the British army. At the present time, the question has not been resolved.

  Computers are utilized by all the intelligence agencies of the United States.

  The National Security Agency, as one of the intelligence services, is the hardware and software supplier of specialized goods to the various other services in the intelligence network.

  British Intelligence has abandoned the old section names of MI-5 and MI-6. The new nomenclature is “secret.”

  The Frunze War College of the Soviet Union is located in the southwest district of Moscow.

  Terror movements in Europe are many and widespread, operating chiefly in the Basque region of Spain, in Italy, in northern Ireland, and in principal cities, such as Paris. It is supposed by U.S. Intelligence authorities that some of these movements are controlled and/or supplied by the Soviet Union.

  In spring 1982, terror threats were made against the life of François Mitterand and acts of assassination and sabotage were performed in Paris and in the region south of Paris.

  By late 1982, the military and economic alliance of the United States and Western Europe (called NATO) had become very unstable. While the U.S. debated pulling its troops from the NATO line, Europeans from Germany and Sweden to Great Britain publicly protested the U.S. decision to deploy new nuclear weapons. Further jeopardizing this economic alliance was Europe’s decision to participate in the building of a Soviet gas pipeline to the West, while, at the same time, the U.S. initiated various trade wars designed to punish European steel firms that were dealing with the USSR.

  Each spring, the students of the Sorbonne in the Latin Quarter commemorate “the events” of 1968 with petty acts of vandalism and with marches in the narrow streets of the old district.

  Finally, the agents portrayed in this book reveal that the Central Intelligence Agency faked certain reports to the American government during the Vietnam War. These charges have been publicly aired and debated.

  Despite these realities, this book is a work of fiction.

  PART ONE

  Memento

  We passionately long that there may be another life in which we shall be similar to what we are here below. But we do pause to reflect that, even without waiting for that other life, in this life, after a few years we are unfaithful to what we have been, to what we wished to remain immortally.

  —MARCEL PROUST

  1

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  Mrs. Neumann did not knock at the door to Hanley’s bare office before she entered, and she did not speak to him until she was settled on the government-issue metal chair in front of his desk. The temperature in the office hovered just about sixty degrees Fahrenheit, as always, and Mrs. Neumann, as always, wore the thick brown sweater she kept in her own office for her private meetings with the chief of operations of the R Section. It was just after nine-thirty in the morning on January 9, and Mrs. Neumann and her staff had been struggling with the knot of the problem for the past six days.

  “Tinkertoy is puzzled,” Mrs. Neumann said in her raspy whisper. For emphasis, she struck one large hand on the computer printout sheets that filled her generous lap. After the meeting with Hanley, a meeting without notes written or recordings made, the printouts would be shredded in the large machine in the central corridor.

  “A computer cannot be puzzled. It is a machine.” Hanley spoke precisely and waited for a reply, his clean, colorless fingers resting on the polished Formica top of the gun-metal-gray desk.

  Mrs. Neumann had unlimited access to him because she never wasted his time, no matter how odd her manner or way of conveying information. It was pointless to ask her questions at the beginning of these conversations because she never arrived at her point sooner than she intended.

  She was a large woman with big bones and a thickening waist; her bones seemed to stretch her healthy, leathery skin. She had expansive gestures and wore old-fashioned cotton dresses, like a farm woman from another century. Her massive head was crowned by thick black, spiky hair, cut short, and she had once told Marge in the computer analysis section that her husband cut it for her twice a month. Despite years of practice, he had never become an expert barber.

  She spoke at last. “It’s in the raw data. The raw data we’ve been getting from the field in the past four months is the puzzler,” she said. “Or rather…”

  “Or rather what?”

  Mrs. Neumann stared at Hanley for a moment, and Hanley tapped his fingers on the desk top. They both understood her look. She was about to bring up something he either would not understand or would not want to hear.

  “It has to do with those created indices,” she said finally.

  Hanley sighed. He hated the words. He hated the computer called Tinkertoy. And he hated the nagging edge of this problem that would not be solved and would not become worse and would not go away.

  “You’re talking about the…indices…in your job file or memory bank or whatever you call it?”

  “The additional ones, Hanley, the ones that weren’t there before.”

  “That you believe weren’t there before.”

  “Dammit, Hanley, the ones that make connections between entries that I know were never made.”

  “That you don’t remember making,” Hanley said.

  “My memory is just fine,” she said.

  “Of course.”

