Something had upset him. Or maybe he’d had his fill of old farts refighting past battles. I followed him onto the porch, but not before watching Preston lean down and poke Cabot in the chest, which drew a swift reaction from a husky young man positioned behind the wheelchair. This in turn prompted a challenge from a stout fellow standing behind Preston, fiftyish but sporting a mullet, which made him stand out in this crowd like a carnival wrestler among retired professors. The last thing I heard as the door shut was raised voices, like on a schoolyard when a fight breaks out.
“Think they’ll come to blows?” I asked, out in the sea breeze. “The one in the mullet looked ready to rumble.”
Dad shook his head and stared out at the ocean. He looked a little pale, but maybe it was the light from the overcast sky. By the time we returned, order had been restored. Preston, Cabot, and their protectors were in separate corners. Nethercutt’s wife was off to the side, talking to the older woman, Val, who’d called Lemaster a pariah.
“So do you think that was Lemaster up in the balcony?” I asked.
“No idea.” He turned away toward the bar.
Later at dinner, when it was just the two of us down on the waterfront at the Mohegan Cafe, I tried to pry out more details about the various players.
“Was the guy in the electric blue suit Mr. Henson?”
“Stu never did know how to dress for the occasion.”
“Wasn’t he a CIA station chief in Europe?”
“Here and there.”
“What do you think Breece Preston and Giles Cabot were arguing about?”
“Haven’t the foggiest.” A pause, then a frown. “Breece was always a bully at heart.”
“Is he still with the Agency?”
“Goodness, no. But he’s still in the business.”
“Consulting?”
“You’ve probably heard of his outfit. Baron Associates. Contracts with the Pentagon, wherever the troops happen to be mired at the moment.”
“Intelligence gathering?”
“Of a sort. His type always goes private eventually.”
“Good money, probably.”
“That’s part of it. It’s more for the freedom. Once you’re outside the velvet rope you no longer have to play by the rules.”
“Wouldn’t that be breaking the law?”
“Where, in Afghanistan? Iraq? Some narco-state? Breece prefers to operate in places where the law has disappeared. If you ever spot one of his people in your rearview mirror, pull over to let them pass.”
“You mean like the guy with the mullet?”
Dad looked away, dabbing a napkin at his mouth as if he’d received a blow.
“Where’s our waitress?” he said. “I need a refill. Pass me that steak sauce, will you?”
I knew better than to press the point, especially when the next topic he raised was Redskins football, which he loathed and I loved. The next morning, before I was awake, he took the early ferry to catch his flight back to Vienna. I hadn’t seen him since.
I considered telephoning him. He would probably get a kick out of all this, especially the Bingham touch with its George Smiley connection. He might even have some leads on who’d done it. It would be midnight there, but he’d always been a night owl.
Then I recalled his continuing silence about Lemaster. In all the years since ’84 he still hadn’t explained their friendship to my satisfaction, despite plenty of opportunities. Let it wait, I decided. For the moment this secret would be mine alone.
The funny thing was, I hadn’t opened any of the cited books in ages, nor had I read a single spy novel. Dad and I both lost interest almost the moment the Berlin Wall came down in ’89. For a while I gamely kept up with Lemaster’s output. Maybe I felt obligated after having burned him in the Post. But he soon lost his edge, tilting toward rightist political themes and straying into techno-thrillers—beloved by the Pentagon but disdained by his oldest fans. Folly hadn’t made an appearance since ’91, and the title of that book, A Final Folly, says all you need to know about how the damn thing ended.
Friends whose literary judgment I trusted occasionally recommended new practitioners, authors who set their spies amid contemporary intrigue in Latin America, Asia, or in the so-called War on Terror. But something in the actions of those brave young men and women who hammered down the Wall seemed to have forever sealed my portal of fascination with the secret world. Spy novels, like the Cold War, lay entombed in my past.
Or so I told myself. For two hundred dollars an hour I suppose some shrink would have explained that fear was what really prevented me from returning, a fear of confronting everything else I’d left behind—my marriage to April, my newspaper career, my hopes of again living abroad, and my fond dream that perhaps one day I, too, might write something worthwhile, even lasting.
