The Once and Future Spy

by Robert Littell

  “Who,” the Admiral repeated his question, “was the other person to ask you about Kabir?”

  20

  In the penumbra of the smoky light filtering through dirty windows, Admiral Toothacher circled the room. His nose twitched of its own accord at the odors—staleness, mildew, stubbed-out cigars, synthetic carpet permeated with dust. He removed the impossibly tacky color photograph of the President from the wall and examined the cobwebs behind it. He ran his fingertips over the joints of the bricked-in chimney. He inspected the once wilting, now dead, plants on top of the safe, lifting them one at a time from their plastic flowerpots. He examined the safe. He tapped a knuckle against the grimy windows, noticed for the first time that there were double panes to prevent lasers from picking off voice vibrations and reproducing what was said in the room.

  How could he have done it? he wondered. The paper trail led to dead ends. The people trail also. Which left electronics.

  Somehow the author of the love letters had ticked to rods and hair triggers and wedges and Stufftingle and Ides of March, and last but by no stretch of the imagination least, Kabir.

  Toothacher circled the conference table as if it were mined. Paper plates, plastic utensils, empty diet cola cans littered the table. On an impulse he swept them with the back of his arm into a large government-issue wastebasket lined with a blue plastic garbage sack. As an afterthought, he jerked off the felt tablecloth scarred with cigarette burns and tossed it into a corner. He watched the particles of dust float up from the felt in the half light and imagined for an instant that he was descending through a cloud of Wanamaker’s dandruff.

  He warily circled Wanamaker’s desk, studying the stains on the glass top. He toyed with the black plastic levers of the squawk box. He slid open a desk drawer. It was filled with hundreds of paper clips bent into distorted shapes. He spun the swivel chair one complete revolution and listened to its squeak. He let his gaze drift to the only other object on the desk—the telephone.

  His eyes, which on ordinary days bulged, slowly widened.

  “The telephone,” he said out loud. A smile of intense satisfaction spread across his sunken cheeks. There was only one truth, and it was knowable—and he had discovered it.

  21

  The Weeder keyed his computer for the last time before erasing all traces of Stufftingle from the memory bank. He listened to the rotors humming behind the partition. In the morning, he thought, he would put the whole business behind him. Nature would take its course. Wanamaker would have no choice but to cancel Stufftingle. Operations Subgroup Charlie would go back to keeping track of terrorists. And he would lose himself in the dusty stacks of libraries; in history.

  Pinpoints of light danced on the screen. Then two words appeared. “The telephone.”

  It struck the Weeder as odd that someone had come to the office over the weekend, and the only thing he or she had uttered was, “The telephone.” What to make of it?

  It could be the cleaning lady tidying up. Or part of a longer conversation that the computer had somehow missed.

  Whatever it was, it certainly didn’t seem important.

  22

  Huxstep, driving, glanced into the rearview mirror. Wanamaker was staring morosely out a side window, lost in thought. Huxstep shifted his head until he could make out the Admiral. He was cringing against the opposite door, his eyes tightly closed, his lips curled in an expression Huxstep normally associated with motion sickness.

  “Is the Admiral carsick?” Huxstep asked solicitously over his shoulder.

  Toothacher’s hoarse whisper came floating up to the front seat. “The Admiral is sick, but not from the car.”

  Going around a curve, the Chevrolet’s headlights swept a sign indicating they were approaching a crossroad. “Would the Admiral like to tell me where we’re going?” Huxstep inquired.

  “Would the Admiral maybe like to tell me where we’re going?” Wanamaker said. He tried to make his voice ooze with irony, but all his own ear picked up was the unmistakable whine of uncertainty.

  “Turn right at the crossroad,” the Admiral instructed Huxstep. “Keep going until you come to a small bridge. Then pull up and kill the motor and the lights.”

  Huxstep found the bridge and did as he was told. The Admiral popped out of his side of the car and ambled onto the one-lane suspension bridge with a sign at each end suggesting that trucks over a certain weight had better find another way of crossing the river. Wanamaker caught up with the Admiral. “Why?” he asked Toothacher.

