One from Without

by Jack Fuller

  Rosten talked him through the last conversation in detail, even mentioning Fisherman’s reference to The Third Man.

  “Orson Welles playing Fisherman,” said McWade. “Gene Hackman would be closer.”

  “Why would Fisherman have sent me to Barcelona if he was working with Nederlander?”

  “He wasn’t yet,” said McWade “He wanted a third opinion.”

  The voice on the scrambler phone came through with a slight gurgle, as if from deep underwater.

  “Whose was the second?” Rosten said.

  “He most certainly consulted Reg Schneider,” said McWade. “He was on you the night you had dinner with the lovely Ellen. I assume you picked that up.”

  “I went to Reg for advice today.”

  “You’re going to have to be more observant,” said McWade.

  “He told me you wanted revenge,” said Rosten. “For somebody killed in Berlin.”

  “When Ernest goes down, revenge will be a collateral benefit,” said McWade.

  Then he went silent on the line, and the room closed in around Rosten. What little sound there was came from the phone mechanism itself—a diver’s air, bubbling out.

  “Did you tell Fisherman about my little exchange with Nederlander about the mujahideen?” McWade finally said.

  “I told him everything.”

  “I imagine he perked up when you mentioned Afghanistan.”

  “Not that I noticed.”

  “You didn’t notice Schneider either,” said McWade. “Do you know where Fisherman is right now?”

  “The last time I saw him was on the wheel,” said Rosten.

  “He’s gone off our radar,” said McWade. “Nederlander, too. Your friend Schneider got out of Royal Albert Hall clean. Looks like they may all have gone black.”

  “Black because of me?” said Rosten.

  “Black is black,” said McWade. “You can’t see into it.”

  “I know how to reach him.”

  “I’ll let you know when it’s time,” said McWade. With that, he was gone.

  When Rosten emerged, he went directly to Fisherman’s office. If he was there, it would mean that he hadn’t gone black. Rosten could tell him of the conversation with McWade. This would make him a courier, nothing more. And if Fisherman was not there? Then Rosten would go to his windowless room and wait for someone to open the box.

  He knocked on Fisherman’s inner-office door, heavily the second time. Of course nobody answered.

  When he returned to his flat that night, there were no calls on his machine. In the weeks that followed, he lived in almost perfect solitude. His world consisted of two men, and each had gone mute. The only voice that spoke came from within, and he barely recognized it. He went to the office every day, arriving early, staying late, going over files, revising his thoughts about believers and unbelievers then revising them again until he had a range of interpretation that even Empson would have admired. He bought Pound’s Cantos and read and read. They spoke all languages at once. Now inscrutable, now hateful, now rambling, now insane. And occasionally a moment of clarity.

  there

  are

  no

  righteous

  wars

  Maybe it took a traitor to see this.

  As the days passed, he would have been no more surprised to learn at Bigsby’s that Fisherman had turned up in Moscow with a medal on his chest than to hear on the BBC that he had been made the Director of Central Intelligence. Finally someone rapped briskly on the door of his cell, the way the cleaning ladies did at night. But it was daytime, wasn’t it? He had lost track. The knock came again. Fisherman would not bother with such a nicety. Rosten went to the door.

  It was the Chargé d’Affaires in a blazer and ascot.

  “You have been summoned,” he said. “Sorry to interrupt, but when the White House calls . . .”

  “Did he say anything?” said Rosten.

  “You have important friends,” said the Chargé.

  Jimmy showed Rosten into the padded room. The gray-green phone rang.

  “How soon can you get to him?” McWade said.

  Rosten told him about the notice in the Telegram, the book code.

  “Seven Types of Ambiguity,” said McWade. “Priceless.”

  “We have a prearranged location,” said Rosten. “On the Strand. A moderate chophouse. I’ll cross over from Waterloo Station to give him eyes on me.”

  There was nothing wrong with bringing McWade’s people together with Fisherman. Rosten was like a secretary arranging a meeting. There had been some terrible misunderstanding. It needed to be talked through.

