“What about the underworld contacts?” Corey said.
Whitlock smiled. “What about them?”
“I think that’s very suggestive—”
“But he has broken no law,” Whitlock said. “And until he does …” He shrugged.
Corey frowned, pushing his eyebrows into a black, ominous V. “An interrogation would be useful, even without a criminal act,” he said. “I think we have a basis for interrogation here—Wright’s association with Timothy Drew, who has stolen classified information, probably for Wright. Can’t we pick him up on that?”
“I feel we should,” Phelps said, speaking for the first time.
Graves spun around to look at Phelps.
“I disagree,” McPherson said.
Whitlock made some notes on the pad in front of him. Finally he said, “Perhaps an interrogation is the safest route. I think we need to know what was tapped out by Sigma Station. Mr. Corey?”
“Pick him up.”
“Mr. Phelps?”
“Pick him up.”
“Mr. McPherson?”
“Opposed.”
Whitlock spread his hands. Graves said nothing. The meeting was over.
“If there are no further questions,” Phelps said, “we can adjourn.”
“You didn’t like that, did you?” Phelps said, as they walked back through the travel agency.
“No,” Graves said. “I didn’t.”
“Still,” Phelps said, “I think it’s best. Arrest him today, on suspicion of conspiracy to commit grand larceny involving classified information.”
“Isn’t it robbery?”
Phelps sighed patiently. “Robbery and larceny are different crimes.”
Graves said, “How long can I wait?”
“A few hours. Play with him if you want, but pick him up by evening. I want to get to the bottom of this.”
Graves couldn’t make the arrest himself. He’d need federal marshals. “You’ll notify the marshals in San Diego?”
“They’re waiting for your call,” Phelps said, and smiled. As much as he ever did.
Graves had fifteen minutes before he had to return to the airport. As he walked out of the travel agency, he heard a room filled with mechanical chatter. Curious, he paused and opened the door. He found that one office had been converted into a temporary hardware room. It had once been somebody’s office, but now there were six teletypes and computer consoles installed there. He was reminded that the State Department (Intelligence Division) and the NSA had more computers than any other organizations in the world.
The room was empty at this hour. He glanced at the teletypes, noting their color. When he first started working at State in the early sixties, rooms like this had contained five red teletypes and one blue teletype. The red machines recorded information from overseas stations and embassies; the blue was for domestic data. Now, four of the machines were blue and only two were red.
There had been a shift in orientation for State Intelligence. Nobody cared any longer about the movements of an eighth assistant deputy minister in the Yugoslav government. They were much more interested in the number five man in the Black Panther Party, or the number three man in the John Birch Society, or the number six man in Americans for a Better Nation.
He sat down at a computer console, stared at the blank TV screen, and began typing in Wright’s call numbers. The screen glowed and printed out the categories of stored information:
WRIGHT, JOHN HENSEN
001 FILE SUMMARY
002 PERSONAL APPEARANCE, COMPLETE
003 PHOTOS
004 PERSONAL HISTORY, COMPLETE
005 RECENT ACTIVITIES (2 WEEK UPDATE)
006 FINANCIAL HISTORY, COMPLETE
007 POLITICAL HISTORY, COMPLETE
008 MISCELLANEOUS
009 CROSS REFERENCES LISTING, COMPLETE
Graves stared at the categories with some distaste. It was disturbing that the government should have so much information on a private individual—particularly one who had committed no criminal act at any time.
Then on an impulse he pushed the “Wipe” button and the screen went blank. He typed in “Graves, John Norman,” followed by his own call-up number. He sat back and watched the numbers print out on the screen:
GRAVES, JOHN NORMAN 445798054
INTELLIGENCE, DEPT STATE/INVESTIGATIONS
(DOM)
TELEPHONE: 808-415-7800 X 4305
FILE CONTENTS CANNOT BE DISPLAYED ON THIS
CONSOLE WITHOUT AUTHORIZATION VQ.
He hesitated, then punched “Auth: VQ”
AUTHORIZATION VQ RECORDED
STATE NAME
After another hesitation, he punched “Phelps, Richard D.”
RECORD CALL-UP NAME AS PHELPS, RICHARD D. FILE CONTENTS CANNOT BE DISPLAYED ON THIS CONSOLE TO THE ABOVENAMED PERSON. CALL-UP PERSON IS ADVISED TO ACQUIRE NTK AUTHORIZATION FROM DEPARTMENT HEAD.
