by Jack Bowie
So why didn’t he want to get started?
They had just been trying to do the right thing. To help each other out. What went so wrong?
He resolutely started on the paper.
The aura took form slowly, just below his sensory threshold. Halfway through the Metro section he recognized the warning signs but it was too late. Sweat formed at his temples and black shadows crept around his field of view, shutting off the light to his eyes like a closing camera lens.
The throbbing started at his eyes and spread up and back, encircling his head with a numbing ache. It was crushing his skull, making it impossible to think; he couldn’t fight it.
He reached for the sumatriptan tablets in his top desk drawer. The migraines had come with increasing frequency over the past months. At this rate, by the end of the year he wouldn’t be of much value to anyone. He hated the medication but there was no way to function without it.
Chamberlain popped a handful of pills in his mouth, and washed them down with now-tepid coffee. Staggering across the room, he collapsed on the couch and let the drug deaden the crippling pain.
He closed his eyes and tried to relax. As he lay there, his thoughts went back to the day, over forty years before, when they first had met.
* * *
He awoke at 5:00 a.m., pulled on a pair of jeans and an old sweatshirt with “Massachusetts Institute of Technology” squeezed on the front, and ran downstairs for a quick breakfast. Thankfully, their cook had remembered his schedule and had unpacked the delivery of cereal. The rest of the fraternity would certainly not get up before eight, and he knew a few who felt that arising before noon was an affront to the unwritten student credo.
He never really minded the quiet of the morning. As an only child, Warren Chamberlain was used to getting himself going. The solitude was comforting, it let him put his thoughts in order and plan the day ahead. He had always been an early riser, and the schedule set out for the crew team was one that he had fallen into with little complaint. The physical exertion of his chosen sport relaxed him for the mental challenges of the rest of the day. His schedule did put a helluva strain on his social calendar, but that had never been a particularly critical part of his life. He would worry about that after he graduated.
After the workout on the Charles he showered and dressed. This was going to be a good term, he decided as he jaywalked across Memorial Drive from the boat house to the campus. He had done well the previous term, receiving a 4.2 average, MIT based its grades on a 5.0 scale, more than enough to keep his scholarship. His family wasn’t poor, his father owned his own insurance agency in Cincinnati, but tuition was unbelievable, over $2500 a year. He had heard about the “1700 Is Too Damn Much” student riots a few years before. What had they had to complain about?
Warren was taking the standard sophomore fare: math, physics, chemistry, and the requisite humanities course. He had also managed to get into a new computer class. He didn’t know much about computers, but he’d heard this one would give him a pretty good introduction.
The catalog said “6.251—Digital Computer Programming Systems”. Like all courses at MIT, the class was known simply by its number, pronounced “six two fifty-one”. The six stood for the Electrical Engineering Department—Computer Science as a course of study hadn’t been invented yet. No one ever figured out what the 251 stood for.
But then everything at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was numbers. MIT was a numerologist’s dream. Course 6.251 lectures were held in 10-250, that was “ten two fifty”. Building number 10, second floor. The verbalization of punctuation was unnecessary. It was all a part of the mystique, the code that MIT students, and graduates, carried around to differentiate themselves from the uninitiated.
He walked east down Mem Drive, then turned north into the verdant tree-lined Great Court—the academic quad at other universities—where students threw Frisbees, ate lunches and generally took a break from academic overload.
Around the Great Court lay the original MIT buildings. The granite-faced, neoclassical buildings, or more accurately interconnected structures, were placed on the sides of a gigantic square with the bottom side removed. The top of the square faced the Charles River and the two sides ran nearly down to Memorial Drive.
Straight ahead, at the square’s top, was the imposing façade of Building 10, the centerpiece, and most-recognized symbol, of the Institute. Its Great Dome, housing the extensive Engineering Library, rose 150 feet into the sky, supported by ten Greek Ionic columns, representing the ten presidents of the university who preceded the move of “Boston Tech” across the river to Cambridge in 1916.
To Warren’s left were Buildings 1, 3 and 5, to his right, 2, 4 and 6. The only consistency in the Institute’s numbering system was that all buildings to the west of Building 10 had odd numbers; those to the east had even. It was a task to just find the locations of his classrooms.
He reached the top of the Court and walked through the entrance doors at 8:52. Climbing the single flight of stairs to the second floor, he entered Room 10-250, the main lecture hall in the center of the building. Warren had arrived early and found a middle seat in the eighth row. Less prepared students searched for dark corners in the upper rows to avoid being asked to contribute to the day’s instruction.
The lecture hall reminded him of a theater. It was huge, twenty-five curving rows rising at a steep incline toward the back of the hall. From his central seat, he looked down on the still empty lecture floor. A large, battered metal table sat in the center of the “stage”, undoubtedly government-issue from some long-forgotten research grant. It was littered with threaded rods and laboratory paraphernalia in preparation for a future chemistry experiment.
