“I don’t understand,” Timmler answered after a moment, and from the look of him he really didn’t. “Or maybe it’s just you who doesn’t understand; you’re Faircliff’s man. Not the President’s, if you can grasp the distinction. You belong to a professional office holder—I don’t want any part of that action, okay? I’ll just retire.”
“Like Coppard? You want to follow the boss out to pasture, is that it?”
“Right—like Coppard.” Timmler nodded sharply, or perhaps he just blinked. Either way, he knew where he was now.
“Let me explain something to you, George. I didn’t ask for this job. It wasn’t what I expected or even particularly wanted. The President just said, ‘Here, Frank,’ and that was that. I’m over here to be out of the way.”
“I don’t believe you.”
Austen merely shrugged. “You believe what you like. But it’s true. ‘I want somebody over there I can trust,’ was the way he pitched it, but the fact of the matter is, I was beginning to make certain parties nervous. Someday, if we get to know each other better, I’ll tell you all about it, but for now the only important thing is that this is my pasture.”
He tapped on the desktop with the point of his thumb to indicate what he was talking about, and Timmler watched the operation with fascinated attention.
“You get the point? Or maybe you haven’t met Howard Diederich yet. “
“I haven’t had that privilege, no. But I still don’t grasp how all this adds up to you as the Company’s sanctified redeemer.”
There were volumes of urbane contempt in the way Timmler pressed the tips of his fingers together and smiled; you had the impression he had heard this particular con a hundred times—Would I lie to you? I’m above all that. Austen didn’t blame him a bit.
“You want guarantees, right?” Austen smiled—nothing could be simpler. “Okay, then, there’ll be no domestic surveillance that isn’t cleared through you first. That’s just number one. Number two, I’ll give you a written exemption from the memoirs rule. What the hell, you can resign anytime you want to; if I start sending the boys around to ring doorbells for the man, you’ve got advance clearance to spill your guts about it in any media you like. And, remember, if you leave me here by myself to fuck up, and Faircliff replaces me, it’s going to be Howard Diederich who nominates my successor. Believe me, you wouldn’t like that. Have we got a deal?”
After a little fencing about the details, they discovered that they had a deal. Timmler could play hard to get as much as he liked, but it was obvious that the deputy director wasn’t quite as ready to write off his beloved Agency as he apparently wanted to suggest. If he was going to sell out to the likes of Frank Austen he wanted to strike the best bargain possible, which was reasonable. It wasn’t even a question of personal ambition. Austen understood and sympathized.
“We’ll run the war like Marshall Zhukov and Stalin,” he said, taking Timmler’s narrow hand in his own and giving it a slight shake. “Only don’t forget which one of us is supposed to be Stalin.”
It was a joke, and Timmler permitted himself to smile.
“I do mean it, George,” he went on. “I’ll keep my end of the deal. From time to time I’ll have political work to do, but I’ll keep the Agency out of it.”
Austen picked up the typed pages of his report, seeming to weigh them in his hand. “In the meantime, is there anything I should add to this? Any little family secrets I should know about? It’s better that I know sooner than later. Anything?”
Timmler shook his head.
“Nothing? You haven’t got Hitler locked away in an icehouse somewhere? No defectors? Please, God, we’re not running any whorehouses, are we?”
“No.” Then Timmler stopped shaking his head and grinned.
“We’ve got old Yegorov—would he count? He’s probably around eighty by now, and crazy as a lemming. We keep him in a nursing home in New Jersey. I guess you could call him our political prisoner emeritus.”
. . . . .
On warm days he had liked to sit outside on the cement bench in the front yard and play chess with Mr. Whitney, who was a Negro and told stories about the forty-seven years he had been a porter on the Southern Crescent, the finest train in America. A broken hip in 1972 had ended the great adventure, but for forty-seven years it had been back and forth between New York and New Orleans; Alabama, where Mr. Whitney had been born, was just a place to wave at through the lavatory window.
