Andrew Vachss - Down in the Zero

"Push real hard, Burke," he said.

I locked my forearm, shoved with all my strength. I felt it pop home, lock in place.

"You want to take it off, you have to push this little button on the side…see?" He guided my hand to the spot. I pushed, and the metal bar dropped into my hand. I put it back in place, shoved the gun's barrel between the rubber grips. It held like it was welded.

"Can I get the gun out without taking the whole thing off?" I asked him.

"Sure. Just grab the handle and pull in the direction of the barrel— it works like a fulcrum, see?" He pulled it out as easy as drawing from a holster.

"Pretty slick, Terry."

He blushed like a kid with a perfect report card. It was another minute or so before I realized he wasn't going to say anything. Waiting the way his father always did.

"Mole around?" I finally asked.

"He's got…someone with him."

I looked a "Who?" question at him. The kid shrugged. Whoever it was, it wasn't Michelle.

"Should I…wait, or what?"

"I'll see," Terry told me, moving off.

He was back quickly, mouth working so he'd get the message just right. "Mole says, the man with him is someone he works with. Not your business. You can trust him. Come down if you want."

I knew the only kind of people the Mole worked with. Knew where his priorities were. But I was just curious enough, just enough in a hurry.

"Let's go," I said.

Walking over, I handed Terry the key to the Lexus. "Can you make a copy?" I asked him.

He gave me another one of those "Are you kidding?" looks teenagers do so well.

The Mole was in his bunker, his pasty white skin shining like a mushroom in a cellar. His workbench was littered with printouts from the computer. A pad at his elbow was covered in his tiny, crabby handwriting, mostly with numbers and symbols I didn't recognize. A short, wiry man was standing next to him, dressed in a simple khaki summer suit. He was dark–skinned with thick, curly black hair and a mustache, dark brown eyes regarding me neutrally.

I greeted the underground genius— he grunted an acknowledgment, absorbed in another list of symbols scrolling down the screen.

I took the pad from his desk, puzzling over the Mole's strange writing.

"It doesn't print graphics," the Mole said, glancing over his shoulder at the printer.

"Ah, Mole…"

He turned to look at me. "This is Zvi," he said. "My cousin."

The dark–skinned man stepped forward, extending his hand. "Cousin" told me the whole story— Zvi was an Israeli, an operative in one of the dozen agencies they had working all around the world. High–placed too— if he knew where to find the Mole. Zvi was the Mole's landsman — of his blood, not of our family. Even his grip was neutral, promising nothing.

"Did you…?" I began.

"I showed the disks to Zvi," Mole said, his eyes ready for a challenge. I didn't react— he'd told me the rules a long time ago. If his country could use something, he'd turn it over no matter what.

"One set of data is my area," Zvi said, his voice neutral as his handshake. "The other is not."

"Which is yours?" I asked.

"This one," he replied, holding up the red disk. "Look at the printout."

I picked it up. A fan–folded sheet with rachet–feed perforations along each side. It ran to dozens of pages all told. Looked like ID information: names, addresses, height, weight, hair and eye color…couple of hundred names, at least.

"What is this?" I asked.

"It's a before–and–after," Zvi said. "See this man," he said, indicating with a pointing finger.

I looked. R21ANDERSON, ROBERT M.669 EAST 7933–C NYC74190lRNXBLUSMT=CAT2. Height in inches, weight in pounds, color of hair and eyes. More numbers followed: a pair of nine–digit sequences, one separated by dashes, the other solid. Social Security and passport, sure.

"What's this SMT CAT2 thing?" I asked him.

"Scars, Marks and Tattoos. I don't know what the Category means— it would be in their coding. If they're operating at this level, they'd have a way to alter things like that too."

"So?"

"So he could be this one now," he said, pointing to another name, different in everything but the height, with a Houston address. "Or this one," showing me still another, this time living in New Zealand. "This is a record of new identities. People who disappeared."

"What about fingerprints?"

"There's new technology. And even without it, people at this level don't get fingerprinted unless they're already caught— your local agencies don't really have a strong Interpol interface. They'd need a document generator too, probably on–line with government computers."

"How do you do the before–and–after? How do you know which is which?"

"There's a program that would do it. A sorting program. That's what the code is before each one. See? The R21 here. The MM8 there? That's what the computer would do, match them up."

"Could you crack the code?"

"It would take months, and even then we couldn't be sure, not without a reference point. We'd have to know at least one correct match to check."

"So what good is it?"

The Israeli lit a short, unfiltered cigarette with a butane lighter. Rubbed his face as though in concentration on my question, but I caught his glance at the Mole. The Mole moved his head maybe an inch, but it was enough.

"We know one of the people on the list," the Israeli said. "He vanished almost three years ago. We would like very much to locate him."

"How did you…?"

"I called them," the Mole said, taking the list from the Israeli, his stubby finger touching the paper next to a name. The name didn't mean anything to me— the Mole was telling me what the Israeli's job was— Zvi was a hunter.

"A sorting program is a simple thing," the Israeli said. "It would be a macro… a series of keystrokes stored in sequence. When you invoke the macro, the whole sequence runs.

"I brought everything when I— " I said.

"I know," he interrupted. "It would be somewhere else. Did the…place where you got it have a computer? A small one would be enough, even a laptop."

"I didn't see one."

He looked at the Mole again. The Mole looked at me. "What was on the other disk?" I asked him.

"An experiment of some kind. A scientific experiment. This much I could tell, only— there are a number of subjects, each subject is given the same…thing. The thing could be a substance, a stimulus…I can't tell. Then there are results…something happened to some of the subjects, I can't tell what. The rest is all probabilities, chi–squares, standard deviations."

"Yeah, okay," I said, puzzled. "Do you know what…?"

"I told you everything I know. The subjects have codes too."

"So there's a sorting program for them too?"

"Maybe." He shrugged his shoulders.

"I could take a look around," I said.

"You wouldn't know what to look for," the Israeli said. "You wouldn't recognize it if you saw it."

I lit a cigarette of my own, buying time, thinking about what I'd just learned. The Israeli sat stone–still, as if any movement would spook me into the wrong decision

"What do you want me to do?" I finally asked.

"The…place where you got this from…could you give us the address?"

I exhaled through my nose, watching the twin streams of smoke in the underground bunker.

"The Mole can copy this for you," I said, handing over the key to Cherry's house. "I'll call…here…when it's clear. You'll have a minimum of three hours. After dark better?"

"It doesn't matter," the Israeli said.

I gave him the address.

I left the two disks with the Mole, picked up the key to the Lexus, confirmed that Terry kept a copy for himself, and headed back to Connecticut. It was way ahead of rush hour— the drive didn't take long.