The President's Man

by Nicholas Guild

  He stared down at his cup as if he expected the answer to be revealed to him there.

  “When did they contact you again?”

  “They never did,” he answered, smiling thinly. “It was Diederich, but not for years. By then I thought everyone had forgotten all about me, that I was safe. By then I hardly even remembered that I had ever been anyone except Chester Storey. The face grows to fit the mask, don’t you know.” It didn’t seem to be a very happy reflection.

  “No, I didn’t hear from Diederich until the summer of 1968. I had just married my second wife—I was the happiest man in the world for a while—and one day my secretary brought me a note that had been sent around to the office by special messenger: I’ve made a one o’clock reservation for us at Le Lavandou on Sixty-first Street, so it’ll be close to home—your treat. Magpie.

  “I felt as if someone had walked over my grave. I didn’t have the faintest idea who it could be after all that time—thirty years. It was the most uncomfortable morning I’ve ever spent in my life.

  “At first I didn’t recognize him; after all, what had we been but boys in Russia? But he brought me up to date fast enough. He wanted money. He had gotten involved in politics, and Simon Faircliff needed a war chest. I was invited to make a large anonymous donation.

  “ ‘I have high hopes for this one,’ he said. ‘I think we might be able to ride him right into the White House.’ And that’s just exactly what he did. Well, I wish Simon Faircliff joy of his Chief of Staff.”

  “Was that all he wanted, just money?” Austen strained forward in his chair, as if he expected Chester Storey to whisper the answer into his ear.

  “No.” Storey shook his head sadly. “At first, yes. I could simply make a withdrawal from my account and mail it, wrapped up in brown paper, to a post office box in Los Angeles. Can you imagine that, tens of thousands of dollars shipped parcel post? Over the years, I think I’ve probably made delivery on something like three quarters of a million.

  “But after a while, especially after Faircliff announced for the Senate, Diederich wanted other things as well—confidential bank records, investment profiles, information about corporate accounts. I was his pipeline into the New York financial world, and from there, I expect, into the business community at large. And I had to do a lot of very nasty things sometimes to dig up everything he wanted to know. Over the years, I got so I hated him like poison.”

  “What was in the package you delivered to me?”

  “Savings account passbooks, about twenty of them. He’d sent me the forms, even the deposit slips—all duly signed, of course, but under half a dozen different names—and I was supposed to pay into them. He said it was his moving expenses; he was coming out from California, and he said he needed the money to get his operation going in Washington.”

  “Did he ever approach you directly after that first time, or was it always through an intermediary?”

  “It was almost always someone else. Sometimes I wouldn’t hear from him for months at a time, and then I’d get word to meet some stranger; it was almost never the same person twice until the last few years.”

  Austen reached into his inside coat pocket and pulled out a slim manila envelope, from which he extracted a photograph. It showed four men, obviously part of a crowd, badly illuminated by an overhead streetlamp. The man in the center, around whose head a circle had been drawn in heavy ballpoint, had a strong, cruel face with eyes that were merely thin dark lines. He had a straight black moustache. Austen handed the photograph to Chester Storey.

  “Was this ever one of the men sent to you?”

  “Yes.” Storey’s eyes widened in recognition and fear as he held the picture up to the light. “Recently it hasn’t been anyone else. Who is he?”

  Austen took the photograph back, slipped it into the envelope again, and returned it to his pocket without answering. “I want to know more about how they thought they were going to get away with it,” he said. “I mean, how do you just drop a seventeen-year-old kid down in the middle of the United States and expect him to find his independent way to fame and fortune? Explain that to me.”

  “Does it need explaining?” Storey asked, a faintly contemptuous smile on his lips. “Obviously they did get away with it.”

  “Then explain it to me anyway. How did they work it?”

  But instead of troubling to reply, Storey took the pack of Camel Filters from his shirt pocket, shook one out, lit it with a paper match from the book that was laying next to his teacup, and, after casually blowing it out with a puff of cigarette smoke, dropped the match on the linoleum floor. It was a wonderfully tranquil operation; it communicated an easiness of mind that, under the circumstances, was almost as extraordinary as it was insulting.

  After giving him just time to draw another breath, Austen sprang from his chair and struck his prisoner on the right side of the face, hard enough to throw him back into his chair and send the cigarette flying. It bounced against the wall with a little shower of sparks.

  “I asked you a question,” he said, pulling Storey toward him by the shirtfront, his voice hoarse with barely suppressed rage. “And I want an answer—now. How did they get you into the country? What kind of help did you get? Did they just turn you loose, or what?”

  “It’s more complicated than that.” More startled than hurt, Storey nursed his jaw without any visible show of resentment, as if he could sympathize with the Director’s impatience. He was merely waiting for Austen to sit down.

  “Soroka always told us that after a point we could expect some help,” he went on. “He said we would have to look out for ourselves for the first ten or fifteen years, but that then, when our efforts could be coordinated, and the end of the war he knew was coming would make it easier for Russia to establish a more effective diplomatic presence in the United States, then they’d help us along. It never happened, of course. For thirty years, until I got that note from Diederich, I never got a word or a kopek.