But Mr. Whitney had died the year before last—his son, who ran a dry-cleaning business right there in Newark, had come to collect his things and had even taken the chessboard—and besides, it was the middle of March and too cold to sit outside at his age.
A-la-ba-ma. Noo-wark and Noo-yark. Places had such comical names in this country, like the nonsense syllables in a child’s rhyme.
“Now, Mr. Eisenstein, you mustn’t just sit on your bed all day. You have to help the circulation along, you know. Go have a nice walk in the recreation room until it’s time for lunch.”
Stupid bitch. In the recreation room the television blared like the bullhorn in a prison yard, and the old women sat against the walls and whispered to themselves. Every so often one of them would get dizzy and collapse on the floor. Go have a nice walk, she whined, like a fat, butter-colored caterpillar bursting from her rayon cocoon. Stupid bitch.
They watched him all the time. The nurses, the boys who wheeled by with the meal carts, all of them. His room had bars in the window, and they watched him all the time because they were waiting for him to escape again. The fools. When he was ready, how would they stop him? They didn’t even know his name.
He had papers—a social security card, an out-of-date driver’s license, his passport—in an envelope in the business office. They all said he was Jacob Eisenstein, an old Jew from the death camps. That was to explain the numbers tattooed on the inside of his arm. They were good papers—the CIA could do those things as well as anyone—but they were all lies a child could have seen through. All lies.
Ten sons he had. Ten fine American sons. They would know it was all lies. Father Georgi Fedorovich, they would say, we are the fine boys who claim you. We know you are not an old Jew. He would find his sons, and together they would pay everyone back. Everyone would be made to pay. He would have them burn down the nursing home—at night, after the doors had been locked. Everyone would die, and he would stand outside on the sidewalk and listen to the screaming and laugh.
Old Mr. Eisenstein would laugh.
Eisenstein, Yegorov—Soroka. It was all lies. The magpie is a nest robber and a mimic. Soroka would find his little fledglings, and then all the lies would become the truth, and everyone would be paid back. The Germans—no, they were all dead now. The Russians, the Americans, OSS, now CIA. GPU, then NKVD, now KGB. Soroka would have the last laugh.
When he was ready, how would they stop him?
. . . . .
One of the perquisites of high government office was that you didn’t have to worry about trying to find a parking space in downtown Washington. You got driven around in a black limousine, and the one for the Director of Central Intelligence had all the modern conveniences, including armor plating in the doors, a telephone in the rear seat console, and even a small safe in place of the glove compartment. But the nicest thing was that it was always waiting for you when you were ready to go home.
It was comforting to know that at that moment the thing was parked down in the FBI building’s basement garage. Austen thought of it with a certain longing as he sat with a fixed smile on his face and listened to Oscar Monke describing how he was going to chew the hide off his back in strips if the President wasn’t persuaded to follow the example of his predecessors in office and request from Congress a further exemption from the federal retirement provisions. Oscar Monke didn’t want to retire.
“You tell Faircliff I’ve been in this job for a long time, and if he thinks Mr. Hoover’s files were really burned in seventy-two he should think again
.” Monke wasn’t even looking at him—in fact, his back was turned. He was standing by the big picture window behind his desk, gazing out over the lawn, his right hand clutching his left forearm just at the base of his spine. He was bluffing, but his voice was perfectly serene.
Austen continued to smile. Somehow that was the way you always reacted to Monke, even over the telephone. It was as if he were examining you under a microscope. “What exactly have you got, Mr. Director? Maybe, at the outside, a few sexual indiscretions—nobody’s perfect. There’s nothing more, and Faircliff knows it because he’s heard it from me.”
“Things can be twisted around, boy. I’m not saying I’ve got proof, but that business with Ted Boothe when your boss was running for his second term never smelled right. You want that going to the papers?”
