第12章 The Polygraph

The second examination was not routine and both of them knew it. Kolm had the machine in the small room again and the same teacup and the same cardigan, and the only difference was that this time the paper on the table was not her access log but a list of names. "You have two weeks," Kolm said. "Today is day nine. The director has asked for a progress note, and the progress note has to say something, and you and I are the two people in this building who know how little there is to say. So we begin again, and this time I will not be kind, because kindness is what you had the first time and it did not open you." "Ask." He asked. He asked about the walk-in at Sterngate, and whether Kaisa believed her, and whether she had told anyone else what the woman had said. He asked about the review she had been given and whether she had found anything external, and she said no, truthfully. He asked whether she had ever, in eleven years, opened a file she was not cleared to open. She said no, truthfully. He asked whether she had ever kept a record she was not required to keep. She said no, and the machine accepted it, because it was almost true, because she kept the record in her head and the head is not a file, and the trade had taught her that distinction early and she had never expected to need it against a friend. "There is one name on this list," Kolm said at last, "that you have not mentioned once in two examinations, though you work beside him every day and he signs every page you produce. Guess." "Eivind Talvig." "Eivind Talvig." Kolm laid down the pen. "Now tell me why you have not said his name." "Because nothing he has done is on this table." "Everything is on this table." Kolm watched the tracings. "When an officer stops mentioning a colleague who is central to his work, the machine asks a question the tongue cannot answer. I am not asking whether your section chief is the leak. I am asking why your body goes quiet when his name is read." Kaisa made herself hold still and made herself breathe where she had been taught and made herself answer in the flat voice of the desk. "Because he recruited me," she said. "Because if the answer is in this building, then the answer is a person, and a person who is my friend is a loss, whether or not he is the loss you mean. That is the whole of it. That is the reason I go quiet." It was true and it was not the whole of it and the machine in Kolm's cabinet did what a machine does, which is to sit in the middle and be read by whoever is watching. Kolm watched. And then, because he had been honest with her once and expected the debt repaid, he set the pen down and told her the thing that ended the examination and began the last part of the week. "The section chief asked to be examined," he said. "He requested it himself, four days ago, and he was, and he passed, and I am telling you because it will come out and because you should hear it from a room rather than a corridor. Whatever you are building, and whatever it is standing against, the man at the other end of it has already been measured by this machine and found clean." She took the stairwell rather than the lift, because the stairwell had no camera and no one to meet, and on the landing she stopped and did the arithmetic the way the desk had taught her, by asking what a guilty man would do. A guilty man with a trained hand would not ask for the machine. He would let the machine be brought to him, and he would arrange to be found clean by someone else's choice. A guilty man who asked for the machine was a man who had already decided that the machine was the last place anyone would look, because no one looks for a traitor in the room where he has just been declared innocent. The section chief had not made a mistake. He had made a move. Kaisa went down the stairs without answering and stood in the courtyard where the ordinary rain came in over the roof and found her, and understood that Talvig had done the one thing that would make her position impossible. A guilty man does not ask for the machine. A man certain of his ground asks for the machine and stands beside it and lets it say his name and his innocence in the same voice, and then waits, patient as the rain, for the officer who suspects him to be asked why she suspects a man the machine has forgiven. Fonn sent for her on the tenth day and did not offer a chair. "The director read the progress note. The progress note says external, and the director asks me why two nets died and nothing was found. I told him the review is not complete. He has given me four more days." "Four days." "Four days to put a name in front of him or to put something else." Fonn looked at her the way a man looks at a ledger that will not balance. "Ondrell. I have known your section chief longer than you have been alive in this service. If you are building a case against him, and you bring it to me in four days and it is wrong, the building will eat you and I will help, because a wrong name in this house is a bomb and I will not stand beside it. If you bring it and it is right, then you will have found the worst thing that can happen to a service, which is a friend who lied, and you will spend the rest of your years being thanked by people who will not want to look at you." "Which would you rather have?" "The truth," Fonn said, "and I would rather have it from someone else's mouth. That is the honest answer, and I give it to you because in four days one of us will need the honesty more than the other." That evening Astrid stopped beside her desk and stood a while without speaking, and Kaisa saw that her friend's hands were not steady, and understood before Astrid spoke what had happened upstairs. "They examined me today." "I know." "They asked about you." Astrid's voice was careful, the voice of a woman walking on a floor she no longer trusts. "They asked whether you had ever shown me a file I was not cleared to see, and whether you had ever asked me to lose a page, and whether I thought you were frightened. I told them what I know, which is nothing, and they wrote it down, and it was not an easy thing to sign your friend's name on an examiner's paper and watch it go into a machine." "I'm sorry." "Don't be sorry. Be quick." Astrid finally met her eyes. "Whatever you are doing, finish it, because it is reaching further than you, and I would rather be examined for knowing a loyal friend than examined for knowing a traitor, and right now the building cannot tell the difference and neither can I." ---