“It would only have been a few minutes,” said Harrington as they stepped off.
“What?”
“In the sardine can, Alfred. We’d only have been there a few minutes.”
He cocked an eyebrow as if suspecting insolence. “And why’s that, Doctor? Would they be whisking us off to some other location? One of the President’s secret hideaways, perhaps?”
“No. But the shelter’s only four levels down. If this had been a real attack, we’d be dead.”
At the entrance to his suite, he turned. His expression was oddly sheepish. “I know you think I’m against you, Dr. Harrington. I’m not. I argued your case in committee.”
And next week, on Halloween, the Easter Bunny is coming down my chimney with presents, she said—but not aloud.
“I’m hoping that you’ll be staying in town,” he continued. “So that we can call on you from time to time. If we need counsel and advice.”
She smiled. Coldly. “What you’re saying is, you’re afraid of my ex-husband, because even now he has better contacts than you do.”
Gwynn began to stutter an angry response, but Harrington was already striding down the hall. She marveled afresh at her own aplomb. She had no children to fear for, and no family other than a sister she never saw. Down in the shelter, waiting to die, all her thoughts had been of GREENHILL.
THIRTY-SEVEN
A Brief Series of Errors
I
Margo was attending to her makeup when Patsy knocked impatiently. Margo groaned. Patsy, on the rare evenings she spent at home, practically lived in the bathroom, and tended toward annoyance at ever having to wait. This was the second evening in a row when Margo, to use Nana’s argot, had gotten herself dolled up. No doubt Patsy considered her a kindred spirit. Again the fiction: her roommates knew she was getting dolled up for somebody, even if they hadn’t guessed who.
“One minute,” Margo called. She had never been much good with lipstick. She didn’t understand how some women applied it so fast.
“It’s the phone, Margo. It’s for you.”
She rubbed her forehead. Of all the times …
The only phone in the apartment hung on the kitchen wall above the counter; and, like the counter, it was yellow and oddly clammy. Margo didn’t like touching it, and in fact had used it only once, to tell Nana where she was staying and what the number was. Patsy was holding the receiver out, jiggling it vaguely in Margo’s direction.
“I like his voice,” the Californian whispered with a saucy wink. She disappeared into her bedroom, but Hope continued to sit at the small table, reading her book.
Margo turned her back and hunched over, in the pretense that the conversation would be harder for her roommates to overhear. She said, “Hi, honey,” and he said, “Hi, honey,” back. She said she was sorry she hadn’t called, and he said he was thinking about her, and she said something equally insipid. She wondered what it meant when you and your boyfriend ran out of things to talk about. Just weeks ago, she had thought herself the luckiest girl in the world to have a brilliant young man like Tom Jellinek at her side. She had sat willingly at his feet as he discoursed on mathematics or politics or whatever he chose at any given moment to dispense. It occurred to her now that Tom, for all his gentle sweetness, rarely asked her opinion.
On anything.
“So—what did you do today?” he asked.
“I was at work.”
“And what are you doing tonight?”
Her breath caught. She knew he heard the sound, and probably was wounded by it. “Going out. Seeing friends.”
Tom digested this. “Anybody I know?”
“I don’t think so. No.”
“Try me.”
She held the phone away from her ear. She sensed without looking that Hope was no longer reading, but studying her instead.
“I need you to trust me,” Margo finally said, voice pitched low, although Hope no doubt could hear. “Will you do that for me? Trust me?”
Even at a distance of three hundred miles, Tom came back hard and fast. “Are you doing something that requires my trust?” She said nothing. “I’m only asking because I care about you,” he hurried on. “Does whatever you’re doing have to do with what happened in Bulgaria?”
Oh, no! Not on an open phone line!
“No, of course not.”
“Then why did you have to go to Washington so fast?”
“The job just became available. I didn’t hear about it until Friday.”
