Back Channel

by Stephen L Carter

  Bundy had his arms crossed. He was peering into the Cabinet Room, where Maxwell Taylor and Curtis LeMay were whispering with CIA Director McCone. Kennedy had been trying for a year and a half to get the military and the Agency to do a better job of coordinating their efforts. That they seemed to be getting along should have struck the national security adviser as good news.

  Only it didn’t. The sight chilled him, though he couldn’t say why.

  “Mac? Did you hear me?”

  “Sorry, Bobby. Yes. She’ll call when Fomin gets in touch. We have to be patient. Khrushchev is making a momentous decision.”

  “So are we. And I don’t know if everybody’s willing to wait.”

  And he joined Bundy in watching worriedly as the generals and the spies plotted together.

  FORTY

  An Invitation to Escape

  I

  That night was dinner at the Madisons’: old friends of Nana, who had made her granddaughter promise to visit them while in Washington. Miles Madison was a major in the Marine Corps, a boisterous Jamaican with dreams of becoming a real-estate investor. His wife, Vera, was among Nana’s many godchildren. Vera was from one of what Nana called the old families, and it was her family money that had mainly paid for their rambling house on Sheperd Street, not far from Rock Creek Park, in an enclave of well-to-do Negroes known as the Gold Coast.

  Margo arrived, still shaken from her twin encounters, first with Erroll Haar, then with Torie Elden. The secret was obviously out. She rang the doorbell not entirely sure what to expect from so prominent and proper a couple. But the Madisons enfolded her in a warmth so unexpected and reassuring that Margo found herself, within minutes, relaxed and very nearly happy. They were a study in contrast, Miles Madison tall and broad, his wife so delicate you feared to breathe hard in her presence, lest she crumple to dust. But her laugh was full and hearty, belonging to a larger woman.

  While Vera got dinner together and the Major, as he was known, chomped on his cigar and took occasional telephone calls in his study, Margo sat on the living-room floor playing with the children, the two-year-old Kimberly and the ten-month-old Marilyn, the pair of them already declared the princesses of a world of colored privilege that Margo had frequently observed but never quite inhabited. A sitter materialized to put the children to bed while the grown-ups sat down to eat. The Madisons peppered her with questions about job and friends and school, all slightly intrusive without being in the least offensive. Vera told stories about a much younger and rather wilder Claudia Jensen, and on any other occasion Margo would have been riveted. But tonight it was the Major’s descriptions of his work in a bunker beneath the Pentagon that caught her interest. Vera explained that Miles Madison was part of a small group of military men with top security clearances who routed orders and messages around the world.

  “If we do go to war over Cuba,” she said, “it will be the Major who transmits the orders.”

  II

  Dinner was over; and so was Adlai Stevenson’s address to the United Nations Security Council, which they had watched together. Miles Madison crossed the carpet and turned down the volume knob. He glanced toward the alcove, and Margo realized that he had been waiting until they were alone.

  “I’m sending the family to Ohio tomorrow. My wife has people near Cincinnati.” His usually humor-lit face was all at once careworn. The raucous storyteller of an hour ago might never have existed. His tone was grimly serious. “It’s only a precaution, Margo. Just for a few days, I hope. Until this thing blows over, as I’m sure it will.” He was still standing near the television. He cocked his head: in the next room, the phone was ringing. “If it doesn’t, those of us in uniform will have to start earning our pay the hard way.” The sad eyes flicked over her face. “Maybe you should go, too. Not to Garrison,” he added hastily. “That’s not really far enough if …”

  He trailed off. Margo was sitting very straight. From studying with Niemeyer, she had this part off pat; the nightmares filled in the rest.

  “If there’s a near miss on Manhattan,” she said, voice like straw.

