Back Channel

by Stephen L Carter

  “Please, miss, make no effort to resist, or we shall be forced to restrain you.”

  The drunk stood at her other side, and one of the women who had been tending the pots guarded the side entrance. Margo looked around for Agatha, but saw only the decent and peace-loving citizens of Bulgaria, frowning their disapproval of the imperialist spy. Ignatiev led her out. A low, dark car was waiting, the driver already behind the wheel. The colonel got in the front. They sat Margo in the back, where the woman and the other man squeezed to either side of her. The car roared off into the cobbled darkness.

  ELEVEN

  How News Travels

  I

  In Washington, D.C., it was early evening. Harrington was in her office, paging through a fresh set of CIA serial reports on the interrogations of various minor defectors from the Soviet Union and its satellites. She needed more collateral. Gwynn was right. And not only Gwynn.

  “Are you sure you have control of this thing?” Lorenz Niemeyer had asked over drinks at the Mayflower the other night. He was in town for a seminar at Georgetown and had dropped in to see how she was doing. Pudgier than ever, he still projected the easy hauteur that had headwaiters mistaking him for royalty. “Because they’re already talking about you in the past tense.”

  That was his way of being clever. There were times when she found it difficult to believe that she had once been married to the man.

  But the powers that be had chosen their messenger well. Gwynn’s screeching Harrington could ignore; Lorenz Niemeyer still knew people. If he felt he had to warn her that her star was falling, it could only mean that Langley and the White House felt the same way. That was why she was pressing so hard for answers. And during the past few days, Harrington had more than once been sure she had found what she was looking for: a hint in the testimony of a former East German military attaché; a discrepancy in the confession of a former Hungarian prison guard; a peculiar omission in one unimportant answer by a former Czech communications officer. But each time, when Harrington tried to press further, she met a blank wall. Though there were clues everywhere, she was unable to piece them together.

  Harrington rubbed her eyes. Time for a break. She took herself off to the ladies’ room, washed her face, marveled at the pale, haggard woman glaring savagely from the mirror. She remembered, vaguely, having once been young.

  Her moment of weakness dispensed with, she returned to her desk, and her research. She had just opened a fresh serial—the deposition of the estranged wife of a deputy commissar in Polish counterintelligence—when Borkland knocked and stepped in without waiting to be invited.

  Harrington shut the folder with a snap and looked up … expectantly.

  “A report, finally? It’s been hours since GREENHILL left the resort.”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am. We have word from the Agency that GREENHILL has been arrested.”

  Harrington digested this. “Are they sure?”

  “They have it from the West Germans, who have an asset in the DS.”

  Another beat. “And her minder?”

  “Disappeared. She hasn’t checked in. Presumed arrested as well.”

  She nodded. “Very well. Keep me informed.”

  “Shouldn’t we—”

  “I believe you saw the same memorandum I did, Bill.” Her tone was bitter. “If GREENHILL is caught, we do nothing. Absolutely nothing.” She read the reproach in his expression. She softened. “Don’t worry. I’ll make some calls.”

  II

  And she did. She called Gwynn. She called Gwynn’s boss. She called Gwynn’s boss’s boss. She called her friends at Langley. She called the office of the President’s national security adviser.

  Nobody took her calls. Nobody returned them.

  Niemeyer was right. Her star was falling indeed, and it was Margo Jensen who would suffer as a result.

  Harrington moved to the window. Washington was enduring one of its misty gray drizzles, the sort where your umbrella is useless because the rain doesn’t so much fall as materialize. She lifted a hand to the heavy curtain, a war relic, as if to tug it closed, but hesitated. The gesture evoked a memory. The same wet fog had blanketed Vienna the night Carina disappeared. Carina was an agent Harrington had run during the war, a young Jewish woman who could pass for Aryan, and on the night in question, Harrington had waited in the wet, drafty safe house for hours past the appointed time. Carina never showed. She was never seen or heard from again, but it was easy to guess her fate.