All had vanished without a trace, unless you counted our son, David, who lived with his mother and had just turned eighteen—voting age, big on Obama but not so big on his dad. Not that I’d given him much reason to be. It was shocking how little had been required to erase everything—a false step in Belgrade, a few foolish lapses in Washington, a cascade of misjudgment, and here I was.
Yet now, with this cryptic note staring up from my lap like a summons, I felt connected to that previous era in a way I hadn’t been in ages, and my emotions were in an uproar. Even if this turned into a glorified scavenger hunt, maybe it was time to start looking for answers. At the very least, I should try to find the dead drop.
Already I was transformed. Seated there, with full heart and empty glass, I was no longer just a lonely PR man with a big paycheck and a spent imagination. I was Folly, I was Smiley, I was page one of a fresh new first edition. I was the boy I had once been, and the man I had never become.
As I scanned the opening paragraphs of Ashenden, a flash of insight told me exactly what I needed to do next. So I stood, ready to turn the page. Ready to turn them all.
3
I was on my way to the dead drop. Was that possible? More to the point, was it advisable? In my PR job at Ealing Wharton I’d warned off many a client from come-ons far more sophisticated than the cryptic letter that had just landed on my doorstep, and I was already wary of the sender’s motives. What sort of dirty work did he have in mind, and who would be ruined as a result? Perhaps he meant to do me harm.
Curiosity overcame caution, if only because of all the times as a boy when I’d imagined setting out on just this sort of spy’s errand—flashlight in hand, an eye out for surveillance, the moon peeping over my shoulder. In those days I was usually on my way to meet a girl, run an errand for Dad, or share a toke by the Danube.
But this was the real thing, or some prankster’s version of it, and as I stepped onto O Street a swell of giddiness caught in my throat like laughter. For the moment, any chance of danger seemed worth the price of admission.
I took precautions nonetheless. To give the streets time to empty and darken, I waited a few hours before leaving the house. I also scrounged up an old canister of pepper spray. To pass the time before zero hour I took down some old books to reacquaint myself with my favorite spies. Their debuts were of particular interest since I was preparing for my own, and I discovered eerie similarities.
In le Carré’s Call for the Dead, George Smiley is summoned from sleep by a ringing telephone. In The Miernik Dossier, Charles McCarry’s Paul Christopher is yanked from bed in Geneva by the doorbell. In Berlin Game, Len Deighton’s Bernard Samson waits in the midnight cold of Checkpoint Charlie for a contact who never shows. And in Knee Knockers, Lemaster’s Richard Folly is lured into the murk of predawn Prague. Such a lonely procession of nocturnal seekers. Literally and figuratively they were all in the dark. Now, so was I, an unlikely initiate to the midnight brethren.
As mandated by page 47 of The Double Game, my tradecraft involved a series of switchbacks to ensure no one was following. It felt childish, especially when I spotted a neighbor walking her dog—an Alsatian, meaning it must be
Mrs. Pierce from over on Dumbarton. I called out in greeting, but the woman who turned was slimmer, younger. Possibly taking me for a mugger, she quickened her stride, and to avoid alarming her further I doubled back toward P Street. Fortunately there was only a block to go, and I tempered my sheepishness with the knowledge that, while Georgetown was hardly Berlin, these chockablock town houses had harbored many a spook and spymaster at the height of the Cold War.
CIA chief Allen Dulles had lived right around the corner. So had Frank Wisner, the doomed zealot whose mania for covert action sent hundreds of operatives to their deaths. In the fifties and sixties, dozens of Agency men had lived here, gossiping and drinking with pundits and policy makers at rollicking dinner parties that included plenty of charming guests from abroad—British mole Kim Philby, for one.
Dad and I lived here then, during a two-year home posting from ’62 to ’64, back when the can-do luster of American spying peaked and began its long, steady decline in the wake of the Kennedy assassination.
