One from Without

by Jack Fuller

  When he got there, he found himself in an antechamber where, at the secretary’s desk, sat a small man in a shabby jacket and ancient tie who did not look up. Nothing indicated what kind of person the office belonged to. Rosten laid his orders in front of the old fellow and asked if he could be announced.

  “This isn’t Buckingham Palace,” said the man, who went on rooting around in the desk drawers. He found what he was looking for and held it up for Rosten’s inspection: a box of government-issue paper clips.

  The man’s manner, though in no way impressive, did suggest that he had not spent his whole career behind a receptionist’s desk. Physically, he was nearly featureless, a guy in line for a teller to whom you would never give a second look, even if he looked at you, which this man seemed determined not to do.

  “Mr. Fisherman is expecting me,” said Rosten. “At London Station, I imagine.”

  “You will learn not to imagine you know what he is thinking,” said the man, finally looking up, his gray eyes large in the lenses.

  “You are Mr. Fisherman, aren’t you,” said Rosten.

  The eyes behind the heavy black frames of his glasses revealed nothing.

  “This is not a test,” said Fisherman. “When they come, they’re much harder.”

  He stood and went to the inner door, which had a keypad lock. The way he positioned himself blocked Rosten from seeing. The apparatus clicked and Fisherman turned the knob.

  “Come in,” he said without looking back. “And bring your orders. It would not do to have them lying around a place that is fit only for secreting paper clips.”

  Rosten stood at the chair across the desk from where Fisherman had lowered himself. Just as this man’s eyes got their power by being without expression, his voice drew force from not rising above a whisper.

  “Sit,” he said, and Rosten obeyed in silence as Fisherman busied himself clipping papers together and laying them out evenly before him like a hand of solitaire.

  The inner office was as nondescript as the outer, though it did have a window with a bright view framed by trees. The walls were blank, without even the standard photo of the President. Magnetic signs on the front of two formidable, combination-locked filing cabinets read, “Closed.” A walk-in safe in the wall was open.

  “I’m told you have an interest in poetry,” said Rosten.

  “Perhaps at some point we will have time for that,” said Fisherman.

  He slid each collection of papers into a separate folder. When he finished, he slipped them all into a large, red-striped manila envelope marked humint for human intelligence. He pushed it across the desk.

  “Go ahead,” said Fisherman. “It only looks radioactive.”

  The envelope was much heavier than Rosten expected, as if sheathed in lead.

  “I want you to tell me who the men in these files really are,” said Fisherman. He turned his back and looked out the window. “Your office is just down the hall. You will find in the envelope the key along with the combination for the filing safe. Do not place the combination in the burn bag. Burn it yourself as soon as you have memorized it. At Yale they still teach one to memorize, don’t they? You will find matches in the envelope. There is an ashtray on the desk. Be sure to stir the ashes then put them in the bag. Do not take any materials out of the office. Lock them in the filing safe each time you leave, even to go to the bathroom. Tell me tomorrow what you have learned.”

  Rosten found the right door and dug out the key, which let him into a windowless room. At first he thought it was for a secretary, but when the fluorescents in the ceiling came on, he realized that this was his office. The walls were bare and needed paint. Under the light his skin had a sick, bluish cast. On the standard gray desk stood a reading lamp with an incandescent bulb. He switched it on and went back to extinguish the morbid overheads. This obscured the walls. The warm glow went only as far as the edge of the desk.

  He hung his coat on the back of the chair and opened the envelope. Inside were dossiers on nine potential informants. The documents were typed on a manual typewriter, single-spaced, and promiscuous with fact. There seemed to be no organizing principle or criterion of selection. Reading them reminded him of confronting one of those experimental poems with words scattered across the page like litter.

