The Once and Future Spy (11 page)

“Which narrows it down to?” Wanamaker prompted when the Admiral didn’t continue.

“The telephone,” Toothacher said triumphantly.

Wanamaker laughed out loud. “First thing I had Huxstep do was check the telephone for bugs.”

“You don’t understand,” Toothacher whispered. “There’s no bug
in
the telephone. The telephone
is
the bug. Back in the seventies, before I retired, I remember hearing rumors about equipment that could convert weak impulses
picked up by ordinary telephones on their own cradles into recognizable speech. Nobody thought there was much of a future
in it—the equipment was huge and had to be quite near the target phone, as in the next room. Which ruled out listening to
the Russian ambassador talking to his station chief. Which ruled out almost everything except tapping into your occasional
hotel room through the telephone.”

“What’s all this got to do with Sibley?”

“Don’t you see it? Computers would have changed all this, and Sibley is a computer freak. He could program a computer to transform
incredibly weak impulses into recognizable speech. He could program the computer to sift through the take for whatever nuggets
interested him. All he would have needed in order to find out about Stuff tingle was your phone number.”

From the far end of the bridge came the sound of a car door opening and slamming closed in annoyance. A bored voice called,
“In case anyone’s interested, it’s a quarter to two in the ayem.”

Wanamaker let a moist whistle trickle through his teeth. “The
telephone!
“ he exclaimed. “That’s how he found out about rods and hair triggers and wedges and the Ides of March. Wait till I tell—”
Wanamaker caught himself in midsentence. Toothacher thought he heard his mouth snap shut.

The Admiral laughed dryly. “I didn’t think the late lamented Director would have turned you loose to operate on your own.
It wasn’t his style. When he knew he was dying of cancer, he would have passed you along to someone he trusted—someone in
the superstructure who massages your ego and tells you what a fine job you’re doing when your spirits are low.” Toothacher
slipped into his father-confessor role. “You want to tell me who it is?”

“I can’t. He made me swear.”

The Admiral acted hurt.

“Honestly,” Wanamaker said. “I would if I could, but I can’t.” When the Admiral didn’t say anything, Wanamaker asked, “What
do we do now?”

“When’s the last time you laid eyes on Sibley?”

Wanamaker told him about the Yale reunion the previous spring. “It all fits. The asshole wanted to know what I was up to.”

“What did you tell him?”

“I told him to fuck off.”

“That must have been when he decided to zero in on your phone.”

“I told him something else,” Wanamaker remembered. “I told him if he found out what I was up to, I’d have to get him murdered.”

Walking in lockstep, they started back across the bridge toward the car. “During my watch,” the Admiral mused quietly, “my
collaborators never really understood what made me tick. I didn’t get my kicks out of fighting the cold war. I wanted to win
it. You know something, Roger—you don’t mind if I call you Roger?—it’s not too late. If we bring off Stuff tingle, it could
turn the whole ball game around. It could set off an avalanche of victories.” Toothacher brought his arm up again and let
it settle across Wanamaker’s shoulders; community of interest, in the end, was stronger than physical repugnance. “Now that
we’re in this thing together,” he said, his tone as fatherly as he could push it, “why don’t you concentrate on Stufftingle
and let me worry about the author of those love letters.” In the darkness the Admiral’s bulging eyes blinked furiously. “Aside
from everything else, I have a personal score to settle with friend Sibley.”

T
he raspy voice of the thickset man filtered through a haze of tobacco smoke. “Be careful,” he warned. “There are things I
want to know and things I don’t want to know. I leave it to your intuition to distinguish between the two.”

Wanamaker could barely contain his excitement. Words spilled out. “The Admiral’s identified the author of the love letters,”
he announced. He wondered if the thickset man had had the men’s room checked for bugs. As a precaution, he turned on the cold
water faucet full blast. It occurred to him that the thickset man might think Wanamaker didn’t trust him, so he began to rinse
his hands under the running water.

