by Gavin Lyall
"He must still want the whole thing stopped."
She raised her eyebrows. "I wish I agreed with you. Look at it this way: Track Two is now doing just what it was set up to do, in just the situation they foresaw: a weak British government getting too close to Moscow. If Mo liked the idea then, why shouldn't he like it now?"
Maxim chewed thoughtfully on something he had deeded to eat rather than take out and look at; he had chosen the hamburger. "Do you think the CIA could still be running it, then?"
"No, the old reasoning still holds. If Charlie had triggered it, there'd have been a big back-up of propaganda and so on. I think the British end somehow managed to start itself up-though I'm damned if I see how."
"What's the problem?"
"Because that's exactly what Charlie wouldn't want them to do: start anything without a clear directive from over here. And there's only one sure way to do that: recruit and train them individually, or in pairs, but never let any one of them see the whole list."
"So somebody must have got hold of the list."
"That could be our strongest point: that things are running out of control. But it depends on how much control the Companywants to have now…"
"Not just a list, though," Maxim went on. "They got hold of a cache of arms and other kit. That sounds like a base, somewhere. They wouldn't issue those things individually, I'd think. I mean, if one of them steps under a bus and you start valuing his estate for probate, Ullo, ullo, ullo, how much is a case of Russian grenades worth?"
Agnes grinned quickly. But Maxim was most likely right. Spreading such immediately incriminating material around was more risky than one truly safe house. "It's something we'd like to know, all right."
"You could ask."
Agnes was about to say scathingly 'Ask how?' but caught herself in time. "So now you go and tramp the streets changing your traveller's cheques into cash and then into traveller's cheques signed Winterbotham. Spread it around the banks-have you got both passports? Clever fellow. Think up a story why you've got cash and want cheques butdon't tell it until they drag it out of you. Sign of guilt. What the hell business is it of theirs? You're innocent, remember."
25
This time there was no waiting at the reception desk; Agnes carefully avoided the girl's eye as she was shown straight through to Magill's office.
The door to the inner room was open and Mo was standing watching a newscast on a TV set in the far corner, sipping from a cut-glass tumbler.
"Hi, sweetie, like a drink?" He mixed her a dry martini from a collection of decanters on a silver tray-nothing so arriviste as a drinks cupboard or private bar-set on a small table. The other furniture was a couple of wing chairs, a single-ended Victorian chaise-longue and a fruitwood dressing-table. The room was decorated in quiet tabby-cat colours, with style-and a purpose. She sipped her drink.
"I did some thinking," Mo said, "and I figured I didn't need to call DC after all. Maybe I should tell you about one man. D'you want to hear?"
"I'm all ears."
"Not all, sweetie, not all. " They sat in the wing chairs. "It goes back to the old OSS days and the crusade we were running against Hitler, along with your SOE and Dot Tuckey and people like that. Like Arnie Tatham. Did you ever meet with him?"
"The name sounds… Didn't he get killed by Italian terrorists?"
"Right. I first met with Arnie, it must've been '44, I didn't get to know him well then, but he came outofthatwith one hell of a name as a field man. He was a natural, you find them sometimes, if you're lucky, and from the damnedest backgrounds. Most anywhere except where you'd go looking. Like Arnie: his old man was rector of an Episcopalian church in small-town Illinois. I think his mother died when he was young and he grew up withmore books than friends, maybe more Shakespeare than Mark Twain. I guess if there hadn't been the war, Arniewould be a professor at some small college writing monographs on how many times Hamlet called Ophelia 'a dumb broad'."
"Mo…"
But Magill was already grinning to himself. "Okay -but did you ever reread Hamlet as power politics, déstabilisation, covert operations?"
"And assassination."
"Plenty of it. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern would be working for The Mob, these days. And did you wonder how an Elizabethan audience would take allofthat? I'd say they loved it-and they understood it. If that was what you did to keep control, that was what was needed. "
"So Tatham became a top field man by reading Shakespeare. And was he running Track Two?"