  By pulling an all-nighter, he was able the next day to bring Fisherman concise, handwritten summaries. Gone were the repetitive ins and outs recorded by Agency spotters around the world. These Rosten turned into neat timelines. References to family members and associates he made into a single paragraph. What Rosten found most difficult was the portion of his summary that he assigned the rubric “C.V.,” under which he reconstructed the subject’s job history. Most dossiers had gaps, sometimes of several years’ duration, representing the blank time between one report from a confidential source and the next. The nature of the sources was never given, but Rosten knew from his training that they could range from newspaper and magazine articles to moles, defectors, and electronic surveillance. In some instances the reports contradicted one another; Rosten noted every discrepancy.

  When Fisherman read what Rosten gave him, he said, “You have a nice, clear hand. Is there anything of a more discursive nature that you did not feel comfortable committing to paper?”

  “Should there be?” said Rosten.

  “Disappointing, but unsurprising,” said Fisherman. “Information of the sort you found in these dossiers is often more important for what it hides than for what it reveals. The times unaccounted for, the conflicting reports. Remember that whatever we see could have been fabricated precisely to be seen. Go back and prepare a report for me of what the dossiers do not say.”

  “I think I’ve indicated all the holes,” said Rosten.

  “Fill them,” said Fisherman.

  Not even during his freshman year, a Midwestern son of public education, a nobody from nowhere, had Rosten felt so inadequate. Fisherman wanted him to doubt everything that was written, and doubt ate its own tail. Doubt the fact, doubt the doubt. This was worse than the sophistry he had gotten used to in critical theory. It was about real beings. He was being asked to divine from without what was within, which for all he knew could be Schrödinger’s cat in its closed box, quantum strange, both alive and dead, only one or the other if someone opened the lid.

  He reread a dossier and put it aside. Then, in his careful hand, he wrote a story. He repeated this process over and over until he had done them all. A few depicted the subject as just another man afraid of the future, afraid of his boss, afraid of his wife. The majority of his stories, however, portrayed a deceiver, compromising everyone with whom he came into contact. Story became Rosten’s way of dealing with the closed box. He simply invented the cat.

  “Good,” said Fisherman when he had finished reading Rosten’s work, “though with a few of these men, you may have been a bit credulous.”

  “Which ones?” said Rosten.

  “We shall see,” said Fisherman, handing him another large, sealed, red-striped manila envelope. “Now work on these.”

  In the windowless office, day and night were indistinguishable. He knew no one in London, so he worked long hours, only occasionally taking a break in the afternoon to hunt for a permanent place to live. It wasn’t long before looking the proper direction at intersections became habit.

  Eventually, he visited London Station and made the acquaintance of some analysts not too much older than himself. They hung out at a club called Bigsby’s, which was far enough from the Station that they had to take the Tube. The first time he went with them, the man at the door challenged him.

  “Show him your Agency ID,” said the analyst who called himself Brick.

  Rosten balked.

  “He’s ours,” said Brick.

  It soon became clear to Rosten that everyone else in the place was, too. The décor did not say American. In fact, it tried just a little too hard not to. On one wall hung a dartboard that had not been struck by many darts and on anot
her a very recent portrait of the Queen. The bar stretched along the back wall. A red-faced guy behind it could have come from Chaucer, until he spoke and you realized he came from Texas.

  “We call this our safe house,” said Brick.

  “It’s swept,” said his pal, Travers.

  “So you don’t have to worry,” said Brick. “You can tell us all about your boss.”

  “He’s a man apart,” Rosten said, nothing more.

  The long hours Rosten spent in the office took on a rhythm. He read. He imagined. He wrote:

  “It was the good fortune of Arkady Pavelovich Simkov to join the Red Army in time to march unimpeded through Poland and take over from the Americans in Leipzig after the German surrender. There his name became associated with victory and Soviet orthodoxy, drawing the attention of the GRU, which had a weakness for men of unearned promise. Simkov did not disappoint. He contented himself with making and moving documents, took on a good, solid, Soviet wife. He was an inside man without a hint that he heard the call of the wild until a year ago, when he found himself posted to France. There, his duties from time to time took him to Nice, accompanying delegations from the film collectives. One day he was seen catching a train to Monaco.

