The Once and Future Spy (4 page)

The day grew heavier. A pall of dust kicked up by horses ahead of them on the Broad Way hung in the air, obliging Nate and
Stephen to mask their noses and mouths with bandannas. For a long time neither man said anything. The silence turned awkward.
Eventually Stephen broke it. “That was a god-awful thing we saw today.”

Nate fingered the hair mole on his neck. When he was a boy his friends had teased him about it, telling him it meant he would
one day be hanged. “A long life has a lingering death,” Nate replied through his bandanna, quoting the English version of
a Latin maxim he had memorized at Yale.

As near as I can figure, all this took place three weeks before Nate got involved in whipping the cat.

T
he first working session had gotten off to a relatively sluggish start. “The desk clerk offered me a room with a queen-size
bed,” the Admiral was explaining. “I naturally inquired about the view. ‘If you are into brick the view is terrific,’ he told
me. I am not inventing. ‘Into brick’ were his precise words. I let him know I was into park. He consulted one of those television
screens attached to a typewriter. ‘I can give you park,’ he said, ‘but no queen-size bed.’ ‘What is it with you and queen-size
beds?’ I asked him. He gave me as thorough a once-over as I have ever had. ‘Just playing a hunch,’ he said.”

“Into brick,” repeated the middle-aged woman whose face was masked by a veil. She clucked her tongue appreciatively.

“I am afraid park will cost you slightly more a day than brick,” Toothacher informed Wanamaker. “I trust you will feel the
additional money was well spent.”

“Brick, park, it’s all the same to me,” Wanamaker said impatiently. He noticed that the Admiral’s eyes were rimmed with red.
He’s been off carousing with Huxstep, he thought, but what he does with his free time is his business as long as he plugs
my leak. Wanamaker pushed a batch of dossiers across the felt to the Admiral. “For starters, here are the service records
of the twelve staffers assigned to Operations Subgroup Charlie. Mildred here is
my
man Friday. She was raised in Tehran, speaks Persian, Pashto, Avestan
and Kurdish fluently, can pronounce the Ayatollah’s name without an accent. Only ask her. She will get you whatever else you
feel you need.”

Mildred reached up and lifted her veil. “I am a navy brat,” she announced breathlessly. “I was weaned on stories about you.
Admiral Toothacher this. Admiral Toothacher that. For me, Eisenhower, Kennedy were minor figures in the Toothacher era. Frankly,
it is a thrill just to be in the same room with you.”

When it came to matters of seduction, the Admiral followed an old formula that in his experience seldom failed; he flattered
the beautiful people for their brains, the intelligent ones for their looks. ‘The pleasure is entirely mine,” he solemnly
informed Mildred. “I seldom get to work with someone who is as easy on the eyes as you.”

Mildred, flustered, let the veil drift back across the upper half of her face. “You are not at all what I expected,” she admitted.

“Dear lady,” the Admiral said, “dare I open that Pandora’s box and ask what you expected?”

Under her veil Mildred blushed. “I was anticipating pie.” She lowered her eyes, her voice. “But you are all meringue.”

Toothacher, absently shuffling service records, turned back to Wanamaker. “I will need to see the paper trail on the sensitive
operation you referred to.”

Once again a muscle over Wanamaker’s right eye twitched. He started torturing a paper clip. “The paper trail is thin.”

“Thin? How can that be?”

“As far as the sensitive operation is concerned, nothing in writing was ever circulated. The few scraps of paper dealing with
the operation never left this office.”

The Admiral studied his former man Friday through the middle lenses of his trifocals. “I will naturally need to know what
you are up to.”

Wanamaker’s face was utterly immobile. “That’s out of the realm of possibility.”

“I must be missing something,” the Admiral said sarcastically. “You obviously trust me or you wouldn’t have asked me to walk
back the cat for you.”

“I would trust you with my life,” Wanamaker said with such fervor only a fool would have doubted him. “But our sensitive operation
is another story.”

“It will make my task infinitely more difficult,” the Admiral noted.

Wanamaker shrugged a shoulder. Toothacher saw there was no point in insisting. “What about deadlines?” he asked. “I should
know if there is a clock ticking.”

“I suppose it won’t compromise the
what
if I tell you the
when
,” Wanamaker said. “For reasons I will not explain to you, we must execute the operation by mid-March or call it off.”

“How very poetic—I mean to have the Ides of March as a deadline. That doesn’t leave me much time.”

