Agent in Place

by Helen Macinnes

  “You don’t finish writing a book by staring up at blue skies,” he agreed.

  “And then,” she said, “you need a place where you can keep in touch with everything that’s going on—newspapers sold at every street-corner, isn’t that your idea of bliss? Book-stores, too. A museum, galleries, interesting little streets to wander around in—after all, you can’t be glued to your desk for ever.”

  Again he shook his head, his smile broadening, letting her run on, keeping his own suggestions to the end.

  “And what with the way you check and double-check, you’ll need a reference library near by, won’t you?”

  “Or else ship three crates of books.”

  “Then I give up. There’s no place that feels like a holiday and yet offers all that. We’ll have to settle on some college town—oh Lord, I had enough of college towns when I was a faculty brat. Where else, then?” She was disconsolate. Perhaps they’d stay right here in Washington, after all. An end to all her dreaming of something different, something new. Vacations in the last five years had been few and interrupted: either her job or his was always tugging holidays apart. “All I wanted was some place where you could finish the last two chapters of your book as well as—” she paused—“oh, just being together. Or does one cancel the other?”

  “Only if I get sidetracked.”

  “I won’t—”

  “You sidetrack me very easily.”

  “This time, I promise. Truly.”

  “Truly and seriously, I’ll need six clear hours at the desk each day. And a couple more to rewrite what I put on paper the night before.”

  “I promise, darling,” she repeated most solemnly. “I’ll start a book of my own. The Talkative Great—all about the tongues swinging loose on TV interviews. Or I could call it Strip-Tease In Words. Or The Day of the Exhibitionist. Or Leaking Secrets—Drip Drip Drip.”

  “At least, you’ve got plenty of titles,” he teased her. “No problem there.”

  “The only problem we have at this moment is—not how we’ll spend these three months, but where.”

  “What about the south of France?”

  She stared at him. “Don’t joke.”

  “I’m dead serious,” he assured her.

  “But it’s impossible—out of our reach, darling.”

  “Not as I see it.”

  “I had a look at our savings account last week,” she told him. “We’ve got to put aside a large dollop for income tax in April. Remember, April is the cruellest month.”

  “And that leaves us about six thousand dollars flat.”

  “Which isn’t so much, once you pay fares across the Atlantic and—”

  “We make use of this apartment. I’ve found someone who wants it.”

  “A stranger—here? Can you trust him with your books and records and—”

  “Not a stranger. Maurice Michel.”

  “Your Paris friend? The diplomat?”

  “He and his wife are coming to Washington in February for a couple of months. So we’ve agreed to trade. We get three months in his place for his two months here. Fair enough.”

  “We’re exchanging?” She was still astounded, scarcely believing.

  “Why not? I had dinner with him last night. It’s all settled. He has a cottage on the Riviera—nothing elaborate—his father once lived there, owned a small flower-nursery. It’s simple and rustic.”

  “Running water?” she asked.

  “I don’t see Michel fetching a bucket from a well.”

  She began to laugh, remembering the immaculate Frenchman who had visited them here last year. And to think of all the lists she had made of possible places and expenses—and Tom had arranged everything. No fuss, no trouble. In one night. Over dinner in Paris. “Darling you are wonderful.” She rose, came round the table to meet him with a tight hug and a wild kiss.

  “And that’s a pleasant idea to take to bed. Come on, Thea.” He put out the candles, began switching off the lights, and checked the front door lock. “No, no,” he said as he came back to the table and found her beginning to gather the supper dishes together. “Let’s just relax tonight.”

  “I’m too excited to sleep.” It was barely ten o’clock. Even if she had an office to remember each morning, her idea of bedtime was usually midnight or later. Days were always too short, somehow.

  “I’ll persuade you into it.” Then he looked at her quickly. “What’s wrong, Thea?” Her eyes were wide as she stood so very still, watching him. She was close to tears.

