The Once and Future Spy

by Robert Littell

  The Admiral was following his own thoughts. “I recall another thing about friend Wanamaker,” he said. “Everyone called him Friday. You called him Bright Eyes. You spread it around that he bathed every day but never changed the water. He didn’t appreciate your sense of humor.”

  Huxstep elevated his chin a notch. “The ones who don’t know how to laugh at themselves I ignore.”

  “Error,” the Admiral observed wryly. “In our business they are the ones you must pay attention to.”

  3

  “Welcome aboard,” Wanamaker said, steering Admiral Toothacher through an outer office wasteland, past a receptionist in a plaid miniskirt filing a broken nail, past a middle-aged female assistant wearing a 1930s scalp-hugging feathered hat with a black veil that fell like a mask over half her face, into an inner sanctum that looked as if it had been furnished with hand-me-downs from a congressional subcommittee examining explosive issues such as evaporation levels in Amazon rain forests. “Sorry about the creature comforts,” Wanamaker apologized as he waved Toothacher into a lopsided armchair with stained imitation leather upholstery. “We are the innocent victims of a government conspiracy to spend less money. Coffee? Tea? Something with a kick to it?”

  “Tea,” the Admiral said without enthusiasm. He eyed the surroundings with a distaste he usually reserved for chain hotels and tried to console himself with the silver lining—the $250 per diem, the nights that would presumably be free, the candles that he would gleefully burn at both ends.

  Wanamaker hovered over the armchair like a rain cloud. “With or without?”

  “Either or.”

  Wanamaker scurried across the room and crawled into a squeaking wooden swivel chair behind an embarrassingly small desk whose glass top was nearly opaque with cottage cheese stains. He depressed a lever on the squawk box. “Two teas. Pronto.”

  A burst of static filtered back through the box. It seemed to say, “With or without?”

  “More static,” Wanamaker muttered. He punched a lever and yelled into the squawk box, “With. Without. Either or.”

  The Admiral, sniffing, caught a whiff of staleness, of mildew, of stubbed-out cigars, of synthetic carpet heavy with dust. He glanced at the windows, which were covered with grime. They probably hadn’t been opened, the room probably hadn’t been aired, in years. Decades even. What had he gotten himself into? He peered at Wanamaker squirming nervously in his squeaking chair. His shapeless clothes looked sweat-stained, his hair matted. When he moved his head suddenly, crystals of dandruff could be seen drifting down through the sunlight onto his shoulders, which bore the unmistakable traces of previous flurries. The Admiral understood what Huxstep had been getting at when he said Wanamaker bathed every day but never changed the water.

  Wanamaker twisted a paper clip, fingered a tin of Schimmelpennincks as he attempted to break the ice with his old boss, his icon, his mentor, his father figure. “You will have noticed that in deference to you I have not lighted a cigar,” he commented.

  “You might have emptied the ashtrays,” the Admiral said absently.

  Wanamaker’s pudgy lips hinted at a pudgy smile. “You will be wondering why I invited you.”

  The Admiral didn’t say anything. He was concentrating on trying not to breathe.

  Observing Toothacher, Wanamaker recalled with visceral pleasure his seven-year tour as the Admiral’s man Friday. There had been many in the intelligence community who had written Toothacher off as a professional devil’s advocate—someone who had no illusions about winning the cold war but simply relished fighting it. Only the chosen few, Wanamaker among them, suspected that the river ran deeper; that the Admiral was a true believer. He detested the Bolsheviks with a passion. And he would go to any lengths to irritate them. Back in his salad days, when everyone was wildly dropping agents behind the Iron Curtain, the Admiral had come up with the idea of dropping shortwave radios and parachutes and letting the Russians fall over one another looking for nonexistent agents. Later, when everyone in the West was desperately trying to penetrate the Soviet High Command, he had run Naval Intelligence as if it had penetrated the Soviet High Command. When the Russians picked up the clues that the Admiral had left scattered around, they launched a mole hunt that all but crippled the High Command for years. Pushing for bigger budgets, Toothacher had made enemies on the Senate Armed Services Committee and had been shunted over to the CIA, where he wound up working for James Jesus Angleton’s Praetorian Guard, the counterintelligence elite, the born-again pessimists to whom the worst case was always the most likely, the most interesting, the most stimulating; above all, the most congenial. Somewhere along the way there had been a whiff of scandal; as part of a surveillance training exercise, a young recruit at the CIA’s Farm had tailed the Admiral and filed a report on the company he kept. Toothacher had been hauled on the carpet and subjected to the indignity of a lie detector test, which he had failed. At which point the Director of Central Intelligence, never one to wash dirty linen in public, had pensioned Toothacher off to early retirement at the American Naval base in Guantánamo, Cuba.

