The Double Game

by Dan Fesperman

  Twenty yards into the brush the path became a plank walkway that curved left through marshland, with high grasses and reeds to either side. I slowed down, not wanting to make a clatter on the boards or come upon them without warning. I heard voices and stopped. Just around the bend I could see that the walkway led to a small dock on a salt pond. They were out on the end of it, and Anderson was lifting Cabot out of the wheelchair into an aluminum skiff with an outboard motor. I kept out of sight, following their progress by sound—a few grunts of effort, sloshing water from the rocking skiff, the pull of a starter rope, then the sputtering roar of the motor. I smelled the oily smoke and heard Anderson rev away from the dock. When I peeped around the corner, the skiff was heading toward the center of the pond, and their wake was coming ashore through the reeds. Anderson was at the stern, steering with the motor. Cabot sat up front, propped on boat cushions, his white hair stiff in the breeze. He stared straight ahead, as rigid as a carved bowsprit.

  It was too risky to move farther out the walkway, so I stepped off the planks and immediately sank ankle-deep in the goo. The muck nearly pulled my shoes off as I moved awkwardly forward, pushing through the high grasses until I was a few feet from the water’s edge. I still had cover but could see across the pond.

  Anderson angled the boat left as a loon dived out of sight. He throttled back and cut a small circle as they reached a faded orange buoy, like the ones lobstermen use. Cabot’s initials were marked crudely on the side. Anderson cut the engine and nimbly latched on to the line of the buoy with a boathook, which he used to pull them closer. When the bow bumped the buoy, Cabot himself grabbed the line and gave a few feeble tugs before Anderson stepped forward in the rocking craft and began hauling up the line, hand over hand. By now I had the binoculars out and could see everything in detail.

  He pulled up at least ten feet of streaming rope before the rusting cage of an old crab pot emerged in a cascade of water. The trap dripped as he swung it into the skiff. A gray canister was inside it, roughly the size of a cooler and dripping with algae. They both looked around the pond a few seconds to see if anyone was watching. I held my breath and kept still. The wet ooze had filled my shoes, and my toes were numb.

  They turned their attention back to the trap. Cabot muttered something, and I saw Anderson working at a combination lock. A metallic snap was audible across the water. He opened the side of the trap, pulled out the canister, and slowly unscrewed the top. It was watertight, and inside it was a yellow dry bag, the kind kayakers use. It, too, was marked with Cabot’s initials. Inside the dry bag were four sealable plastic bags, each big enough to cook a turkey in, and each was filled with banded stacks of documents and folders. It was Cabot’s stash, his Holy Grail of stolen and privately collected intelligence. Mine, too. My breath came in short bursts. Between the cold and the excitement it was all I could do to hold the binoculars still.

  Cabot opened the FedEx box and withdrew the Oppenheim book that I’d left at the Vienna dead drop only two mornings ago. All of my work, and all of his, was encapsulated in this makeshift treasure chest, which Anderson was now resealing to put back inside the trap. He clicked the lock, took one last look around, and heaved the bulky crab trap back over the side. It sank in a hiss of bubbles.

  That’s when I realized I’d better get the hell out of there. But it was too late now to try to beat them back up the path. Anderson had already pulled the starting cord, and even if I made it through the muck in time I’d make a terrible racket, and leave muddy tracks on the planks.

  So I crouched lower in the reeds, soaking myself and the binoculars as the skiff swung around toward the dock. I shivered nervously as I listened to them go through the whole routine in reverse, with Anderson lifting Cabot back into the wheelchair. All the while I hoped Anderson wouldn’t notice the path I’d cut through the reeds. Fortunately some clouds had come up, and it was still gloomy enough that visibility was poor once you left the open space of the pond.

  I heard the whine of the wheelchair motor. Neither man spoke as they headed back toward the house. After they passed I remained still for another ten minutes, waiting for the storm door to slam shut. My fear was that Anderson would go into town in the Jeep and see my bike stashed in the brush at the head of the driveway. But after the door closed there was only silence, except for the lonely call of a loon. I sloshed back to dry land and worked my way around the perimeter of the underbrush, an arduous but necessary route to keep anyone in the house from spotting me. It took me nearly an hour to reach the bicycle, and I didn’t breathe easily until I rolled onto the main road and was on my way into town.