  “Nothing’s wrong. Everything’s wonderful.” Her voice trembled, and she tried to cover the surge of emotions with a little laugh. She failed quite happily, as he smoothed away the threat of tears with a kiss. “I love you love you love you.”

  He kissed her again. And again, straining her close to him, saying in a voice that was almost inaudible, “Never leave me, darling. Never leave me.”

  * * *

  The morning came, bright and beautiful as far as he was concerned. Thea had let him sleep on for an extra hour—he had a dim memory of her, fully dressed, dropping a goodbye kiss on his cheek as she was about to take off for a nine o’clock appointment at her office. Complete metamorphosis, he thought now: the girl of last night, all floating chiffon and soft shoulders, teasing lips and hands, sweet seduction complete, had become the successful woman, neat in sweater and well-cut pants suit, attractive and competent, equalling the male competition in brains, surpassing it in looks and natural warmth. What poor man had a chance against all that? Fifty-fifty, Women’s Lib insisted, and with every right on their side of the argument; but weren’t they forgetting some natural advantages that tipped the scale? And long live those natural advantages, he thought, leaving the disordered bed as he recalled that he too was due at an office this morning. Nine thirty now, he noted: time to get a move on.

  The supper table’s remains had been cleared, his breakfast tray ready along with a note warning him that Martha came in to clean around eleven. He’d be well out of here before the vacuum-cleaner—one of his minor dislikes—started breaking up the peace of this apartment.

  He scrambled some eggs, and had a leisurely breakfast, with four newspapers for company. Recession was deepening, inflation swelling, the Middle East seething as expected, Vietnam making its unhappy way back into the headlines, the CIA a cripple and perhaps to become a basket-case, terrorism in London, floods in Bangladesh, drought in Africa; and oil-spill over everything, from prices and veiled threats to bitter denunciations. By comparison with all this gloom, his own piece on current French reactions to NATO seemed almost reassuring although, when he turned it in yesterday, he had thought, Here goes another report to ruin a lot of breakfasts tomorrow. There was only one misprint in it—fare instead of fire—to wrinkle a few eyebrows. His lucky day, he thought: no transposed lines, no broken paragraphs.

  On the page opposite his own by-line, was another column with Holzheimer’s name heading it. So young Holzheimer was starting to dig into NATO too, was he? And with considerable help from someone: the full text of a NATO Memorandum “now under serious consideration in Washington” was printed along with Holzheimer’s analysis and comments. There was no hint of the source for this piece of information, beyond the usual “official who preferred to remain anonymous, but who verified the authenticity of the document.” Also, of course, “The Pentagon has not denied the existence of the memorandum” and “The State Department offered no comment in response to this reporter’s repeated questions.”

  So there was another abominable leak, Tom Kelso thought: we are becoming a nation of blabbermouths. It wasn’t only on harmless TV programmes that there were (in Thea’s words) “Leaking Secrets—Drip Drip Drip.”

  He had heard of this memorandum—some evasive, upper echelon gossip had been seeping around for the past few weeks, but no one knew the details. (Maurice Michel, last night in Paris, had quizzed him about it. If the French hadn’t been able to learn its particulars, then it was pretty secret
stuff.) What was it all about, anyway? With professional interest as well as private misgivings, he began reading it carefully.

