Back Channel

by Stephen L Carter

  Kennedy surprised him.

  “Well, I guess we’ll just have to get them out of there, won’t we?” Then the crooked smile. “And I don’t suppose words are going to do it.” The smile faded. The President was in his rocker, and Bundy could tell that his back was particularly bad today. “You’ve seen the evidence, Mac?”

  “Yes, Mr. President.”

  “You’re persuaded?”

  “Entirely, Mr. President.”

  Kennedy nodded. His gaze drifted out toward the Rose Garden, where his children were playing, and Bundy wondered whether he was thinking of the millions of children on both sides whose fates hung suddenly in the balance. “I warned them,” said the President. “I said that strategic missiles in Cuba would have the gravest consequences. They didn’t listen. They think because of the Bay of Pigs …” He trailed off.

  “There’s no doubt they’re testing us, sir.”

  “Testing me, you mean.” He shook his head. “Khrushchev thinks I’m a weak little boy, doesn’t he?”

  “I’m sure he doesn’t, sir.”

  “It doesn’t matter what he thinks, though, does it? It’s the policy of this government that no other country in this hemisphere can have strategic missiles. Period. And it’s not just me who’s said it. Ike said it. And Congress—what was it, two weeks ago? three?—Congress even adopted a resolution along that line—not unanimous, but almost—”

  “In the House, three hundred eighty-six to seven, in the Senate, eighty-six to one.”

  “So the missiles have to go. We’re not negotiating on that.”

  Bundy wondered whether this was decisiveness or bluster. “Yes, Mr. President.”

  “Do the Sovs understand this could mean war? Nuclear war? I mean, how do they know we won’t just bomb the missile sites?”

  “I assume they’re hoping to present us with a fait accompli. The missiles aren’t yet operational. Most likely, their plan was that we wouldn’t discover the missiles until they could be fired at us.”

  Kennedy chewed this over. “And they think I’m gun-shy. I wouldn’t bomb Cuba to help the invasion at the Bay of Pigs, so I won’t bomb now? Something like that?”

  The question was rhetorical, and Bundy said nothing.

  “We don’t go public, Mac. And we don’t tell the Reds what we know. Not just yet. Let’s kick this around a little. Figure out what we can do. Not just what we can say. Get some people in. Get the agencies working overtime. We hold the knowledge to the people who absolutely need to know, but those people work the hell out of it. Nobody’s on vacation. Nobody’s on leave. Nobody’s out sick.” The eyes swiveled back to Bundy, and hardened. “And nobody talks. We still have the Espionage Act, right?”

  “We do.”

  “Good. Anybody who leaks, I want in prison. For life. I don’t care who it is.”

  “Yes, Mr. President.”

  “And, Mac?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “We start today. Get them in this morning. We’ll meet daily until this is resolved.”

  “Yes, Mr. President.” Packing up his file. “But I think you should still make your Midwest campaign trip at the end of the week.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “If we don’t want anyone to know something’s going on, we can’t act like something’s going on.”

  Kennedy smiled. “You know future historians will say that when I heard about the missiles, the first thing I did was go off to raise money for our congressional candidates. They’ll think it shows how irresponsible I was.”

  “With all due respect, Mr. President, this isn’t about your reputation. Our job right now is to make sure that there are future historians.”

  The grin widened. “What a charmer. I can’t imagine why Harvard ever let you go.”

  II

  Doris Harrington sat in her cramped office, glasses for once on her nose. Unclassified files were heaped everywhere. The heavy green safe stood open. Borkland sat across from her. They had divided up the transcripts of GREENHILL’s debriefing, searching for any clue, however small, to explain the twin mysteries of why the Bulgarians arrested her and why they let her go. They had just switched halves, so that he was now reading the pages she’d read, and vice versa. It was a bit past ten when she spotted something.

  “Look at this,” she said. “Page seventeen. Top. A line she attributes to Fomin.”

  Q Please tell us again, Miss Jensen. What exactly did he say about the President?

  A He said, “Your President believes his own side’s propaganda that the Chairman has been forced to place offensive missiles in Cuba.”

