by Jack Fuller
“We don’t even know whether the attacks were separate incidents,” said Rosten. “We don’t know how long ago they occurred. We don’t know whether anything has happened since. What do you expect me to tell Joyce?”
“The truth,” said Gunderman.
“Which is?” said Rosten.
Joyce was seated at his conference table, the PowerPoint deck squared away in front of him.
“We’re a tweak or two away,” he said.
Rosten sat but did not open his deck.
“Take a look at the fourth slide,” said Joyce.
“There’s a problem we need to discuss,” said Rosten.
“Is it before the fourth slide?”
“This isn’t a tweak.”
Joyce kept his eyes on his deck.
“Let’s do this in order, shall we?” he said.
“I think you pay me to be straight with you,” said Rosten. “The board presentation is moot. There’s been another breach of the database.”
Joyce pulled out his nail clipper as Rosten took him through the things Lawton and Gunderman had told him. His nails were already at the quick.
“Did you tell them you would come to me with this?” Joyce said. His voice had nothing in it. Did you check with my secretary? Did you try the new pastry at Au Bon Pain?
“Containment isn’t a viable strategy at this point,” Rosten said.
“Are you threatening?” said Joyce as he took a snip that must have drawn blood.
“The security problem is real,” Rosten said. “It will grow. Then it will burst.”
“This is nothing,” said Joyce, putting down the clipper. “There was a prank. Weeks, maybe months ago. Nothing since. It is immaterial.”
“You’d better get Sebold’s opinion about that,” said Rosten.
“So he’s in on this, too,” said Joyce. He stood up so abruptly that it knocked the pages of the decks askew.
“I’ve spoken to no one but Lawton and Gunderman. For God’s sake, Brian,” Rosten said, rising from the table himself.
“Sit down,” said Joyce. “Please sit. You make me nervous. You know, when I commanded a destroyer, threat conditions were not uncommon along hostile coasts. The other guy’s ships playing chicken. Dire public warnings from a communist dictator thumping his chest. Then, out there alone, hundreds of miles from the nearest support, something would show up. A sonar ping or something incoming on the radar.
“Do you know what the man on the bridge had to do? He had to wait. Take no action. If he reacts and is wrong, he can start a war. Ask the commander of the Turner Joy.”
Joyce was over him now, leaning in.
“If he fails to react,” Rosten said, “he can lose his ship.”
“It’s called having balls.”
“All right,” said Rosten, “let’s look at the intelligence. We know somebody is attacking us. The radar signal isn’t a ghost. There’s no reason to believe he can’t do it again. Think about the Gnomon negotiations getting to the short strokes. Then comes another intrusion, a big one this time. Big and public, maximum malice. Now everyone knows what we have hidden. The Audit Committee. The board. The Gnomon shareholders. The Securities and Exchange Commission.”
“The Congress,” said Joyce. “The President. God.”
He had begun to pace.
“You think this will just go away?” said Rosten. “Let’s put a probability on that. What? Seventy-five percent? Are you ready to take a one-in-four chance of exploding the company and maybe going to jail?”
“Steady,” said Joyce.
Rosten picked up the deck and let the pages flutter down to the table.
“All these representations to the board?” he said. “Complete bullshit so long as you leave this out of it.”
“This,” said Joyce. “This what? This fear? Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. The CEO has a dark spot on his hand and we need to disclose that it could be cancer? You know why I’m CEO, Rosten? Because I don’t panic.”
“You need a second opinion,” said Rosten. “Sometimes the mole really is malignant.”
6
It wasn’t clear which was unraveling faster, the Soviet empire or the CIA’s deep-cover operations inside it. A half-dozen men whose dossiers Rosten had analyzed disappeared, including one whose photo Nederlander had pushed across the table to Shchusev.