  Back at the hotel, the desk clerk gaped at me as I trooped across the lobby holding muddy shoes in my right hand. My pants were soaked from the thighs down. The binoculars were dripping, and I smelled like a marsh. I smiled and nodded as if it were all in a morning’s work of vigilant bird-watching, and he nodded back, seemingly horrified.

  Eric Ambler, I thought. I had become like a prototypical leading man in an Ambler novel, one of those Everyman types who blunders into something bigger than himself, then keeps tripping over his own two feet while the professionals circle for the kill. If it wasn’t so foolhardy it might even be funny. Give me enough time and maybe I’d be like Jim Wormold, the vacuum cleaner salesman in Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana, who faked intelligence reports to earn extra cash only to have all his dark postings start coming true, leaving him caught in the middle. High comedy, except at the moment I didn’t feel like laughing. But at least I knew that Curtin and the Hammerhead were out of the picture, safely detained back in Vienna. That alone made me feel better.

  In my room I peeled off the wet clothes and hopped into the shower, and by the time I emerged—clean, pink, and reenergized—I had worked out my plan of action for the afternoon and on into the next day. There were holes in it—almost any ambitious plan has holes when there is only one person to carry it out—but its simplest and most appealing attribute was this: By nightfall tomorrow, for better or for worse, the game would be over.

  40

  At midday I rented a kayak, bought wire cutters at a hardware store, and studied the map. The pond behind Cabot’s house was accessible from a dirt road on the far side, although I’d have to fight my way through another marshy stand of underbrush.

  Toward dusk, I lashed the kayak to the top of my rental car and drove it to the spot I’d pegged as the most convenient drop-off. I shoved the boat and paddle far enough into the brush to hide them from passersby. Then I drove to the nature preserve, where I parked on the shoulder of the dirt road and walked to the lookout spot. I hoped my hunch about Anderson’s habits was correct.

  Shortly after six p.m. he emerged from the house, right on schedule. He headed for the Jeep while I headed for the car. I gave him enough time to make the turnoff, then I drove to where the kayak was stashed and parked on the shoulder.

  The remnants of an old path offered easier and drier access than I’d expected, and the boat was light enough to drag through the grass and sand. The hard part was climbing into the snug cockpit and casting off without turning the thing over. It tipped alarmingly as I shoved off with the paddle. But it finally eased into the pond, and I quickly reached the buoy. I grabbed the line to stop my progress, then held on for dear life as the boat rocked and wobbled beneath me.

  I waited for the waters to calm and took my bearings. The loon from this morning was still on patrol, keeping his distance. A night heron prowling near Cabot’s dock eyed me suspiciously. The only sounds were of bugs and the wind.

  Taking a deep breath, I began hauling up the slimy line, a chore that told me just how strong Anderson must be. Every foot was hard-earned, and each great tug threatened to capsize the boat. But my excitement mounted as the line coiled on the deck, and I gasped with joy when the rusting trap finally broke the surface with its treasure inside.

  The trickiest part was balancing the trap on the deck while getting the wire cutters out of my pocket. A
mosquito buzzed my ear, Cabot’s last line of defense, and I began clipping open the rusted mesh. It snipped easily, and I peeled back a panel large enough to reach in and take hold of the canister. It was bigger than I’d expected, and cumbersome to hold while I shoved the trap back off the deck. Bubbles rose as I watched it disappear into the murk.

  I opened the canister and removed the yellow dry bag marked with Cabot’s initials. I put the open canister back in the pond, where it immediately filled with water and sank. The lid floated, so I took it with me and paddled back to shore. Getting out was easier than launching, and within ten minutes I’d tossed the dry bag into the trunk of the car and lashed the kayak to the roof. Only one car passed while I was tying down the boat, and it didn’t even slow down. On my way back into town I saw Anderson’s Jeep, still parked at the natural foods grocery. Enjoy your latte, Kyle. I was giddy with excitement.