  Q Were those his precise words?

  A I think so. I’m pretty sure.

  Borkland was puzzled. “I don’t see what you’re driving at.”

  Harrington snorted. “Oh, Bill, I had no idea you were such a dunce. Why exactly did I hire you?”

  “For my good looks, I imagine.”

  “Dear boy. You really don’t see it, do you? It’s all there. In this single word.”

  She tapped the page. He followed her finger. “Forced,” he read aloud.

  “That’s right.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “It means that Khrushchev may not be in control of things. It means somebody over there is sending us a message.”

  Borkland looked at the page again. “That’s a lot to read into one word.”

  “I agree.”

  “You think they arrested her to send us a message?” His turn to tap the paragraph. “How could he be sure she’d remember the words right? How can we be sure?”

  Harrington’s tone was placid. “I’m sure, Bill.” She turned a page. “Look. It all fits together. See? He keeps asking about her mission. But he insists that he already knows. The mission is to find out what is happening in Cuba. But then he essentially tells her what’s happening: it only matters whether Khrushchev has been ‘forced’ to place missiles in Cuba, if there are in fact missiles in Cuba. He goes to a lot of trouble to make sure she understands the importance. He even tells her he came ‘a considerable distance’ to meet her. See? Page eleven. He doesn’t want her to forget. He hammers home the message five different ways.” She closes the folder. “And notice that they don’t interrogate the minder—the person they have to know is an actual intelligence officer. They knock her around a bit, they break her wrist, but in the end they leave her in the street. They only interrogate GREENHILL. But they give her more information than they get from her. Fomin even mentions the missiles. And then she escapes. Isn’t it likely that Fomin intended to let her go all along? It all adds up, Bill. It all adds up.”

  Her deputy sighed. “Fine. Say you’re right. What do we do about it?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “There’s nothing to do. There’s something off about this whole case. Can’t you feel it?”

  “Sorry, boss,” said Borkland tartly. “I haven’t had the chance to peek at the answers in the back of the book.”

  Harrington smiled. “You mean that as a criticism. Fair enough. I don’t have facts to back up my worries. But I’ve been around long enough to trust my instincts, and so have you. The other questions she raised in her debriefing are good questions. How did Fomin tumble to her mission? Where did he get the file on her so fast? Why didn’t he rearrest her when he had the chance? He could have found a thousand excuses to keep her.”

  “If somebody’s sending a message, that’s why he let her go.”

  “And why he arrested her. Yes. But that’s the problem, Bill. Why her? Why GREENHILL? And why Bulgaria? If Fomin has a message for us, there are hundreds of diplomats and reporters he could call right here in Washington.” She sighed and shut her eyes briefly: age was beginning to play its games. “No, Bill. We do nothing. Not yet. It’s not our move.”

  “With the missiles in Cuba, we just sit and wait?”

  “Exactly.” She waved an admonishing finger. “And not a word of this
goes into any report. No hint passes outside this office.”

  “You don’t think the Secretary should hear this? Or maybe the President? Or the fifty analysts Langley has on Cuba just now?”

  “Again, not yet. Let’s see how things play out.”

  Borkland was uncomfortable. “Time is short, boss.”

  A beatific smile. “Then I suspect our wait shan’t be very long.”

  EIGHTEEN

  The Elusive Peace

  I

  “Let’s talk about fallout shelters,” said the great Lorenz Niemeyer, striding across the stage. It was the same Tuesday, October 16, and Margo had been back since Saturday. “If you’ve spent any time in Washington or New York or Chicago, you’ve seen the signs everywhere. But imagine the weapon targeted on those cities. Possibly thirty megatons. The Soviets build them that big, I seem to recall. A thirty-megaton warhead would leave a crater nine hundred feet deep and a mile across. Even the White House bomb shelter would be ash.”

  He snorted and executed a rather fine pirouette for a man of his bulk. Margo frowned at his antics. She had switched seats since her return to campus and now sat near the back. She admired Niemeyer a good deal less than she had before her little jaunt behind the Iron Curtain. It didn’t seem fair that he’d survived the war and her father had blown himself to bits.

