The Double Game

by Dan Fesperman

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2012 by Dan Fesperman

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf,

  a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Fesperman, Dan, [date]

  The double game / Dan Fesperman. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  “This is a Borzoi book.”

  eISBN: 978-0-307-96090-0

  1. Journalists—Washington (D.C.)—Fiction. 2. Fathers and sons—Fiction. 3. Intelligence officers—Fiction. 4. Cold War—Fiction. 5. Espionage—Fiction. 6. Moles (Spies)—Fiction. 7. United States. Central Intelligence Agency—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3556.E778D68 2012 813′.54—dc22 2012019889

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Front-of-jacket photograph by LOOK-foto/Wildcard Images UK Jacket design by Evan Gaffney Design

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  A Precaution

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Appendix

  Acknowledgments

  A Note About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  A PRECAUTION

  I no longer believe what I read in books.

  Unless, of course, the text states clearly that every word is made up, a product of the author’s imagination. I especially take notice when a novelist deploys that oft-used legal disclaimer, the one that says, “Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.”

  Sure it is. That statement makes me perk up like a dog that has heard a distant whistle from a cruel and deceitful master. It means truth is about to appear in some elegant and artful disguise.

  As for all those dusty “facts” piled in the vast remaindered bin known as nonfiction, well, I’ve exhumed quite a few such items in this autumn of foraging and funerals, and so many have proven to be false that I’ve lost faith in their authenticity. Along the dim corridors of the secret world I’ve come to know best, only the so-called inventions of fiction have ever shed any light of revelation.

  But with light come shadows, and therein lies the rub. Shadows hide danger. They conceal death, even love. They must often be avoided, but never ignored. I arrived at these conclusions only recently, although I now suspect that at some deeper level I’ve known their truth all along.

  Let me tell you why …

  1

  The Great Man himself was waiting for me on the phone. I say that without irony. In those days Edwin Lemaster was my hero, accomplished and unblemished, the very sort of fellow I aspired to be but never became. Even my wife, April, sensed the call’s solemn importance, although she’d never liked his books.

  “Genre fiction,” she always sneered. “Spies and secrets, lies and betrayal, blah blah blah.”

  “You mean like life?” I’d counter, little knowing we were touching on the dynamics of our coming failure.

  Yet on that long-ago sunny morning she smiled in excitement and stretched the phone cord to its limit, as if it were a lifeline that might pull me to safety. I grabbed it.

  It was June of 1984, Orwell’s year of reckoning. The Cold War, after a brief thaw, had safely returned to subzero, and the Berlin Wall remained rock solid. I was twenty-seven, a Washington journalist on the make, poised at roughly the halfway point of my life up to now. Opening my mouth to speak, I felt like a flustered fan who had finally reached the head of the autograph line.

  “Uh, Mr. Lemaster? This is Bill Cage.”

  “Bill, a pleasure. And call me Ed. My assistant Lenore forwarded your request. As you know, I don’t usually give interviews, but your letter was quite convincing.”

  Of course it was. I’d spent hours on it, agonizing over every word. In my latter-day career as a PR flack, nothing I’ve written has ever matched its persuasive sincerity. Then again, I am no longer paid to be sincere.

  “I’ll be coming down from Maine for the university lecture anyway,” Lemaster continued, “so why don’t we give it a try?”

  I could barely draw breath to answer.

  Why such excitement over a mere scribbler? I should explain. Not only was Lemaster the world’s premier espionage novelist, but he’d also been a spy for sixteen years at the height of the Cold War, back when spying was a glamorous profession. “Our le Carré,” the American critics called him, although to my mind le Carré was “Their Lemaster.”

  But for me the appeal went further, and was deeply personal. Having grown up as a Foreign Service brat, I had come of age in the very capitals where Lemaster set his plots, at the very moment in history when they were unfolding. In those days, to walk the night streets of Berlin, of Prague, of Vienna, of Budapest, was to imagine that mysterious and exciting events were occurring just around the corner. And sometimes they were.

  My father, also a fan, first put a Lemaster novel in my hands when I was twelve, as an antidote to a gloomy Saturday in Prague in 1969. Within days I was pillaging his shelves for the equally timely glories of John le Carré, Len Deighton, and Adam Hall. Eventually I turned to earlier classics by Maugham, Buchan, Ambler, and Greene. I even read the 1903 Erskine Childers book that supposedly gave birth to the modern spy novel, The Riddle of the Sands, its pages haunted by the knowledge that the author had eventually been hanged as a spy. My father had them all, a painstakingly assembled collection of more than two hundred espionage first editions, most of them signed by the author.