“But you left on Thursday. You have to admit, it’s pretty strange. Tuesday you stand me up for our study date, Thursday you stand me up for coffee, and the next day you have an internship in Washington? That’s one heck of a coincidence.”
He was making it worse, and she had no way to stop him, because he didn’t know about telephones and walls and cars, and how they could listen to you anywhere except the surf.
“Honey, look. I’ll be back in a few weeks. Can all this wait until then? Please?”
Again he was a long time answering. “I don’t like all these secrets,” he said.
“There aren’t any secrets,” she lied. She felt Hope’s judgmental gaze boring at the back of her head. “But there are things that are hard to talk about on the telephone.”
“Is that a fancy way of saying you don’t want to see me any more?”
Margo began to bristle. “Tom, please. Not everything is about you.”
“Then who’s it about?”
“Please, honey. When I get back.”
They rang off inconclusively.
II
Again the Yenching Palace. Again Fomin. Tonight the Soviet was brusque to the point of rudeness. He had anticipated Kennedy’s message, and had his reply ready. It was short. And angry.
Margo’s anger was rising, too, but she had yet to find a target her own size. She needed Melody Davidson. She needed poor Phil Littlejohn. She needed someone she could defeat with a double dactyl. But with Fomin and Khrushchev on one side, and Bundy and the President on the other, she was a pygmy in the land of the giants.
Only she wasn’t. That’s what Margo kept telling herself as she left the restaurant with the message and headed for the bus stop. This time she would ride all the way down to the Federal Triangle to meet her driver. She wasn’t a pygmy, she whispered into the night wind that whipped her long coat around her ankles. She was Donald Jensen’s daughter, and they needed her. She hadn’t sought out her role as intermediary, but she wasn’t involved in the negotiation merely on the sufferance of the powerful men around her.
She was here because they needed her.
III
Bundy was in his office when his secretary buzzed. He ignored her. He was studying Nate Esman’s report. Although the SANTA GREEN subscription list ran to forty-seven names, only nine people actually possessed enough information to have blown the operation. Of those, only four knew the actual identities of both GREENHILL and GREENDAY, the cryptonym for Agatha Milner. Someone could, of course, have alerted the Soviets without having that knowledge, but the precision with which the DS acted strongly suggested that they had hard information. Not even Bundy himself, who had approved the mission, had been privy to their identities. The four who had complete knowledge were Harrington; her boss, Gwynn; her assistant, Borkland; and, from the Agency, Jerry Ainsley, who had been the point man in Bulgaria.
Borkland he decided to exclude. In the wake of Harrington’s forced retirement, Borkland had opted to resign from government service as a protest—hardly the act of a spy. He had a law degree, and planned to join a Washington firm.
Bundy was also inclined to put aside Alfred Gwynn. Gwynn seemed too much the fool, although that could be cover. But his ambitions were too openly and honestly worn. It was obvious to everyone that he was destined to crash and burn.
The buzzer went off again, and again Bundy ignored it. He turned to the next page of Esman’s report.
That left two suspects—Ainsley and Harrington—w
ho, between them, had engineered GREENHILL’s return to Washington.
Bundy was tempted to dismiss Ainsley, largely because, as Esman’s memorandum noted, his cover had been blown by the collapse of SANTA GREEN: his career in the field was over. On the other hand, the Soviets might have reasoned that a man of Ainsley’s prospects could serve them better from Washington. And although Ainsley had virtuously refused to listen to GREENHILL’s story, he surely could figure out why she was in such a hurry to get to Washington.
Harrington was so decorated and respected that Bundy could not imagine her as a fruitful target for Soviet recruitment. But Esman’s report pointed out that the KGB’s predecessor, the NKVD, had a significant presence in Vienna during the war years. Was it possible that she had been a Soviet agent since—
His secretary buzzed a third time.
“Yes, Janet?”
“Sir, Lorenz Niemeyer is in the West Wing lobby.”
“In the lobby? He’s at the White House? Now?”
