The Once and Future Spy (24 page)

“W
hat are you doing?” she asked as the Weeder started to walk through the shopping mall, diagonally across from the fish restaurant,
for the fifth time.

“I’m practicing something I’m not very good at,” the Weeder said. He made no effort to suppress his bitterness. “Where I used
to work, it was called tradecraft.” He plunged his gloveless hands deeper into his overcoat pockets and studied the window
of a record store, using it as if it were a mirror, looking in it for remarkable things-lean young men wearing belted raincoats
and lightly tinted aviator sunglasses, window-shopping for things they were unlikely to buy. “The last time I tried this particular
trick of the trade I wound up being cornered in a parking lot by a wino breathing fire.” On the spur of the moment he pulled
Snow into a store that sold clothing and made her try on a pleated skirt while he surveyed the passing crowds through the
window. Snow played the game. “How do you like me in lilac?” she asked, pirouetting to make the skirt flare around her feet.

The Weeder caught a glimpse of her ankles, remembered his man Nate noticing Molly’s ankle as she climbed into the buck cart.
“Try the one in black,” he suggested, and turned back to the window.

The sun came out from behind a cloud as they left the store. Snow glanced worriedly at her wristwatch. “He said we should
be there at noon. It’s twenty after.”

And still the Weeder hesitated. As far as he could see everything
was in order, but given his lack of professionalism that didn’t mean much. “How did he react when you described the third
attempt on my life?” he asked Snow again. She understood he needed reassurance and supplied a generous dose of it. “When he
realized he wasn’t getting the story secondhand-when he realized I had almost been killed too-he believed every word. He’s
on your side, Silas.”

Snow smiled encouragingly and gestured with her head toward the fish restaurant, which was in the middle of a street that
had been closed to traffic. His breathing became shallower. “All right,” he said reluctantly. “Let’s go and talk with this
friend of yours.”

They crossed the street and turned down the block past a heavy man wearing gloves with the fingertips cut off selling roasted
chestnuts from a pushcart. They passed a band of black teenagers dressed in identical jackets with “Born to Love” splashed
across their backs- the boys were gathered around a ghettobuster set on an orange crate. The fish restaurant loomed ahead.
An elderly couple emerged from the doorway into the sunlight, winding long colorful scarves around their necks, laughing.
Snow was looking at a dwarf selling Japanese hand puppets in another doorway when she heard the screech of brakes. The sound
registered first, then the thought that it was out of place on a street where cars were prohibited. She spun back and reached
for the Weeder but he wasn’t there-through the crowd she could see his arms flailing as he was hustled by four men in dark
suits into the back of a car. The door was slammed behind him. Pushing through the crowd, Snow screamed “Silas!” Her cry was
drowned in a squeal of tires as the car lurched away from the curb. Nodding in time to the music, the teenagers with the ghettobuster
watched Snow lunge after the car disappearing down the street. The elderly man with the colorful scarf around his neck called
uncertainly, “Shouldn’t somebody notify the police?” The heavy man who had been selling chestnuts held up a plastic identification
card in the flap of a wallet. “The show’s over, folks,” he called. “Move along. Kindly go on about your business. The show’s
over.”

Staring after the car, Snow felt a hand grip her elbow. She tried to pry it loose, discovered there was no strength left in
her fingers, looked up into Fargo’s ashen face. “You bastard,” she whispered hoarsely. Then she screamed, “Bastard! Bastard!
Bastard!” as he steered her toward another car that had pulled up to the curb. The heavy man wearing gloves without fingertips
opened the back door
and Fargo tried to force Snow inside, but she twisted around and swung weakly at his face. Fargo ducked under the blow and
caught her wrists and pinned them against the open door of the car. “He’s mentally ill,” he told her. “He made it all up.”

“You’re the one who’s mentally ill,” Snow cried. “You used me.

“I have the proof,” Fargo pleaded with her.