  “This has to happen ASAP,” said McWade.

  Rosten went directly to the newspaper office to place the ad. It was mostly numbers.

  The lady in drab flowers behind the counter winked at him.

  “They’ll catch you if you’re running a lottery, luv,” she said.

  “It’s just a little fun,” he said, paying cash.

  “No harm in that,” she said.

  Rosten set a date two days off to give Fisherman time to get back from wherever it was that he had gone. He returned to his office but left promptly at 5 to check his messages at home. If Fisherman needed to abort, he would call and simply ask for the Complaint Department. The message machine was empty. The phone remained silent.

  The day of the meeting, he came home at noon, half-hoping the call would still come. When he finally left his flat, the air was clean from an afternoon rain. A transparent half-moon hung in the falling light over the city. He walked to Euston and took the Northern Line. Waterloo Station was still aswarm with commuters. He pushed his way in one direction and then another until he finally emerged on the busy street, which he crossed and took directly to the bridge.

  He assumed that McWade’s team was there watching. One could have been that girl coming toward him with colorless skin and raccoon eyes. Or the fellow standing against the wall just outside the human current, reading the Sun. If Fisherman had eyes on the situation, it would be old school like Schneider, maybe someone who had gone out in the purges.

  As Rosten moved forward, he saw Fisherman up ahead, standing at the rail, looking up and down the bridge, then way out over the Thames past the Old Bailey and Fleet Street’s Christopher Wren. He was risking exposure, which did not seem right. Then he saw Rosten and started to scan. Rosten had to fight the impulse to quicken his pace. Suddenly, Fisherman focused hard on someone on the opposite side of the bridge. Quickly he took something from his pocket, bent over, and jabbed at his lower leg. As Rosten approached him, Fisherman hauled himself over the rail, looking back from the parapet for a moment. His eyes may as well have already been dead. As he plunged into the river, something fell onto the walkway. He hit the water flat and went under.

  “Oh, my God!” a woman cried.

  “Someone help him!”

  The crowd on the bridge knotted at the spot, with Rosten in the middle of it. He reached down and picked up a metal tube with its sharp, spring-loaded point. In one motion he rose, put his hand over the rail, and let the device drop. It was so small that he could not see the splash. He hoped it would be carried away along the bottom and never found.

  12

  The KGB’s poison would have stopped his heart before he hit the water,” said Rosten.

  “My God, Tom,” said Grace.

  “He must have realized that I had set him up,” said Rosten. “It would have been his last thought.”

  “He had been using you.”

  “And I failed him,” he said.

  In a matter of minutes Rosten was surrounded by police and spirited off to New Scotland Yard.

  Had he seen anyone push Fisherman over the rail?

  Rosten said the crowd had obscured him.

  “Somebody with an umbrella?”

  He said that it was a perfectly clear evening. Not a suggestion of rain.

  “Then you would have noticed an umbrella, wouldn’t you?”
<
br />   All he saw was his boss going into the water. He wasn’t looking at fashion accessories.

  At some point the questions turned to Fisherman’s state of mind. Rosten told them that anybody who thought he could know that was an idiot.

  “Was he despondent?”

  “He made other people despondent.”

  “Including you?”

  “Only those who deserved it.”

  “Could one of them have killed him?”

  “If you don’t who he was, talk to MI6,’ Rosten said. “They’ll tell you that the world is full of people who would have killed Ernest Fisherman with pleasure.”

  After the police were finished with Rosten, the Agency questioned him.

  “Why were you on the bridge?”

  “I was meeting him for dinner.”

  “But he had vanished.”

  “We set the date before he left.”

  “Your idea or his?”

  “Mine.”

  “Yours alone?”

  “Of course.”

  “Why?”

  “To catch up.”

  Then more questions about the poison, how it got into him and why, all going in the wrong direction—East rather than West.

  McWade was radio silent, and when the questions finally stopped, Rosten dialed his private number from his flat. He didn’t care that the call might be intercepted. He cared only about the way Fisherman had looked at him just before he jumped.

