Margo’s face burned. Her words dried up. Now she understood what Phil Littlejohn had been leading up to. He had been trying to find a way to invite her to join his family up in Maine. He wanted her safe.
The women stood side by side in the kitchen, each alone with her private grief. Margo had come to obtain information, but would leave with more than she wanted. Phil wasn’t one of the bad guys. He had been trying to help. Guilt and responsibility threatened to overwhelm her, and no matter how hard she tried to tell herself that it wasn’t her fault—that she had never flirted back or encouraged him in any way—she had to accept the bizarre truth. Had she never met Phil Littlejohn, he might still be alive.
“I’m sorry,” Margo said again, just to break the crushing silence. “I’m so sorry for your loss.”
Finally, Priscilla’s eyes sought out her guest once more. “I’m sorry, too, Margo. And it was good of you to come by, but I think it’s time you left. I have things to do, and, well, the truth is, you’re starting to give me the creeps.”
Priscilla walked her briskly to the door. One of the movers, stepping hastily out of her angry way, dropped a box of framed photographs, presumably from her father’s study. The glass on one shattered. Priscilla let loose a stream of firm but quiet invective as the man stooped to collect the pieces.
“Just step over him,” Priscilla commanded.
“Wait,” said Margo, crouching.
“He doesn’t need help.”
But Margo wasn’t trying to help. She was tugging another photo from the box, one that had caught her eye.
“Who’s this?”
“Oh. Well. That’s Phil, obviously. That’s me. Way too fat for shorts in those days. I tried to get Dad not to frame it. And the good-looking fellow in the captain’s hat is our cousin Jerry. This was on Nantucket, I think two years ago.”
“Jerry,” Margo echoed.
“First cousin on my mother’s side. He works for the State Department.” Priscilla looked at her strangely. “Family black sheep. He got in some kind of trouble overseas. He’s riding a desk at Foggy Bottom while they decide what to do with him.”
Margo looked up. They recruit families, Fomin had said. “Do you know how to get in touch with him?”
TWENTY-EIGHT
Jerry
I
Doris Harrington wondered whether somebody was playing a bad joke. It was nearly ten o’clock, and she was sitting alone in a booth at an all-night diner in Bethesda. The phone call that found her at her house two hours ago included all the proper code words, and when she tried to protest that she was on the verge of retirement, the male caller, who declined to give his name, replied that her “immediate plans” made no difference.
So here she sat, still on her first slice of pie but sipping her third cup of coffee, watching the parking lot through the wide front windows. The diner announced its name in huge flashing neon letters, and the light played hypnotically over the shiny cars. The waitress poured more coffee without being asked. Harrington needed the coffee to stay awake, but knew she would regret it later on, when she tried to sleep.
The place the caller had chosen was well off the usual State Department path, and that was the only mercy, because, had anyone she knew spotted her, Harrington would have been mortified—not because she was in some hole-in-the-wall diner but because the only explanation for her presence at this time of night would be that she was involved in some sort of—
She sat straight. A young man had come in and was heading toward her. He was slim and towheaded and had eyes of a strange orange-gold. Smiling, he slid into the booth, across from her.
“Thank you for coming, Dr. Harrington. My name is Jerry Ainsley. I work for the State Department—”
“May I see your identification?” she asked coolly.
He opened his wallet, showed the laminated photograph threaded with blue.
“Very well, Mr. Ainsley. Would you mind telling me what I’m doing here?”
“A friend of yours would like to see you.”
“Oh?”
“She’s waiting in the car. I gather that she has quite the story to tell, but for some reason, Dr. Harrington, she won’t tell it to anybody but you.”
II
They were in the woods, walking along a path of hard, pitted dirt in Wheaton Regional Park. The park was closed for the evening, but Jerry knew a side way in. The first frost had come early. Leaves crunched beneath their feet. Ainsley was off in the trees, moving silently as he guarded their backs. Harrington was unsurprised at his evident skill: she had guessed almost from the moment they met that State might cut his paychecks but his orders came from the clowns across the river.
She had been somehow unsurprised to find Margo Jensen in the front seat of Ainsley’s Mercedes. She did not believe in fate, but she did believe in her distant Anglican God, and she had suspected that her path and GREENHILL’s might be crossing again. In unconscious mimicry of her former husband, Harrington had first rehearsed her onetime agent on the details of how she had wound up in Bethesda: the condolence call on the Littlejohns, the discovery that Ainsley was a cousin, cajoling Priscilla Littlejohn into calling with the cryptic message that “the person you met in front of the cathedral has to meet you urgently”—and Ainsley’s message back fifteen minutes later, that she should take the two o’clock train to New York City, where a friend of his would drive her to Baltimore, where in turn he would be waiting.
“He sounds very swift and well organized,” said Harrington, all skepticism. “Maybe too well organized.”
Margo spread her hands. “I don’t know how I’m supposed to answer that.”
“You’re not. I’m thinking aloud.”
“I’m telling you the truth.”
“I know you are, dear.”
The wind had changed direction. It had been swirling gently at their backs. Now, all at once, they were walking into an icy breeze. Harrington hoped it wasn’t a portent.
