The Once and Future Spy

by Robert Littell

  The Weeder caught a glimpse of her ankles, remembered his man Nate noticing Molly’s ankle as she climbed into the buck cart. “Try the one in black,” he suggested, and turned back to the window.

  The sun came out from behind a cloud as they left the store. Snow glanced worriedly at her wristwatch. “He said we should be there at noon. It’s twenty after.”

  And still the Weeder hesitated. As far as he could see everything was in order, but given his lack of professionalism that didn’t mean much. “How did he react when you described the third attempt on my life?” he asked Snow again. She understood he needed reassurance and supplied a generous dose of it. “When he realized he wasn’t getting the story secondhand-when he realized I had almost been killed too-he believed every word. He’s on your side, Silas.”

  Snow smiled encouragingly and gestured with her head toward the fish restaurant, which was in the middle of a street that had been closed to traffic. His breathing became shallower. “All right,” he said reluctantly. “Let’s go and talk with this friend of yours.”

  They crossed the street and turned down the block past a heavy man wearing gloves with the fingertips cut off selling roasted chestnuts from a pushcart. They passed a band of black teenagers dressed in identical jackets with “Born to Love” splashed across their backs- the boys were gathered around a ghettobuster set on an orange crate. The fish restaurant loomed ahead. An elderly couple emerged from the doorway into the sunlight, winding long colorful scarves around their necks, laughing. Snow was looking at a dwarf selling Japanese hand puppets in another doorway when she heard the screech of brakes. The sound registered first, then the thought that it was out of place on a street where cars were prohibited. She spun back and reached for the Weeder but he wasn’t there-through the crowd she could see his arms flailing as he was hustled by four men in dark suits into the back of a car. The door was slammed behind him. Pushing through the crowd, Snow screamed “Silas!” Her cry was drowned in a squeal of tires as the car lurched away from the curb. Nodding in time to the music, the teenagers with the ghettobuster watched Snow lunge after the car disappearing down the street. The elderly man with the colorful scarf around his neck called uncertainly, “Shouldn’t somebody notify the police?” The heavy man who had been selling chestnuts held up a plastic identification card in the flap of a wallet. “The show’s over, folks,” he called. “Move along. Kindly go on about your business. The show’s over.”

  Staring after the car, Snow felt a hand grip her elbow. She tried to pry it loose, discovered there was no strength left in her fingers, looked up into Fargo’s ashen face. “You bastard,” she whispered hoarsely. Then she screamed, “Bastard! Bastard! Bastard!” as he steered her toward another car that had pulled up to the curb. The heavy man wearing gloves without fingertips opened the back door and Fargo tried to force Snow inside, but she twisted around and swung weakly at his face. Fargo ducked under the blow and caught her wrists and pinned them against the open door of the car. “He’s mentally ill,” he told her. “He made it all up.”

  “You’re the one who’s mentally ill,” Snow cried. “You used me.

  “I have the proof,” Fargo pleaded with her.

  Snow wrenched a wrist free and spun around and struck her head sharply against the side of the car. Her body shook with sobs. “They’re going to kill him-”

  The heavy man grabbed Snow’s head to prevent her from hurting herself. Behind Fargo the teenagers lined the sidewalk, watching, nodding in time to the music. Fargo told Snow, “Nobody’s going to hurt him. He’s sick. He needs professional help. We’re going to see he gets it.”

  The two men maneuvered Snow onto the backseat of the car. Fargo climbed in alongside her and waved a hand at the driver.

  “Where are we going?” Snow mumbled as the car rounded the corner and moved out into traffic. It was clear she didn’t give a damn.

  “To an office,” Fargo said. “As soon as you’ve calmed down I’m going to prove to you he’s mentally disturbed.”

