One from Without

by Jack Fuller

  “The only one I recognized was Nederlander,” said Rosten. “Other than him and McWade’s assistant, nobody knew who I was.”

  “I understand she is efficient at what she does, too,” Fisherman said.

  “Seemed to be,” said Rosten.

  “Bradley, isn’t it?” said Fisherman. “I knew her father. It must have been intriguing, you and McWade and the Dutchman watching each other watching each other.”

  Perhaps it was jet lag, but Fisherman’s voice grated.

  “Nederlander approached me,” Rosten said.

  “Waiting until everyone was out of the room, I imagine,” said Fisherman, “so he would not become known for knowing you.”

  “Comrade Nederlander had nothing much to say,” said Rosten. “But during the meeting he alluded to the danger our mujahideen allies could become for us in the event of a Soviet pullout. It was subtle, but it was there.”

  “Brave of him,” Fisherman said.

  “When I raised it with McWade, he flicked the subject away.”

  “He has always known the line and usually hewn to it.”

  “Frankly, I don’t know what to make of these,” said Rosten, laying his palm on the three sets of dossiers.

  Fisherman leaned back in the chair, putting himself entirely into the shadows.

  “Frankness is always the unanswered question, isn’t it,” he said. “You might want to think of those as part of a little experiment in frankness.” He reached across the desk and picked up the first set. “These will seem more like your usual fare. The difference is that the individuals have already revealed their truth. Some have defected with distinction. Others have proven to be doubled against us. The files you have do not indicate the outcomes. I want you to predict them.”

  “You’re treating me like a schoolboy,” said Rosten.

  “I have only described Part One of the little experiment,” said Fisherman, picking up the second set. “These are dossiers on men from the southern Soviet Republics who have assimilated. Imagine how uncomfortable they must feel now that the ground is shifting. If a veteran intelligence officer in the GRU worries what will happen to him as Moscow falters, think of the anxiety of a closet Muslim serving as a functionary in Tashkent, let alone Kabul. The question for you is which of the men in this second group is most likely to accept a Christian offer.”

  “You already know,” said Rosten.

  “I only have a view,” said Fisherman. “I want yours.”

  He picked up the third set and held them suspended over the desk.

  “Now we come to the most interesting collection,” he said. “You will notice that these documents are not classified. That is because they do not officially exist. I have used my own devices to have them prepared. These are men we are supporting against the Soviets. You will find quite a range. Tribal warlords, mullahs, dealers in drugs. I want you to write me the story of what each will do after the fall.”

  “I’m ignorant of their culture,” said Rosten. “Anything I write will be Scheherazade.”

  “I’ll be away for ten days or more,” said Fisherman. “You will give your report when I return. Please deliver it orally.”

  “And if I pass your exam?” said Rosten.

  “Don’t let what you imagine Isaac McWade sees in you distort your vision,” said Fisherman. Then he stood and left. No wonder people who had worked for Fisherman hated him.

  Rosten put away the South Asian files in order to work on the apparatchiks; at least this was the part of the exam that he had studied for. These men had recognizable needs: intoxicants, sex, a way to hide the truth from the wife and children. Vodka was cheap, but women were dear. Drugs and gambling made non-negotiable demands. What these subjects required, only a market economy could readily supply. The Volograd GRU man whose experience in the German siege might explain his attraction to rough sex. The bureaucrat from Minsk, who could have been an accountant in the West but in Moscow specialized in valuing human assets. The second-generation son of the secret police whose time in the KGB office in Dresden was marked by vanity, drunkenness, and a fondness for fondling women who said no.

  The next day his brain felt a little clearer. He turned to the Central Asian Soviet functionaries. Many of their names had been transliterated twice—once from their native language into the Cyrillic alphabet and then from the Russian into English. Quite often the file contained a religious history, the name of a madrasa, the date of the negotiation of the nikah, which binds a marriage under Allah. In a few cases there was a takfir, when a subject renounced Islam in favor of official state atheism. Rosten made a list of these. Come the collapse, life for them among the believers would be brief.