  “When he returned, he bought many rounds of drinks for the filmmakers in a bar overlooking the Mediterranean, after which he entered an elevator with an actress, Agrafina Ivana Rogozin, who had many men buying her things.

  “The wheel of fortune did not continue to treat Simkov well, which is what eventually brought him to our attention. He has the requisite weaknesses and needs but is too frightened to do what would be worth our keeping the wheel spinning.”

  These narratives seemed to satisfy Fisherman, as did the increasing skepticism Rosten demonstrated in them, but Rosten was becoming dissatisfied.

  “I’m tossing my judgments random on the wind,” he said.

  “So you know your Euripides,” said Fisherman. “Too bad it’s such ancient knowledge. We are creatures of darkness. We see by our own light. That’s Gide. He’s more current.”

  When Rosten got together with Brick and Travers now, he sometimes allowed conversations about Fisherman to develop, hoping to learn any little bit of gossip that might enhance the story he was writing in his mind. He had already picked up certain things during training, beginning with the miracle of Fisherman’s survival of the post-Watergate purges. Few who had worked counterintelligence for James Jesus Angleton had come through undamaged, and none who did had been as close to Angleton as Fisherman.

  Often when men fall who have built empires on fear, their ideas fall with them. So it was with Angleton. Close to two decades later, Rosten’s trainers still used his relentless mole hunt of the 1960s as a case study of the damage that can be done when skepticism tips into paranoia. When Rosten pressed them to say why Fisherman hadn’t been destroyed, each had his own explanation, one more improbable than the next. Only one retired Agency veteran, now on contract to teach recruits the art of escape and evasion, dared to say a thing that had the sting of truth: Fisherman’s split with his former boss could have been a deception. “I wouldn’t put it past Angleton,” he said, “to have frozen some of his semen.”

  As Angleton weakened, the Director of Central Intelligence apparently came to fear that the whole counterintelligence function could collapse with him, so he pulled Fisherman in to be his Plan B. Fisherman must have chosen his moves well, because even after Langley rebuilt a regular counterintelligence unit under another man, the DCI found it convenient to keep Fisherman on his own payroll along with a staff of meaningful size and skill. It was here that the two reasonably detailed stories that Rosten’s trainers told came in, both involving successful encounters with one of the Soviets’ most accomplished agents, Anton Ignatyeff Kerzhentseff. It was said that Fisherman, in triumph, claimed to have given him this name, but it was just his little joke. The nom de guerre he almost certainly did give the man was Zapadnya, the Trap.

  In the first case, Fisherman had managed to trick Kerzhentseff into thinking the system used to communicate with Soviet deep-cover agents had been unriddled, though in fact the code breakers at NSA could not read a syllable. Deceiving the master deceiver had cost the life of one young American soldier, a suicide.

  Later, as Fisherman approached retirement age, a new DCI reattached him to the regular counterintelligence unit, which eliminated his autonomy. Just when it looked as if the old man would not get to serve past sixty-five, Fisherman delivered a figure from the National Security Council so high-ranking that some years later the trainers did not dare speak his name. Fisherman got his waivers. In fact, he went back on the DCI’s payroll, with more freedom than ever, which was what had brought him not long ago to his garden-view office in the Embassy in London, from which he said he could smell the continent all the way to the Urals without actually having to get it on his shoes.

  With evidence mounting that the Soviets had someone well placed within the Agency, Fisherman’s position was secure. As the Agency’s eyes closed in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, most of them ending with pennies on them, Fisherman did not spin up elaborate conspiracy theories the way his mentor had. He built dossiers, challenged assumptions. When he made a case, he made something happen, or stopped it before it did. When he took the top off the box, he was ready to deal with the cat, dead or alive.

