The Once and Future Spy (28 page)

With that Nate, walking with as firm a step as the chains attached to his ankles permitted, left the tent. The sun was high
and incandescent. Squinting, Nate looked at it not as if he would never see it again but as if he had never seen it before.
Its warmth on his skin felt painfully delicious. A hundred or so artillerymen were drawn up in two formations on either side
of the gibbet. Several dozen civilians stood behind the artillerymen. Others, attracted by the sound of the kettledrum, were
wandering over from The Sign of the Dove; some still held tankards of ale in their hands. Cunningham prodded the condemned
man in the back with his fingertips. Nate took several deep breaths and started toward the gibbet, toward the noose dangling
from it.

Nate well remembered the execution he had witnessed on the bowling green, remembered the spittle dribbling from the quivering
lower lip of the condemned man, remembered thinking, If it ever comes to that, I swear to God I will never lose control of
myself. And he raised his chin, raised his head high, straightened his shoulders and continued on as if he had no reluctance
to get where he was going.

A dray had been parked directly under the gibbet. The fusilier with the waxed mustache took hold of Nate’s elbow. “God bless
you, boy,” he whispered under his breath as he helped him up onto the dray.

Nate obliged himself to look around. He saw the noose dangling inches from his head, felt an icy hand lightly caress his spine.
He raised his eyes to a pewter sky, to a pewter God. A moment more, he told himself, and it will be over. Only give me the
dose of courage I need to get through it with dignity. He struggled to keep his limbs from trembling, his heart from sinking
under the weight of pure fear. He let his eyes drift back to the crowd. He spotted Molly’s slave, John Jack, off to one side.
His face was a mask of agony. Seeing he had caught Nate’s eye, John Jack nodded vigorously and then brought a hand up to his
face to wipe away the tears. Nate nodded back once, turned his head, was relieved to see Captain Montresor standing stiffly
next to a rank of artillerymen. He nodded at Montresor. The captain lifted his cap in salute.

The crowd grew deathly quiet. Cunningham climbed onto the dray, fitted the noose over Nate’s head and tightened it around
his neck. Nate tried to speak. His mouth worked but no words emerged. Dear God in heaven, he thought. Help me. The code passage
from Addison’s play was on his tongue, the lines Cato recites when he sees the body of his son Marcus, and Nate opened his
mouth and flung them into the deathly still midmorning air. “How beautiful is death when earned by virtue! What pity is it
that we can die but once to serve our country!”

The beat of the kettledrum quickened. Cunningham jumped off the dray and motioned to the two fusiliers holding the traces.
They
started forward, pulling the dray with them. Nate tiptoed along the floorboards to keep his footing, then ran out of dray
and dangled from the noose. A muted sigh, an exhaling of many breaths, came from the crowd as Nate danced at the end of the
cord, which was slowly strangling him. The fusilier with the waxed mustache started to wrap his arms around the jerking knees
of the hanging man but Cunningham, smiling cruelly, waved him off.

Here is a post scriptum:

J
OHN JACK CAME BACK FROM
Manhattan barely able to speak. Gradually Molly pried the details out of him. He had seen the shadows of birds racin’ ‘cross
the ground, had looked up, but there wasn’t no birds, he told her, there was jus’ Mister Nathan dancin’ at the bitter end
of a rope. After a god-awful long while the dancing it stopped. Poor Mister Nathan was left to twist gently in the breezes
coming in off the river.

For a while Molly, who had dreamed the night before that life was stirring in her womb, tried to sob; but a voice in her warned
that if she started she might never be able to stop. Later, beyond tears, numbness set in. She dipped her quill into the inkwell
and wrote on a blank page of her diary:

F
argo telephoned Snow from Washington every day. All he ever reached was her answering machine. “The doctors are quite pleased
with the way things are proceeding,” he recorded one day. “Your friend is eating well. He’s even put on some weight. I have
to tell you, Snow, that they’ve diagnosed schizophrenia, but there have been breakthroughs in the treatment of schizophrenia.
He’s in very professional hands. There is no reason under the sun to be pessimistic about the outcome of therapy.”

“He’s getting along just fine, Snow,” Fargo reported to the machine another time. “All things considered, he’s in good spirits
and eager to get started with his analysis. Everyone is extremely hopeful.”

A third message from Fargo said, “He’s under sedation, naturally, but the doctors think they can gradually decrease the dose
as therapy proceeds.”

The next time Fargo phoned he found a message addressed specifically to him on the answering machine. “If this is Fargo,”
Snow’s recorded voice challenged, “tell me this: Have you seen him with your own eyes?”

When Snow played back the tape she could hear Fargo exhaling in frustration. “The answer is no, I haven’t seen him with my
own eyes. But I’ve talked to people who have-his assistant, Marvin Wesker, for one. That buddy of his from his college days,
Roger Wanamaker, went out to visit him. The Attorney General has taken a personal
interest in the case. He’s spoken on the phone with the doctor in charge. If everyone is lying about Sibley, then our government
is a lie, our whole system is a lie.” Fargo hesitated. Snow could visualize him shaking his head in annoyance. Finally he
spoke again. “I hope this convinces you.”

