The President's Man

by Nicholas Guild

  “What about aerial reconnaissance? We don’t get everything from snitches, you know. What about the satellite photos?”

  Like the soft tip of a leaf touched by the flame, Timmler seemed to draw into himself just slightly. It was a sign that Austen had learned to look for. It meant that some raw mental nerve had felt the tread of a strange boot, that good old George had that curious little itch in the back of his neck that good analysts acquire after a long time.

  “The photos are ambivalent,” he said, holding his hand level and then tilting it from side to side. “ All the fallibles, all our little tattletales will say one thing, and the photos, the only really hard evidence we usually get, neither confirm nor deny.

  “Take the Jakutsk chemical research facility, just as a for-instance. All we hear from our people is that the Russians are scaling down their efforts in chemical warfare. It’s too unreliable, we’re assured; the boys in the brass hats don’t think it can be effectively targeted; that’s all we’ve been told for months. The satellite flies by and. . . Maybe yes, maybe no. They haven’t torn the place down, but there seems to be less activity—somewhat. Maybe they’re staging that too. All they have to do is dummy up for a while—keep everybody indoors, disperse the rail traffic in that area for a few days. It isn’t exactly as if they don’t know those things are up there. And they can track them as well as we can.”

  Austen squirmed uncomfortably in his seat. “So you think that the British are right, I take it—that we’re blown?”

  “Yes.” As if the statement needed confirmation, Timmler nodded his head slowly and said it again. “Yes, I think we’re blown.”

  . . . . .

  At Fishing Bay, along Maryland’s eastern shore, the Company maintained property it had purchased several years before at a probate sale after the death of an elderly woman who had once been married to J. D. Montcleath, the department store millionaire. Apparently she had made out like a bandit in the divorce settlement, because one of the smaller holdings her will divided among her various nieces and nephews was an eighty-acre estate, complete with mansion, bordered on one side by the Blackwater National Wildlife Preserve and on the other by that quiet finger of the Chesapeake.

  It was a lonely spot, and none of the heirs had shown any inclination to live there, so they were willing to let it go for comparatively little money. At present, the local people were under the impression that the house was inhabited by a retired gangster who suffered from certain unspecified but debilitating diseases and lived in constant fear of assassination. Hence the presence of the barbed-wire-topped cyclone fence, the guards, and the medical technicians in their white uniforms who occasionally were seen in town loading groceries into the back of a wood-paneled station wagon.

  In fact, Fishing Bay was a CIA safe house and, for the present, Georgi Fedorovich Yegorov’s private prison, where he had been held, all by himself, in close confinement ever since a few days after the Belmont Nursing Home fire.

  At four o’clock on the afternoon of February fifteenth, Frank Austen and George Timmler were on their way there, driving along Highway 50, looking for the Bucktown turnoff that would eventually lead to a private road protected by a locked steel gateway. They were setting out to test a theory.

  “I still don’t see what Yegorov’s got to do with it,” Timmler groused, jamming his cold hands into his coat pockets. They had left the limousine at Langley and taken an unmarked Company car and the heater didn’t work. “We’ve got a security leak, and you want to go fart around with that crazy old bastard. He hasn’t been near a secret in forty years, and you act like he’s the hottest thing since the Golitsin catch.”

  Austen smiled tightly, never taking his eyes from the road. He felt strangely exhilarated, perhaps because it was the first time he had been behind the wheel of a car in months, and perhaps for other reasons as well. He had figured something out; he wasn’t sure quite yet what it was, but it was something. A couple of pieces of the puzzle were beginning to fit together.

  “George, if we’ve got a leak of the dimensions you indicate, where would it have to be? If it’s in the Company, then who’s turned dirty? I won’t make you answer—it would have to be one or the other of us. Am I right?”

  “Yes. You’re right.” It was clear from the tone of his voice that George had seen that as clearly as Austen. What he might make of it he kept to himself. Austen nodded, still studying the road.

  “Is there anyone else who would have access to that kind of blanket information? Anyone you can think of?”

  “No.”

  “I can think of one.”

  They turned off the main road into what seemed an unending forest of tall, thin, naked trees. The ground was thickly covered with leaves, grown black and matted since autumn, and here and there were visible a few patches of snow no larger than manhole covers. There was an occasional mailbox standing beside a gravel driveway that seemed to lead to nothing, but it was a lonely place.

  “You remember my famous report? I thought you would. You didn’t think it was very wise, putting that kind of information together in one document, and probably, as it turns out, you were right. I wasn’t dumb enough to include any names because nobody needed any, but wouldn’t it have been possible, if someone had an insider’s familiarity with Soviet security arrangements, to read back through all that and draw some reasonably solid inferences about where we were getting our information? When they know how much we know, can’t they backtrack to their own leaks?”

  “Sure—we do the same thing all the time.” Austen was aware that Timmler was looking at him with a kind of horrified curiosity. “What are you getting at, Frank? I thought nobody saw that report but the President.”