“Why don’t you tell me what this is all about,” Harrington finally said. “After that, we can worry about the logistics of your journey.”
In an instant, Margo was off. It was obvious that she needed to talk, and that Harrington was her chosen confessor. The older woman had seen this before in agents, and she fought not to be so swept up in the narrative that she failed to search for the tiny hesitations and inconsistencies that might suggest that GREENHILL was romancing, or nuts—or, recalling a couple of unfortunate cases, had been instructed to memorize a script.
She heard nothing but a desperate fluency, and relief in the telling.
When Margo at last ran down, they walked together in silence for a bit. Harrington was remembering what was known in the trade as the second rule of intelligence—when you’re out, you’re out. She’d preached it herself in her lectures to the kiddies, and now and then to people she’d fired. When you’re out, you’re out. No matter how much you miss it, no matter what the temptation, you don’t get involved. Period. No contact. No clever ploys. You’re done, and you can’t buy your way back in with information. You shouldn’t even want to. If an old agent comes alive once more, you don’t debrief him yourself: you turn him over to your ex-employers and go back to bed.
Therefore, the first words out of Harrington’s mouth should have been a warning to say no more, and the second words should have summoned Jerry Ainsley, followed by crisp instructions to take GREENHILL and her story straight to Langley. Here was the key to resolving the Cuban missile crisis, and Margo belonged with the people who were on the inside, not with a washed-up former agent runner whose career had ended when her final operation was blown to pieces.
She opened her mouth, meaning to explain these things, but what came out was “Well, you are in a pickle, my dear. Let’s see what we can do to get you out of it, shall we?”
Because suddenly it all made sense. The late-night interview with Bundy. Her exclusion from the discussions about Cuba, and now her summary dismissal from State. The way her contac
ts went dead on her. Even—rough justice—the way Fomin had so cleverly manipulated matters that Margo had briefly suspected Harrington herself of being a Soviet agent.
“They gave you a lot of obstacles to overcome, dear. Checking to see if you’re really the right conduit, one supposes.” They were standing now, on a low bluff from which they could look down at the highway and the scattered lights of houses beyond. Harrington reached up and tucked a few loose strands of hair behind Margo’s ear. “I want you to come home with me now,” she said. “You can get some rest, and I’m going to make a couple of calls. Tomorrow is Saturday, and I suspect they’ll want to bring you in and brief you and so forth. But understand one thing.” Her voice hardened. “I won’t be your case officer. I won’t be involved at all.”
“But I came to you—”
“Listen, Miss Jensen. Listen carefully, my dear. This has been scripted. Your part in this whole contretemps. I don’t know by whom, but it doesn’t matter. You are going to be playing on a much larger stage now. A stage where the Harringtons and the Niemeyers and the Ainsleys of the world never tread. The people who will run the operation will likely be from the very top. They will keep this knowledge close. They won’t want second-level bureaucrats like me involved at all. Do you understand?”
“Yes, but—”
Harrington talked right over her. The lessons took hold after all. “What they want you to do is going to be dangerous. What Fomin told you is true. There are people on both sides who, should they discover the back-channel negotiations, will do whatever they can to keep them from succeeding. Secrecy will be your only protection. Do you still want to proceed?”
Margo swallowed but didn’t drop her gaze. “Yes.”
“Don’t just say what you think I want to hear.”
“I’m not. I’ve thought it through. I’m doing this.”
Harrington was impressed by the girl’s resolution, but she had heard the same determination in Carina’s voice the night she’d disappeared in Vienna. “Very well,” she said after a moment. “This, then, is how things are going to work. I will make the calls on your behalf. I will ensure that your information gets to the right individuals. Once that task is done, I shall be stepping out of the picture.” To her surprise, she choked on the next words. “And you, my dear, must promise, absolutely promise, never, for any reason whatsoever, to contact me again.”
III
Margo spent the night at Doris Harrington’s small row house on P Street in Georgetown. She didn’t expect to sleep. Her day had been too full. Priscilla had telephoned Ainsley for her, and his swift, confident response had both exhilarated and frightened her. Within ten minutes he was back with instructions: catch such-and-such a train, look for such-and-such a car. Returning to Garrison, Margo had squared for a battle with Nana, but Claudia Jensen was surprisingly complaisant, only making her granddaughter promise not to leave Washington without calling on various family friends.
Now, as Margo tried to get comfortable in the narrow attic guestroom, she found her thoughts back in Poughkeepsie. During the conversation with Priscilla, an idea had teased at the corner of her mind, a question about the accident that had killed Phil Littlejohn. Something vital that she had missed. The key to the mystery. Alas, the harder she tried to grab the thought, the more tantalizingly it eluded her, and when Margo opened her eyes, it was nine in the morning, and she didn’t even remember trying.
TWENTY-NINE
Indecision
I
McGeorge Bundy was irritated, a trait he manifested only by a slight tightening of his fingers on his gold-plated pen. It was late morning of Saturday, October 20. Yesterday, he had told the President that he had changed his mind. He no longer believed a blockade would be adequate. They had to go in and get the missiles. It wasn’t that Bundy wanted war; he simply had no other option ready to hand.
