Jack in the Box

by John Weisman

  “Like der Racciinvald?” Just saying the words brought a smile to Sam’s face. Der Raccünvald had been O’Neill’s pet name for the late Jerrold von Brünwald, their station chief in Paris. The day before he’d turned fifty, von Brünwald announced he was taking a week of personal leave. With Jerry’s wife in the States, everyone thought he’d be going somewhere romantic with his mistress, a sensational redhead named Chloe. Instead, six days later, he’d reappeared at the embassy, both eyes blackened. From then on, the self-important von Brünwald was known to O’Neill’s circle as der Raccünvald.

  O’Neill waited until Miguel mixed the drinks, filled their glasses, and then left the bar in search of something. He plucked the olives from the glass, ate them, and laid the bare toothpick on a bar napkin. The lawyer lifted his martini and carefully touched the rim of Sam’s glass with his own. “To absent friends, Sam Waterman.”

  “Pey Dadna—drink to the bottom, Michael O’Neill. Drink to those who keep the secrets.”

  Sam watched Michael O’Neill glance across the bar as Martha the NOC and her client made their way toward the dining room. If O’Neill knew she was an Alien, he didn’t let on. But then, O’Neill could keep secrets. Or, perhaps he didn’t possess The Knowledge.

  O’Neill turned back to Sam. “So you miss secrets, do you?”

  “I didn’t say that,” Sam corrected. “But I’ll tell you what I do miss, since you asked and I’ve had a second cocktail.” He paused to sip. “I miss the adrenaline rush. I miss the competent chiefs, who taught me what they called ‘The Great Game,’ and encouraged audacity and risk taking—not the grands zéros like Grünwald who were scared of offending the French, or pissing off the ambassador. Believe it or not, I miss writing agent debrief memos and activity reports and even PMP cables.” He stared at the back bar. “I miss running agents, Michael.”

  “The thrill of the chase.”

  “God, it was so much more than that,” Sam said. “It was the Cold War. It was the feeling of commitment. We were the better angels. We did God’s work. Life had meaning. And now, what are they doing? Screwing up target information in Belgrade or Baghdad, tapping drogista telephones in Bogotá, or chasing transnational terrorists on the Internet. It’s all turned so mean, so grimy, so … spiritless. It’s as desolate as a lunar landscape.”

  “But valuable nonetheless.” Michael O’Neill shrugged. “The end of the Cold War simply meant that we had to refocus our resources on other problems.”

  “We?” Sam wriggled an eyebrow at his friend. “Ah, so maybe the law is just another form of cover, too, eh?” He paused, but got no response. “You’re right, of course. But you know what? Let the youngsters deal with asymmetrical warfare, transnational hackers, and trying to decipher the intentions of our unipolar-focused bilateral relationships.” Sam tapped the bar. “I’m happy doing nothing.”

  “Horse puckey.”

  “The Romanoffs wanted me out,” Sam said, using his personal term for the CIA’s current leadership. “Nicholas the Third wanted me gone. And he got what he wanted.”

  “Ah, Czar Nicky—the turd,” Michael O’Neill pronounced, cracking a grin. “But was it all Romanoffs, Cyrus? Didn’t you bear some responsibility?”

  Sam looked at his friend, then turned away, toward the French doors, and stared out into the garden. There were still leaves on some of the cherry trees. Maybe winter would come late this year. Sam loved autumn. He’d especially loved autumn in Moscow—except for his last autumn there. He blinked, and for an instant he was back on the road to Zagorsk, the handwritten document in his pocket. He twisted away from the grim vision to face Michael O’Neill. “You know, afterward, the son of a bitch didn’t even give me time to pack,” Sam said bitterly.

  “Who?” O’Neill said, confused.

  “Franklin Dempster Pierce. Our ambassador plenipotentiary and extraordinary in Moscow. Called me into his office before I’d had a chance to change clothes. I was still bleeding. ‘The Russians want you out,’ he told me. They say you were drunk. They say you drove illegally into the diplomatic exclusion zone outside Moscow.’ ”

  O’Neill raised his glass and sipped, giving him time to ponder Sam’s words. “What did you say?”