  The sun disappeared behind a cloud and thick flakes of snow began to drift down; the crystals were directed by the air flowing around the car past the side window. It occurred to Snow that the flakes were falling in the wrong direction, that the world was upside down. She let the lids close over her eyes of their own weight and sank back into her seat. She had been ambushed again …

  The driver turned off Commonwealth Avenue into a side street, then turned off the side street and pulled up at a deserted loading ramp. Fargo got out and came around and opened the door and offered Snow his hand. Ignoring him, she swung her legs out. She imagined the lilac skirt swirling around her feet, felt the Weeder’s eyes flicker to her ankles as she started up the steps. She was too feeble to protest when Fargo slipped his arm through hers and steered her into a padded freight elevator. She leaned back against the padding, felt her weight rush to her feet as the elevator soared. Her weight redistributed itself when the elevator coasted to a stop. The doors opened. Fargo looked at her. Her face a mask of anguish, she heaved herself off the wall and stepped into the corridor. A young woman in a striped business suit with padded shoulders was waiting next to an open door. She took a firm grip on Snow’s arm and led her down the hall to the ladies’ room. “Splash some cold water on your face,” she told Snow. “It will help you.”

  The young woman escorted Snow back down the corridor into an office, then through a door into a sparsely furnished inner office. She pulled a chair up to a coffee table. Snow sank into it. “Can I get you anything?” the young woman asked. “Warm milk? A stiff drink?”

  Snow didn’t respond. The young woman glanced at Fargo. He nodded toward the door. The woman left. Fargo drew up a second chair so that it was facing Snow and sat down. The coffee table separated them. It was made of glass. Snow could see Fargo’s shoes through it. They appeared to be brand-new. Distrust any enterprise, Silas-quoting Thoreau-had said, that required new clothes.

  “This isn’t going to be easy for you,” Fargo began. “But you might as well face up to it now as later.” He held out a piece of paper. Snow looked at it without seeing it. Fargo said, “What you don’t know can hurt you.” He let the paper drop onto the coffee table in front of her.

  Snow’s eyes drifted to the paper. “What will that change?” she asked. “Anyone who can type can put things on a paper.” She smiled, but the tears flowed anyhow. “He warned me being naive wouldn’t increase his chances of survival.”

  “Read the paper,” Fargo said softly.

  “Someone once said it’s dangerous to be right when the government is wrong. I guess it is.”

  “Read it.”

  “What kind of game are we playing?” Snow demanded with sudden vehemence. “If I read it I’m going to have to act as if I believe it because I’m afraid you’ll kill me too if I don’t swallow it-if I believe he was stark raving sane and put his life on the line to prevent an atrocity.”

  “When you read it,” Fargo said, “you’ll believe it because it rings true-because you will think back on things he did and said and it will fit in with what you’re reading.”

  Snow reached out and edged the paper along the table top. Her eyes were swimming in tears and she had to wipe them away with the back of her sleeve in order to focus. She read the title: Psychiatrist’s Preliminary Report on Silas N. Sibley-Top Secret. “I didn’t know he had a middle initial,” she murmured.

  Fargo said, “The N stands for Nathan, of course. The initial is not on his birth certificate. Nor is it on his official Agency service record. He started using the N about two and a half years ago.”

  “What does that prove?” Snow demanded. “He’s a descendant of Nathan’s. It’s natural that he would want to add the N.“

  “Read on. He’s not a descendant of Nathan’s. He comes from English stock that emigrated to this country in the middle of the last century.”

  Snow began reading the first sentence of the psychiatrist’s report. It was all invented, of course
. They were trying to discredit him so that nobody would believe his story about the atrocity.

  “He didn’t live and work in New York,” Fargo said. He droned on like a voice-over to a documentary film. “He lived and worked in Washington, D.C. He wasn’t involved in a program to eavesdrop on people through their phones-I checked that out personally. He was analyzing the serial numbers of Soviet tanks. I’ve seen his report, the one where he says the Soviets cooked the numbers. I’ve held it in my hand, Snow.”

  Snow forced herself to read on. The clinical detachment of the tone, the certainty with which the psychiatrist trotted out his arguments and put them through their paces, rubbed her the wrong way.