Rosten studied Kerzhentseff’s dossier more intensely than he had ever studied any poem for Professor Hawthorne. Then he wrote the man’s story. Fisherman read it and shortly afterward laid out a secure way to make contact in case either of them had to go dark. It involved a book code based on a volume of criticism called Seven Types of Ambiguity and a classified advertisement in the Telegraph. Still Fisherman refused to acknowledge the possibility that Nederlander had become Kerzhentseff’s asset.
One night Brick and Travers arrived at Bigsby’s with an older man in tow. Rosten thought at first that he was another of the hot warriors back from Central Asia, where a bunch of bearded zealots with surface-to-air missiles were taking the Soviets down. But then Brick introduced him as Reg Schneider from London Station. He had an air of weary confidence to which Rosten was drawn. The two of them stayed on when the others left.
“You come in as a kid and they have you sorting paper,” said Schneider. “Eventually they send you out. If you survive, you get old. They bring you back in and have you sort paper again.”
He told stories of ancient times, just as Rosten’s trainers had. This was pleasant enough after all of Fisherman’s elusions, but at some point Rosten said he had to go. Early-morning wakeup, he said.
“Ernest likes the dark before dawn,” Schneider said.
“You know him?” said Rosten.
“One of the men who trained you is an old pal,” said Schneider. “He asked me to take you under my wing, but my wing is kind of small.”
The next day Rosten reported the conversation to Fisherman.
“He’s OK. Indulge him, Tom,” said Fisherman. “You may learn something.”
Fisherman had never called him by his first name before.
Schneider was large in the shoulders and chest, more muscular than might be expected in a man his age, which Rosten could estimate pretty accurately from the lines in his face.
“The secret is Indian clubs,” Schneider said. “Five pounds apiece. Every morning. Found them in an outdoor market. Somebody’s grandfather must have brought them home from the colonies. You look like you could use a little exercise yourself, laddie.”
They got together from time to time for a lunch-hour run in Kensington Gardens. Schneider talked about the headiest days of the Cold War, when nuclear bombs were going off in the atmosphere and people were digging shelters. One day Rosten was able to bring the conversation around to the purges.
By the time of the Watergate break-in, Schneider said, he was safely on ice on the analytic side, but at one point he had worked in New York in Angleton’s mail-opening program. A criminal investigation was opened. Luckily for Schneider, the statute of limitations had run.
The more the two of them worked out together, the more Schneider opened up. Chopping along the Serpentine one sunny day, avoiding the children and ducks, he talked about his first tour in London.
“Most of the wreckage from the Blitz was gone,” he said, “so you could easily feel like London was safer than a lot of other postings. Well, we know what that got Ben Wheeler.”
“Sorry,” said Rosten, “am I supposed to recognize the name?”
“An outside man’s outside man,” said Schneider. “How he could listen. Didn’t matter how green a laddie was, Ben would open his ears. That’s how he and Ike McWade got so close. You’ve heard of him, I hope.”
“I read the papers,” said Rosten.
“Now he’s got an office in the West Wing,” said Schneider. “Ben saw his potential right off. Funny. They were as different as Scotch and scones.”
Schneider kept the pace at a steady shuffle, easy enough for Rosten sin
ce he didn’t have to spend much breath talking. At the Hyde Park end of the Serpentine, they cut through a carnival, passing a merry-go-round and a Ferris wheel. There were lots of kids in line, and Schneider went mute. When they broke out of the crowd, he spoke again.
“A terrible death,” he said, his fists punching the air. “He didn’t see it coming. How could he? Not the kind of thing you expect in the Charing Cross Tube station. It was a pellet filled with ricin delivered by a spring-loaded device in the tip of an umbrella. Very bad shit, laddie. It takes days to kill. Stuff they use now gets you in a heartbeat. Not that they’re the Humane Society. It’s just that after Wheeler, they realized they had given us time to spin things our way. Poor old Benny. By the time he finally passed, we had managed to get the whole thing so far under wraps that you would have thought it had been his heart.”
“I remember something about it,” said Rosten.
“You’re thinking of the guy on Waterloo Bridge who worked for Radio Free Europe,” said Schneider. “When he got it, we didn’t have anything to lose by raising holy hell.”
