One from Without

by Jack Fuller

  “I’m not afraid to stand up,” he said.

  “You’re here,” said Gunderman.

  Sitting down. In my chair.

  “There has been suspicious activity on the system,” Chase said. “Lots of it.”

  This was how it usually began with Chase. First a shock. Then silence. Then the attack.

  “Have there been customer complaints?” said Gunderman.

  Chase rearranged himself again, as gracefully as a man lifting a hundred-pound sack.

  “Did I say anything about complaints?” said Chase.

  Getting you off balance was also Chase’s way, like a sumo wrestler. Take umbrage. Make it about you. Ordinarily, Gunderman avoided getting into the ring with him, not because he was afraid, just because it wasn’t worth all the sweaty pushing and pulling. But this was different. If Chase knew of more intrusions, Gunderman needed to learn of them.

  “Why don’t you just tell me exactly what you’re saying, Dick?” he said.

  Chase paused for effect, but Gunderman was already racing ahead. A secret board meeting had been scheduled to get the approval to approach Gnomon. But if Chase had discovered another hacking, Joyce would have to decide whether to abort. He would demand details, the data.

  “Greener has been seeing interventions under system administrator authority,” Chase said. “Multiple interventions every day.”

  “That would be Lawton,” said Gunderman.

  “I know who has the authority,” said Chase.

  At one point he had raised a fuss that, as VP of Operations, he did not have it, too.

  “Lawton has been poking around,” said Gunderman.

  “Into individual files? What the fuck is he thinking?”

  “He has a reason.”

  Chase leaned forward. His face seemed actually to inflate.

  “You’re blowing this off,” he said.

  “I’ve been working with him on it.”

  Chase fell back into his seat. He needed secrets the way other people need love.

  “Can I speak to you now in confidence?” said Gunderman. “Strictest confidence.”

  “I’m a closed book,” said Chase.

  Gunderman knew that he should clear this with Rosten first, even Joyce, but Chase was already well on the way to figuring the thing out, and that could take everything into unpredictable orbits fast. The time to co-opt him was right now.

  “Nobody is in on this beyond Joyce, Rosten, and Lawton,” said Gunderman.

  “I should have been told,” Chase said. “Joyce and Lawton, OK. But Rosten? If somebody fucks the database, it’s my ass, not some Finance geek’s.”

  “It’s all our asses,” said Gunderman. “I’m going to the kitchen. You want anything?”

  “I want more,” said Chase.

  “Of course,” said Gunderman.

  At the sink Gunderman drank cold tap water from a glass then filled it again. As he sat back down on the couch and pulled a coaster toward him across the tabletop, he said, “We had a little scare.” Then he laid out for Chase exactly what had occurred when, the steps he and Lawton had taken, the algorithm, the null results.

  “Lawton has kept checking,” said Gunderman, “just to be sure.”

  “I need to be in,” said Chase.

  “Now you are.”

  “All the way in.”

  “There are others who will have to approve.”

  “You take care of it,” said Chase. “I want Greener on the team that deals with this or anything like it.”

  “That will be up to Rosten and Joyce.”

  “Reason with them,” said Chase.

  He stood, put on his topcoat. He did not thank Gunderman, did not shake his hand. Gunderman stayed on the couch until the door had latched, the storm door had squeaked closed, and everything had fallen silent again. Dealing with Chase had jolted him out of the dead zone. The sun came bright through the windows. The house was warm around him. Any moment Megan would scrape into the hallway.

  The club had a men’s room of marble, polished in places to a shine as bright as the porcelain and brass. Even the partitions between the urinals were solid stone. Rosten stood before the mirror folding his tie and putting it into the pocket of his suit jacket. Behind him in the mirror was Bill Sebold.

  “Tie on. Tie off,” Sebold said.

  Rosten rinsed his face and dried it on a towel that had the warm smell of having just been laundered. When he finished, he dropped it into a dented brass canister beneath the sinks.