  Three months ago, Mrs. Neumann had slammed into his office with a loud complaint: Someone in Section had tampered with her work files. She had been storing complicated variables in a separate memory file of the computer in order to relate certain types of data—to make cross-checks of minor bits of information. And now someone had tapped into her files and built up these false indices.

  Hanley had called in the National Security Agency—the policeman of the intelligence servic
es—to make a careful and routine check of personnel in computer analysis. They had found nothing, and Hanley had not been surprised. He had assumed that Mrs. Neumann had accidentally punched some incorrect entries into Tinkertoy and then gone back over them without remembering to erase them from the computer memory. Mrs. Neumann had not been mollified; her suspicions remained. “The trouble with all of you is that you don’t know a damned thing about computers,” she had said at the time. Everyone agreed with her on that.

  “What’s wrong now?” Hanley asked.

  “All right. This new data—Tinkertoy has been giving me a correlation coefficient that—”

  He held up his hand. “You’ve lost me again, Mrs. Neumann.” He said it with a slight smile that was not pleasant, as though he were a teacher admonishing a child who skipped words in his reading.

  “It’s not that hard, Hanley. I wish you’d pay a little more attention to Tinkertoy.”

  “I am from another age, a noncomputer age…”

  “When spies were spies and men were men,” she said. “Dammit, Hanley, I’m no older than you.”

  “Perhaps I am old-fashioned.”

  “Perhaps you can afford to be,” she said in her raspy whisper.

  “In any event,” he said, “you are in charge of computer analysis, not me. So give me an analysis. In an approximation of plain English.”

  “Do you remember on 9 December when we picked up that flutter out of British intelligence through our London station?”

  “From Auntie?” He used the British operation’s slang term for itself. “That was about Auntie running a little operation at Mildenhall air force base?”

  “Right. Our base in East Anglia.”

  “Actually, it is their base, I believe. They allow us to use it.”

  “What the hell are the British going to fly out there? Spitfires? The British air force is paper.”

  “No political commentary please, Mrs. Neumann.”

  “All right. We took all their garbage and fed it into Tinkertoy. All routine. Then on 14 December, Tinkertoy gets fed Quizon’s crapola from Paris about new government postings and we dump it in. Nothing special from Quizon, but that doesn’t surprise me—we never get anything but press clippings from the Paris papers from that old fool.”

  “Quizon has been with the Section for a long time.”

  “Too damned long.” She paused and shifted her thoughts. “The point is that yesterday I was working from some of those indices. The ones that someone had put into my file when I complained before.”

  Another sigh. Hanley realized he wished he were out of this room, strolling down Fourteenth Street, away from this woman and her problem, which Hanley could not quite comprehend.

  “So I entered one of those phony indices—”

  “I thought you had cleared them from memory.”

  “I want to know who’s been screwing around with my computer,” Mrs. Neumann said. “Well, do you know what Tinkertoy gave me? The numbers were fantastic.” She glanced at the look on Hanley’s face and hurried ahead. “Anyway, I had this great idea right away. You know I was puzzled about the data those indices were throwing together because it didn’t seem to mean anything to me. There were things in there like troop movements, but also odd things like indication codes on some individuals. It was like a bowl of popcorn with apples in it—I mean, what the hell do the apples have to do with popcorn?”

  “Popcorn?”

  “So I asked Tinkertoy to print out all the separate data items that had gone into those indices. And I worked a couple of hours last night going through all the stuff Tinkertoy threw at me, and then it hit me—”

  “Overtime? Mrs. Neumann, we need authorization for overtime now. You know that.”

  “Damn overtime, listen to me. That index selected out—you can say related, if you want—only three names of individuals. Three goddamn names, Hanley.”

  Hanley stared at her.

  “Two were British agents, the two agents at Lakenheath-Mildenhall. And one other. A French woman, an official in the Mitterand government. Madame Jeanne Clermont.”

  “But I don’t really understand any—”

  “Let me finish,” she said sternly. “What do we have? We’ve got someone who thinks Madame Clermont and this Lakenheath business are linked in some way important enough to make them want to enter my files—enter my files, Hanley—and play around inside Tinkertoy to find out how they relate to troop-movement figures or—”

  “Troop movements. Mrs. Neumann, we have been through all this before. We’ve had the NSA run checks on everyone at the highest level. I thought we had agreed there is no evidence to support your idea that a mythical someone has tampered with Tinkertoy. Mrs. Neumann, we can’t keep going back and forth over the same ground. We all become a little paranoid, it goes with the business, but you agreed that those ‘created indices’ you complained about must have been an accident.”