Snow wrenched a wrist free and spun around and struck her head sharply against the side of the car. Her body shook with sobs.
“They’re going to kill him-”

The heavy man grabbed Snow’s head to prevent her from hurting herself. Behind Fargo the teenagers lined the sidewalk, watching,
nodding in time to the music. Fargo told Snow, “Nobody’s going to hurt him. He’s sick. He needs professional help. We’re going
to see he gets it.”

The two men maneuvered Snow onto the backseat of the car. Fargo climbed in alongside her and waved a hand at the driver.

“Where are we going?” Snow mumbled as the car rounded the corner and moved out into traffic. It was clear she didn’t give
a damn.

“To an office,” Fargo said. “As soon as you’ve calmed down I’m going to prove to you he’s mentally disturbed.”

The sun disappeared behind a cloud and thick flakes of snow began to drift down; the crystals were directed by the air flowing
around the car past the side window. It occurred to Snow that the flakes were falling in the wrong direction, that the world
was
upside down. She let the lids close over her eyes of their own weight and sank back into her seat. She had been ambushed
again …

The driver turned off Commonwealth Avenue into a side street, then turned off the side street and pulled up at a deserted
loading ramp. Fargo got out and came around and opened the door and offered Snow his hand. Ignoring him, she swung her legs
out. She imagined the lilac skirt swirling around her feet, felt the Weeder’s eyes flicker to her ankles as she started up
the steps. She was too feeble to protest when Fargo slipped his arm through hers and steered her into a padded freight elevator.
She leaned back against the padding, felt her weight rush to her feet as the elevator soared. Her weight redistributed itself
when the elevator coasted to a stop. The doors opened. Fargo looked at her. Her face a mask of anguish, she heaved herself
off the wall and stepped into the corridor. A young
woman in a striped business suit with padded shoulders was waiting next to an open door. She took a firm grip on Snow’s arm
and led her down the hall to the ladies’ room. “Splash some cold water on your face,” she told Snow. “It will help you.”

The young woman escorted Snow back down the corridor into an office, then through a door into a sparsely furnished inner office.
She pulled a chair up to a coffee table. Snow sank into it. “Can I get you anything?” the young woman asked. “Warm milk? A
stiff drink?”

Snow didn’t respond. The young woman glanced at Fargo. He nodded toward the door. The woman left. Fargo drew up a second chair
so that it was facing Snow and sat down. The coffee table separated them. It was made of glass. Snow could see Fargo’s shoes
through it. They appeared to be brand-new. Distrust any enterprise, Silas-quoting Thoreau-had said, that required new clothes.

“This isn’t going to be easy for you,” Fargo began. “But you might as well face up to it now as later.” He held out a piece
of paper. Snow looked at it without seeing it. Fargo said, “What you don’t know
can
hurt you.” He let the paper drop onto the coffee table in front of her.

Snow’s eyes drifted to the paper. “What will that change?” she asked. “Anyone who can type can put things on a paper.” She
smiled, but the tears flowed anyhow. “He warned me being naive wouldn’t increase his chances of survival.”

“Read the paper,” Fargo said softly.

“Someone once said it’s dangerous to be right when the government is wrong. I guess it is.”

“Read it.”

“What kind of game are we playing?” Snow demanded with sudden vehemence. “If I read it I’m going to have to act as if I believe
it because I’m afraid you’ll kill me too if I don’t swallow it-if I believe he was stark raving sane and put his life on the
line to prevent an atrocity.”

“When you read it,” Fargo said, “you’ll believe it because it rings true-because you will think back on things he did and
said and it will fit in with what you’re reading.”

Snow reached out and edged the paper along the table top. Her eyes were swimming in tears and she had to wipe them away with
the back of her sleeve in order to focus. She read the title: Psychiatrist’s Preliminary Report on Silas N. Sibley-Top Secret.
“I didn’t know he had a middle initial,” she murmured.