  “I’m glad Joyce finally brought you in,” said Rosten.

  Sebold pushed open the door of each stall. Joyce was obsessed with secrecy, hence the decision to convene the board at his club. And then there was the order that staff not put on ties until they arrived at the club and take them off again before leaving. This was supposed to be so that back at the Dome, nothing would seem out of the ordinary.

  “Pinstriped worsted-wool suits and white, open-collared shirts,” said Sebold. “What could be more inconspicuous?”

  “Are you comfortable?” said Rosten.

  “I’d rather be in khakis,” said Sebold.

  “About the direction we’re heading.”

  Sebold gave him a lawyerly look.

  “You’re the man with the numbers,” he said.

  “I mean the other matter.”

  “We’re here, aren’t we?”

  “I imagine he pushed you.”

  “It was an isolated incident. Documented. Nonrepeating. Nonmaterial,” said Sebold.

  “I tried to get him to talk to you right away.”

  “You’re a pal,” said Sebold.

  “I mean, I wasn’t comfortable.”

  Sebold had soaped up his hands. He met Rosten’s eyes in the mirror. Water shushed from the faucet.

  “You blessed the incident report,” he said. “That’s part of the documentation I looked at.”

  “Of course,” said Rosten.

  “And on that basis . . . ,” said Sebold.

  “That’s all I was asking,” said Rosten.

  Sebold bent over and put his hands under the tap then dried them and took a comb from the Barbicide jar.

  “I’ve got to run over to a meeting at Northern Trust on that indemnification issue,” he said. “You have a car, right?”

  “Run,” said Rosten.

  He was in no hurry himself. He walked up the grand staircase with its brass risers and banisters. At the top was the big, stately room where they held receptions. Portraits of the founders hung from the high walls. Huge, cut-stone fireplaces faced one another across a tennis court of oriental carpet. When Rosten stepped off it to reach the window, the polished old parquet floor squeaked.

  At the board meeting the investment bankers had presented the pro formas, so Rosten’s only speaking part had been to talk through a single page on the base-case projections of what earnings would look like in the absence of a deal. There had been no questions. Joyce had controlled the pace the way Michael Jordan in his prime had controlled a basketball game.

  Joyce was just as masterful one on one. Simply by his tone of voice, he could bring Rosten in so close that it felt the way he imagined it would with a brother. At other times, one look could put Rosten back into a windowless room. When the security leak had threatened the deal, he had locked him there for weeks. When he let him out again, it was like the sun. Joyce had never been more intimate. He talked lovingly of the sea, said that come the summer he would like to introduce Rosten to the zen of the sail.

  “Sounds relaxing,” Rosten said. “I imagine you could use some relaxation about now.”

  Joyce pointed to a model of a destroyer on a shelf above the credenza.

  “You get used to being on the bridge,” he said.

  10

  He never expected to see her again. Then one day she summoned him.

  “I’m in town,” she said, “and I’ll be requiring you at dinner.”

  Fisherman had gone on another one of his absen
ces, so there was no question of informing him, nor any particular reason to. Ellen Bradley was just a single woman in London not wanting to dine alone.

  He went home, showered, and put on a tweed jacket he had just bought, an extravagance that had left him a little short. He arrived early at the Indian restaurant in Chelsea that she had chosen. He did not want her to think him eager, but he went right in, which turned out not to be a problem, because when the appointed time came, she was still not there. He ordered a glass of wine, looked at the prices on the menu, which were within his range, but just. The waiter wore a button-down white shirt and a royal-blue vest with a turban to match. After a time he asked whether Rosten would like another glass of wine while he waited.

  “A friend,” Rosten said.

  “Sometimes they require patience,” said the waiter.

  Just then Bradley flashed across the windows. It was a small place, so even if she hadn’t been the way she was, everyone would have noticed her. The waiter caught Rosten’s eye and gave a nod: Worth the wait. Then he approached and stood off just the right distance as Rosten pulled out the chair for her.

