Asterisk

by Campbell Armstrong

  Moscow.

  It wouldn’t have happened except for the curious circuitry of history; there would be no Asterisk, no trip to Moscow, no defection. A working knowledge of Russian—by ironic courtesy of the GI Bill of Rights—and a postwar job with a company that sold—Christ—cardboard boxes to the countries of Eastern Europe. 1949. Trips, simple business trips: spiders’ webs. Corrugated cardboard. An illusion. I had papers, he thought, papers I didn’t even realize I carried. Berlin, city of ruins. Death. How was I to know the fucking papers contained CIA material? Coded bullshit identifying the principal operators of the Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti in the Berlin area?

  The whole goddamn company, he thought. A CIA front. A stooge. The salesman as fall guy, stand-up comedian. Did I ever tell you the one about the farmer’s daughter? So: slowly, unwittingly, you were recruited. The climate of the World. Red Peril. Frost of the cold war. You were recruited and thought nothing of it.

  Covert operations. Everybody was doing it. The Soviets, the British, the Americans, the French. It was the fabric of the age. Stop world communism. Stand up and be counted. Then 1952, a continuation of the same pointless conflict; intelligence supplied to the United Nations Forces in Korea.

  Gung fucking ho.

  You’re doing a good job, Ted. We think the world of you.

  Washington.

  I dirtied my hands, he thought. I got myself stained in the shit of McCarthyism, prime swine time, the madman from the heartland whose pulse palpitated at the thought of a Marxist in the State Department, who would have changed the color of his blood from red to something more American if he had had the power.

  Name names.

  That was the job: name names. Make it stick good.

  Climbing the ladder, Ted.

  Old newsreels. Guilty faces. Denials.

  And that was your job: dig them out wherever they might be lurking—the State Department, Justice, even the army.

  The ritual cleansing of the collective psyche.

  Lives falling apart, crashing all around him.

  You could continue to blame the times.

  When the craziness was over he had gone to London for a year, coordinating the activities of Southern European intelligence from a tranquil office in Grosvenor Square.

  But what was it? It was hollow, an empty shell, a surface upon which you rapped your knuckles and heard nothing come back but the echoes of yourself. Obscure fur traders in Stara Zagora had useless information to sell on the subject of Balkan intrigue; haberdashers from Smyrna, hungry for American residence, flew paper darts over the intelligence wires. A Bulgarian minister blows his brains out; a Turkish admiral is screwing his thirteen-year-old niece. Put it in boxes. File it. It added up to nothing. Nothing. It meant nothing, it made no mark, no indentation, upon the delicate equilibrium of the world.

  Back home, he thought: a malicious deity had saved Cuba for last. Back home in time to see how all the deadly pieces on the checkerboard could be made to move when the stakes were for real. He was in a world of killers, a world in which only the most fragile of balances prevented the holocaust. They almost had you fooled, Hollander. They almost pulled the wool of patriotism over your eyes. But the darkness had been lifted and there was light and what you perceived was that borderlines and frontiers and properties and divisions didn’t matter a shit because nobody was going to get off the old planet alive. Ah, Ted, Ted, Ted. Where was my brain? Sunk in the formaldehyde of nationalism; the preserve jar of insularity. America, America.

  But Cuba was only an aperitif. Asterisk was the main course.

  Asterisk.

  New project for you, Ted. Security of a missile site in Oscura, New Mexico. Asterisk: it might have been the prototype of an advanced toilet tissue for all he cared: what did it matter? You were told to guard something, you guarded it. That was the cards they dealt you.

  Breaking point. Shards. I saw the file.

  I didn’t mean to. I didn’t want. But I saw the file.

  Too easily, too simply, it came my way.

  Blueprints, research data, the whole schmear.

  The thing they had christened Asterisk.

  He heard the loudspeaker announce more bus departures. In another place at another time it would be a different voice: Novosibirsk, Omsk, Magnitogorsk and all hellholes west.

  He stood up, gazing at the debris on the table.

  There was an ache, a pain, far within him that he could not quite locate. There was an insistent pressure directly behind his eyes. My kids, he thought. My babies.