I remember Dad pointing out Dulles at a cocktail gathering and admonishing me, “Be nice if he speaks to you. He just lost his job because of the Bay of Pigs”—which sounded to me like some kind of farming disaster.
At the age of seven I spotted Mr. Wisner at a neighbor’s garden party one Sunday afternoon. At the time I had a crush on his daughter, who was several years older, so I was paying close attention to all things Wisner. Even a kid could tell that her dad seemed pale and beleaguered, a man at the end of his rope, although I had no way of knowing that years earlier he’d suffered a nervous breakdown in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Hungary.
A year later, after we moved back overseas to, of all places, Budapest, my father heard that Mr. Wisner had blown out his brains with a shotgun. I recall feeling bad for his daughter, and wondering if I could improve my standing with a sympathy card.
But my most vivid Georgetown memory was of an autumn afternoon just before my eighth birthday, when murder was the talk of the town. A woman was shot to death on the towpath of the C&O Canal, a pleasant greenway where everybody walked their dogs. The Post identified her as Mary Pinchot Meyer, sister-in-law of Benjamin Bradlee, who identified the body. All I knew of Mr. Bradlee was that he was the dad of a schoolmate a grade behind me, although the story said he was the Washington bureau chief for Newsweek, which sounded important. It felt strange seeing our neighbors’ names in a crime story, and I read over Dad’s shoulder as he drank his morning coffee.
“Shouldn’t you be getting ready for school, sport?”
“I’m done.”
“Teeth brushed?”
I bared them fiercely, and he turned back to his reading. A few seconds later he chuckled under his breath.
“What’s so funny?”
“Oh, it describes this poor woman’s ex-husband, Cord Meyer, as a ‘local author and lecturer.’ You remember Mr. Meyer, don’t you?”
I did, mostly because he was the only person I’d ever met named “Cord.” Still is.
“I thought he worked with Mr. Wisner?”
“He does. The paper is being discreet.”
“What’s ‘discreet’ mean?”
“You could look it up. Increase your word power, like in Reader’s Digest.”
Dad hated Reader’s Digest, so I took it for a joke, although I didn’t get it.
“Don’t you be wandering over to the towpath. That’s police business, not yours. And if you cross Wisconsin Avenue on your bike, for God’s sake, walk it across.”
“Yes, sir.”
Naturally I made a beeline for the towpath after school on my red Galaxy Flyer. To my disappointment, there was no sign of the crime, so I set out for the next best destination—the victim’s art studio in the Bradlees’ garage, on an alley behind N Street. The Post had evocatively described a freshly painted canvas, still wet from her final brushstrokes, drying on an easel in front of an electric fan.
I negotiated a dogleg turn up the alley, and to my morbid delight the garage was wide open, revealing a roomful of canvases, including the one in front of the fan. What I hadn’t bargained for were the two men who turned abruptly at the sound of my approach.
One was Mr. Bradlee, who relaxed the moment he recognized me. But the other man, taller and thinner, stared with probing eyes from behind thick, horn-rimmed glasses. He acted more like a cop than a neighbor, and when he took a step in my direction I nearly fell off my bike. Fortunately Mr. Bradlee put out a hand to stop him.
“It’s all right, Jim. It’s Warfield Cage’s boy.” Then, to me: “It’s Bill, right?”
“Yes, sir. I’m sorry if—”
The man named Jim interrupted.
“This isn’t your business, son. That’s what your father would tell you.”
It probably wasn’t his, either, but I’d been taught not to talk back to adults.
“Yes, sir.”
Then he said the strangest thing, reminding me of one of those folk tales where the troll offers a riddle for safe passage:
“Remember, son. Caution is the eldest child of wisdom. Now run along.”
“Yes, sir.”
I was shaky in the saddle until I reached the wide open spaces of Thirty-third Street. When I described the encounter to Dad, he chuckled just like he had while reading the Post.
“Sounds like Mr. Angleton,” he said. “Quoting Victor Hugo, no less.”
“Who’s he?”
“Victor Hugo?”
“Mr. Angleton.”
