Back Channel: A novel

by Stephen L Carter

He had lost all capacity to surprise her. “Freshman English was seated alphabetically,” she explained. “We were next to each other.”

  “So you’re blaming coincidence. Well, why not? You gals have to blame something, I’d imagine.” Evidently satisfied, he sat back and glanced at Borkland: Your witness.

  Borkland was the diplomat, his smile well practiced and smooth. “Please forgive Agent Stilwell. His job in this thing is to make sure you’re who you say you are.”

  The smoke, she decided: the clouds of pipe smoke were making her punchy. Surely she hadn’t heard him right. “I beg your pardon.”

  “You’d be surprised what the Soviets get up to. No, you wouldn’t. Professor Niemeyer seems to think you’re rather bright. Congratulations. He praises men rarely, and women not at all. Like traveling?”

  “I haven’t done much.”

  “Ever been to Varna?”

  Margo was taken aback. Varna was a dying country town due east of the campus. A couple of bars served everybody without checking driver’s licenses, and although Nana would have had a heart attack on the spot, Margo had visited each a time or two.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Recently?”

  This time she did drop her eyes. It seemed absurdly unlikely that these two had come from Washington to give her a citation for underage drinking, but one never knew. “Two weeks ago,” she said.

  Borkland had a wide, mellow face, and comically thick glasses, but Stilwell’s countenance, like his voice, was ugly and twisted and disapproving. “Did you get down to the docks? Notice any of the ships? That sort of information is always helpful to your government.”

  Margo’s confusion grew. Perhaps they were testing her. “I don’t think any shipping goes through Varna.”

  The men looked at each other. “The Soviet Black Sea fleet is headquartered there,” said Stilwell. “I thought you were supposed to be smart.”

  Borkland touched his colleague’s arm. “I believe Miss Jensen is referring to Varna, New York.” To Margo: “The Varna we are asking about is in Bulgaria.”

  She colored. “Oh. No. I’ve never been anywhere in Europe.”

  Stilwell: “Well, you’re going now.”

  Borkland greedily snatched back the narrative. “There’s a State Department program that provides grants for student journalists to report from abroad, especially behind the Iron Curtain. You applied for a fellowship.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Well, no, not exactly.” A shy smile. “But you were approved anyway.” He slid the form from his briefcase, handed it over. “Take a look.”

  She did. There were the various questions answered in her own block capitals, and there was the essay, in her own handwriting, complete with the little dagger-strikes for the lowercase “g” and “j,” and the many cross-outs that characterized her writing in haste. Reading the lines, she could almost imagine penning them. Her boyfriend was teaching her to play chess, the essay explained, and she wanted to go to Varna, the Bulgarian one, to watch the Chess Olympiad, where several dozen countries would send squads of four players each to battle over the course of a month for gold and silver medals. Thus would she combine her interests in chess and study of the Cold War.

  The essay looked and sounded exactly like her work.

  The trouble was, she had never seen it before.

  “I don’t understand,” said Margo, managing to keep the tremor out of her voice. “Who wrote this?”

  Borkland tapped the signature line. “You did.”

  FOUR

  The Social Contract

  I

  “This is a forgery,” she said after a moment.

  “It’s as genuine as it needs to be.” Stilwell’s chilly voice brooked no argument. “Maybe we were a little naughty. Let’s get past that, shall we?”

  “So—you want me to go to Bulgaria?” She looked at the paper. “To the Chess Olympiad? This is how you want me to—to protect my country? Why?”

  Borkland slipped the application from her hand and slid it back into his briefcase. He pointed the pipestem her way. “Well, this is where we have a problem,” he said, with a confiding frown. “We don’t actually want you to go. If we could spare you the trip, we would. Unfortunately, Miss Jensen, the matter is out of our hands. There is someone else we need rather urgently to do something for us there—well, for America, really—and he adamantly refuses to help us unless we send you, too. So here we are.”

  Mystification, fear, fury: all were swirling now. At least she understood what Stilwell was so angry about. “Who is he?” When they said nothing, she asked a different way: “Why won’t he go without me?”

