Down in the Zero

He blushed like a kid with a perfect report card. It was another minute or so before I realized he wasn't going to say anything. Waiting the way his father always did.

'Mole around?' I finally asked.

'He's got…someone with him.'

I looked a 'Who?' question at him. The kid shrugged. Whoever it was, it wasn't Michelle.

'Should I…wait, or what?'

'I'll see,' Terry told me, moving off.

He was back quickly, mouth working so he'd get the message just right. 'Mole says, the man with him is someone he works with. Not your business. You can trust him. Come down if you want.'

I knew the only kind of people the Mole worked with. Knew where his priorities were. But I was just curious enough, just enough in a hurry.

'Let's go,' I said.

Walking over, I handed Terry the key to the Lexus. 'Can you make a copy?' I asked him.

He gave me another one of those 'Are you kidding?' looks teenagers do so well.

The Mole was in his bunker, his pasty white skin shining like a mushroom in a cellar. His workbench was littered with printouts from the computer. A pad at his elbow was covered in his tiny, crabby handwriting, mostly with numbers and symbols I didn't recognize. A short, wiry man was standing next to him, dressed in a simple khaki summer suit. He was dark–skinned with thick, curly black hair and a mustache, dark brown eyes regarding me neutrally.

I greeted the underground genius— he grunted an acknowledgment, absorbed in another list of symbols scrolling down the screen.

I took the pad from his desk, puzzling over the Mole's strange writing.

'It doesn't print graphics,' the Mole said, glancing over his shoulder at the printer.

'Ah, Mole…'

He turned to look at me. 'This is Zvi,' he said. 'My cousin.'

The dark–skinned man stepped forward, extending his hand. 'Cousin' told me the whole story— Zvi was an Israeli, an operative in one of the dozen agencies they had working all around the world. High–placed too— if he knew where to find the Mole. Zvi was the Mole's landsman — of his blood, not of our family. Even his grip was neutral, promising nothing.

'Did you…?' I began.

'I showed the disks to Zvi,' Mole said, his eyes ready for a challenge. I didn't react— he'd told me the rules a long time ago. If his country could use something, he'd turn it over no matter what.

'One set of data is my area,' Zvi said, his voice neutral as his handshake. 'The other is not.'

'Which is yours?' I asked.

'This one,' he replied, holding up the red disk. 'Look at the printout.'

I picked it up. A fan–folded sheet with rachet–feed perforations along each side. It ran to dozens of pages all told. Looked like ID information: names, addresses, height, weight, hair and eye color…couple of hundred names, at least.

'What is this?' I asked.

'It's a before–and–after,' Zvi said. 'See this man,' he said, indicating with a pointing finger.

I looked. R21ANDERSON, ROBERT M.669 EAST 7933–C NYC74190lRNXBLUSMT=CAT2. Height in inches, weight in pounds, color of hair and eyes. More numbers followed: a pair of nine–digit sequences, one separated by dashes, the other solid. Social Security and passport, sure.

'What's this SMT CAT2 thing?' I asked him.

'Scars, Marks and Tattoos. I don't know what the Category means— it would be in their coding. If they're operating at this level, they'd have a way to alter things like that too.'

'So?'

'So he could be this one now,' he said, pointing to another name, different in everything but the height, with a Houston address. 'Or this one,' showing me still another, this time living in New Zealand. 'This is a record of new identities. People who disappeared.'

'What about fingerprints?'

'There's new technology. And even without it, people at this level don't get fingerprinted unless they're already caught— your local agencies don't really have a strong Interpol interface. They'd need a document generator too, probably on–line with government computers.'

'How do you do the before–and–after? How do you know which is which?'

'There's a program that would do it. A sorting program. That's what the code is before each one. See? The R21 here. The MM8 there? That's what the computer would do, match them up.'

'Could you crack the code?'

'It would take months, and even then we couldn't be sure, not without a reference point. We'd have to know at least one correct match to check.'

'So what good is it?'