Without Honor

by David Hagberg

  “Good morning, Leonard, this is Janos.”

  “Hello, Janos. I was just on my way out. Staff meeting. What can I do for you?”

  “I’m driving down. Be there a little after lunchtime.”

  “Damn. I won’t be here. Sam wants me at the Pentagon at two. Can yours hold till tomorrow?”

  Janos looked at his watch. He was beginning to feel tight. “No, actually I’ll be tied up for the rest of the week. It’s routine anyway, unless you’re locking the doors.”

  Treitman chuckled. “Sounds like another inspection to me.”

  “I’d like to run a few tracks. The budget reared its ugly head again this morning. Next thing they’ll be down here fussing about our efficiency.”

  “I’ll tell Charlie and the others that you’re on your way down …”

  “No, don’t do that, Leonard,” Janos said a little too quickly. He covered himself, though. “I want this as routine as possible. I just called you as a courtesy. It really doesn’t matter if you’re there or not.”

  “I see,” Treitman said, a bit of disappointment in his voice. He was one of the bookworms who didn’t care for someone else playing amongst the bits and pieces in his inner sanctum. “Do me the courtesy of a follow-up report.”

  “Of course, Leonard. It goes without saying.”

  “I know, but do it anyway.”

  On the way out, Charlene, his secretary, chalked him out on the status board for an inspection visit to the Lynchburg facility. She was new from the pool. “Shall I transfer your calls down there, sir?” she asked.

  “Unless the Russians invade Poland, make my excuses until morning,” Janos said. It had been his standard joke for years. She didn’t crack a smile. McGarvey had told him to watch himself. Not to trust anyone. Anyone at all. They’d be working under the old rules on this one. Janos figured Charlene was high on his list of those not to trust.

  He got his car from the parking lot, drove off the agency’s grounds, then took the George Washington Parkway over to the Beltway and down to Interstate 66. The day was pleasant. He rolled down his window, lit a cigarette, and turned the car radio up. They were playing Tchaikovsky, one of the few things Russian Janos could honestly enjoy, though over the past few years even that passion had begun to abate. To say it was Russian wasn’t to make it automatically bad in his mind.

  He thought about Pat. She said they were becoming comfortable. He agreed with her, though for him it wasn’t a point of pride, as it was for her. She liked McGarvey, but this morning before Janos left the house she had come out to the garage in her robe and slippers to face him eye-to-eye. “Janos, tell me you are not going back into the field for Kirk, or for anyone else.” He had lied to his wife, the thought lingered on the long trip south, but as he entered Ft. McGillis the old feelings of excitement and self-preservation had begun to sharpen his wits. He was glad to be back in the field.

  “Oh shit,” the officer of the day, Lieutenant Charles Guthrie, said, jumping up as Janos walked in. “Captain Treitman isn’t here this afternoon, Mr. Plónski.”

  “I know, but that doesn’t really matter, does it.” On the way down Janos had mentally prepared for his inspection tour. The safest place to conceal a snowflake, after all, is in a blizzard. “We’ll just do a few line items, and then I’ll get out of your hair.”

  “Yes, sir,” the young lieutenant groaned.

  The entire small post was nestled in a heavily wooded area of rolling hills. Lynchburg itself was a few miles to the south, and Appomattox Court House, where Lee surrendered to Grant to end the Civil War, was not too far to the east. Most of the installation’s buildings were constructed of red brick with white Colonial wood trim. From the standpoint of a record-keeping facility, the post was inefficient. The records themselves were kept in a dozen warehouse-type buildings in cardboard bins on steel shelving that rose almost twenty feet toward the very high ceilings. Here, there was no such thing as electronic retrieval. It was thought that the files, as sensitive as they still might be, had aged sufficiently so that their rapid retrieval wasn’t necessary. Since Janos became director of records, that had changed. Now, unlike the old days when a few antiquated clerks ran the entire post, there were a dozen young administration types who were constantly being drilled to keep on their toes. The solution, of course, was to reduce the material to computer memory. But the amount of data was so vast, so complicated, and so sensitive that no one dared suggest such an undertaking. Some things were better left undone. The funds that such a project would drain were better spent elsewhere. The main administration building contained a couple of offices; incoming-records processing, in which arriving cartons of material were opened, sorted, graded, and cataloged according to their national security sensitivity and classification, given a retrieval code, and finally placed on the appropriate shelf in the appropriate warehouse; and the reading room, which contained the brains of the system.

  Janos followed the lieutenant down the corridor that opened onto the reading room, which stretched across the entire rear of the building. Fully half the large room was taken up by rows of chest-high oak cabinets in which were contained the heart of the retrieval and cross-referencing systems. Laid out much like a library’s card catalog, the filed information was given a number akin to a Dewey decimal system classification in which each document or file was located by building, shelf, and slot, and was also referenced to dates, subjects, and case officers. A few chairs and tables were grouped at one end of the room, and at the back was a short counter from which the runners were dispatched to the various warehouses.

