The Once and Future Spy

by Robert Littell

  Huxstep surveyed the upper half of her face. Little lines fanned out from the corners of her eyes. Invisible eyebrows, plucked down to the bone, arched in curiosity. “Before I joined the Navy,” he said, “I worked in another circus—a real one. I did arithmetic tricks. People would shout out problems and I’d solve them in my head. Wednesdays I filled in for the fire breather—I’d swig kerosene and light a match and singe the eyebrows off the ones who looked at me the wrong way.”

  Mildred, impressed, gushed, “You can breathe fire?”

  Huxstep’s face screwed up into a crooked smile. “Aside from numbers, what I like, what I do well, is violence.”

  Mildred’s tongue flickered at her upper lip. She snapped the veil back over her eyes. “Chacun à sa faiblesse,” she said in a tone husky with sensuality.

  “I don’t speak nothing but English,” Huxstep muttered. “Even that the Admiral don’t think I speak good.”

  Across the room the Admiral was telling Wanamaker, “Whoever composed these love letters works for the Company. How else could he—or she—have gotten access to the interoffice pouching system?”

  Wanamaker shook his head in bewilderment. “Who? Who? Who? Who? Who?”

  “Let’s come at the problem from another direction,” the Admiral suggested. “Let’s concentrate on motive. Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?”

  “You have an idea?”

  “It could be you who is sending these love letters.”

  This took Wanamaker by surprise. His expression that was expressionless evaporated. “Me? Why would I do it?”

  “You might be trying to create an excuse to cancel an operation that you have no confidence in, or stomach for, in a way that wouldn’t indicate to your handlers in the Company hierarchy any lack of nerve.”

  “If I wanted to cancel, I’d cancel. Period. My reputation isn’t riding on this.”

  “Or it could be any of your people—Mildred over there, or Parker, or Webb. One of them may have qualms, moral or operational in origin, and be trying to head off Stufftingle without looking like a left-leaning card-carrying fellow-traveling wimp.”

  Wanamaker thought about this for a moment. Presently he said, “All three consider me a closet middle-of-the-roader. They are rabid. What we are doing doesn’t go far enough for them. So that’s not the answer.”

  The Admiral tried another tack. “Whoever is sending you these love letters could just as well be sending them to the Company Director, or the White House, or The Washington Post, with little arrows pointing to Operations Subgroup Charlie, SIAWG. But he’s not doing that. He’s sending them to you.”

  “Which means?”

  “Which could mean he’s not at all sure what rods and hair triggers and wedges really mean and is just doing it to annoy you. Or he has an inkling and is trying to head you off without bringing the roof down on the Company.” The Admiral turned to stare at what sky he could see through the grime of the windows. “Or all of the above,” he said more to himself than to Wanamaker. “Or none of the above. Or any combination thereof.”

  At the conference table Huxstep started packing the magnetic head and the meter into a black Plexiglas case. “If there’s a bug in this room,” he called across to Toothacher, “I’ll eat it.”

  Parker, a sour-faced, sour-breathed man in his early forties, pranced into Wanamaker’s inner sanctum carrying the leather interoffice mail pouch. He pulled an envelope from it and dropped it onto the desk between Wanamaker and the Admiral. Printed on the outside of the envelope, in a child’s unsteady scrawl, was

  R. Wanamaker

  Operations Subgroup Charlie

  Special Interagency Antiterrorist Working Group (SIAWG)

  Mildred, who had come up behind Parker, stared down at the letter in horror. Wanamaker, expressionless, slit it open with a finger and, using a soiled handkerchief, extracted a sheet of computer printout paper. He flattened it on the desk. Inside a mushroom-shaped cloud, coming out of the mouth of someone with a broken nose, were the words Stufftingle and Ides of March.

  “He knows the code name of our operation,” Wanamaker moaned.

  “He knows the date too,” Parker noted.

  “And there are no bugs, no microphones in the room,” Mildred said in total bafflement.

  “None,” Huxstep called across from the conference table. “Not one.

  “This is getting curiouser and curiouser,” the Admiral admitted.

  “Curiouser and curiouser,” Huxstep muttered, loud enough for Toothacher to overhear. “And the Admiral accuses me of not speaking the King’s English!”

  12

  Wanamaker nodded to the two young men in loose-fitting sport jackets who stood guard on either side of the door to the men’s room. Then he lifted his arms over his head. One of the young men began to pat him down.

  Wanamaker rolled his eyes and rocked his head in mock boredom. “I am not armed,” he said.

  “We are not looking for weapons,” the second young man told Wanamaker. “We are looking for tape recorders. We are looking for microphones.”

  “I am not wired either,” Wanamaker said.

