negligee Harriet had given her for Christmas when it looked as if her anemic romance with Ogden might finally blossom.
Poor Ogden. His town house always looked as if the maid just left five minutes before you arrived. Appearances were so impor- tant to him. He would be devastated if he could see her in this slum. Ob well. Toad had something that Ogden would never have. She thought about it as she brushed out her hair again. Tarkington had guts as well as brains, and he knew what was important and what wasn’t. He believed in himself and his abilities with a pro- found, unshakable faith, so he wasn’t threatened by what she was, what she accomplished. Any way you looked at it. Toad Tarking- ton was a man.
And a man was precisely what Rita Moravia wanted in her life.
She turned off all the lights except the one on the nightstand, then opened the bedroom door.
Toad was up to his elbows in soapsuds in the sink. He had used too much dishwashing liquid. Too much water too. Water and suds were slopped over half the counter. Damn. He shouldn’t have brought Rita here with the apartment in such a mess. He had been meaning to unpack and clean it up, but the chore always seemed one that could wait. He had been seeing that secretary over in Alexandria but they always went to her place. It just hadn’t oc- curred to him how Rita might react until it was too late — like when he was fishing for the key to open the door.
Doggone, Toad, you find a really nice girl for a change and you screw it up right at the start. More water slopped over the edge of the sink. He felt it soaking the front of his pants. Oh poop.
He heard a laugh and turned. Rita was standing in the kitchen door laughing with her hand over her mouth. He grinned at her and worked blindly on the dishes. He couldn’t take his eyes off her
“You used too much water,” she said.
“Uh-huh.” With her hair down around her shoulders she looked like a completely different woman — softer, more feminine. And that frilly little nothing she was wearing!
“Do you have any dish towels?”
“Of course I have—“
“Where?”
“Where?” He forced his eyes to look at the likely places while he considered. “Oh yeah, in that box over there behind the table.”
She swabbed the counter while he hurriedly finished the dishes md stacked them in the drainer. He pulled the plug in the sink and she wiped his hands and arms.
“I’m sorry this place is such a mess. I—“
She put her arms around his neck and kissed him. He never did get to finish that apology.
“What’s your first name?”
“Robert.”
“Why do they call you Toad?”
“Because I’m horny all the time.”
“Umm,” Rita Moravia said. “Oh yes, I see. Lucky me.”
We got something,” Dreyfus said with a grin as he leaned in Luis Camacho’s office door-
“Well, don’t keep me waiting.”
After entering and closing the door, Dreyfus approached the desk and handed Camacbo a photocopy of the message from the cigarette pack that Mrs. Jackson had supplied. “Interest Golden. TS 849329.002EB.”
“What I did,” Dreyfus said, “was to have the computer wizards in the basement assume this message came from one of those letters that have been going to the Soviet embassy.” Camacho nodded. All mail addressed to the Soviet embassy was routinely examined and interesting items photocopied. So the FBI had copies of messages from sixty-three letters that looked suspicious.
“And sho nuff, it did. This little dilly right here.” From a file he pulled another photocopy. The message was a vitriolic screed on Soviet support of the Afghan puppet regime.
“What’s the code word?”
“Luteinizing.”
“What the heck kind of word is that?”
“Some medical word.”
“Will that break any of the other messages?”
“These four.” Dreyfus laid four more photocopies on the desk before his boss. On the bottom of each was penciled the code word and the message, and the initials of the computer technician.
“How about that?” Camacho said. “Very nicely done, Dreyfus.”
Dreyfus sagged into a seat across the desk. He was tall and angular and liked his pipe, which he extracted from a sweater pocket and charged. “We’re still short a whole bunch of code words.”
Camacho eyed his colleague as he drew deeply on the pipe and exhaled clouds of smoke. “So now we know how the code is con- structed?” he prompted.
“Yeah. It’s a matrix.”
“And?”
“And if we could tie up the mainframe for a couple weeks, we could construct a matrix for each and every word in the dictionary and compare them with every message. Given enough time on the computer, we can crack them all.”
“And then we’ll know what was stolen.” Camacbo turned to the window. There was little to see. It was a windy, cold day out there. “Two weeks? Jesus, that’s a hell of a lot of computing time. You should be able to find the Grand Unified Theory with two weeks on a Cray computer.”
“Well, from looking at this word he used—’luteinizing’—it’s ob- vious that some of the words are probably verb participles, past tense, etc. It’s possible — probable, since this guy’s pretty damn cute — that some of the code words are the names of persons or places. The number of possible English codewords is in the mil- lions, and the computer must construct a matrix for each and every one of them and test each matrix against all the suspected mes- sages. So what is that — a couple million repetitions of the program times sixty? Assuming he used real words or names. But if he made up random combinations of letters, say a dozen letters…”Drey- fus shrugged.
On a scratch pad Camacho wrote, “26?.” “Point made,” he muttered.
“Oh, I know, I know. Even after we have all the messages cracked, we won’t have him. But we’ll have his scent. Once we know which files he’s been in, we can trot over to the Pentagon and glom on to the access sheets for those files. Our boy has seen them all.”
“Maybe. But not very likely. Probably he got the access codes during an unauthorized peek in the main security files. But the document key words and numbers—” He sighed. “I would bet my last penny he hasn’t seen all the files he’s given away. I’ll bet there isn’t a man alive who’s had authorized access to all those files.”
“It’s worth a try.”
“Agreed. But we’ll never get the Cray mainframe for two weeks. The fingerprint guys would cry a river. So let’s get started with what we have. Get the access sheets for these five files we know about and let’s see who’s on them. And for Christ’s sake, keep your head down. Don’t let anyone know what you’re after. We don’t want to spook our man.”
“Okay,” Dreyfus agreed. “While we’re at it, why don’t we just pick up Terry Franklin and sweat the little bastard?”
“Not yet.”
Dreyfus’ pipe was dead. He sucked audibly, then got out his lighter. When he was exhaling smoke again, he said, “I think we’re making a mistake not keeping Franklin under surveillance.”
“What if the little shit bolts? What then? Is Franklin the only mole Ivan has over there? Is he?”
Dreyfus threw up his hands and gathered up his papers.
“Get somebody to tackle this decoding project with the main- frame when it’s not in use. The front office will never give us two weeks, but let’s see what we can do with a couple hours here and there.”
“Sure, Luis.”
“Again, nice work, Dreyfus.”
Camacho stared at the door after Dreyfus left. He had slipped and made a mistake; he had lied to Dreyfus. The only way to keep two separate lives completely, safely separate was to never tell a lie. Never. You often had to
