The Once and Future Spy (5 page)

T
he Weeder rang up his physicist friend from a pay phone that night. “Am I interrupting anything?” he demanded.

“If I said yes, would you hang up?” Early asked.

“I’d talk faster.”

“Talk fast, then.”

“Does the word
Stufftingle
ring any bells?”

Early laughed into the phone. “You’ve been robbing graves again.”

The Weeder force-fed some quarters into the slot and pressed his ear to the receiver.

“You could count the people who recognize that word today on the fingers of one hand,” Early was saying. “Back in the early
1940s we had a gaseous diffusion plant at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, that produced the enriched uranium which went into the wedges
of the first atomic bombs. One of the physicists working on the project circulated a spoof describing the finished product
produced at Oak Ridge as
ousten-stufftingle
, and the people who produced it as
shizzlefrinks
. It got quite a laugh at the time. Hello? Are you still on the line, Silas?”

“I’m here.”

“Ha! The moral of the story is that you aren’t the only one to go around armed with a sense of humor.”

W
esker had finished shredding the chaff and was pouching the wheat for the courier, who was due in fifteen minutes. “Funny
about Savinkov having hemorrhoids and complaining about it in Latin,” he was saying. “Somehow you’d think a KGB station chief
would be above that kind of thing.”

“Hemorrhoids or Latin?”

“Hemorrhoids, obviously.”

“Hemorrhoids are not a character flaw,” the Weeder pointed out.

“You’re being ironic again, right?”

“Right. Why don’t you pack it in for the day,” the Weeder added. “I’ll zip up the pouch.”

Wesker began slipping into a vast belted overcoat before the Weeder finished the sentence. He hooked enormous yellowish designer
sunglasses over his floppy ears, pulled on a fore-aft Russian astrakhan and lowered the ear flaps so that they dangled over
his jaw like medieval armor. He leered at his reflection in the mirror above the sink and, apparently satisfied with what
he saw, lowered his head and charged the armor-plated door. He punched with his fist at the button that sent electricity flowing
to the lock. The door sprang open and Wesker disappeared.

The Weeder, who thought of himself as an
artiste manqué
, switched to a graphics program on his computer and began toying with the stylus. He drew a mushroom-shaped cloud coming
out of the mouth
of someone with a broken nose that had more than a passing resemblance to Wanamaker’s. Inside the cloud he wrote, in an elegant
gothic script, the words
Stufftingle
and
Ides of March
.

He glanced at the wall clock; the courier would be there any moment. The Weeder depressed a key. In an instant the high-speed
laser printer had spit out the hooked nose and the mushroom cloud. The Weeder put on his fleece-lined gloves, tore off the
printout and folded it into a plain white envelope. With a red grease pencil he printed in a child’s handwriting:

R. Wanamaker

Operations Subgroup Charlie

Special Interagency Antiterrorist Working Group (SIAWG)

A mischievous grin installed itself on the Weeder’s lips as he slipped the letter into a second envelope, which he sealed
and addressed to Company Mail Room—Classified Material for Eyes Only Distribution. That meant the letter would be put into
Wanamaker’s hot hands. He would go straight up the wall when he opened it. He’d swallow the soggy Schimmelpenninck that bobbed
on his lower lip. He’d have a coughing fit, turn blue, experience chest pains, have difficulty breathing. An ambulance would
be summoned. A mask would be fitted over his mouth and broken nose. Oxygen would be supplied. With any luck, last rites would
be administered.

Images of disaster multiplied in the Weeder’s head. It occurred to him that waiting all those years was what made it so sweet.
Revenge was a meal that tasted best cold.

W
anamaker took Webb aside and lectured him about rank having its privileges. Webb swallowed his pride and moved out of his
office, doubling up with Parker so that the Admiral would have a place to hang his hat. Toothacher personally presided over
the purification of Webb’s cubbyhole of an office. “Kindly vacuum under the desk,” he instructed the black maintenance man
who turned up in response to his urgent requests. “It might not be a bad idea to shake the rug out the window. Better still,
take it with you when you leave. The ashtrays, the books on the shelves, the magazines on the coffee table can also go. The
coffee table too. I don’t drink coffee. And kindly don’t forget to wash the windows and sterilize the desk top.”

“Wouldn’t it be simpler if I removed the desk with the coffee table?” the maintenance man inquired with a straight face.

“If you can replace it with a new one I would leap at the offer,” Toothacher cooed. “If not, moisten a cloth with some sort
of detergent and scrub it squeaky clean.”

