The President's Man
Page 23
“We serve it in small quantities, Mr. Timmler. Its name in English means ‘three cups and you will not make it over the mountain.’”
Timmler ventured a sip and decided it was probably some sort of heavily fortified plum brandy. He didn’t experience the slightest temptation to finish it, so he simply stood there, holding the tiny cup between first finger and thumb and smiling, wondering what the head of the Hsin-Pao, China’s version of the CIA and Murder Incorporated all rolled up into one, was doing so far from home.
“You surprise me, Mr. Yuan,” he said finally. “I don’t remember your name on the retinue list for this junket.”
“That is because I am not here, Mr. Timmler. I am presently back home in Peking, taking my grandchildren on a tour of the Forbidden City. This conversation is not even taking place.”
He grinned broadly, and Timmler understood at once. This was to be a little something between professional colleagues who had their own side of the street to walk. The politicians, of whatever allegiance, could damn well look out for themselves.
“A Taiwanese freighter into San Francisco—I was a deck hand—and then regular air fare to Washington, carrying an American passport that is the finest forgery I have ever seen.”
“Very slick. I suppose you also knew that Director Austen would be in London this evening, and you sent the two invitations so my presence here wouldn’t be too great a strain on anyone’s credulity.”
The Chinese spy grinned again. “Something like that. Your Director is, I believe, President Faircliff’s son-in-law.”
“He is that,” Timmler said quietly, his eyes narrowing just a trace. “He is also someone you would do well not to underestimate.”
“Doubtless—that is not the point. One can imagine where his loyalties are to be found.”
Timmler began to say something and then thought better of it. A year ago he wouldn’t have offered any reservation, but now he wasn’t sure what he made of Frank Austen, except that he wasn’t stupid and he wasn’t in anybody’s pocket. But it wouldn’t have done any good to communicate those opinions to Mr. Yuan, and Timmler contented himself with a nod.
“I simply wondered whether the Central Intelligence Agency was aware that the threatened Soviet invasion of last April was perhaps less serious than any of us imagined at the time. Indeed, I suspect that, unless they were counting on our being frightened to death, they never intended to take any directly offensive action. Would that surprise you?”
“Yes, that would surprise me. That would surprise anyone.”
Yuan nodded a second time. “Yet such is what our agents tell us. Petrol, food, ammunition, spare parts—they had nowhere near enough to sustain them for even a week in hostile territory. And there were none of the—how shall I express it?—the psychological preparations for such an attack. My people tell me their garrison had rather the atmosphere of a Junior Red Brigade camping trip in poor weather; the Russians simply wanted to be on their way home. Do you understand me, Mr. Timmler? These were not men in the process of readying themselves for war.”
“Yes, I understand you, Mr. Yuan. You think they were bluffing.”
“Quite succinctly put, Mr. Timmler.”
It was a great deal to think about. As he drove back to his home in Falls Church, where his wife would grill him about who had been there and what the dinner service was like and what the women had worn, too wise to ask why she couldn’t have been allowed to come along but probably cursing him until three in the morning—You, a spy? You never notice anything important—George Timmler tried to remember everything Yuan Chu Lin had told him and tried to assess what it could possibly mean.
The Russian invasion force had been a paper tiger. He was prepared to take the Chinese at their word; after all, they had had a better chance for a good close look than anybody else and didn’t have a motive to lie.
Suppose that, somehow, Faircliff had known the truth. You always call a bluff when you know the other player doesn’t hold the cards, and calling that particular bluff had given the President enormous political and diplomatic leverage. Both the voting public and the Kremlin, in their very different ways, now thought they had a regular John Wayne on their hands. All the polls indicated that the Americans had at last found their hero, and the Russians were probably shitting in their pants lest, on the slightest provocation, this crazy cowboy would blow up the world. If he had known the truth, he had played his hand with remarkable skill.
But how the hell could he possibly have known?
Frank Austen understood him perhaps better than anyone. Austen had said that the President was not a screwball—not at all the type to take unreasonable risks, and not the least bit given to displays of adolescent heroism. The April Fools’ Crisis had been completely out of character.
QED: Simon Faircliff had known more about what was happening in the Gobi Desert during those few weeks than either the Chinese or his own Central Intelligence Agency. Somehow he had developed some private source, circumventing regular channels of information. The President was in business for himself.
But if one question was answered—and that was by no means as sure as it looked; after all, the guy could still be just your basic screwball, regardless of what Austen said—an even bigger question rose up right behind it: why would the Russians have put themselves in such a position? Why does somebody assemble an army of invasion and then not invade? To wring concessions from the Chinese? Apparently not, since there had been no diplomatic activity, no ultimatum delivered in Peking. And if you don’t invade, and you’re not trying to shake anybody down, how can you come out of it not looking like a horse’s ass?
Even if Faircliff had minded his manners and stayed quietly in his own backyard, what could the Russians conceivably have had to gain?
