The Once and Future Spy

by Robert Littell

  Wesker fitted wire spectacles over his large ears. The eyeglasses magnified his eyes and made him look as if he were leering. Grunting when he came across anything interesting, laughing out loud at times, he began reading through the pile of printouts that had accumulated overnight. “Here’s a nugget,” he said at one point. “Senator Woodbridge talks baby talk when he makes love.”

  “We knew that,” the Weeder said.

  “Well, lookee here. The wife of the cultural attaché, I. Krasnov, is having an affair with the wife of I. Kurchik, the electronics technician.”

  “That’s new. Add it to the pouch.”

  The Weeder punched an instruction into the keyboard and brought a “menu” up onto the screen of his terminal. The computer was listing new material under the heading Chinese Bin—intercepts from a pay telephone on the wall of a downtown Washington Chinese restaurant. The telephone was next to a booth where Savinkov and some of his colleagues regularly ate dinner. The Weeder typed in some call-up codes and waited. There was a whirring of tapes in the mainframe behind the partition in a corner of the loft. Dialogue appeared on the screen. The Weeder copied off a Russian word he didn’t know, thumbed through a Russian-English dictionary until he found it. “Ah, I see,” he said.

  “What do you see?” Wesker asked.

  “Remember Savinkov?”

  “The Savinkov who is KGB? The one who talks Latin to his wife to throw off the microphones?”

  “He’s arranging for one of his cipher clerks to sell us the February key to the embassy’s class seven messages. They’re obviously going to put out something they want us to read.” The Weeder penned a note to himself on a yellow index card. “We’ll dress that one up so it looks as if it came from a conventional intercept source. Our people will have to pay through the nose for the key so as not to tip off the Russians that we know about the operation.”

  “Then we’ll have to act on the information the Russians plant or they’ll suspect us of suspecting them of having planted it,” Wesker said brightly.

  The Weeder shook his head. “You’ve put it on backwards. We’ll have to be careful not to act on the information so the Russians won’t suspect us of reading their class seven codes.”

  “I don’t get it,” Wesker said. “They’ll know we’re reading their class seven codes because they’re selling us the key to them.”

  “But they don’t know that we know that they know we have the key.”

  Wesker groaned. “I think I prefer vacuuming. I’m starting to program the chauffeur’s home phone this morning. Any suggestions?”

  “Look for the usual,” the Weeder advised. “Odd words that could be codes for operations. Conversations in which nobody names names. Any reference to Savinkov. Noun-rich sentence structure.”

  Wesker groaned again. “Noun-rich sentence structure! What if they talk in verb-rich sentences to throw us off the scent?” He lowered his voice to a whisper and stared in mock alarm at the telephone on the table between them. “What if they’re listening to us listen to them?”

  “That’s why we’re working out of a loft in SoHo,” the Weeder said. “Even if they had the capability to do what we’re doing, it’d never occur to them to target this number. We’re just another mail-order house in another loft, as far as anyone knows.”

  “A mail-order house with an IBM mainframe, a two-hundred-and-fifty-phone trunk line, a reinforced steel shield welded on the inside of the door, an alarm system that goes off in some precinct house if anyone blinks after hours, and one of those new State Department cipher safes that needs a combination and a key to open it.” Shaking his head, Wesker went back to his printouts.

  The Weeder consulted the menu again, noticed new material under the heading of Farmer’s Almanac, which was the code he had assigned to Wanamaker’s Operations Subgroup Charlie. He punched in the appropriate call-up codes. Snatches of conversation began appearing on the screen. Two people were probably talking on the other side of the room from the telephone, which accounted for the computer getting only bits and pieces.

  “… feel bad about the American nationals who are there. Isn’t there some way …”

  “… out of the question, Parker. The last thing we want to do is open the door to speculation …”

  “… thinking out loud. I guess you’re …”

  “… I know I’m …”

  Wesker, across the table, swallowed a yawn. The only items that seemed to interest him were the ones with sexual overtones. He loved tuning in on people making love; he claimed that reading what they said to each other during the act was more arousing than watching. Right now all he had were people playing bridge. Two diamonds. Pass. Two hearts. Pass. Two no-trump. Pass. Three no-trump. Noun-rich sentences could be boring as hell. He saw the Weeder peering intently at his screen. “Anything sexy?” he asked hopefully.

