ALSO BY ROBERT LITTELL
The Company
Walking Back the Cat
The Visiting Professor
An Agent in Place
The Revolutionist
The Sisters
The Amateur
The Debriefing
Mother Russia
The October Circle
Sweet Reason
The Defection of A J. Lewinter
Copyright
This edition first published in the United States in 2003 by
The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.
Woodstock & New York
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Copyright © 1990 Robert Littell
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.
The paper used in this book meets the requirements for paper permanence as described in the ANSI Z39.48-1992 standard.
ISBN: 978-1-59020-904-2
For Ed Victor
… not a single absolute truth
but a welter of contradictory
truths (truths embodied in
imaginary selves called
characters) …
Milan Kundera
Contents
ALSO BY ROBERT LITTELL
Copyright
PART ONE: Walking Back the Cat
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
PART TWO: Whipping the Cat
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Part One
Walking Back the Cat
INSTRUCTIONS for the inlifting of MEN
… let our manners diftinguifh us from
our enemies, as much as the caufe
we are engaged in.
IN PROVINCIAL CONGRESS
at New York June 20th 1775
1
Rank has its privileges. One of them is to keep underlings waiting. Wanamaker was savvy enough to understand that this was the natural order of things; to not take it personally. He peered at the roman numerals glowing on his wristwatch, shrugged a shoulder stoically, tried the car radio again. Again all he got was static.
Sometimes it seemed as if all he ever got was static. Static about budgets being chiseled in stone from the upwardly mobile asshole who ran the Special Interagency Antiterrorist Working Group. Static from his subordinates on Operations Subgroup Charlie, who didn’t appreciate the relation between rank and privilege. Static from his contact in the superstructure about deadlines, as if Wanamaker didn’t know a deadline when he saw one; as if bellyaching about the occasional delay would make things run more smoothly.
Too much static could give a man ulcers, Wanamaker suspected. He could see himself filling in the Company form, in triplicate, requesting sick leave; under “Description of Malady” he would write “A terminal case of static.”
From the bowels of the underground garage came the sudden whine of a motor starting up. At last! Wanamaker stubbed out his Schimmel-penninck (he had given up giving up smoking the instant the love letter, anonymous, ominous, landed in his in-basket) and glanced at the elevator doors. Above them tiny lights began blinking like fireflies as the elevator started down. It stopped on the minus-four level. The silver doors parted. Two young men wearing loose-fitting sport jackets to conceal their shoulder holsters swept out and proceeded to secure the area. They checked the handful of government cars parked on the minus-four level. They checked the alcoves. They checked the emergency staircase. Then they checked Wanamaker. One of them beckoned with a forefinger. Wanamaker opened the door and spilled himself out of the car. The young man frisked him so thoroughly Wanamaker squirmed in embarrassment. Flashing a sliver of a smile, the young man nodded toward the elevator. Wanamaker started toward it.
Sucking on the gnawed end of a dead pipe, studying some notes scribbled in longhand on the back of an envelope, a thickset man dressed in a tuxedo slouched against one wall of the elevator. He noticed Wanamaker and reached into a pocket to turn up his hearing aid. More than one journalist had attributed his success in the superstructure to a convenient deafness; he had the knack of hearing what it suited him to hear, it was suggested, and not a syllable more.
“I assume this is important,” the man in the elevator told Wanamaker. No small talk, not a word about being an hour and a quarter late. “I have an after-dinner speech to deliver. The President is one of the guests.”
“We’ve got trouble,” Wanamaker announced. “Someone’s ticked to Stufftingle.”
The thickset man waited for him to go on so patiently that Wanamaker wasn’t sure he had been heard. He raised his voice. “I got a love letter in the interoffice packet today.”
“You don’t need to shout. It mentioned Stufftingle? It used the word?”
“It mentioned rods. It mentioned hair triggers. It mentioned wedges.”
“Only that? Nothing more?”
Wanamaker shrugged a shoulder in exasperation. “Rods, hair triggers, wedges are Stufftingle.”
“What do you make of it?”
“What I make of it is we have got to get to the bottom of this real quick or call the whole thing off.”
“Someone’s playing games with you,” the thickset man decided. “That kind of thing goes on around your shop, I’m told.”
“It happens,” Wanamaker conceded. “Somebody you rub the wrong way wants to get back at you. So he tries to make it seem as if you have a leak. On the other hand, it’s me that’s sitting out there on the limb and I’m not excited about taking the fall.”
The thickset man produced a gold and silver cigarette lighter and angled the flame into the bowl of his pipe. He sucked it into life, filling the elevator with a haze of vile-smelling smoke. “Let’s try to identify the author of your love letter before
we jump to conclusions,” he remarked.