“One day short of four weeks,” said Mildred.

The Admiral favored her with an ironic smile. “Thank you.” He turned back to Wanamaker. “Of the twelve people in your subgroup,
how many are in on your little sensitive operation?” he asked.

Wanamaker ticked them off on his fingers. “There’s me. There’s Mildred here. There’s Parker. There’s Webb. That makes four.”

“The others don’t have an inkling of what’s going on?”

Wanamaker shook his head. “The others keep track of terrorist groups.”

Toothacher was a breath away from abandoning the whole thing. How could he be expected to plug a leak on an operation he didn’t
know anything about? Let Bright Eyes get another sucker to walk back his cat. Suddenly the idea of returning to Guantánamo,
to his wife of twenty-nine years who wheezed in her sleep, to the endless boredom of pinochle and happy hours, was too much
for him. He batted both eyes in Wanamaker’s direction. “Shouldn’t I at least know what code name your operation goes by?”

Wanamaker hesitated. He studied a hole a Schimmelpenninck had burned in the felt. He advanced an empty low-fat cottage cheese
container across an imaginary chess board, then took back the move. He shrugged a shoulder. He arched an eyebrow and lowered
it. He was obviously having a conversation with himself. Finally he said, “Do I have your word you won’t repeat it to a living
soul?”

The Admiral, who loved secrets the way other men loved women or money or fast cars, shivered in anticipation. “It is another
white hair that will go to the grave with me,” he promised.

“We call it Operation Stufftingle.”

“Stufftingle?”

“Stufftingle.”

T
he Weeder’s humorless deputy dog, Marvin Wesker, finished cleaning the IBM mainframe with the feather duster. “Would you be
annoyed if I vacuumed tomorrow?” he called across the loft to Silas Sibley, who was weeding through the night’s crop of printouts
at his worktable. “I’m already behind with my programs.”

“Vacuum tomorrow if you like,” the Weeder replied, “but get yesterday’s stuff shredded and down the chute before you attack
the new pile.”

“My dream in life,” Wesker muttered as he ran the reams of computer printout paper through the shredder, “is to work at an
operation with a classification so ordinary you can have a cleaning lady.” He replaced the empty burn baskets and settled
into the chair in front of his terminal, across the enormous worktable from the Weeder. “I don’t mind weeding,” he explained.
“I just don’t see myself vacuuming. I have a Ph.D. I speak four languages fluently. I have a working knowledge of three others.
I’m overqualified.”

Wesker fitted wire spectacles over his large ears. The eyeglasses magnified his eyes and made him look as if he were leering.
Grunting when he came across anything interesting, laughing out loud at times, he began reading through the pile of printouts
that had accumulated overnight. “Here’s a nugget,” he said at one point. “Senator Woodbridge talks baby talk when he makes
love.”

“We knew that,” the Weeder said.

“Well, lookee here. The wife of the cultural attaché, I. Krasnov, is having an affair with the wife of I. Kurchik, the electronics
technician.”

“That’s new. Add it to the pouch.”

The Weeder punched an instruction into the keyboard and brought a “menu” up onto the screen of his terminal. The computer
was listing new material under the heading Chinese Bin—intercepts from a pay telephone on the wall of a downtown Washington
Chinese restaurant. The telephone was next to a booth where Savinkov and some of his colleagues regularly ate dinner. The
Weeder typed in some call-up codes and waited. There was a whirring of tapes in the mainframe behind the partition in a corner
of the loft. Dialogue appeared on the screen. The Weeder copied off a Russian word he didn’t know, thumbed through a Russian-English
dictionary until he found it. “Ah, I see,” he said.

“What do you see?” Wesker asked.

“Remember Savinkov?”

“The Savinkov who is KGB? The one who talks Latin to his wife to throw off the microphones?”

“He’s arranging for one of his cipher clerks to sell us the February key to the embassy’s class seven messages. They’re obviously
going to put out something they want us to read.” The Weeder penned a note to himself on a yellow index card. “We’ll dress
that one up so it looks as if it came from a conventional intercept source. Our people will have to pay through the nose for
the key so as not to tip off the Russians that we know about the operation.”

“Then we’ll have to act on the information the Russians plant or they’ll suspect us of suspecting them of having planted it,”
Wesker said brightly.