  Moscow. Traitors’ Row. It would be a different kind of loneliness there.

  The piano was playing in a forlorn, broken way. Sharpe thought of a mongrel stumbling over the keys. What did they say about an infinite number of monkeys on an infinite number of typewriters? Dilbeck opened the conservatory door, Sharpe followed him out; the grass underfoot was damp and muddy. Dilbeck put his eye to the lens of the telescope, muttered to himself, then turned to Sharpe.

  “I understand he went to see the widow,” he said.

  Sharpe nodded.

  “What do you suppose they discussed?”

  “The weather,” Sharpe said. “Inside the house all they discussed was the weather.”

  “Ah,” Dilbeck said. “Then she knows.”

  “I guess.”

  Dilbeck tutted, fidgeted with the telescope, put his eye once more to the lens. Inside the house, the piano stopped clunking. “Young Thorne’s like the dog who will not let go of the bone,” he said. “Even if there appears to be no meat on it.”

  Sharpe saw the conservatory door open and the daughter appear, a shadow with the light behind her.

  “Phone, Daddy,” she called out.

  Dilbeck went toward the house.

  Sharpe hoped the daughter would not join him. He tried to make himself inconspicuous on the lawn, lighting a cigarette, turning away, ignoring how she raised her hand in a greeting. He heard the conservatory door close. But he did not turn around to see if she had come outside or gone back in. He didn’t want to encourage her. With that kind, it was the best course to turn your back and say: Fuck it.

  He walked down to the trees, then strolled back to the telescope, the conservatory door opened, Dilbeck was coming out across the lawn. He was mumbling to himself, hurrying, as if something of the utmost urgency had taken place. Sharpe braced himself: visiting Dilbeck was like going to a dentist. You knew there would have to be a moment of pain.

  “Damn,” Dilbeck said.

  Sharpe waited. He felt a single drop of rain on his face.

  “Damn,” Dilbeck said again. “You’re going to have to do something about Hollander.”

  “Hollander? Ted Hollander?” Sharpe asked. What was up now?

  “Ted, yes,” Dilbeck said. “Damn. You’re going to have to do something there quickly.”

  He was silent a moment. His hand lightly lingered on the shaft of the telescope.

  “In this business, Sharpe, it never rains without truly pouring,” he said.

  They gave Myers a meal of fried chicken and mashed potatoes and green beans and apple pie; he understood he was being, in the fashion of the Pavlovian creature, rewarded. He ate hungrily. The captain watched him. What happens to me next? Myers wondered.

  When he was through eating, he sat back and lit one of the cigarettes that had been returned to him. They had deprived him of nicotine all day long. He looked at the captain, who was smiling.

  “Well, Jack,” the captain said. “Feel better?”

  “Much better,” Myers said.

  “It looks like we’re going to have to keep you under wraps for a day or two,” the captain said. “But you’ll eat okay. You’ll sleep okay. And you won’t have to go around looking for birds.”

  Under wraps? Myers wondered. They made him sound like something you have to throw a tarpaulin over.

  “I’m a prisoner?” he asked.

  The captain clapped him on the shoulder. “No, Jack. You’re
not exactly a prisoner.”

  Myers looked at his empty plate. And he thought of Hollander; a sinking feeling. He had never been very close with Ted, but they had trusted each other. Now he knew, he knew beyond doubt, that he had landed Ted in something of a mess. Sometime in the future, he thought, he would have to say that he was very sorry.

  5

  Wednesday, April 5

  It was three minutes past midnight and raining. An upper-floor window of the embassy building was lit, a thin glow behind drawn drapes. Inside the room, Brinkerhoff was walking up and down and pausing now and then to peer through the drapes as if to reassure himself that the world outside did not cease to exist even if he was not perceiving it.

  The undersecretary, a stout man whose present relations with the Politburo were outstanding and who therefore could not be crossed, was seated behind his desk and drawing swastikas on his blotter pad. The scientific attaché, whose relations with the Politburo were equally shining, sat slumped in a chair with his legs crossed. On his lap there was a sheet of paper; he was writing something, stopping every so often to suck the end of his pen or to run his fingers, in an agitated way, through his thinning hair.