  Whenever we moved—and in the diplomatic corps that happened about every three years—the books were my back-door passage to our new home, with the characters as my escorts. At a moment in history when other American boys were memorizing batting averages and home run totals, I was steeping myself in the lore of fictional spies. They were my Mays, Mantle, and Maris, and I aspired to emulate them. To be a spy was to survive by your wits in a dangerous foreign landscape, to seek to know everything about others while revealing nothing of yourself—an arrested adolescence in which you merited your country’s highest trust even as you traded in its deepest duplicity.

  And the writer I always returned to with the greatest anticipation was
Lemaster, who seemed more willing than the rest to take me into his confidence. He declassified the world I lived in, elegantly parting the curtains in all their varying shades of gray. So perhaps now you can understand why his promise of an interview left me momentarily at a loss for words.

  “Bill?” he prompted. “Are you there?”

  “Great,” I finally managed. “That would be … great.”

  “Chancellor Stewart has kindly offered the use of his conference room. Shall we say four o’clock?”

  “Perfect.” At least I’d moved on from “great.”

  “In the meantime, Lenore will send you an advance copy of my latest. See you next week.”

  “Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

  Wouldn’t miss it for the world? Had I actually said something so trite? I blushed as I hung up, and for the next hour I half expected Lenore to call back to cancel. Then, determined to make the most of the opportunity, I began finding out all I could about Lemaster’s life and times.

  The basics were already known to me: He was divorced, childless, eldest son of a Wall Street lawyer. Groton ’51. Yale ’55. Then two years as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, where he became an incurable Anglophile before joining the CIA in 1957. Served throughout Europe. Began writing novels while still an Agency employee. Left the CIA in ’73, a month after his third book became a best seller.

  I figured there would be plenty more. But in those days before Google and YouTube it was far easier to maintain a low profile, and that’s what Lemaster had done. I checked the clip file at the Post, the Lexis-Nexis database of publications from around the world, Who’s Who, the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature. My search turned up loads of book reviews, but only a few profiles, and those were skeletal. Only Time magazine and London’s Guardian had interviewed him at length, and even their stories were mostly about his books and characters. When Time asked about his career in spying, Lemaster was charmingly dismissive.

  “Oh, I was quite unimportant. A cog in the machine, easily replaced. Anything I picked up for the novels came mostly from hearing what other fellows were talking about, the ones who were doing the interesting stuff.”

  Frustrated, I retraced my steps, this time combing the material like an old-fashioned Kremlinologist, alert for significance in the backwash of minor detail.

  He hunted, but only for birds, never mammals. Fished, but only with a fly rod and he tied his own lures. Liked Bordeaux reds, Alsatian whites. A Red Sox fan who had never been to Fenway, yet had twice been to Yankee Stadium (and if that isn’t the behavior of a natural-born spy, what is?). His thesis at Oxford was on the theme of courtly love in medieval poetry.

  I looked up “courtly love.” It was all about a knight’s idealized, secretive devotion to a specially selected woman, never his wife, although possibly someone else’s. He pledged eternal loyalty even if she never loved him back, and wrote her letters under a code name.

  It sounded an awful lot like espionage.

  At the appointed hour I appeared at the chancellor’s oaken chambers with a fresh notebook and a microcassette recorder. Folded in my pocket was a list of forty questions, winnowed from fifty-seven the night before. I wore a jacket and tie, which in those days occurred about as often as sightings of Halley’s Comet.

  Chancellor Stewart, who turned out to be a school chum of Lemaster’s, handled the introductions. His secretary kindly tried not to smile as I wiped a sweaty palm on my corduroys before shaking hands.

  Lemaster was taller than I expected, even a bit imposing. But the craggy nose, the lined face, and the stray forelock, curling toward his brow like a comma, were exactly as advertised on his dust jackets. Both he and the chancellor wore tweeds. Stewart escorted us into the conference room, then departed.

  “Where would you like to begin?” I asked nervously, feeling like a sycophantic fool.

  “Wherever you’d like.” He sounded as though he meant it. “We don’t even have to talk about the new book unless you want to, although my publisher would probably send me to the gallows for saying so.”

  His relaxed manner immediately put me at ease, and for the next two hours I enjoyed that rarest of pleasures—a much-anticipated event that exceeds expectations. His answers were witty and expansive, candid and unrehearsed. And although he continued to downplay his career with the CIA—seeming almost sheepish on the topic—in other areas he revealed details I had never seen elsewhere. He even described the exact moment he had dreamed up his greatest creation, frumpy spymaster Richard Folly, who had come to him out of the blue in 1967 as he rode a heaving tram car in Budapest, where I had actually been living at the time. Folly, a perennial loser in love and in office politics, had been the most sympathetic literary companion of my adolescence, and I’d always felt redeemed when he ultimately triumphed on the strength of his nimble, analytical mind.