  As the months wore on, Rosten began to detest the hermetic nature of the tasks he was given. He had been trained for the outside. That had been the purpose of the games on the Washington streets with the Sisters, and he had a gift for it, a gift unopened as he sat in his windowless room.

  Finally he reached his limit.

  “I trained for the real world,” he told Fisherman.

  “And where is that, exactly?” said Fisherman.

  That was the whole conversation.

  Rosten continued on as before, feeling as if he were writing for an obscure scholarly journal that nobody read but those who wrote for it. He tried to relieve his boredom by going to the theater. At the bar between acts one night, he struck up a conversation with an attractive woman. They went out several times, but then she said he was just too distant, even by English standards. After that experience he asked out a few young American women from the Embassy. One became interested, even eager, but when she did, he backed away. Apparently word got around. So he frequently found himself at Bigsby’s with Brick and Travers. There he sometimes encountered veterans of what they called the Holy War, who often came from Central Asia to London for a kind of R&R. Rosten would see them drinking as if it were the last alcohol that would ever pass their lips.

  Late one evening Rosten returned to his office after a siege at Bigsby’s and nodded off at his desk. The telephone shouted him awake. He gathered his files; there were enough of them that he had to cradle them on his forearms. When he reached Fisherman’s office, he balanced the stack of folders carefully as he pushed into the anteroom. He let the door ease against his back until he felt it latch. But for a sliver of light under Fisherman’s inner door, the room was black. He felt for the unused secretary’s desk. When his knee found it, he put the stack down and knocked. No answer. He knocked again, louder this time. He put his ear against the door. Silence. Then, without so much as a scuff of warning, the feel of the wood vanished in a burst of light.

  “There are better ways to eavesdrop,” Fisherman said.

  “You didn’t answer,” said Rosten. “I’m sorry.”

  “That is something one so rarely hears in our line,” said Fisherman, “and even more rarely believes.”

  “The dossiers,” Rosten said, stepping back out of the trapezoid of light.

  “Bring them in, but you won’t need them,” said Fisherman. “I have another for you.”

  Rosten sat down in the hard chair that he had come to think of as the Rack. Fisherman handed the file across the desk.

  “You will need to read it here, I’m afraid,” said Fisherman. “And you may not take notes
.”

  The envelope bore no warning stripes, no notation on the tab, no markings of any kind.

  “Now?” Rosten said.

  “You are booked on an early flight to Barcelona.”

  “I don’t even know Barcelona.”

  “That way you may actually be able to see it,” said Fisherman.

  On the first page Rosten saw that he was to participate in the interrogation of a potential defector, a KGB officer of particular promise, if he could be believed. The principal examiner would be Peter Nederlander, Langley’s chief of Soviet and Soviet-bloc counterintelligence.

  “Heavy company,” said Rosten.

  The Russian was Leonid Shchusev.

  “Shall you and I call him Khlestakov?” said Fisherman. “One never knows who has an ear to the door.”

  “From Gogol,” said Rosten.

  “You get a gold star.”

  “I assume you want me to come back with an opinion whether he really is an inspector general or an impostor,” said Rosten.

  “Do you actually know the play,” said Fisherman, “or did you just see the Danny Kaye movie?”

  “The movie.”

  “You see,” said Fisherman, “there is an impostor in every man. But it is not Khlestakov I am interested in. Focus on Peter Nederlander.”

  4

  Fisherman booked Rosten into a hotel that was a favorite of tourists, saying that even a novice could avoid being noticed there. As the taxi from the airport worked its way deep into the city, Rosten began to see the extraordinary specificity of this place. In the United States you might not be able to look out the car window and know whether you were in Cleveland or Kansas City. In Barcelona the buildings were not just unique; they were from an alternate universe. This one had chimneys that looked like a procession of hooded gremlins. That one was a stack of enchanted grottos. There were Moorish harems, miniature castles, buildings that seemed to have sprouted from spores in the night.