  “There is an Operation Stufftingle,” Fargo was saying. “There is a Wanamaker, and he was a roommate of Sibley’s at Yale-though there seems to be no evidence of a grudge between them, no record of a girl’s death. Sibley was doing what all paranoids do-he was constructing a make-believe world using bits and pieces of the real world. Stufftingle is the code name for Wanamaker’s program that analyzes the structure of Soviet ministries from their phone books- from how many extensions someone has, from the order of the numbers.”

  Snow was reaching the end of the report now. “The seeds of his disorder-probably traceable to a chemical imbalance-were lurking inside him, waiting to burst into life,” the psychiatrist had written. “There is good reason to believe that Sibley has been walking a very fine line between sanity and insanity for years. Whenever the ‘present’ became too oppressive for him he took refuge in a ‘past’ that he invented-he pulled the past over his head the way a child afraid of the dark pulls a blanket over his head in bed. For a time this technique seems to have supplied him with the relief he needed. More recently, however, he began inventing a ‘present’ as well as a ‘past.’ F. Scott Fitzgerald has a sentence in The Last Tycoon about how we live in the present, and when there is no present (that is, when there is no present that is congenial to us), we invent one. Fitzgerald might have been describing Sibley. At this point in time it is difficult to say exactly what pushed him over the line. It could have been his divorce. It could have been the trauma of his separation from a child he adored. The years of meticulous and painstaking work in the back rooms of the CIA must have been extremely frustrating for someone who saw himself as a hero and a patriot. The shock of having the CIA not only question the results of his study on Soviet tank production but seriously consider the possibility that he was a Soviet agent surely contributed to the breakdown.

  “To sum up: I think we are dealing with an all-too-classic case of someone whose mental health was fragile to begin with; who was subjected to insupportable personal and professional pressures; who then cracked like a piece of old crockery when the results of his work were questioned and his security clearance was withdrawn. For a great many of its employees the Central Intelligence Agency is family, and Agency disapproval or outright rejection can result in the disintegration of the facade the employee’s psyche has been barricaded behind. We have seen this kind of phenomenon before. We will unfortunately see it again. It is an occupational hazard that goes with the terrain. Formulating a specific diagnosis for Sibley under the present circumstances is extremely difficult. I am fairly certain, however, that an eventual diagnosis, made under clinical conditions, will mention functional paranoia with delusions of persecution, delusions of grandeur and a vigorous death wish. I suspect schizophrenia from the fact that Sibley appears to be able to meander in and out of the role of Nathan Hale at will.”

  Snow handed the psychiatrist’s report back to Fargo. He looked at it, shook his head reflectively, tucked the report into a manila folder marked “Eyes Only.” “Admit,” he said, “that you’re beginning to wonder.”

  Snow remembered asking Silas how he knew so much about his man Nate. It’s me, Nate, he had replied. Even then she hadn’t been sure how to take that piece of information. “What about the third attempt on his life?” she asked Fargo now. “I suppose you can explain that away too.”

  Fargo pulled three sheets of paper from the folder and offered them to Snow. She read them quickly, handed them back. Fargo said, “I took those depositions myself. The foreman, the two men who worked the cranes, swear on a stack of Bibles that they searched the building when they came back from their lunch break. Of course they didn’t do anything of the kind, but they’re not about to admit it and lose their jobs. They sounded a warning blast on the hand-cranked siren-you said you heard a siren, remember?-and waited to see if anyone stuck his head out of a window. When nobody did, they started in with their wrecking balls. Did you or Sibley go to a window and scream at any point to attract attention?”

  “He saw the Admiral drive up. The man with the tattoos who tried to incinerate him in the parking lot, the woman, were with him.”

  Fargo asked very gently, “Did you see them?”

  A whimper of frustration escaped Snow’s lips.

  Fargo stood up. “I want to show you something.” He steered her into a waiting elevator, pushed the basement button. They rode down staring wordlessly at the padded door. It parted. Fargo led the way through a brightly lit, spotlessly clean garage. Half a dozen automobiles were parked in it. Some of them had been taken apart, piece by piece, in a search for hidden drugs. Two agents in coveralls had jacked up a Mercedes 190SL and were removing the tires. They looked at Fargo and the woman, nodded and went back to work. Fargo guided Snow to a tow truck parked in a corner of the garage. A beat-up brown Volkswagen Beetle was still attached to its crane. The car’s front wheels were off the ground. “What kind of car did Sibley drive?” Fargo asked.