At the next sink the thickset man coughed up a grunt of satisfaction. He studied his image in the mirror as if he hadn’t seen
it for a long time.

Wanamaker glanced uneasily at the door. “You sure we won’t be interrupted?” He pictured the two young men in loose-fitting
sport jackets blocking with their bodies the door to the men’s room. “What if somebody has to pee very badly?”

“My people won’t prevent him from urinating. They will only prevent him from urinating
here.”

Wanamaker opened his mouth to giggle at what he thought was a joke. Then he decided it hadn’t been meant as a joke and aborted
the laugh. “About the love letters, the guy who sent them’s named Silas
Sibley. You want to know how he ticked to Stufftingle? Or how the Admiral ticked to him?”

Sucking thoughtfully on his pipe, the thickset man said, “No.”

Leaving the faucet running, Wanamaker began drying his hands on a paper towel. “Then all that’s left to talk about is what
we’re going to do to neutralize the leak.”

The thickset man pursed his lips and shook his head.

“You don’t want to know that either?”

“Definitely not. The only thing that interests me is Stufftingle. All I want to know is that it is back on track. How you
get it back on track I leave in your very professional, and I assume very discreet, hands. I don’t really give a damn what
you people do, so long as you don’t do it in the street and frighten old ladies walking their spaniels.”

“Yeah, well, there is still the small matter of locating the guy who wrote the love letters in the two weeks and two days
left to us before the Ides, but my Admiral friend doesn’t foresee any great problem there because the asshole who wrote them
doesn’t know we know he wrote them.”

The thickset man seemed disturbed about something. “We?”

“The Admiral and me.”

“The Admiral and you?”

“The Admiral figured out what Stufftingle was on his own—”

The thickset man turned on Wanamaker. “Someone outside your cell is aware of Stufftingle? I thought it was clearly understood—”

“There’s nothing to get nervous about because the Admiral’s all for it. He thinks it’s a first-class idea, something we should
have done years ago. You have to understand about the Admiral. The thing that motivates him is nostalgia. He’s nostalgic for
the days when an agent used a code name and left a sample of his Morse “fist” on file so the enemy couldn’t send phony messages
over his call sign. He’s nostalgic for when everyone knew who the enemy was and anything you did to weaken or embarrass him
or confuse him was legitimate, and you didn’t have to go sucking up to the turkeys from Congressional Oversight. Listen, the
Admiral’s one of us. He’s offered to see the business of the leak—” Wanamaker started selecting his words carefully so as
not to tell the thickset man something he didn’t want to know—”through to its logical conclusion, if you get what I mean without
my actually going and spelling it out.”

“He’s going to plug the leak?”

“Him and Huxstep and Mildred. Right.”

“What will happen if they fail?”

“The Admiral’s anticipated that contingency. He’s cooked up a worst-case cover story. If the leaker goes public, we’ll claim
he has a history of mental instability. The Admiral has a shrink up his sleeve who’s preparing a written diagnosis—schizophrenia,
whatever. If we need to, we’ll pull that out of the files to protect ourselves.” Wanamaker shrugged a shoulder. “It’ll be
our word against that of a lunatic.”

“Does this Admiral friend of yours”—Wanamaker didn’t miss the sarcasm here—”know about me?”

“He’s no dummy, the Admiral. He could find his way through a labyrinth of half-truths blindfolded. He’s figured out I must
be reporting to someone in the superstructure, but he doesn’t know who. And you can bet he’s not going to find out from me.”

“That is precisely what I am betting,” the thickset man remarked. He flashed a thin smile at his reflection in the mirror
and seemed genuinely gratified when his expression smiled back at him. When he spoke, he appeared to be addressing the reflection
in the mirror. “Thank you for bringing me up-to-date,” he told it, and he reached into his jacket pocket to turn down the
hearing aid.

“The pleasure—” Wanamaker started to say, but he saw that the thickset man could no longer hear him, and didn’t waste breath
finishing the sentence.