  The secretary with the repaired fingernail and the plaid miniskirt barged in with a tray and set it down on Wanamaker’s desk. She caught sight of the Admiral sharpening the crease on his trousers with his fingers and discreetly averted her eyes as she left. Wanamaker skidded a mug across the desk top toward the Admiral and offered him a saucer filled with tiny paper envelopes. Toothacher poked at an envelope, read its label. “Powdered milk!“ He let his eyes take another turn around the room. (Was he looking for a way out?) He noticed the impossibly tacky color photograph of the President hanging on the wall above the bricked-over chimney. He noticed the wilting plants in plastic flower pots on a dusty battleship-gray combination safe. He noticed the conference table overflowing with empty cans of classic Coke and diet cola and low-fat cottage cheese containers and paper plates with crusts of sandwiches on them. “My God, Wanamaker,” the Admiral said in a fierce whisper, “what are we here?”

  Wanamaker hit the lever on his squawk box. “No calls. No visitors. No nothing,” he barked. He swiveled three hundred and sixty degrees in his chair, as if he were winding himself up, then settled back to stare at the Admiral. A muscle over Wanamaker’s right eye twitched. “What we are here,” he said with quiet urgency, “is an operations subgroup of SIAWG, which stands for Special Interagency Antiterrorist Working Group.”

  “Is this a United States government agency?”

  Wanamaker managed a nervous giggle. Clearly retirement had not dulled the Admiral’s appetite for irony. “Very quick,” Wanamaker said. “Very clever.” He squirmed impatiently in his chair, then leaned forward and lowered his voice to indicate that the conversation had crossed a threshold. “SIAWG was set up after the humiliating failure to rescue American hostages in Iran in 1980. Our particular subgroup—we are Operations Subgroup Charlie—is staffed by Middle East experts. We save string on a dozen terrorist organizations so secret the people in them aren’t always sure what cell they belong to.”

  Watching his former protégé’s performance, the Admiral was reminded that Wanamaker had the narrowest range of emotions he had ever come across in a homo politicus. He seemed to have winnowed his repertoire of facial expressions down to a derisive smirk, often, though not invariably, accompanied by a giggle, and another expression that was expressionless. It was the expressionless expression that was being deployed now, a tired army taking up position on a worn rampart. “I don’t quite see what your problem is,” the Admiral ventured.

  Wanamaker began deforming another paper clip. “Our product is tightly held—it is BIGOT listed, stamped NODIS, NOFORM, ORCON, stamped anything we can get our paws on. Despite this, we seem to have sprung a leak. Somebody outside our subgroup, somebody outside our distribution list even, appears to have access to our product. To the product of our single most sensitive operation, to be exact. Which is why you’re here. I am hoping you can walk back the cat and quietly plug the leak so w
e can get on with our work.”

  When it came to methodology the Admiral never leapt; he crawled in what he took to be the general direction of conclusions. “What makes you think there has been a leak?” he inquired now.

  A derisive smirk replaced the expression that was expressionless on Wanamaker’s face. He produced a cardboard portfolio from a desk drawer. On the cover, in large block letters, was stamped BIGOT LIST and NODIS and NOFORM and ORCON. Inside the portfolio was a page of computer printout paper protected by a transparent folder. Wanamaker handed the folder across the desk to the Admiral.

  Peering through the lower part of his trifocals, Toothacher studied the printout. “Rods,” he read out loud. Then, “Hair triggers.” Then, “Wedges.”

