Back Channel

by Stephen L Carter

  The crisis wasn’t over.

  II

  The campus had changed little since her departure, except that she felt as if every step bogged down in the beautiful but endless Ithaca snow. She enrolled in no courses in the government department: she was giving serious consideration, she told her adviser, to changing her major to French.

  “But why?” he asked, very surprised. “You’re a B student in French. You have straight A’s in government and, well, everything else.”

  “Government is too stressful,” she answered, knowing and not caring that he would misunderstand.

  Margo went out with Tom Jellinek twice, but by the second time, it was plain that he was ready to move on, and probably already had. She was kind and even warm in releasing him, though later she felt more lonely than she could have imagined. Annalise and Jerri both insisted that Margo was better off, and she supposed that listening to their fluttery reassurances was the price of friendship. Meanwhile, her grades slipped a bit. She was having difficulty with her concentration, and one afternoon her French professor even taunted her: “Avons-nous votre attention, mademoiselle? Vous vous ennuyez?” She resolved to work harder. But when, in mid-February, a cheery Nate Esman from Bundy’s office telephoned to remind her that they were still waiting to hear back about the offer of an internship this summer, all she could think about was how he stood in front of the FBI car in the White House driveway.

  She noticed that nobody talked about Cuba. Everyone seemed to have forgotten, in days or weeks, how close the world came to annihilation. But of course great disasters are also great abstractions, easily buried beneath layers of the practical triviality we call everyday life. And Margo’s inability to accept that truth pushed her away from her friends, thus increasing the isolation that she had in any case come to prefer. On the long nights when she found herself unable to sleep, she scribbled cautiously affectionate letters to Jericho Ainsley in Paris, none of which she posted.

  In February, Bobby Fischer showed up in Ithaca without warning, and spent three nights in Tom’s dorm room before moving on. Bobby at first refused to see Margo at all, but she prevailed upon Tom, who finally talked him into it. Over coffee at the student union, Bobby announced his decision to forgive her for leaving Varna without warning. It was not Margo’s disappearance that had ruined his game against Botvinnik, he’d realized. It was the Russian cheaters. He was thinking he might retire, except that he didn’t know how to do anything else. Margo reminded him that he was the best player in the world, and kept stroking his ego until he was calm enough to answer a couple of pertinent questions.

  And all the while, she avoided Lorenz Niemeyer like the pest. Once or twice, when she noticed him crossing the Quad, she made an ostentatious point of turning around and heading the other way. When she read in the campus paper that he had been appointed to the legendary Forty Committee, which evaluated intelligence operations for the White House, she raced to the bathroom and threw up.

  Finally, in early March, her nerves stretched near breaking, Margo received the telephone call she had been awaiting and dreading. Her role in the Cuban crisis would at last have its final act.

  III

  She made the appointment through the great man’s secretary. Usually Mrs. Khorozian protected his time with a fearsome dedication, but when she learned that it was Margo Jensen on the line, she was able to clear half an hour that very afternoon.

  “An hour would be better,” said Margo.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Mrs. Khorozian promised.

  The meeting was set for half past four, right after the end of Niemeyer’s graduate seminar on nuclear strategy, and when Margo arrived ten minutes early, she was at once shown into his grand office to wait.

  She didn’t sit. She wandered along the walls, peering at the photographs of Niemeyer with the leaders of the world, Niemeyer receiving awards and medals, Niemeyer in major’s uniform during the war. There were no photographs of Niemeyer with Donald Jensen; or Niemeyer with his wife. Her reconnaissance over, Margo stood in the bay window that gave on the courtyard where Niemeyer had first told her that he knew her father, and so ensured that she would accept the assignment to accompany Bobby Fischer to Varna and set in motion the chain of events that had nearly taken her life.

  “Miss Jensen,” said the great man, stepping inside. “How wonderful to see you again.”