W
hile Huxstep worked his way through an enormous ring of keys, the Admiral, wearing spit-shined oxfords and a jumpsuit, checked
in with Mildred. “Traviata, this is Parsifal. Do you read me?”

Mildred’s voice, sounding as if it originated underwater, filtered back over the walkie-talkie. “Parsifal, this is Traviata.
I read you five by five, Admiral.”

The Admiral winced. “We use code names like Parsifal and Traviata,” he lectured the walkie-talkie, “in case anyone is listening
in on this channel. That way they won’t be able to identify who is speaking.”

Mildred clicked on after a long pause. “My tradecraft is rusty, but I’m a fast learner,” she said.

“Any activity on the street?” the Admiral asked Mildred.

The walkie-talkie burst into life. “Quiet as a morgue, Parsifal.”

At the door of the Weeder’s apartment, Huxstep growled, “I think I got it.” The key he had slipped into the lock clicked audibly
as he turned it. “One more to go and we’re inside,” he told Toothacher.

The Admiral ambled over to the head of the stairs and looked down five flights to the front door. The three floors directly
under the loft where Sibley lived were rented by mail-order houses. The young woman who lived on the bottom floor had a backlog
of mail piled up in front of her door. He and Huxstep appeared to have the building to
themselves. And there was Mildred, huddled in the Chevrolet outside, to warn them in the unlikely event that Sibley, who seemed
to have left town two days before, turned up.

Another of Huxstep’s keys fitted perfectly into the top lock and it clicked open. He eased the door back on its hinges with
the palm of his large hand and listened. The Admiral, armed with a flashlight, tiptoed up behind him. “Opening locks,” Huxstep
muttered, “is like taking candy from a baby.”

The Admiral, his bulging eyes rimmed with raspberry red, whispered, “I have trouble opening them even when I have the key.”

“It’s all in the wrist,” Huxstep observed in a bored voice.

Toothacher glanced quickly at Huxstep to see if he was playing with words. It would have been out of character, or at least
out of the character the Admiral was familiar with. Huxstep’s face was not so much innocent as empty. Nothing hidden there,
Toothacher decided. He pushed past Huxstep into Sibley’s apartment and switched on his flashlight. The beam stabbed into the
corners of a long, narrow loft with uneven knotty pine floorboards and brick walls and a boarded-over skylight. The loft smelled
(the Admiral noticed instantly) as if it had been aired and cleaned regularly. No hint, not the faintest, of mildew, of dust.
And not an ashtray in sight. If it weren’t for an old grudge, the Admiral could have almost liked the man the archivist had
referred to as “the Weeder.” Near the back wall, behind an open kitchen space, Toothacher could make out a neatly made double
bed covered with a cashmere shawl. A small black-and-white television set stood on a stool facing the bed. An Eames chair
and a footstool and a reading lamp were off to one side. An enormous gilt-edged mirror was leaning against the wall near the
Eames chair; the Weeder, the Admiral realized, had positioned the mirror so that he could glance up from his book and
see
himself reading. Which raised the intriguing possibility that Silas Sibley, like so many others, related to an image of himself
he invented for the mirror more than an inner self that existed independently of the mirror.

Toothacher’s flashlight played over some bookcases built against an entire wall facing the open kitchen. “Start there,” he
instructed Huxstep. Grunting, Huxstep headed for the back of the loft. The Admiral spotted a long table that obviously served
the Weeder as a desk.

Smiling to himself in anticipation, he settled into the wooden desk chair with the high cane back. Every item on the table
seemed to be in its place. There was a color photograph, in a silver frame, of a small boy with long blond hair building sand
castles on a beach. There was a fish fossil that doubled as a paperweight. There was a cut glass inkwell filled with ink and
an old-fashioned pen with a gold nib jutting from a cut glass holder. Next to the inkwell was a lined grade school notebook.
Toothacher reached for the notebook and began thumbing through it. There were alternate entries, one written in the flowing
hand of someone who prided himself on penmanship, the other printed in rigid block letters crowding onto each line as if space
were rationed.

