The President's Man

by Nicholas Guild

  “I want you to get a couple of men up there,” Austen said finally, breaking a long silence. “The police are to be persuaded to issue a list of the victims that includes Yegorov—I assume he was admitted under a false name. If you have to, supply them with another corpse. Then I want a complete breakdown—the nursing home’s latest financial reports, insurance, background checks on everybody, staff and patients. And I want Yegorov, alive and undamaged. I don’t care where he is—find him. Use all the manpower necessary, but find him.”

  Timmler only nodded from time to time, as if Austen were his wife reminding him of things to pick up at the A&P on his way home from work. He was wonderful that way, the perfect bureaucrat; you never knew whether he thought you were right or wrong, or even whether it mattered.

  “Am I overreacting, George?”

  “I don’t know,” Timmler answered evenly, never taking his eyes from the road. “Let’s put it this way—I’m not sure I know where you’re coming from on all this.”

  “That’s fair enough. I’m not sure I do either.”

  They drove on in silence, right up to the gates of the Langley compound. There was nothing more to say.

  There was a back way into his office from the underground garage. He let himself in with his key, and, even before he took off the tan trench coat the presidential campaign staff had given him after it was announced that he would head the CIA (If you’re going to be a spy, then you’d better look like a spy, the card had read) he hit the red button on his desk console that summoned his secretary’s voice over the intercom.

  “Kay, go down and get the file on Georgi Yegorov. Y-E-G-O-R­O-V. No—don’t send a courier; fetch it yourself. Bring it right to me. Thanks a million.”

  It took her about four minutes.

  To keep access down to the minimum—couriers had been discovered leafing through things, apparently just for their own amusement, on their way to and from the records room—all operational files were kept in locked metal boxes, not unlike the cardboard letter boxes you used to see sometimes in old-fashioned law offices, and possession of the necessary keys was a function of job assignment and security clearance. Austen, as director, had a key that would open any file box, but some of them even he was permitted to read only in the presence of the Chief Security Officer, and in the main vault. And, of course, you had to sign for everything.

  The Yegorov file, however, was old business dating from the Truman era and therefore had a very low security clearance. They wouldn’t let the cleaning ladies read it, but that was about the only limitation.

  The introduction, written in 1955 when the case had finally been deemed unproductive and recommended for termination, wasn’t very helpful:

  Subject was discovered by forward units of the American Third Army,

  June 9, 1944, approximately fifteen miles inland from the Normandy

  invasion site. He was dressed in the remnants of a German private’s

  uniform (trousers were Wehrmacht general issue) and claimed to have

  been employed as part of a slave labor battalion building antitank defenses

  along the road leading to Rennes. Subject was in an advanced state

  of malnutrition and suffering from what was later diagnosed as the early

  stages of tuberculosis; he was assigned to medical corps for treatment.

  As soon as he was sufficiently restored to do so, subject notified

  military intelligence of his membership in Russian NKVD (rank, lieuten­

  ant colonel; confirmed through photographic evidence of his participa­

  tion in 1936 trade delegation to Spain). Subject claimed to have been

  captured in September 1942, during the German invasion of the Ukraine.

  Intelligence council [cross-reference to Minutes, January 14, 1945]

  ordered subject retained for interrogation. Subject interned at Gorham

  Military Hospital, Phoenix, Arizona.

  So far, so good—just what anyone would expect. What American intelligence knew about the NKVD in those days you could have stuck under your fingernail, and doubtless Yegorov wasn’t very eager to be repatriated. Stalin was shooting anyone suspected of collaboration, and having survived close to two years in German hands might have been taken as sufficient evidence to convict. Those people played by their own rules.

  And then, of course, the natural inertia that governs all such matters had set in. At first Yegorov was too sick for extensive questioning; later, inevitably, he got lost in the paper shuffle. People seemed to have forgotten all about him.

  It wasn’t until 1947 that an enterprising file clerk brought his dossier back to the surface, and a team from the newly formed CIA was sent out to Phoenix to make an assessment. They decided that the colonel might be worth talking to and brought him back with them to Washington. He was grilled at intervals of several months over the next four years.

  Initial information provided by subject on NKVD (KGB) infrastructure

  proved reliable (confirmed by Deriabin, 1954), but testimony concerning

  his own career judged to be extremely suspect due to growing evidence

  of mental deterioration.

  Well, what could you expect? It wasn’t the sort of thing anyone had noticed when he was already half-dead—you don’t expect a man to be perfectly in control of himself when he’s been turned into a walking corpse by twenty-one months on a Nazi chain gang—but once he was restored to health and people with an interest in something besides the state of his lungs had a chance to listen, it became clear that Georgi Fedorovich Yegorov was seriously psychotic.

  For one thing, he labored under the permanent impression that he had family in the United States—sons, in fact. The number shifted around a bit at first, but eventually it settled on ten.

  YEGOROV: Ten little red Indians (laughter). Just braves now, but someday all of

  them will be chiefs. All my sons, my little boys.

  INTERROGATOR: Could you assist us in locating them? It would help

  in your resettlement.

  YEGOROV: You wish to make provision for my old age (laughter)? No—when

  the time comes. . .