  Margo reminded her of Carina, not in appearance but in manner: the same swift intelligence, the same determination not to be bested by her fears. The difference was that Carina had a personal stake in her war. As for Margo, Harrington had played to her ambition and her vanity, to say nothing of her simple curiosity, and, as always, had played well. Yet she felt a punishing guilt that had never plagued her during the war, when she sent children much younger than Margo into battle.

  TWELVE

  Unsung

  I

  Margo wasn’t sure what she had expected. A dank basement lined with shackles. Truncheons. Bright lights in her face. Even being marched to the parapets lining the roof: Tell us your mission, or we throw you off! Instead, she sat in a steamy office, the windows tightly shut. They had driven her to what Agatha called, half jokingly, the Forbidden City: a compound of broad, squat buildings on the outskirts of Varna, guarded by grim men in greatcoats. She was pretty sure she was on the first floor. The windows gave on a floodlit inner court where motorcycles and black ZIL automobiles were lined up as if waiting for the parade. For an hour or more they had left her alone with her fears, but her solitude was past. A blue-clad female guard stood near the door, at parade rest. She was not wearing a sidearm, but the deadness in her gaze said she could break Margo in half without a twinge of regret. The chair had a bad leg and wobbled every time Margo tried to get comfortable. The table was plain wood, and on the other side, the same colonel who had presided over her arrest offered foul cigarettes and a grape-flavored rakia, known locally as grozdova—“to calm your nerves, miss”—but she accepted only mineral water. She was frightened, certainly, but the fear seemed to sharpen her perceptions, and her mind was alert. She had talked her way out of trouble all her life, and was not about to turn teary and girlish.

  “You are Fischer’s girlfriend?”

  “No.”

  “His wife?”

  “No.”

  “His mistress?”

  “No.”

  “Then why do you keep going up to his room like a whore?”

  There was no malice in his tone. He was scarcely looking at her, and never once raised his voice. Mostly, he wrote in a small notebook made with cheap paper and cardboard covers. The cigarettes smelled very bad in the airless room.

  “We’re friends,” she finally said.

  “You have known him long?”

  “A year or so.”

  “What are his views about the socialist countries?”

  Relief flooded her. It was Bobby who was under investigation, not she. And although she had been raised never to take pleasure in another’s misfortune, she found herself gaining strength from the realization that she might not be in trouble after all.

  “We don’t discuss politics,” she said. “All he talks about is chess.”

  “And money, naturally. He is a capitalist. All capitalists are greedy, are they not?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “Because you are the descendant of enslaved Africans. You have no access to capital. Naturally, your people are forced to become the dregs of the West.”

  There was considerable truth in this observation, Margo admitted to herself, but she thought also of the old Negro families she knew, some of them with millions in the bank: the sort of family Nana expected her granddaughter to marry into. Few Americans, black or white, were aware of their existence. There was no reason to expect an officer of the Bulgarian secret police to know any better.

  “Naturally,” she said.


  She wondered whether she sounded sarcastic, but the colonel seemed pleased by her agreement. “Are you comfortable? Do you need anything?”

  “To contact the American consulate.”

  “We shall see.”

  A few more desultory questions, and then, without a word, the colonel closed the notebook and left. Margo was alone with the female guard, who had spoken not a word. The woman’s hair was drawn severely back, much like Agatha’s.

  “How long do I have to stay here?” Margo asked.

  The guard stared at a spot several feet above her prisoner’s head.

  “What’s your name?” she tried. “I’m Margo Jensen.”

  No answer.

  “Do you speak English?”

  Nothing. The woman was so still, she might have been a waxwork, and being alone with her was like a child’s nightmare.

  Margo turned toward the window. She sipped. The mineral water was warm and tasted metallic. Her hands were trembling again, and she wondered whether she should have accepted a little grozdova after all.

  To calm her nerves.

  She shut her eyes and listed fifteen reasons why she should have listened to Tom. She would be in Ithaca right now, just another student hoping to attend a decent law school. She wondered where Agatha was, and why she hadn’t ridden to the rescue. She wondered if they were going to send her to prison, and hoped Nana wouldn’t take it too hard.