“I assume,” read one notation written in rigid letters, “from the amount of tissues in the wastebasket that you have a head
cold. Don’t say I didn’t warn you about bathing in a bathroom with a broken radiator. I’m leaving some homeopathic pills,
you dissolve two of them under your tongue four times a day, and some thyme for infusions, drink all you can, eat also, you
starve a fever, you feed a cold. And for God’s sake get the radiator fixed. Also have you given some thought to what I said
last week about aspirins?”

The notation was signed, “Yours sincerely, Mrs. Doolittle.”

“Many thanks,” said the next notation written in flowing script, “for the homeopathic pills and the thyme. I admit to feeling
better already. As for the aspirin a day, I feel I am too young to worry about heart attacks. But I appreciate your mentioning
it. I left a pile of shirts on the bed—if you have time, you can iron them. If not, not.”

The entry was signed, “S. Sibley.”

Another entry, in rigid printed letters, read: “The vacuum cleaner needs bags. The iron needs distilled water. The kitchen
needs paper towels and liquid soap, no matter what the ads say one brand is as good as another so buy whichever’s cheapest.
I need a vacation but what with one thing or another I can’t afford to take it and wouldn’t know where to go if I did, but
thanks for suggesting it, you are definitely my kind of white liberal, I don’t mean that as an insult, just the opposite.
Yours sincerely, Mrs. Doolittle.”

The Admiral flipped to the last entry in the book, written in Sibley’s flowing script. “Tomorrow I’m off and running for three
weeks,” it said. “With any luck I may be able to fill in some missing links. If you can air the loft and vacuum before I return,
I’d appreciate
it. S. Sibley.” There was a postscript: “Could you check the box downstairs and bring up any mail—I don’t want to advertise
that nobody’s home.”

Huxstep called from the back of the loft, “There must be two, three hundred books here. There’s a hundred more stacked on
the floor of the closet. What you want me to do with them all?”

“Hold each one by the spine and shake it—see if anything falls out.”

Huxstep, muttering under his breath about how there had to be better ways of making a living, went back to the bookshelves.
The Admiral turned to the wooden filing cabinet next to the table. He pulled open a drawer, saw typing paper, opened another,
found envelopes, opened a third, discovered a thick folder tied with a ribbon. He set it on the desk, undid the ribbon, opened
the folder. Inside was what appeared to be the carbon copy of a typed manuscript. The first pages contained a quotation:

INSTRUCTIONS for the inli
f
ting of MEN

… let our manners di
f
tingui
f
h us

from our enemies, as much as the cau
f
e

are engaged in.

IN PROVINCIAL CONGRESS

at New York June 20th 1775

Intrigued, the Admiral turned to the second page and read, “For starters, I’ll do my man Nate: In my mind’s eye I see him
still dancing leaf in the rebellion’s gusts.”

The perspiration on Toothacher’s palms, the tingling in his scalp told him he had come across something significant. The Admiral
leaned eagerly over the manuscript and plunged on. He heard the beat of the kettledrum on the bowling green. He passed “Whose
truth? Which truth?” He witnessed the execution of Sergeant Hickey. He came to the part where Nate takes two steps forward.
His friends try to talk him out of volunteering. Nate persists. The Commander-in-Chief. not a very sympathetic figure, personally
briefs him. “I need to know what the lobsters are up to.” Exit the Commander-in-Chief. When last seen, the Weeder’s man Nate
is selecting patriotic phrases from Addison’s
Cato
to use as codes.

The Admiral looked up. E. Everard Linkletter, his archivist friend,
had filled him in on Silas Sibley. This Nate he was writing about was a distant relative of his and a lifelong obsession.
It struck Toothacher that Sibley was doing to Nate what he, the Admiral, was doing to Sibley, walking back the cat on an operation
that had gone wrong. Sibley was taking Nate’s mission apart piece by piece to discover why his illustrious ancestor ended
up the way he did. “I’m off and running for three weeks,” Sibley had written in the notebook to his cleaning lady. “With any
luck I may be able to fill in some missing links.”

