The Once and Future Spy (13 page)

W
anamaker was beside himself with anger. “What do you mean ‘almost but not quite’?” he raged into the phone. He realized he
was talking over an open line and lowered his voice to a near whisper, as if that would solve the problem of security. “What
kind of an answer is that?” he demanded.

“Our jackass-of-all-trades has let him get away,” the Admiral explained with a calmness that was not human.

There was a moment of silence as Wanamaker digested this. Presently he said, “He’ll recognize the jackass-of-all-trades from
when he was your driver on the Farm. He’ll know we know.”

“Not necessarily,” the Admiral said. “Our jackass has changed over the years. In my opinion it’s not likely our friend will
remember him. My guess is he’ll take what happened for an ordinary mugging.”

“He’ll go to the police,” Wanamaker warned. “We’ll have to trot out the story about him being off his rocker.”

The Admiral could be heard snickering over the phone line. Wanamaker obviously wasn’t thinking things through logically. “He’d
have to explain who he is,” Toothacher said. “He’d have to get into the business of whom he works for. Phone calls would be
made. Questions would be asked. Stories would be checked. The whole thing could become very sticky. If I know Sibley, he’ll
assume it was a coincidence.”

“What makes you so sure?” Wanamaker asked. He hoped to God the Admiral knew what he was talking about.

“He’ll assume it was a coincidence because he’ll desperately want it to be a coincidence. Anything else would put him out
of his league, would affect his digestion, his bowels, his ability to get a nightly ration of sleep.”

“Where do we go from here?” Wanamaker wanted to know.

“If at first we don’t succeed,” the Admiral breathed into the mouthpiece, “what is it we do?”

C
oming off a white night, the Weeder obliged himself to think the thing through again from the beginning. He approached the
problem from every conceivable angle, tortured himself with possibilities (which tended, because they existed, to take on
the solidity of probabilities), eventually concluded that there was no way the Admiral could have traced the love letters
back to him. Which reduced the mugging attempt in the faculty parking lot to an ugly coincidence; an episode best forgotten.
Comforted (though not completely convinced; there was still the nagging familiarity of the fire breather to account for),
the Weeder picked up the keys to the Beinecke from the head librarian, let himself into the library through a back door, installed
himself at a binder’s desk in the glass tower within the building where the rare books and manuscripts were stored. He opened
the folder containing the A. Hamilton papers, recently unearthed, newly acquired, as yet uncatalogued. His mind wandered to
the burly man swigging mouthwash from a transparent green jug, but he forced himself to concentrate on the business at hand.
“I am a bookworm,” he had told the new DDI, Rudd. “For play I bury myself in the corners of libraries and read.” Which was
what he proposed to do now.

He began weeding through the Hamilton papers. There were itemized bills for services rendered, for clothing purchased, for
repairs to the roof over the earth closet in the backyard, all dated after the turn
of the century, so the Weeder knew he was dealing with the right time span. There were drafts of letters, dictated but unsigned,
written—if the Weeder’s amateur eye was any judge—by the young Harvard tutor who had served as Hamilton’s secretary between
1799 and his death, which was the period when Nate’s brother Enoch boasted of having received a letter from Hamilton. Most
of the letters were filled with gossip about political figures of the day. The mayor of New York was said to have taken a
bribe from a construction firm angling for a contract to build horse-drawn public transportation vehicles, which were to be
called “street-cars.” A. Burr was said to have lost his new wife’s fortune in a land reclamation scheme and was consoling
himself in the arms of a black mistress in New Jersey. G. Washington was supposed to have so many wooden teeth in his mouth
that he went to a carpenter for repairs rather than a dental surgeon.

Stuck between two pieces of blank paper with watermarks that said “Fool’s cap” was an unsigned, undated partial draft of a
letter that recalled the “troblous times.” “A Remarcable Patriote” had volunteered to spy behind the British lines while pretending
to “Whip the Cat.” The author of the letter had had the signal honor of “superintending” the mission. There followed a detailed
description of how the patriot had crossed Long Island Sound and had made his way across Long Island to the village of Flatbush,
to the house of the widow of a Concord martyr. From there, with the help of the young widow, he had scouted the British positions
in Brookland and the western reaches of Long Island, had discovered the “opresing Britich, freshe from their Victory over
the Colonials, Rejoyceing as if Bedlam was broke loose.” According to the widow’s diary, which Hamilton claimed to have read,
the patriot had gleaned British intentions, had devised a plan to thwart them. A coded report had been sent back that had
provided the Commander-in-Chief with vital information. If the war had not been lost then and there, it was safe to say it
was due in no small part to the “Martyr in ye glorious Cause of Liberty,” whose end had been so “cruel and uncristion” it
aroused “Pastion” in all who knew the “True and Reale storie.”

There had been periods in the Weeder’s life when the discovery of a document that mentioned Nate by name, even one with a
cryptic reference to him, would have reduced him to dizzyness. Now, however, a corner of his brain was obsessed with the event
of the previous night, with the burly mugger who had tried to incinerate him. The
Weeder was unable to shake the queasy feeling that he was missing something important, something that went to the heart of
the matter. Had he seen the mugger before? If so, where? For the hundredth time he let snatches of conversation trail through
his thoughts, picking at them for clues.

“What is it you want?”

“What I want, what I need to have is your money
and
your life.”

The Weeder had given him a chance to correct the slip. “You mean
‘or.’ “

“I mean
and.”

“You’re crazy.”

“That’s one possibility. There are others.”