  But the best thing about the interview was that Lemaster spoke just the way he wrote—in complete and flawless paragraphs, rarely hesitating and never doubling back. I couldn’t help but compare the painstaking hours I’d spent on the letter, and I surmised enviously that for Lemaster writing must be almost like taking dictation.

  Things went so well that the chancellor, with Lemaster’s blessing, invited me to join them afterward for dinner at the University Club, where a round of cocktails followed by two bottles of wine further loosened tongues. In those days I was too vain to consider that anything other than my winning personality had prompted his easy collegiality, but toward the end of the meal I learned otherwise. The chancellor had just excused himself to the men’s room, leaving the two of us alone for the first time since our interview. Lemaster leaned across the table.

  “So tell me something, Bill.”

  His tone was conspiratorial, and I edged forward. He paused for a swallow of claret, then sprang his surprise.

  “How is your splendid father? We once knew each other well, you know.”

  “You did?” The words were out before I could stop them.

  “Oh, yes. We crossed paths here and there back in the day. He was a useful man for people like me. Very helpful.”

  I had long known that my father’s embassy duties sometimes included assisting men who were, as he liked to say, “in a more delicate line of work.” I fancied I’d even met a few, on strange occasions when my dad chivvied me along after dark to some unfamiliar café, where we would share a back table with a fellow I’d never seen before and would never see again. None of those men ever stated his name, and at some point in the proceedings my father always suggested that I make a preemptive visit to the men’s room, which is probably when he and the mystery guest transacted the evening’s real business. I liked to believe then that my role was to help provide cover—a cozy father-son backdrop for some spook in transit. But in retrospect I may have embellished those memories, because at the time I was always waist-deep in some new find from my father’s spy shelves, and would have been highly susceptible to any suggestion that clandestine doings were afoot.

  What I did know for certain was that Lemaster had never appeared at any of those trysts. And surely my father would have told me if he’d met the man. Autographed Lemaster novels held pride of place on his shelves, although Dad had led me to believe the signatures had all been obtained by enterprising booksellers.

  Yet here was the author saying they were pals. Obviously I had missed something.

  “Well,” Lemaster continued, “I shouldn’t be too surprised he never mentioned it. He was a good soldier that way. A real Joe, your dad, and you certainly couldn’t say that about everyone on the diplomatic side. A lot of them acted as if we were radioactive.”

  Before I could respond he raised the stakes further.

  “He always spoke well of you, Bill. His son the top student. His son the track star, beating all those strapping Austrian boys ’round the oval. Four minutes twenty-one seconds, wasn’t that your mile time? And that flap you got into with that pretty gal of yours down in Vienna, Litzi somethin
g or other? That’s why your letter was such a hit. Lenore usually tosses those things in the trash, but she made sure I saw yours right away.”

  So even his assistant knew all these details? I was feeling hurtfully excluded, the foil of some long-running jest. You were right, Warfield. That lad of yours had no idea! My discomfort must have shown. Lemaster’s expression softened. Then, perhaps in atonement, he offered a small intimacy, just for me.

  “Of course, in those days even your father didn’t know what I was really up to. No one did. I was keeping an eye out for the Don Tollesons of this world.”

  Now that was interesting. Tolleson was the traitorous creation at the heart of Lemaster’s magnum opus, The Double Game, in which Folly unmasks his lifelong friend and colleague Don Tolleson as a Soviet double agent. Was Lemaster admitting that he, too, had been a mole hunter? None of his press clippings had even hinted at that.

  “So did you ever find one?” I asked. “Who was your Don Tolleson?”

  Lemaster frowned, as if realizing he’d said too much. He swallowed more claret, then launched into a paragraph on the nature of betrayal. This time the answer felt rehearsed, and it skirted my question. I tried again.

  “But what about you personally? You wrote The Double Game while you were still with the CIA. It must have been a guilty pleasure to contemplate betrayal to such depths. Did you ever play with the idea of crossing the line yourself?”

  “What, by defecting?”

  “Or just by turning. Working for the other side. If only to find out what it was like.”

  His eyes crinkled in amusement, and at that moment it was clear to me that Lemaster believed he was still talking solely to the son of his old friend Warfield Cage, and not to an ambitious reporter for the Washington Post.

  He swirled the wine, and something about the way it eddied in the big glass reminded me of a crystal ball on the verge of revealing all. Maybe that was what stimulated my baser instincts as a newshound. Or perhaps I was still feeling stung by my dad’s secrecy, or emboldened by drink. Whatever the case, as Lemaster glanced downward, momentarily lost in thought, I slipped a hand inside the lapel pocket where I had stowed the microrecorder. Then, like one of Folly’s zealous young acolytes, I squeezed the red button for “Record,” setting the tape in motion without the slightest click. I casually withdrew my hand just before he looked up, and upon seeing he hadn’t noticed, I was giddy with a sense of accomplishment. For the only time that night, I was the smartest man in the room.