“Yes, Mr. Bundy.”
The national security adviser glanced at his watch. In half an hour he had to see McCone and McNamara—to talk about not Cuba but Southeast Asia, the other corner of the globe where America was on the verge of war. Bundy was skeptical that anything much could be accomplished, but the President seemed determined to try. At least Bundy would be spared his usual fight with Bobby: the attorney general was consulting with his staff about the security of James Meredith, who had recently become the first Negro ever to enroll at the University of Mississippi. The President was insistent that his Administration continue to do the work of the nation while awaiting the Soviet response.
Kennedy himself was on his way to the townhouse on East Capitol Street to hear GREENHILL’s latest report. Afterward, Bundy and Bobby would join him in the Oval Office to analyze whatever news she brought.
Niemeyer had certainly picked a bad time to drop in.
“Bring him down,” Bundy said, unaccountably worried.
IV
Bundy cleared his desk. He locked Esman’s report in his safe. When the professor arrived, Bundy greeted him with a courteous diffidence that conveyed, if not quite affection, certainly respect. They made small talk for a few minutes, and Bundy poured his guest a glass of Scotch from the bottle on the credenza. Niemeyer was in town for a conference at Georgetown, and wanted to pay his respects. Bundy, just as disingenuously, assured the professor that not dropping in would have been a crime.
“I won’t take much of your time,” said Niemeyer when the pleasantries were done. He shifted his bulk. The wooden chair creaked. “I quite understand that this is a difficult moment.”
“Indeed,” said Bundy, dryly. “And so, just to save time, let me say right at the start, if this is about Dr. Harrington—”
“It isn’t.”
“Go ahead, then.”
“From what I read in the press, Soviet ships are approaching the blockade line.”
“I know you keep your contacts in the intelligence apparatus, Professor. You needn’t pretend that your sources are limited to the papers.”
Niemeyer toyed with his glass. “I would imagine that every amateur strategist in the Western Hemisphere is offering you advice. I’m mainly here to pay my respects, and to tell you I think the President is handling matters exactly right.”
“But,” invited Bundy.
“But,” his guest agreed, “I’m a little worried, to be frank.” He hunched forward. “Kennedy has made plain that he’s willing to go to war over the missiles.”
“That isn’t what we’ve been saying.”
“It’s the implication, Mr. Bundy. Let’s be honest. The President’s statements may be cautiously worded, but they amount to a threat to wage war. The American public certainly understands his meaning. That’s why you can’t find any canned goods in the stores. That’s why people in Washington and the other big cities are suddenly finding excuses to visit relatives in the Midwest. That’s why those same relatives are digging shelters in their back yards.”
“You’re saying we’re causing a panic.”
“No. The missiles are doing that. And it doesn’t really matter what your own people think. It matters what the Soviets think.”
“Go on,” said Bundy, eyes narrowing.
“The President’s determination has frightened America. The question is whether it’s frightened Khrushchev.” Nodding toward the bottle. “Maybe I could have another drop.”
Bundy crossed to the sideboard and poured. “Please continue, Professor.”
“Think about a game of chicken,” said Niemeyer. “The kids play it. I assume you know the rules. Two young men go zipping toward each other in their cars, fast as they can, and the one who swerves first loses. And if nobody swerves, they both die, so they both lose. If you want to win, the trick is to get the other fellow to believe that you’re so crazy you won’t swerve. At the same time, you need him to stay rational enough that, once he realizes you’re crazy, he’ll swerve.”
“I know the theory, Professor.”
“Do you?” Sardonically. “Well, then, maybe you’ve thought about the winning strategy. How do you persuade the other fellow that you’re crazy? Not just by driving straight at him fast as you can. He’s doing the same. You have to give him a stronger signal than that. Something unmistakable. Throw beer bottles out the window so the other fellow will think you’re drunk. Better still, throw the steering wheel out the window. But I think there’s an even better idea.”