  Wanamaker felt better than he had in days. He was glad he had sent for his mentor. He was sure the Admiral wouldn’t disappoint him. Like Mao Tse Tung, the Admiral understood that a journey of a thousand miles began with a single step.

  Reading the four words on the printout in the transparent folder had been that first step.

  4

  The Weeder, as usual, kept most of himself up his sleeve. “A bit of this, a bit of that,” he replied. His face corkscrewed into a sheepish grin; having to be coy about what he did for a living made him uncomfortable. He discovered sediment at the bottom of his wineglass and shook his head in annoyance. He had no respect for wines that voyaged badly; also for people. The thought crossed his mind that he was voyaging badly, but what could he say? That he prospected in currents of conversation for nuggets of treason? His physicist friend would laugh if he didn’t believe him and leave if he did.

  “You haven’t changed,” the physicist, whose name was Ethan Early, said. “Remember that American History professor who gave you an A because you knew more than you said, and me a C because I said more than I knew?” The physicist snickered pleasantly. “Why don’t you try telling the truth for once, Silas. The whole truth, nothing but.”

  “Whose truth?” the Weeder asked. “Which truth?”

  Nodding appreciatively, Early plunged on. “The word out on you is you don’t work for the State Department at all. A lot of your former classmates, me included, think you’re some sort of spook.” He leaned over the table; the southernmost handpainted sunflower on his silk tie slipped into his bowl of fettucini, but the Weeder didn’t say anything. “Own up, Silas. Do you carry cyanide pills and false passports?” Early asked eagerly. “Do you dot your i‘s with microdots and post your letters in dead drops? Are you armed?”

  “I am armed,” the Weeder said, “with a sense of humor. Which is what protects me from friends like you.” More coyness; another sheepish grin.

  At the next booth an elderly man raised his voice in frustration. “Admit it,” he whined. “Admit you slept with him.”

  The elderly woman sitting across from him pleaded, “Oh, God, you’re not going to dredge up something that happened forty-two years ago.”

  “Did you, yes or no, sleep with him?”

  “That was spilled milk, which you’re not supposed to cry over,” the woman complained. She was silent for a moment. Then she blurted out, “Sometimes I wish you’d die!”

  “I’m trying,” the old man retorted. And he emitted a high-pitched whistle that reminded the Weeder, sitting with his back to the two old people in the next booth, of steam seeping from a grudgingly open valve in his SoHo loft.

  The physicist leaned toward the Weeder. “What is your position on spilled milk?” he whispered.

  “If a historian isn’t interested in spilled milk, who is?” the Weeder said. “It’s the amniotic fluid of history.”

  “But do you cry over it, Silas, that’s the question?”

  “It is an article of faith with me that spilled milk is definitely something to cry over,” the Weeder assured his friend. He thought: If I didn’t believe that, I wouldn’t be walking back the cat on Nate.

  “There is hope for you yet,” Early remarked.

  They were contemplating layered Italian desserts when the Weeder finally got around to steering the conversation onto physics. “And what frontiers are you pushing back these days?” he casually asked Early.

  “I am, believe it or not, counting hydrogen atoms,” the physicist replied.

  The waiter, passing, called, “So, everything all right?”

  “Your food is eatable,” the Weeder called back. “Your wine needs work. Your prices too.” To the physicist he said, “Why are you counting hydrogen atoms?”

  “If there are more than three to every cubic yard of space, the universe will eventually fall back on itself. When things get dense enough, there will be another big bang and history will start all over again. If there are less than three, the universe will expand forever. Distant galaxies will flicker out like spent candles. If some poor son of a bitch is still here to observe all this, he will be adrift on this life raft of a planet, alone in a dead universe.”

  The Weeder said with emotion, “Some people are already adrift on this life raft of a planet. But that’s another story.”

  The physicist spotted the traces of fettucini sauce on his sunflower. He moistened the tip of his napkin in a glass of water and dabbed at the stain. “When you phoned,” he said, “you mentioned something about wanting to pick my brain.”