Graves smiled. So even Phelps couldn’t call up Graves’s file without a special need-to-know authorization. Who could call it up? Feeling whimsical, he typed out “This is the President of the United States.”
The screen glowed:
RECORD CALL-UP AS PRESIDENTOFTHEUNITEDSTATES
IS THIS A CODE NAME
STATE GIVEN NAME
Graves sighed. Computers just didn’t show any respect. He pressed the “Wipe” button and returned to the question of Wright.
He didn’t really know what he was looking for. Graves had supplied most of the computerized file contents himself. But perhaps someone else had added to it. He pushed the 008 sequence calling up miscellaneous information. That category had been empty two weeks ago. Now it contained an academic history of Wright’s work in mathematics, prepared by “S. Vessen, State/Anal/412.” Whoever that was. He had a moment of pleasure at the thought that State’s analysis people were abbreviated “anal.” It was fitting.
He turned to the information itself:
HX ACADEMIC—JOHN WRIGHT (BIBLIO FOLLOWS: 008/02)
WRIGHT STUDIED MATHEMATICS AT PRINCETON UNDER REIMANN. FROM THE START HIS INTEREST, LIKE THAT OF HIS TEACHER, WAS HEAVILY STATISTICAL AND PROBABILISTIC. HIS FIRST PAPER CONCERNED STOCK MARKET FLUCTUATIONS. THIS WAS WRITTEN IN 1942, BEFORE HIGH SPEED DIGITAL COMPUTERS WERE AVAILABLE. HOWEVER, WITHOUT SUCH TOOLS WRIGHT DECIDED THAT THE STOCK MARKET WAS TOTALLY RANDOM IN ITS BEHAVIOR. (THAT IS, THE CHANCE THAT A GIVEN STOCK WOULD GO UP OR DOWN ON ANY DAY BORE NO RELATIONSHIP TO WHAT IT HAD DONE THE PREVIOUS DAY.) THIS FACT WAS FINALLY CONFIRMED BEYOND ALL DOUBT IN 1961.
WRIGHT WAS ALSO INTERESTED IN SPORTS AND GAMBLING. IN 1944 HE WROTE AN AMUSING SHORT ARTICLE “ON BEING DUE.” IN IT HE ARGUED CORRECTLY THAT THE ORDINARY NOTION THAT A MAN IS “DUE FOR A HIT” IF HE HAS BEEN RECENTLY UNSUCCESSFUL AT BAT IS TOTALLY FALLACIOUS. EACH TIME AT BAT IS A SEPARATE EVENT.
HE WAS ALSO INTERESTED IN HISTORICAL CONTEXTS: THE FACT THAT JOHN ADAMS, JAMES MONROE, AND THOMAS JEFFERSON ALL DIED ON JULY 4, AND SO ON. HE WROTE A PAPER ON ASSIGNING CAUSATION TO HISTORICAL AND POLITICAL EVENTS. IN THIS WORK HE WAS STRONGLY INFLUENCED BY THEORETICAL PHYSICISTS.
HE SHOWED THAT YOU CAN NEVER DETERMINE “THE CHIEF REASON” FOR THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR, NAPOLEON’S DEFEAT AT WATERLOO, THE FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE, OR ANY OTHER HISTORICAL EVENT. THE CHIEF REASON CANNOT BE KNOWN IN ANY PRECISE SENSE. FOR ANY EVENT THERE ARE HUNDREDS OR THOUSANDS OF CONTRIBUTING CAUSES, AND NO WAY TO ASSIGN PRIORITIES TO THESE CAUSES. HISTORIANS HAVE ATTACKED THE WRIGHT THESIS VIGOROUSLY SINCE IT TENDS TO PUT THEM OUT OF A JOB. HE WAS, HOWEVER, MATHEMATICALLY CORRECT BEYOND DOUBT.
FINALLY WRIGHT TURNED TO THE GENERAL THEORY OF INTERACTIONS. FOR SIMPLICITY HE STUDIED TWO-COMPONENT INTERACTIONS LEADING TO A SINGLE EVENT OR OUTCOME. HE BECAME QUITE KNOWLEDGEABLE IN THIS AREA.