  “I’m not complaining, you understand; I was glad. A lot of things got lost in the war, and I suppose I hoped that we had too, that they had simply forgotten us. I don’t know, maybe they had. Maybe the only one who remembered was Diederich. Anyway, for thirty years I was on my own.”

  “But they must have set you up—initially, at least.”

  “Oh yes.” Chester Storey nodded in agreement, eager, apparently, to confirm the basic truth. “They did do that. They would have had to, wouldn’t they?” He looked down at his hand, as if suddenly ashamed.

  “How did they do it?” Austen’s voice was beginning to drop once again to a menacing quietness. “How was it managed—I want to know, damn you.”

  Once again the pack of cigarettes appeared, and once again the ritual was enacted, except the composure was gone. Now Chester Storey was a man whose nerves needed settling.

  “Didn’t I tell you that the magpie was a nest robber?” he asked, laughing quietly and mirthlessly as he looked at the extinguished match in his hand, seeming to have lost any recollection of what it was.

  “Soroka did his research very well. Each of us had been assigned an identity we could assume when the moment came, someone we could crowd out of the nest, whose life we could take over and start living as if it were our own. In my case, there really was a Chester Storey growing up in a little town in Texas. I had read all about him.

  “In a country the size of the United States, there must be thousands of gifted boys at any given moment. Soroka merely selected ten, the ten who corresponded to his needs. He had their careers followed right through childhood—the music lessons, the sports, the teachers, the dental records, everything.

  “He needed boys who fulfilled certain criteria. They had to be brilliant, marked for early success. They had to come from small families—an only child was best, but you couldn’t always have that—so the relatives wouldn’t cause any unnecessary complications. And, finally, they had to be accepted by a college hundreds of miles away from their homes so they w
ould have a reason for not coming back. Poor Chester—the real one—he signed his death warrant the day he filled out those application forms for Harvard.

  “Walter and Ida Storey had moved to Texas from Missouri in 1923, after Walter quarreled with his father over an inheritance. He seems to have been the type who quarreled with people pretty regularly; in any case, he maintained no contact with the rest of his family, so they hardly even knew young Chester was alive. Walter worked as a teller in the Weatherford National Trust until Roosevelt closed the banks in thirty-three, and then he set up as a feed grain broker. The Storeys kept to themselves. Ida apparently regarded herself as ‘quality’ and didn’t encourage her son to make too many friends among his schoolfellows. It was the sort of setup that Soroka was looking for.

  “There was a younger sister—that was the one snag. But she was only about twelve when Chester left home.

  “As for physical resemblance, it wasn’t considered vitally important. We didn’t have to be identical twins. The same eye and hair color, the same general height and body type, a certain coincidence of feature. People change between seventeen and forty; it was considered enough.

  “It couldn’t have been too difficult a problem for Soroka. After all, he had hundreds of boys in the United States and hundreds more in Russia to choose from. He only needed ten matches. He felt that if the operation went beyond that number it would prove unwieldy and too open to detection.

  “So it came down to ten. Ten of us, preparing ourselves to step into the lives of ten of them. We knew their relatives and their friends, the names of all the streets in the towns where they grew up, everything that could be learned about them.”

  “How was the switch made?”

  Storey paused for a moment, saw that his cigarette had burned down almost to the filter, and stubbed it out. It took on the quality of a meditative ritual, like counting the beads of a rosary.

  “You have to remember,” he continued finally, “you have to bear in mind that I had never been told anything beyond the fact that after a certain date I would be expected to be Chester Storey—not merely to masquerade as him, but to be him.”

  “How was the switch made?”

  “It was easy.” This man who had become Chester Storey but who might have been anyone, glared at Austen with perfect if restrained hatred, as if goaded almost beyond endurance. His eyes seemed to say, You will have it all, won’t you.

  “On the fifth of September, 1938, Chester Storey boarded the train in Fort Worth. I watched him from the window as he kissed his parents goodbye. He was going off to join that year’s freshman class at Harvard.”

  He stopped for a moment and wiped his forehead with the heel of his hand. It was an odd gesture, implying God only knew what obscure spiritual suffering, as if he were attempting to wipe away some ineradicable mental wound. He was no longer telling the story to anyone except himself; Timmler and Austen might as well not even have been in the room. This was no longer a confession. It was an act of penance.

  “We waited until he had entered his compartment; he had a sleeper, and we knew the number. His trunk was stored in the baggage car, and we knew that too. We waited until a few minutes before the train was to stop again, in Dallas.

  “I had been brought into the country from Mexico by two men who had come with me all the way from Leningrad. We had been together for days, but they hardly ever spoke to me. It was like living with a pair of animated blocks of wood.

  “Just as the people who were getting off began to collect their things from the overhead racks, the three of us went back to Chester Storey’s compartment. One of them tapped lightly on the door and, when it was opened, pushed his way inside, covering the boy’s mouth with his hand. He was a huge man; there was hardly any struggle at all.