  “I said that you people didn’t understand anything about computers.”

  “Mrs. Neumann, what is the importance of any of this, outside of your obviously firm-rooted paranoia?”

  She made a face at him but continued: “Well, it struck me funny because you had talked to me about this Madame Clermont person. Before you sent Manning across. I don’t know. I don’t suppose it would have bothered me that much until we kept getting some other strange stuff coming out of Tinkertoy.”

  “Maybe it’s a mistake.”

  “Tinkertoy doesn’t make mistakes.”

  “Someone made a random entry sequence that coincidentally matched another entry sequence,” Hanley said.

  “Yes. I thought of that.”

  “Well? Who was it, if it wasn’t you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You should know that.”

  “I know I should know that, but I don’t. I went back over the entries, and there isn’t any access code.”

  “Well, how did the stuff get into the machine?”

  “Magic.”

  Hanley looked up with a sour expression pursing his lips.

  Mrs. Neumann flashed him a broad smile. “I was kidding.”

  “There isn’t anything funny.”

  “But there is. Someone can get into Tinkertoy. And now we’re getting more of this crazy stuff. Troop strengths along the Czech corridor, you know, the spring games of the Warsaw Pact countries? They’re doubled. I’m sure of it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Hanley, I had a request from the Baltic desk for some figures on Polish armored strength in the northern sector, near Gdansk. So I punched it into Tinkertoy.”

  “Yes?” Hanley asked hurriedly.

  “Well, when they came up with some of those troop strengths, something rang a bell up here.” She touched her spiky hair.

  “What bell?”

  “About a year ago I had some reason to find out the strength of the Ninth Armored of the Polish army, and I remember distinctly the figure of two hundred forty-eight tank units.”

  “So?”

  “Now Tinkertoy flashed it out four hundred ninety-six. Exactly double. In one year.”

  “Is that possible?”

  “You tell me.”

  “Well, where did the new information come from?”

  “That’s it, Hanley.” Her eyes were gleaming. “Tinkertoy said it was there all the time, made in the original report by Taurus in Krakow.” Taurus was the Section R agent in Poland.

  “Well, then it must be right.”

  “But it isn’t, Hanley, I remember the number. It was two hundred forty-eight, not four hundred ninety-six. Exactly double.”

  “Your memory is fallible.”

  “Just as yours is, but I do remember some things, and I know I remembered that number, don’t ask me why. And the number is wrong now. Then I went through all the troop strengths in Warsaw Pact, and the figures were incredible. If Tinkertoy is right, the Opposition is putting together a war machine for a hell of a lot more than some troop
maneuvers or war games.”

  For the first time, Hanley felt a chill seeping through her words. He did not understand computers but he understood Mrs. Neumann’s plain words: a war machine.

  “Tell me,” he said. His voice was quiet.

  “Six hundred and fifty thousand troops,” she said. “Two thousand six hundred and seventy-five tanks. Nineteen—that’s one nine—armored divisions alone composed of mixed elements of the Czech, Polish, Hungarian, and Bulgarian forces, and—”

  “Mrs. Neumann, that’s impossible. There can’t be so many troops for a war game.”

  “Right, Hanley, now you’re getting it.”

  “But Tinkertoy can’t be right.”

  “Every piece of data in Tinkertoy supports itself. Tinkertoy analyzes that the troop strengths indicate we should put NATO up on red alert status, code two. Now.”

  “But what do you think?” He realized his voice had assumed a pleading tone.

  “Hanley, I’m in computers, you got other geniuses here to do the heavy thinking. I just give them the stuff to think with.” She paused and looked across the government-issue desk at the middle-aged man with the pursed lips and dour expression. “I put in this name again, this Jeanne Clermont. I wanted all the readouts on her. Interesting woman, Hanley—a middle-class sort of background but she scored well in tests, went to the University of Paris at the Sorbonne. Became a revolutionary, of course—this was 1967. And in 1968, our William Manning uses her to get the stuff on the Reds there…And now she’s in the Mitterand government.”

  “I know all this,” Hanley said in his dry way.

  “I’m just saying, Hanley, that a person like that could be hooked up with all kinds of funny business.”

  “Funny business?”

  “She was with the Reds once, with those terror people, maybe she still loves them. The trouble with this business, I’ve told you before, is that you get people like that wandering in, making friends, and you never know what they’re going to get into.”

  “I don’t understand the point of this, Mrs. Neumann. Will you be clear? What do you suspect about Tinkertoy?”