  It was fairly quiet this afternoon. Only a couple of tables were occupied. Case officers doing their homework for the DDO, who was a stickler for details during planning. Janos knew neither of them, though he’d seen them around. He knew the type. They were the same as him … or at least the same as he used to be. One of them looked up and nodded as he passed, the other was buried in his files.

  “Is there something specific you’ll be wanting this afternoon, sir?” Guthrie asked.

  They had come to an empty table. Janos put down his briefcase. He smiled as Mary Prentiss, the chief duty clerk, came from behind the counter. She was one of four capable civilians Janos had hired. He’d got her from the staff of an angry U.S. senator.

  “I’m going to pick out a few random case histories for your people to track down,” he said to Guthrie. “Nothing important.”

  “What nasty tricks have you got up your sleeve today?” Mary said, smiling. She was in her thirties, somewhat too athletically built to be pretty, and was married, though no one had actually ever seen her husband.

  “Leonard is gone for the day …” Guthrie started.

  “Well, I think we can manage for Mr. Plónski,” Mary said, ignoring him. “Is there anything specific you need, Janos, to make you come all the way down here?”

  In many ways she reminded Janos of his own wife. They both were capable women who sometimes displayed a hard edge. He’d learned early on to relax around them, let them do the work, not fight them. In the end he usually got what he wanted.

  “I like to watch you work, Mary,” he said, shrugging. “Maybe we’ll look at a few case histories. Maybe we’ll see how well you’ve taken care of the jackets. Maybe we’ll see how fast your crew can perform for you.”

  “You won’t be needing me, then, sir?” the lieutenant asked hopefully.

  “No,” Mary said to him before Janos had a chance to reply. “We’ll handle it.”

  The lieutenant went back to the front office. Treitman didn’t like civilians messing around on his turf. He’d get a full report from Guthrie.

  “He’s okay as long as he’s shuffling army forms around. Back here he’s a disaster,” Mary said.

  At least, Janos thought, the lieutenant didn’t actually believe he owned the base, as Treitman did, or the records, as Mary did. She was good, but she was worse than the bookworms; she felt she had a proprietary interest in every scrap of paper here.
She would be behind the same counter twenty years from now, he figured. A fixture.

  “Let’s get started, then,” Janos said, opening his briefcase. He took out a legal-size tablet and a pen, but before he closed the lid he made sure she had gotten a good look inside at the several fat case files he had purposely brought with him. Two of them were marked with a diagonal orange stripe, indicating they contained secret material.

  “Anything for me in there?” she asked.

  Janos looked up. “No.” He locked his briefcase, then moved directly across to the first row of the card catalogs under Case Officers, A—C.

  Mary came up next to him as he opened the first drawer and at random picked out a card for Albright, Edward J. Three terse lines gave a clinical history of his life; date of birth, place of birth, education, service record, employment covers, and finally date of death, in this case April 19, 1959. The body of the card contained the code names of the operations in which Albright had been involved, followed by a three-digit building number, a three-digit row number, and a two-letter three-digit address for each particular jacket. The card was nearly filled on both sides. Albright, it seemed, had been a very busy man.

  Janos jotted down three of the file numbers, then looked over his shoulder at Mary, who was hovering just behind him. “Do you want to bring me some pink slips?”

  “I’ll do them for you, Janos,” she said. “It’ll speed things up.”

  She went back to her counter as Janos moved to another drawer, this time selecting the card of Aumann, Dieter K., born in 1909 in Hamburg, Germany, ending his career, it seemed, with the BND (the West German intelligence service) in 1957. He jotted down a pair of addresses.

  Mary returned with a bundle of pink retrieval slips. Each was supposed to be filled out with the name or subject of the requested file and its archives address, as well as the date and time and the name of the requesting officer, whose signature was also required.

  “What have you come up with here?” she asked.

  Janos tore off the top sheet of his tablet and gave it to her. “I’m going in for misfiles. Dig these up by address alone. When they come in I’ll match them against name and operation.”

  “You won’t find any in there,” she said.

  “None?” Janos chided.

  She grinned. “Not one.”

  As she began filling out the slips, Janos quickly moved to the Bs, where he found Basulto’s name in the second drawer. He glanced at Mary, who was still busy writing, then back at Basulto’s card. There were only three reference files under his name. One was listed as Operation Sweep, another Operation Box Cars, and the last was Operation White Out. McGarvey had worried that there would be no references to Basulto in the files, or at least none under his own name. The alternate source would have been Roger Harris. After that it could have been anyone’s guess. Only they had gotten lucky on the first try. Janos jotted down the three addresses and then as Mary came toward him he closed the drawer and tore off the paper for her. She gave him a half a dozen pink slips to date and sign. As he was signing them he was conscious that she was studying him. He looked up when he was finished.

  “How many more?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. A few more maybe.”

  “I’ll just get started with these.”

  Janos pulled out a stopwatch, made a show of setting it to zero, then clicked the start button. “You’re off, then,” he said, stepping around her and moving over to the next row.