  I dropped off the boat at the rental place just before closing, then returned to the hotel. As I passed through the lobby, the desk clerk looked at me with even greater curiosity than he’d shown in the morning. I was again wet, with leaves and brambles stuck to my trousers. The yellow dry bag dangled from my hand like the catch of the day at the fisherman’s dock. I held it so that he didn’t see Cabot’s initials, but otherwise I was feeling downright cocky, so I smiled and waved.

  “Beautiful day, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Sometimes it was brazen or nothing in this business.

  I spread the items across the bed. The size of the archive was astonishing. Cabot’s trove could be roughly divided into four categories, one for each of the plastic bags. The largest was the contents of a fat folder marked “Nethercutt.” Most of its holdings were stamped with an H for Project Honetol, the name Angleton gave to his ruinous mole hunt when he began it in 1964.

  Nethercutt, being one of Angleton’s most zealous disciples, had spirited away quite a haul, and I’m sure that if I’d known as much as a historian about all the contacts and ops, then I would have been able to make sense of everything. As it was, the only Nethercutt materials I could put into context pertained to either Lemaster (“Headlight”), his Soviet source Nijinsky, or Headlight’s communications network.

  Among the most relevant items was a summary of an interrogation with Yuri Nosenko, the defector whom Angleton and his own Soviet pet, Anatoly Golitsyn, had never believed, and who had therefore been locked away in a bunker. Nosenko named four KGB “traveler” agents with roaming rights to all of Central and Western Europe. One was code-named Dewey, the longtime recipient of all those goodies from Lemaster.

  The Nethercutt file also included material on the Soviet agent Leo, or Trefimov, the one Litzi and I knew as Vladimir just before he was murdered. There was a summary of the criminal associations he developed after the collapse of the Soviet Union, which mentioned his relocation to Vienna in the late 1990s. This was the material Cabot must have used to track him down and set up our meeting.

  There were also several 1972 Nethercutt memos to Angleton, which outlined Nethercutt’s involvement in quashing the publication of Lothar Heinemann’s novel. Not one of them mentioned the book’s title, or Lothar’s pen name, which helped explain why Cabot hadn’t found it.

  The second batch was a collection of Cabot’s own Agency files. The findings of Valerie Humphries’s research were there with regard to the points of intersection for Lemaster and Dewey. There were also records of Cabot’s recent correspondence with Vladimir and with Milan Bobić, my old consular adversary from Belgrade.

  At the very back of the Cabot folder was a long list of antiquarian book dealers across Europe. Many had tiny checkmarks by their name. Der Flügel was prominent among them, but obviously when Cabot called he hadn’t known which title to ask for, and I suspected that Lothar had alerted Ziegler to deflect any queries that came in by phone. I’d lucked out.

  The third, and smallest, portion of the cache was made up of my own contributions—the negatives of Vladimir’s KGB documents, my one written report, and the copy of Oppenheim’s The Great Impersonation. By the look of it, Cabot had placed the microdot right back on the dust jacket, as if to better preserve it for use in an official proceeding.

  The fourth bag was in some ways the most interesting, even though the materials had little or nothing to do with Edwin Lemaster. It was a huge stack of pages from Angleton’s office diary and appointment logs from September 1949 to May 1951, the period when the British mole Kim Philby had been a frequent lunch companion and a regular visitor to his office. Incredible material, in other words, for any CIA historian.

  As I flipped through the pages, scanning Angleton’s odd marginalia and notes of his discussions with Philby, all sorts of key operational details jumped out, meaning that he had leaked them directly to the infamous mole, often doing so after a very wet lunch in which he regularly consumed boatloads of martinis. Anything Ed Lemaster would’ve leaked might well have been tiny by comparison. In fact, if Lemaster had truly been a Soviet operative, his main role could have been to help fuel Angleton’s mistrust of people like Nosenko.