  “We spend a fortune building shelters where they’re least needed,” Niemeyer continued, punching the air with his tiny fist. “Nobody in the big cities is going to survive anyway. They’re needed in the hinterlands, where the fallout, not the bombs, will be the killer. And, of course, up here we don’t have enough. Why is that?” The mocking gaze moved around the lecture hall, brushed past Margo without lingering, settled on a nearer target. “Miss Seaver. Tell us, please. Why are there so many shelters in the cities?”

  Annalise struggled through a halting explanation. From her perch at the rear, Margo tried to take an interest in her best friend’s answer, but couldn’t hold the words in her head. She was too busy being angry at Niemeyer. A part of her wanted to march right up to the lectern and demand to know whether or not he had really known Donald Jensen in the OSS, even though she knew perfectly well—the civil-rights leaders still talked about it—that American Intelligence during World War II had not recruited Negroes.

  “Not even wrong,” said Niemeyer when Annalise was done. With a theatrical sigh of disappointment, the great man moved on to someone else, who offered at least a fragment of the response he was seeking: the purpose of the shelters was to make people believe they would survive. Another acolyte supplied the rest: at the same time, the shelters provided a unifying force, a way of reminding us that we’re all in this together, and—

  Margo decided she’d had enough. She rose from her seat and hurried up the aisle toward the door. She felt Niemeyer’s eyes on her, but that might have been her imagination. “Most fallout shelters are little more than holes in the ground,” he was saying as she fled. “They aren’t built to the proper specifications. For example, the entrances should be constructed with a particular set of complex angles to make penetration by wind-borne fallout less likely, but instead we tend to …”

  She was out. Mercifully. She let the door slam, probably on purpose. The sound echoed in the corridor, where the teaching assistants kept their gloomy vigil against unwanted listening. Margo could hardly believe that a month ago she would have given anything to be one of them. She could take little more of Niemeyer and his acolytes. Every time she heard his voice, she was plunged back into precisely the memories she was trying to forget. Harrington had said to put it behind her, and Margo wanted to. Desperately.

  But as one October day shivered into the next, Margo found herself unable to follow Harrington’s advice. She would sit in a sunlit classroom as the professor discoursed, in elegant French, on the wonders of Lamartine, and for a moment she would forget herself; but when the hour ended, out in the bustle of the corridor, her eyes would lift automatically to the sign on the wall, three inverted yellow pyramids, touching at the vertices, emblazoned on a black circle—the symbol for a fallout shelter—and that night she would dream sleeplessly, plagued by visions of her classmates banging pitifully on the locked shelter door as they breathed their last.

  Or she would be downtown with Annalise and Jerri, sipping ice cream sodas at the counter and exchanging superior comments about the high school girls who flitted in and out, trying to draw the eyes of the Cornell men, when she would catch sight of some fellow who reminded her, in manner if not in appearance, of Aleksandr Fomin, and suddenly she would begin to tremble, quite badly, and excuse herself. Naturally, her girlfriends would insist on driving her back to campus. Annalise would tell her she needed to lie down, and Jerri would offer her something to calm her down, but she would break free of them and stalk up the hill on foot, hoping to use the afternoon chill to drive the memories away. It never worked; but at least her friends would not be around to see the tears.

  The worst time of all occurred with Tom, who had at first tried to comfort her over the trauma she had suffered in Bulgaria, but her refusal to discuss the details finally put him off. They quarreled. Tom said he knew that it was something to do with Bobby. Margo insisted that this was untrue, but Tom refused to let it go. From the wounded and occasionally angry hints he dropped, Margo finally realized that he thought she had slept with Bobby during the Olympiad, even though, for reasons of either pride or propriety, he refused to come out and ask. In all the scenarios she had imagined for their reunion, it had never occurred to her that her boyfriend might be jealous. The reproach in his voice even as they held each other began to weigh on her. On the second night, as they stood together outside her dormitory after pizza, Tom made the mistake of forgiving her for, as he put it, whatever she had done.

