She had been skirting around the issue of his loyalty as well as his abilities to run the CIA, during the hearings and in the media.
Television cameras were split between focusing on Brenda Madden’s face and on McGarvey, who sat unmoving, looking at her as if he might be looking at an interesting new species of animal in a zoo. Almost no one missed his expression, least of all Senator Madden. Paterson sat forward. “Mr. McGarvey has demonstrated his loyalty to his country time and again over a long and distinguished career,” he said. “I might respectfully remind the senators that Mr. McGarvey took the same oath of office that every CIA officer takes ”
“The same oath that Aldrich Ames swore to?” Brenda Madden blurted. She immediately recognized her mistake. She tore her eyes away from McGarvey and looked over at Hammond, who had his gavel in hand. “Excuse me, Mr.
Chairman,” she said. She turned back to McGarvey. “I did not mean to imply in any way a comparsion between you and Mr. Ames.” McGarvey nodded. “I didn’t think you had, Senator.”
“Thank you, Mr. McGarvey,” she said. “There will be other areas that I’ll want to explore with you.” “But not today.” Senator Hammond jumped into the breach. “These proceedings are adjourned. We will reconvene tomorrow at ten o’clock in the morning.” He banged his gavel once, and started gathering his files. An even bigger mob of reporters was waiting for them in the corridor and outside on the Capitol steps.
Yemm and his security detail kept them at arm’s length, and Paterson thought it best that McGarvey answer no questions on the way out.
Riding away, McGarvey thought about all the other DCIs who had been called to the Hill and raked over the coals. Now it was his turn, and he was feeling something dark riding over his left shoulder. Maybe it was his past catching up with him. Tomorrow the questions would begin in earnest: in the meantime he had the India-Pakistan problem to deal with.
TWELVE
EVERY MAN BELONGED TO HIS OWN AGE.
Otto Rencke stopped at the security gate leading to the CIA, trying to quell the voices inside his head that threatened to drive him nuts.
He’d been going crazy all of his life. But this time it was serious.
He was frightened. He rolled down the window of Louise Horn’s RAV4 and handed out his security pass to the civilian guard. He recognized the man. But he thought that he recognized everybody. He couldn’t get the pictures out of his head. “How’re you feeling, Mr. Rencke?” the guard asked. He was a younger man, very short hair, stand up bearing, probably a former marine. He was smiling pleasantly. “Well, ya know, I’ve had better days,” Rencke said. He spread out his arms and let his head droop. “Hell of a way to spend Easter.” The guard didn’t get it, and Rencke saw it at once. He grinned. “Sorry. Bad, bad joke. I feel like I’ve been in a car accident. My head hurts, my shoulder hurts, even my butt hurts.”
“You’ll be black-and-blue. But from what I heard, you were lucky.” The guard handed Rencke’s ID back. “Anyway, welcome back.” “Yeah, thanks.” The road had been plowed, but it was icy in spots. Rencke drove very carefully though he wasn’t paying attention to what he was doing. Sometimes he was super attuned to his surroundings. At other times, like now, the world around him was an out-of-focus blur. Early in his study of mathematics, when he was seven or eight, he had learned to compartmentalize his brain. Much like a computer works on a complicated problem by breaking it down into its constituent parts and then chewing on each of the parts simultaneously, Rencke had learned to divide his thinking. He’d explained to a mathematician at the University of Wisconsin’s Van Vleck Hall that he was like a juggler keeping a half-dozen balls in the air while balancing on one foot, singing and watching television. He was able to work on a number of different problems at the same time. There were perhaps as many as a half-dozen compartments running as many problems at any given time in his head. When he had the bit in his teeth, like now, the number rose to a dozen or more. He’d never been able to count them all without breaking his concentration. He thought of his abilities like a Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. If you stopped to count the operations, the operations themselves fell apart. But the problem he’d always faced, especially now, was that each compartment in his brain was separated from all the others by a gigantic wall. Sometimes when he wanted to find the doors between the walls he couldn’t. It was like being lost inside a constantly moving kaleidoscope. The images were beautiful, and complex, and very often useful, but he wasn’t able to see the real world because of his fragmented thinking. Usually, if he tried very hard, he could find a ladder and climb over the top of the wall and look out over the entire field. But this time he couldn’t even find the ladder. Which is why he thought that he was going seriously crazy. The driveway through the woods branched off into the various parking lots. It was a few minutes after noon and all but the visitors’ lot were full. Rencke was a high-ranking officer, so he had an assigned spot in the underground garage. This place had become home to him. Everyone else came here to work. He came to live. The nurses had given him a sponge bath at the hospital, and Louise had brought his fresh jeans, a bulky knit sweater, clean socks and new Nike running shoes, and she’d had his MIT jacket cleaned. His long frizzy red hair was covered by the bandage, over which he wore a watch cap. When he came through the doors the guards did a double take. They’d never seen him cleaned up. Upstairs in the computer center he went directly back to the area he’d been using for the past few weeks. He stopped in his tracks. The dozen monitors were still up and running, but the desk and long worktable he’d used were clean of everything except non classified materials. The wastepaper baskets and shredder bins were empty, the photos and charts he’d taped to the wall dividers had been taken down, and the litter on the floor had been picked up. “Sorry, Otto,” Karl Zimmerman, chief of computer services, said. Rencke spun around so fast he almost lost his balance. He was lightheaded from the accident.
Louise wanted him to stay at home, but he’d left as soon as she’d lain down on the couch and fallen asleep. “Hey, take it easy,” Zimmerman said, reaching for him, but Rencke pulled away. “Where are my things?”
“It was Mr. McGarveys call. We put everything in the safe room. Are you okay?” “What about the stuff in my car?” “We’ve got that, too,”
Zimmerman said. “Would you mind telling me what you’ve been working on? We burned a couple of your disks trying to find out.” Rencke glanced at his monitors. “We didn’t dare touch them,” Zimmerman said.
“The whole place would probably blow up.” The chief of computer services was a slightly built man with thinning gray hair and a pencil-thin mustache. He was very bright, although his real strength was administration: “If you can direct the gee ks you can run the system,” he said, not unkindly. “It’s too early,” Rencke mumbled.
“Lavender, you know. Bad. Getting badder.” There was light spilling over some of the walls in his head, like the sun on the horizon, or like the blue glow from the core of a swimming pool reactor. That in itself was a thought: a chain reaction building like a chain letter.
What if there were impurities in the core? What if just the right impurities were added, would the results tell what was going on inside.
Like an alloy. “Bring my things back,” he said, absently. He took off his jacket, tossed it toward a chair, which it missed, then started bringing his search engines back on-line one at a time.
Even now when his head was fragmenting he could appreciate the simple beauty of his programs. His machines had no opinions except for an appreciation of a deft touch on the keyboard. They didn’t care about his background, about how he looked, his clothes, his hair, his mannerisms, which he knew were sometimes odd, out of the ordinary. They did things for him without question or judgment. When he looked up it was a few minutes after six and he was surprised to see that someone had brought back all of his files. The table was piled, the floor was littered and several satellite shots of downtown Moscow were pinned to the divider. Zimmerman was gone and McGarvey stood in the doorway in his place. He seemed tired to Rencke, maybe even a little battered and bruised, as if he, too, had been in a car accident. He looked sad, the thought popped into Rencke’s head. “Oh, wow, Mac,” Rencke said. “What are you doing here?” “Trying to find out what the hell is happening to a friend of mine. His name is Otto Rencke. You haven’t seen him, have you?” Rencke turned back to face his monitor. He was inside the SVR’s Washington embassy computer center. He touched the escape key and the monitor went blank. His narrow