Wanamaker made no effort to hide his lack of enthusiasm.
The thickset man realized Wanamaker needed stroking. “Before he died,” he said in a low voice, “the Director told me you were one of the handful of people at the Company who could be counted on. He told me you were one of us.”
“I am. You can.”
“He told me you were an artist at operations. He said you didn’t so much plan them as choreograph them. He said you could keep more balls in the air than a juggler.”
“I do what I’m paid to do. The difference between me and the next guy is I do it better.”
“Stufftingle is not just another operation. A great deal is riding on it.”
“It is. I know. Trouble is, we’re in no position to ask the Company to walk back the cat for us.”
“Walk back the cat?”
“Take the operation apart piece by piece. Find out where the leak comes from. Plug it.”
“Call in a freelancer,” the thickset man suggested. “Some retired talent who could use the action, not to mention the cash, and knows how to keep his mouth shut.”
Wanamaker thought about this. “There’s an admiral down in Guantánamo who’s done that kind of thing. I used to work for him. Ex-Naval Intelligence. Ex-Company counterintelligence. Eccentric as a hatter, but brilliant. He was brought in a couple of years ago to walk back the cat on that Soviet defector who skipped home to Moscow first chance he got. It was the Admiral who fitted the pieces together—who figured out the defector had been a double agent all along.”
“You won’t need to explain Stufftingle. You won’t need to mention me.” The sentences weren’t put as questions.
Wanamaker shook his head in vigorous agreement. Several flakes of dandruff drifted down toward his shoulders. “He’ll assume it’s a Company operation. Where is it written I have to straighten him out?”
“Keep me posted,” snapped the thickset man.
Wanamaker cranked an ingratiating smile onto his normally immobile features. Few people at his level dealt directly with someone who was not only in the superstructure, but a member of the President’s inner circle. If Stufftingle succeeded, Wanamaker’s star would soar. “Definitely. Count on it,” he replied.
“I do.” The thickset man reached into his jacket pocket and turned down the hearing aid. It was apparent from his expression that deafness had fallen like a curtain between him and Wanamaker.
“Well,” Wanamaker said to no one in particular. He shrugged a shoulder and backed out of the elevator. The two young men backed in. The silver doors slid closed. The motor started up. Over the elevator doors the fireflies began blinking again.
2
The shuttle from Guantánamo taxied to the bitter end of a remote runway at the Bethesda Naval Air Station. Portable steps were rolled up to the fuselage. A petty officer with a handlebar mustache cracked the door, then stepped aside deferentially. Hunched over like a parenthesis, Rear Admiral J. Pepper Toothacher (retired) appeared in the doorway. Listed on the plane’s manifest as a Navy dentist deadheading into D.C. for a symposium on wisdom teeth, he was in his late fifties, but his chalk-colored hair made him seem a dozen years older. His first wife (as he called her, though never to her face) had been after him for years to dye it, but the Admiral flatly refused; every white hair, he liked to say, represented a secret that would go to the grave with him.
Wearing spit-shined oxfords, aviator glasses with trifocal lenses and civilian sport clothes that might have fit him before he went on a macrobiotic binge, the Admiral had the lean, hungry look that comes from pecking cocktail peanuts at one happy hour too many; retirement was slowly boring him to death. With his sloping shoulders, his sunken cheeks, his mournful face, his pasty complexion, his bulging eyes that seemed to take in absolutely everything, he could have passed for a perfect Polonius spying from behind a silver arras; the archetypal fin de race nobleman who knew not only where the various bodies were buried, but what they had died of—and who had profited from their deaths and could be accused of murder if the need arose.
The Admiral sucked air into his lungs until his rib cage ached, then plunged down the steps and danced a little one-legged jig on the tarmac to celebrate his safe arrival back on earth. The celebration was cut short when he caught sight of the hulking figure of Chief Petty Officer M. Huxstep (also retired) leaning insolently against the door of a car pool Chevrolet. The Admiral organized the various limbs of his lanky body so that they would function more or less harmoniously and ambled over to Huxstep.
“Of all people,” the Admiral remarked.
“Small world,” Huxstep agreed.
The Admiral cocked his head. “What is the cube of one twenty-one?” he demanded.
Huxstep yawned. “Too easy,” he said.
“You’re playing for time,” the Admiral said.
“Don’t need time. One twenty-one cubed is one seven seven one five six one.”
“How about the cube root of 12,812,904?”
Huxstep, who always looked bored, managed to look more bored than usual. “The third power of twenty-three point four.”
The Admiral pouted in bewilderment. “How do you do it?”