  The Major nodded. “Exactly. Sorry. That’s the way it is.” He tilted his head toward the alcove. “You’re welcome to go with Vera and the girls if you want. Cincinnati would be a low-priority target, so you should be safe. Again, it’s just for a few days. I’m sure your internship will wait, and it’s the least I could do for your grandmother. She asked me to keep an eye on you, make sure nothing happened, and, to be honest—”

  He shut up at once, because Kimmie came hurtling back into the room, chased by her shrieking sister Marilyn. Their mother bustled in after, somehow stately despite her rush. Tension pinched the long planes of Vera Madison’s elegant face, but she managed a smile.

  “The phone is for you, dear,” she said.

  It took Margo a moment to realize which of them was being addressed.

  III

  The telephone, a blue Trimline, sat on a three-legged table in the alcove. A notepad lay handily beside it, the Bic pen attached with prudent string. Lifting the receiver, Margo caught her reflection in the oval mirror with its pretty gilt trim. Haggard. There was no other word. She was looking haggard, and a decade older than she had a few weeks ago. Pretty soon, it would be “ma’am” instead of “miss.”

  If there was a pretty soon.

  “Hello,” she ventured.

  “Margo, honey, it’s Carol,” the familiar voice gushed. “I’m really sorry to bother you. You said you might be at the Madisons’ tonight, and I thought I’d take a chance.” A beat for the listeners, if any, to work that out. “Anyway, I have to cancel. I can’t do lunch tomorrow. Will Monday work for you?”

  For a mad moment Margo found that she couldn’t play her role any more. Major Madison had awakened in her the fears that haunted her dreams, and what she wanted more than anything was to hop on the train to New York, change for Garrison, and hide her head in her grandmother’s skirts; or, better still, her late mother’s. Failing that, she wanted someone to disqualify her, to find a better actress; and better liar. And so, ignoring the lines she had so painstakingly memorized, she answered with great umbrage.

  “You called me here to tell me that? Couldn’t it have waited until morning?”

  But Carol, whoever she really was, kept her cool. “I’m sorry, honey. I don’t mean to spoil your dinner. If the Monday won’t work, how about next Tuesday?”

  “No, no, it’s fine,” said Margo with a theatrical sigh. The plan was really clever, fiction within fiction within fiction: anyone who looked at her life closely enough to discover that she had no friend Carol would think the calls were arranged by insiders at the White House to cover her affair with Kennedy. Nobody would imagine that she might actually be talking to a Russian spy. “Monday, at the usual place,” she muttered. “I’ll be there.”

  “Great,” chirped Carol with the same brightness. “You sound tired, honey. Try to get some rest.”

  “Thanks,” said Margo, bitterly, but the other woman had already hung up.

  IV

  She returned briefly to the parlor. Her hosts were standing near the fireplace, whispering. From their guilty expressions as she entered, Margo knew that the subject was herself.

  “Mrs. Madison?”

  “Yes, dear?”

  “May I use your phone to make another call? I’m sorry.”

  Vera smiled indulgently. “Of course, dear. It’s local, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Thank you.”

  Margo walked back to the alcove, reviewing her lines. She felt no excitement and no fear. She felt robotic, controlled, spoken for. As she lifted the receiver, she glanced in the mirror again and saw not Vera but the Major standing in the doorway, smoking his cigar, yellowy eyes narrowed as he regarded her thoughtfully. Margo shut her eyes. She had muffed it. She had said the wrong thing, given away the secret—or at least that there was a secret. As soon as she was off the phone, Major Madison would renew his offer to send her to Ohio, an
d then, when she declined, begin to wonder why. He would ask around, and before too long he would be on the phone to Nana, warning that her innocent little granddaughter was spending a little too much time alone with the President of the United States.

  All of this flashed through her mind in an instant, but when her eyes fluttered open again, the Major was gone.

  She let her shoulders sag and dialed.

  “Yes?” said a growling male voice.

  “Is Crystal there?”

  “Crystal? Who is this?”

  “This is Margo. I’m a friend of hers.”

  “I think you have the wrong number.”

  “Isn’t this 5502?”

  “It’s 5505.”

  Click.