  Margo turned in time to see Mrs. Khorozian sweeping the heavy door shut. Niemeyer crossed straight to the trolley and poured himself a rye, neat. He didn’t offer her anything, and it occurred to her that he was terribly nervous.

  “Professor,” she acknowledged.

  For as long as it takes to stare your adversary down, they stood at opposite ends of the room, not speaking. Niemeyer finished his drink in two gulps.

  “To what do I owe the pleasure?” he asked, with a hint of his old bonhomie.

  “I wanted to thank you,” she said pleasantly. She even smiled. “And to talk about what happened.”

  He studied her a moment longer, then motioned her to the sofa. He seated himself in an Eames chair that groaned beneath his bulk.

  “There’s nothing to thank me for,” he said. “I’m delighted at your success, but not surprised.” He crossed his plump legs. “Mac Bundy tells me they’ve offered you a position. Will you take it?”

  “I haven’t made up my mind.”

  “Take it, Miss Jensen. Or perhaps you might rather join the spies. I’m sure Langley would be happy to have you.” His confidence was back. “You won’t be surprised to learn that Dr. Harrington sent them a memorandum strongly urging your recruitment.”

  Margo hunched forward. “She was a wonderful woman. You must miss her terribly.”

  “Indeed. The last time we spoke, you accused her of being a Soviet spy. Working with Aleksandr Fomin. I assume you realize by now that such a notion is absurd. She’d never have given secrets to the Communists. She dedicated her life to protecting this country. She would no more commit treason than I would.”

  “But would it be treason if it was intended to protect the country?”

  “Sophistry, Miss Jensen. That’s the excuse every double agent gives.”

  She nodded. The ticking of the grandfather clock was suddenly very loud, the way it had been on the day when Stilwell and Borkland recruited her. “That’s what leads to the part that bothers me.”

  “Which part is that?”

  “The part about who killed Phil Littlejohn.”

  IV

  The great man’s eyes widened. “I beg your pardon.”

  “He was run down by a car right after he turned out to know what had happened in Varna. That’s one heck of a coincidence.”

  Niemeyer leaned back in his chair. His bewilderment seemed so genuine that she knew it had to be feigned. “Then most likely it was the Soviets. Fomin, or the other fellow. Vaganian.”

  “And how exactly did the Soviets know that Phil Littlejohn was pestering me? Who would have told them?”

  “Come, Miss Jensen. You were Fomin’s chosen conduit. Surely after Varna he had agents in Ithaca, watching you. Vaganian, too.”

  “Yes, but an endless supply? Somebody ready to step in and pretend to fit on the campus? All of them with perfect English?” Not long ago, it had been Niemeyer who peppered her with questions, not the other way around: back in the days when he intimidated her. “On the other hand, you were there that day when Phil wouldn’t leave me alone, when he brought up Bulgaria, when he hinted at special knowledge. You rescued me, as you put it, from his clutches. But now, looking back, I wonder how long you were standing there. I wonder what else you heard.”

  “You’re stretching, Miss Jensen.”

  “Am I? I’m not so sure. That fake alum who took my photo on the first day you asked me to meet after class. He wasn’t waiting at the front door of the building where all the students leave. We went out the side, and there he was. How would he have known I’d be using that exit unless he knew you’d be inviti
ng me to walk you to your office?”

  Niemeyer said nothing, but the look of faint amusement never faded from the pudgy face. In the light of his glowing confidence she faltered briefly, but forced herself to press on.

  “And there’s more. Fomin knew Ithaca awfully well. Almost as if he’d been here before. For instance, he knew Stewart Park would be accessible at night, and also that we’d be undisturbed if we met there. Then in Varna, Fomin knew that I’d been inquiring about my father’s fate. But at that point the only person I’d discussed my father with was you. Most important, when he asked me in Washington if I’d told anyone else, I mentioned two people—one here and one there—it was the one in Washington that upset him. He had to know that you were the one in Ithaca. He didn’t seem to care.”

  “He presumably accepted that you needed my help.”