“How does the Admiral tie his shoelaces?” Huxstep retorted. He indicated with an imperious toss of his head that the seaman deuce struggling with the Admiral’s two Vuitton suitcases was to deposit them in the trunk compartment. Toothacher favored the automobile with a baleful stare. “Don’t pretend this was the very best you could do,” he admonished Huxstep.
“I was instructed not to draw attention to the Admiral’s presence in Washington,” Huxstep said.
“You might have at least washed the beast.” The Admiral dusted the passenger seat with a handkerchief and settled uneasily into it, but pointedly left the door on his side of the car open. Huxstep, whose short cropped hair and eyes were the color of pewter, snorted loudly enough for the Admiral to hear him as he strode around to the passenger side and kicked it closed. He climbed in behind the wheel and gunned the motor. The Chevrolet lunged toward the gate in the chain link fence.
The Admiral nodded vaguely at the Marines in full battle dress guarding the gate, sniffed delicately at the interior of the car, checked the ashtray for butts, wrinkled up an incredibly Roman nose when he found one. He investigated the glove compartment and discovered Huxstep’s handgun hidden under the road maps. It was a Smith & Wesson. 357 Magnum, a weapon that punched a hole the size of a fist in anything it hit. “I see you are armed,” Admiral Toothacher noted. “Couldn’t you have selected something slightly more”—he racked his brain for the appropriate word—“discreet?”
“A derringer, for instance? Or a walking stick that opens into a sword?”
Toothacher sighed in frustration. “Another thing—you might have had the decency to give the sailor back there a hand with my bags.”
That was too much for Huxstep. “I would like to respectfully point out that the Admiral has been on the ground five fucking minutes and he has so far managed to complain about the car I am driving and the handgun I am carrying and the bags I did not help some sailor with the lowest fucking rank in the entire United States of America Navy put into the trunk.”
“If I really wanted to be picky,” the Admiral said sweetly, “I would comment on your sentence structure.”
Huxstep snorted again and tucked the stray hairs that appeared back up into his nostrils with delicate clockwise thrusts of his thick pinky.
The Admiral closed his eyes in pain. “Tidying up?” he baited Huxstep.
The driver glanced sideways at his passenger. “Fuck the Admiral.”
“Tch, tch,” cooed Toothacher. He caught Huxstep’s eye and batted both of his lids in a conspiratorial double wink.
Huxstep melted, cleared his throat, tried to swallow the emotion that welled up, failed. “I am glad to see the Admiral after all these years,” he mumbled awkwardly. “The truth is, when I heard the Admiral was com
ing, I volunteered to meet him.”
Toothacher nodded emphatically. “If I had known you were available I would have insisted on you as a condition of my coming.” He muttered under his breath, “What a fool I was not to specify the make of the automobile.”
Huxstep produced what, coming from him, passed for a laugh. “Just like old times,” he said. “The Admiral was always preoccupied with the perks.”
“Since when is it a crime for a man to know what he’s worth?” Toothacher asked defiantly.
“Since when,” Huxstep agreed affably.
Heading toward downtown Washington, Huxstep broke a silence. “So the Admiral is walking back another cat.”
“And who in heaven’s name planted that idea in your head?”
“I just assumed, the Admiral being here and all. And them laying on a car and driver.”
“Where are you taking me?”
“To meet the man I work for, Mister R for Roger Wanamaker.”
“Roger Wanamaker,” Toothacher repeated, narrowing his eyes to stir an almost photographic memory. He nodded carefully as it came to him. “He was my man Friday when I ran Naval Intelligence. Mid-thirties. The kind of face that normally comes equipped with a lisp. Weak chin. A nose with a knob on it. Broke it at Yale, if I recall, playing intramural squash. Disheveled hair full of static electricity and dandruff. Always overweight, always dieting; he used to eat low-calorie cottage cheese at his desk. I could tell which dossiers he’d seen because they had cottage cheese on them. He was the sloppiest individual I ever had the displeasure to work with. But the sloppiness masked an intellectual rigor. He collected details the way other men collected lint in their trouser cuffs, had a nose for the oddball operation, which is why I took him with me when I was kicked upstairs to Counterintelligence.”
Huxstep laughed under his breath. “I remember the Admiral saying something about misery loving company.”
“How’d you wind up in Wanamaker’s shop?” Toothacher asked.
“The Navy gave me the boot because of a dumb manslaughter conviction. I was at loose ends. I heard on the grapevine that Mister Wanamaker was recruiting for a hush-hush antiterrorist operation. You don’t mind I gave your name as a reference when I applied?”
The Once and Future Spy Page 1