  McGarvey had been a surprise last night. Not so pleasant for Pat, though she had finally asked him to stay for dinner. The children loved him. He was Uncle Kirk, Daddy’s best friend. Only five years ago when the witch-hunters had been in full stride, daddy hadn’t done much to help his friend. His mother told him once that people do most things out of guilt. It was easy to see in others, but not so easy in yourself. Today part was guilt, but another part was … what? Larceny? McGarvey’s warning that Basulto could still be working for someone within the Company rang in his ears. In a way the old adrenaline felt good.

  In ten minutes Janos had picked out a dozen more files, as the first of the runners came back. He set himself up at one of the tables, his briefcase unlocked and open beside him, his stopwatch beside him, a fresh tablet and several sharp pencils at the ready. Mary brought him the first of the jackets, and then a coffee, black, as he started to work.

  The case histories themselves were contained in thick buff-colored envelopes with accordion bottoms and tie flaps. He opened the first of the Albright cases marked with its address and, in gray type, CONFIDENTIAL: OPERATION HAT RACK. All case files were the same. Just inside was a slip on which was marked the date of each withdrawal and the initials of the withdrawing officer. On the first page of the main body of the file was a summary of the jacket’s contents: work sheets, budget items, justification data, authorization documents, planning and analysis, actual details of the operation, follow-up analysis, and references, if any, to other files. Hat Rack was an operation that had taken place in East Berlin in January of 1948. Albright, along with a half-dozen Americans and some British agents, were to organize as many cells as possible of unhappy East Germans who would be willing to conduct a rumor campaign of an impending Russian drive to round up petty criminals and low-ranking Nazis for work in the mines in Poland. The operation had apparently meant to stir up unrest in the Russian sector. There was a lot of that sort of thing going around in those days. The Russians to this day maintained it was just because of that kind of Western operation that they were forced into building the Berlin Wall.

  During his reading Janos made a great fuss of making frequent references to the various files he carried in his briefcase. After half an hour, when the remainder of the jackets had been brought to him, his files were intermingled with the ones from Archives. It would be no problem switching the contents of the Basulto jackets to three of his own.

  For a while he stayed away from the Basulto files. Twice he went to the card catalogs where he pretended to make reference to the files, and after a short time his paper shuffling and trips back and forth became so commonplace that not even Mary paid much attention to him.

  At one point he sat back, stretched his legs under the table, and sighed deeply as if he were a man weary from his labors. Actually his chest had begun to feel tight, his mouth dry, and the old heartburn had returned. It was a part of the business. It burned out a lot of agents, but he had been weaned on such feelings.

  Mary turned away as he pulled the first of Basulto’s files to him and looked at the slip on the inside cover. The file had been signed out three times in 1959, seven times in 1960, three in 1961, and then once in 1964. It had not been signed out since then. The first times the withdrawing officer’s initials were R.H.—probably McGarvey’s Roger Harris. Whoever had signed out the file in 1964, however, had signed his or her initials in a tiny, illegible scrawl. Impossible to make out.

  Turning next to the contents, Janos pulled out the first page. For a long moment he simply stared at it uncomprehendingly. It was nothing. Just a page from an encyclopedia. Euphrates to Euripides. The first page should have been the summary. But this was nothing. Someone had tampered with the bloody file. Janos could feel the tightness building in his chest. McGarvey had warned him. He glanced up toward the counter. Mary was still talking with one of the clerks. He took the rest of the thick sheath of papers and documents out of the jacket and began thumbing through them. They were nothing. It was almost too incredible for him to believe. Here in Archives! Basulto’s file—at least this one—contained nothing more than encyclopedia pages, telephone directory pages, and some blank papers. Nothing of any significance. No underlined messages. Nothing with a date such as a newspaper or magazine page.

  In 1964, this file was still up at Langley. Nothing had been moved down here yet. Almost anyone could have had access. But Christ, why? he asked himself.

  Mary was looking at him. He forced himself to smile. Lean forward. Casually, Janos, he to
ld himself. After a moment or two, Mary went back to her work.

  He pulled the second Basulto file over, this one marked SECRET: OPERATION BOX CARS. Inside, the withdrawal slip showed some activity in the late fifties and early sixties with the last action coming on the same date in 1964. For a few terrible seconds Janos could not bring himself to look through the jacket. He knew what he was going to find, but he did not want it to be so. He could feel himself being drawn into McGarvey’s operation against his will. He should have listened to Pat. She had known. She had seen it in Kirk’s eyes.

  He glanced again at the withdrawal slip, June 14, 1964. Then he thumbed through the main body of the file, which like the first contained nothing but book pages, telephone directory pages, some blank pages, a few ruled sheets, also blank. The third file, titled OPERATION: WHITE OUT, was the same.

  Slowly he retied the jackets and stacked them with the others ready to be sent back. Someone had concealed Basulto’s activities back in 1964, in anticipation that he would be under a drug investigation twenty-three years later? Or, he asked himself, had the files been tampered with more recently than that and simply not been signed for?

  Each question raised a dozen more. Each possibility admitted a thousand dark avenues down any one of which was some unknown danger.

  I want you to pay real close attention. This Cuban we’re talking about worked for the Company a long time ago. He might still be working for the Company.

  For whom, Kirk? he wanted to ask. The back door was wide open, and no one was there covering it for him. The next time he was going to get more information before he went off half-cocked.