  The Weeder said, “Savinkov is jerking off the assistant cultural attaché. All I’m getting is moan-rich sentences.”

  “You’re being ironic, right?” Wesker asked.

  “Right.”

  Another snatch of conversation flashed onto the Weeder’s screen.

  “Admiral Toothacher this. Admiral Toothacher that … it is a thrill just to be in the same room with you.”

  The Weeder read the line again to be sure he had gotten it right. What was Wanamaker’s old boss, Admiral Toothacher, doing for Operations Subgroup Charlie? Could Wanamaker have brought him in to walk back the cat on the leak? It wasn’t a pleasant thought. Toothacher was a formidable adversary. And he had an old score to settle with the Weeder. If the Admiral ever traced the leak back to its source, he would skin Sibley alive and nail his hide to the Company wall.

  “… paper trail.”

  “… paper trail … thin … never left this office.”

  “… naturally need to know …”

  “… out of the realm …”

  “… if there is a clock ticking.”

  “… by mid-March or call it off.”

  “How very poetic … to have the Ides of March as a dead …”

  “… at least know what code name your operation …”

  “… tingle.”

  “… tingle.”

  “… Stufftingle.”

  The Weeder stared at the screen. He felt himself being sucked into the heart of a mystery. What had started out as a prank had become a puzzle. The snatches of conversation raised more questions than they answered. What was the connection between rods and hair triggers and wedges, and someone named Parker worrying about American nationals? And then there was the code word Stufftingle. Chances were that Wanamaker had picked it out of the Company’s book of random code words. Still, it might be worth checking into. When selecting a code word for an operation, people sometimes used one that had significance because it was easier to remember.

  The Weeder keyed his computer to print out what he had seen on the screen and erase the original from the tape. Then he programmed it to scan Wanamaker’s future conversations for the word Stufftingle.

  Wesker, at his terminal, caught sight of the Weeder staring off into space. “You look as if you lost your best friend.”

  All he got for an answer was the frustrated grin of someone who knew less than he said.

  8

  The Weeder rang up his physicist friend from a pay phone that night. “Am I interrupting anything?” he demanded.

  “If I said yes, would you hang up?” Early asked.

  “I’d talk faster.”

  “Talk fast, then.”

  “Does the word Stufftingle ring any bells?”

  Early laughed into the phone. “You’ve been robbing graves again.”

  The Weeder force-fed some quarters into the slot and pressed his ear to the receiver.

  “You could count the people who recognize that word today on the fingers of one hand,” Early was saying. “Back in the early 1940s we had a gaseous diffusion plant at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, that produced the enriched uranium which wen
t into the wedges of the first atomic bombs. One of the physicists working on the project circulated a spoof describing the finished product produced at Oak Ridge as ousten-stufftingle, and the people who produced it as shizzlefrinks. It got quite a laugh at the time. Hello? Are you still on the line, Silas?”

  “I’m here.”

  “Ha! The moral of the story is that you aren’t the only one to go around armed with a sense of humor.”

  9

  Wesker had finished shredding the chaff and was pouching the wheat for the courier, who was due in fifteen minutes. “Funny about Savinkov having hemorrhoids and complaining about it in Latin,” he was saying. “Somehow you’d think a KGB station chief would be above that kind of thing.”

  “Hemorrhoids or Latin?”

  “Hemorrhoids, obviously.”

  “Hemorrhoids are not a character flaw,” the Weeder pointed out.

  “You’re being ironic again, right?”

  “Right. Why don’t you pack it in for the day,” the Weeder added. “I’ll zip up the pouch.”

