Code to Zero (2000) Page 3

Billie had lied about where she was spending the night, Elspeth recalled. Now she could not return to her dorm without revealing her deception.

  'I took her to the House.' He meant Cambridge House, where he and Luke lived. Harvard men's dormitories were called 'Houses'. 'I thought she could sleep in our room, and Luke and I could spend the night in the library.'

  Elspeth said: 'You're crazy.'

  Luke put in: 'It's been done before. So what went wrong?'

  'We were seen.'

  'Oh, no!' Elspeth said. For a girl to be found in a man's room was a serious offence, especially at night. Both the man and the woman could be expelled from the university.

  Luke said: 'Who saw you?'

  'Geoff Regeon and a whole bunch of men.'

  'Well, Geoffs all right, but who was with him?'

  'I'm not sure. It was half dark and they were all drunk. I'll talk to them in the morning.'

  Luke nodded. 'What are you going to do now?'

  'Billie has a cousin who lives in Newport, Rhode Island,' Anthony said. 'Would you drive her there?'

  'What?' said Elspeth. 'But it's fifty miles away!'

  'So it will take an hour or two,' Anthony said dismissively. 'What do you say, Luke?'

  'Of course,' Luke said.

  Elspeth had known he would comply. It was a matter of honour for him to help out a friend, regardless of the inconvenience. But she was angry all the same.

  'Hey, thanks,' Anthony said lightly.

  'No problem,' Luke said. 'Well, there is a problem. This car is a two-seater.'

  Elspeth opened the door and got out. 'Be my guest,' she said sulkily. She felt ashamed of herself for being so bad-tempered. Luke was right to rescue a friend in trouble. But she hated the thought of him spending two hours in this little car with sexy Billie Josephson.

  Luke sensed her displeasure and said: 'Elspeth, get back in, I'll drive you home first'

  She tried to be gracious. 'No need,' she said. 'Anthony can walk me to the dorm. And Billie looks as if she might freeze to death.'

  'Okay, if you're sure,' Luke said.

  Elspeth wished he had not agreed quite so fast.

  Billie kissed Elspeth's cheek. 'I don't know how to thank you,' she said. She got into the car and closed the door without saying goodbye to Anthony.

  Luke waved and drove off.

  Anthony and Elspeth stood and watched the car recede into the darkness.

  'Hell,' said Elspeth.

  .

  6.30 A. M.

  Stencilled on the side of the white rocket is the designation 'UE' in huge black letters. This is a simple code -

  HUNTSVILEX

  1234567890

  - so UE is missile number 29. The purpose of the code is to avoid giving clues as to how many missiles have been produced.

  Daylight crept stealthily over the cold city. Men and women came out of the houses, narrowing their eyes and pursing their lips against the biting wind, and hurried through the grey streets, heading for the warmth and bright lights of the offices and stores, hotels and restaurants where they worked.

  Luke had no destination: one street was as good as another when none of them meant anything. Maybe, he thought, he would turn the next corner and know, in a flash of revelation, that he was some place familiar - the street where he was brought up, or a building where he had worked. But every corner disappointed him.

  As the light improved, he began to study the people he passed. One of these could be his father, his sister, even his son. He kept hoping that one of them would catch his eye, and stop, and embrace him, and say: 'Luke, what happened to. you? Come home with me, let me help you!' But perhaps a relative would turn a cold face to him and pass by. He might have done something to offend his family. Or they might live in another town.

  He began to feel he was. not going to be lucky. No passerby would embrace him with glad cries, and he was not suddenly going to recognize the street where he lived. Simply walking around fantasizing about a lucky break was no kind of strategy. He needed a plan. There must be some way to discover his identity.

  Luke wondered 'if he might be a Missing Person. There was a list, he felt sure, of such people, with a description of each. Who kept the list? It had to be the police.

  He seemed to remember passing a precinct house a few minutes earlier. He turned abruptly to go back. As he did so, he bumped into a young man in an olive-coloured gabardine raincoat and matching cap. He had a feeling he might- have seen the man before. Their eyes met, and, for a hopeful moment, Luke thought he might have been, recognized; but the man looked away, embarrassed, and walked on.

