Asterisk

by Campbell Armstrong

  The fucking plants. What was important here? Sharpe wondered.

  “Then, of course, there’s the problem of our young friend Thorne,” Dilbeck said. “It won’t go away simply by wishing. I’ve been reading your surveillance briefs. Why is he seeing Erickson? What’s the connection there? Thorne is getting to be a bad nuisance.”

  “I’ve got him watched, twenty-four hours out of every twenty-four,” Sharpe said.

  “Watched,” Dilbeck said, not without contempt. “I want a little pressure there.”

  “Like how?” Sharpe asked.

  “I’ll handle that end,” Dilbeck said. “With all due respect, Sharpe, a certain finesse is needed.”

  Finesse, Sharpe thought. Sometimes the only finesse people understood was a five-pack in the teeth.

  Thorne spread the papers on the kitchen table. Marcia stood behind him, watching. She put her hands on his shoulders and said: “More top-secret shit?”

  Thorne said nothing.

  “It looks like a computer printout,” she said. “Is that what it is?”

  “That’s what it is,” he said.

  “Of what?”

  “Secret,” he said.

  She wandered around the kitchen, poured herself a glass of milk, said something about calcium. She paused by the edge of the table.

  “Why don’t you think Jacobson was on the level? I mean, I don’t want to see you in the crap of politics, John, but at the same time I don’t want to see you on the long boulevard that leads all the way down to the schizo factory—”

  “I’m not being schizo,” he said. “I just don’t like it when things don’t add up.”

  “Nothing ever adds up,” she said.

  “Nothing ever adds up. What kind of gradschool mumbo jumbo is that?” he asked.

  “Suit yourself, honey,” she said. She went into the living room to her books.

  He straightened the papers. They were stats of printouts from a Pentagon computer. They listed, one by one, the personnel data of the hard missile sites. He began to go down the list.

  Adamson, Idaho

  Badger, Montana

  Caledonia, Nebraska

  Davenport, Utah

  Escalante, Arizona

  He looked closer.

  He skipped over the names listed under STAFF, SECURITY and went directly to those that came under the heading STAFF, TECHNICAL. At first, he did not believe what he saw; at first, it seemed to him that what he had discovered was just another enigma. If Escalante was a hard missile site, then these names made no sense. If, on the other hand, it was something else … but what?

  He paused, raised his head, stared at the wall.

  Then he looked back at the sheets again. He looked at the technical-staff data for the sites apart from Escalante. Predictable. Missile engineers. A nuclear physicist or two. But none of the other sites had anything that remotely approached the technical personnel at Escalante.

  He walked up and down the kitchen for a time.

  Why? Why?

  He returned to the table and reread the listings again.

  Beneath the list of these names, in the margin at the side of the printout, there was the character *. A footnote, Thorne thought. Somewhere there would be an explanatory footnote. He turned the pages. He found Zelda, Montana, the last listing. Then nothing. Nothing. The asterisk went nowhere. It led to zero. An asterisk that was not explained.

  And those names, those Ph.D.s—Christ, what connection could they have with a hard missile site? A cryptanalyst, two linguists, an astronomer? Space, language, and space, codes to be cracked—what did that add up to?

  He went into the living room.

  Marcia was lying on the sofa, reading a book.

  “Well?” she said. “What’s the score?”

  Thorne was looking along the bookshelves. “Haven’t we got an old Who’s Who somewhere?”

  “Bottom shelf to your right,” Marcia said.

  He found it and gave it to her.

  “I get to play?” she asked.

  “I want you to check four names for me,” he said.

  She sat up on one elbow. He read the names to her. She checked each, reading the entries aloud. When she had finished, she looked at him curiously.

  “Okay. What’s what?”

  “Those guys are listed as the technical staff at Escalante, which is supposed to be a hard missile site,” Thorne said.

  “And?”

  “Come on—don’t you think it damned odd? What kind of connection is there between a linguist, for example, and a nuclear missile?”

  Marcia shrugged. “Listen, we live in a world where educated guys talk to dolphins—”

  Thorne felt exasperated. “Think,” he said.