  Fisherman had disappeared again, so Rosten felt free to spend time in libraries and the British Museum in order to get some sense of the world with which he was dealing. Material was plentiful, much of it dating from the era of the Great Game, when it was the British against the Russians and yet somehow the Afghans prevailed. The people in the dossiers had predecessors in those times, dark men who wore British woolens, drank British tea, and accepted British condescension in return for the power to condescend to their own. Perhaps some of their lineal descendants drank at the samovar today.

  Very different were the mujahideen. Mohammad Shaur. Abdul Qadir. Nek Muhammad. Their dossiers contained much less biographical detail than those of the Soviet collaborators, but they were rich with tales of fighting prowess and implacable will. The documents appeared to have been compiled by a single individual with an Agency background. The style of presentation made an effort to depart from Langley standard, but there was a telltale accent. This one fell out with that one over a girl. This one accused that one of being a Paki shill. The back-fence gossip of the trade.

  At first Rosten thought he might be able to put things together to make at least a partial organization chart of the mujahideen command structure and the subjects’ places in it, but soon he realized that there was no structure. Affiliations were opportunistic and provisional. Tribal leaders from the ungovernable mountain hinterland between Pakistan and Afghanistan learned their martial skills fighting each other, though for the moment, the miracle of a common enemy kept them from killing one another most of the time. As Fisherman had promised, there were figures from the opium trade fighting alongside monarchists bent on a restoration, bespectacled Islamic intellectuals next to rugged tribesmen who were only able to read through a gun sight.

  In the sandstone and gravel of the alluvial wash from the Hindu Kush, the mullahs were granite. Many had years of formal education in religious schools, the Koran their only textbook. They may not have been the most accomplished fighters, but their hatred of communism and its godless promise was total.

  Then there were the Arabs. Though they were not all Saudis, they seemed to share the experience of having been converted from the modern ennui to an ancient clarity through contact with Wahhabism. Not that they had abandoned all of the advantages of the world against which they rebelled. Some even seemed to find opportunity in it, such as the Saudi rich man’s son who recognized how much money the Agency was pouring into the region and showed up along the Afghan-Pakistani border to build concrete fortifications and soak some of it up.

  Fisherman’s absence had gone past ten days when Nederlander appeared at the Embassy. No rumor of his arrival preceded him, not even a call from the Marine guard. Rosten was at his desk when the dead bolt began to rattle, followed by a fist pounding on the wood and something that sounded like a curse. Before opening the door Rosten put the files that did not exist in the safe, locked it, and put up the Closed sign.

  “What are you doing in there, boy?” said Nederlander. “Pulling your pud?”

  When Rosten cracked the door, Nederlander pushed past him into the windowless room.

  “Where is he?” he said.

  “Wherever he wants to be,” said Rosten.

  “Are you still his plaything, or are you McWade’s now?” said Nederlander, so loudly
that Rosten heard doors opening all along the polite, diplomatic corridor.

  “Fisherman doesn’t run his itinerary past me,” said Rosten. “But when I see him, I’ll give him your best.”

  “You’re a cocky little shit,” said Nederlander. “You think you’ve got both Fisherman and McWade in your pocket. But here’s some advice: They aren’t good at sharing. They’re going to tear you apart.”

  That was an exit line, delivered as if he had rehearsed it. Rosten stood for a moment, then grabbed his coat and went to the stairs. As he reached the bottom, he saw Comrade Nederlander pass Lance Corporal Kowalczyk. Rosten waited until he was well out the door before following.

  Nederlander moved at an easy pace. This man had decades of experience in evasion; Rosten had to rely on what he had learned playing games with the FBI on the streets of Washington. He turned into Grosvenor Square Garden, where he could follow at an oblique angle, partly screened by hedges. Nederlander went straight down Brook past Hanover Square. The man seemed all about where he was going. He never turned his head. When he started down Regent, Rosten left a large interval. Jostling through the crowds at Piccadilly put him at the limits of his training. Fortunately, Nederlander was wearing a scarlet scarf. At Leicester Square he abruptly turned into a doorway. It was, of all things, a tourist pub.