  “It’s beyond me,” he said finally.

  “I don’t understand,” the undersecretary said. “What is beyond you?”

  “This … this information,” the scientific attaché said.

  “The question is not whether it defeats your brain,” Brinkerhoff said. “The problem is one of its possible authenticity.”

  “It isn’t in my field,” the scientist said. “It would have to be examined by experts.”

  “Like who?”

  “Berganin would be the best,” the scientist said. “It’s his sphere of interest.”

  “Berganin is in Moscow,” the undersecretary said.

  “It would take days,” Brinkerhoff said. “I don’t think Hollander is a man of much patience. He’s going to pressure me soon. I have to tell him something.”

  The undersecretary yawned. “I should wake the ambassador,” he said.

  “The ambassador is doing what he knows best,” Brinkerhoff said. “He’s out. He’s at a party. And even if he were here he would leave the decision to you, you know that.”

  The undersecretary yawned again. He looked at the scientific attaché. “Is it conceivable? Answer me that.”

  The scientist sucked his pen. “Anything’s possible—”

  “Don’t give me answers from the ether,” the undersecretary said. “I’m an idiot. Explain to me as you would answer an idiot.”

  The scientist shrugged. “It’s possible. I don’t understand it. But it’s possible. The consequences, if this were true, would be devastating.”

  Brinkerhoff turned from the window. He had been watching the rain fall through the streetlamps. “Then we must act on Hollander, because even if there’s only the slightest possibility—”

  “Look, this is one sheet of paper out of many. We would need the rest.”

  “Which we will get when we have made certain commitments to Hollander,” Brinkerhoff said.

  “It smells,” the undersecretary said. “He wants to defect. I don’t buy it.”

  Brinkerhoff said, “I don’t think he wants to defect. If he stays, he’s a traitor. If he leaves, he’s a traitor but alive. It’s simple.”

  “And if he’s a plant?” the undersecretary asked. He was wearing pajamas under a dressing gown. American pajamas, American gown, Brinkerhoff noticed.

  “If he’s a plant then what have we lost?”

  “Your reasoning is wild,” the undersecretary said. “A plant is a danger.”

  “A disposable danger,” Brinkerhoff said. “There’s nothing to lose and much to gain.” He looked at the scientific attaché. “Am I right? Am I being reasonable?”

  “Reasonable,” the scientist said. “If this is a part of Asterisk, then it’s very reasonable.”

  “Asterisk,” the undersecretary said. “I wish I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard something about this marvelous Asterisk.”

  Brinkerhoff said, “Asterisk or not, do we act on Hollander?”

  The undersecretary shrugged. “I can’t take the responsibility for this on my own. It needs to be cleared.”

  “You’re talking again of days—two, perhaps three, days.”

  “This Hollander,” the undersecretary said. “I don’t like the sound of it. He thinks his information is going to make the world safe—”

  “Perhaps,” Brinkerhoff said. “All this information can be evaluated later. His personality can be dissected. But I urge you to act now, Secretary. But not by diplomatic bag.”

  The undersecretary stared at his rows of penciled swastikas, then reached for the telephone. “I will make a call. Then we will see.”

  Brinkerhoff sat down. He placed the tips of his fingers together. Everything was so slow, so slow.

  The meeting had gone on too long. Dilbeck was very tired. The air in the conference room was thick with tobacco smoke; papers were strewn across the surface of the long table, ashtrays crammed, people yawning. He looked across the faces, waiting for an opportunity to bring the meeting to a close. Burlingham, the man from the RAND Corporation, was still holding forth. The problem with Burlingham was you couldn’t easily shut him up. Dilbeck sighed. Some people were in love with their own noises, just as his daughter, bless her, thought she was really making progress with her music. Noise, everything was noise. It was what the modern world manufactured best of all. The six people of the Asterisk Project Committee were especially adept. Through the lens of a telescope you could sense the peace of space, that was something, even if a freeway droned in the distance. And plants; plants grew silently, patiently. He wanted to go home.