The Weeder shook his head. “You’ve put it on backwards. We’ll have to be careful
not
to act on the information so the Russians won’t suspect us of reading their class seven codes.”

“I don’t get it,” Wesker said. “They’ll know we’re reading their class seven codes because they’re selling us the key to them.”

“But they don’t know that we know that they know we have the key.”

Wesker groaned. “I think I prefer vacuuming. I’m starting to program the chauffeur’s home phone this morning. Any suggestions?”

“Look for the usual,” the Weeder advised. “Odd words that could be codes for operations. Conversations in which nobody names
names. Any reference to Savinkov. Noun-rich sentence structure.”

Wesker groaned again. “Noun-rich sentence structure! What if they talk in verb-rich sentences to throw us off the scent?”
He lowered his voice to a whisper and stared in mock alarm at the telephone on the table between them. “What if they’re listening
to us listen to them?”

“That’s why we’re working out of a loft in SoHo,” the Weeder said. “Even if they had the capability to do what we’re doing,
it’d never occur to them to target this number. We’re just another mail-order house in another loft, as far as anyone knows.”

“A mail-order house with an IBM mainframe, a two-hundred-and-fifty-phone trunk line, a reinforced steel shield welded on the
inside of the door, an alarm system that goes off in some precinct house if anyone blinks after hours, and one of those new
State Department cipher safes that needs a combination
and
a key to open it.” Shaking his head, Wesker went back to his printouts.

The Weeder consulted the menu again, noticed new material under the heading of Farmer’s Almanac, which was the code he had
assigned to Wanamaker’s Operations Subgroup Charlie. He punched in the appropriate call-up codes. Snatches of conversation
began appearing on the screen. Two people were probably talking on the other side of the room from the telephone, which accounted
for the computer getting only bits and pieces.

“… feel bad about the American nationals who are there. Isn’t there some way …”

“… out of the question, Parker. The last thing we want to do is open the door to speculation …”

“… thinking out loud. I guess you’re …”

“… I know I’m …”

Wesker, across the table, swallowed a yawn. The only items that seemed to interest him were the ones with sexual overtones.
He loved tuning in on people making love; he claimed that reading what they said to each other during the act was more arousing
than watching. Right now all he had were people playing bridge. Two diamonds. Pass. Two hearts. Pass. Two no-trump. Pass.
Three no-trump. Noun-rich sentences could be boring as hell. He saw the Weeder peering intently at his screen. “Anything sexy?”
he asked hopefully.

The Weeder said, “Savinkov is jerking off the assistant cultural attaché. All I’m getting is moan-rich sentences.”

“You’re being ironic, right?” Wesker asked.

“Right.”

Another snatch of conversation flashed onto the Weeder’s screen.

“Admiral Toothacher this. Admiral Toothacher that … it is a thrill just to be in the same room with you.”

The Weeder read the line again to be sure he had gotten it right. What was Wanamaker’s old boss, Admiral Toothacher, doing
for Operations Subgroup Charlie? Could Wanamaker have brought him in to walk back the cat on the leak? It wasn’t a pleasant
thought. Toothacher was a formidable adversary. And he had an old score to settle with the Weeder. If the Admiral ever traced
the leak back to its source, he would skin Sibley alive and nail his hide to the Company wall.

“… paper trail.”

“… paper trail … thin … never left this office.”

“… naturally need to know …”

“… out of the realm …”

“… if there is a clock ticking.”

“… by mid-March or call it off.”

“How very poetic … to have the Ides of March as a dead …”

“… at least know what code name your operation …”

“… tingle.”

“… tingle.”

“… Stufftingle.”

The Weeder stared at the screen. He felt himself being sucked into the heart of a mystery. What had started out as a prank
had become a puzzle. The snatches of conversation raised more questions than they answered. What was the connection between
rods and hair triggers and wedges, and someone named Parker worrying about American nationals? And then there was the code
word
Stufftingle
. Chances were that Wanamaker had picked it out of the Company’s book of random code words. Still, it might be worth checking
into. When selecting a code word for an operation, people sometimes used one that had significance because it was easier to
remember.

The Weeder keyed his computer to print out what he had seen on the screen and erase the original from the tape. Then he programmed
it to scan Wanamaker’s future conversations for the word
Stufftingle
.

Wesker, at his terminal, caught sight of the Weeder staring off into space. “You look as if you lost your best friend.”

All he got for an answer was the frustrated grin of someone who knew less than he said.