  Rosten was able to slip into a mob of kids and cutpurses on the green. It was easy to find a place where he could see the entrance of the Merrie Olde England unseen. Could this really have been the destination Nederlander had been so intent upon? Time passed, too much time. A back door. What a rookie mistake. Rosten went to the corner and looked down the street. Fortunately, there did not seem to be an alley behind.

  Quite a few of the kids and buskers on the square were doing their thing near a statue of Shakespeare. Given what Elizabethan London was like, the Bard would probably not have felt out of place. Suddenly, Rosten realized that his attention had drifted. He could not have said whether anyone had entered or left the pub door. He pulled focus, and as he did, he saw an apparition. A small, stooped figure in a black raincoat and gray Homburg was going inside. It was Fisherman.

  “Fink you could spare me a square?”

  Rosten had no choice but to look to the voice. It belonged to a Cockney girl in leather boots, a long, threadbare blue suede coat, and luminescent short shorts that peeked out where the coat fell open.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  “Gimme a nicker,” she said.

  “I’m busy,” he said, looking back to the doorway. He felt something and grabbed her hand before it got into his pocket. She cried out. He let go. He wanted the police less than she did.

  “Wanker,” she said.

  He kept glancing her way as she headed toward the statue. There she approached another man who looked as out of place as Rosten. He was much older, shortish, thin, and carefully dressed in a charcoal gray suit. When she spoke to him, he reached into his pocket and in one movement pulled out a pack of cigarettes and shook a single one toward her. When she took it, he put the pack back and pulled out a matchbook, folded a match over, and snapped it alight.

  Rosten moved a little closer to the tourist pub to see if he could get a glimpse through the window, but he could not. The situation was utterly beyond him. He was operating in Fisherman’s world now, just as he had always wanted to, and he was lost. He had been able to follow Nederlander only because Nederlander was leading him. At any moment the old man would come out the door and see him, the way he saw everything. Get out! Get out now!

  He cut a diagonal across the square, accelerating to a jog. He passed the Cockney girl, who gave him the finger. At the corner he felt eyes on his back. He kept himself from looking.

  When he reached the Embassy, he was winded and pouring sweat.

  “Forget your running gear?” said Kowalczyk.

  There was only so much repair work Rosten could do in the restroom. If Fisherman had taken a taxi and was waiting for him, Rosten would say that he had taken a walk at lunch, lost track of time, and raced back to continue working on the little experiment. Fisherman would enjoy the performance.

  He opened his door and felt his way to his desk, where he switched on the reading lamp. Then he opened his safe and took out the dossiers, arranging them next to a government-issue legal pad. An hour passed. Two. The burn bag began to fill with crumpled yellow sheets. Fisherman did not appear.

  Eventually Rosten left his office and counted the twenty-five paces down the hall to Fisherman’s. He could see no light under the outer door. He let himself in. The door to the inner office was locked. He knocked. No sound.

  “Are you there?” he called.

  Nothing.

  He returned to his office to stare some more at the dossiers and the blank legal pad. The phone rang. It was Schneider inviting him for a drink.

  “Rumor has it that Peter Nederlander is in town,” Rosten said.

  “First I heard of it, laddie,” said Schneider. “But I did hear that you met Isaac McWade.”

  “Did Fisherman tell you?”

  “You knew that McWade tried to do Ernest in at one point, didn’t you?” said Schneider. “A couple of DCIs tried, too. They’re gone. Only McWade and Ernest are still standing.”

  “McWade seems to be standing pretty tall,” said Rosten.

  The pub Schneider chose was on a side street south of the river near Tower Bridge. He ordered Scotch for both of them, and after another he became talkative. The changes he had seen in the Agency over the years. So many ex–special ops guys with tightly cropped hair and steel-rimmed glasses.

  “Is that the future?” said Rosten.