  She remembered him mentioning something about a VW Beetle.

  Fargo opened the driver’s door of the Volkswagen and reached for an envelope attached to the inside of the sun visor with rubber bands. He removed a registration certificate from the envelope and offered it to Snow. “This particular Volkswagen belongs to Silas Sibley. You’ll notice there is no middle initial, but the certificate was issued before he started using the N. After the two attempts on his life in New Haven he abandoned the car near Yale. Do you notice anything curious about the car?”

  When Snow shook her head Fargo said, “He told you, and you told me, that the first attempt on his life took place when he returned to the faculty parking lot to get his car. He escaped by locking himself inside the Volkswagen, banging into the car ahead and then the one behind to give himself room to maneuver, and driving off while the Admiral’s driver, the man named Huxstep, breathed fire on the car. That’s what he said, right? Huxstep breathed fire on the car and Sibley could smell the singed paint and burning rubber. Take a good look at this Volkswagen, Snow. Does it look as if it has been subjected to fire and heat? Look at the bumpers. They’re rusted, but they don’t look as if they’ve been used to push cars around.”

  Snow ran her fingers over a fender. Paint flaked off in her hand. She could see patches of rust coming through the paint in places. She turned to Fargo and asked, “How long have you had the car down here?”

  “Jesus, Snow, we didn’t repaint the damn thing and put on new bumpers.”

  “You could have.”

  Fargo slipped his arm through hers and steered her back toward the elevator. “There is one proof that will convince you,” he told her. “It’s that nobody is going to kill Sibley. There is no reason to-there is no scheme to commit an atrocity that has to be protected. He’ll have to be isolated for a while, naturally. He had access to Agency secrets. He can identify Agency employees. But he’s going to be helped back onto his feet. When he’s well again the Agency will retire him with pay. They’ll find him a job, give him a new life.” He smiled worriedly. “If you decide to, you can share that life with him.”

  Snow studied Fargo’s face; he clearly believed what he was telling her. If there was a plot, he wasn’t part of it. But somebody might have set out to fool Fargo …

  “I’m telling you the truth,” Fargo said with emotion. “Trust me.”


  Snow could hear Silas’s peal of laughter echoing through her skull. “Whose truth?” he seemed to say. “Which truth?” She tossed her shoulders tiredly, brought a cuticle to her lips. “I don’t know whose truth to trust,” she admitted.

  21

  The Weeder came up slowly, carefully, pausing every twenty or so yards until he became accustomed to the depth. At one marker he started to hear voices but they were too far above his head to make out what they were saying. Two markers farther up he got a whiff of ether. The odor provoked a memory: One of the two men in the back of the car had pinned his wrists while the other had clamped a thick wad of gauze over his mouth and nose. Before consciousness had slipped through his fingers he remembered screaming Snow’s name into the ether-soaked gauze. He wondered now why he had done that. After all, she was on their side. He floated up to the last marker, the one directly beneath the surface. Rays of dappled bluish light tickled his body. The sounds coming from above became more distinct. “He’s all yours,” someone was saying. A woman said, “Thanks for the favor. The Company owes you one.” Several people laughed pleasantly. They might have been taking tea. Car doors slammed. A motor spurted into life. A machine whined, cranking open something big. Diffused light poured in. A car drove away. The machine whined, closing whatever it was that had opened. The light became dappled, bluish again. “He’s coming out of it,” the woman’s voice, close to his ear, called out. “Check the handcuffs,” a man called back from outside the room. “And make sure he don’t yell.”

  The Welder’s eyes batted open as the strip of cloth was pulled across his mouth He could feel someone knotting it at the back of his head. He bit down on the cloth and gagged, and gagged again, and started to suck air wildly through his nostrils.