  “Did you order?” she said.

  “Wouldn’t think of it without you,” he said.

  “Not even naan?” she said.

  The waiter quickly made some appear.

  “I don’t have much time,” she said.

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” he said.

  “Nothing personal.”

  “Apparently,” he said.

  She unfurled her napkin and settled it in her lap.

  “What’s fast?” she asked the waiter. He told her and she said, “I’ll have that, and he will, too.”

  Then her surprising eyes were on Rosten.

  “I’m here for McWade,” she said. “He needs you to keep watch on Fisherman.”

  “Looking for what, exactly?” said Rosten.

  “Anything that seems strange.”

  “What doesn’t?”

  “Strangely strange then,” she said.

  “And why should I be willing to do this?”

  “For me,” she said.

  She looked toward the waiter, who sprang into action, lifting a tray of food from the stand next to him.

  “Maybe we should talk somewhere else,” Rosten said.

  At the closest table a man and his wife seemed to be hosting their two young-adult children. In the other direction were three couples, two of middle age, one who could have been on a college date.

  “Where is Fisherman now?” she said.

  “Forgive me,” he said, “but no.”

  She took some from every dish then said, “Have you heard of a man called Kerzhentseff?” She bent down and lifted her fancy attaché case to her lap, hitting the combinations quickly and sliding out a file. “His photograph,” she said, passing the folder across to him.

  He held it between his body and the table.

  “Well, open it,” she said.

  He leaned back and bent the cover of the folder until he could see inside. There wasn’t much light, but it was enough for him to recognize the man in the suit he had seen in Leicester Square.

  “This is him?” he whispered.

  “Or was,” she said. “They took him across in Berlin. He did not look like he was expecting a hero’s welcome.”

  “You’re saying he was ours?”

  “Fisherman’s,” she said.

  “And Nederlander knows this?” Rosten said.

  “He shouldn’t,” she said. “At the Agency it’s only the DCI. McWade was involved in the decision, so he knows, too. Nobody else.”

  “Except you.”

  “You would be surprised what I know,” she said.

  Rosten peeled back the corner of the folder again and looked more closely. The photo could have been from one of the dossiers—grainy, the contrast way too high, no way to know where it was taken. Anything with words had been dodged out by the lab tech’s classified thumb, leaving only soot.

  “We believe Fisherman gave him up,” she said.

  Rosten closed the file, returned it, and took a bite of food, which was galvanic in his mouth. He looked at the couple seated to their left—the man gap-toothed beneath his mustache, clearly British, the woman dark and fine-featured, maybe Sri Lankan. Neither of them looked back at him. They were well trained, just like the waiter.

  “I’m leaving,” he said. His words sparked.

  “You have our numbers,” she said.

  Drizzle coated his face as he hurried to the South Kensington Tube station, where he watched at least a dozen people come down to the platform after him, looking for something about each of them that he could remember. The dash from the restaurant had made him clammy inside and out. He took the Piccadilly train and shared the pole with a trio of shop girls with translucent skin and eyes sunken in makeup. At Leicester Square he got out with them then popped back into the car as its doors closed. A painfully obvious move, but this wasn’t tradecraft. It was giving whoever was following him the finger. At Holborn he left the Underground and went directly to his flat, where surely somebody was already in place.

  On the table lay a pile of books from Fisherman’s list of readings about the Persian Empire and the great Sunni caliphates that had preserved classical learning after Rome fell.

  “Why these?” Rosten had asked him.

  “For the same reasons the Muslims studied the Greeks and Romans,” Fisherman said. “To understand the future. It won’t be long before communism will look like just another European dynastic struggle. Professors will strain to explain how such obvious errors in the economic assumptions of Das Kapital could have led to the potential to destroy the world.”

  “Kerzhentseff must have believed at some point,” said Rosten.

  “He was worthy,” said Fisherman.