Austen’s smile broadened into a ratty grin. “Mr. Director, you’re dating yourself. We’ve been through that; I checked the accident out myself. The worst you could do would be to hand us a few embarrassing inside-page headlines, and the only tangible result would be that you’d end up making yourself an enemy in yours truly here, and I know how that game is played as well as anybody. Have you led such a blameless official life, Mr. Director? Is that how you want to spend your retirement, on the witness stand at federal court?”
The message worked its way through. Oscar Monke was standing so still his eyelids didn’t even flicker; he could have been turned to stone. “I don’t even know if I’m talking to the right man,” he said finally. “I don’t even know if you’ve got that kind of drag.”
“I’ve got the drag. Count on it—Faircliff wants your ass out, but one word from me and you can stop cleaning out your locker. If you want that exemption, you might try being nice.”
“What is it you want?”
“To start, George Timmler tells me that liaison with the Bureau almost doesn’t exist, that you got pissed off at Coppard and told your people not to cooperate. Fine; Coppard was a horse’s ass. But it’s a new team now, and we think you should open your files to us.”
“Done.”
So apparently it was going to be easy. Austen drew a deep breath and decided to go for broke. “And it just may happen that once in a while you and I could do each other the odd small favor. The kind that doesn’t go into any reports—not even the ones the President gets with his luncheon chat when you come calling. I would appreciate that, Mr. Director. We all have people breathing down our necks.”
Oscar Monke merely nodded this time; perhaps he was afraid that Austen had come in wired. Austen rose out of his chair, the two men silently shook hands, and the meeting was over. Two minutes later a Bureau usher was holding open the door to his limousine.
So that was settled. Now there was only the White House and a quiet drink with the President. Austen smiled as he leaned back against the upholstery; he would tell Simon about their political prisoner emeritus. That would hand him a laugh.
II
There had been rumors for weeks, so when Major Serebryakov received the telegram at his sister’s home in Baku ordering him to rejoin his battalion, he wasn’t particularly surprised. Dounia, of course, made a great fuss, but women never understood these matters and were subject to all the terrors of the ignorant. He was the last of the family, she said; he ought to leave the military and get married to some pretty woman who was still young enough to bear him children. She begged, with tears in her pale old eyes, that he should be careful and volunteer for nothing, pleading with him that he was all she had left to live for in the world. It was very tiresome.
He packed his kit and went to the railroad station to catch his train to Saratov, making Dounia stay at home; they were both well past the age at which public farewells were seemly. He had survived Hungary and Afghanistan, he told her, so it struck him as unlikely that he would die in some little border skirmish with the Chinese.
She had made him up a basket of food. The trip was nearly two thousand kilometers, and everyone knew that the meals one got along the way weren’t worth the trouble of eating. He sat by the window watching the countryside slip by, huddled up in his greatcoat because the carriage was freezing, nibbling at one of Dounia’s cold pirozhki and trying not to regret that his leave had been cut short. It seemed so unsoldierly.
But the truth was, as he perfectly well understood, that the army had lost its charm for him. Perhaps Dounia was right and he really ought to retire, except that the two of them could hardly make a great show in the world on their combined pensions. As for marriage, for years it had been out of the question, and now he discovered he had lost interest in the idea.
He had expected to make colonel by forty, but already that honor was seven years overdue and would certainly never come now. He was a good soldier, and if there had been another war. . . But chasing after peasants in Afghanistan hardly answered, and he was without the sort of family connections that made a peacetime career possible. So it had been rotating tours along the Mongolian border and garrison duty in Poland. A life without romance. He would not be unwilling to spend what was left of his life keeping his widowed sister company on the shores of the Caspian Sea—except that there wasn’t enough money.
In Saratov the railroad station was alive with uniforms, and there was barely time enough to change trains. In the officers’ compartments he found himself sitting next to Semyon Kostylev, who was a lieutenant colonel and four years his junior but a good fellow nonetheless. They had done a tour together in one of the armored companies, but since his promotion Kostylev had been a staff officer and now they hardly saw one another. Serebryakov dug a bottle of vodka out of his sister’s hamper, and within an hour of departure they were both pleasantly drunk. There was little enough else to do.
