The Double Game

by Dan Fesperman

  The Lemaster courier network he described was a complex feat of espionage genius, a multilayered structure in which secrets were passed within the covers of old espionage novels. In one of its more clever touches, the rarest books were used for passing the most important secrets. Was that Lothar’s creation, or Lemaster’s?

  In Lothar’s version, at least, the information was passed by using book codes, with the code key being sent via separate channels, much as I’d already guessed. But here, too, the device felt unconvincing, which made me suspect Lothar never actually got his hands on a code key. On that point we both seemed to be guessing.

  Lothar kept things interesting by setting up a series of close scrapes, and by showing the machinations of the rival spymasters as they tried to pinpoint what Headlight was really up to—Angleton in Washington, Oleg in Moscow. At various times both were convinced that they were getting the best of their rivals, only to believe in the next minute that they were being bamboozled.

  Lothar let the reader go back and forth this way until the final twenty pages. In the climactic scene, Headlight passes the coveted NATO report to his Soviet handler in a meeting at a Vienna café—the Bräunerhof, by God, with Headlight initiating the exchange by entering the very phone booth where Litzi and I had recently reunited. He places a coded call, walks to the newspaper table, and slips the report inside a copy of the German newspaper, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. He then leaves the café just as his Soviet handler takes the newspaper back to his own table and slips the report inside a briefcase.

  So there it was. In Lothar Heinemann’s judgment, Lemaster was a Soviet double agent.

  Even after days of believing that this might well be the case, the news hit me harder than I would have expected. I sat there remembering the Ed Lemaster of twenty-six years ago, swirling wine in his glass and teasing me with his talk of having contemplated betrayal.

  But had Lothar really witnessed such a decisive moment, or had he surmised it from his threads of evidence? Even if the former was true, had he really known the details of the item Lemaster placed inside the newspaper? Was the betrayal genuine, or had Lemaster been passing a clever bit of disinformation?

  Lothar left unresolved the question of whether Lemaster’s first CIA handler, Breece Preston, had been in on the scheme or merely a dupe. Not that Preston would have appreciated either interpretation. Either way, he didn’t look reliable enough to entrust with millions of dollars to spy for your soldiers.

  While Lothar’s verdict on Lemaster was clear, to me the jury was still out. And this was hardly the sort of “proof” I could publish in a magazine story, especially since I wouldn’t even be leaving the store with Lothar’s book. But at the very least, especially if Valerie Humphries’s account was accurate, Lothar’s findings showed Lemaster had been far cozier with the Soviets than his Washington handlers had ever realized or sanctioned. If he wasn’t a double, then he had run one hell of a rogue operation.

  But the book’s most diabolical section, as far as the CIA would have been concerned, was the acknowledgments page in the back. Each and every Agency operative portrayed in the book was thanked by name. All you had to do then was match their initials to those of the characters in the book to fill out the entire covert cast. No wonder the Agency had intervened to stop publication.

  My handler would no doubt be pleased by these findings, which made me all the more satisfied with the idea of withholding them from the manipulative son of a bitch. And now I would finally learn his name.

  I checked my watch. It was 7:43 p.m., dark by now, and I was hungry, thirsty, and needed to pee. I picked up Ziegler’s phone and punched in Lothar’s number. He answered right away.

  “Heinz?”

  “You’re finished?”

  “It’s impressive.”

  “The prose, or the contents?”

  That’s when I realized that even after all this time, Lothar had retained his authorial vanity. The CIA had not only bottled up his secrets, it had also deprived him of his literary moment—reviews, reaction, and, most important, readers. Lothar, who practically lived in bookstores, had never once seen his own work on a shelf or a display table, tucked in among his favorites. So now he was eager to hear at last from his one and only patron.

  “Both. Best thing I’ve read in years.”

  “Well … it has its problems, of course. But I’m gratified to hear you say it. Truly.”

  “You seem pretty sure he’s guilty.”

  “As sure as you can be in this business. Meaning not very.”

  “But you were winging it on the book codes, weren’t you?”

  “An educated guess. Our handler was always convinced that there must be something about the books themselves that held the key, but I never found it.”

  “You promised me a name.”

  “Try page one-nineteen. I believe you’ve already met him, however briefly. But don’t say it over the phone. By now I doubt we’re the only ones on Ziegler’s line.”

  I thumbed quickly to the page, running my forefinger down the column of type until I saw the name Gil Cavanaugh, an assistant to the Angleton character. I was pretty sure I knew who that was, but checked the acknowledgments page, and there it was: Giles Cabot.

  I thought back to the funeral on Block Island. Wils Nethercutt, the deceased, and his neighbor and onetime Agency rival, Giles Cabot, confined to a wheelchair even as he faced down a menacing Breece Preston. A perfectly logical choice, but nonetheless amazing. I’d been strung along across half of Europe by a frail invalid who must also be a bookworm. At least I knew where to find him.

  “Do you have it?”

  “I do. Thanks to your acknowledgments page.”

  “A cheap shot at the Agency, but I couldn’t resist. The bastards owed me. Still do. Now for the hard part. Follow Ziegler’s instructions to the letter, but once you leave the store I doubt you’ll be going very far. I just hope that the right people get to you first.”