  That was how the transcript read.

  Ten little Yegorovs, all corporate lawyers and college presidents, to hear him tell it. Inquiries were made, of course, but no one was ever able to trace any of these distinguished relatives.

  Subject claimed to enjoy the highest access to covert strategy plan­

  ning against the United States, maintaining that as early as 1927 Stalin

  had planned to foment a communist revolution here, with the purpose

  of enveloping Europe between Russian numbers and American indus­

  trial power. On another occasion he asserted that the intention had been

  to establish the nucleus of a resistance movement against the emergence

  of an American fascist dictatorship. Neither of these reports has ever

  received independent confirmation.

  And apparently people had checked. That kind of story probably went over very big in the late forties and early fifties, but Yegorov had been so vague about specifics that even in the McCarthy era it was difficult to give him much credence.

  Still, for a long time there were always a few ready to listen—Yegorov was such an intriguing subject. Perhaps they kept asking themselves where he had learned to speak English with an American accent; a phonologist had reported it indistinguishable from the dialect, if there was one, of west central Oregon. Perhaps they wondered what use the NKVD would have made of such a man.

  But after a while the entropy of boredom took over. The hole was declared dry, and Yegorov was shipped off to a succession of mental hospitals; there didn’t seem to be anything else to do with him. Every once in a while, as a practical joke that eventually became almost an initiation ritual, some brand-spanking-new case officer would be sent off to interview the political prisoner emeritus, primed to believe that the sec
rets of the Kremlin would shortly be within his grasp. It was a million laughs, and it kept Yegorov from feeling completely neglected; that was felt to be important, too.

  From the power of staff rank in the NKVD to the CIA’s in-house comic legend—it must have been a hard fall. Austen locked up the file. He hadn’t learned anything that threw any brilliant light on anything, but he hadn’t really expected to. After a couple of minutes of staring at it as it sat on his desk, he decided to take the file back to the records room himself. That was five floors down, in a subbasement, but he had an itch to take a look at the record book and he didn’t particularly want to call attention to his interest.

  Sure enough, he found Kay’s signature, with the time and that day’s date entered beside it, and nothing else within the last five years.

  As early as twelve hours ago, someone had, in all probability, tried a hit on Georgi Yegorov, relic of another time. And the only two people who had recently discovered his existence were: (1) the Director of Central Intelligence, and (2) the President of the United States.

  . . . . .

  He had no knowledge of how things were now at home, but in Comrade Stalin’s day the business had had a certain elegant simplicity. People simply disappeared. They were arrested, removed quietly from their office desks or their beds, and vanished forever. Sometimes, if there was still some purpose they could be called upon to serve, they might surface again as the object of a trial, after which they were once more submerged as effectively as if they had never existed. A bullet through the base of the skull in some prison corridor, extinction, or, what was perhaps worse, the frail continuance of life in a labor camp at the edge of the Arctic Circle—no one ever knew.

  The Americans, on the other hand, had no sense of style.

  He had known for years—for decades, in fact—that eventually the CIA would attempt to assassinate him. He had expected, all the time he had been languishing in that hospital in Arizona, that one night one of the injections they gave him to help his breathing would contain cyanide, or that an orderly would come in while he was taking a nap, lock the door, and smother him with a pillow. Those who were in possession of dangerous or embarrassing secrets often died thus. But it had not happened. They had merely packed him off to a succession of lunatic asylums, periodically moving him from one to the other, sending strange young men to question him from time to time, perhaps from some unspecific dread of what he would or would not say. They had left him alive; he could only ascribe it to a failure of nerve, and these things did not last forever.

  So he was prepared for the eventuality. He had formulated certain plans. They would discover they were not dealing with a child. He had long expected a fire in the nursing home, either this one or some other. Such a plan had exactly the mixture of indiscriminate carelessness and panic-stricken lack of resolve he would expect from the Americans. Twenty or thirty elderly innocents would perish. This he did not regret; their lives amounted to nothing, and he had witnessed the deaths of many hundreds of the young and strong—but he, the object, would escape. These were the consequences of a debilitating morality.

  The bars covering his window filled a metal frame that was merely bolted into place. It had been a simple enough matter to steal a screwdriver and remove the bolts. He had filed the bolts down until almost nothing except the heads were left, replaced them, and painted them over so they gave the impression of never having been tampered with. All the rooms were painted the same color, and the cans were kept in the basement; anyone with the daring of an altered rabbit could carry off enough paint to fill an aspirin bottle. He used the torn-away end of a paper match for a brush. The whole process had taken close to three months—one had little privacy and, even with nothing to do, even less free time—and in the end all that was required was that he take the bars in his hands and pull the whole thing free. Even at his age he had strength enough left for that.

  On that particular night he heard the alarm sound. The home was provided with smoke detectors and a sprinkler system, but the fire spread too quickly for these to make a difference; he supposed they had used some compound of aluminum powder and iron oxide.