  “I said nothing. Because it didn’t matter to Franklin Dempster Pierce. ‘Don’t even bother trying to make excuses. I have it on the highest authority that you screwed up big.’ Sure he did: he’d heard it from his pals the Russians. And that was it. I was back in Washington thirty hours after the general was murdered.”

  Michael O’Neill said nothing.

  Sam went silent, too, for some seconds. Then he dropped his voice to just above a whisper. “He was the only one I lost, Michael,” he rasped, the hurt still deep enough to keep him from pronouncing Pavel Baranov’s name. “Only one. In twenty-six years. That’s not so bad, is it?”

  “Considering people like Ebenezer J. THREADNEEDLE, they should have given you a friggin’ medal.”

  Sam snorted. In 1996, THREADNEEDLE, a blockheaded Middle East branch chief whose real name is, 8 had managed to lose all forty-three of the CIA’s precious assets in Iran in one fell swoop. But was a Romanoff. And so, as a reward for his agents’ torture and executions, Czar Nicholas the Third—who was then CIA’s deputy director—promoted to chief, Near East Division, where he got a lot more CIA assets killed. Currently, is the executive assistant to CIA’s assistant deputy director for operations.9

  O’Neill sipped his martini. “No, Sam, in fact, it’s a record to be proud of. But you took your one loss way too hard.”

  Sam’s eyes flashed dangerously. “Who told you that?”

  “You did—just now,” O’Neill said coolly. “But you’re right. I heard things. After all, Romanoffs like to gossip in the corridors.”

  In the CIA’s ingrown culture, corridor gossip was bad. juju. Michael O’Neill, whose political barometer was a lot more finely tuned than his mentor’s, understood that a DO officer’s formal personnel file, filled (as Sam’s was) with awards, two medals, and fulsome, albeit bureaucratic, praise, counted for nothing. What had really mattered was Sam’s corridor file—the gossip that reflected how the Romanoffs perceived him.

  Sam wagged his head. “I should never have told you about Romanoffs.” He saw the hurt look in his friend’s eyes and recovered quickly: “You understand, of course, it was the champagne that loosened my tongue.”

  THE FIRST TIME Sam Waterman ever told Michael O’Neill about Romanoffs they’d been sitting in high-backed, cognac-colored leather wing chairs, isolated from casual eavesdroppers in the Hotel George V bar’s denlike alcove. Behind Sam was a fireplace on whose mantel sat a pair of small Remington bronzes. Between the two men stood a small, round wood table covered with a starched white cloth on which sat a magnum of Dom Ruinart in a silver bucket, and a large crystal ashtray holding two well-aged Punch double coronas. They were celebrating Sam’s forty-first birthday.

  “If you’re planning any future at all in the business, you are going to have to learn about Romanoffs,” Sam said quasi-solemnly after they’d finished about two thirds of the huge bottle.

  “Romanoffs?” O’Neill cocked his head like an Airedale. He’d never heard about Romanoffs. “Who are Romanoffs?”

  “The new ruling class on the Potomac.” Sam drained his champagne, and while O’Neill refilled his glass he picked up his monologue. Romanoffs, he explained, had almost completely displaced the home office’s original dominant caste, Brahmins.

  Brahmins were mostly Ivy League. They wore bespoke suits and Burberry trench coats. They had trust funds, they drank scotch, martinis, and twenty-five-year-old cognac—except between Memorial Day and Labor Day, when they drank gin-and-tonics, martinis, and twenty-five-year-old cognac. Brahmins saw what they did as a noble calling.

  Sam paused to draw on his cigar. He blew a perfect smoke ring, paused to appreciate the long gray ash, then carefully replaced the half-smoked Punch on the broad rim of heavy crystal. Romanoffs, he continued, came from scho
ols like Indiana University, Brigham Young, and Kansas State. They wore polyester suits, wash-and-wear shirts, Hush Puppies, and London Fog raincoats. When they drank at all they drank rye-and-ginger or plonk Chablis spritzers. Romanoffs saw what they did as a job.

  Brahmins spoke three, four, or five languages fluently and elegantly. Romanoffs had trouble with English. Brahmins, virtually all of whom had served in the military, accepted and tutored the CIA’s Sergeants—the generation of ex-military case officers like Sam who had been recruited in the post Vietnam era—with patriarchal charm and patrician dignity. Romanoffs, most of whom had never served in the military, detested Sergeants and therefore spent much of their time making the lives of Sergeants like Samuel Elbridge Waterman miserable.