  Swallowing his disappointment, Luke tried to retrace his steps. It was difficult, because he had turned corners and crossed streets more or less at random. However, he had to come across a police station sooner or later.

  As he walked, he tried to deduce information about himself. He watched a tall man in a grey Homburg hat light a cigarette and take a long, satisfying drag, but he had no desire for tobacco. He guessed he did not smoke. Looking at cars, he knew that the racy, low-slung designs he found attractive were new. He decided he liked fast cars, and he was sure he could drive. He also knew the make and model names of most of the cars he saw. That was the kind of information he had retained, along with how to speak English.

  When he glimpsed his reflection in a shop window, what he saw was a bum of indeterminate years. But when he looked at passers-by, he could tell if they were in their twenties, thirties, or forties, or older. He also found he automatically classified people as older or younger than himself. Thinking about it, he realized that people in their twenties seemed younger than he, and people in their forties older; so he had to be somewhere in between.

  These trifling victories over his amnesia gave him an inordinate sense of triumph.

  But he had completely lost his way. He was on a tawdry street of cheap shops, he saw with distaste: clothing stores with windows full of bargains, used-furniture stores, pawnbrokers, and grocery stores that took food stamps. He stopped suddenly and looked back, wondering what to do. Thirty yards behind him, he saw the man in a green-gabardine raincoat and cap, watching the TV in a store window.

  Luke frowned, thinking: 'Is he shadowing me?'

  A shadow was always alone, rarely carried a briefcase or shopping bag, and inevitably appeared to be loitering rather than walking with a set purpose. The man in the olive cap matched the specification.

  It was easy enough to check.

  Luke walked to the end of the block, crossed the street, and walked back along the side. When he reached the far end he stood at the kerb and looked both ways. The olive raincoat was thirty yards behind him. Luke crossed again. To allay suspicion, he studied doors, as if looking for a street number. He went all the way back to where he had started.

  The raincoat followed.

  Luke was mystified, but his heart leaped with hope. A man who was following him must know something about him - maybe even his identity.

  To be sure he was being followed, he needed to travel in a vehicle, forcing his shadow to do the same.

  Despite his excitement, a cool observer in the back of his mind was asking: 'How come you know exactly how to check whether you're being followed?' The method had popped into his head immediately. Had he done some kind of clandestine work before he became a bum?

  He would think about that later. Now he needed bus fare. There was nothing in the pockets of his ragged clothes; he must have spent every last cent on booze. But that was no 'problem. There was cash everywhere: in people's pockets, in the stores, in taxicabs and houses.

  He began to look at his surroundings with different eyes. He saw news-stands to be robbed, handbags that could be snatched, pockets ready to be picked. He glanced into a coffee shop where a man stood behind the counter and a waitress served the booths. The place would do as well as anything. He stepped inside.

  His eyes raked the tables, looking for change left as tips, but it was not going to be that easy. He
approached the counter. A radio was playing the news. 'Rocket experts claim America has one last chance of catching up with the Russians in the race to control outer space.' The counterman was making espresso coffee, steam billowing from a gleaming machine, and a delicious fragrance made Luke's nostrils flare.

  What would a bum say? 'Any stale doughnuts?' he asked.

  'Get out of here,' the man said roughly. 'And don't come back.'

  Luke contemplated leaping the counter and opening the cash register, but it seemed extreme when all he wanted was bus fare. Then he saw what he needed. Beside the till, within easy reach, was a can with a slit in the top. Its label showed a picture of a child and the legend: 'Remember Those Who Cannot See.' Luke moved so that his body shielded the box from the customers and the waitress. Now he just had to distract the counterman.

  'Gimme a dime?' he said.

  The man said: 'Okay, that's it, you get the bum's rush.' He put down a jug with a clatter and wiped his hands on his apron. He had to duck under the counter to get out, and for a second he could not see Luke.

  In that moment, Luke took the collection box and slipped it inside his coat. It was disappointingly light, but it gave a rattle, so it was not empty.