“Romanians, was it?” said Rosten.
“Bulgarians,” said Schneider. “With Wheeler it was the Russians themselves.”
“Was Fisherman in London then?” Rosten said.
“McWade drew the assignment to investigate,” said Schneider, “and somewhere along the way he got it into his head to blame Fisherman. It didn’t make any sense, but McWade was in a rage. Blamed everyone. Probably blamed me. He loved Benny like kin.”
They had reached the stoplight at the street corner but were keeping their legs moving.
“Did Kerzhentseff have anything to do with it?” Rosten said.
“You’re smarter than you look, laddie,” said Schneider.
“What’s become of him?” said Rosten.
“Ask Ernest,” said Schneider.
“He has me trying to guess,” said Rosten.
“Interesting exercise,” said Schneider. “I don’t suppose you’ve come up with anything.”
“He seems to have gone to ground,” said Rosten.
“He’s like Ernest,” said Schneider. “It’s when you don’t see him that you need to sweat. Hell, you’re sweating like a pig, laddie. Give Ernest my best. Next week then?”
They set a time, but as it turned out, a call came from Langley a few days later summoning Rosten to Washington for a series of unspecified meetings. In the meantime Fisherman had disappeared. Rosten wasn’t comfortable leaving without getting instructions, but he had to assume that Fisherman had been consulted, so he packed and took the first available flight.
The Old Executive Office Building had never looked American to Rosten, more like the pictures he had seen of old Berlin. He could imagine Bismarck there, balancing nations like an apothecary balanced powders and poisons. They checked Rosten’s ID at the door and told him to wait. Eventually a secretary came to show him the way through the long, high-ceilinged halls. He was not prepared for the room she took him to.
“It’s where President Eisenhower held the first televised press conference,” she said.
“What am I doing here?” he said.
“You’ll be trying to stay awake,” she said.
The Indian Treaty Room rose two stories with a fancy cast-iron balcony one floor up. In the metalwork Rosten made out molded sea horses and dolphins, creatures heaved upward by deep forces. The ceiling was covered with stars. From a skylight in the center hung a chandelier. Under it eight tables had been set up in a rectangle around a compass pattern in the ornate tile floor.
“You’ll be sitting along this wall,” said the secretary. “Go ahead and get comfortable. The others should be drifting in soon.”
“Do you know the agenda?” he said.
“That’s somebody else,” she said.
Nederlander was one of the first to take a seat at the table. He did not seem to notice the splendid ceiling or the extraordinary mosaic underfoot, and he certainly did not notice Rosten. Soon a healthier-looking man entered and placed himself at the head of the table. Rosten recognized him from the photographs in the papers. It was Isaac McWade.
A large number of younger men and women, each armed with a yellow legal pad and several pens, arrayed themselves along the walls. The sun slanted down through the balcony windows, making everything almost too brilliant. Within a quarter of an hour, and only two minutes after the appointed time, the doors were closed by the security men and McWade began to speak.
“We are at a pivotal moment,” he said. “I believe we all sense this. But there is no consensus. Perhaps the Soviet leadership is falling apart. Perhaps Gorbachev has a master plan and the support to execute it. Everyone and every agency has a perspective. We are not here to come to a single point of view. We are here to take the conversation out of the shadows.”
McWade’s CIA background gave him a reputation as a risk-taker, but he showed none of that here. He was so measured that quite a number at the table diverted themselves by catching up on their correspondence. Not the people along the wall, however. They were not principals. Not deputies. They were factotums like Rosten, and they leaned in to McWade’s every word.
Rosten leaned toward Nederlander. He had to assume that this was where Fisherman wanted him to focus. As McWade delivered his remarks, Nederlander read the Pentagon’s Early Bird collection of the day’s newspaper clippings. He was better groomed than he had been in Barcelona, and the fussy little bow tie seemed more appropriate.