  She opened her purse, took out the worn address book McCone had given her—full of names and numbers in her handwriting, but penned by others!—and flipped to the “S” page. The code was in the “05.” She added two, making it “07,” and ran her fingers down to the seventh name, someone she’d never met. An address on Brandywine Street. She turned the page, counted seven entries up from the bottom: this time, somebody she did know, a cousin, address on Mayflower Avenue in New Rochelle. The last two digits were a pair of ones.

  The car would pick her up on Brandywine Street tonight at eleven.

  She had an hour to get down to the restaurant, and then it was back up Connecticut Avenue to meet her driver.

  The President would be waiting.

  V

  Doris Harrington, too, was out that night. She had dined with a prominent journalistic couple who lived two blocks away. She had tested carefully for relevant rumors, and found none. Now, walking home through the misty Washington night, she could almost imagine that the years were rolling away, and the cobbles of Georgetown were the pavements of Vienna during the war. The teenagers making out in an alley were Gestapo informants; the bus trundling northward on Wisconsin Avenue was the stinking, belching tram; the White Castle restaurant on M Street was a Viennese café where the habitués stayed up half the night playing chess and murmuring revolutionary slogans and state secrets.

  What sparked the overlap of memory and reality was a silent scream that told her she was being followed, not just tonight but all the time now. She tried to blame it on Gwynn, but he had neither the cleverness nor the entrepreneurial spirit. Instinct told her that whoever was out there was malevolent. Whoever was out there was also skilled at surveillance, so that she rarely caught anything but the merest breath of their presence.

  She walked faster.

  FORTY-ONE

  The Threat

  I

  “Tell the President that the Comrade General Secretary cannot turn the ship.”

  “What ship is that?”

  She expected to be slapped down. Fomin, as she had already learned, hated questions, particularly from women. And he was fanatical on matters of security. So it surprised her when he answered.

  “There is a cargo ship, the Grozny, that will arrive at the blockade line tomorrow. Your Navy will try to stop the ship and board her. The Comrade General Secretary cannot allow either of these actions, Miss Jensen. The loss of face would be too great. Tell President Kennedy, please, that if they attempt to intercept the ship, the captain will not stop. If they disable the ship in order to board, they will have committed an act of aggressive warfare against the peace-loving peoples of the Soviet Union.” His broad face furrowed. “You are not persuaded, I see. You have a further question?”

  She was remembering a report on the news. “Isn’t it the position of your government that the blockade itself is an act of war?”

  “Miss Jensen, if a single Soviet soldier were to get drunk and stumble across to the Western side of the Berlin Wall, he would be committing an act of war against the fascist German regime in Bonn. But unless he opens fire, the matter can likely be resolved without a fight. Do you begin to understand?”

  “Yes.”

  Fomin devoted himself to his food once more. He had insisted this time that Margot eat, and she picked listlessly at a chicken dish she would on another occasion have relished.

  “You will convey the message?” he asked suddenly. “About the Grozny?”

  “Yes, but”—she hesitated, unsure whether it was her place, but a part of her would always be the eager student determined to impress—“but don’t you think it’s likely that President Kennedy will face the same dilemma? How can he back down?”

  The Soviet’s eyes were lidded. “It is not a matter of backing down, and the decision is not in your hands. You must tell your President that the Comrade General Secretary cannot turn the ship.”

  Margo remembered Kennedy’s implicit expectation that she would not only convey his position but argue in favor of it.

  “Mr. Fomin, the problem I believe the President has is that you keep asking him for things, or even demanding them—but you’re not offering anything in return. I think it’s fair to say that the President believes that America is the aggrieved party.”

  “It makes no difference. The Comrade General Secretary cannot be the first to back down. He cannot lose face.”

  “I don’t think President Kennedy can be the first to back down, either.”

  Fomin signaled the waiter for another beer. “You are saying there is no solution. The negotiation is a waste of time.”

  “Not exactly.” The idea sprang to mind, and she wanted to kick herself for not thinking of it before: textbook conflict theory. “It’s a classic example of what’s called the prisoner’s dilemma.”