  “Why what?” the Admiral shot back, although he knew what the question would be.

  “Why have we come all this way—an hour out of Washington—in the middle of the night? What kind of wild-goose chase are we on?”

  Toothacher mumbled something about them needing to talk without being overheard.

  “My office has been checked for bugs. If that doesn’t satisfy you, we could have gone into the men’s room and flushed the toilet while we talked.”

  In the darkness the Admiral was unable to make out Wanamaker’s features, but he could imagine them—his former man Friday would be smirking derisively, he decided. He would be feeling very put upon, very sorry for himself. And he would be wondering what the Admiral knew that he didn’t.

  “Suppose we start with Operation Stufftingle,” Toothacher said.

  Wanamaker finally managed to inject some irony into his voice. “Be my guest.”

  “Stufftingle,” Toothacher announced with conviction, “is not a Company operation.”

  A muscle would be twitching over Wanamaker’s right eye about now, the Admiral knew.

  Wanamaker asked very quietly, “What makes you think that?”

  “I was not born yesterday,” the Admiral said. “I figured out that much before I boarded the plane from Guantánamo. If Stufftingle were a Company operation, you would have gotten one of the Company hotshots to walk back the cat for you.”

  In the darkness of the suspension bridge Wanamaker cleared his throat. It came across as a bad imitation of the river gurgling underfoot. When he started to speak again, his tone of voice told the Admiral that his expression had changed to the one that was expressionless. “You didn’t bring me all the way out here to tell me that,” is what Wanamaker said.

  “Your Operations Subgroup Charlie,” the Admiral persisted, “is an iceberg.”

  Wanamaker’s face was suddenly visible as he touched a lighted match to the tip of a Schimmelpenninck. The Admiral confirmed that his expression was totally devoid of expression. “Even outdoors,” Toothacher said, “I would prefer it if you didn’t smoke.”

  “Rank,” Wanamaker remarked with studied stiffness, “is supposed to have its privileges. Right now I hold the rank of employer.”

  The Admiral smiled to himself. If he harbored any doubts about Operations Subgroup Charlie being an iceberg, they had been dispelled by Wanamaker’s attitude. He was annoyed because Toothacher had stumbled on the truth. Like all petty spirits, his reaction to being annoyed was to annoy back. “The tip of the iceberg visible above the waterline,” the Admiral continued, perturbed by the cigar smoke but determined not to give Wanamaker the satisfaction of knowing it, “is a bona fide United States government agency—an Operations Subgroup of SIAWG. You have stationery with letterheads. Embossed. You have written protocols tucked away in your office safe—you’re supposed to be keeping track of half a dozen terrorist organizations. You have BIGOT-listed clients in SIAWG and beyond to whom you distribute your product. You have a payroll. You hold meetings. You swipe office supplies. You make personal phone calls on the office phone. You fight for a larger slice of the SIAWG budget. In short, you go through the motions of doing what your charter says you are supposed to be doing.”

  The end of Wanamaker’s Schimmelpenninck glowed brightly in the dark, then became dull again.

  “Which brings us to the invisible part of the iceberg, the part underwater,” the Admiral continued. “That part of the iceberg is a secret of
f-the-table operational unit within a known operational unit. My guess is it consists of you, your man Friday, Mildred, plus Parker and Webb. I know from experience how these things are patched together. I used to do roughly the same thing when I ran Naval Intelligence. There are some operations that need to be kept away from the prying eyes of Congressional Oversight. You get the Saudis to funnel their loose change through various and sundry Swiss accounts. You arrange for a cut-out or two to muddy the water. If you were a gentleman, I’d be willing to make a gentleman’s bet that my per diem, my hotel room with its view of park, all the expenses for the invisible part of your iceberg come from some place other than the United States Treasury Department.”

  The Admiral thought he heard Wanamaker swallow a yawn. “Am I boring you with things you already know? Only say the word and we will skip ahead.”

  “Skip. Skip. That way we won’t have to stand out here all night.”