As waiters passed along the conference table offering the conferees coffee and tea in china cups, Rosten turned to the woman next to him and asked if he could bring her anything from the table of urns and soft drinks in the hallway. He did not know what to call it but the bar.
“It’s the White House,” she said. “It’s morning.”
“I was thinking coffee,” he said.
“Oh, well then,” she said.
“How do you take it?” he said.
“Shaken, not stirred,” she said.
As he stood, he caught a whiff of her sweetness. It wasn’t perfume. Perhaps soap from a much better hotel than the one he had checked into. When he returned, he held two cups in steady hands. As he sat down, she slid over to give him space then slid back. Someone from Defense was droning on about symmetrical and asymmetrical threats.
“He’s got a shopping list,” the woman whispered.
He pretended to have trouble hearing, which gave him a reason to turn and get a good look at her.
“You aren’t very subtle for a spy,” she said.
“I think you have mistaken me for someone else,” he said.
“Please,” she said. “I work for Ike McWade.”
“I’d better be careful what I say,” he said.
“You people usually are,” she said.
The gentleman from Defense had finally completed his sales pitch with an obligatory reminder that the Soviet Union was still ready to launch a devastating attack at any moment. Several at the table nodded.
“If I may take advantage of my prerogative as chair,” said McWade, “I would like to make a change in the agenda that will bring us back closer to the foundational issue. I think all of you know Peter Nederlander. I have asked him to give a perspective that ranges as broadly as possible and, Peter, as deeply as you deem prudent.”
Rosten had been careful not to stare, but now that the man was the center of attention, he bore in on his eyes and pulpy nose, the tar-and-nicotine smile. Nederlander’s manner was not arrogant, the way it had been in Barcelona, but his voice was confident, even when he was acknowledging that he could not say with any certainty what was going on inside the Kremlin.
“All we hear,” he said, “are voices arguing in another room. There are divisions within the leadership, but that does not tell us much. This stately room in which we meet today has echoed with raised voices from time to time over the years. It may happen again before our sessions end.”
He waited for more l
aughter than came. Then he went on. It was best to assume, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, he said, that Gorbachev had the cards. “Make no mistake about him. He is determined to prevail not only against his domestic rivals but also against the United States.”
Nederlander recited the evidence that the Soviet Union had not been tamed. Though he managed to make it seem revelatory, it had all been out already in one form or another. Of course, he did not mention the success Soviet intelligence was having in eliminating our eyes and ears. The closest he came was when he lapsed into the ursine cliché and said that Afghanistan was not the only place where the Soviets did their work with claws bared.
“Still,” he said, “Gorbachev is as much a realist as he is a communist. He sees that the United States has been willing and able to spend heavily on strategic forces, including missile defense. The Soviet economy is bending to the breaking point under the weight of its need to respond in kind. Money is for us what the winter has always been for Russia.”
The gentleman from Defense seemed about to lead a round of applause.
“Did everyone but me get a list of the attendees?” Rosten whispered.
“I’m Ellen Bradley, by the way,” she said, handing him her card. “You were already en route when the list went out.”
She was clearly more than McWade’s girl toy, though on looks she would have fit the part, with an athlete’s cut of strawberry-blonde hair and a barely detectable wash of freckles. She would have made a fine picture jumping a horse or stroking easily in the pool. Though you noticed many things about her, it was the unexpected blue of her eyes that called to you.
“I’ll fill you in when we break,” she whispered so close to his ear that he felt the warmth. He had to be the most junior man in the room, and yet she seemed to be attending to him. He glanced at the card. It had both a mobile and a home number written on it in pen.
Nederlander had begun to discuss intelligence that had not yet leaked. From the middle level of detail he presented, Rosten inferred that everyone in the room had at least Top Secret clearance. Some must not have had access to code-word matters, because Nederlander was careful to stay away from communications intelligence. “He’s walking the line like a Wallenda,” Bradley whispered. “Look how relaxed the guy from the National Security Agency looks.”