“Oh, sort of an ‘author and lecturer,’ like Mr. Meyer.”
“Why was he in that lady’s room?”
“Looking for secrets, I’d imagine. That’s mostly what he writes and lectures about.”
“What kind of secrets?”
“They wouldn’t be secrets if he went around telling everybody, would they?”
Not until my thirties did I find out from some book what they’d really been up to. By then I was working for Bradlee, who’d become executive editor of the Post, and I’d long since learned that Jim Angleton had been the CIA’s chief counterspy. They’d been looking for Mary Meyer’s diary, which described her affair with the late President Kennedy. Since she was something of a lefty, Angleton may also have wanted to scan it for clues to assist his infamous Great Mole Hunt, a paranoid quest in which he ruined the careers of so many trustworthy CIA men that he, too, was eventually forced out.
They found the diary. Bradlee gave it to Angleton, who promised to destroy it. Instead, telling no one, he stashed it in his files.
So that was my neighborhood, a high-toned ghetto of spies and policy makers. And here I was now, decades later, crossing the shadows of its maples and dogwoods as I zeroed in on yet another cache of secrets.
In case you’re wondering how I figured out the location, it was a breeze once I read the opening lines of Ashenden. The key sentence was right there on page one:
On the house at which Ashenden had been asked to call there was a board up to announce that it was for sale, the shutters were closed and there was no sign that anyone lived in it.
The passage perfectly described a detached house on P Street that my neighbors and I had long been complaining about. It had been gutted for renovation, then the developer went broke and boarded up the windows. In Georgetown you didn’t do that, so we raised a stink. City Hall finally sent a crew to replace the boards with tasteful shutters and post a “For Sale” sign. It had to be the place.
Normally a porch light was burning, but tonight the house was dark. As I crossed the tiny lawn I saw why—someone had removed the bulb. The front door had one of those big padlocks favored by real estate agents. Based on Folly’s tradecraft, I was looking for a yellow chalk mark on the bricks, but there was nothing out front. I went around to the left and spotted a yellow slash just below the rearmost window. I glanced back at the neighboring house, a mere fifteen feet away. The last thing I needed was someone reporting me to the cops, but all was quiet. The shutters were unlocked, and th
e sash opened easily when I pressed up against the glass. I climbed through the opening into an empty room that smelled of sawdust and fresh plaster.
I closed the shutters behind me and turned on the flashlight. Sweeping the walls with the beam, I spotted a buff-colored envelope propped on the mantelpiece like a note left for Santa. I fetched it, every footstep a hollow thud. Then it was time to leave, unless I wanted to become a poster boy for Neighborhood Watch.
In my impatience to get home, I ignored tradecraft and took the most direct route. As if to punish my haste, someone called out from behind me just as I reached my street.
“You’re out late tonight, Bill.”
It was the woman with the Alsatian, maybe thirty yards behind me at the end of the block. The dog was lit by the streetlamp, but she was in shadow.
“I am. And your name is …?”
“Mail service is so slow these days. But I’m glad you finally got delivery.”
She and the dog set off briskly in the opposite direction. I hurried after them, full of questions. But as soon as she rounded the corner a rear door opened on a car at the curb. No dome light, no headlights. I broke into a run as they climbed in. A black Lincoln Town Car, the kind embassies used, but the tags were unlit. The car pulled away. Brake lights glowed briefly as it paused at the next intersection, then it sped off.
Now what kind of tradecraft was that, tipping off a target to surveillance? It felt more like thug behavior than espionage. Or was it a signal that someone would be guarding my flanks? Either way, I’d been put on notice. But why would someone with the resources to hire a burglar, a tail, and a driver with a limo need me? Maybe the envelope would tell me.
I shut the blinds, settled onto the couch, and slit open the envelope. Two pages were inside—generic white paper, although the typing was all too familiar. How many hours had this person spent on my Royal? The words “Use on line 11” were typed on the first page above a long strand of paired numbers, presumably for the book code. But in what book? And on what page?
The Double Game Page 3