  Suddenly the shivering was more than she could take. Her eyes blurred, and she wiped at them with her soiled sleeves. The guard looked on with the studied impassivity of someone who had seen it a hundred times. The green walls, badly plastered and badly painted, seemed to draw closer. The chips in the paint might have been fingernail marks, from the desperate scrabbling of some earlier prisoner. Margo knew that was insane, but all at once her brain wasn’t going where it was told. They were never going to let her out of this room.

  “Is it okay if I stand up?” she asked, voice shaking. “I have to stretch my legs.”

  Hearing no answer, she pushed the chair back and began to rise. The guard snarled at her in Bulgarian and made a furious gesture.

  Margo dropped back into her seat.

  The minutes ticked past. The heat was making her drowsy. She felt her eyelids droop and forced herself to sit straighter. She dozed anyway, and when she opened her eyes again, a different, younger man stood across the desk, arms folded as he studied her dispassionately.

  Margo managed a glare.

  “I demand to contact the consulate,” she said.

  The man said something to the guard, who marched out. Then the stranger stood across the desk from her, arms folded.

  “No,” he said, after a moment.

  “I have the right—”

  “Let me explain how this works, Miss Jensen. This is not America. You don’t have any rights. If I decide our conversation isn’t going the way I like, you might just cease to exist.”

  “You—you can’t just—”

  “My name is Fomin. I am a colonel in the Soviet intelligence apparatus. I have come a considerable distance to meet you, Miss Jensen. So let’s not waste time.”

  II

  Margo had thought she was frightened before, but Colonel Fomin’s idiomatic English came as a terrifying surprise. She was in the hands of the expert now.

  “You are a student of Niemeyer,” he announced, still not seated. In his expensive tweed suit, he would have looked right at home on the Cornell campus. “Then, all at once, you leave campus and come here. That means you’re probably a spy.”

  “That’s not true.” Panic. Deny, deny, deny.

  “Then why are you here?”

  “I came for the Olympiad. To watch the chess—”

  Fomin finally sat. He leaned his chin on his large hand, a pose that twisted his mouth into something small and cruel. “What are your orders from American Intelligence?”

  Down beneath the table, Margo was pinching the same fold of skin that had kept her calm during her interview with Borkland and Stilwell, but the trick wasn’t working, for her voice was rising in pitch, and she could not seem to stop its trembling. “I don’t have any orders. I don’t know anything.”

  “You are here as part of an American intelligence operation to determine what my government is offloading in Cuba. There is no point in denying this fact.” He had a brown folder under his arm. He laid it unopened on the table. “Margo Jensen. That’s your name.”

  “Yes.”

  “You are from a family of spies, then.” Her evident bewilderment amused him. “Please, Miss Jensen. There is no need for games. The American services are known to recruit family members of their officers. They have obviously done so in your case.”

  She was shaking her head. “I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”

  He flipped open the folder. Margo glanced down. The first few pages were in Cyrillic script. Fomin shoved them aside, withdrew a typewritten document in what looked like German.

  “You are a student of Niemeyer,” he repeated. “He was a spy in the war.”

  “He’s not family!”

  “No, he is not. However, according to the records of the Gestapo, he ran a réseau. Do you know this word? Réseau? You are studying French, are you not?”

  Margo shook her head. She was only a B student in French, and in the panic of the moment the language seemed a meaningless jumble.

  “Then I shall tell you,” said Fomin, like an impatient tutor. He stabbed out the cigarette. “In the war, réseau was used as a synonym for a network of spies. Niemeyer was part of what became known as Operation Jedburgh. He ran a réseau across occupied France and even into Germany. Some intelligence gathering, but mainly sabotage. Very dangerous work, Miss Jensen. Over time, the Gestapo captured several members of this réseau. Naturally, they talked. They implicated not only Niemeyer but also a French-Algerian engineer, a black African called Rouane. He was possibly the best bomb-maker in the Resistance. He built portable but very powerful devices that killed many German soldiers.” Fomin pulled something else from the folder—a photograph, which he kept facedown. But already she feared what it showed more than anything this man might do to her. “The Gestapo set a trap for this Rouane. He escaped, but a colleague of his, high in the French Resistance, was captured. Under intense interrogation, this man admitted that Rouane was actually an American agent.”