  In fact, Romanoffs treated everyone below them in the pecking order like serfs. Which is why Sam had started calling them Romanoffs in the first place.

  O’Neill’s voice brought Sam about halfway back from Paris. “It wasn’t the champagne that loosened your tongue that day”—the lawyer winked, “it was the cigars.”

  Sam grinned at his old friend and savored the memory. “They were good.”

  “They were perfect.” O’Neill sighed. “Life was good in Paris, Cyrus—until everything …” The lawyer paused. “Yes?”

  “It all just … evaporated, Cyrus. Everything good just went away.”

  CHAPTER 4

  MOVEMENT in the Cosmos corridor diverted Sam’s attention. He blinked, refocused on O’Neill, and wrestled the George V bar into the ether. “You’re right, Michael. Romanoffs, Brahmins, Paris—even Moscow. It’s all water under the bridge. It doesn’t matter anymore.”

  “We both know that’s not true,” O’Neill said adamantly. “Look, Sam, there’s nothing wrong about taking what happened in Moscow as hard as you did. It was murder.”

  Sam scratched the back of his neck. “The thing that bothered me most,” he finally said, “was that I wasn’t given any time to pack my stuff.”

  “Or mourn, perhaps?”

  “Mourning wasn’t the point,” Sam said, much too quickly.

  “You sound detached about it now,” O’Neill said. “But that wasn’t how you were then. When you came back, you were quite zealous—looking for revenge.”

  How much does O’Neill actually know? Sam wondered. How much did he ever find out? How much has he been able to piece together?

  “Revenge?” Sam looked poker-faced into his friend’s eyes. You’re right about that, pal. But he said nothing. There was no need to talk about revenge now. Revenge was a dead issue. As dead as Pavel Baranov.

  O’Neill, however, wanted to take matters another step. “In point of fact, Sam, after you returned from Moscow, I was told you saw Russian penetration everywhere.” The attorney paused. “Well?”

  “I never made any secret of that.”

  “That’s a fact,” O’Neill snorted. “Christ, Sam, somebody said watching you stampede through Langley looking for Baranov’s killer was like watching the bulls running in Pamplona.”

  “Maybe it was.” Sam dropped his forearm onto the marble bar top and turned toward the attorney. “Maybe you’re right. But you know what? I was one of six people who came up with the name Robert Philip Hanssen in 1999. And the Romanoff running CI laughed me right out of the room.”

  O’Neill crooked a finger in Miguel’s direction and pointed toward Sam’s almost empty glass. “So, they laughed. So what? They still arrested the son of a bitch.”

  “ ‘So what?’ “ Sam caught the bartender’s quick nod and watched as he began mixing another cocktail. “So what, is that they didn’t want to know about Hanssen.”

  “Who’s they, Sam? The same people who killed Pavel Baranov?”

  Baranov again. The caution light went on in Sam’s head. He and O’Neill had never really discussed Baranov. And yet, here O’Neill was, trying to draw him out. He’d been doing it ever since he’d walked into the bar, too. O’Neill was eliciting. And he was using Boodles to help grease the skids.

  Well, let him try; Sam thought, he should know better. After all, alcohol was a way of life at the Central Intelligence Agency. Good case officers used alcohol as a tool, to loosen tongues and lower inhibitions. Sometimes they also used it as a crutch, to deaden emotions, to help them compartmentalize their existence. But the way Sam saw it, those who used booze as a tool generally did well in the field. Those who used booze as a crutch became drunks. O’Neill was wasting his time: Sam had long ago mastered alcohol—and it had never become a crutch.

  But O’Neill was indisputably eliciting. And he was using Miguel’s martinis to help him do it.

  The question, of course, was why. In Sam’s world, nothing was ever happenstance. Coincidence was an impossibility. And hadn’t O’Neill already admitted he’d been looking for Sam? He’d tried to make a joke of it, but he’d said it right off: I’ve just been all over town looking for you.