SUMMARY: WRIGHT IS A TALENTED MATHEMATICIAN WHOSE PERSONAL INTERESTS FALL IN THE AREA OF PROBABILITY AND STATISTICS AS THEY APPLY TO HUMAN ACTIVITIES SUCH AS SPORTS, GAMBLING, AND THE INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY. HIS DEVELOPMENT AS A MATH
EMATICIAN DISPOSED HIM TO BE INTERESTED IN TWO-COMPONENT INTERACTIONS LEADING TO A SINGLE EVENT OR OUTCOME.
Graves stared at the screen. The notion of two-component interactions fascinated him. It seemed to have all sorts of connotations. He punched buttons and looked at the bibliography, which was not revealing. He looked at the abstracts of articles written by Wright. They were equally unrevealing. Then he saw that a final study was available: Apparently S. Vessen had applied a statistical analysis of his own to Wright’s work.
S. VESSEN: ANALYSIS OF WORD FREQUENCIES IN PAPERS OF JOHN WRIGHT.
THE FOLLOWING WORDS APPEAR MORE FREQUENTLY THAN EXPECTED ACCORDING TO RATIOS OF TOTAL WORDAGE FOR MATHEMATICAL TREATISES
PROBABILITY
COINCIDENCE
GAUSSIAN
INSTABILITY
INTERACTION
TWO-COMPONENT
IMPOTENCE
Graves frowned, staring at the last word. Then he pressed the “Wipe” button a final time and hurried to catch his plane.
En Route to San Diego: 7 a.m. PDT
Hour 10
THE AIRCRAFT BANKED STEEPLY over the oil fields of Long Beach and headed south toward San Diego. Graves stared out the window, thinking of Wright’s file. Then he thought about his own. He wondered what it looked like, the information displayed on the unblinking cathode-ray screen in sharp white easy-to-read block letters. He wondered how accurate it was, how fair, how honest, how kind.
Graves was thirty-six years old. He had worked for the government fifteen years—nearly half his life. That fact implied a dedication which had never been there; from the start his career in government had been a kind of accident.
In college Graves had studied subjects that interested him, whether they were practical or not. On the surface they seemed highly impractical: Russian literature and mathematics. He was drafted immediately after college and did push-ups for five weeks before somebody in the Army discovered what he knew. Then he was sent to the language school in Monterey, where he remained forty-eight hours—just long enough to be tested—before being flown to Washington.
That was in 1957, and the Cold War was grim. Washington needed Russian translators desperately. There were fears of a land war in Europe, fears of grand conquistadorial campaigns conducted by World Communism, meaning those two friendly allies, Russia and China. At the time the fears had seemed compelling and logical.
Graves worked for two years in the Army as a Slavic translator, and after his discharge joined the State Department in the same capacity. The pay was good and the work was interesting; he had the feeling of being useful, of doing necessary and even important work. In 1959 he married a girl on Senator Westlake’s staff. They had a daughter in 1961. They got divorced two years later. He had a kidney stone and spent five days in the hospital. He met a nice girl, almost married her, but didn’t. He bought a new car. He moved to a new apartment.
In retrospect, these seemed to be the signposts, the significant shifts and alterations in his life. The years went by: he wore his hair a little longer, but the hair was thinner, exposing more of his temples. His trousers got tight, then flared, and now were baggy again, as they had been in the fifties. There were cyclic changes in himself and his world—but he was still working for the government.
State no longer wanted Russian translators. The big push was for Chinese and Japanese translators. Graves transferred into Intelligence, a division of State that was highly mathematical, heavily computerized. He worked in the foreign division for five years, doing a lot of code breaking. At that time the foreign embassies were all utilizing computer-generated codes of various kinds, and it was challenging work—even if the messages usually turned out to be requests for funds to refurbish the ballroom on the second floor, or to hire additional kitchen help. Graves was interested in the codes, not in the content.
In 1970 he was moved to the domestic end. It seemed a minor change at the time, and a change he welcomed. He was ready to do something different. It was a long time before he realized just how different it was.
During his fifteen years in the government, slowly and imperceptibly his enemy had shifted from the Big Bear, the Russkies, the Reds, the ChiComs—to his fellow Americans. That was his job now, and he hated it. It was tapping telephone transmissions and competing with other agencies; it was value judgments and it was very, very political.
Nothing was clean and direct any more. And Graves didn’t like it. Not any more.
Graves had been planning to quit State for a long time, ever since his domestic work had become distasteful. But he hadn’t quit.