“What’s that?” asked Bundy, only because he knew it was expected of him.
“Run over somebody.”
“I beg your pardon.”
Niemeyer grinned. Savagely. He knew he’d made an impression. “On the way to the collision. Hit one of the spectators and keep on going.”
“Hit a spectator.”
“Hard. And make sure the other fellow knows you don’t give a damn.” He took a long swig from the glass. “When we drop a bomb in wartime, we accept that there will be civilian casualties. We always say it’s okay because we don’t target them intentionally. But we targeted them in Japan and we won the war. We made them see how crazy we were. That’s the point. The other side has to think you’re a little crazy. The best evidence that you’re crazy is to act crazy.”
“Let me be clear, Professor. Are you advising us to blow a Soviet ship out of the water just to make a point? Because if that’s what—”
“I’m advising you to do something crazy.”
Bundy watched him closely. “Can you be a little more specific?”
“I told you already. Run down a spectator. A bystander.”
“A bystander.”
“Not as a rule. Only if that’s what it takes to make your adversary believe you’re sufficiently irrational not to swerve.”
“Thank you, Professor,” said Bundy. He stood. “Now, if you’ll excuse me.”
Niemeyer didn’t budge. “How’s she doing?”
“Who?”
The pudgy man shifted his bulk. “Miss Margo Jensen. GREENHILL. I assume by now you have her running between wickets.” Toying with his glass. “Only you won’t tell me, will you? Operational security. All that.”
“I’m sorry, Professor Niemeyer. I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The old man ignored the attempt at deflection. “She’s taken a sudden leave. One minute Fomin shows up, and the next GREENHILL is in Washington. It’s not difficult to make the connection.” He put the drink down and folded his pudgy hands across that ample stomach. “I’m sure she told you I disappeared on her. Ordered my staff to tell her nothing. You understand that it was necessary. After I called you to convey Fomin’s offer, and you turned it down, I had to find a way to force GREENHILL to act. If she was half the girl I thought she was, she’d fight her way up the ladder. She did, didn’t she?”
“You know I can’t—”
“After GREENHILL managed that feat, her utility would be obvious. You’d have
no choice but to use her, and I suspect that you’re doing exactly that. Precisely as Aleks Fomin planned.” Niemeyer, too, was now on his feet. “Ah, well. Thank you for your time, Mr. Bundy. I’m afraid I’ve chewed your ear enough. You must be about your duties. But do bear in mind one detail.”
“What’s that?”
“You remember what I said about playing chicken.”
“Yes.”
“Excellent. Because I think you should bear in mind that GREENHILL isn’t one of the drivers. She’s a spectator. A bystander. I’m sure Fomin and his masters accept that.”
“You’re a coldhearted bastard. Did anyone ever tell you that?”
“This is war, Mr. Bundy. A war we need to win without fighting.”
The two men exchanged a hard look of professional understanding. Bundy extended a hand. “Thank you for coming by, Professor Niemeyer.”
V
“What happened to you was operational,” said Lorenz Niemeyer. “Bundy as much as told me that.”
Doris Harrington’s fingers tightened on her coffee cup. She was sitting on her living-room sofa. Niemeyer was in the chair opposite, drinking brandy.
“I’d figured that out,” she said. “As soon as that nice young man showed up with GREENHILL in tow, it was plain that they wanted me out of the way.” She sipped, watched his face for the old telltales. “Bundy must have spent days in preparation. Before he ever heard from me—before GREENHILL ever arrived in Washington—he had the plan ready.”
“He’s an amateur,” the great man murmured, “but he’s not without certain skills.”
She shook her head. “I took orders from amateurs in the war. We lost good people because the amateurs wouldn’t listen to those of us in the field.”
“Including GREENHILL’s father. He was one of the best.”
“Well, I’ve been wanting to ask you about that.” She put the cup down. “You said you promised him you’d look after his family.”
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