  The diplomat gave a doleful shrug. “Alas, the identity of the gentleman in question cannot be disclosed until you have agreed to make the trip. And the information in any case is not ours to vouchsafe. You’ll have to come to Washington to get your explanation. All I am allowed to tell you this afternoon is that your country needs you.”

  “You expect me to agree to fly to Europe, with a man you refuse to name, and you won’t tell me why?” She finally exploded. “What kind of woman do you think I am?”

  At this Stilwell smirked and made a note. Borkland’s tone became if anything meeker. The pipe appeared to have burned out. “My apologies, Miss Jensen. Certainly it isn’t that sort of trip. We’ll send a chaperone. An older woman. What we call a minder.” She was about to reply, but he lifted a finger. “All I can tell you at this moment is that the task we need the gentleman in question to perform is vital to the nation’s security. Nobody else can do it, and, as I said, he will not do it unless you go. Unfortunate, but there it is. He rather has us over the proverbial barrel, Miss Jensen. Thus this visit.”

  Margo’s fear was growing, but so was a peculiar thrill of excitement. The national security apparatus of the United States was going to all this trouble—fake documents, a minder, goodness knows what else—because they wanted her. Her. Margo Jensen. A man was going off on a vital mission, and wouldn’t go without her. Ambition began to trump caution. This morning she had been nobody, and now, suddenly, she was nearly as indispensable as the man they refused to name. Yet she would not yield so easily. After all, as Niemeyer liked to remind them, only a fool shows his hole cards before the final bet. And so she took refuge in practicalities.

  “I can’t go to Varna. I have classes. I have a boyfriend. What will he think of me running off to Europe?”

  Stilwell’s turn. “The dean has been spoken to. You’re excused from classes. As for your boyfriend—well, you gals have ways of dealing with your menfolk’s anger, don’t you?”

  Trying to get a rise from her; and so she damped down her slowly uncoiling ire. “At least tell me what I’ll be doing.” She selected a sassy tone. “Will I be helping this man you won’t name do the task you won’t tell me?”

  Borkland again: “In Bulgaria, Miss Jensen, you’ll be watching the chess and sunning on some of the most beautiful beaches in Europe. Maybe you’ll be called upon to attend a couple of meals. That’s all.” He smiled at her bewilderment. “You’ll be away two weeks at the most, and then you’ll be back, with the thanks of a grateful nation.”

  Margo took this in stride. Anger had cleansed her mind, and she could read the genuine desperation in his round face. Whatever they needed, they had to have. The trick, she reminded herself, was to get the opponent to show his cards first. “Suppose I say no.”

  “You live in a free country, Miss Jensen. If you would rather take its benefits for granted when you could have helped protect it, that choice is yours to make.” The men were suddenly on their feet. “Take a little time to think it over, Miss Jensen—bearing in mind that we need your answer before we leave for Washington.”

  “When are you leaving?”

  The diplomat glanced at his watch. “In about an hour.” He nodded toward the door. “Take a moment. Speak to Dr. Niemeyer. Ask his advice.”

  “And only to Niemeyer.” Stilwell lifted a warning fin
ger. “Breathe a word of this to anyone else, Miss Jensen, and you’ll be leaving this building in handcuffs.”

  But the silky threat was unnecessary, and the satisfied looks on both their watchful faces said they knew they had her.

  II

  “What’s this really about?”

  Lorenz Niemeyer shook his head. The government department backed on a private garden shared by several buildings, and they sat together on a stone bench. She supposed the men from Washington were watching from one of the many windows; maybe somehow listening, too.

  “I know less than they told you, I’m sure,” said Niemeyer. He brushed at a low branch, whipped by the wind against his pudgy face. “All I can tell you is that the people behind this are people I’ve known a long while.”

  She caught something in his tone. “Is that an endorsement or a warning?”

  “It’s neither.” He fixed her with those brilliant eyes. “I want to be very clear, Miss Jensen. Whatever they’re asking you to do, you can say no. That is absolutely an option. It won’t come back to bite you. You won’t be marked down in some file as un-American. Is that clear?”