“So it is to be China again, Rodian Prokofyich,” Kostylev said quietly, nodding with the air of someone imparting a great secret. “And this time, I hear, there is to be some action—give the little yellow devils a taste of Russian cannon fire and see how they like it. Teach them a lesson.”
“Where are we to be stationed—Noyon? Eh, that was what I was afraid of. A terrible hole. In the officers’ mess the cooking fires are fueled with dried yak dung, and the women all have flat noses and lice. We made a great mistake having anything to do with the Mongolians.”
“Then you have been there?” Kostylev raised his eyebrows in interest. “I, never. I was in Ulan Bator, which is not so bad. They say Noyon is hardly more than an outpost. Why would they be raising such a place to division strength, I wonder.”
“Is it to be a division, then? Ah, they must be interested in the oil fields; it is a straight line from there, maybe four or five hundred kilometers. You follow the river and miss the Ma-tsung Shan Mountains. It must be the oil fields.”
They were almost into the Urals by then, and the snow was still heavy on the ground. There was hardly a speck of color for as far as the eye could see. It was so cold in their compartment that Serebryakov wished he had a glass of tea with a chunk of lemon in it and some sugar cubes; dinner wasn’t for another three hours.
“A division, you say?” He shook his head, making a contemptuous sound rather like a low whistle. “What do you suppose they expect to do with a division? Four hundred kilometers inside the border—enough to take a few towns, perhaps—more than enough—but not enough to hold them. Not if the Chinese want them back. And they will want them back if we are heading for the oil fields. They must be crazy in Moscow.”
“Well, then, perhaps it is not the oil fields after all, Rodian Prokofyich. Perhaps it is something else, eh? Like the pretty women.”
But Serebryakov only frowned and wondered silently at the folly of those in command. South of Noyon there was only the Gobi, nothing but sand and rock and mountains, one of the poorest places on earth except for the oil. Except for the oil, the Chinese would not defend it against a company; even the Great Wall stopped there. But there was the oil, and it would take more than a division to hold fast. The Chinese would fight, and drive them away
, and the oil would still be there in the ground when they left. Somewhere in this, there was madness.
. . . . .
Half a world away it looked like something else. So far the indications were fragmentary—the Chinese were very tight about that sort of thing, so it was difficult to get hard independent intelligence—but what was available so far was scary enough for Peking to break its customary silence about such matters, and the Company office there had been sending along some perfectly terrifying cables. The satellite photos confirmed it; the Russians were penetrating their Mongolian client state in force and building up along the southern border.
“They mean business, Simon. This isn’t going to be some little punitive raid to teach the local goatherds not to stray over the line. They’re massing for a strike against the oil fields at Chiu-ch’uan and Yü-men—that’s what it looks like—and the Chinese have a heavy investment there. It would mean a war.”
President Faircliff stood beside his desk, looking down at the map Austen had brought along with him from Langley. His thick fingers traced along the red thread indicating the boundary between the Mongolian People’s Republic and China proper. He seemed to be feeling for a crevice, something real to mark the political abstraction. And then the hand came to rest over a blue line that indicated the Jo Shui River.
“If it came to that, could we give them any help?” he asked, although he knew the answer to his own question.
“From Korea, maybe. But we’re talking about a distance of around two thousand miles, and Outer Mongolia is Russia’s backyard. If they cross in strength, we couldn’t deliver enough to make a difference. Not with conventional weapons.”
“And if we decided on the nuclear option?”
Austen again had the impression that he had stopped breathing. It was one of those moments when you felt your mortality closing in around you like a cold shroud. He reminded himself that all this was real, that he was the Director of Central Intelligence and was being asked his opinion on a question within his official purview, and he didn’t even smile.
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