The Admiral eventually settled warily into the only chair left in the room, scraped it up to the sterilized desk and started
sorting through his notes. When Wanamaker had described the paper trail as “thin” he had been exaggerating. In fact it was
almost nonexistent. The handful of written references to “rods,” “hair triggers,” “wedges,” “Stufftingle” and “Ides” had never
traveled beyond the four incredibly
soiled walls of Wanamaker’s inner sanctum, or so Wanamaker would have him believe. Wanamaker, Mildred, Parker and Webb at
various times had access to the paper trail; each scrap of paper in Wanamaker’s battleship-gray safe bore the initials of
anyone who read it. That seemed as good a place to start as any.

The Admiral pulled a single sheet of typing paper from the middle of the pile in a drawer (never having been touched by human
hands, it would be relatively germ free) and began to compose a chart. Down the left-hand side of the paper he entered the
names of the four people involved in Stufftingle. Across the top he listed the dates at which various elements of the operation
(rods, hair triggers, wedges, Stufftingle, Ides) had fallen into place. Across the bottom he put the dates the love letters
had been delivered into Wanamaker’s clammy hands. Then he attempted to cross-check to see who had known what when. The result
was disappointing. Parker, a specialist on getting people and things across Mideast borders undetected, had joined the Stufftingle
team eighteen months before; he had known, according to the paper trail, about rods and hair triggers and wedges, but had
never been let in on Ides. Mildred had been on sick leave (“female problems,” according to Wanamaker) when wedges, whatever
they were, became operational. Webb, who had worked in the field with the anti-Khomeini Iranians before being posted back
to Washington, had slipped a disc and been out of action when the element known as hair triggers was introduced.

Wanamaker, on the other hand, had his initials on every scrap of paper, which meant that he was familiar with all the pieces.
Which was to be expected since he was, after all, in charge of the operation. Was it possible that Wanamaker was writing the
love letters to himself? The Admiral had seen odder things in his day.

Toothacher set aside his chart and placed the first of the four thick dossiers in his in-basket on the desk. Perhaps the key
to who had leaked Stufftingle was to be found not in the paper trail but in the biographies of the four principal players.
One of them might be jealous of Wanamaker or hold a grudge against him for a slight, real or imagined. The Admiral would pore
over the dossiers to see which of the four had crossed paths before. He would pry loose rocks and search for worms of treachery—the
tiny discrepancy, the microscopic incongruity that would help him unravel the mystery. Insofar as there was only one truth,
and it was knowable, he was determined to discover it.

M
ildred looked up from a thick pile of Mideast intelligence summaries and watched as Huxstep ran the magnetic head back and
forth over the felt that covered the conference table. His shirtsleeves were rolled up to his biceps, revealing part of a
patriotic tattoo on each arm—”begun to fight” on his right arm, “Give me liberty or” on his left arm. Huxstep’s gestures were
systematic. Mildred liked men who were systematic, who didn’t leave anything to chance. Out of the blue she asked him, “Is
it true you can do funny things with numbers?”

Huxstep kept his eyes glued to the needle on the meter. “Test me out?”

Mildred pulled a pocket calculator from a purse that resembled a carpetbag and punched in some numbers. “Multiply 123456789
by 987654321,” she said.

“That’s a piece of cake,” Huxstep said. “The answer’s 121932631-112635269.”

Mildred glanced at her calculator. The window only accepted nine digits. She saw he had gotten the first nine numbers right.
“What’s your trick?” she asked.

“I don’t got a trick,” Huxstep insisted. “I seen right off if you multiply 987654321 by 81 you get 80,000,000,001, then multiply
123456789 by 80,000,000,001, which is child’s play, and divide the answer by 81.” Huxstep started to laugh under his breath,
but
stopped abruptly when he spotted the needle vibrating. “I got a bite!” he called.

The Admiral and Wanamaker, working at Wanamaker’s desk, glanced across the room.

Huxstep pinpointed the spot with sweeps of the magnetic head, then gingerly lifted the cloth and felt around with his fingertips.
“Fuck,” he muttered. He held up a deformed paper clip.

“Keep at it,” the Admiral ordered. He turned back to Wanamaker. “I traced the letter to the Company mail room, which is pretty
much like tracing it to the Washington, D.C., central post office.”

Wanamaker grunted; he had hoped for more. “That’s a dead end, then.”

“Not quite a dead end,” Toothacher said. Wanamaker perked up, a smirk of anticipation pasted on his pudgy lips.

At the conference table, Mildred was still trying to strike up a conversation with Huxstep. “You are obviously a jack-of-all-trades.”

“I am a jackass-of-all-trades,” Huxstep corrected her, his eyes on the meter.

“How so?” Mildred asked.