  “I almost forgot,” the Weeder said. He fished some three-by-five index cards from the breast pocket of his sport jacket and offered them to Early. “I came across a batch of notes that don’t make much sense to me. I thought they might to you.”

  The physicist glanced at the first card, then shuffled it to the back of the pack and read the next one. “Well, U-239 is definitely not a German U-boat, if that’s any help.” Early looked up. The Weeder, so casual a moment ago, was hanging on his words. “It’s uranium, and the other 239 is plutonium. The chemical notations mean that U-239 loses two electrons and converts two neutrons into protons to become Pu-239. Given the context, ‘rods’ obviously refers to uranium rods. They are sealed in aluminum cylinders and inserted in graphite. You slow down a chain reaction by removing rods. You speed it up by adding rods.”

  “What about ‘hair triggers’?”

  “The thing that makes uranium and plutonium stand out in Mendeleyev’s crowd is that, atomically speaking, they have hair triggers—they can be made to explode relatively easily. How can I explain it? Look, Silas, say you are operating an atomic pile, either with uranium or with plutonium. You are removing or adding rods to slow down or speed up the chain reaction, right? The size of the rods and their spacing are very delicate—get one wrong and you wind up with an uncontrolled chain reaction, otherwise known as an atomic explosion.”

  The physicist shuffled the top card to the back of the pack and read the next one. “ ‘Wedges’ refers to the way early uranium or plutonium bombs were constructed. Wedges of uranium in the case of the Hiroshima bomb, wedges of plutonium in the Nagasaki bomb, were arranged in circles—maybe we should call them vicious circles—and imploded by a ring of conventional dynamite placed around the perimeter. The implosion packed the wedges into a critical mass which, in turn, resulted in a chain reaction and an atomic explosion. The thing to remember when configuring wedges of uranium or plutonium into bombs is this: for any given shape there is a critical weight, and the stuff explodes instantly when it reaches that weight. So you’d better have your calculations down pat before you start to configure.”

  Early handed the index cards back to the Weeder. “The documents you came across are obviously old hat. Whoever wrote this was worrying about the various ways that someone going through the motions of constructing a primitive atomic device might bring on an accidental atomic explosion.” Early smiled across the table. “Has what I said helped you any?”

  The Weeder had a faraway look in his eyes as he murmured, “I’m not sure.”

  5

  For starters, I’ll do my man Nate:

  IN MY MIND’S EYE I SEE HIM STILL dancing leaf in the rebellion’s gusts
. His hair, cut short because of lice during the siege of Boston, would have grown long enough for him to wear it again in a knot at the nape of his neck, which was the style he preferred. He would have been paler than usual, and weaker; he had “taken the smallpox” (as the inoculation was called) three weeks before when he was home on leave and was only just getting back on his feet. One day in mid-August, when the sky over New York had the dull sheen of pewter, Nate and his friend from New London, S. Hempstead, were sent in from Haarlem to see if they could requisition bayonets, which the eighty or so men in Nate’s Company (part of Colonel Webb’s Nineteenth Connecticut Volunteers) desperately needed. Rumor had it that a Dutch ship carrying bullets and bayonets had run the blockade and docked on the North River.

  Nate wouldn’t have been in a particularly good mood that day. The girl with whom he had had “polite intercourse” (Nate’s phrase, not mine) while he was teaching at Haddam’s Landing—she had been one of the handful of girls in his early morning Latin class—had written to say that she had gotten engaged to a constable from Hartford. When the cat’s away, mice will play, is what Nate must have thought. (It’s what I would have thought if I had been in his shoes, but that may tell more about me than Nate; it certainly says something about how I reconstruct history.) The sweltering heat was probably accumulating in drifts, and Nate and his friend would have stopped at Cape’s Tavern on the Broad Way for a tankard of cool ale. Later they would have scrambled over the barricades that had been thrown up on the streets sloping down to the river and asked some of Colonel Glover’s Marbleheaders, in their tarred fisherman’s trousers, where they could find the Dutch ship. The Marblehead men would have shrugged; as far as they knew there was no Dutch ship, and no bayonets.