What kept him was partly inertia and partly the fear that he might be unable to teach Slavic or mathematics. At least, that was what he told himself. He was reluctant to admit the real reason, even to himself.
The fact was that he took a genuine pleasure in his work. The pleasure was abstract, the pleasure of a compulsive jigsaw puzzle worker who will fit the pieces together without caring what the puzzle really means. It was a game he loved to play, even if it was fundamentally nasty.
He also liked the notion of an opponent. In the foreign division he had been up against institutions—embassies, foreign press corps, political groups of various kinds. In the domestic division, it was most often a single individual.
Graves had long ago discovered his skill at poker, backgammon, and chess—games which required a combination of mathematical insight, memory, and psychological daring. To him the ideal was chess—one man pitted against another man, each trying to calculate the intentions of the other in a game of enormous complexity with many alternatives.
That was why he had agreed to leave Washington in order to follow the activities of John Wright. In the realm of puzzles and games, nothing was more challenging than John Wright.
He and Wright were well matched: the same intelligence, the same mathematical background, the same fondness for games, particularly chess and poker.
But now after three months, Phelps was rolling him up. Wright would be arrested; the game would be called off. Graves sighed, trying to tell himself that this did not represent a personal defeat. Yet it was; he knew it.
With a low whine the plane began its descent toward San Diego, skimming in over the roofs of the highest buildings. Graves didn’t much like San Diego. It was a utilitarian town dominated by the needs of the Navy, which ran it with a firm, conservative hand. Even its sins were dreary: the downtown area was filled with bars, pool halls, and porno movie houses which advertised “Beaver films—direct from Frisco!” as if San Francisco were six thousand miles away and not just an hour up the coast. Fresh-faced sailors wandered all over the downtown area looking for something to do. They never seemed to understand that there was nothing to do. Except, possibly, to get drunk.
Despite the early hour San Diego was hot, and Graves was grateful for the car’s air conditioning. Lewis drove away from the airport, glancing occasionally at Graves. “The marshals checked in with us an hour ago.”
“So you know?”
“Everybody knows. They’re just waiting for you to say the word.”
As they left the airport they passed beneath a banner stretched across the road: WELCOME REPUBLICANS. Graves smiled. “I’m going to hold off for a while,” he said. “At least until this afternoon.”
Lewis nodded and said nothing. Graves liked that about him, his silence. He was young and enthusiastic—characteristics Graves severely lacked—but he knew when to keep his mouth shut. “We’ll go directly to his apartment,” he said.
“All right,” Lewis said. He didn’t ask why.
“What time did Wright quit last night?”
“Nine. Lights out at nine.”
“Rather early.” Graves frowned. It was rare for Wright to go to bed before midnight.
“Duly noted on the time-clock sheets,” Lewis said. “I checked them myself this morning.”
“Has he ever done that before? Gone to bed at nine?”
“July fifth.
He had the flu then, you remember.”
“But he’s not sick now,” Graves said, and tugged at his ear. It was a nervous habit he had. And he was very nervous now.
There were a lot of cops stationed on the road from the airport to the city. Graves commented on it.
“You haven’t heard?” Lewis said.
“Heard what?”
“The President’s coming in today.”
“No,” Graves said. “When was that decided? This is only the second day. I’m surprised he’d show before he’s nominated.”
“Everybody’s surprised. Apparently he intends to address the Convention delegates before the balloting.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah.” Lewis smiled. “It’s also apparently true that there are some squabbles in the rules committee and the platform committee. He’s going to straighten that out.”
“Ah.” It was making more sense. The President was a practical politician. He’d sacrifice the drama of a grand entrance if he had to get a political job done earlier.
“We just got the word a couple of hours ago,” Lewis said. “Same with the police. They’re furious. The Chief has been making statements about how hard it is to provide security …” He gestured at all the waiting cops. They were stationed every 30 yards or so along the road. “I guess he managed.”
“Looks like it. What time is he due?”
“Around noon, I think.”
They drove on in silence for a while, leaving the coast road and heading into the center of town. Graves noticed that Broadway had been dressed up, its honky-tonk glitter subdued a little. But there were a lot of tough-looking girls around.
Lewis commented on it. “The City Fathers are going crazy,” he said. “About that.” He jerked his thumb toward one spectacularly constructed girl in a tightly clinging pants suit.
Binary: A Novel Page 3