  He flipped the photograph over.

  The image was yellowed and creased, as if copied many times. A man was lying on the muddy ground, a German soldier standing above him. The man on the ground was Margo’s father. A bloody mess, but undeniably her father.

  “He was cornered a week later, outside a farmhouse near Nancy. He blew himself up with a grenade to avoid capture and interrogation.”

  III

  The hissing of the radiator seemed louder than ever, or perhaps it was her hearing that was off. Margo’s clothes were sticky with sweat. She wondered whether she could pinch herself and wake from the nightmare, but when it didn’t work, she picked up the photograph instead. Fomin made no effort to stop her. Her emotions warred with each other—anger versus pride, fear against joy—but beyond the turmoil, her rational faculty was less surprised than she would have imagined. Furious, yes; surprised, no. She twisted the photograph this way and that, matching the features to the snapshot in the top drawer of her dresser at Cornell. Well, yes. Maybe the chin a trifle more pointed? The hair a little thicker? And that ragged beard: where had that come from? But undeniably Donald Jensen. So this was it. The big secret nobody dared discuss. Daddy was a war hero. A spy who’d risked greatly to battle the Nazis, then blown himself to bits to protect other people. Well, of course, that was the kind of thing Nana would hide, she told herself bitterly: who’d want to burden a child with such knowledge? Let a daughter think well of her father? Heaven forbid!

  And Niemeyer, with his teasing. He knew her father, but wouldn’t say where. Then there was the hypothetical in class, the man
who walks into a bank, threatening to blow himself up … with a hand grenade. It was as though he’d been testing, to discover how much Margo knew about her father’s death. But just to come out and tell her directly—well, no, that wasn’t the great man’s style.

  Fomin seemed to read her thoughts. “They never told you,” he said, not unkindly. “Perhaps your grandmother herself does not know the entire truth. Perhaps Niemeyer was not sure that you are ready to hear. However, it is my understanding that you have lately been inquiring about his fate.” He slipped the photograph gently from her grasp, returned it to the folder. “These are from the archives of the Gestapo, captured by the Red Army when Berlin fell. They are accurate.”

  Margo felt an absurd burst of gratitude, exactly what the Soviet no doubt intended. She was furious at those who had deceived her, and was certain he was counting on that, too. She needed a moment to quiet the hot whirl of emotion. “Why are you telling me this?” she finally managed.

  “As I said, Miss Jensen, the Americans like to recruit from the families of their spies. Perhaps they believe that loyalty and perseverance are transmitted from generation to generation through our genes.”

  She hesitated. The hot worm of terror was still squirming, but somehow had been shoved back, back, back, as the pride had clawed its way to the surface. She didn’t have the whole story yet—she suspected she never would—but one thing she was sure of was that Colonel Fomin hadn’t told her about her father out of altruism. He expected her to feel betrayed by those she had trusted. He expected her fury at Professor Niemeyer. He expected her to confess everything.

  Instead, he had given her reason not to.

  “I don’t know if I should believe you,” she said.

  Fomin was unimpressed. “You believe me, Miss Jensen. You need to believe me. You cannot bear to think that your father, so brilliant and accomplished, was an unimportant transport corporal who died when his truck crashed in North Africa.”

  “I can bear it if it’s true.”

  “Come, Miss Jensen. You’re not a child. Which of us truly longs for truth? We all of us live for the lies that make life bearable. Joyful, if we are lucky. Given the choice between two stories about your father, do you really wish to reject the one in which he is an unsung hero of the war?” He put the folder aside, took up another. “I, too, performed tasks of a clandestine nature in the war against fascist aggression. I therefore respect your father and his sacrifice. He was a great hero. You should be proud to follow in his footsteps.” He turned a page. “You see now why I am interested in you. And why Niemeyer is interested. By the way, why did he take you to his office after class the week you left? Was it so that you could receive your instructions for this mission?”