It didn’t. Snow felt trapped between two persuasive truths. She needed to know which truth was invented and which was real.
The next day she took a bus into Cambridge and went directly to the Widener Library. She still had a valid library card from
the time, a year before, when she had audited a course on the history of photography. She decided to begin with the word
Kabir
.

There was nothing under Kabir in
The New York Times Index
. On a hunch she checked a recent guidebook on Iran. The index listed “Amir Kabir College, formerly the Polytechnic College
of Tehran University.” Snow went back to
The New York Times Index
, found a listing for the Polytechnic College. There had been an article on it in the
Times
in January 1982, and another in March 1984. Snow noted the dates and the page numbers, signed out the microfilms and threaded
the first one through the viewing machine. She flipped through the newspaper until she came to the article. It described nervousness
in the American intelligence community over rumors circulating in the Middle East that the Polytechnic College had been transformed
into a nuclear research center. The second article was more specific. It cited informed sources as saying that the college’s
five-megawatt research reactor was believed to be operating twenty-four hours a day. The sources speculated that the reactor’s
fuel load of five kilograms of enriched uranium might one day be diverted to nuclear weapon production.

Kabir, at least, was not a figment of Silas’s imagination.

Tracking down
Stufftingle
proved more difficult. The librarian shrugged bony shoulders, shook spring-shaped locks of hair, decided that all she could
suggest was for Snow to go through the indexes of books on the subject. She hoped Snow wasn’t pressed for time because there
would be hundreds. She gave Snow the appropriate Dewey decimal number off the top of her head. Snow installed herself at a
table in the stacks, carried over an armful of books on atomic energy, nuclear fission, the Los Alamos project, and related
material, and began checking the indexes for the word
Stufftingle
. She kept at it all morning and half the afternoon. She was beginning to have
difficulty focusing when she opened a thin book entitled
Secret
, by Wesley W. Stout. She almost didn’t believe it when she came across a reference to Stufftingle in the index. She thumbed
excitedly through the book to page thirty-nine. The words
Oak Ridge
and
burlesque secret document
jumped out at her. She read on:

They are taking plumscrate, raw plumscrate mind you, and putting it into ballisportle tanks … Next, this is taken to the sarraputing
room … At this point, of course, is when they add thungborium, the ingredient which causes the entire masterfuge to Knoxify.
… At 12:20 on the third Tuesday night of each month, 800 men known as shizzlefrinks, because their brains have been siphoned
from their heads, are lined up in single file, each given two ingots of ousten-stufftingle (name of the finished product)
and away they march …

Not only was there a Kabir College. There was a Stufftingle too!

Snow caught an evening plane to Washington, installed herself in a hotel at the airport and checked the telephone directory.
There was no one in it named Toothacher, either in Washington proper or the surrounding countryside. She tried to remember
the name of Silas’s assistant but it wouldn’t come to her. Snow’s mother had claimed that the best way to remember something
was to think about something else. Following her mother’s advice, Snow lay down on the double bed and closed her eyes and
concentrated on Silas. She was able to duplicate his voice in her head, the way it lingered over syllables at the end of a
sentence when he wasn’t sure of himself, the way the words came in a rush when he felt he had something to prove. She remembered
the cord burns on his palms, remembered telling him, “Your life lines have been erased.”

Snow sat up abruptly. “Marvin Wesker,” she murmured. “That’s his name.” She grabbed the telephone directory and leafed through
to the
W
?’s. Sure enough there was a listing under Wesker, M. She scratched the address on a notepad next to the phone and bolted
from the room.

Three quarters of an hour later she found herself ringing the doorbell of a fourth-floor apartment near the Buffalo Bridge
at Q Street. The sound of loud music came from behind the door. The volume was turned down. The door opened the width of the
safety chain. A young
man with a thin, humorless face and enormous ears with wire spectacles hooked over them said, “Yeah?”

“You don’t know me,” Snow began. “My name is Matilda Snowden. I’m a friend-a good friend, actually-of Silas’s.”

Wesker let his gaze drift from her head to her feet and then work its way back up to her head again. He clearly liked what
he saw because he cracked a smile and announced, “Any friend of Silas, et cetera, et cetera. Come on in.”

He motioned her to a sofa, asked if she could do with a drink, and when she said no thank you, settled into a chair facing
her. “Do you recognize the music?” Wesker asked, nodding toward a tape deck in a bookcase. “It’s a golden oldie, ‘California
DreaminV The Mamas and the Papas. If I can’t get you something to drink, what
can
I do for you?”

“I was told that you’d been to see Silas.”

“Who gave you that tidbit of information?”

“A friend of mine who works in the Justice Department. His name is Fargo. He said he’d talked to you on the phone.”

“I may have talked to a guy from the Justice Department,” Wesker said carefully. “But I never told him I’d seen Silas. I told
him I’d been out to the, eh, hospital.”

“You went out to the hospital and you didn’t see Silas?”

“Hey, I don’t want to get you into trouble or anything, but I’m going to have to report that you came around asking about
Silas like it is.”

