Lacking normal credentials such as a birth certificate, Erszebet had to be whisked through a special lane by aides who had come down to meet us. Tristan stayed with her. The rest of us presented our Massachusetts driver’s licenses and got scanned for concealed weapons. Erszebet’s idiosyncratic 1950s-era wardrobe left very few places where she could have hid anything. I suppose they x-rayed her clutch. A lot of walking ensued. Erszebet in her heels and Frank Oda with the weight of his years were not particularly fast walkers, so we dawdled and shuffled down endless corridors in the bowels of the Trapezoid until we came to an elevator that took us up to a nicer-than-normal office zone. “The Acute Angle,” Tristan explained, “the nice one, with the view over the river.”
Anywhere else they’d have called it what it was: a corner office suite on the top floor. It was nice, old-school, paneled in wood, hung with pictures of battleships from the Age of Sail, Washington at Valley Forge, and the like. After passing through a couple of layers of receptionists and aides, and surrendering our electronic devices, we were ushered into a conference room, invited to take seats, and plied with ice water. Erszebet insisted on water with no ice and gave us all a piece of her mind about the American obsession with putting ice cubes into everything.
We waited there for twenty minutes or so, which Tristan seemed to think was only mildly remarkable. Then another door—not the one we’d come through—was opened by an aide, and in walked a man in a civilian business suit. Even I, with very little taste in clothes, could tell that this was a fine suit indeed. “Dr. Rudge!” Tristan said. “Good to see you again!”
Rudge was trailed by a couple of younger civilian aides who quietly took seats along the wall of the room and opened up their laptops as the rest of us did introductions. “Oh, please, don’t get up,” he told us in the sort of mid-Atlantic accent that I associated with Franklin Delano Roosevelt and midcentury newsreel announcers. “I’m so sorry to be late, we were detained in the West Wing—everything’s running late there today. Dr. Stokes! Charmed! I’ve heard so much about you and I’m looking forward to talking about the Breton language at some point if we ever have time. Old family connection—long story. And you must be Mrs. East-Oda.”
And so on. Dr. Constantine Rudge was as immaculate in his manners and breeding as he was in his attire. In his early forties, he had the gravitas of an older man, but was styled younger, with somewhat longer hair than most men in the Trapezoid, and heavy, stylish eyeglasses that I thought of as European. His jovial confidence made me feel somehow as if I were missing something—was this guy really famous? Powerful? Important? Later I Googled him, to discover that he was classic Yale, Rhodes Scholar, Fulbright, City of London, and all that, but kept a low public profile. Rudge was the head of IARPA, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency, which like a lot of the intelligence world was a blend of civilian and military personnel. He’d been the boss of the late General Schneider. As Tristan had already explained, he would be an advisor—a “dotted line” on the org chart—to the newly re-founded and upgraded DODO.
Anyway, he got off on the right foot with Erszebet by kissing her hand—incidentally giving her a chance to admire his cuff links—and greeting her in what sounded like passable Hungarian. To my astonishment they actually conducted a short exchange in that most difficult of tongues before Rudge begged off, apologized for his butchering the beautiful Magyar language, and switched to High German. Catching my eye at one point, Rudge remarked, “Dr. Stokes will have noticed an Austrian accent. I lived in Vienna for some years in my twenties, working on a dissertation about interwar banking. It took me to Budapest frequently.” And yet somehow Rudge managed to say all of this with little eye rolls and shrugs that actually made it seem self-deprecating.
I didn’t much care, all I knew was that Erszebet clearly thought Rudge was the only person of any sophistication in the room, which meant that the rest of us didn’t have to expend energy trying to keep her happy. Tristan checked his watch a couple of times, once raising his eyebrows and saying to me, “Looks like we won’t have time to go shopping after all, Stokes!”
Finally General Frink showed up, preceded and followed by more aides, some civilians, others in uniforms of various services. He had a row of three stars on each lapel, which even I knew made him a very big deal. I wouldn’t need to Google this fellow. He was the Director of National Intelligence, reporting directly to the President. He was Rudge’s boss, and now Tristan’s. As he blew in, he was in full conversation with two members of his entourage, and scarcely seemed to notice that he had entered another room with a different set of humans in it. His crew formed a sort of football huddle around him for a minute and they held an acronym-studded conference that didn’t concern us. Then half of them speed-walked out of the room. Of those who remained, some took up seats along the wall. General Frink slammed his formidable arse down into a chair that had been pulled out for him by a junior officer. That seemed to be Tristan’s signal to sit back down—for he had exploded out of his chair when Frink had entered the room, and stood at attention waiting to be noticed.
A civilian aide skimmed a sheet of paper onto the table directly in front of General Frink. Frink reached into the breast pocket of his uniform, which was stiff with ribbons and decorations, and drew out a pair of reading glasses, put them on, and scanned the page for a minute before finally looking up and acknowledging our presence. “Yes,” he said, “Department of Diachronic Operations.” His eyes scanned the row of faces on our side of the table, and I suppose it was a credit to his powers of discipline that he lingered only briefly on Erszebet. The civilian whispered something in his ear, and I was pretty sure I heard the sibilant word “Asset,” which was the term that the late General Schneider had used to refer to Erszebet. Frink’s eyes went back to her for a moment and he nodded. He then thought silently for a while, and heaved a sigh.
“I am going so far out on a limb for you people,” he said, “that if I hadn’t seen even stranger things during my career in Intelligence I would shitcan this project in a heartbeat. But all the evidence points to this being real. Roger Blevins has vouched for it, and that means a lot to me.”
“Roger Blevins?” I blurted out.
A few moments of silence ensued. Everyone was startled—most of all me. I’m not a blurter in general. But hearing that name in this context could not have been more astonishing. Tristan kicked me under the table.
More whispering from the civilian aide: a buff-looking bro in his early thirties, with heavily gelled hair. “You’re Stokes,” Frink said. “Roger’s your mentor. At Harvard.”
This really did render me speechless, but Tristan kicked me again just to be sure. “General Frink, if I may, Dr. Stokes here is just a little surprised to hear Dr. Blevins’s name brought up, because she doesn’t know of his connection to the program. Operational security.”