"He set it up, I just ran interference for him, trying to keep your people looking the wrong way with talk about opening up Winter Garden again. I guess it worked, too -until you figured it out." Agnes noted the sly flattery and smiled. "But if you're going to ask me did I know who he recruited, no I didn't. I never wanted to."
Agnes absorbed that and found that she believed it: Mo had been thirty years in intelligence work, which trains up a determination not to know some things quite as strong as the desire to know others. "And Tatham got himself killed in Italy-what? four, five years ago?"
"Right. He retired over there: his marriage had gone, and so had his daughter's"-and so had Magill's first marriage, she knew: marriages in the secret world had a high casualty rate-"and she went over to keep house for him. " He took her glass and freshened their drinks. "Then some asshole of a journalist printed a story that he was still working for the Company and a couple of weeks later the Red Brigade snatched both of them. It was the usual stuff: demands for money and release of terrorist prisoners… I don't know how much pressure we put on for the police to get off their butts and do something. I wasn't with the Company any more, and Arniedidn't have much in the way of friends left in DC, so… Anyhow, they killedhim. In front of his daughter; they made her take pictures of his body… Then the cops did do something, but I don't know if it was a tip-off or dumb luck: they raided some farmhouse up in Tuscany and found her still alive. They charged some people with the murder, a year later. It was that big show trial, everybody charged with everything, the Bologna train station bombing, Moro's murder, you remember it… I don't recall if they got a conviction for Arnie. What did it matter?"
Agnes sipped her drink, assuming that Magill was watching her face for signs of disappointment. "That sounds like the end of the story, then."
"That's the end of it, sure. What I haven't told you yet is the beginning. When the war ended, the OSS was busted up: they hung on to a few units-there was a whole alphabet soup of SI, SSU, X-2, CIG, for a rime-but most of us just went home to build a brave new world with law books and Shakespeare. We figured the United Nations could handle the rest.
"So then it started over." He stood up, ticking off the events with his glass against the fingers of his left hand. "The Soviet takeovers in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland. The Berlin blockade. First Soviet nuclear test. Mao in China. The Korean war. And when we could see some of these coming, we didn't have the resources, the agencies, to head it off. That's when Central Intelligence really got started. "
"A new crusade?" Agnes said quietly.
"I guess we saw it that way: I did, for sure. That's why I came back when they called. But I'd say a crusade was something you came home from, for Arnieit was a way of life. He was a believer. Not a preacher, just a quiet believer. You know one of the things he believed in? He believed in England-well, Episcopalian is your Church of England, and I think his grandfather was an immigrant back around the end of the century.
"Now when I say he believed in England, I don't mean your thatched cottages and warm beer, he didn't think the place wascute, not just his grandfather's birthplace. I wonder if Arnieeven bothered to go there. No, he thought of England as Magna Cartaand Shakespeare and Churchilland Milton and the rule of law-a lot of great ideas and ideals that maybe you were going to just crumple and throw away." He had been pacing the room with slow, majestic energy, ending by peering down through the Venetian blind at Madison below. "That's what made him a natural for Crocus."
&nb
sp; "Crocus?"
After a moment, Magill said: "Yes. We called it that, so if it leaked out it would get mixed up with the old Winter Garden names." He sounded annoyed at himself for letting that slip, and Agnes wondered how much was genuine: the codename, the slip, the annoyance. You had to think like that with Magill. Tatham might have been a natural, but Magill had been the achiever in the secret world.
He went on flatly: "So I fixed things for him-he was posted to Germany; we didn't want him in London having to ride the cocktail circuit." That was standard practice: where possible, you ran a group in one country from a nearby one. Most Soviet espionage in the USA was directed from Canada and Mexico. "But he came through London when… when he needed to."
"And you never saw the Crocus List?"
"Like I say."