  “There is no such thing as being too careful,” observed the young man who was frisking Wanamaker. He stood up and snapped his head in the direction of the door. Wanamaker pushed through it. A haze of vile-smelling tobacco smoke filled the white-tiled room. The thickset man was wringing his hands dry under a hot air nozzle. The rush of air ceased abruptly. Spotting Wanamaker, the thickset man reached into his pocket and turned up the hearing aid. “In a nutshell, what has the Admiral come up with?” he asked.

  “In a nutshell, nothing. Zero. Zilch.”

  “He must have an inkling, an intuition, the beginnings of a theory,” he insisted.

  “He thinks maybe I’m sending the love letters to myself because I don’t have the stomach to go through with it.”

  “Are you?”

  Wanamaker sneered.

  “I’ve been quietly nosing around,” the thickset man announced. “The oversight people don’t appear to be on to anything out of the ordinary. As far as I can determine, the congressional pulse is normal.”

  “That’s a comfort,” Wanamaker said sarcastically. “Because my pulse isn’t normal. I got a new love letter in the mail yesterday.”

  Again the thickset man waited with seemingly infinite patience for Wanamaker to continue.

  Wanamaker hated dealing with people who had perfect control of their emotions. He couldn’t resist asking, “Don’t you want to know what it said?”

  “Am I wrong in assuming you intend to tell me?”

  Wanamaker shrugged a shoulder. “It said Stufftingle; it said Ides of March. Whoever sent the love letter knows the code name of the operation and the date.”

  The thickset man sucked on his pipe and exhaled into Wanamaker’s face. The aroma of tobacco overpowered the odor coming from the camphor tablets in the urinals. “I see,” the thickset man finally said.

  “What is it you see?” Wanamaker asked.

  “I see that you are dealing with an isolated person who, for some reason as yet unbeknownst to us, has decided to bait you and you alone. If he had gone to The Washington Post, we would be reading about Stufftingle in the newspaper. If he had gone to the Director or the oversight people, you would have been called on the carpet by now. No. No. The thing is not to lose your nerve. There’s still three weeks before the deadline—plenty of time for the Admiral to get to the bottom of it.”

  “That’s easy for you to say. It’s my head that’s on the platter.”

  “We always foresaw the possibility of something going wrong—of the operation being traced back to you. You would of course deny everything, and as there is no paper trail, who could prove you wrong?”

  “Who?” Wanamaker agreed eagerly. He liked to think he knew the answer.

  “If worse came to worst you were prepared to fall on your sword.”

  “Not eager. But prepared,” Wanamaker confirmed.

 
; “The late Director often spoke about you. If I told you what he said, your ears would burn.”

  Wanamaker understood he was being buttered up, but he found the experience pleasant anyhow. “I liked him a lot too,” he said.

  The thickset man turned reverential. He might have been pledging allegiance. “We owe it to him,” he said. “We owe it to his memory.”

  Wanamaker nodded in grudging agreement.

  13

  It was the one weekend in two when the Weeder didn’t have visitation rights with Martin. So he spent the morning drowning his aching emptiness in history. He wandered around an outdoor flea market lusting after a pre-Revolutionary powder horn and a Pennsylvania rifle engraved with the initials of the German-immigrant gunsmith who made it and a narrow truckle bed and a collection of Continental coins and a worn leather portmanteau with the date 1776 embossed on it. He almost bought a copy of Frederick’s Instructions to His Generals but abandoned the idea when he discovered the asking price. Reluctantly. Washington, the Weeder remembered, had kept a copy of Frederick’s Instructions on his desk during the battles of Long Island and, later, Harlem Heights. The Weeder wondered if Nate had noticed the book when he was summoned to the Commander-in-Chief’s headquarters. Knowing Nate, knowing his love for books, he thought it more than likely. The Weeder made a mental note to check if the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library had a copy of Frederick’s Instructions next time he got up to Yale.

  At mid-morning the Weeder headed south toward SoHo and the loft. Even though it was Sunday he couldn’t resist seeing if his computer had come up with anything interesting on Farmer’s Almanac. Wanamaker often worked Saturdays and sometimes late into Saturday night; he was one of those people who had to be pried away from his desk. Operation Stufftingle consumed most of his working hours, most of his thoughts; all (if you read between the computer’s neatly typed lines) of his passion. But what was he up to? Operations Subgroup Charlie, the Weeder knew, was keeping track of a handful of terrorist cells in the Middle East; almost all the chitchat that the Weeder had picked up when he first programmed his computer to eavesdrop on Wanamaker dealt with details of various terrorist groups: where they got their money or their arms or their marching orders. But when Wanamaker and Parker and Webb and a woman called Mildred were alone, the conversations had taken another turn. In the beginning there had been a lot of airy right-wing rhetoric. “America,” one of the early Wanamaker intercepts had said, “occupies some hypothetical middle ground in international disputes, feebly supporting the side we want to win, feebly opposing the side we want to lose.” “What we have to do,” another person had chimed in, “is commit ourselves to the hilt even if it means taking risks.” “Bite the bullet,” someone had agreed, “set matters right.” “Why become a world power if we are afraid to wield that power so that the world functions in a way that is congenial to us?” someone else had asked.

