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returned a few phone calls and did some work on the draft of his opening statement.
    He spent a couple of contentious hours with Carleton Paterson, who insisted on playing devil’s advocate; acting as he thought Senator Hammond might act, working at every turn to provoke McGarvey into making an angry outburst; say something impolitic. “If it gets too bad, I’ll keep my mouth shut,” McGarvey promised. “I might throttle the senator, but I won’t say a thing.”
    â€œHammond’s not a bad man like Joe McCarthy was,” Paterson
said seriously. “He really believes that what he is doing is for the good of the country.”
    â€œI know, and I won’t actually choke him to death,” McGarvey said, smiling. “Not unless I snap.”
    Paterson gathered his papers and stuffed them into his attaché case. “I used to wonder if there was anything behind that superefficient, cool, macho exterior of yours. Like maybe a sense of humor.” He shook his head. “I guess I just found out. I suggest you don’t take your wry wit into the hearing chambers. You won’t have a lot of understanding friends there.”
    â€œNo DCI has.”
    â€œTrue.”
    After his directorate meetings and his talk with the ambassador to India, he went down to the competition-size pool in the basement gym to do his laps. It was 6:00 P.M. Yemm swam with him, as usual. DCIs were not allowed to drown themselves, even accidentally, especially not on Yemm’s watch. And anyway, Yemm needed the exercise, too. The act of swimming was mindless, just like the treadmill in the mornings, freeing McGarvey’s mind to drift to Otto Rencke, who, despite his eccentricities, or perhaps because of them, was possibly the most valuable man in the Agency. He was able to see things that no one else could. He’d once explained to McGarvey that he had worked on the problem of describing color to a blind Indian mathematician. “Toughest thing I ever did, ya know. Oh, wow, but it was cool.” Using a complicated series of tensor calculus matrices, he was able to first establish neutrality—white. Then he separated the equations into their constituent parts; the way white light separates into a rainbow of colors through a prism. “The eighth-order equations were my prism, and in the end Ravi kissed me, and said, ‘I see. Thank you very much.’” The same concept in reverse, representing very difficult mathematics by colors, was Otto’s breakthrough. He’d already quantified millions of pieces of seemingly random data and intelligence information into the form of mathematical equations, so now he could reduce the complicated decisions that an intelligence officer had to make into colors. Pastels were at the edge of his understanding; not strong, not clear. But lavender, and especially purple stood for very bad situations—acts of terrorism, assassinations, even wars. To this point Rencke had never been wrong, not once. When a color showed up he could predict what was coming.
    They got dressed at seven. On the way down to the car they stopped at the third-floor computer center. This was where Otto usually worked, in the midst of the Agency’s mainframe and three interconnected Cray supercomputers.
The huge, dimly lit blue room was kept cooler than the rest of the building. It smelled strongly of electronic equipment, and no one ever wanted to speak above a whisper. Mysterious forces beyond human ken were in operation here. The computer was like the tabernacle that held the host on a Catholic Church altar; holy of holies. There were niches and alcoves scattered throughout the room, nestled amidst the equipment, where the human operators worked. They hadn’t seen Otto for most of the afternoon, though no one could say exactly when he had left. It was like that down here; he was an elusive figure, like the shadows beneath a shifting pattern of clouds. The