  The counterman grabbed Luke by the collar and propelled him rapidly across the cafe. Luke did not resist until, at the door, the man gave him a painful kick in the ass. Forgetting' his act, Luke spun round, ready to fight. The man suddenly looked scared and backed inside.

  Luke asked himself what he had to be angry about. He had gone into the place begging, and had not left when asked to. Okay, the kick was unnecessary, but he deserved it - he had stolen the blind children's money!

  All the same, it took an effort for him to swallow his pride, turn around, and slink away like a dog with its tail between its legs.

  He ducked into an alleyway, found a sharp stone, and attacked the can, venting his anger. He soon busted it open. The money inside, mostly pennies, amounted to two or three dollars, he guessed. He put it in his coat pocket and returned to the street He thanked heaven for charity and made a silent promise to give three bucks to the blind if he ever got straight.

  All right, he thought, thirty bucks.

  The man in the olive raincoat was standing by a news-stand, reading a paper.

  A bus pulled up a few yards away. Luke had no idea where it went, but that did not matter. He boarded.

  The driver gave him a hard look, but did not throw him off. 'I want to go three stops,' Luke said.

  'Don't matter where you want to go, the fare is seventeen cents, unless you got a token.'

  Luke paid with some of the change he had stolen.

  Maybe he was not being shadowed. As he walked towards the back of the bus, he looked anxiously out the window. The man in the raincoat was walking away with his newspaper tucked under his arm. Luke frowned. The man should have been trying to hail a taxicab. Maybe he was not a shadow, after all. Luke felt disappointed.

  The bus pulled away, and Luke took a seat He wondered again how come he knew about all this stuff. He must have been trained in clandestine work. But what for? Was he a cop? Perhaps it was to do with the war. He knew there had been a war. America had fought against the Germans in Europe and the Japanese in the Pacific. But he could not remember whether he had been in it.

  At the third stop, he got off the bus with a handful of other passengers. He looked up and down the street There were no taxicabs in sight, and no sign of the man in the olive raincoat. As he hesitated, he noticed that one of the passengers who had got off the bus with him had paused in a shop doorway and was fumbling in his pockets. As Luke watched, he lit a cigarette and took a long, satisfying drag.

  He was a tall man, wearing a grey Homburg hat Luke realized he had seen him before.

  .

  7 A. M.

  The launch pad is a simple steel table with four legs and a hole in the middle through which the rocket jet passes. A conical deflector beneath spreads the jet horizontally.

  Anthony Carroll drove along Constitution Avenue in a five-year-old Cadillac Eldorado that belonged to his mother. He had borrowed it a year ago, to drive to Washington from his parents' place in Virginia, and had never gotten around to returning it His mother had probably bought another car by now.

  He pulled into the parking lot of Q Building in Alphabet Row, a strip of barracks-like structures hastily erected, during the war, on parkland near the Lincoln Memorial. It was an eyesore, no question, but he liked the place, for he had spent much of the war here, working for the Office of Strategic Services, precursor of the CIA. Those were the good old days, when a clandestine agency could do more or less anything, and did not have to check with anyone but the President.

  The CIA was the fastest-growing bureaucracy in Washington, and a vast multimillion dollar headquarters was under construction across the Potomac River in Langley, Virginia. When it was completed, Alphabet Row would be demolished.

  Anthony had fought hard against the Langley development, and not merely because Q Building held fond memories. Right now the CIA had offices in thirty-one buildings in the government-dominated downtown neighbourhood known as Foggy Bottom. That was the way it should be, Anthony had argued vociferously. It was very difficult for foreign agents to figure out the size and power of the Agency when its premises were scattered and mixed up with other government offices. But when Langley opened, anyone would be able to estimate its resources, manpower, and even budget simply by driving past.

  He had lost that argument The people in charge were determined to manage the CIA more tightly. Anthony believed that secret work was for daredevils and buccaneers. That was how it had been in the war. But nowadays it was dominated by pen-pushers and accountants.