Fargo said, “The
N
stands for Nathan, of course. The initial is not on his birth certificate. Nor is it on his official Agency service record.
He started using the
N
about two and a half years ago.”

“What does that prove?” Snow demanded. “He’s a descendant of Nathan’s. It’s natural that he would want to add the
N
.“

“Read on. He’s not a descendant of Nathan’s. He comes from English stock that emigrated to this country in the middle of the
last century.”

Snow began reading the first sentence of the psychiatrist’s report. It was all invented, of course. They were trying to discredit
him so that nobody would believe his story about the atrocity.

“He didn’t live and work in New York,” Fargo said. He droned on like a voice-over to a documentary film. “He lived and worked
in Washington, D.C. He wasn’t involved in a program to eavesdrop on people through their phones-I checked that out personally.
He was analyzing the serial numbers of Soviet tanks. I’ve seen his report, the one where he says the Soviets cooked the numbers.
I’ve held it in my hand, Snow.”

Snow forced herself to read on. The clinical detachment of the tone, the certainty with which the psychiatrist trotted out
his arguments and put them through their paces, rubbed her the wrong way.

“There is an Operation Stufftingle,” Fargo was saying. “There is a Wanamaker, and he was a roommate of Sibley’s at Yale-though
there seems to be no evidence of a grudge between them, no record of a girl’s death. Sibley was doing what all paranoids do-he
was constructing a make-believe world using bits and pieces of the real world. Stufftingle is the code name for Wanamaker’s
program that analyzes the structure of Soviet ministries from their phone books- from how many extensions someone has, from
the order of the numbers.”

Snow was reaching the end of the report now. “The seeds of his disorder-probably traceable to a chemical imbalance-were lurking
inside him, waiting to burst into life,” the psychiatrist had written. “There is good reason to believe that Sibley has been
walking a very fine line between sanity and insanity for years. Whenever the ‘present’ became too oppressive for him he took
refuge in a ‘past’ that he invented-he pulled the past over his head the way a child afraid of the dark pulls a blanket over
his head in bed. For a time this technique seems to have supplied him with the relief he needed. More recently,
however, he began inventing a ‘present’ as well as a ‘past.’ F. Scott Fitzgerald has a sentence in
The Last Tycoon
about how we live in the present, and when there is no present (that is, when there is no present that is congenial to us),
we invent one. Fitzgerald might have been describing Sibley. At this point in time it is difficult to say exactly what pushed
him over the line. It could have been his divorce. It could have been the trauma of his separation from a child he adored.
The years of meticulous and painstaking work in the back rooms of the CIA must have been extremely frustrating for someone
who saw himself as a hero and a patriot. The shock of having the CIA not only question the results of his study on Soviet
tank production but seriously consider the possibility that he was a Soviet agent surely contributed to the breakdown.

“To sum up: I think we are dealing with an all-too-classic case of someone whose mental health was fragile to begin with;
who was subjected to insupportable personal and professional pressures; who then cracked like a piece of old crockery when
the results of his work were questioned and his security clearance was withdrawn. For a great many of its employees the Central
Intelligence Agency is family, and Agency disapproval or outright rejection can result in the disintegration of the facade
the employee’s psyche has been barricaded behind. We have seen this kind of phenomenon before. We will unfortunately see it
again. It is an occupational hazard that goes with the terrain. Formulating a specific diagnosis for Sibley under the present
circumstances is extremely difficult. I am fairly certain, however, that an eventual diagnosis, made under clinical conditions,
will mention functional paranoia with delusions of persecution, delusions of grandeur and a vigorous death wish. I suspect
schizophrenia from the fact that Sibley appears to be able to meander in and out of the role of Nathan Hale at will.”

Snow handed the psychiatrist’s report back to Fargo. He looked at it, shook his head reflectively, tucked the report into
a manila folder marked “Eyes Only.” “Admit,” he said, “that you’re beginning to wonder.”