  “Well,” Marcia said. “I noticed one tiny detail about the four.”

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s probably nothing.”

  Thorne closed his eyes. “Tell me.”

  “Unless I’m much mistaken,” she said, and paused, “they’re all over the age of sixty-five.”

  “Are they?”

  “According to their dates of birth, they are.”

  He sat on the arm of the sofa, looking down at her.

  “There isn’t a young man among them,” she said. “You might call that coincidence.”

  “You might,” Thorne said. “Or there might be a reason for it.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Marcia closed Who’s Who and put it down on the floor. She stared at Thorne for a time. He was thinking: Old men, all of them, all of them past the statutory age of retirement. Why? What was there about Asterisk that needed old men?

  “John,” she said, “ever since you got involved in this—shall I call it the Burckhardt affair—I’ve been worrying about you. Our sex life is practically dead. Which is bad enough—”

  “It’s easily remedied,” he said.

  “Not when you’re spending all your time chasing around after loose ends and trying to fit the pieces together. You should take up painting by numbers, or something less strenuous.”

  “Come to bed,” he said.

  “And make love and know your head’s filled with the old men of Escalante?” She stuck her tongue out at him. “I need total concentration—”

  “No old men, I promise.”

  She raised her hand and he gripped it, helping her to her feet. They went into the darkened bedroom. He undressed her, drew her toward the bed—but when he closed his eyes, when he sought that necessary dark, that sense of relaxation, all he could see were afterimages of the computer printout behind his eyelids—and it was a long time before they disintegrated.

  “You’re not concentrating, are you?” she said. “Sex should be savored. You’re rushing it, lover.”

  “I wasn’t aware of it—”

  “Slow down, okay? There’s no hurry. I’m not going anywhere. And your old men—well, they’ll still be there in the morning, won’t they?”

  “I guess,” he said. He put his arms around her and pulled her back toward him.

  Brinkerhoff saw it come through on the IBM, 7 A.M. Moscow time. Decoded, from the difficult priority code, it read:

  ACCEPT HOLLANDER INFORMATION REQUIRED AFFIRMATION ACTION URGED VASHILIKOV ACADEMY OF SCIENCES CODE ASSIGNED APRIL FIVE DASH NINETY DASH LETTER H M K L DASH TWELVE NUMBER 12 PRIORITY ROUTE SIX NUMBER 6 URGENTLY SUGGESTED ZAKUNIN MINISTRY OF SCIENCE

  6

  Thursday, April 6

  It was the sound of the telephone that woke Thorne. He sat up—conscious of the dawn sunlight coming into the bedroom, the sky beyond the window cloudless and blue and unspoiled—and picked up the receiver, fumbling it in his sleepiness. He expected to hear his mother. She was given to the eccentric habit of making calls at odd hours from wherever she might be; an addicted traveler, she had called in her time from Tokyo, Edinburgh, Munich, unaware of the subtleties of chronological differences.

  But it was not his mother.

>   “You better get in here,” Farrago said.

  “Jesus,” Thorne said. “What time is it?”

  “Six on the morning of the sixth,” Farrago said. “Did I interrupt you at your … activities?”

  “What’s going on?” Thorne said.

  “Bannerman wants you to come in. Like now.”

  Thorne watched Marcia. The telephone had not wakened her. She slept deeply, her mouth slightly open, her breathing regular.

  “Now?” Thorne said.

  “This is the White House,” Farrago said. “The White House never sleeps. Didn’t you know that?”

  Thorne pushed the sheets aside, hung up the telephone, went into the bathroom, and gazed at his own puffy image in the mirror. Ungodly hour: what did Bannerman want with him at this time of the day? He washed his face in cold water, dressed, didn’t stop for coffee. “Now” was ten minutes ago in Bannerman’s lexicography. He went out of the apartment building into a dawn that was sunlit and cold. He shivered, turned up the collar of his coat, looked across the rows of parked cars that had begun, in dull reflections, to catch the first glimmer of sun. He went to the VW, got inside, drove out of the parking lot.