  Margo stiffened, and Tom hastily tried to make amends. “I’m just worried about you, sweetheart. You’re not yourself.”

  “I’m fine,” she said, but couldn’t meet his injured gaze. She glanced at the building. “I have to get inside. Parietals.”

  Now she stood in the hallway outside Niemeyer’s classroom—coincidentally, beneath the yellow-and-black triangles of the fallout-shelter sign—and tried to slow her whirling and disobedient mind. She might never have gone to Varna at all had not Niemeyer manipulated her with that mention of her father. She had yet to confront him about that, and she told herself that her reluctance was because she didn’t want to invite him to lie to her any further. But another part of her knew that she didn’t want him to burst her bubble. Harrington had sown doubt about Fomin’s tale, and the last thing Margo wanted was for Niemeyer to say: Yes, sure, I knew your father because he drove for me when I was in Tunisia to see Eisenhower. Sorry about the way he died, Miss Jensen, but of course history doesn’t give all of us the opportunity to be heroic. Still, you can take pride in—

  “Margie. Hey.”

  Phil Littlejohn had a hand on her shoulder. She realized that she had been standing with her head tipped against the chipped hardwood paneling of the corridor.

  “I saw you run out. You okay?”

  “I’m fine,” she said, shaking off his touch and turning around.

  “It’s just, you’ve been acting spooked since you got back from Bulgaria.”

  Margo studied his patrician face, searching for any hint of the cruel mockery of which she knew he was capable. She remembered their confrontation under the stands at the stadium, and his teasing invitation to inspect the mattresses of the shelter back at his frat. But this time she saw a genuine concern, and, in his eyes, a twinkle that seemed to her to mark some sort of secret knowledge.

  “I’m fine, Phil,” she repeated, more gently than she intended.

  “Look. I wanted to apologize for the way I behaved last month. Too much beer. I’m sorry, Margo. See? I got your name right.”

  “I have to be somewhere—”

  He leaned closer. “It’s okay, Margo. I know all about what happened over there.”

/>   The doors burst open. The crowd was filing out. Now somebody would tell Tom that she’d been whispering with Phil Littlejohn in the hallway, and there would be yet another fire to put out. But she had to hear the rest. She took Phil by the sleeve and drew him away from the main entrance.

  “What are you talking about, Phil? What do you think happened?”

  “That the scholarship was just a cover. The way I heard it, you went to Bulgaria on official business. I think something went wrong and you got arrested.” He grinned. “But you’re back. So they let you go. You’re safe. You should relax and put it behind you.”

  She tightened her grip on his arm. “Where did you hear that story?”

  “My family knows people who know people. That’s all I’m going to say.”

  “Phil, you can’t tell anybody. I’m not saying if you’re right or wrong, but you can’t—”

  “Ah, Miss Jensen,” an all-too-familiar voice boomed. “Is this your young man, then? Or do you require rescue from his clutches?”

  Niemeyer had come up behind them, trailed by a brace of graduate students.

  “No, no,” she began. “We just—”

  But the great man as usual spoke right over her. “The way you went racing out of class, I was worried. For no reason, I see. You seem to be in good hands.”

  This was too much for her. She made her awkward excuses and hurried from the building, nearly colliding with a man she took to be another professor, because of his pipe, tweeds, and flannels. She scarcely noticed his gold-rimmed glasses.

  II

  After dinner, from a phone booth in the dorm lobby, she made a collect call to her brother, Corbin, in Ohio. They passed a few pleasantries, but the truth was they were nearly strangers by now. Corbin had attended a small college in the Midwest, met a young woman, and settled down. He taught history at an Episcopal academy near Cleveland. He seemed happy, but he never came home to Garrison. A part of her longed to share her experiences in Bulgaria, and another part of her wanted to warn him about Cuba, but she remembered about telephones and didn’t dare. Finally, she asked him straight out whether he had ever heard any stories about Daddy doing more in the war than drive a truck. He was four years older, after all, and might have knowledge she lacked.