Off and running where? The Ides of March was two weeks away. If he and Huxstep and Mildred could catch up with Sibley and
neutralize him before then, Wanamaker could go ahead with Stufftingle. But the Ides of March was the absolute limit. Kabir
was being closed down permanently on the fifteenth. The faculty and the atomic facility were being transferred to a remote
base in the countryside. It would take Wanamaker years to smuggle enough uranium into the new site and mount the operation
again. Faced with this delay, the locals in Tehran, not to mention Wanamaker’s contact in the superstructure, would lose their
nerve, would scurry back to their holes. A great occasion to make the world more congenial to American interests would have
been lost forever.

The Admiral’s flashlight played over the desk. Under the fossil paperweight was a pile of unopened envelopes that the cleaning
lady, Yours sincerely, Mrs. Doolittle, must have brought up. Toothacher leafed through them. Most of them were bills, bank
statements, advertisements. Two were personal letters. Toothacher held the envelopes up to the flashlight one at a time, but
he couldn’t make out the writing because the letters inside were folded. He reached into a pocket of his jumpsuit and produced
a length of bamboo that had been carefully split not quite to the end. It was a trick of the trade the Admiral had picked
up from an agent in Hong Kong. Working the bamboo into the first envelope through a small opening at the corner of the flap,
Toothacher pinched the folded letter in the split bamboo. He carefully turned the length of bamboo so that the letter wound
itself around it, then pulled both the bamboo and the letter out through the small opening. He unwound the letter, flattened
it on the desk and read it. It was from the director of Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library in New Haven. “This
will confirm our phone conversation of yesterday,” it said. “Browse till the cows come
home, Silas. If you stop by my home Sunday morning, I’ll give you the back door keys. You’ll have the place to yourself.”

Toothacher checked a Master Plan of Leads to Run Down appended to the Nate manuscript. Sure enough there was an entry marked
“Beinecke Stacks—A. Hamilton’s missing letter to Nate’s brother Enoch could be buried in the uncatalogued Hamilton papers.”

Using the length of bamboo, the Admiral returned the letter to its envelope and extracted the second letter. Unrolled from
the split bamboo and flattened on the desk, it was cryptic to the point of rudeness. “On the phone you were very persuasive,”
it said. “But I’m having second thoughts. My privacy is more important than your wild-goose chase, at least to me. Forget
my yes. Please don’t come. Please.” There was no signature on the letter, no return address on the envelope. The stamp had
been canceled at Concord, Massachusetts. On Sibley’s Master Plan of Leads to Run Down, the “pot of gold at the end of the
rainbow” entry read: Molly’s diary—Concord descendants?

The Admiral switched off his flashlight and stared into the darkness for a moment, imagining the loft, the bed with the cashmere
quilt, the boarded-over skylight; imagining Huxstep pulling books off the shelves and shaking them by their spines; imagining
the Weeder curled up with a good book in his Eames chair watching himself reading in the mirror. Except for two tours of duty
on board destroyers, both cut short because of chronic seasickness, Toothacher had spent all of his career in intelligence
work. And although he had never admitted it, had never put words to the thought, he had been plagued by a hesitation. It was
an article of faith with him that there was one truth and it was knowable—but once you had discovered it, what then? Did knowing
an enemy’s capabilities really tell you anything about his intentions? Did he have a capability because he intended to use
it or because he wanted you to think he might use it? Therein lay the essential flaw of intelligence work; a flaw that left
many of its practitioners half-paralyzed with uncertainty. But now the Admiral found himself engaged in another sort of intelligence-related
activity—one unequaled for its purity, its primitiveness. Here there was no uncertainty, no hesitation, no self-doubt.