  There was something he found especially lovely about this town at this particular time of day. The emptiness of streets, the silences, the appearance of buildings as they emerged from darkness. A street-cleaning vehicle, spraying water, rotating its huge brushes, was moving along the edge of the opposite sidewalk. The only other vehicle in sight was a green car some way behind him; he saw it in the rearview mirror. A beautiful morning altogether, a time of day in which you could not imagine darkness and perplexities and conspiracies, you could see only a certain clarity.

  Inside the White House, he went directly to Farrago’s office. Bannerman was sitting with his chair tilted back against the wall. Thorne looked at both of them quickly. Farrago in his usual droopy bow tie and plaid suit, rimless glasses, his hair untidy; like a professor of classics from another age. Bannerman was dressed in a black suit with a pale-gray vest, across the front of which there hung a gold watch-chain. It was not the kind of suit, Thorne thought, in which it would be easy to sit down; it looked curiously brittle, as though it might crack. Bannerman’s face had its customary expression of despair, something in the way the jowls hung; he was a man with global puzzles on his mind.

  “Sorry about getting you in this early, John,” he said. Now he rose; Thorne watched the chair tilt forward from the wall, released from Bannerman’s substantial weight. He’s apologizing, Thorne thought.

  Thorne glanced at Farrago, who was staring at his blotter pad. In one hand he held a paperweight; the kind that contains an igloo and, shaken, produces a snowstorm in miniature.

  “Sometimes things happen,” Bannerman was saying. He had gone to the window and was looking out. Thorne realized, inexplicably, irrationally, that he was afraid of something here, something in this room, something that was about to happen.

  “You know,” Bannerman said, turning with that quick, famous smile for which he was notorious: on and off, off and on, an electric beacon. “Time becomes, well, precious.”

  “The thing is—” Farrago said.

  “The thing is, we’re promoting you, John.”

  Promotion? Thorne thought. First the House of Representatives, now promotion: where did they draw the line?

  “I realize it’s going to be unsettling at first,” Bannerman said. “But I read your file and it says your French is excellent, so you shouldn’t have any problems in acclimatizing yourself.”

  “French?” Thorne said. “You’re losing me. I’m sorry. I just don’t follow.”

  “You’re going to the embassy, John. Paris, France.”

  Thorne watched Bannerman: the smile flickered. He saw the chief of staff’s hand go out for a congratulatory handshake, and he raised his own to meet it, he raised his own slowly, before he had time to think.

  “Now, wait,” he said. “I still don’t think I understand any of this.”

  “Paris, France,” Farrago said. “You’re going to the embassy.”

  No. They would pull somebody out of State if there was an opening in Paris. They would pull out one of the career diplomatic boys. How far did this thing go? Where was the end of the line? This trumped-up promotion to Paris, where did it end? It was wrestling an octopus.

  “To do what exactly?” Thorne asked.

  “To be Cunningham’s attaché,” Bannerman said. He was grinning, an expression that had begun to infuriate Thorne. “The opening cropped up, as these things do, and Cunningham asked for you personally.”

  “This is all very well,” Thorne said. “But I don’t want to go to Paris.”

  “Ah,” Farrago said.

  “I don’t want to work for the ambassador. I’m quite happy right here.”

  Bannerman’s smile began to radiate a warmth that Thorne found distinctly chilly. He was still clutching Thorne’s hand, as though he were determined never to release it.

  “You’re going to Paris, John,” he said.

  Thorne dragged his hand away. “It’s not my line. You know that. Max, you know that.”

  He looked at Farrago for support but Farrago had his face turned toward the window. The room was silent now. Thorne heard the sound of an electric motor, maybe that of a lawn mower, from outside. He shut his eyes: Paris, he thought. It wasn’t an altogether unpleasant prospect; and in other circumstances, maybe, just maybe, he would have accepted. But not like this.

  Bannerman said: “You’re going to Paris, John.”

  Thorne looked at the chief of staff. The eyes were determined and cold; you wondered how many had tried to cross his path on his climb up the ladder and what had become of the victims.

  “No,” Thorne said. “Thanks a lot, but no.”