Behind the table on the front walls of the room were six enormous chalkboards that would hold the scenery of the day’s performance. They were mounted three-abreast, covering the surface between the entrance doors and the opposite front corner of the room. The boards were stacked top to bottom, the upper one nearly reaching the vaulted ceiling. The upper boards had tracks on each side, and were counter-weighted, so that the professor—or more likely the unfortunate graduate-student-of-the-day—could pull them down over the lower boards at the start of class, fill them with notes, and then raise them out of the way to expose a new virgin area. This left all the notes visible during the lecture. A relief to those with less-than-perfect note-taking skills.
This morning, the scenery from the previous class was still there; Warren didn’t understand it all but it appeared to be from an advanced calculus class. He could imagine the furious writing as the students attempted to recreate this outpouring of knowledge in their notebooks.
He watched as the rest of the class arrived. It was the beginning of a new term, and the students rambled into the classroom, looking for familiar faces, hoping that the genius from that killer subject last term was here to help them get through this one. Five noisy black students came in and sat toward the back. Chamberlain hoped they wouldn’t disrupt the class too badly.
The last to arrive was a very preppy-looking scholar replete in a coat and tie. At first Warren had thought he was the professor, but he was dressed too well for even them. It was hard to believe the student came from the Institute. He located one of the last free seats along the side and was still getting settled when the instructor arrived.
“Good morning,” the man began, “I’m Professor John Donovan and this is 6.251, Digital Computer Programming Systems.” He lectured for a full fifty-five minutes, stopping just before the top of the hour. He spoke of compilers and assemblers, linkers and loaders - terms that were unfamiliar to most but would become a central part of their lives for the next four months.
The students had been quiet, almost reverent. For some this was their first introduction to computers. Others had some knowledge of the new type of machine. Those that finished the course would know more than most so-called experts in the field. 6.251 was a proving ground, an obstacle course for the futu
re computer elite. It would be the hardest course any of them had ever taken.
* * *
The culmination of 6.251 was the “term project”. For other schools the effort expended would have been sufficient for a Senior Thesis, but for this class it was just half of the term’s grade. What was so surprising was the zeal with which the students approached it. More than just a project, it was a rite of passage, a challenge to the manhood, or womanhood in a few isolated cases, of the students. In later years the project would be more proscribed to limit the psychological damage, but for this term it was still completely student-designed. A simple approval from a teaching assistant and a team set out toward their goal.
Project teams were set up about a third of the way through the term. They normally consisted of two or three members. Most of the students in the class had already made their selections; they had friends, roommates, classmates from the same dormitory or fraternity in the class. Warren didn’t know anyone else and simply hadn’t had time to make any new friends. When the final team assignments were posted on the bulletin board outside 10-250, he tried to associate faces with the two names he saw printed with his.
As the other students filed off to discuss their plans, he noticed two classmates milling self-consciously around the board. Finally the one in the jacket and tie came up and introduced himself. “My name’s Bob,” he had said. “I’m from Harvard.”
The other student, a gangly black with an impressively large afro, then joined them. “I’m Nick,” he offered.
The team set about their effort with no small sense of trepidation. They had a distinctly unique range of styles and backgrounds, and their differences initially resulted in overt hostility. They were all confident of their individual abilities, Warren often thought the others arrogant, but soon they realized they were all in over their heads and would need to work together to get through the daunting assignment.
Each team’s first job was to pick a name for themselves. It gave them a unique identity that served the purposes of both the instructors and the participants. After much heated debate, Warren suggested “The Cache”. Its double meaning satisfied his sense of ambiguity. Webster’s said a cache was “a hiding place for concealing and safeguarding valuables”. In computer terminology, a cache was an intermediate storage area that, among other actions, mediated the flow of information from one part of a system to another. Unable to come up with anything better, the trio made their first decision.
Bob and Nick designed the project drawing on their particular interests. Warren was satisfied to just have a topic settled. The project was a natural language query system into a data base of financial records. Since data bases themselves were still a matter of academic research at that time, the team decided to design a new one for the project. This was typical of the 6.251 assignment. Having little insight into how difficult real problems were, the students simply picked a topic that sounded interesting and ended up inventing all the structures and algorithms that were needed.
Bob gathered the raw data. He collaborated with Warren on an appropriate data structure and on the programs to load and access it.
Nick found he had a gift for programming. He designed and built the language interpreter, the program that would take user commands and convert them to the arcane instructions needed by the data base. Warren also worked with Nick to complete the necessary subroutines and operating system interfaces.
The effort went forward, albeit not without a number of fits and starts. The hours devoted grew longer as the deadline approached and all three students began missing other classes, social engagements, and sleep. They felt the exhilaration of success as a test run completed without error, and the frustration of failure when three days’ work turned into nothing more than a stack of incomprehensible error messages.
The hours of effort were broken with discussions of thoughts and feelings that would have otherwise gone unsaid. They expressed their own goals and desires, their hopes for the future. They found common bonds in their intellect, their mental confidence—if not their personal—and their social perspective. The Cache finished their project on time, perhaps not in the grand form as they had originally planned, but enough to get them the grade they wanted.