  I realized then what the CIA desired most from my unofficial mission to Block Island. It was the Angleton stuff—the logbooks, the diaries, and all of the Honetol material that Nethercutt had squirreled away. The more personal game that I’d gotten so caught up in involving Cabot, Lemaster, Preston, Dad, and Litzi was the merest of sidelights, a means to an end.

  The idea that a popular author might once have betrayed them was probably worth keeping under wraps, especially if Preston and his new Russian business partner were involved, since Preston still made millions from the government. But in the bigger picture of the Agency’s legacy, the Angleton stuff carried more weight.

  It was nearly midnight by the time I finished going through it all, and I was exhausted. I packed everything back into the folders and slipped the dry bag into my luggage for safekeeping. Then I slept soundly, ready to finish the job once and for all.

  41

  In the morning I headed to the post office, carrying the documents in a couple of plastic laundry bags from my hotel room. I bought a pair of large flat-rate boxes and stuffed everything inside. I consulted the slip of paper with the CIA address in Herndon, Virginia, considered it one last time as a possible destination, then decided against it.

  Where should I send the boxes, then? Not to my town house. And not to David, I thought, remembering how I’d been used without my knowledge in so many spy games. My ex-wife, April, probably would have helped if I’d asked nicely, but it was unfair to expect her to take on that kind of responsibility. Enough innocent people had already been harmed in this venture.

  Then I remembered that this was the time of year when Marty Ealing went on his annual two-week romp to Las Vegas. Ostensibly it was to touch base with a few clients, but everyone in the office knew it was mostly an excuse for Marty to fool around on his wife. I mailed the box to myself in care of Marty at the office address for Ealing Wharton. I knew I could count on his secretary, Anne, in a way that I could never count on him. Then, once I’d had time to make my own copies, and only then, I’d forward all the originals to that P.O. box in Herndon.

  “Will these go out today?” I asked the clerk. He looked at the wall clock.

  “Noon ferry. Soon enough?”

  “Perfect.”

  Just before noon, with plenty of time to kill, I went to a short-order place by the dock to watch the cars load onto the ferry. I ordered a beer and a basket of fried clams just as the postal truck rolled aboard. The clams arrived as the horn sounded. I watched the crew cast off the lines, then toasted myself with the beer as the ferry eased away in a blast of diesel fumes and churning seawater. I bit into a clam. Crunchy-hot on the outside, cool and juicy in the middle, the taste of the sea. Life was sweet. I ordered a second beer and went back to the hotel to pack. Then I snoozed for an hour.

  But by the time five o’clock rolled around I was anxious. One more job to do, and i
t was the riskiest. I got back on the bike, which by now had twigs in the spokes and dried mud on the frame, and pedaled to the nature preserve to take up my usual post. At six p.m. I watched Anderson leave for his coffee break. Then I pedaled toward the house, reaching the paved road just as the Jeep’s taillights disappeared toward town. I rolled up the driveway, stowed the bike out of sight, and knocked loudly at the front door. I checked my watch. I figured I had thirty-five minutes to finish my business and get the hell out of there.

  Before long I heard the electric whine of Cabot’s wheelchair, then the bump of the tires against the door. A curtain stirred on the window atop the door. The old man’s eyes flashed in surprise. He backed up the chair and shouted, the voice raspy but stronger than I expected.

  “Come in.”

  When I opened up, he was grinning crookedly, as if he’d been expecting me all along.

  “My assistant is away at the moment, but I suppose you already knew that.” He frowned at my rucksack, and waved me back toward the porch. “Leave that outside, if you don’t mind.”

  “I do mind. I’ve brought you something special. One last contribution to the cause before I officially resign from your employment.”

  He grinned again, but more uneasily this time. I followed him down a hallway toward the back of the house while he spoke over his shoulder.

  “The microdot was much appreciated. You practically beat it back across the water. I’m just sorry you never found Lothar’s book.”

  “Oh, but I did. An excellent read, too.”

  He looked back at me as we reached the end of the hall, and gazed with new appreciation at the rucksack.