  Bannerman laughed. He had taken a small nail file from his vest and was working on his fingers. “I don’t think I’m getting through to you, John. You see, you don’t exactly have a choice.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  Bannerman was silent. Thorne looked at Farrago.

  “Max. What does he mean? You tell me.”

  Farrago raised one hand in the air in the fashion of one giving up on a problem; don’t ask me, it’s too hard, I can’t find a solution.

  “Max,” Thorne said. He listened to the lawn mower. He imagined he could hear it vibrate in the room. So, it reached this far. Asterisk reached this far. It was the same damn wall, the same goddamn thing. He felt angry all at once, angry at the thought of being pushed, manipulated, dispensed with—like an errand boy sent home, no more deliveries for the day.

  “Don’t look at me,” Farrago said.

  “John understands,” Bannerman said. “Don’t you, John?”

  Thorne stared at the chief of staff. “No, I don’t understand. Suppose you spell it out.”

  “Is that necessary?” Bannerman was no longer smiling. He was gazing at his nail file. “On your desk, John, you’ll find an airline ticket for the midday flight to Paris. Today. You understand me? Today.”

  “No,” Thorne said. “No way.”

  “Is this display of stubbornness a family trait?” Bannerman said. “As I recollect it, your late father had a stubborn streak some miles wide.”

  Thorne walked around the office. This reference to his father: it was clear, it was plain enough, he was to understand that some enormous favor was being done for him courtesy of a man who had been fifteen years dead. He was to understand the not very subtle implication involved: that without this family connection he would have been dealt with in a more abrupt manner. His immediate reaction was one of disbelief and behind it, taking flame, a deeper sense of anger. Dear Christ, he thought. Why don’t I just lie down and roll over like some good old dog and lick their goddamn hands? The hell with that.

  “John,” Bannerman said. “I want to wish you the very best in your new position. I’m sure you’ll find Paris stimulating and Cunningham a good man to work for.”
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  The chief of staff looked at his watch, walked to the door. There he paused, swung around, and added: “Be on the flight. Okay?”

  He went out.

  There was a silence in the room for a time. Farrago, politely making a funnel of one hand and pressing it to his lips, cleared his throat. Then he said: “Well. Congratulations.”

  Thorne went to the window. He saw the lawn mower below, flakes of clipped grass flying behind the driver of the vehicle.

  “Congratulations?” he said. “What’s behind it?”

  “Behind it?”

  “I didn’t ask for it, did I? And you never said you were unhappy with my work here. So what the fuck’s behind it?”

  “Like the chief said, John, it’s a promotion for you—”

  “Promotion my ass.” Thorne turned to look at Farrago, who suddenly appeared pathetic, ineffectual, fingering his floppy bow tie with a gesture that suggested nervousness succumbing to panic.

  “France, Jesus,” Farrago said, smiling in a watery way. “Wish I could get over there.”

  “Go in my place then,” Thorne said.

  He slammed the door. He went down to his own office.

  There weren’t the usual newspapers piled on the desk.

  There was an airline ticket in a blue envelope. He picked it up. Paris, midday flight, one-way. He twisted the thing in his fingers. Then he sat down behind his desk, laid his hands on the bare surface, and noticed a cardboard box in the corner of the room. He went to it, looked inside.

  His desk had been cleared out. The pictures had been taken down from the wall. Everything had been shoved into the box. Jesus, they wanted him out of the way fast. On top of the box there lay the photograph of Senator Thorne. The face seemed darker than before, more stern, as if some disillusionment were beginning to move across the features. Thorne took out his address book and flipped through the pages. His hand was shaking as he dialed a telephone number; anger, fear, some bad combination of the two—he wasn’t sure. He called Leach’s home number. There was no answer. He tried the congressman’s office. A girl asked his name, then said the congressman was in a meeting. Be on that flight, Thorne thought. He shoved the telephone down. In a pig’s ass. Okay, try Jacobson. What could Jacobson tell him? He dialed the senator’s home number in Fairfax. Mrs. Jacobson told him that the senator was attending a conference in Wichita. He put the telephone down, then he sat back, thinking, thinking of the moves.