Down in the Zero

'I think I'm close now,' I told him. 'I need you to do something.'

'You got it.'

'Fancy's upstairs. Over in the garage apartment. I want you to stay with her. No matter what she does. Don't let her out of your sight. Don't take no for an answer. Stay with her until I get back.'

'I'll take care of it,' he said. In a man's voice.

The junkyard was shrouded in what passes for morning mist in Hunts Point— a nasty mix of industrial pollution and half–burnt garbage no converter could ever recycle. Terry was right near the gate, as if he was expecting me.

'Mole had a fight,' he said.

'A fight? Is he okay?'

'Oh sure. It was, like, not a physical thing. With Zvi.'

'The Israeli?' I asked, climbing aboard the shuttle.

'Yes. He didn't want you to know anything about…whatever they took. I couldn't follow it all. He said you weren't one of them. But Mole said, you were one of him, and he was going to show it to you. They had this big argument. Then this Zvi guy, he offered Mole money. For the information, he said. Mole got really mad then. They started arguing, in Jewish, I guess, I couldn't understand. Then this Zvi guy left.'

'Don't fuss about it, kid. They won't do anything to the Mole.'

'Oh, I know that. I just never saw him, like, mad before.'

The Mole was in his bunker. If the argument with the Israeli had him worked up, you couldn't see it on his face.

'You cracked the code?' I asked him.

'Yes. It was what I thought— a sort program. It matched all the names— before and after.'

'You have a copy?'

'Yes.'

'Any trouble. With…?'

'No,' he said, handing me a thick sheaf of papers.

'They do plastic surgery there,' I told him. 'It's the perfect cover for the ID business.'

'They do something else, too.'

'What?'

'I'm not sure. See this?' he said, holding up a clipboard covered with calculations.

I nodded, waiting— the Mole had already used up his supply of words for the week and I didn't want to throw him off the track.

'This was an experiment, like I told you. A double–blind, with a probability matrix.'

'Huh?'

'Don't play stupid, Burke— I don't have time. There was a group of subjects, all right? It was divided in half. Half received some…input. A substance, a treatment, exposure to radiation…I can't tell. The other didn't— maybe they got a placebo, maybe nothing. Again, I can't tell. Now for the group which got the input, there was a certain result predicted. That's the probability matrix…the experimenter was looking for a result, and that result was something you would expect to get in a certain percentage of cases anyway, understand?'

'You got a group of a hundred people. You give fifty of them a pill that causes headaches— you give fifty of them nothing. In the first group, ten of them get headaches. But you gotta figure, people get headaches without the pills. So the question is…how many more? Is that it?'

'Yes. The difference must be statistically significant for the input to be the cause.'

'But you don't know who…or what?'

'No.'

'Did the…experiment work?'

'I don't know. It's not in the data. The running time was ninety days. They run it four times a year, with different split groups. Whatever they expected to happen, it did happen. But I don't know the probability of it happening without the input.'

'Wouldn't they know it?'

'They made…educated guesses. It seems they don't have hard data on it.'

'So after ninety days, the…input…it's not gonna work.'

'That's what it seems. If it works at all.'

'It fucking fits,' I muttered.

'You think you know…?'

'Mole, you know all about the experiments in the camps. Remember you told me about them?'

'Yes,' he said, Nazi–hate blazing behind his thick glasses.