“Report me if you have to. It won’t change anything. How come you didn’t see Silas?”

“He’d had a bad night. He was under sedation. The doctor said it wasn’t such a good idea to visit him right then.”

“Did the doctor tell you what’s wrong with Silas, Mr. Wesker?”

“Only that he was sick.”

“Sick?”

Wesker fidgeted uncomfortably in his chair. “Sick in the head,” he said. “Listen, why don’t you go and see him yourself?”

Snow said, “They won’t tell me where he is.”

“Hey, if you’re really a friend of his you know who he works for, huh? And who he works for, its board of directors so to
speak, they get very jumpy when one of their employees has a more or less nervous breakdown. It’s no state secret that the
Company has state
secrets which it has got to protect, huh? If it will make you feel any better I can tell you the hospital is as modern as
they come. I’m thinking of going out again the weekend after next weekend. I’m on the list of people who are allowed to visit.
That’s because there’s nothing Silas can say that I’m not cleared to hear. You want me to give him a message?”

‘Tell him-” Snow had a sudden thought. “Have you worked with Silas a long time?”

“I can’t talk about work.”

“Can you say whether you worked here in Washington or in New York? Surely that’s not a state secret.”

Wesker blinked rapidly but didn’t reply.

Snow tried a different approach. “Silas told me what you and he did.”

Wesker shook his head. “He oughtn’t to have done that. The Company gets all hot under the collar if we talk about what we
do with anyone who’s not cleared to listen.”

Snow insisted, “I have to know if he was telling the truth.”

Wesker arched his eyebrows as if to say he was genuinely sorry he couldn’t help her.

“Look, I’ll tell you what he told me,” Snow said, “and you keep looking at me if you can confirm it.”

“I can’t do that-”

Snow decided to use Fargo’s version of the truth. “Silas said he worked with computers,” she began.

Wesker continued to look into her eyes.

“Something about doing a computer study of the serial numbers of a certain kind of equipment.”

Wesker looked at her, blinking uncomfortably.

“Of tanks.” When Wesker didn’t look away she ventured, “Of Russian tanks, actually.”

Wesker shifted his gaze to one side. Snow said, “Oh!”

“Hey, don’t take my looking away for anything. You made the rules of your little game, but I didn’t say I would play. I can’t
divulge information on what we do. No way.”

Snow smiled in appreciation. “I understand.”

Wesker caught her smile. “I don’t think you do.” He laughed nervously. “For all I know you could be a Russian spy. So don’t
go away thinking you know more than when you came. I just listened politely.”

“Right,” Snow agreed. “And thanks.”

“Oh, Jesus. Don’t for Christ’s sake thank me. I didn’t do anything.”

At the door Snow turned to ask a question. “Did Silas ever mention an Admiral Toothacher to you?”

Wesker shook his head stubbornly. “Wild horses couldn’t get me to answer any more of your questions.”

Snow lay awake in her bed that night sorting through possibilities. Kabir College existed. So did Stuff tingle. Wesker seemed
to say that the story about Silas studying serial numbers of Soviet tanks was phony, which meant that the story Silas told
about running an eavesdropping operation was true. And someone did try to kill Silas by bringing down a building on his head;
Snow had been there, had seen it with her own eyes, even if she hadn’t seen the Admiral and his two colleagues. Which meant
that Silas had been telling the truth all along. She had been a fool to get in touch with Fargo, to believe the story they
had cooked up about Silas being mentally disturbed; she would never forgive herself for delivering him into their hands. Silas
was probably in a “hospital” all right, but it was no accident that Wesker hadn’t been allowed to see him. Silas had probably
had a bad night-being quizzed by Company interrogators working in relays. A terrible thought occurred to Snow. They would
have gotten their hands on the material Silas left in the dead drop, would be convinced he was a Russian spy. The Company’s
board of directors, as Wesker called it, couldn’t afford to accuse Silas publicly and let him come to trial; couldn’t take
the risk of Silas talking about Stufftingle in open court.

Oh God, she thought, Silas would never be allowed to leave the hospital alive!

What if she were to go to the newspapers and tell the whole story? No, that wouldn’t work. The Company would trot out evidence
that Silas Sibley was stark raving mad or better still, that no one with that name worked for it; would talk the newspapers
out of running the story; would even arrange things so that Snow herself wound up in that little “private” hospital of theirs.
And that would be that.

On the other hand, if she could get someone who knew about Stufftingle, who knew about the attempts on Silas’s life, to help
her, she could try and strike a deal with the Company. If the board of directors could find it in their hearts to let Sibley
go free, Silas and she would forget Stufftingle ever existed, would disappear.

But who could help her? And why would he help her?

A name came to her lips. She pronounced it out loud. “Admiral Toothacher!”

Silas had once followed the Admiral, had discovered him burning the candle at both ends, after which the Company had preferred
to quietly retire Toothacher rather than wash its dirty linen in public. If she could follow the Admiral and catch him burning
that candle, it would give her the leverage she needed to talk Toothacher into helping her, into helping Silas.