  It was a warning bell, he decided when he finished its final paragraph: an attempt to shock the Americans into taking a closer look at détente and its actualities, at pitfalls ahead for unwary feet. It wouldn’t make NATO more popular with several segments of the public, he decided, but when did Cassandra ever have an easy role? He’d question some of NATO’s statements himself—there was no proof offered, for instance, of certain ominous trends, unless one allusion to certain facts and figures meant that there was some appendix, some other part of the memorandum perhaps, that had not been included in today’s publication. But as it stood now, the document was simply an unpleasant shocker: not an actual breach in security, as far as he could see—except that some son of a bitch had taken it upon himself to make it public. He wasn’t blaming Holzheimer: few journalists could resist a chance of a scoop. But the point was simply this: NATO’s opponents would use it to help weaken the Western alliance still more. He could hear them even now. “Scare tactics,” the right-wingers would say, “to get more men and money out of old Uncle Sam.” Or, from the left, “shocking belligerence...cold warriors...imperialist aggression.” As for Holzheimer himself, he carefully avoided giving his own private judgment. (Perhaps he hadn’t made up his mind. The by-line was everything, was it?) He had contented himself with heaving a brick through a plate-glass window: often tempting enough, Tom admitted, but definitely resistible. Holzheimer shared one belief with his unknown source—he mentioned it twice so that no one would fail to understand his high motives. The public has a right to know, he stated. And who would quibble with that, when (apparently) no breach of real security was involved?

  Well, Tom decided as he got ready to leave the apartment, I’ll find out more about all this at the office. The first day back at work was always a heavy one, with a pile of mail and a list of possible news-items all waiting for his attention. He’d be willing to bet that the first joking comment he got would be, “Hey, Tom—do you see Holzheimer’s out after your job?”

  Is that what’s really worrying me? he asked himself. No not altogether... Yet why the hell can’t I shake myself free of this small depression? Last night, even early this morning, I was on top of the world. Now—

  No, he couldn’t explain it. But his misgivings didn’t vanish either. It was a serious-faced man who strode into the office, and once the greetings were over, the first joking comment was made and he had won his private bet. There was an additional remark, too, a question that he hadn’t been prepared for. “What was your idea in giving Holzheimer this break? Or didn’t you want your own sources to dry up on you?”

  Tom stared blankly. “I don’t follow—”

  “Come off it. They would freeze stiff if you’d given it your own by-line.”

  “That’s a pretty sick joke.”

  A small stare back at him, a laugh and a shrug of the shoulders. “Okay, okay—if that’s the way you want to play it.”

  Let’s get to the bottom of this, Kelso told himself, and he telephoned his oldest friend at the Times in New York. The replies to his questions were meant to be soothing. Not to worry, just a rumour flying around, based on very little actually and the Times saw no cause for any alarm.

  “What rumour?” Tom demanded. Everyone seemed to know what they were talking about, except himself.

  “The typescript of the memorandum.”

  “What about it?”

  “Your machine, Tom.”

  “What?”

  “Yes. But even if you did copy the memorandum, what harm really? You didn’t break any—”

  “I didn’t copy it. Never saw it—”

  “And of course we wouldn’t have published it if we felt there was the remotest chance of breaching the security of the United States.”

  “But I didn’t—”

  “Tom, listen to me! The less said about this, the better for you. We’re trying to contain it within the paper, don’t want it spread abroad. You could get hurt by it, Tom, if your NATO friends thought you had pulled this off. Actually, I think you were right to want to see the memorandum in print. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have published it. So relax. We aren’t criticising you, even if your method was slightly—well, odd. We’ll stand by you, in any case. You know that, Tom.”

  Tom said slowly, “I repeat, I did not—”

  “See you before you leave for Brussels on the tenth. We’ll have all this under control by that time.”

  The telephone went dead, leaving Tom staring at the receiver with grim set eyes. And what would be the use of going to Brussels if this gossip was not only controlled but completely disproved? He had seen journalists’ careers smashed by less than this. He was in deep trouble. And the hell of it was that he didn’t know why. Not yet, he told himself in sudden cold anger; but he’d find out, that was one thing for damned sure.

  9

  Along with The New York Times, there had been a series of shocks delivered that morning.

  First, there was Tony Lawton, who—within two minutes of reading the Holzheimer page—was calling the Pentagon.

  The Pentagon, in turn, was telephoning Shandon House.

  There the Director had left a ruined breakfast for an all-hell-breaking-loose session in the filing-room. The entire NATO Memorandum was there, he could report. Completely safe. Security had not been breached. Of course, he’d make further checks, find out more details about access to the memorandum at Shandon; of course, he understood the future implications for the Institute if the fault lay with it. And, testily, he added the suggestion that the Pentagon might start investigating its own security: it had had the memorandum in its possession before sending it to Shandon.