  “It’s clear,” she said, but wasn’t sure she believed him.

  “You still sound uncertain, Miss Jensen. Let me tell you a story you won’t read in the papers. Last March, two Soviet military aircraft overflew Kuskokwim Bay and entered American airspace over Alaska. They were on a reconnaissance mission, and they flew unheeded for almost half an hour before we were able to intercept them. An intrusion of that magnitude and duration couldn’t have been accidental. They were taking a titanic risk. Suppose we’d shot them down? Do you realize that, merely by sending military aircraft across our borders intentionally, the Soviets committed an act of war?” He had plucked a dying blossom from the branch, and now began to pull the petals, one by one. “And this isn’t the first time this sort of thing has happened, Miss Jensen. It’s getting more frequent. It doesn’t make the papers, because we tend to keep it quiet.”

  “Like Gary Powers.”

  Niemeyer’s plump face dipped in a nod of grudging respect. “Gary Powers was shot down in his U-2 in May of 1960, and Eisenhower’s summit was canceled. That was very public. Let me tell you what isn’t. Prior to Powers, the Soviets had shot down a good eight to ten of our surveillance aircraft—possibly more—with significant loss of life. A couple of years before, eleven of our airmen survived the downing of a C-130 over Soviet territory and were never heard of again. Presumably, they’ve spent all the time since under interrogation. That’s top secret, you understand. You’re not cleared for it, but you have the right to know.” He stood up and brushed off his shapeless tweeds. “Things are very bad, Miss Jensen. Much worse than I can tell you in the classroom. Much worse than the Administration can admit. We are dangerously close to a shooting war with a regime possessing several hundred nuclear warheads.”

  She felt a chill of excitement and fear, mixed. “You’re telling me I should do it.”

  “The decision is yours, Miss Jensen, just as I said. All I’m telling you is that, whatever you may decide, childhood has reached its end.” Somehow they were on their feet. Niemeyer was holding the door. “And whatever you may decide, I know your father would be proud.” He saw her expression. “I knew him well, Miss Jensen. I don’t believe I’ve mentioned that.”

  Margo swayed on her feet. “My father died in the war.”

  “Which is where we met.”

  “Excuse me, Professor. I don’t see how that’s possible. You said in class you were in the OSS. Behind enemy lines in Europe.”

  “Indeed.”

  “My father was in a transport battalion in North Africa.”

  “Quite.”

  “Then how could you have known him?”

  He tapped the face of his watch. “I believe your deadline is upon you, Miss Jensen.”

  III

  She had not anticipated how difficult her departure would be. Tom Jellinek, the only boyfriend she had ever had, was wounded: How could she have applied for the fellowship and not told him? How could she say yes and not ask him? For they had promised to keep no secrets from each other, not least because they were busily keeping each other secret from their families, neither of which would have approved dating outside the race. But he was a kind young man, and made her promise to write twice a week, even, given that she would be behind the Iron Curtain, though her letters would be read, as he put it, by both sides’ secret police—a comment he intended as a joke, although as it turned out he was right. Her roommate, Jerri, took the news more in stride. Jerri was a professor’s daughter and a professor’s niece, and her grandfather had been provost at Princeton. She fancied herself a great radical and talked incessantly of the coming revolution, but, given that she rarely attended classes and was usually high, she could not have expected to play a significant part in the struggle. Jerri made Margo promise to bring back oodles of revolutionary literature—that was what she said, oodles—and then she went back to her dope, which she called mezzroll. Margo’s only other real friend in Ithaca was Annalise Seaver, a blue-eyed South Carolinian. They were outsiders together on an Ivy League campus, the black girl from Westchester County and the Southern belle. Both were government majors, and both were enrolled in Niemeyer’s course. It was Annalise who raised the question Margo had not considered:

  “Is Niemeyer going? Is that why he wanted to talk to you after class?”

  “Why would Niemeyer be going?”

  “Another girl told me the story. A couple of years ago, he had an absolute thing for one of his graduate assistants. Well, Niemeyer didn’t want to try his chances on campus, so he got his buddies at State to arrange for the two of them to go to New Zealand together for a month. Supposedly, she came back pregnant.”