About that, George Timmler had to admit, he hadn’t a clue.
. . . . .
“The files say he worked for us back in the early sixties, as a pilot in ‘Nam. His name is Yates, Victor Yates, and he’s not a real sweet fella. I want to know where he is now, and what kind of company he’s been keeping.”
George Timmler pushed the photograph across his desk, and Michael Starkman, one of the two men sitting on the other side, rose out of his chair and picked it up. He looked at it for a few seconds, his unsmiling face a blank and rather brutal mask, and nodded. Then he handed it to his partner.
“Anything like a current address, Mr. Timmler?” he asked.
Timmler merely shrugged.
“Nothing since the Flowering Tree Hotel in Saigon, and I suspect that’s a little out of date. You have lots of contacts in the soldier-offortune set, Mike; you’ll be able to run him to ground.”
“What do you want done about him?” This time it was Earl Rutledge who spoke, but it hardly made any difference—these two were stamped out of the same press and their voices had the same lack of expression. A good agent keeps his feelings about a job to himself.
“Nothing. “
“Nothing?” Rutledge lifted his eyebrows—he was merely curious.
“Nothing. This is simply someone we want to keep a string on for the time being.”
“Okay.”
They all rose, since the interview had obviously run its course, and Timmler was shaking the hands of first one man and then the other, when suddenly he looked inquisitively into Michael Starkman’s face.
“Mike, see if you can find out where Yates’s paychecks have been coming from lately. Don’t push it hard enough to make yourself noticeable, but if he’s been working for someone fairly steadily it might be worthwhile to know who that could be.”
“Sure thing, boss.” The two of them turned their broad backs and shuffled out of the room like a couple of tame bears.
But they were good men, especially Mike. He did first-class work. He was a field man—there would never be any place for him behind a desk; his mind just didn’t work that way—but if you wanted something done, you gave it to Mike.
. . . . .
The past week had been the first time that Austen had been away from his office since Inauguration Day, and Timmler had been impressed, finally, by the degree to which that absence had made itself felt. Austen was probably the most powerful Director of Central Intelligence since Dulles’s time, and his authority rested much less on his unique relationship with the President than on the qualities that must have induced Simon Faircliff to raise him so high in the first place. He was a natural spy. It was as if the man had been born to this one task.
And Timmler liked him. He was a nice guy, and, as everyone knew, his private life hadn’t been particularly easy in recent memory. So if news about a rest home fire in New Jersey made Frank Austen’s day, the associate director didn’t mind being the bearer of happy tidings, even if he couldn’t understand why anyone should care.
The plane arrived on time, and Timmler had barely had a chance to sit down in the passenger lounge when Austen, only the second person off, stepped into sight behind the security gate.
“London was freezing,” he said, handing his baggage stubs to the driver as he took Timmler’s arm and they started down the corridor. “The fucking Brits wouldn’t let me in the same room with any of their Moscow product; I thought you said they were being better about that lately. They seem to be under the impression that we’re just about completely blown everywhere east of the Berlin wall. Did Monke finally come through with anything on the nursing home fire?”
Timmler grinned. “Some crowd photos—our people discovered one familiar face. I brought them with me. Did you have a good flight?”
“No,”
They hardly said anything more until they were both seated in the limousine and the smoked-glass partition between the front and rear seats was up. Without waiting for it to be offered to him, Austen took Timmler’s briefcase from the floor, unsnapped the locks, and started sorting through the manila file folders until he came to one that contained photographs. He laid them out on his lap and went through the stack, one sheet at a time.
Finally, near the bottom, he found a face he knew. It was in three-quarter profile, as if the man had just seen the camera and was beginning to turn away, but the features were perfectly recognizable. The subject was a little under medium height and wearing a hat, the brim of which didn’t quite conceal a pair of narrow, almost reptilian eyes. Along his upper lip there was a straight black moustache. Austen took a ballpoint pen out of his shirt pocket and circled the head.
“You know him?” Timmler asked, his voice an incredulous whisper.
“I know him—who the hell is he?”
“His name’s Yates, and he’s definitely one of the bad guys. There’s a file on him back at the office; he’s had a very colorful career. I don’t suppose it would do me any good to ask where you could have made his acquaintance?”
“None at all.”
V
“You’ll never guess who came down for the state dinner, Frank, never in a million years. Sylvia Burgess. Apparently she’s been hiding up in Connecticut ever since Clay died. I hadn’t seen her since the funeral.”
“How did she look?” Austen was only asking out of politeness; he wasn’t blind, and Simon Faircliff was lit up like a Christmas tree. It was obvious the lady had lost none of her charm.
“Oh, she was fabulous. She’s come back to life.” Simon grinned and leaned back in the desk chair, clasping his hands behind his head. In that posture, he only looked relaxed if you didn’t know him. “When I sent her the invitation, I wasn’t sure she’d come, but she did. She looked just great, Frank—I wonder whether there isn’t some way we could get her down to Washington a little more often.”