  Washington then stepped in, quietly, to contact the Times’s New York office. There, questions were coldly received and answered. No source could be divulged. Surely it was understood, in this day and age, that there was freedom of speech guaranteed in the Constitution? The Times stood by its reporter, Martin Holzheimer. What was more, this morning’s news had contained nothing to injure US security.

  The office of the Secretary of Defence chose its own tactics. Again there was a long telephone call to the New York office of the Times, but now an attempt at conciliation: yes, yes, yes, total agreement that there was no breach of security in the publication of this part of the memorandum. And then, with everything flowing more smoothly, came a sudden stretch of white water: had Holzheimer known that there were two additional parts to the memorandum? Had he seen them? If so, security had not only been broken, but a highly dangerous situation created that could involve all members of NATO (and that, don’t forget, meant the United States too).

  The Times went back to square one. The second and third parts of the memorandum, if they existed, were not its concern. Mr. Holzheimer had neither seen nor heard of them. He refused to divulge his source of information on the first part of the memorandum, which was his constitutional right. Prior to publication there had been intensive study of the text of this section of the NATO Memorandum, as well as considerable investigation of the place from which it had originated. It was found (a) to be authentic, and (b) to contain no actual military information. In fact, its publication was a service rendered to the American people, who ought to know some of the vital opinions that were held in certain influential circles of Western Europe, opinions that might influence the possible future of the United States.

  The impasse seemed complete.

  It was then that Tony Lawton decided to make his own move. Frankly, today’s little bombshell might be a fascinating debate for some people in New York or a red-faced embarrassment to others in Washington; but for a NATO Intelligence agent in Moscow (and for eight others scattered through Eastern Europe in sensitive assignments) there could be imminent arrest, interrogation, death.

  You can’t bloody well waste any more time, Lawton warned himself. Ninety minutes already wasted in well-mean
ing talk. Get hold of Brad Gillon.

  He telephoned Brad at once, using his private number and avoiding the office switchboard. “Brad—I’m flying in to New York. I’ll be there by two o’clock. Cancel the three-Martini lunch, and see me in your office.”

  “See you here?” Brad sounded startled.

  “That’s right. And if you haven’t read your Times this morning—” A delicate pause.

  Gillon reflected for a moment, and came up with the proper assumption. “I have. But what’s the excitement? No infringement on security as far as I saw.”

  That’s what you think, old boy. “No?” Tony asked blandly.

  Gillon said, “Okay. Come to the twenty-second floor. I’ll tell the receptionist that Mr. Cook is delivering his manuscript. She’ll announce you at once.”

  “Two o’clock,” Tony reaffirmed. That would give him time to drop in at Shandon for a quick check on his way to New York. Bless the Cessna that he could call upon in an emergency, making this hop-skip-and-jump journey plannable.

  * * *

  From its marble-coated walls to its array of high-speed elevators, the large and busy lobby of the building in which the publishing house of Frankel, Merritt and Gillon occupied three floors, was definitely impressive. Tony Lawton was both subdued and amused as he faced the young woman who sat on the other side of a vast gun-metal desk in the twenty-second floor’s reception office. It was an interior room, small and antiseptic, with one giant abstract mural representing—? Tony had several interpretations, but repressed them as he looked at the virginal face of this latter-day Cerberus. “Mr. Cook,” she repeated, voice frank mid-Western, dress chic Madison Avenue. Languidly, she picked up the telephone and announced him; but her eyes, outlined with heavy black fringes, took a visitor’s measure as efficiently as any guard back at Shandon’s main gate. “You can go in, Mr. Cook. That door—” she nodded to one of three. “I’m sorry Mr. Gillon’s secretary is still out to lunch, but if you go straight through, you can’t miss his office. It’s the corner one—on your right.”