  What did O’Neill want? Sam decided to release chaff. “Okay, Michael: last question first. Why do Romanoffs laugh? They laugh because they won. Because they forced out a whole generation of people like me, and replaced us with reports officers and analysts who don’t give a rat’s ass about stealing secrets. They—” Sam broke off suddenly, some primitive protective instinct taking control. He glanced around the room. There was a newcomer at the bar. A professorial stranger in worn, clerical gray worsted with real buttonholes on the cuffs, aged blue button-down, and gravy-soiled Metropolitan Club tie was looking strangely in his direction.

  It was an Alien. Again, O’Neill seemed not to have noticed. Sam snuck another look. The old gent reminded Sam of his own Agency mentor, a patrician, courtly, long-dead spy named Donald Kadick. Sam lowered his voice. “So, who are they? Y’know, Michael, there’s a word in Russian. Mudak. It means ‘dumb-ass.’ Well, they are all the mudaki who come to the office with blinders on. Who can’t see past their noses. Who have no vision. Who take no risks.” Sam paused.

  ‘That kind of behavior isn’t unique to CIA these days, Sam. There are a couple of corporations I represent who fit that description exactly.”

  “Yeah—but I’m not paying for their incompetence with my tax dollars. Nobody’s running agents. Nobody’s recruiting. It’s all counterterrorism—and most of that’s done through liaison, or PM.”10 Sam made a sour face. “The Agency is completely dysfunctional these days.”

  Michael O’Neill crossed his arms, his body language betraying the fact that his eliciting wasn’t going anywhere.

  Sam decided to rub it in. “For chrissakes, Michael—it’s my birthday, and I’ll bitch if I want to.”

  “Then bitch away, old chap”—O’Neill sighed patiently—“I’m listening.”

  Gotcha. Triumphant, Sam picked a filbert out of the small bowl of nuts in front of him and pondered his next move. Today he was on the cusp of his sixth decade. The endgame. Bishop to queen’s pawn 6.

  It had been a decade since the George V bar. Maybe it was time to tell O’Neill something else he didn’t know. Or confirm something he did. One of the things Sam had learned over the years was that if you gave a little, you sometimes got a lot. He’d just released chaff. Now he’d drop a small depth charge and see what it brought to the surface.

  Sam scrutinized the intricate pattern of the dark marble under his glass. “Lemme tell you a story,” he finally said. “I was working in Purgatory.”

  “At least it was convenient.”

  “What?”

  “Convenient,” O’Neill repeated. “Purgatory. I mean, it was only three blocks from your apartment. Think of all the gas you saved.”

  Sam rolled his eyes. “Are you listening? This is important. It was on the twenty-first of February 2001—the day after they arrested Bobby Hanssen. I had this … epiphany. I realized that all of the successful arrests, prosecutions, and incarcerations were meaningless. Hanssen, Ames, Nicholson, Pitts—they hadn’t been caught because of counterintelligence. It had all been on purpose. They’d been betrayed.”

/>   “Betrayed,” Michael O’Neill said. His face was deadpan, but Sam could see the machinery engage and the gears begin to grind behind O’Neill’s eyes. Telegraphing was a problem common to young case officers.

  “Correct. Betrayed. In order to muddy the waters. Betrayed in order to protect a traitor or traitors operating at the very highest level of America’s intelligence apparatus.” He paused. “It was an audacious, brilliant op.”

  Michael O’Neill blurted, “Who ran this incredibly successful operation?”

  “Edward Lee Howard.”

  O’Neill’s eyes went saucer-wide. “Ed Howard? The CIA defector?”

  “Yup.”

  Sam saw the attorney’s internal engine decelerate. “Sez who?”

  “Sez me.”

  In response, Michael O’Neill extended his right index finger, touched the skin just below his right lower eyelid, and tugged it downward slightly, in the French sign of gross skepticism. “Sam, that is just plain crazy.”

  “Why?”

  “You tell me it was Andropov, and I’d say maybe. Or Klimov—he was Rezident in Paris when we were there. He had balls, too—aggressive son of a bitch. Tough opponent. But Howard is a second-rate hack. A drunk. A screwup. Besides, I heard he’s out of favor with President Putin and the current leadership at Moscow Center.”

  Sam said, “Oh?”

  “Just last night I heard reliably that Putin distrusts foreign defectors because he thinks they could be doubles.”

  “I think I read something to that effect in a newspaper, Michael.”

  O’Neill shook his head. “There was nothing in any newspaper about Putin not trusting defectors.”