  He hardly knew whether he had been asleep or not, but he knew what was happening as soon as he touched his doorknob and felt the heat. In an instant the window was open and unobstructed. Fortunately, his room was on the first floor; perhaps they had always expected that eventually he would defeat the bars and hadn’t wished him to hurt himself jumping from one of the upper floors. He always kept his clothes rolled up in a tight little bundle on his chair, and so he had simply to pick them up and be gone, and quietly as any thief.

  For perhaps half an hour he stood on the other side of the street, watching with the rest of the crowd as the old building collapsed into a charred ruin they would not even have to bulldoze flat. When firemen began carrying out the bodies of victims, wrapped in oilcloth shrouds, he slipped away into the darkness.

  He had no idea where to go. Except for one trip to the hospital, when he had been suffering too much from a kidney stone to pay very great attention to his surroundings, he had never been away from the nursing home grounds. Newark was a foreign landscape to him. He walked on until he reached a boulevard where at least there were streetlamps, and he would have less to worry about from the casual mugger who would naturally think to prey on an old man, and he stayed on that, waiting for dawn. He really was just an old man, and he was tired and his legs ached and he had no plan. It was cold, and the wind stung his face like a lash.

  It was hard to make good an escape when one had no money. That would be the first task before him when the sun rose and the shops began to open; he would need money. With twenty dollars—ten, in fact—he could disappear forever. He could reach his fine boys, and they would hide him until he and they had matured their revenge.

  But until then, what? How does a tired old man get twenty dollars without attracting the attention of the police? Of the muggers he was not really afraid—he was old, but he was NKVD and could deal with the violence of amateurs—but the police would deliver him back into the hands of the CIA and death.

  In his trouser pocket he had thirty-five cents, hardly even enough for a cup of coffee.

  At last he found a bus stop and sat down on the straight wooden bench. Perhaps he fell asleep for a while, because suddenly he was aware of the sun in his face, and he was no longer so cold, and the noise of the traffic and of human voices buzzed in his ears. Yes, it was morning now—he had been asleep. It was morning, and his mind was empty.

  . . . . .

  “You were right about the money. We found him in a Salvation Army soup kitchen on South Street. The poor old bastard must have had a rough time of it. He looked awful.”

  Austen, who had taken the call in his office, glanced at the correspondence his secretary was still holding in her hand. He motioned for her to put it down, and, knowing the rules, she quietly withdrew and closed the door behind her.

  “How would you look at his age after three days on the bricks? Did he give you any trouble?”

  “Not a peep.” It was almost possible to see George’s head shaking, for all that he was in a phone booth somewhere in the slums of Newark. “I guess he knew he was beaten; he seemed almost glad to see us.”

  “Fine. Take him out to the Fishing Bay house. Drug him if you have to, but take him yourself. The people there are expecting you, but they won’t know anything about Yegorov. Tell your boys to come in, and to keep their mouths shut.”

  “They already know to do that, Frank. This isn’t any Brownie troop I’ve had chasing around with me out here.”

  “I know that. Tell them anyway.”

  He replaced the receiver and picked up a pencil that had been lying on his desk, almost breaking the eraser off with the point of his thumb. Everything had gone perfectly. They had Yegorov back and would keep him in cold storage. Somehow or other, Timmler had seen to it that the name Eisenstein, Jacob appeared in all newspaper accounts and official r
eports of the Belmont Avenue Nursing Home fire, and the staff actually did believe he had died there; there was even a death certificate. Georgi Yegorov, for all the practical purposes of this dark world, had ceased to exist.

  But there was a feeling about the business. . . It was impossible to define, but Austen knew with a kind of wordless instinct that his problems with the old man were just beginning.

  IV

  The great social and diplomatic event of the following January was the visit of the Chinese Premier, Hua Yung T’an. The pretext for his journey was to thank the United States for its intervention the previous spring and to seek increased technological assistance for his industrial modernization program, but his real purpose, according to the Agency field officer in Peking, was to take the measure of the man who had risked nuclear war with the Soviet Union over a couple of drilling rigs on the fringes of the Gobi Desert. Apparently Simon Faircliff was an object of genuine curiosity.

  George Timmler was curious too. Ordinarily CIA personnel, even ranking members of the central administration, didn’t venture much into Washington political society. It wasn’t encouraged; there was too much chance of somebody’s getting, say, two and a half sheets to the wind and betraying Company secrets just to impress some broad who was falling out of her bodice as she listened to stories about his exciting life as a real live spy. Nevertheless, Austen was out of town, and Timmler wanted to know why, all at once, the two senior intelligence officers were such sought-after guests. Somebody had to go. So he rented a tuxedo and showed up.

  It started out to be a pretty dull evening; he was seated next to some second deputy vice-chairman’s wife who couldn’t speak a word of English but kept addressing remarks to him in Mandarin. On his other side was a woman from the Swiss delegation who complained a lot about the chopsticks.

  It wasn’t until after dinner, while he was touring the main reception room and admiring its collection of hand-painted ornamental screens, that things began to pick up. Out of nowhere appeared a spruce-looking Chinese fellow, possibly in his early sixties, decked out in a carefully tailored version of the standard light gray Mao jacket and trousers and holding out to him a small thimble-shaped vessel of enameled brass filled with a substance about the color and apparent consistency of brake fluid.