  Or had he used the present tense? Rosten couldn’t be sure now. There had been nothing to lock in a memory. No galvanic taste in the mouth. Is, was. It had not mattered, until it did.

  He saw no evidence that anyone had gotten into the flat, but they were skilled enough not to leave any. He smelled the breath of them. In the directory that he pulled from a desk drawer, he found the number of the restaurant and punched it into the phone. A message came on saying it was closed for the evening due to a private event. Reservations would be accepted starting at 10 a.m. tomorrow. It was not the waiter’s voice.

  Was it time to send Fisherman the signal by the Telegraph? She had not pledged him to secrecy. Maybe he had walked out before she’d had a chance. Or maybe McWade wanted him to go running to Fisherman. Rosten was in a room soured by others, talking to himself.

  The next morning he woke up early, heated some water, and spilled the coffee crystals all over the counter. At the Embassy, he went directly to Fisherman’s office, though he did not expect him to be there. As he stepped toward the inner door, it opened.

  “Did you enjoy your dinner?” Fisherman said.

  Positive met negative across Rosten’s tongue.

  “We need to talk,” he said.

  “I was just going to your office,” Fisherman said, “but mine is a little cheerier. Better yet, let’s take the sun.”

  Fisherman walked on stiff legs. Rosten found himself leading the way.

  “Do you know where you’re going?” said Fisherman.

  Suddenly, Rosten did. When they got to the Ferris wheel in Hyde Park, he went to the booth and bought a long tail of tickets.

  “You have been watching old movies,” said Fisherman. “Hearing a zither, are you? You seemed shocked to see me. I hope you didn’t think I was dead.”

  A pulpy-faced man with tattoos gone to blue opened a gate that reached no higher than his knees. He offered a hand to Fisherman. Rosten climbed in after, and the man snapped the restraining bar in place. If it seemed strange to him that two men in dark suits and ties had decided to take a child’s ride early in the morning, he did not show it. He engaged the gears, the machinery creaked, metal on metal,
and they began to rise.

  “So you had me followed last night,” said Rosten.

  The red-and-yellow paint around them was chipped, the bar they gripped worn to bare steel. They rose slowly to the top of the trees. Antennas on the Embassy roof spiked the sky above the highest branches. When the wheel carried Rosten and Fisherman to the apex and stopped, the car pulsed back and forth on its mooring. Rosten looked down through the mechanism. A woman and a little girl were getting aboard. They disappeared behind the center axle.

  “They wanted me to spy on you,” said Rosten.

  “And are you?”

  “I’m telling you.”

  “What exactly?” said Fisherman.

  The wheel jerked, and they began to descend. On the way down, all they saw was girders and cables. A recording of a Wurlitzer through a tinny speaker grew louder, as festive as a busker with a monkey.

  “McWade thinks you betrayed Kerzhentseff,” said Rosten.

  “I suppose he wanted to thank me,” said Fisherman.

  The car skimmed above the planks at the bottom, passed the pulpy-faced man, who was looking at some geese in the Serpentine. When they began to rise again, Fisherman said, “Kerzhentseff was less valuable than McWade may have been led to believe.”

  “Led by you,” said Rosten.

  “I had other sources,” said Fisherman. “I thought it best that they be known to no one. Still, Kerzhentseff had his uses, as every human spark does if you know what to ignite with it.”

  “They showed me his photograph,” Rosten said.

  “I’m sure it did not do him justice,” said Fisherman. “In his prime he was formidable. Then I found the lever to turn him. After that he declined, I’m afraid.”

  The wheel carried them over the top and into their descent.

  “I saw him in Leicester Square the day you met with Nederlander,” Rosten said.

  “I imagine Peter’s name came up last night, too,” said Fisherman.

  “She only talked about Kerzhentseff and you.”

  “McWade shares your view of Peter,” said Fisherman. “He has not persuaded the Director of Central Intelligence.”