  “No offense intended, but you are certainly not senior enough to have done all this on your own. I assume you were the brainchild of the late, great Director. The Iran-Contra business had his fingerprints all over it. Your Operation Stufftingle does too. It is common knowledge that he liked to cook creatively without having congressional cockroaches scampering around his kitchen. Did he supply you with a specific brief?”

  A quarter moon edged out from behind a cloud and the Admiral caught a glimpse of Wanamaker’s eyes. There was something about them—a gleam of satisfaction? a pinprick of certitude?—that indicated he was very pleased with himself. At first glance it was hard for Toothacher to see why. At second, too.

  Wanamaker shrugged a shoulder. “He gave us a compass heading. We are still marching. Some of us think of our little operation as a memorial to his memory.”

  “Tch, tch,” the Admiral cooed into the night. “How extraordinarily touching.” His voice turned singsong; he might have been lecturing on the fundamentals of intelligence methodology at the Farm. “Kabir, of course, is Amir Kabir College in Tehran, which by a curious coincidence happens to have an American five-megawatt nuclear research reactor on campus. And Stufftingle”—the Admiral let the word hang in the cold, moist night air for a long moment— “Stufftingle is the code name of a plot, run by the off-the-shelf unit within Operations Subgroup Charlie, run by you, Wanamaker, to explode an atomic device in Tehran and let the world think the ayatollahs had an accident while trying to fashion a bomb of their own.”

  The Admiral took Wanamaker’s strained silence for assent. He filled his lungs with air until his rib cage ached, then slowly exhaled. “It is an idea whose time had come,” he said softly. “Absolutely first-rate. Difficult to see why we didn’t do it years ago.”

  Wanamaker, to the Admiral’s intense discomfort, inched closer. “You—approve?” he whispered huskily.

  “Perhaps you could see your way clear to extinguishing your cigar now,” Toothacher remarked. When Wanamaker sent it spinning into the river, he added, “Of course I approve. An atomic explosion in Tehran will eliminate most of the ayatollahs and discredit the ones who survive. It will leave the secular pragmatist in the driver’s seat. Iran will see which side its bread is buttered on and return to the fold. The eastern frontiers of NATO will become secure. Middle East oil will no longer be menaced. The Saudis can go back to worrying how to invest their profits. Stability will return to that part of the world. The Russians will suffer a strategic setback.” Here the Admiral employed a gesture he normally reserved for lovers; as uncomfortable as it made him, he forced himself to fling a fatherly arm over Wanamaker’s dandruff-flaked shoulders. “The crucial thing is that the explosion must be primitive,” he said.

  “We thought of that,” Wanamaker said proudly. “The technology, the fabrication of the device are straight out of our 1945 atomic manuals.”

  Wanamaker couldn’t see it, but the Admiral was batting both eyes at him in a conspiratorial double wink. “Wedges,” Toothacher murmured.

  “There was a suggestion,” Wanamaker plunged on eagerly, “that we should quietly evacuate American nationals, but I smothered the idea in the crib. Nobody will be able to point a finger at us. The explosion will be a dirty one—plenty of fallout, radioactivity all over the joint, meaning the bomb was primitive, glued together by religious fanatics who didn’t know which end was up, who miscalculated the configuration. The ayatollahs fucked up and the thing blew up in their faces.”

  “Hair triggers,” murmured the Admiral.

  “We’ve been smuggling in uranium for a year and a half,” Wanamaker confided. “A handful at a time. Hidden in the saddle bags of camels. In the stuffing of pillows. In sacks of fertilizer. The people who were doing the smuggling didn’t know they were smuggling, that’s how well Parker organized things. It’s all sitting there in a sub-basement storage room at a nursing school next to Kabir waiting to blow. When they measure the blast on the Richter scale, they’ll trace the center of the explosion to the campus. Kabir’s atomic pile went bananas. The chain reaction got out of hand. There was a meltdown, an explosion.” Wanamaker was so excited he was stuttering. “B-b-boom. No more K-K-Kabir C-C-College. No more T-T-Tehran.”

  “Rods,” murmured Toothacher. He might have been lulling a baby to sleep.

  Wanamaker got a grip on himself. “Teach the bastards to mess around with uranium,” he sneered. “You play with fire, what happens is you get burned.”