  “ ‘Presumably.’ That doesn’t sound like the Professor Niemeyer I know.” She almost smiled. “It seems to me that the other possibility is that the two of you know each other. Maybe pretty well.”

  Niemeyer stood up. He rumbled over to the other bay window and folded his arms as he gazed upon the Quad.

  “The way your mind works is fascinating,” he said, not turning. “When you put the facts together that way, yes, you can reach the conclusion you suggest. But in the analysis of intelligence information, we have a word for people who make up their minds too quickly and then try to make the evidence fit. We call them amateurs.” His laugh was ugly; she didn’t know why she’d never noticed before. His laugh was a mirror of his brilliant, precise, very ugly mind. “The trouble with your theory, Miss Jensen, is that there’s another explanation. If Fomin knew Ithaca well, that might mean only that he and his people are good at their jobs. We can’t infer anything from his having a photographer in the proper position to cover your exit from the back of the building unless we know whether he had other people covering the other exits. And as to how many English-speaking operatives the KGB employs in this country, I haven’t any idea, and neither has the CIA or the FBI. Probably there are hundreds. Why couldn’t two or three of them spend a few weeks in Ithaca, looking you over?”

  “That still doesn’t explain why he was looking me over at all before I’d even been invited to Washington.”

  That awful laugh again as he turned to look at her. “The fact that you hadn’t been invited doesn’t mean the decision hadn’t been made. The leak most likely came from State or the Agency. After all, several dozen people knew about SANTA GREEN. Is it too much to assume that one of them might have spoken out of turn?”

  “You’re making assumptions again.”

  “As are you, Miss Jensen. The difference is, I’m making an educated guess that some unknown individual out of thirty or forty might have been indiscreet. You’re focused on one individual you believe to be the guilty party.”

  “Which makes me an amateur.”

  “Precisely.”

  Margo stood. “I’ll always wonder, you know: How much of the planning was yours. How much was Fomin’s. And whether you’d worked together before.”

  “Miss Jensen, I really think—”

  “You must have already known each other, I guess. Otherwise, there would have been no reason for him to approach you. Fomin knew how to reach you, didn’t he? And he came to you on Khrushchev’s orders and said there were missiles in Cuba and he needed a go-between to serve as a back channel, somebody trustworthy and ambitious but utterly unobtrusive. Maybe you asked him if it would be safe, and he lied and said yes, and so, since you knew my father, and maybe felt a little guilty about letting him get blown to bits, you thought this would be good for my career. So you gave him my name. Then you sent somebody—maybe Vale, maybe Mr. Khorozian—to see Bobby Fischer to make sure he’d demand the company of his good-luck charm in Varna. All Bobby remembers is that the man came in a shiny old green car, and offered him a lot of money.”

  “There are a lot of green cars, Miss Jensen.”

  She refused to let him deflect her. “And after that you took yourself out of the loop—probably by design—and events took on a momentum of their own. But the part I’ll really wonder about is whether you’d have gone down this road if you’d known what it would cost. Your ex-wife died because of this plan. Doesn’t that bother you a little?”

  He was shaking his head. His expression was troubled but unreadable. “You have a magnificent imagination, Miss Jensen.”

  “Does Fomin?” He looked startled, and she rushed right on. “Do you know what he told me the last time we met? That the Gestapo had a report of another man fleeing the farmhouse just before they found my father. A short, heavyset man, they said. And the interesting part is that he fled after the explosion, not before. Almost as if he’d waited to make sure Donald Jensen was blown to bits.” She was on her feet. “Goodbye, Professor Niemeyer.”

  V

  Margo didn’t close the door behind her. She didn’t smile at Mrs. Khorozian. Her heels clocked along the hall. She shoved open the doors and burst into the sunshine. She felt unstoppable. Descending the very steps where the fake alum had snapped her photo a million years ago, she felt the future stretching endlessly ahead of her.

  Until a sudden prickly shiver brought her to a halt.

