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Finally he said, “Do I have your word you won’t repeat it to a living
     soul?”
    The Admiral, who loved secrets the way other men loved women or money or fast cars, shivered in anticipation. “It is another
     white hair that will go to the grave with me,” he promised.
    “We call it Operation Stufftingle.”
    “Stufftingle?”
    “Stufftingle.”

7

    T he Weeder’s humorless deputy dog, Marvin Wesker, finished cleaning the IBM mainframe with the feather duster. “Would you be
     annoyed if I vacuumed tomorrow?” he called across the loft to Silas Sibley, who was weeding through the night’s crop of printouts
     at his worktable. “I’m already behind with my programs.”
    “Vacuum tomorrow if you like,” the Weeder replied, “but get yesterday’s stuff shredded and down the chute before you attack
     the new pile.”
    “My dream in life,” Wesker muttered as he ran the reams of computer printout paper through the shredder, “is to work at an
     operation with a classification so ordinary you can have a cleaning lady.” He replaced the empty burn baskets and settled
     into the chair in front of his terminal, across the enormous worktable from the Weeder. “I don’t mind weeding,” he explained.
     “I just don’t see myself vacuuming. I have a Ph.D. I speak four languages fluently. I have a working knowledge of three others.
     I’m overqualified.”
    Wesker fitted wire spectacles over his large ears. The eyeglasses magnified his eyes and made him look as if he were leering.
     Grunting when he came across anything interesting, laughing out loud at times, he began reading through the pile of printouts
     that had accumulated overnight. “Here’s a nugget,” he said at one point. “Senator Woodbridge talks baby talk when he makes
     love.”
    “We knew that,” the Weeder said.
    “Well, lookee here. The wife of the cultural attaché, I. Krasnov, is having an affair with the wife of I. Kurchik, the electronics
     technician.”
    “That’s new. Add it to the pouch.”
    The Weeder punched an instruction into the keyboard and brought a “menu” up onto the screen of his terminal. The computer
     was listing new material under the heading Chinese Bin—intercepts from a pay telephone on the wall of a downtown Washington
     Chinese restaurant. The telephone was next to a booth where Savinkov and some of his colleagues regularly ate dinner. The
     Weeder typed in some call-up codes and waited. There was a whirring of tapes in the mainframe behind the partition in a corner
     of the loft. Dialogue appeared on the screen. The Weeder copied off a Russian word he didn’t know, thumbed through a Russian-English
     dictionary until he found it. “Ah, I see,” he said.
    “What do you see?” Wesker asked.
    “Remember Savinkov?”
    “The Savinkov who is KGB? The one who talks Latin to his wife to throw off the microphones?”
    “He’s arranging for one of his cipher clerks to sell us the February key to the embassy’s class seven messages. They’re obviously
     going to put out something they want us to read.” The Weeder penned a note to himself on a yellow index card. “We’ll dress
     that one up so it looks as if it came from a conventional intercept source. Our people will have to pay through the nose for
     the key so as not to tip off the Russians that we know about the operation.”
    “Then we’ll have to act on the information the Russians plant or they’ll suspect us of suspecting them of having planted it,”
     Wesker said brightly.
    The Weeder shook his head. “You’ve put it on backwards. We’ll have to be careful
not
to act on the information so the Russians won’t suspect us of reading their class seven codes.”
    “I don’t get it,” Wesker said. “They’ll know we’re reading their class seven codes because they’re selling us the key to them.”
    “But they don’t know that we know that they know we have the key.”
    Wesker groaned. “I think I prefer vacuuming. I’m