“That’s up to you, lover boy.”
They could still laugh at something like that; on the surface at least, they were still close. They could sit together like this in the Oval Office, and it was almost possible to believe that nothing had changed since those first few years when Simon Faircliff was still dazzling his new Senate colleagues and Frank Austen was his eyes and ears and, some people said, almost his other self. They had simply grown up—the same relationship, but on a vastly grander scale. It was almost possible to believe that.
“I’d like you to look this over for me,” Faircliff said, his good-humored laughter breaking off abruptly. He took a thin report, encased in stiff blue covers bearing the presidential seal, from the middle drawer of his desk and tossed it across to Austen. “State thinks the Russians might be prepared to take up strategic arms limitations again, and they’ve drawn up what they propose as a bargaining posture. Check it out—see if it squares with the Agency’s assessments. I want to know what they’ve got going for them before we sit down with the bastards.”
“Okay.”
And that was the beginning of the SALT IV negotiations, which were to become, for the next three years, the great and consuming labor of the Faircliff administration.
. . . . .
George Timmler was probably the first person in Washington to voice his mistrust.
“It sounds great, assuming we can believe our own intelligence,” he said, sitting in the small dining room behind the director’s office, across the starched white tablecloth from Frank Austen. He was investigating the contents of his plate, without any marked enthusiasm, delicately turning things over with the prongs of his fork. “What is this stuff anyway?”
“Greek stew, made with veal. It’s one of the cook’s new recipes. I take it that you don’t believe our own intelligence—or is that putting it too bluntly?”
“You’re sure this is veal?”
Timmler finally pushed the plate away and satisfied himself with finishing his Sanka. The expression on his face was not, however, solely traceable to his dissatisfaction with lunch.
“It’s what I’ve been telling you for weeks,” he said at last, when the waiter had cleared the table and left. “I think something’s gone seriously wrong somewhere, and now the British seem to think so too. You said yourself they claimed we were blown in Russia. I think we’ve sprung a leak, and pretty high up if we’re getting that wet.”
It was an old story; Austen had heard it dozens of times in the months since the Mongolian border scare. It was rapidly becoming George Timmler’s private obsession, the controlling assumption behind almost every word he spoke. But it couldn’t be written off as the kind of paranoia that comes to people after too many years in this business, because it squared too well with the facts—in ways that Timmler hadn’t even guessed yet.
“More than anything, it’s a question of shadings,” he went on, toying with his empty coffee cup. When George talked about shadings, he wasn’t kidding; for him, the evaluation of intelligence data was the one true art form. “After all, we haven’t got a man in the Politburo; the Russians aren’t such blockheads as that. We just don’t ever get the whole picture—a piece here, a piece there, and that’s it.” He looked up and smiled, as if to say, I know you’ve heard all this before. . .
“Think of it,” he went on. “Why does anybody ever become a traitor to his own side? Our agents, let’s face it, are most of them disappointed men—clerical workers and second assistants, that sort of thing. Nonentities. The very fact that for one reason or another they’ve been kept from the real centers of power and knowledge is the reason we were able to approach them in the first place. Their access is limited, so they interpret or extrapolate or, sometimes, just make things up. They’re like someone trying to follow a three-dimensional chess game from underneath the table; all they can really do is listen for th
e clicking of the pieces being moved.”
Austen, who was working his way through a small dish of bread pudding—he had found much consolation lately in desserts—set down his spoon and sighed. He was feeling the inevitable close around him. His range of options seemed to be narrowing by the second, and it frightened him. He decided to be annoyed instead
“I’m not unfamiliar with the problem, George.”
“I know. I just wonder whether you appreciate the implications for our own little difficulty. I really don’t think you do.”
“Try me.” Austen rose from the table and pressed the wall panel that formed a camouflaged door into his office. “Bring your Sanka.”
Austen had recently had an eight-foot leather sofa put in his office so he would have somewhere to take a nap when Company business kept him away from his own bed. He and Timmler sat at opposite ends now, and he waited for Timmler to drain his cup and set it aside.
“Like I said,” he began. “Try me.”
“All right.” Timmler crossed his knees and leaned back against the sofa cushions, making the leather groan slightly. “It comes down to this. In the real world, given the nature of your sources, you don’t get consistent information. A says one thing, B says another. You can’t expect them to agree all the time because their perspectives are usually vastly different and they’re looking at tiny pieces of something that’s way beyond anything they can understand on their own. So you pick and choose; you have to sift what you get and take your best guess. That’s the way it’s always been.”
He shrugged his shoulders, like a man who had made his peace with the world and was willing to work with what was offered. “And now, in the last nine or ten months, all those pieces have been coming together to make nice coherent wholes. It doesn’t wash. Have our snitches suddenly gotten that much smarter, or are we getting diddled? I ask you—which do you think is more likely?”