  This caused Margo an uneasy moment: was it possible that Lorenz Niemeyer was the one who was being sent to Bulgaria, and refused to go without her? If so, she decided, she would never set foot on the plane. But she doubted it. The concern in his eyes just before he threw her to the wolves had seemed genuine.

  Hardest of all was explaining to Nana. Margo called her, collect, from one of the booths across from the front desk in her dormitory foyer, and apologized that there would be no time to come home before she left for Bulgaria. But Nana, who spoke very loud because she assumed others were as deaf as she, was enthusiastic. She believed in traveling the world, and had been to Europe herself a number of times, always by ship, because those fancy airplanes were death traps—didn’t Margo read the papers?

  “Get them to send you by ocean liner,” shouted Nana. “And make sure they give you a decent cabin. Oh, and tell them you want dinner at the captain’s table.”

  Late that night, as her roommate slumbered noisily, Margo sat up in bed, clutching the snapshot of the father she had never met, clad in his Army uniform. She kept it in her desk drawer, along with the telegram that began, “Dear Mrs. Jesson.” They couldn’t even get the name right. It was impossible, of course, that Niemeyer would have known him. She supposed that he had mentioned her father as a kind of goad. Whatever his protestations, Niemeyer obviously wanted her to say yes.

  Or else her imagination was running away with her. She thought again of the alumnus in the funny hat, and wondered whether she had really seen him twice; or even once.

  “Go to sleep,” she whispered in her grandmother’s stern voice, but instead continued to study the photograph. It was wrinkled and smudged, because she had spent so many hours over the years holding it, wondering what he was like. His smile was bright and confident and, she liked to pretend, noble. Or maybe it was just that she wished he had died more nobly. The family seemed to consider the manner of Donald Jensen’s death an embarrassment. He had tried to volunteer for the war, said Nana, but they rejected him because he was colored, only to draft him six months later. She was volunteering, too: still following in her father’s footsteps. She wasn’t sure why she felt like a fool.

  IV

 
; In the morning, Tom drove her to the tiny Tompkins County Airport for the flight to Washington. Niemeyer was waiting in the lobby, and for a bad moment Margo was prepared to credit Annalise’s doleful speculations. But all the great man wanted was a private word before she left. They spoke in a corner, near the battered vending machines. She wanted to ask about her father, but he gave her no chance.

  “I’ve been thinking things over since yesterday,” said Niemeyer. “Now, listen carefully. There’s only time to say this once. What you’re doing for them isn’t supposed to be dangerous. On the other hand, they’ve sort of thrown this thing together on the fly. A lot can go wrong even in the best-planned intelligence operation, and this one isn’t the best planned. You do understand that, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” said Margo, voice suddenly faint.

  “I don’t know what private instructions they’re going to give you, but, if the ploy goes to pieces? You don’t go back to your hotel. You don’t go to your minder. You march straight into the American consulate, nowhere else. Ask for a counselor named Ainsley. Mr. Ainsley is an associate of mine, and he’ll take care of you.” He put his good hand on her arm. “Borkland might make it all sound like sun and fun, Miss Jensen, but you’ll be behind the Iron Curtain. Remember that, and be careful.”

  On the plane, she almost threw up. Intelligence operation, Niemeyer had said.

  FIVE

  Counterintelligence

  I

  “There’s some kind of jurisdictional fight going on,” said the American. “Both State and the CIA want to run the operation.”

  The Russian frowned. The two men were sitting in a car outside a small restaurant in Warrenton, Virginia, an hour or so from Washington. “I have never understood the chaotic nature of your bureaucracy. Surely there exist clear rules to determine the matter.”

  “Rules are made to be broken, Viktor.”

  “So your people are always saying. I find it a miracle that your country has survived this long.”

  “Me, too.” The American laughed, but only for a second. “The point is, they’re going to put in an agent. It doesn’t matter whether Langley or Foggy Bottom winds up with the charter. Either way, we’ll be doing your work for you. You want to know who Smyslov was working for. They’ll find out, and I’ll let you know.”