Sitting at the binder’s table, gazing sightlessly at the stacks of rare books around him in the glass tower, the Weeder once
again explored these other possibilities. It could have been a random mugging. Or a case of mistaken identity. Or an attack
provoked by drugs. Or the attacker could have been, as the Weeder had suggested to him, stark raving mad. An image of Admiral
Toothacher, lecturing back at the Farm on methodology, came to the Weeder; smiling slyly, the Admiral had summed up possibilities
at the end of his talk. “Or all of the above,” he had said in a singsong voice. “Or none of the above. Or any combination
thereof.”

And then, suddenly, it came to the Weeder; the vision of the Admiral at the Farm had triggered a memory. Toothacher had arrived
in the morning and departed in the evening in a sparkling black limousine with shiny whitewall tires and a small admiral’s
pennant flying from the right front fender. The door to the limousine had been held open, the car had been driven by a hulking
chief petty officer with short cropped hair and eyes the color of pewter. It had been driven by the man who had attacked him
in the faculty parking lot, who had demanded his money
and
his life!

Another snatch of conversation, one the Weeder had unconsciously avoided, echoed through his head.

“So what governments are you stabbing in the back these days?” he had asked Wanamaker when they ran into each other at the
Yale reunion the previous spring.

“If you were to find out,” Wanamaker, smiling smugly, had replied, “I suppose I’d have to get you murdered.”

So the attempt on his life had not been a coincidence! The Admiral
had walked back the cat, had somehow traced the leak and the love letters to the Weeder. Having found the leak, they were
trying to plug it.

Shivering, the Weeder rose to his feet. He felt an icy hand caress his spine. He would race off to the nearest police station,
he would tell the sergeant on duty—what? That a mugger had tried to incinerate him the night before because he knew that an
agency of the United States government was planning to explode a primitive atomic device in Tehran on the Ides of March? Because
he had set out in his bumbling way to stop what he considered an atrocity without bringing the whole world down on the Company?
Nobody would believe him. Even worse, someone might—and he would be fitted into a strait-jacket and shipped back to the Company
in question by the local police who preferred not to get involved in matters of national security.

Whatever he decided to do, he would be a fool for hanging around Yale. They had been waiting for him once, they would be waiting
for him again. He tried desperately to remember some of the things he had learned at the Farm about avoiding surveillance.
All he could come up with was the story of the OSS agent who had thrown the Gestapo bloodhounds off the scent by urinating
on his tracks. He couldn’t see that urinating on his tracks would have the slightest effect on the people who were after him.
It occurred to him that the best thing would be to abandon his clothing at the motel, abandon his almost classic car. He would
rent an automobile in New Haven and disappear into New England. Even if they discovered he had rented a car, they would have
no way of knowing in what direction he had headed. If he could manage to stay out of their clutches until the Ides of March…

From somewhere below him in the glass core of the Beinecke Library came the thud of a heavy fire door being slammed closed.
The sound seemed to skate along the glass walls of the building within a building, to resound through the stacks. At the back
of the glass tower, another fire door slammed shut. And a third. The Weeder edged between two stacks and peered down through
the glass wall at the main lobby, sandwiched between the inner glass tower and the outer shell of the building, two stories
below him. A rail-thin woman wearing a scalp-hugging feathered hat with a black veil masking half her face (was he imagining
it or did she look familiar too?) was standing at the main desk, looking up. She spotted the Weeder and
wagged a finger at him, as if he had disobeyed a biblical injunction and was being mildly chastised for it. A burly man the
Weeder instantly recognized as the fire breather from the faculty parking lot the night before appeared at the other end of
the lobby. He was holding an enormous pistol, fitted with a silencer, at present arms. He saw the woman with the veil pointing
and followed her finger until he spotted the Weeder. The burly man formed his left forefinger and thumb into a pistol and
sighted over it at the Weeder. He mouthed the words, “Bang, bang! You’re dead!”

And then the Weeder saw the Admiral, hunched over like a parenthesis, his mane of chalk-colored hair flying off excitedly
in all directions. The Admiral backed up to get a better view of the Weeder, studied him with his bulging eyes for a moment,
then turned toward the large red fire box on the wall. He broke the glass with a small hammer hanging next to it, pulled open
the door and pushed down the large brass lever to the position labeled Danger—Exhaust.

From the dozen or so grilles installed in the walls of the inner glass tower came an ominous hissing.

The Weeder had worked in the library his junior and senior years and understood instantly what the sound meant. The Beinecke
housed some of the rarest books and manuscripts in the world. In the event of fire, there was a system to seal off the glass
core where the books were stored by closing hermetic fire doors and then pumping out the air. No air, no fire. There was supposed
to be an alarm to warn the people working in the stacks that they had thirty seconds to clear out.

A pulse throbbed in one of the Weeder’s ears as he raced for the narrow metal staircase that corkscrewed up to the top floor
of the core. Plunging up the steps, already short of breath, he became aware of the gravitational drag of the earth pulling
at him through the soles of his shoes. With each step lifting his feet took more effort. His vision started to blur. A rasp
stuck like a bone in the back of his throat. His lungs burned. Gasping for air, he clutched the railing and hauled himself
up, hand over hand. He reached the top floor and sagged against a whitewashed brick wall and lashed out wildly with his palm,
searching for the small glass box that had been installed during his senior year. The throbbing in his ear grew into a roar,
drowning out the hissing, and the space around him began to go dark, as if the light were being sucked out of the glass tower
along with the air. Suddenly the tips of his fingers struck something smooth. He
willed his fingers into a fist and plunged it into the glass, groped through the shards for the mask, fumbled in what had
become a nightmare to fit it over his face as his knees ceded to gravity and he sank in the general direction of the center
of the earth.