  “It’s a brilliant scheme,” the Admiral said. He removed his arm from Wanamaker’s shoulder and turned to stare down at the river, which he could hear but not see. In the distance a train whistle screamed in pain. The Admiral sighed; there was pain in that sound too. “It makes me sick to the stomach to think all that effort is going down the drain because of a handful of love letters.”

  The comment struck Wanamaker with the force of ice water. “For a minute I forgot about the leak,” he said sourly. “If only—”

  “If only I’d been able to find out who sent them …”

  “Yeah. Maybe …”

  “… maybe we could have …”

  “Could have maybe neutralized the threat.”

  “And gone ahead with Stufftingle.”

  “Yeah. Gone ahead with Stufftingle,” Wanamaker agreed.

  The Admiral turned away from the river to face Wanamaker. “It’s not too late,” he announced.

  Wanamaker wasn’t sure he had heard correctly. “Not too late for what?”

  Toothacher lingered over each word. “Do you happen to know someone named Sibley? Silas Sibley?”

  “Yeah,” Wanamaker said. “I do know a Silas Sibley. What about him?”

  “Does he have a grudge against you? Is there any reason he might be out to get you?”

  “It’s possible,” Wanamaker said carefully.

  “How possible?”

  “Now that you mention it, very possible. What makes you think Sibley wrote the love letters?”

  “He was inquiring about Kabir not too long ago.”

  “How could he know about Kabir?”

  “I spent all day yesterday nosing around the Campus. Came across a lot of fellows I hadn’t seen in years. Asked about some of my colleagues. Asked about my students at the Farm. Heard you were running something called Operations Subgroup Charlie over at SIAWG, keeping track of terrorist groups. Heard Sibley ran some kind of computerized operation out of New York. Very hush-hush. No one seemed to know for sure what he was up to. It couldn’t be archives because they’re here in Washington. Which leaves eavesdropping.”

  “Huxstep swept the office for bugs,” Wanamaker reminded the Admiral. “And the windows have double panes so nobody can pick off voice vibrations.”

  “Your windows are too dirty to pick anything off them,” the Admiral couldn’t keep from commenting.

  Wanamaker was thinking out loud now. “It couldn’t be Parker or Webb or Mildred who tipped him off—none of them would give the time of day to someone like Sibley. The asshole thinks he’s some kind of intellectual. All he’s got is
a good memory.”

  “Which narrows it down to …” The Admiral let the sentence trail off. He could sense Wanamaker leaning toward him in the darkness, holding his breath so as not to risk missing a word.

  “Which narrows it down to?” Wanamaker prompted when the Admiral didn’t continue.

  “The telephone,” Toothacher said triumphantly.

  Wanamaker laughed out loud. “First thing I had Huxstep do was check the telephone for bugs.”

  “You don’t understand,” Toothacher whispered. “There’s no bug in the telephone. The telephone is the bug. Back in the seventies, before I retired, I remember hearing rumors about equipment that could convert weak impulses picked up by ordinary telephones on their own cradles into recognizable speech. Nobody thought there was much of a future in it—the equipment was huge and had to be quite near the target phone, as in the next room. Which ruled out listening to the Russian ambassador talking to his station chief. Which ruled out almost everything except tapping into your occasional hotel room through the telephone.”

  “What’s all this got to do with Sibley?”

  “Don’t you see it? Computers would have changed all this, and Sibley is a computer freak. He could program a computer to transform incredibly weak impulses into recognizable speech. He could program the computer to sift through the take for whatever nuggets interested him. All he would have needed in order to find out about Stuff tingle was your phone number.”

  From the far end of the bridge came the sound of a car door opening and slamming closed in annoyance. A bored voice called, “In case anyone’s interested, it’s a quarter to two in the ayem.”

  Wanamaker let a moist whistle trickle through his teeth. “The telephone!“ he exclaimed. “That’s how he found out about rods and hair triggers and wedges and the Ides of March. Wait till I tell—” Wanamaker caught himself in midsentence. Toothacher thought he heard his mouth snap shut.