“Well, I drive the Admiral around, don’t I? I take in, I take out, sandwiches, messages, burn bags. I organize things so the
Admiral isn’t bored nights. Between chores I debug offices. But I don’t really enjoy my work. I do everything badly.”

Mildred lifted her veil suggestively. Her voice seemed to lap against the conference table as if it were a shore. “If something
is worth doing, it may be worth doing badly. What do you enjoy? What do you do well?”

Huxstep surveyed the upper half of her face. Little lines fanned out from the corners of her eyes. Invisible eyebrows, plucked
down to the bone, arched in curiosity. “Before I joined the Navy,” he said, “I worked in another circus—a real one. I did
arithmetic tricks. People would shout out problems and I’d solve them in my head. Wednesdays I filled in for the fire breather—I’d
swig kerosene and light a match and singe the eyebrows off the ones who looked at me the wrong way.”

Mildred, impressed, gushed, “You can breathe fire?”

Huxstep’s face screwed up into a crooked smile. “Aside from numbers, what I like, what I do well, is violence.”

Mildred’s tongue flickered at her upper lip. She snapped the veil
back over her eyes. “
Chacun à sa faiblesse
,” she said in a tone husky with sensuality.

“I don’t speak nothing but English,” Huxstep muttered. “Even that the Admiral don’t think I speak good.”

Across the room the Admiral was telling Wanamaker, “Whoever composed these love letters works for the Company. How else could
he—or she—have gotten access to the interoffice pouching system?”

Wanamaker shook his head in bewilderment. “Who? Who? Who? Who? Who?”

“Let’s come at the problem from another direction,” the Admiral suggested. “Let’s concentrate on motive. Why? Why? Why? Why?
Why?”

“You have an idea?”

“It could be you who is sending these love letters.”

This took Wanamaker by surprise. His expression that was expressionless evaporated. “Me? Why would I do it?”

“You might be trying to create an excuse to cancel an operation that you have no confidence in, or stomach for, in a way that
wouldn’t indicate to your handlers in the Company hierarchy any lack of nerve.”

“If I wanted to cancel, I’d cancel. Period. My reputation isn’t riding on this.”

“Or it could be any of your people—Mildred over there, or Parker, or Webb. One of them may have qualms, moral or operational
in origin, and be trying to head off Stufftingle without looking like a left-leaning card-carrying fellow-traveling wimp.”

Wanamaker thought about this for a moment. Presently he said, “All three consider me a closet middle-of-the-roader. They are
rabid. What we are doing doesn’t go far enough for them. So that’s not the answer.”

The Admiral tried another tack. “Whoever is sending you these love letters could just as well be sending them to the Company
Director, or the White House, or
The Washington Post
, with little arrows pointing to Operations Subgroup Charlie, SIAWG. But he’s not doing that. He’s sending them to you.”

“Which means?”

“Which could mean he’s not at all sure what rods and hair triggers and wedges really mean and is just doing it to annoy you.
Or he has an inkling and is trying to head you off without bringing the roof
down on the Company.” The Admiral turned to stare at what sky he could see through the grime of the windows. “Or all of the
above,” he said more to himself than to Wanamaker. “Or none of the above. Or any combination thereof.”

At the conference table Huxstep started packing the magnetic head and the meter into a black Plexiglas case. “If there’s a
bug in this room,” he called across to Toothacher, “I’ll eat it.”

Parker, a sour-faced, sour-breathed man in his early forties, pranced into Wanamaker’s inner sanctum carrying the leather
interoffice mail pouch. He pulled an envelope from it and dropped it onto the desk between Wanamaker and the Admiral. Printed
on the outside of the envelope, in a child’s unsteady scrawl, was

R. Wanamaker

Operations Subgroup Charlie

Special Interagency Antiterrorist Working Group (SIAWG)

Mildred, who had come up behind Parker, stared down at the letter in horror. Wanamaker, expressionless, slit it open with
a finger and, using a soiled handkerchief, extracted a sheet of computer printout paper. He flattened it on the desk. Inside
a mushroom-shaped cloud, coming out of the mouth of someone with a broken nose, were the words
Stufftingle
and
Ides of March
.

“He knows the code name of our operation,” Wanamaker moaned.

“He knows the date too,” Parker noted.

“And there are no bugs, no microphones in the room,” Mildred said in total bafflement.

“None,” Huxstep called across from the conference table. “Not one.

“This is getting curiouser and curiouser,” the Admiral admitted.

“Curiouser and curiouser,” Huxstep muttered, loud enough for Toothacher to overhear. “And the Admiral accuses me of not speaking
the King’s English!”