  “Go to the Embassy,” McWade said.

  “I’m done with all that,” said Rosten.

  “The situation has not been resolved,” McWade said and hung up.

  This time the Chargé d’Affaires did not escort Rosten. Lance Corporal Kowalczyk made a call, and some functionary took him up and punched in the combination that let him through the code-room door. Jimmy dialed up McWade.

  “What did you do to him?” Rosten said into the dirty green phone.

  “Your boss was romancing the KGB. It was all about the mujahideen,” said McWade. “He was offering the KGB information about our Afghan allies—names, precise locations—so the KGB could target them right under the noses of our guys on the ground. He believed the Soviet Empire will fall, and soon. He had become fanatically certain that when this happens, the greatest threat to the United States will the jihad. Strange for a man who read as much history as Fisherman did, he forgot that Islam isn’t the only empire that can become more lethal as it declines.”

  McWade’s spotters had seen the meeting at the tourist pub. They had photographed Kerzhentseff and Rosten in Leicester Square. The Cockney girl who called him a wanker and cadged a cigarette from the Russian was McWade’s. Rosten had thought she was picking his pocket, but she was probably trying to plant a tracking device.

  McWade said that Fisherman had Nederlander pegged as the mole, which was just the opportunity the old man had been looking for. But he needed to prove to the Soviets that his interest in making common cause was genuine. Kerzhentseff appeared in Leicester Square because Fisherman had summoned him. He wanted to demonstrate that Zapadnya was actually his Petrushka. This consigned Kerzhentseff to the Soviets’ mercies and established Fisherman’s bona fides.

  When McWade’s team saw Rosten in the square, they also spotted Schneider. The Cockney girl got a picture of him. Rosten had never noticed him. He might as well have been blind.

  “You can’t put this on yourself,” Grace said.

  “I have both Fisherman’s and Kerzhentseff’s blood on my hands,” he said.

  She took them in hers.

  “McWade tried to tell me that Kerzhentseff had died for his sins,” Rosten said. “I asked him what if Fisherman died for his virtues? ‘Your man took himself over the edge,’ he said. ‘Yes,’ I told him, ‘I saw him hit the water.’”

  Grace held his hands more tightly.

  “I always thought that one day I would tell you everything,” Rosten said. “I wanted to, but then the jets hit the Twin Towers. I don’t know what I would have done if you had been hurt. Osama bin Laden was one of the men in the files Fisherman gave me. Everything turned out exactly the way he said it would. The Russians lost their empire and are a threat to nobody, but the fundamentalists are bloodying us up all over the world.”

  “Do you think he could have prevented it?” she said. “That you could have?”

  “There are a lot of things I didn’t think I could do,” he said.

  Within a week of Fisherman’s death, they pulled Rosten out of the windowless room in the Embassy and reassigned him to London Station. The Agency came up with a narrative: Fisherman was onto the Soviet mole, and the KGB killed him; the type of poison they found in his system proved it. Rosten was expected to sing the ballad with conviction.

  “Schneider never did surface,” he told Grace. “People said he became disgusted, just up and left. Strange for someone so close to his pension. Sometimes I have a nightmare of finding him facedown in a Berlin canal.”

  “Tom,” she said.

  “They’re capable of anything, Grace,” he said. “Sometimes in the nightmare I put him there.”

  For more than a month they had Rosten on ice, like a deadly microbe. Nothing to do, not even little experiments. He realized that he had only two real options: to make his own game or to resign. Some people expected him to attempt the former. After all, he had been taught by the master. But on the Waterloo Bridge he had seen that he was not nearly good enough. He submitted the paperwork to leave the Agency.

  Nobody in London tried to talk him out of it. He might as well have been submitting his taxes. His resignation letter went into the great machine, and a reply came back setting out in tedious detail the procedures, his continuing obligations of secrecy, the benefits he had coming, such as they were. It advised him to wait in place for his formal release. But before it came, he received an order to return to the States. He was to report to Isaac McWade at the White House.