  Wesker began slipping into a vast belted overcoat before the Weeder finished the sentence. He hooked enormous yellowish designer sunglasses over his floppy ears, pulled on a fore-aft Russian astrakhan and lowered the ear flaps so that they dangled over his jaw like medieval armor. He leered at his reflection in the mirror above the sink and, apparently satisfied with what he saw, lowered his head and charged the armor-plated door. He punched with his fist at the button that sent electricity flowing to the lock. The door sprang open and Wesker disappeared.

  The Weeder, who thought of himself as an artiste manqué, switched to a graphics program on his computer and began toying with the stylus. He drew a mushroom-shaped cloud coming out of the mouth of someone with a broken nose that had more than a passing resemblance to Wanamaker’s. Inside the cloud he wrote, in an elegant gothic script, the words Stufftingle and Ides of March.

  He glanced at the wall clock; the courier would be there any moment. The Weeder depressed a key. In an instant the high-speed laser printer had spit out the hooked nose and the mushroom cloud. The Weeder put on his fleece-lined gloves, tore off the printout and folded it into a plain white envelope. With a red grease pencil he printed in a child’s handwriting:

  R. Wanamaker

  Operations Subgroup Charlie

  Special Interagency Antiterrorist Working Group (SIAWG)

  A mischievous grin installed itself on the Weeder’s lips as he slipped the letter into a second envelope, which he sealed and addressed to Company Mail Room—Classified Material for Eyes Only Distribution. That meant the letter would be put into Wanamaker’s hot hands. He would go straight up the wall when he opened it. He’d swallow the soggy Schimmelpenninck that bobbed on his lower lip. He’d have a coughing fit, turn blue, experience chest pains, have difficulty breathing. An ambulance would be summoned. A mask would be fitted over his mouth and broken nose. Oxygen would be supplied. With any luck, last rites would be administered.

  Images of disaster multiplied in the Weeder’s head. It occurred to him that waiting all those years was what made it so sweet. Revenge was a meal that tasted best cold.

  10

  Wanamaker took Webb aside and lectured him about rank having its privileges. Webb swallowed his pride and moved out of his office, doubling up with Parker so that the Admiral would have a place to hang his hat. Toothacher personally presided over the purification of Webb’s cubbyhole of an office. “Kindly vacuum under the desk,” he instructed the black maintenance man who turned up in response to his urgent requests. “It might not be a bad idea to shake the rug out the window. Better still, take it with you when you leave. The ashtrays, the books on the shelves, the magazines on the coffee table can also go. The coffee table too. I don’t drink coffee. And kindly don’t forget to wash the windows and sterilize the desk top.”

  “Wouldn’t it be simpler if I removed the desk with the coffee table?” the maintenance man inquired with a straight face.

  “If you can replace it with a new one I would leap at the offer,” Toothacher cooed. “If not, moisten a cloth with some sort of detergent and scrub it squeaky clean.”

  The Admiral eventually settled warily into the only chair left in the room, scraped it up to the sterilized desk and started sorting through his notes. When Wanamaker had described the paper trail as “thin” he had been exaggerating. In fact it was almost nonexistent. The handful of written references to “rods,” “hair triggers,” “wedges,” “Stufftingle” and “Ides” had never traveled beyond the four incredibly soiled walls of Wanamaker’s inner sanctum, or so Wanamaker would have him believe. Wanamaker, Mildred, Parker and Webb at various times had access to the paper trail; each scrap of paper in Wanamaker’s battleship-gray safe bore the initials of anyone who read it. That seemed as good a place to start as any.

