Over the past few hours the images on Otto’s main monitor had begun to change in a way that was significant to him, and he was unable to stay seated now that he knew he was coming close. He bounced from one foot to the other, something he did when he was excited.
The 120-inch extremely high-def OLED flat-screen mounted on the wall above one of his desks was visible from anywhere in his primary office, but he had to look away from time to time or he knew he would explode.
He was always the odd duck. And when he was a kid in Catholic school, his classmates teased him unmercifully. And sometimes, after school and on the weekends, a few of the class bullies who’d singled him out would beat him. One time they’d broken a couple of ribs, another his nose and even his arm, and one winter his left leg—which still ached on rainy days.
It was impossible for him to go to the nuns about it, because they didn’t like him either. By the age of six or seven he was already smarter than they were in just about every subject—especially in math and science. But instead of treating him like a prodigy, they called him a liar. He was already solving college-level mathematical equations in his head, and they accused him of simply parroting the words and symbols he’d seen on paper. They’d never bothered to call someone who knew the math to check him out, because they were afraid of him. Instead of being proud of the genius they had in their classrooms, they were scared silly, mostly because he was already questioning the basic tenets of the faith, and they knew if he learned too much too soon, he would become an atheist and they would have failed as teachers.
It was just about the same for him in high school and even in college, because he’d developed the unfortunate habit—which he later managed to break—of laughing at people who couldn’t just “get it.” He had the tendency to solve problems they were grappling with and telling anyone who’d listen how stupidly easy they were.
He’d finally dropped out in his third year, and he spent several years of intense reading—not studying because he could “get it” just by reading—supporting himself by cooking in restaurants and any number of other jobs where he didn’t have to use his brain. But each time, he was fired because whatever he was doing, he did it better than the boss.
At one point he went to work for a Catholic diocese, running its books and doing some teaching, but by then he had discovered sex in a big way, and he was fired because he had not only seduced the dean’s twenty-year-old daughter but the dean’s nineteen-year-old son as well.
And then he came to the attention of the CIA.
Some letters and even scraps of words were beginning to emerge when his phone chimed softly. But it wasn’t Mac. The call was internal, ID blocked. He answered anyway, though the interruption just now was irritating.
“What?”
“Good morning. Marty asked that I check in to see what progress you were making.” It was Tom Calder, the assistant director of the national clandestine service. Bambridge had no idea how to deal with Otto, so he had taken to sending Calder to talk to him.
“I’m slammed down here, Tom. Tell him I’m being a bastard.” In Otto’s opinion, he was one of the smarter guys on campus.
Calder chuckled, his voice, like his manner, soft, even gentle, but refined. “I know, and I apologize, but I’d like come down for a chat. I’ll make it brief; we don’t want him going ballistic on us now.”
“Okay,” Otto said. He hung up and sat down at his desk, facing the big monitor.
Just about everyone in the CIA was ambitious. Everyone worked hard at their jobs; there was no doubt about it. But a lot of them worked just as hard at securing their career paths. Everyone wanted promotions, not only for the money, but for the prestige, for the increased power. The flavor of the intelligence business had always been the thrill of knowing something the general public hadn’t an inkling of.
Calder was no different than most of them. He wanted to take over and run the directorate the way he thought it should be run. He was doing that by making the clandestine service look so good, Marty would be promoted. Calder would be the logical choice to fill the vacancy.
In that much, at least, Otto agreed. Although Calder was in his late fifties, and starting to get a little old to run a directorate—by now he should have been the assistant director of the entire CIA—he would have done a much better job running the spies overseas than Marty had ever dreamed of doing.
It meant Calder was a spy for Marty. Part of his job.
Otto’s fingers flew over the keyboard, and the image on the screen changed, the train of characters slowed down, and the background went from a pale blue to a medium violet.
He didn’t disturb the ongoing decryption program—just hid it—and instead brought up on the monitor a version of the search that was six hours old, just before the word BERLIN had popped up en clair.
The state of his search was no one’s business except his and Mac’s. Everyone else—and that was everyone with a capital E—was an outsider as far as he was concerned. When the decryption was a done deal and he had shared it with Mac and they had produced the results they were after, then it might be time to spread the wealth. Until then, nada.
One of his monitors chimed. “Excuse me, dear, but Mr. Calder is at the door.” The computer voice was Louise’s.
“Let him in, sweetheart.”
The door lock popped, and Calder walked into the outer of the two rooms that were Otto’s domains. The first meant for a secretary or assistant he used for generally unclassified searches: the weather at some specific place and time, tides, moon phases (most operators liked to go out in the field during a dark night), airline, train and ship schedules, social security, passport, and driver’s license information—the easy stuff.
“In here, Tom,” Otto called.
Calder came into the inner sanctum and looked up at the main monitor. He was a slender man, thinning hair—a prematurely old man’s malady, one of many, he liked to say—and a shuffling gait. His expressions were always pleasant, and his eyes, pale blue, were kind and intelligent. Otto thought that he was a pleasant man, someone people immediately thought could be a friend.
BERLIN came up on the monitor.
“Ah, progress,” Calder said.
Otto glanced up at the monitor. “Just a key word. It’s come up several times.”
“What’s your best guess? Twenty-four hours maybe?”
“Twenty-four hours, twenty-four days, twenty-four years. Maybe never.”
Calder laughed softly. “I might believe that coming from anybody but you,” he said. “Marty’s keen on this, you know.”
Otto shrugged. “I’ll let you guys know soon as.”
Calder held his gaze for a beat then nodded. “Do that, please. We’d like to get this mess behind us.”
“Sure.”
Calder started to leave. “Have you heard from Mac or Ms. Boylan? Bob Blankenship wants to know what’s going on. Quite an embarrassment with his guy being taken and all.”
“He got back in one piece?”
“Thankfully.”
“They’re off campus, is all I know at the moment,” Otto said.
“Right,” Calder said, and left.
“Lou, is he gone?” Otto asked.
“Down the hall to the elevators,” his computer replied. “You have an interesting development on your Kryptos search engine.”
Otto brought up the decryption program in real time. After the briefest of pauses, he sat back and laughed, suddenly knowing with certainty what was buried in the hills above Kirkuk, and the why, but not who had buried it, though he had his strong suspicions.
AND GOD SAID, LWET TRHER BE LIGHT: AND THERE WAS LIGHT X AND THE LIGHT WAS VISIBLE FROM HORIZONQ TO HORIZON X BERLIN X AND ALL WAS CHANGED X ALL WAS NEVER THE SDAME X AND GOD SAID LET THERE BE PROGRESS X AND THERE WAS X PEACEF