  When he got to D.C., the city was in the midst of a temperature inversion. The air smelled of exhaust and standing water. His flight arrived late, so he had to go directly to the White House with his bags. He was so anxious that he would have sweated through his suit even if it hadn’t been 90 in the shade. He did not want to see this man. He wanted to forget and be forgotten. If the Agency had some experimental potion that did that, he would have volunteered to take it.

  When he presented his credentials at the Pennsylvania Avenue gate, the security officer told him that because of the luggage, they wanted him to check in next door at the Old Executive Office Building. As he left the gate, a crowd of kids and their chaperones was walking down Pennsylvania. The kids kept bumping his suitcase and saying they were sorry.

  “Are you somebody?” said a ginger-haired boy.

  “Nobodaddy,” Rosten said. The boy laughed.

  Getting into the Old EOB was slow, but a young woman was waiting on the other side, and she led Rosten deep into the building. The last time he was there, he had been dazzled. Now it just seemed old. Wires ran along baseboards. Here and there the paint was peeling. The nameplates beside the tall doors were plastic, as if it were a Social Security office.

  “We’ll stop in here,” the young woman said. “This is Mr. McWade’s second office. I’ll be bringing you to the one he has near the Oval Office. You can take a minute to freshen up if you’d like.”

  She let Rosten into McWade’s private bathroom. There was a razor and Barbasol shaving cream on the counter, along with Mennen deodorant and a large bottle of aspirin. You might have thought he was a man like all men. When Rosten splashed water on his face, it got all over him. He waved his tie around to dry off the spots, but it became clear that he could do this for hours in the humidity and they would still be there. He must have looked like he was the one who had gone into the Thames.

  “Don’t worry about your bags, sir,” the young woman said when he came out of the bathroom. “They’ll be taken care of.”

  She walked him across to the West
Wing entrance, checked him through security then pointed out the landmarks.

  “The Situation Room is on the right,” she said, “and there’s the White House mess. We’ll go up these stairs. Now this way.”

  Large photos of the President hung everywhere. The corridors were ridiculously narrow.

  “Back behind us are the Cabinet Room and Oval Office,” she said.

  “Mighty close quarters,” Rosten said.

  “People choose proximity over legroom every time,” she said. “Here we are.”

  She opened a door into a tiny room. A secretary was crammed into the corner.

  “Tom Rosten for Mr. McWade,” said the young woman.

  “Go right in,” said the secretary.

  When she opened the inner door, Rosten found himself in another windowless room. McWade sat at a desk that was much too large. The credenza behind him pushed everything forward so far that when Rosten sat down, the back of his chair was touching the wall.

  “You cannot resign,” McWade said.

  All Rosten could think of was: You can’t stop me.

  The paintings on the wall were oils of men in ruffled shirt fronts and waistcoats. Perhaps they were the first spies. A gray-green phone sat on the credenza.

  “You have a future,” McWade said.

  “I have a past,” said Rosten.

  “My only question is how he did it.”

  “You know how.”

  “Not the toxin,” said McWade. “I mean how he got it into his leg.”

  Rosten shrugged. But often it’s harder to lie with a gesture than with words.

  “You disposed of it, didn’t you,” McWade said.

  “They didn’t find anything on me.”

  “You must have made quick work of it,” said McWade. “Even our spotters didn’t see you do it. I’m guessing you pitched it over the side.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to read me my rights?”

  McWade leaned back in his chair as far as he could.

  “Getting rid of the evidence was helpful,” he said, “since we decided to make him a hero in the ghost wars.”

  “I don’t suppose I have a need to know why.”

  “Congress smells weakness,” said McWade, “and it doesn’t even know about Nederlander yet. You can imagine what a mess it would be if we had to explain two moles. So Fisherman is honored, Nederlander is on the run, and there will be a change at the top at Langley. Fisherman’s dalliance with Nederlander will be easy enough to explain: Your boss figured out that he was the mole and was about to take him down.”