  “Is that a guess, or do you know something?”

  “A little of both.”

  From out in the store I heard the sound of smashing glass.

  “You’re right. Someone’s just broken in.”

  “Get moving, Bill. Finish the job, then run like Zátopek. Now!”

  I slammed the receiver and moved quickly to the file cabinet and wrenched it away from the wall. Footsteps pounded through the store. The doorknob rattled. I knelt and reached behind the cabinet, pulling the handle of an old metal flap hinged at the bottom, which opened onto a coal chute. I tossed in the book, wincing in spite of myself as it banged and tumbled. As I peered into the darkness of the cellar I thought I heard the scrape of leather soles below. The flap thumped back into place. I stood and shoved the cabinet back against the wall, then had just enough time to move back behind the desk before the office door splintered open with a crunch of shattered wood. Two men rushed me. One pinned my arms behind my back while the other shouted in heavily accented English, “The book. Where is the book?”

  I’m not quite sure where my answer came from, probably some old paragraph from a long-ago rainy Saturday, author unknown. But it made all the difference.

  “It’s in a burn box in the corner.” I nodded toward a shelf where Ziegler piled his old newspapers. “It’s set to activate in two minutes.”

  A burn box is a spy device. You throw your secrets inside and lock it up. If anyone comes to take them, you push a button or punch in a number to incinerate everything inside before the enemy can retrieve a single scrap. My assailants knew this as well as I did, and my words created such an alarming sense of urgency in both of them that for a single decisive moment they forgot all about me and rushed toward the corner.

  I darted out the office door toward the broken glass at the front of the store. They were still shouting and thrashing around as I stepped into the cool Vienna night.

  Free. But for how long?

  Looking left, I saw a van twenty yards away, engine running, passenge
r door opening. I set off in the opposite direction, giving it everything I had, all of the old Emil Zátopek effort and drive. But even the great Zátopek was a distance runner, not a sprinter, and I was merely a deskbound flak with fifty-three years on the odometer. They caught me in half a block, a man on either side clamping onto an arm just as a second van squealed to the curb beside us.

  Breathless, I expected them to toss me inside. Instead, my escorts nimbly turned me back toward the first van, which was gunning toward us in reverse, straight down the sidewalk, its panel doors open. Behind me I heard the second van back on the move, and voices shouting in Russian. Some sort of brutal competition was under way, and I was the dubious prize.

  My shoulder slammed against the floor of the first van as my two escorts shoved me inside. Both tumbled in with me, and everything went dark as the doors slammed shut. I heard the grunting of bodies landing atop me, the grind of the revving engine, the muffled shouts of our pursuers, and the thump-thump of the tires as we roared back onto the street across the curb. Then a drumroll across cobbles, another shout, followed by the shriek of a siren and heavy breathing from above. A needle plunged into my buttocks.

  “Ow!”

  I was about to say more when the world disappeared.

  37

  “How many fingers?”

  An older fellow with gin blossoms and yellow teeth asked me that question. His face was only a foot from mine. He wore a gray pin-striped suit, tie loosened at the neck.

  “Three,” I answered. I was groggy, just coming around.

  “How many now?”

  “Where the hell am I?”

  “He’s fine,” a second man said from somewhere behind me. I twisted in the chair to see him but couldn’t turn more than a few inches because I was strapped around the waist and chest. My hands were bound at my sides, and my feet were bungee-corded to the legs of the chair.

  “What the fuck is happening?”

  “See? That stuff wears off in an hour, then it’s gone in seconds. Just like I told you.”

  An hour. Then it must be close to nine p.m. I had a headache, but the guy was pretty much right, because I seemed to be thinking fairly clearly. I looked around at what I could see of the room. Small and antiseptic, somebody’s office. An American flag in the corner and a picture of the president on the wall. It didn’t look like the sort of place where someone would beat you, waterboard you, or hook up your genitals to electrodes, but these days I suppose you never knew for sure. The important thing was that there was no sign of either Ron Curtin or the Hammerhead.

  The first fellow who’d held up his fingers backed away a few feet and inspected me with a rather forlorn expression, as if he’d seen better specimens.

  “Should we give him coffee?”

  “No. It’ll skew the results. Just wait another few minutes.”

  “Could somebody please tell me where I am, and what this is all about? And maybe loosen these ropes.” My hands were numb.

  The second man moved into view. Mid-twenties and full of himself. Black stretch pants and a black synthetic top, with his hair mussed. One of the guys who’d grabbed me, probably. The other fellow in the suit tilted his head in a pose of curiosity, but he no longer looked worried.

  “I’m staying for the questioning,” he said.

  “Of course.”

  “I really need to pee,” I said.

  “Give him some water. He probably needs a drink.”

  “Oh, yeah,” I said, “that’ll help.”

  “Get him a jar, or a glass from the canteen. I’ll unzip him.”

  “Are you serious?”

  He was. The suit left the room. The cocky young man in black squatted in front of me like a prostitute eager to conclude business and move on to the next customer. He unbuckled my belt and unzipped my trousers as I squirmed in the chair. Then he frowned, seemingly uncertain about what to do next.

