Besides Seth and Jacob Yost’s son, the conversation had significance for other sets of ears.

At Fort Meade, Maryland, the telephone number, mention of Stahl’s name, and title of the painting all connected with alerts programmed into the eleven acres of computers. Since the phone number and two names were tagged with priority alert status, the first computer that had analyzed the taped conversation alerted a second computer known as Lodestone. Just as some humans are more equal than others, so it is with Lodestone.

Lodestone analyzed the short telephone call, then phecked on the identity of the person entering the intercept keys: the telephone number, Stahl’s name, and the name of the painting. The computer noted that the originator was an agent code-named Byzantium and that any messages relating to the intercept key were to be classified Top Secret Umbra. The message was for the eyes of Byzantium only. Less than three minutes after Ridgeway had hung up, a coded message was on its way to NSA agent Byzantium, who at that time was on his way to the Los Angeles International Airport.

At a cramped but nonetheless efficient set of new prefabricated office buildings east of Paris, a PTT computer absorbed all of the information beamed to it from TAT 6. The computer was smaller, slower, and in human terms, dumber than Lodestone. But it only had to handle the traffic for some two thousand telephone calls at any given time, and that was well within the capacity of the Olivetti mainframe computer that was assigned to the task. Several PTT technicians strolled around, caressing the computer, watching its lights, tending its needs—human acolytes before their god.

In a room next to the computer sat a man in a business suit who worked for the SDECE—the French secret service. The man was one of three who manned the room twenty-four hours a day, waiting for the computer to recognize any of the code words and intercept keys they had entered into the PTT computer. The PTT was never particularly happy about having to devote some of the computer’s memory and computing ability to the dirty business of spying. And the SDECE men assigned to the boring task of sitting in the adjacent room waiting for something to happen manifested little enthusiasm either. But since the SDECE and the PTT were both owned by the same government, neither had any choice, and the people from the two different agencies did their best to stay out of the way of the other.

The SDECE agent in the next room on this night was named Yves LePin, and he had gotten his job with the agency as a result of his enthusiasm for the French Socialist party, which had finally won the government. Wary of the new batch of Socialists and even Communists of dubious security value (for the French and Italians still clung to a variety of archaic ideologies), the SDECE had placed people like LePin in jobs where they could do the least amount of damage should they turn out to be spies for someone else.