  “The story is that nobody did. And I got the one copy back three days later and put it through the shredder. But the White House is full of Xerox machines, and I can think of at least one person besides the President who could have gotten access any time he wanted it. The President trusts Howard Diederich a hell of a lot more than he trusts me, pal. “

  They drove the rest of the way in silence. It wasn’t every day you accused the White House Chief of Staff of treason. Timmler would want to consider whether such a thing was really possible, or whether perhaps the Director of Central Intelligence wasn’t simply covering his own tracks. And knowing George, you could bet he would do his considering in the quiet of his own heart.

  Austen didn’t disturb him. He knew Timmler suspected that he himself might be a double agent, and he discovered with something like surprise that he hardly resented it at all. He would have thought less of George if he hadn’t been suspicious. Maybe over the last thirteen months Austen had turned into a Company man in spite of everything. It was an unsettling thought.

  They pulled up in front of the gate to the Fishing Bay House, and Austen got out and whispered a few words into the intercom attached to the fence post. The gate swung open.

  The house was huge, and almost as empty as a barn. The heirs had taken all the carpeting and furniture and, except for the few rooms that were used on something like a regular basis, the place had been allowed to remain as the Company had found it. Your steps echoed against the hardwood floors, and every word you said came back to you from the central stairway and the great barren rooms. Austen and Timmler were greeted in the entrance hall by a precise, fiftyish-looking woman in a stark black dress that just missed looking like some sort of uniform. She didn’t smile; the most she would do was nod. She ran the place and was known simply as the Den Mother.

  “And how’s our patient today?” Austen asked, allowing himself to smile but feeling all the time that, as far as this lady was concerned, even he didn’t have any business in this burial vault of secrets.

  “Just the same, Mr. Director,” she said evenly. “He is questioned every day, in conformity with your instructions, but he tells us nothing. He refuses even to answer. He seems to think it’s some kind of a game.” Her eyes narrowed; you had the idea that Fishing Bay’s
guiding spirit had very clear and settled opinions about how Mr. Yegorov might be disabused of that notion. Austen was glad again that he had given explicit orders that no form of coercion was to be used.

  “We’d like to see him if we may.”

  “Certainly. If you’ll come this way, please.”

  They were shown into a small, cell-like room, empty except for a couple of wooden chairs and a bare table. There was a single window that really wasn’t a window at all but the other side of a one-way mirror. Through it they could see into the next room, where an old man was lying on a cot bed, his right arm thrown across his eyes to block out the light from a single bulb in the ceiling.

  “You don’t keep him in there all the time, do you?” Austen asked. He had never been to Fishing Bay before and found the place slightly appalling, rather like a genteel Victorian dungeon. “I’m surprised his brains haven’t turned to jelly by this time.”

  “There’s no cause for alarm. He’s taken out for a walk around the grounds every morning and afternoon, accompanied by a guard, of course. And we see to it that he has plenty of company. He likes to play chess with the orderlies.”

  The Den Mother smiled triumphantly and withdrew as noiselessly as a black shadow. Austen waited until he heard the door click shut behind her before sitting down on one of the chairs.

  “That woman gives me the creeps,” he said finally. Behind him he could hear George Timmler’s quiet laughter.

  “She gives everybody the creeps. That’s why she’s here.”

  As if he had suddenly remembered his reason for coming, Austen stood up and went over to the window into Yegorov’s cell. It was the first time he had ever seen the old man, and he discovered that he was disappointed. Lieutenant Colonel Yegorov had loomed so large in his imagination for so many months that he had expected something more than the frail little figure stretched out almost corpselike on the brown blanket. He couldn’t have been taller than five three or four, although it was difficult to judge.

  Presently Yegorov took away his arm and revealed a pair of sunken eyes and a grim mouth and chin traced out with deep facial lines. The hair, of course, was white, and very thin across the top of his gray skull. It was impossible to imagine what he must have looked like as a young man. This was someone who had been born elderly.

  “What are we doing here, Frank?” Timmler’s voice was almost pleading now.

  Austen turned around and smiled. “I want to know why all of a sudden somebody tried to murder that old coot. The fire was arson, remember? He’s been on ice for decades. I want to know what makes him worth killing now.”

  They both turned back to the window. Yegorov remained perfectly motionless; it was almost impossible to tell that he was breathing.

  “He’s always been worth killing,” Austen said slowly. “It’s just that now they know he’s around to kill.” For a long moment he continued to study the reclining form of the political prisoner emeritus, and then he turned away and looked at George Timmler, who obviously didn’t know what he was talking about. Austen’s smile had disappeared, and his face was as expressionless as a death mask.

  “I’m interested in a coincidence of timing, George. You say we have a leak—practically a hemorrhage, it seems. And just when we’re beginning to notice it, somebody tries to do a number on that old man. Has it occurred to you that there might be a connection?”

  Timmler didn’t respond, didn’t even shake his head, so Austen simply went on as if he had never asked the question. “When I gave the President my report on current Company operations, I told him a story about this old guy we’d apparently been keeping in cold storage since the Year One. I thought it would make him laugh, and it did. And guess who just happened to come into the room as I finished? How does Howard Diederich sound? The President thought my little story was so odd and funny that he asked me to repeat it to Howard. And I did.