  There was a parking slot reserved for him and marked: 'Head of Technical Services', but he ignored it and pulled up in front of the main door. Looking up at the ugly building, he wondered if its imminent demolition signified the end of an era. He was losing more of these bureaucratic battles nowadays. He was still a hugely powerful figure within the Agency. 'Technical Services' was the euphemistic name of the division responsible for burglary, phone tapping, drug testing and other illegal activities. Its nickname was Dirty Tricks. Anthony's position was founded on his record as a war hero and a series of Gold War coups. But some people wanted to turn the CIA into what the public imagined it to be, a simple information-gathering agency.

  Over my dead body, he thought.

  However, he had enemies: superiors he had offended with his brash manners, weak and incompetent agents whose promotion he had opposed, pen-pushers who disliked the whole notion of the government doing secret operations. They were ready to destroy him as soon as he made a slip.

  And today his neck was stuck out farther than ever before.

  As he strode into the building, he deliberately put aside his general worries and focused on the problem of the day: Dr Claude Lucas, known as Luke, the most dangerous man in America, the one who threatened everything Anthony had lived for.

  He had been at the office most of the night, and had gone home only to shave and change his shirt. Now the guard in the lobby looked surprised and said: 'Good morning, Mr. Carroll - you back already?'

  'An angel appeared unto me in a dream and said: 'Get back to work, you lazy son of a bitch.' Good morning.'

  The guard laughed. 'Mr. Maxell's in your office, sir.'

  Anthony frowned. Pete Maxell was supposed to be with Luke. Had something gone wrong?

  He ran up the stairs.

  Pete was sitting in the chair opposite Anthony's desk, still dressed in ragged clothes, a smear of dirt partly covering the red birthmark on his face. As Anthony walked in he jumped up, looking scared.

  'What happened?' Anthony said.

  'Luke decided he wanted to be alone.'

  Anthony had planned for this. 'Who took over?'

  'Simons has him under surveillance, and Betts is there for back-up.'

  Anthony nodded thoughtfully. Luk
e had got rid of one agent, he could get rid of another. 'What about Luke's memory?'

  'Completely gone.'

  Anthony took off his coat and sat behind his desk. Luke was causing problems, but Anthony had expected as much, and he was ready.

  He looked at the man opposite. Pete was a good agent, competent and careful, but inexperienced. However, he was fanatically loyal to Anthony. All the young agents knew that Anthony had personally organized an assassination: the killing of the Vichy French leader Admiral Darlan, in Algiers on Christmas Eve in 1942. CIA agents did kill people, but not often, and they regarded Anthony with awe. But Pete owed him a special debt On his job application form, Pete had lied, saying he had never been in trouble with the law, and Anthony had later found out that, as a student in San Francisco, he had been fined for soliciting a prostitute. Pete should have been fired for that, but Anthony had kept the secret and Pete was eternally grateful.

  Now Pete was miserable and ashamed, feeling he had let Anthony down. 'Relax,' Anthony said, adopting a fatherly tone. 'Just tell me exactly what happened.'

  Pete looked grateful, and sat down again. 'He woke up crazy,' he began. 'Yelling 'Who am I?' and stuff like that I got him calmed down ... but I made a mistake. I called him Luke.'

  Anthony had told Pete to observe Luke but not to give him any information. 'No matter - it's not his real name.'

  'Then he asked who I was, and I said: 'I'm Pete.' It just came out, I was so concerned to stop him yelling.' Pete was mortified to confess these blunders, but in fact they were not grave and Anthony waved aside his apologies. 'What happened next?'

  'I took him to the gospel shop, just the way we planned it. But he asked shrewd questions. He wanted to know if the pastor had seen him before.'

  Anthony nodded. 'We shouldn't be surprised. In the war, he was the best agent we ever had. He's lost his memory, but not his instincts.' He rubbed his face with his right hand, tiredness catching up with him.

  'I kept trying to steer him away from inquiring into his past. But I think he figured out what I was doing. Then he told me he wanted to be alone.'

  'Did he get any clues? Did anything happen that might lead him to the truth?'