7

The Weeder’s humorless deputy dog, Marvin Wesker, finished cleaning the IBM mainframe with the feather duster. “Would you be annoyed if I vacuumed tomorrow?” he called across the loft to Silas Sibley, who was weeding through the night’s crop of printouts at his worktable. “I’m already behind with my programs.”

“Vacuum tomorrow if you like,” the Weeder replied, “but get yesterday’s stuff shredded and down the chute before you attack the new pile.”

“My dream in life,” Wesker muttered as he ran the reams of computer printout paper through the shredder, “is to work at an operation with a classification so ordinary you can have a cleaning lady.” He replaced the empty burn baskets and settled into the chair in front of his terminal, across the enormous worktable from the Weeder. “I don’t mind weeding,” he explained. “I just don’t see myself vacuuming. I have a Ph.D. I speak four languages fluently. I have a working knowledge of three others. I’m overqualified.”

Wesker fitted wire spectacles over his large ears. The eyeglasses magnified his eyes and made him look as if he were leering. Grunting when he came across anything interesting, laughing out loud at times, he began reading through the pile of printouts that had accumulated overnight. “Here’s a nugget,” he said at one point. “Senator Woodbridge talks baby talk when he makes love.”

“We knew that,” the Weeder said.

“Well, lookee here. The wife of the cultural attaché, I. Krasnov, is having an affair with the wife of I. Kurchik, the electronics technician.”

“That’s new. Add it to the pouch.”

The Weeder punched an instruction into the keyboard and brought a “menu” up onto the screen of his terminal. The computer was listing new material under the heading Chinese Bin—intercepts from a pay telephone on the wall of a downtown Washington Chinese restaurant. The telephone was next to a booth where Savinkov and some of his colleagues regularly ate dinner. The Weeder typed in some call-up codes and waited. There was a whirring of tapes in the mainframe behind the partition in a corner of the loft. Dialogue appeared on the screen. The Weeder copied off a Russian word he didn’t know, thumbed through a Russian-English dictionary until he found it. “Ah, I see,” he said.

“What do you see?” Wesker asked.

“Remember Savinkov?”

“The Savinkov who is KGB? The one who talks Latin to his wife to throw off the microphones?”

“He’s arranging for one of his cipher clerks to sell us the February key to the embassy’s class seven messages. They’re obviously going to put out something they want us to read.” The Weeder penned a note to himself on a yellow index card. “We’ll dress that one up so it looks as if it came from a conventional intercept source. Our people will have to pay through the nose for the key so as not to tip off the Russians that we know about the operation.”

“Then we’ll have to act on the information the Russians plant or they’ll suspect us of suspecting them of having planted it,” Wesker said brightly.

The Weeder shook his head. “You’ve put it on backwards. We’ll have to be careful not to act on the information so the Russians won’t suspect us of reading their class seven codes.”

“I don’t get it,” Wesker said. “They’ll know we’re reading their class seven codes because they’re selling us the key to them.”

“But they don’t know that we know that they know we have the key.”

Wesker groaned. “I think I prefer vacuuming. I’m starting to program the chauffeur’s home phone this morning. Any suggestions?”

“Look for the usual,” the Weeder advised. “Odd words that could be codes for operations. Conversations in which nobody names names. Any reference to Savinkov. Noun-rich sentence structure.”

Wesker groaned again. “Noun-rich sentence structure! What if they talk in verb-rich sentences to throw us off the scent?” He lowered his voice to a whisper and stared in mock alarm at the telephone on the table between them. “What if they’re listening to us listen to them?”

“That’s why we’re working out of a loft in SoHo,” the Weeder said. “Even if they had the capability to do what we’re doing, it’d never occur to them to target this number. We’re just another mail-order house in another loft, as far as anyone knows.”

“A mail-order house with an IBM mainframe, a two-hundred-and-fifty-phone trunk line, a reinforced steel shield welded on the inside of the door, an alarm system that goes off in some precinct house if anyone blinks after hours, and one of those new State Department cipher safes that needs a combination and a key to open it.” Shaking his head, Wesker went back to his printouts.

The Weeder consulted the menu again, noticed new material under the heading of Farmer’s Almanac, which was the code he had assigned to Wanamaker’s Operations Subgroup Charlie. He punched in the appropriate call-up codes. Snatches of conversation began appearing on the screen. Two people were probably talking on the other side of the room from the telephone, which accounted for the computer getting only bits and pieces.

“… feel bad about the American nationals who are there. Isn’t there some way …”

“… out of the question, Parker. The last thing we want to do is open the door to speculation …”

“… thinking out loud. I guess you’re …”

“… I know I’m …”

Wesker, across the table, swallowed a yawn. The only items that seemed to interest him were the ones with sexual overtones. He loved tuning in on people making love; he claimed that reading what they said to each other during the act was more arousing than watching. Right now all he had were people playing bridge. Two diamonds. Pass. Two hearts. Pass. Two no-trump. Pass. Three no-trump. Noun-rich sentences could be boring as hell. He saw the Weeder peering intently at his screen. “Anything sexy?” he asked hopefully.

The Weeder said, “Savinkov is jerking off the assistant cultural attaché. All I’m getting is moan-rich sentences.”

“You’re being ironic, right?” Wesker asked.

“Right.”

Another snatch of conversation flashed onto the Weeder’s screen.

“Admiral Toothacher this. Admiral Toothacher that … it is a thrill just to be in the same room with you.”

The Weeder read the line again to be sure he had gotten it right. What was Wanamaker’s old boss, Admiral Toothacher, doing for Operations Subgroup Charlie? Could Wanamaker have brought him in to walk back the cat on the leak? It wasn’t a pleasant thought. Toothacher was a formidable adversary. And he had an old score to settle with the Weeder. If the Admiral ever traced the leak back to its source, he would skin Sibley alive and nail his hide to the Company wall.

“… paper trail.”

“… paper trail … thin … never left this office.”

“… naturally need to know …”

“… out of the realm …”

“… if there is a clock ticking.”

“… by mid-March or call it off.”

“How very poetic … to have the Ides of March as a dead …”

“… at least know what code name your operation …”

“… tingle.”

“… tingle.”

“… Stufftingle.”

The Weeder stared at the screen. He felt himself being sucked into the heart of a mystery. What had started out as a prank had become a puzzle. The snatches of conversation raised more questions than they answered. What was the connection between rods and hair triggers and wedges, and someone named Parker worrying about American nationals? And then there was the code word Stufftingle. Chances were that Wanamaker had picked it out of the Company’s book of random code words. Still, it might be worth checking into. When selecting a code word for an operation, people sometimes used one that had significance because it was easier to remember.

The Weeder keyed his computer to print out what he had seen on the screen and erase the original from the tape. Then he programmed it to scan Wanamaker’s future conversations for the word Stufftingle.

Wesker, at his terminal, caught sight of the Weeder staring off into space. “You look as if you lost your best friend.”

All he got for an answer was the frustrated grin of someone who knew less than he said.