  Margo stood on the walkway, glancing around. She felt watched. But around the Quad she saw only students, all ignoring her as they hurried along their various ways.

  She turned and looked at Niemeyer’s corner office.

  He stood in the window, watching her without expression.

  For a moment she felt she should march back in and apologize, or in some other way make peace. But she shook off the conciliatory mood. She was done with him. She was free. It was all over.

  That is, unless, of course …

  VI

  Margo crossed the Quad, not looking back. At the northern edge of campus, she walked along the gorge where Fall Creek cut through the middle of Ithaca. She descended the muddy wooden steps to the pedestrian bridge.

  Agatha Milner was waiting at the near end. She had cut her hair short and wore jeans and a thick sweater to go with her hooded parka, adding plenty of bulk and obscuring her face. No surveillance team would have recognized her.

  “What did he say?” she asked.

  “He denied it.”

  “Do you believe him?”

  Hesitation. “I don’t know. I can’t be sure.”

  Agatha’s smile was flinty. “You do know, Margo. You just don’t want it to be true.” She counted on her fingers. “He killed Littlejohn, or he had Vale do it, or he told Fomin, which amounts to the same thing. That poor man who was tortured in the swamp. That would never have happened except for his grand scheme. He would willingly have sacrificed your life for the sake of his operation. The way he sacrificed Dr. Harrington’s.”

  “He couldn’t have known they would go that far!”

  “Couldn’t he? Aren’t you the one who told me that the first rule of conflict theory is to keep your adversary guessing? To strike out in ways that look like the acts of madmen? Do you really imagine that Niemeyer is so simple that he thinks nobody else knows the winning strategy?”

  Margo was near panic. “But that’s all assuming that he’s guilty. That he and Fomin are”—even now she could scarcely pronounce the words—“agent and handler. And we can’t know that for sure. Don’t you think we should gather more evidence?”

  “I’m willing to wait, Margo. But not long. I’m good, but I’m not perfect. Sooner or later, they will track me down and they will kill me. And I want to finish my work first.” The minder fixed her with that disapproving librarian’s stare. “And stop telling me we’re not sure. There are plenty of people in my business who can’t make up their minds whether some guy is the enemy or not. Know what we call them?”

  “No.”

  “Dead.”

  Agatha slipped away along the sodden path, descending toward the gorge, and disappeared into the twilight.

  Epilogue
/>   That was all more than half a century ago. Margo Jensen, later Margo Waterman, has recently retired from her faculty position at Cornell. She’s been in and out of government over the years, and has taught at three or four different institutions, but Cornell, where she also received her doctorate, is the place she considers home. The national security bug bit her after all, just as Lorenz Niemeyer predicted that it would. He survived for some years, by the way, and when he died during the Clinton Administration, his obituary made the front page of the Times, above the fold. Margo professes to have no idea what became of Agatha Milner.

  What about the other players in the tale? Jericho Ainsley, as you probably remember, rose through the ranks to become director of central intelligence, although a scandal would later force him from office. Jack Ziegler survived and even thrived. In the 1980s, he was indicted for arms trafficking—charges subsequently dropped, after two witnesses vanished and the rest decided to lose their memories.

  President Kennedy kept his side of the bargain, withdrawing the Jupiter missiles from Italy and Turkey within a year. Khrushchev kept his less known side, too. Faced with growing opposition after the Cuba humiliation, in 1964 he agreed, with remarkably little resistance, to retire as General Secretary.

  Margo’s friend Annalise Seaver, as you probably know, became a power in the Republican Party. Her friend Jerri dropped out of Cornell the following year and found her way to Hollywood, where she worked for many years as a publicist. Margo never heard again from her Washington roommate Patsy, but when Hope married a young man from her church the following year, Margo was in the wedding. Nate Esman left government shortly after these events to pursue graduate work in computer science. He rose to become chief technologist at Hewlett-Packard, back in the days when Silicon Valley was young, and later cofounded a venture-capital firm.