  “Langley obviously thinks so,” said Schneider. “That and national technical means of intelligence. Satellites. NSA’s monitoring arrays, which are nothing but glorified vacuum cleaners. All they get you is a lot of dust. No computer will ever be able to think the way Fisherman does.”

  Rosten let him go on and on, but what Rosten wanted to talk about required an empty street. Eventually he asked Schneider how he intended to get home.

  “I’m sober,” said Schneider.

  “Mind walking a bit?” said Rosten.

  “Next best thing to a jog,” said Schneider.

  When they were out of range of unwanted ears, Rosten said, “I think Fisherman is in contact with Peter Nederlander.”

  “Why wouldn’t he be?” said Schneider.

  “Black contact.”

  “Does Ernest know any other kind?”

  Rosten slowed to a stop.

  “I don’t trust Nederlander,” he said.

  “Good policy as a rule.”

  “I’ve told Fisherman.”

  “There’s another,” said Schneider.

  “I think Nederlander is playing both sides,” said Rosten. “I told Fisherman that Kerzhentseff might be involved.”

  “Be careful with that one,” said Schneider. “Leave him to Fisherman. Nederlander, too, for that matter. If there is something deep, you can be sure that Fisherman understands it a whole lot better than you ever will. We going to run tomorrow?”

  The next morning Rosten was in no particular hurry to get to the Embassy. Kowalczyk stopped him at the guard booth.

  “Your boss has been on my ass for an hour about you,” he said.

  “It’s because we’re Polish,” said Rosten.

  “No shit,” said the Marine.

  Rosten did not hurry but did not stop in his office either.

  “You become a man of leisure when I’m away,” said Fisherman. “Go get your files. We don’t have much time.”

  When Rosten returned, the light from the window behind Fisherman made it impossible to see his face. Others would have wanted this office for the view; Fisherman probably wanted it for the cover.

  Rosten began with the cases in which Fisherman already knew whether the subject was a deceiver or not. In the windowless room he had sorted these individuals into three categories: the bona fides, the doubles, and the
don’t knows. He started to speak but only got as far as explaining this taxonomy before Fisherman interrupted.

  “Don’t knows?” said Fisherman. “I know. I assume they do, too.”

  “As well as you or I know ourselves, I suppose,” said Rosten.

  “Go on,” said Fisherman.

  Rosten began to discuss the first individual.

  “No need to continue,” said Fisherman after a minute or two. “Just leave me the list you’re reading from.”

  “Are you going to tell me how I scored?” Rosten said.

  “Please move to the Central Asians,” said Fisherman. “We are wasting time.”

  Rosten pulled out the next set of files.

  “The collaborators,” he said, “can best be categorized by the nature of their fear.”

  Fisherman opened and closed a small pocket knife, sometimes pausing in the process to use the point of it to clean a nail.

  “Am I boring you?” Rosten said.

  “They all know they can be killed by either side,” said Fisherman. “Everyone is afraid. This is a dry hole. I wanted a story.”

  “I’m trying,” said Rosten.

  “Just tell me this: Do any of these men believe in the cause they serve?” said Fisherman.

  “I can’t imagine even Lenin would anymore,” said Rosten.

  “What about Mohammed Omar?”

  Rosten fanned out the third set of file jackets until he found the right one.

  “Pashtun,” he said. “Born around 1960. Fights under Nek Muhammad. Very intense about his religion.”

  “Tell me,” said Fisherman, “does he believe in what he’s fighting for?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Good word,” said Fisherman.

  He put down the little knife and leaned forward.

  “Whom do you fear most?” he said. “The men in the first two groups or Mohammed Omar?”

  He stood up before giving Rosten a chance to answer.

  “We need to get to Paddington Station,” he said. “We’ll leave your material in my vault. Did I ever tell you about my year at Oxford?”

  The taxi they hailed just outside the Embassy gate was no place to talk about the encounter at Leicester Square. Neither was the train. During the Oxonian walk Rosten was given no chance as Fisherman kept up a monologue on the history, architecture, and landscape. Along the way, he revealed little bits of personal information, which he had never done before.