Now, suddenly, he did. An opportunity had been handed to them; but he couldn’t mention it in the meeting.
And so he kept listening and taking notes. His intention when he spoke to the President had been to support only a limited air strike. But now, as he listened to the other members of the ExComm, Bundy realized that his reluctant switch in position had only hardened the line of the hard-liners. General Taylor thought an air strike would work. Robert Kennedy called an immediate attack their final chance to destroy the missiles.
Then the director of central intelligence reported that at least eight and possibly as many as sixteen of the launchers were now active. Silence fell.
“What that means,” said McCone, “is that they can now fire off the R-12s on about eight hours’ notice. And those missiles, as you know, can strike anywhere on the East Coast.”
Everyone looked expectantly at the President, waiting for him to instruct the Joint Chiefs to take out the launch sites.
But Kennedy kept going back and forth. He saw points in favor of the strikes; he saw points in favor of the blockade. One minute he seemed inclined toward Maxwell Taylor and the Joint Chiefs, who wanted to attack at once. The next he was nodding in apparent agreement as McNamara, backed up by United Nations Ambassador Adlai Stevenson, insisted that diplomacy could resolve the crisis.
“That’s crazy,” said Taylor. “If we make the first offer, we look weak.”
“All that matters is getting those missiles out,” said Stevenson. “What difference does it make how we look?”
“When they launch those R-12s at Washington and New York, you’ll find out what difference it makes.”
“You can’t possibly hit all the missiles in the first attack. They’ll launch whatever they have left.”
“Once you start thinking that way,” growled Taylor, “you’ve already lost.”
The general’s furious gaze was focused on Stevenson, but Bundy knew that the true object of his anger was his commander in chief. The President’s indecisiveness was costing him respect around the table. A lot of these men had served under Eisenhower, and still considered Kennedy an unproven boy.
Other voices, equally passionate, weighed in. Discussion was turning into argument. Finally, at Kennedy’s signal, Bundy rapped on the table for silence.
“We go with the blockade,” said Kennedy.
Several members of the ExComm suppressed groans: the President had chosen to split the difference.
“Let’s at least call it a quarantine,” said Dean Rusk, unhappily. “A blockade violates international law.”
“Quarantine, then,” said Kennedy. He turned to Bundy. “And let’s do something to make sure that, no matter what happens, nobody fires the Jupiter missiles in Turkey without my direct order.”
“We’ve taken care of that already,” said an irritated General Taylor. “We’ve sent out clear instructions.”
“Let’s just make double sure,” said the President.
As the ExComm broke up, Bundy hurried into the hallway, catching up with the Kennedy brothers just before they entered the Oval Office.
“Mr. President, if I might have a minute.”
“I have to talk to Bobby and Sorensen—”
“Yes, sir. Your brother should probably hear this anyway. But nobody else at this point.”
Kennedy gave him a look. He hated Bundy’s penchant for secrecy, but could not deny its dividends.
“Let’s go in the office,” he said.
II
The President sat in the rocker, with the attorney general frowning behind him like a bodyguard. Bundy sat to attention on the sofa.
“Go ahead,” said Kennedy.
“Sir, I had a call early this morning from President Eisenhower—”
The President’s brother interrupted. “Well, call him back, Mac. Tell him we’re grateful for his advice, and we’ll let him know if he can help.”
But Jack Kennedy only waited, fingers steepled as he rocked. “This isn’t Ike being a busybody again, Bobby. This isn’t Ike tossing off ideas to remind me that I commanded a little wooden patrol boat and he commanded D-Day.
This is different, isn’t it, Mac?”
Bundy’s eyes never left the President’s face. “Yes, sir.”
“Well, then, what is it? What did Ike say that you can’t say in front of the whole ExComm?”
“Sir, it’s about SANTA GREEN.”
Again the attorney general intervened. “I’ve told you before, Mac, we don’t want to hear any more about that operation. This office has to be protected from it.”
Still Bundy spoke only to his commander in chief. “Mr. President, it seems that the operation may have borne unexpected fruit. I believe that we may have our back channel. That was the subject of President Eisenhower’s call.”
All at once, neither Kennedy looked bored. “Go on,” said the President, eyes narrowing.
“Sir, President Eisenhower was calling to give me his enthusiastic endorsement of a woman named Harrington. She’s an analyst at State—”
“She’s the one who just got fired,” said Bobby, to the President. “The one who came up with the idea for SANTA GREEN in the first place.”
Bundy would not be deterred. “Sir, I also had a call late last night from Dr. Harrington. President Eisenhower’s purpose was to tell me that I should trust what she told me.”
“Why on earth—” the attorney general began, but his brother waved him silent.
“Let him finish, Bobby.”
“Sir, GREENHILL got in touch with Dr. Harrington last night. She claims to have been contacted directly by the Soviets. The General Secretary is offering to negotiate through her to you, as a back channel, separate from the negotiations at the embassy, which he does not expect to bear fruit. One of our leading academic analysts believes her story to be credible. So does Dr. Harrington. And the claim is also consistent with certain information the Agency has developed concerning the movements of the KGB’s top man in the United States. In short, we should take it seriously.”
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