  Again Fomin cocked an eyebrow. “What is a prisoner’s dilemma?” he asked, still chewing.

  For a moment, Margo was back in the classroom. Breezy. Confident. “Say that the sheriff knows that one of two suspects has committed a crime and arrests them both. Then he tells them—” she saw the Russian’s expression. “Um, never mind. Explaining it would take too long. But look at the situation. That ship is approaching the quarantine line. It can stop voluntarily; it can be forced to stop; or it can sail right through, untouched. If it stops voluntarily, Khrushchev loses. If it sails right through, Kennedy loses. If it’s forced to stop, that’s the worst of all, because that’s when you could have the kind of accident that leads to war.”

  “I see. This prisoner’s dilemma is the name you give to a problem with no solution?”

  “The solution to the prisoner’s dilemma typically requires mutual trust, and a degree of sacrifice—”

  “Yes. We will sacrifice, and you will break your word. That is how the world has always dealt with Mother Russia.”

  “That’s what makes it a prisoner’s dilemma. Both men have to sacrifice a little. Each side has to trust that the other will do as he promises. Otherwise, both will break their promises, and the cost to both will be a lot higher.”

  “This is what Niemeyer teaches you? These abstractions?” Fomin’s hand made a chopping motion. “Do you know that the West has broken every promise it has ever made to us? Does Niemeyer teach you this, too? How, in the Great Patriotic War, your President Roosevelt promised to open a Western front by 1943, then left Russia to fight for its life in the East for another entire year? How, after the war, you promised us aid, but attached so many strings that to accept it would have meant an end to socialism in our country? How you swore you would never place offensive nuclear weapons in Turkey? And yet there they sit.”

  She felt as if they had gone in a circle. “Mr. Fomin, if your side has nothing to offer—”

  “The Comrade General Secretary has informed your President that he considers your naval blockade of our Cuban ally an unacceptable act of aggression. Naturally, we would not cooperate by allowing your country to stop or inspect our ships.”

  About to reply, Margo sensed that more was coming. She took a small bite, and waited.

  “I have told you that there are those in the Kremlin who seek a war with the Main Enemy, who believe that it is better to fight now, on our terms, rather than later, on yours
. This faction is powerful, and the Comrade General Secretary must placate them. This is what you must tell your President, Miss Jensen. Wolves need fresh meat. Do you understand?”

  “I’m not sure I do.”

  “At times it is necessary to behave irrationally, in order to make one’s point. I am sure Niemeyer taught you this principle.”

  “He did.”

  “Very well. Then please inform your President that it may become necessary for the Comrade General Secretary to engage in a small act of irrationality, in order to placate his war faction.” He took a long swallow of beer, wiped his mouth with his sleeve. “At the same time, it is vital that your President control his own war faction. Otherwise he will force upon the Comrade General Secretary an unthinkable choice.”

  Margo put her chopsticks down with a snap. “Are you saying that you’re going to launch some kind of attack?”

  “Your President will understand the message, Miss Jensen. It is not required that you understand it as well.”

  But she did. She understood perfectly; and was frightened out of her wits.

  II

  At the townhouse, the scene felt wrong. There were no agents inside this time, and she heard the music even before she reached the top of the stairs. The room was the same—the same hideously ornate bed, the same champagne on ice—but the sounds of Sinatra from the wooden stereo beneath the bar seemed inappropriate to the moment.

  Also, the President had his shoes off.

  She tried to talk about Fomin, but he kept telling her it would keep. He took her coat and told her how nice she smelled; he handed her a glass and watched until she’d drained half.

  “Mr. President, about Fomin. He says Khrushchev is in trouble with his hard-liners and—”

  “Hush. Listen.” He hummed a couple of bars. “He’s singing ‘Come Dance with Me.’ Hear it?”

  “Yes, sir, but—”

  “Then dance with me. Come on, Miss Jensen. Margo.” A wink as he topped off her glass. “It’ll help with the fiction.”

  Kennedy was courteous but pushy, and finally she asked him, straight out, if he wanted to hear what Fomin had to say.