  The Admiral pulled a single sheet of typing paper from the middle of the pile in a drawer (never having been touched by human hands, it would be relatively germ free) and began to compose a chart. Down the left-hand side of the paper he entered the names of the four people involved in Stufftingle. Across the top he listed the dates at which various elements of the operation (rods, hair triggers, wedges, Stufftingle, Ides) had fallen into place. Across the bottom he put the dates the love letters had been delivered into Wanamaker’s clammy hands. Then he attempted to cross-check to see who had known what when. The result was disappointing. Parker, a specialist on getting people and things across Mideast borders undetected, had joined the Stufftingle team eighteen months before; he had known, according to the paper trail, about rods and hair triggers and wedges, but had never been let in on Ides. Mildred had been on sick leave (“female problems,” according to Wanamaker) when wedges, whatever they were, became operational. Webb, who had worked in the field with the anti-Khomeini Iranians before being posted back to Washington, had slipped a disc and been out of action when the element known as hair triggers was introduced.

  Wanamaker, on the other hand, had his initials on every scrap of paper, which meant that he was familiar with all the pieces. Which was to be expected since he was, after all, in charge of the operation. Was it possible that Wanamaker was writing the love letters to himself? The Admiral had seen odder things in his day.

  Toothacher set aside his chart and placed the first of the four thick dossiers in his in-basket on the desk. Perhaps the key to who had leaked Stufftingle was to be found not in the paper trail but in the biographies of the four principal players. One of them might be jealous of Wanamaker or hold a grudge against him for a slight, real or imagined. The Admiral would pore over the dossiers to see which of the four had crossed paths before. He would pry loose rocks and search for worms of treachery—the tiny discrepancy, the microscopic incongruity that would help him unravel the mystery. Insofar as there was only one truth, and it was knowable, he was determined to discover it.

  11

  Mildred looked up from a thick pile of Mideast intelligence summaries and watched as Huxstep ran the magnetic head back and forth over the felt that covered the conference table. His shirtsleeves were rolled up to his biceps, revealing part of a patriotic tattoo on each arm—”begun to fight” on his right arm, “Give me liberty or” on his left arm. Huxstep’s gestures were systematic. Mildred liked men who were systematic, who didn’t leave anything to chance. Out of the blue she asked him, “Is it true you can do funny things with numbers?”

  Huxstep kept his eyes glued to the needle on the meter. “Test me out?”

  Mildred pulled a pocket calculator from a purse that resembled a carpetbag and punched in some numbers. “Multiply 123456789 by 987654321,” she said.

  “That’s a piece of cake,” Huxstep said. “The answer’s 121932631-112635269.”

  Mildred glanced at her calculator. The window only accepted nine digits. She saw he had gotten the first nine numbers right. “What’s your trick?” she asked.

  “I don’t got a trick,” Huxstep insisted. “I seen right of
f if you multiply 987654321 by 81 you get 80,000,000,001, then multiply 123456789 by 80,000,000,001, which is child’s play, and divide the answer by 81.” Huxstep started to laugh under his breath, but stopped abruptly when he spotted the needle vibrating. “I got a bite!” he called.

  The Admiral and Wanamaker, working at Wanamaker’s desk, glanced across the room.

  Huxstep pinpointed the spot with sweeps of the magnetic head, then gingerly lifted the cloth and felt around with his fingertips. “Fuck,” he muttered. He held up a deformed paper clip.

  “Keep at it,” the Admiral ordered. He turned back to Wanamaker. “I traced the letter to the Company mail room, which is pretty much like tracing it to the Washington, D.C., central post office.”

  Wanamaker grunted; he had hoped for more. “That’s a dead end, then.”

  “Not quite a dead end,” Toothacher said. Wanamaker perked up, a smirk of anticipation pasted on his pudgy lips.

  At the conference table, Mildred was still trying to strike up a conversation with Huxstep. “You are obviously a jack-of-all-trades.”

  “I am a jackass-of-all-trades,” Huxstep corrected her, his eyes on the meter.

  “How so?” Mildred asked.

  “Well, I drive the Admiral around, don’t I? I take in, I take out, sandwiches, messages, burn bags. I organize things so the Admiral isn’t bored nights. Between chores I debug offices. But I don’t really enjoy my work. I do everything badly.”

  Mildred lifted her veil suggestively. Her voice seemed to lap against the conference table as if it were a shore. “If something is worth doing, it may be worth doing badly. What do you enjoy? What do you do well?”