  “Scared to touch it, or worried I’ll get it all over you?”

  “You right-handed?”

  “What?”

  “Are you right-handed?”

  “Yes.”

  He untied my right hand. The suit brought in a McDonald’s cup. Medium. The way my bladder felt, maybe they should’ve supersized. I flexed the wrist of my free hand, which tingled as the feeling returned, then went about my business while the young guy held the cup with surprising poise. If it hadn’t been such a relief I probably would’ve done something stupid and juvenile like spraying him.

  The suit wrinkled his nose and took away the cup, which was filled alarmingly close to the brim. Then the other guy pushed up a small table to my right and set down a full glass of water, which I greedily drained.

  “Got anything to eat?”

  “Later.”

  “Mind telling me where I am?”

  “The U.S. embassy. You’d better be damn glad we got to you first.”

  “Actually, that’s not how I remember it.”

  “Okay, but we got you.”

  “The other guys were Russian?”

  “Just like old times, huh? And believe me, you wouldn’t be peeing into any cups with those guys.”

  “A samovar, you think?”

  “Funny. In your pants, more like it.”

  “You guys are the best.”

  But in spite of everything, I was relieved. Being abducted and then bound to a chair by my countrymen might still lead just about anywhere, I supposed, but it seemed preferable to the alternative.

  “Does my father know I’m here?”

  “He has no idea about any of this.”

  “That’s not what I asked.”

  “You’ll be released into his custody. Provided you cooperate.”

  I exhaled slowly. By now my head was completely clear, and I felt better after the water. Maybe I would be all right.

  The suit returned, this time with a man in a white lab coat carrying a silver hard-shell briefcase, which he placed on the table and snapped open. The guy in black removed the rest of my bindings and backed away toward the door. Then, without a word, the man in the lab coat unrolled a black band, wrapped it tightly around my right bicep, and secured it with Velcro, as if he was about to take my blood pressure. He secured two thinner bands around my chest and began connecting sensors to the fingers on my right hand.

  They were hooking me up to a polygraph. I was about to be fluttered.

  I suppose it could have been an aftereffect of the knockout drug, but for a moment I experienced a sensation close to dizziness. It was as if the room were in motion and I was whirling on a long comet tail of history, preparing to land at the very point where all of this had started half a century ago, when Dad had been in an identical position. They’d hooked him up to an older version of the same machine and placed him before an inquisitor, all in the name of security. A moment that changed our lives, and now I would relive it. But I doubted my captors felt that way. To them this was more like battlefield cleanup, carting the last litters of the wounded from a very old and dormant field of action.

  Rather than freaking out, I began to relax, fortified by the moment of solidarity with Dad. I realized then that I was ready for any question.

  “All set,” the technician said.

  I flexed my hand and drummed my fingers on the table.

  “Don’t do that,” he said.

  The young fellow in black introduced himself.

  “I’m Peter West.” Then, gesturing toward the suit, “This is Arnold Harrison.”

  “Am I really supposed to believe those names?”

  “Believe what you want, as long as you answer the questions completely and truthfully. Are you ready to do that?”

  “Fire away.”

  West started me off with a series of easy questions to establish a baseline response. Name, age, home address, and so on, although about halfway through they threw in a wild card.

  “Have you ever had sexual relations with Austrian national Litzi Strauss?”

  “Yes.”<
br />
  West checked with the technician, who nodded.

  “Within the past week?”

  I decided to test the machine.

  “No.”

  Another look. The techie shook his head. West frowned and tried again.

  “Have you had sexual relations with Austrian national Litzi Strauss at any time during the past seven days?”

  “Yes.”

  A nod. A short time later they got down to business.

  “Tonight at the bookstore, did the Russians take possession of the Lothar Heinemann book?”

  “There was no Lothar Heinemann book.”

  West didn’t even bother to check with the techie.

  “We monitored your phone conversation. We know there was a book, whether Lothar’s name was on it or not. Did the Russians take possession of it?”

  “Not to my knowledge. I told them I’d put it in a burn box. That got their attention long enough for me to get away.”

  West raised an eyebrow and nodded.

  “Not bad. Where was it really?”

  “In the desk. A locked drawer. If you haven’t found it by now, then I guess they have it.”

  West looked over at the white coat. Then he frowned.

  “You’re lying.”

  “So you really haven’t found it?”

  “Answer the question.”

  “I got rid of it.”

  “Where?”

  “Down the coal chute. A flap behind the file cabinet.”

  West seemed surprised when my answer passed muster.

  “How did you know to put it there?”

  “Earlier instructions. I’m a good listener.”

  West looked at Harrison, who shrugged. The CIA must already have checked the cellar but come up empty. Maybe the Russians had it. Then I remembered the scrape of footsteps I thought I’d heard below. Lothar must have arranged for someone to be there to retrieve it. Many of those old cellars, I knew, had connecting doors that had been installed during the Second World War so that people could escape through their neighbors’ houses in case their own homes collapsed in an air raid. Ziegler himself might have been down there, the old rat. I smiled.