It was the start of a complex journey that would take many more years to reveal its destination.
* * *
The drug finally took hold, masking the pain and giving Chamberlain the blessing of sleep. It was the most he could ask for. There were no easy answers to the questions he posed.
Chapter 29
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Saturday, 5:15 p.m.
BRAXTON HAD SPENT the day doing the chores and running the errands that had piled up from the previous week. He had badly needed a break from the investigation and had moved from one to-do list item to the next in mindless oblivion. Not coincidentally, it also had allowed him to avoid thinking about his upcoming appointment.
He couldn’t procrastinate any longer, however, and now stared dejectedly into his bedroom closet. It had been a very long time since he had gone to dinner with an attractive female. In fact, it had been a long time since he had even thought much about the opposite sex. Ever since Megan had left, he had shunted those thoughts to the back of his mind. He had even taken the divorce lightly, too withdrawn in himself to really care, but he had felt the loss every day since.
At first he had blamed her. She just wouldn’t understand. He now realized it had not been her at all. He had shut her off and driven her out of his life in the same way he had alienated all of his friends. Where was their compassion, he had cried. Couldn’t they see how badly he had been treated? Why wouldn’t they be depressed with him?
Megan had been unbelievably patient. She held him, talked to him, tried to get him to go for help. But he had rejected her at every corner. After a year, there had been nothing left to save. It wasn’t that she had stopped caring for him. She simply knew there was nothing more she could do. He had to find his own way and that meant breaking all of his dependencies.
One afternoon he had come home from the unemployment office and she had told him it was time to go. She was in high-tech also, and had accepted an offer as Director of Marketing at a West Coast start-up. She was starting immediately. The next day she was gone.
They still spoke on the phone occasionally, and he received the obligatory birthday and holiday cards. He tried not to dwell on her memory, but there were times when her absence burned painfully in his heart.
Susan Goddard reminded him a lot of Megan. She was certainly appealing, and he sensed a wit and intelligence rare in a college coed, at least as far as he remembered. Her call had come as a complete surprise. He tried not to read too much into the invitation.
All of which brought him back to his closet. He only had a half-hour and he didn’t have any more time to procrastinate. His blue blazer was clean, so he grabbed a pair of charcoal gray slacks and a button-down blue oxford. He threw on the jacket and headed out the door, hoping he didn’t look too stodgy.
He met Terrel coming up the stairs as he was going down.
“Wow, Adam. You’re all spruced up. Got a heavy date?”
“As a matter of fact, yes,” he said proudly, only slightly stretching the truth. He flashed a broad smile. “Don’t wait up for me.”
“Cool. Before you go, I had a thought on the . . .”
Braxton checked his watch. He had to get going. “Sorry, Paul. I’m late already. I’ll catch you tomorrow.”
He waved over his shoulder and headed for Harvard Station.
* * *
The two men watched silently from their rented Taurus as Braxton left at 5:35. The lights along Brattle Street were on, their glow filtering through the heavy mist that had come in off the coast. Traffic moved methodically down the street toward the Square and the few pedestrians braving the weather were huddled under umbrellas.
It was perfect weather. People were generally depressed on days like this and not ver
y perceptive. They didn’t bother to notice new faces or out-of-the-ordinary events. It was enough for them to just get through the day. Harding was amazed how important these psychological effects had become to him. As he grew older, he had begun to focus much more on the subtleties of his profession. A necessity to compensate for the slow but inevitable diminishing of his physical skills. He had always been meticulously careful, you had to be in his business to stay alive, but bad weather gave him an extra edge. It was important to take advantage of every opportunity.
The discovery of his current colleague was a case in point. He had been in Houston on a contract. The target was a politician who had been a little too loose with some recent wealth he had received from local business concerns. The businessmen were worried that the man’s actions would draw undesirable attention, and their warnings had gone unheeded. More reliable assurances had been deemed necessary.
The politician had hired a bodyguard and Harding was, of course, checking him out. The protector was young and undisciplined, hardly more than a thug, but he impressed Harding with his natural skills. He was about ten years younger than the professional and almost a foot shorter. Stocky and solid, he made a significant barrier but unfortunately was also quite obvious in a crowd.
His movements were smoother than Harding had expected. That meant he had had some physical training, probably boxing. He was reasonably thorough in securing perimeters and access, and was not afraid to use his considerable strength when it was required. Over this period of observation, Harding had actually developed a rudimentary respect for the man. It was unfortunate that he was going to fail so early in his career.
Harding had chosen a private, face-to-face hit. He entered the target’s suite at 3:00 a.m., the generally accepted time of minimum human alertness. The bodyguard had incorrectly assumed the alarm system was sufficient and awoke to find his principal in a pool of blood on the bed and a 9mm Glock focused on his face. Harding had given him a choice: to come and work for him as an associate, or death.