  He stood up and tried to bring the thing to order. He had considered bringing up the subject of Thorne before the committee, but if he could contain that for the time being it would be best. Thorne was, as yet, only a small nuisance. And besides, the real reason for this meeting was Ted Hollander.

  Burlingham, finally, had stopped talking. Dilbeck looked around the room. Marvell, of the National Security Agency, sat with his necktie undone and, in his shirtsleeves, had the appearance of a hotshot newspaper reporter hanging on a dramatic deadline. Whorley of Aerospace Defense Command looked his usual alert self. Razor-sharp, Dilbeck thought. You could imagine cutting yourself on Whorley. Nicholson, from the U.S. National Space Board, was gaunt and ghostly. You could see him suddenly fading away around the edges.

  “I don’t think we’ve really touched on the reasons for Hollander sending a man out there,” Dilbeck heard himself say. He was hoarse now; the smoke was in his throat. “I’ve heard a great deal of wild speculation—”

  Burlingham interrupted: “You’re in charge of security, Dilbeck. Let’s hear it from you.”

  Marvell sarcastically clapped his hands. “What’s your feeling, Dilbeck?” he said. “Let’s have it.”

  Dilbeck closed his eyes. Security, he thought. You tried to sit on something, keep the lid closed: but it was the first law of security that nothing in the world was airtight. This is what the others did not understand. They thought you could create a vacuum, a perfect vacuum.

  “Hollander had charge of intelligence, as you all know,” he said. “For personal reasons, as he put it, he quit. Who knows why?”

  “Why wasn’t there an investigation?” Marvell asked.

  “He quit,” Dilbeck said. “The strains of the job, I daresay. His wife found somebody else. Divorce. That kind of thing tells on a man.”

  “This is history,” Burlingham said.

  “History,” Dilbeck said. Could he ever get Emily married off? he wondered. Fatigue: the most random thoughts came in like birds. “History,” he said again, feeling for threads. “Hollander’s history is important here. For one thing, in the course of his job, he might have stumbled across some information. We can speculate further and say that he must have. Otherwise, why send a man out to that g
odforsaken place? Why go to that trouble? So Hollander has some information on Asterisk. How much? And what does he plan to do with it?”

  Marvell rolled his shirt sleeves up in the manner of someone who faces a long night ahead. Dilbeck watched him and thought: No, I want to wrap it up, I want to go home.

  “There’s nothing in his background to suggest any association with foreign powers,” Dilbeck said. “His record is exemplary. I wish, in fact, we could find men of his caliber these days. Anyhow, somewhere along the way he discovered something about Asterisk—”

  “And who do we blame for that?” General Whorley asked.

  “Blame?” Dilbeck said. “Who do we blame for Major General Burckhardt? You people live in dreams. You think something like this is—is easily contained. You can put it in a box and tie it with a ribbon and nobody gets to look inside. But that’s a fallacy. Hollander isn’t a fool. The man is naturally curious. Some people take orders, don’t ask questions, but Hollander—”

  He watched Whorley get up and open a window a little way. Security, he thought. What did these people know? A little smoke and Whorley has to open a window. A mindless gesture. They were trying to pin every security breach on him, Dilbeck realized: I won’t take the blame because there isn’t any blame.

  “Hollander,” Nicholson said. “I just don’t see any viable alternative in a situation like this.”

  Burlingham looked at his papers and nodded. “Nor do I,” he said.

  Whorley had returned to his seat. Cold, damp air was dissolving the smoke in the room. “Asterisk is more important than Hollander,” he said. He had a way of saying things with finality, leaving no margins for argument. “And as far as Walter Burckhardt was concerned, I don’t think that’s my baby. I’m on record, I didn’t want him to go any further, I wanted him out—”

  “We’re not discussing Burckhardt,” Marveil said. “It’s Hollander. I think it’s a problem we can safely leave to you, Dilbeck.”

  Pontius Pilate, Dilbeck thought. He looked around the table. Hollander. He had always liked Ted. But that was the run of things. Death was no more significant than spitting a fishbone from your mouth. Nothing was permitted to get in Asterisk’s way. Not even Ted.