  “They held him down and gave him some sort of injection, just at the base of the neck. In a few seconds he stopped struggling. He wasn’t dead, but he wasn’t human anymore either. He simply stared ahead, blankly, seeing nothing. There was no will there, nothing but a nervous system that would obey any impulse from the outside, incapable of action on its own. He sat across from me, one of the men holding him upright; I’ve never seen anybody who looked like that in my life.

  “When we reached Dallas, they led him off the train. No one seemed to notice. When the porter came to turn down the bed at night, he never even looked at me; I was just the kid who was sleeping there that night, so I must have been the kid who came aboard at Fort Worth. That was my first lesson in how easy it was going to be.

  “As for Chester Storey, he ceased to exist—or, rather, he became myself. The boy who was led away by the men who had brought me had already lost any idea that he was anybody at all. So I guess the name, and the identity, could come to me as easily as to anyone else.

  “About three weeks after I got to Harvard, I received a telegram saying that my ‘parents’ and my ‘sister’ had been killed in an automobile accident. How that was achieved, I couldn’t say. I don’t imagine it would have been too difficult to stage. Naturally, I didn’t return for the funeral. What they made of that back in Weatherford I haven’t any idea, and it no longer mattered what they thought.

  “For a couple of years after that I kept a check on the Fort Worth newspapers, just to see whether there was ever any news from Weatherford, and every so often I would read one of the names I had memorized—so-and-so, who had been Chester Storey’s intimate friend, had drowned in a fishing accident, or so-and-so, who had been Chester Storey’s godfather, had died after a sudden illness. Someone, I could only assume, was cleaning house.

  “They needn’t have bothered. In all the years since, I’ve never been near the place again.”

  . . . . .

  When Frank Austen and George Timmler went back up the stairs from the detention cells, it was already close to three in the morning. As much to get away from a strange feeling of unreality as to escape any possibility of being overheard, they went outside and started walking down the gravel driveway toward the main gate; it was a direction as good as any.

  “Did you believe him?” Timmler asked, breaking the silence.

  “Yes. No one would make up a story like that. He knows that we’ll kill him if he lies to us, and too much of it can be checked.”

  Austen stared straight ahead, his hands in his overcoat pockets. He gave the impression of being at a great distance from himself, like someone watching his own dream.

  “Then we have our hands full,” Timmler answered, kicking faintly at the gravel as he walked along. “Jesus. The White House Chief of Staff is a goddam Russian agent. They’ve put somebody in right under the President’s nose.”

  He was startled by the short, bitter bark of laughter that cut through the quiet like a beam of light, stopping just as suddenly as it had begun. He looked at Austen as if he expected to witness some terrible transformation, but there was nothing. Only a faint smile.

  Part Four - THE SEAL OF CONFESSION

  WITHIN the first twenty-four hours after listening to Storey’s recital, Austen made a series of decisions the weight of which he was to feel for the remainder of his life. From the first moment the character of his predicament was uncomfortably clear.

  “We can’t make a move now,” he said flatly, as if it were the most obvious fact in the world. “We have no idea what the Soviets have in mind, no idea at all, and if we spook them now we risk tempting them into something rash. Who knows what kind of edge they might imagine they have over us? Or really have?”

  “I think they’ve got in mind to con us into your boss’s precious treaty. I think they mean to blow our brains out.”

  Austen glanced at Timmler, who was walking beside him, still scuffing his shoes on the gravel driveway, and nodded. “I think you’re probably right.”

  But of course they couldn’t be sure. And so the first order of business had to be an attempt to discover just how badly the American intelligence establishment, that servant and dupe of their Constitutionally sa
nctioned masters, had been hoodwinked.

  “I keep thinking that it’s been over a year now,” Austen said glumly. “I keep thinking about all those daily briefing papers we’ve sent over to the White House, all those little chats I’ve had with the President over drinks and lunch. Everything we know about everything that’s happening in the wide world. . . We must be blown nearly everywhere. And all the garbage they’ve been able to feed us—all this time, they’ve known exactly how to get us to believe just about anything they want.”

  They walked on in silence for a few minutes, the only sound the grating of their footfalls on the driveway.

  “What will it take, George? That’s your line of country, not mine. Would it be possible to backtrack through all that muck and figure out where we really are? Can you pin down what they’ve been trying to hide from us? Is that possible at all?”

  “It’s possible,” Timmler answered, pursing his lips as he considered the mechanics of the problem; he was in his chosen element now. “They’ve got what they have to think is an unimpeachable source. Maybe we can turn that around on them.

  “The really hard part is going to be replenishing our networks inside Moscow. The others can wait, I suppose; they’ll have to. But we’ve got to have access to some information we can trust, if only for comparative purposes so we can have something to check our conclusions against. Now that we know what’s going on, I can go through the old reports and make some fairly solid guesses about what the Russians have been up to, but it isn’t possible to do everything by indirection. What it comes down to is that we need some new snitches.”