"But somebody at Langley saw it. If the time came, they'd be directing operations from there and they'd want to know just who they were directing, where they were placed in British society-everything. And somebody must have taken over when Tatham resigned."
Magill shook his head slowly. "No… I didn't tell you how he left, yet. It was just after Nixon fired Dick Helms and was dumping all over the Company to get us to take the rap for Watergate, and Congress was hearing words like assassination and setting up committees and… like everybody was pissing into our bathtub and hoping to stir up a U-boat. At one time it looked like everything we'd done in twenty years was going to be spread out on the table-and that included setting up a group to destabilise our closest ally, if it got needed. Now, do you think anybody who wasn't already tied in to that wanted to get tied in, at that time?"
Shaking his big head slowly, he lowered himself on to the chaise-longue and sat back carefully. "I said, I said it to Arnie, we had two choices: that file on the committee table, or Crocus had never happened and surely wasn't happening now. If we tried to keep it alive, we had an open flank: some guy trying to save his own ass by telling them: 'Jeez, if you think I did bad things, just look at what Maguíand Tatham were doing in London.'Arniewas ready to take that risk, but I wasn't: I'd been the one at London station. I told him, either that file went up the Hill, maybe with the list he'd recruited, or it all went in the shredder."
"Not much of a choice," Agnes said.
"No, I had him by the balls. It wasn't the only operation that went into the shredder at that time-you could figure that for yourself. So, Arniewent to London and closed it off, wiped our prints off everything, and I shut down the Langley end. And from then on, it had never happened. Only, he never spoke to me again. He'd been all set to save England and I'd stopped him. He put in his resignation, took out his pension contributions and walked."
"But with the Crocus List in his head."
Magill turned the heavy glass in his hand, studying the reflections on his drink. "I'd assume he couldn't forget it if he wanted to. It would only be ten names, maybe. Arniedidn't think that big was beautiful, he believed small was secure-and Crocus had to be secure; the blowback potential was massive. Natch, if the operation had gotten the go-code, that List would only have been part of it. The big push would be diplomatic propaganda, screwing the pound sterling on the money markets… mugging the Mother of Parliaments would've been quite a job." He smiled lopsidedly.
"Only now, your Crocus List is trying it all on its ownsome."
"Not mine, sweetie, nor the Company's neither. I told you: it never happened."
"Why did you leave the Company, Mo?"
The big man sighed heavily. "Maybe I'd stopped believing, started wondering if things couldn't have been just a bit different. Maybe I'm just saying I wish we hadn't donethe things that went wrong-old men think like that, kid themselves along. You can't regret everything. So… I hung in there another year, shredding a few more files, saying maybe it was time I went back to the law, and when I got this offer… I took my medal and they all cried. And I cried for Arnie, because he'd trusted me." He sighed again. "Sweetie, you are looking at an old moose who just can't figure out where he took the wrong trail, and he'll never get back up that hill again. Maybe I should just've stayed here and untangled Mrs Wertenheimer's fight with her landlord. That, I could'vegot right."
Despite herself, Agnes smiled with real warmth at the old crocodile -Maguíwas never a moose-shedding genuine crocodile tears. She believed in most of what he'd been saying; she had no idea of how much he believed himself.
Magill put on a brave, wry smile. "And how's about you? Is there still a crusade out there someplace?"
"Perhaps. Perhaps I'm on one now… I like to think so."
He reached and took her hand. "That's what I like about you. You belong to the good times… there were some, had to be. Tell me we can still win more than we lose."
"You and me together, Mo? Strictly under the UKUSA agreement?"
He threw his head back with laughter, then hauled her to her feet and hugged her to him. "I should've thought of invoking that long since. Yes, you and me. "
Her body had stiffened for a moment, but she made herself relax and huddle against him. This was why she was there; this, and something more… "Why, Mister Magill," she reacted with over-prim innocence.