  “Now, a question. If you were starting from stone-cold zero, and all you knew was that Georgi Fedorovich Yegorov, under some other name, was in a nursing home somewhere in New Jersey, and you couldn’t make any direct inquiries about it because the new Director of the Central Intelligence Agency had thrown too big a net over the whole of the nation’s security establishment and would be certain to find out if you so much as tried, how long do you think it would take you to track down our distinguished guest?”

  “A couple of months,” Timmler answered. Finally, it seemed, he was beginning to understand.

  “That’s right, a couple of months. Or about the interval of time between when Howard Diederich hears my stupid little story and when somebody makes French toast out of the old folks at home.”

  “My God.”

  George sat down, resting his forearms on his knees, and simply stared at the floor for a long moment, without so much as twitching. “So what are you going to do about it?”

  “I’m going to see what we can learn from Yegorov.”

  “And how will you do that, Frank? You heard the lady—he’s been here for ten months, and he hasn’t said a word.”

  “I don’t care what he says, George. I want to know what he does. He’s always trying to escape; okay, we’re going to let him. Then we’re going to learn what it is that he’s so terribly interested in finding.”

  “You’re nuts—you’re nuttier than he is.”

  Austen simply raised his eyebrows as if that possibility had never occurred to him before and he was giving it careful consideration.

  “Could be—but have you got a better idea?”

  “No.”

  They rose together and started toward the door, when all at once Timmler laid his hand on Austen’s sleeve, pulling him gently to a stop. “You really think it could be Diederich, Frank?” he asked. It was simply a question. “I’ve only met him a couple of times, but he hardly seems the type for murder. Treason, yes—maybe somebody’s got something on him—but murder?”

  Austen smiled benignly, with the superior knowledge of an old stager.

  “Come along, George,” he said. “And while we’re driving back to Langley, I’ll tell you a thing or two about Howard Diederich.”

  VI

  It was decided that the best way to proceed was to take Yegorov back to Newark, where at least he wouldn’t be wandering around lost in the piney woods—what was an old man supposed to do all alone in the wilds of Maryland’s eastern shore?—and it would be easier for him to convince himself that he had made a clean getaway. As Timmler put it, “Anybody can hide out in a big city, but if we set him down in the boonies and he manages to get clear, he’s going to smell a rat. After all, why shouldn’t we be able to track down one guy, on foot, tramping through the underbrush? He’s old and he’s crazy, but there’s no evidence that he’s stupid.”

  This trip, Yegorov would have to be well funded, especially since nobody had any idea where he was going to want to run to. Of course, if somehow he managed to scratch up a phony passport and tried to get out of the country, if he just wanted to get home to Mother Russia, they would have to stop him before he had a chance to board the plane, but Austen wasn’t very worried about that contingency; he had the feeling that whatever Yegorov was looking for would be right close to home. Forty or fifty bucks would do it, as much as the average man might carry around in his billfold. Any more and, once again, he would probably decide that somebody must be pulling his leg.

  “Of course, we can’t even be sure he’ll make a break,” Austen had warned. “At his age, he may just say to hell with it. We really haven’t got any idea what his state of mind might be.”

  “He’ll make a break—give him half a chance and he’ll be gone like a shot.”

  “And we’ll give him a clear path,” George went on, smiling at his own cunning. “If we try to follow him too closely. . . After all, he’s played these kinds of games too. He’s old, but he’s NKVD.”

  . . . . .

  They had not killed him after all. Perhaps they had merely lost their nerve, but after ten month
s he was still alive. In the last analysis, the Americans simply did not seem to have the stomach for any of the obvious necessities.

  “You’ll be leaving in the morning, Mr. Yegorov,” she had said, that dreadful woman who reminded him so forcefully of a crow. “A new home has been found for you, where you’ll have a bit more company. We’ve even bought you a new suit; I’ll just lay it out for you here on the foot of the bed, and you can try it on in private.”

  They were all such fools—did they really imagine he hadn’t known all along about the mirror? And you can just try it on in private. Did they honestly suppose he did not know they watched him every moment?

  But the clothes were well enough, and after breakfast they brought him a little suitcase filled with clean linen and he was taken out to the front of the house, where they waited for the car.

  “Why don’t you let me take that, Mr. Yegorov?”

  So it was to be Gordon who would be his escort. Fat Gordon, whose skin was so pink and who showed such fine teeth when he smiled, who played chess so badly but who seemed to have a kind heart. Gordon ran his thick hand down the curling blond hair on the back of his neck and picked up the suitcase, putting it in the trunk of a long car that the people on the television called a “station wagon.”

  “And don’t forget to fasten your seat belt.”

  No, he would not forget.

  By noon they had driven through a city called “Wilmington,” and Gordon decided it was time to stop for lunch. They must have made a curious sight, sitting together in the booth at the Howard Johnson’s restaurant, the old man, dressed in a heavy brown business suit, and his attendant in white trousers and a heavy black sailor’s jacket. Gordon talked incomprehensibly about baseball and ate a vast meal of steak and mashed potatoes, consuming several buttered rolls and even having the special dessert, a little chocolate cake called a “brownie” topped with ice cream.