"You and me," he repeated, smiling reassuringly. "The ones who understand crusades. D'you want…?" He nodded at a door that must be the bathroom.
"Won't be a minute." She took her big shapeless handbag with her. She was unsurprised to find a long silk bathrobe, neither masculine nor feminine, hanging on the back of the door. When she had undressed and put it on, without catching her own eye in the mirror, she went back to the other room and dumped the handbag on top of thedressing-table. As an afterthought, she routed in it to find her cigarettes and lighter, leaving it sloppily open.
Afterwards, she sat in one of the chairs and lit a cigarette, still in the bathrobe; Magill seemed to like his women never quite naked. He stayed stretched on the chaise-longue.
"Fix yourself another drink, sweetie."
"No thanks. It's either too early or too late."
"Never too late… didn't we just prove that?" He chuckled contentedly. "We should have got together a long time ago, when I wasn't an old man."
"You aren't old, Mo," she reassured him.
"Not with you, maybe…"
There had to be something left on the sideboard for her: she had earned it. But she was going to have to ask for it.
"Mo-where did the Crocus List get its training?"
"Germany. We had so many military establishments over there, the Company had its own place, Camp King close off Frankfurt, I guess most of it would have been there. Good practice for them getting there: fly to Paris, make contact with somebody who gives them a new passport, find your own way to Frankfurt."
"They must have done some in Britain. "
"I guess." Magill stretched lazily."Arnie would'vefixed it."
"And a base to store weapons and stuff. That's something you must have known about. It would have had to be protected by some sort of front for the gold chain to run through."
Magill just said: "Long time ago. All shredded and wiped clean."
"Then how did it self-start?"
"Just a clutch of Britons getting together in a pub, nothing to do with Langley. "
"Except for what you've told me."
"We've been socialising. You came up to socialise, we socialised."
Agnes clenched her teeth, recognising a dead end. "And what happened to Tatham's daughter?"
"Sure, her… last I heard, she was living in the old family house in Illinois. Matson, Illinois."
"Did she go back to the name Tatham?"
"No, I think she stayed with her married name. Hall. Clare Hall."
That was too easy; Agnes was immediately suspicious.
Magill went on: "You could write her. Tell you what: I'll give her a call and say you'll be writing, okay?"
"I might even drop in and see her."
"Well now, about that… with the UKUSA agreement and all… You just write her."
>
"While time goes by."
"Sweetie, I wouldn't want for you to get in a hassle with our government. That wouldn't help a career-oriented girl at all."
"Damnit, Mo, this is happeningnow. Something your God-fearing Arnie Tatham set up and is happeningnow. Because somehow that List got away. How?"
"I shredded it myself, without looking at it. You look great when you're mad. "
That made Agnes even madder, because she knew her friendly snub-nosed face couldn't cope with anger. She grabbed her handbag and went through to the bathroom.
When she got back she had put on not just her clothes but the cheerful little-girl smile that suited her far better.
'TUbe away."
Magill was mostly dressed, too. "Be seeing you, sweetie. Next time you're in town, don't forget old Mo."
"Never." She reached and pecked his cheek.
"Off to find your soldier friend?"
"That's right."
"Seems a nice boy."
Thank you, Mo, she thought: that'll do nicely. She had hoped to end on a note of pure hatred.
26
She was meeting Maxim at Pennsylvania Station, to take the Amtrak Metroliner back to Washington. For no special reason except that it was something new to show him, and it avoided the long grind out to the airport, the brief shuttle flight, and another cab queue. Airlines were brisk morning things; in the afternoon, you drifted home by train.
She bought first-class tickets and still had half an hour to spare. She found a phone booth in the shapeless concourse and called Magil J's office.
"Sweetie, what can I do for you that I didn't already? If there's anything I forgot, put it down to old age and I'll try and remember next time." If there was any post-coitaltristesseabout Mighty Mo Magill, his lifetime in covert operations hid it well.