  Eventually the theoretical discussions had given way to something more concrete. The Weeder had picked it up the very day he had gotten the bright idea of programming the computer to register noun-rich sentences. The words rods and hair triggers and wedges had leapt off the printout page. For days Wanamaker could talk about little else. The Weeder had assumed that rods and hair triggers had to do with guns, that wedges were some sort of plastic explosive. It seemed as if Wanamaker’s Operations Subgroup had stumbled across a terrorist assassination plot. And the Weeder had stumbled across Wanamaker stumbling across it.

  The idea of targeting his computer on Wanamaker had come to the Weeder after he had run into him at a Yale reunion the previous spring. The Weeder had been staring out at the sea of faces in the lecture hall when he spotted Wanamaker in a back row. To hide his confusion he had looked down at his three-by-five index cards spread out on the lectern. Sentences were splashed across them as if they had spilled from tubes of pigment. Phrases trickled down the margins. There was a secret code of asterisks and arrows and underlined words to remind him that some detail was particularly juicy, that it went to what he thought of as the heart of a matter. When the Weeder was still an undergraduate at Yale, a professor of Colonial military history had caught a glimpse of his raw notes and had concluded he would never amount to much as a historian; too unfocused to be scholarly, he said, too willing to fill historical gaps with figments of his imagination. If only the professor, long buried, could have seen him lecturing to this gathering of alumni at a class reunion.

  “Which brings me to what we don’t know,” the Weeder had heard himself saying. “We have a fairly complete picture of what happened to the subject of my study before September fifteenth. We certainly know what happened to him on the twenty-second. But the week between the two is missing—it’s a blank, a black hole in history. Where did he go during the missing week? Whom did he contact? What, if anything, did he accomplish? I have discovered a hint buried in an old orderly book that codes were involved, which would suggest that a message might have been sent back. I’ve also come across reminiscences written many years after the events in question by one of the subject’s brothers, Enoch. In it he refers to someone in Brooklyn whom Nate was supposed to get in touch with, a patriot who would provide him with a cover story—Nate would pretend to be an itinerant artisan boarding with families while he repaired shoes. Enoch appeared to know exactly what had happened to his brother during the missing week and claimed to have gotten the information from A. Hamilton in a letter that has unfortunately been lost. I am hot on the trail of the A. Hamilton letter, as well as any record that may have been kept by the patriot in Brooklyn. With their help I hope to solve one of the great mysteries of American history—to tell the world what happened to the subject of my study during the missing week.”

  There had been applause. Nothing to register on the Richter scale, but polite. The professor who had invited the Weeder to give the lecture had lunged forward to shake his hand. Collecting his index cards on the lectern, the Weeder had glanced at his former roommate, Wanamaker, in the last row.

  He was stifling a yawn.

  Once again the Weeder had been struck by the tendency of people who haven’t seen each other for long periods to pick up, emotionally speaking, precisely where they had left off.

  He and Wanamaker had roomed together in Branford College until the incident; the accident; the murder. Wanamaker, afterward, had put out his hand and said he hoped there would be no hard feelings. Trying the capsules had been her idea, he explained. He merely told her where she could find some. If he hadn’t helped her, somebody else would have. As for what happened to her well, nobody could have foreseen that; nobody could have taken precautions.

  If the Weeder had been hoping to avoid Wanamaker at the reunion, he ran out of luck after the alumni luncheon under the blue-and-white striped awning. By coincidence they bumped into each other near the statue of Nate outside Connecticut Hall, the one with his feet tied at the ankles, his wrists tied behind his back, his fists clenched—in fear? in anger? in exhilaration (the Weeder’s pet theory, unproven) at the prospect of putting one over on the enemy?

  “That was an interesting talk you gave this morning,” Wanamaker remarked.

  “I didn’t think you heard a word I said,” the Weeder retorted.

  “Actually, I didn’t. I was just being polite.” Wanamaker hadn’t been able to cap the giggle that bubbled to the surface.

  “Well,” the Weeder said, “everyone steps out of character now and then.” He eyed Wanamaker suspiciously. He knew that Wanamaker worked for the Company. As new recruits, their paths had crossed during basic training at the Farm; they had even found themselves in the same classroom when the famous Admiral Toothacher turned up for three days of guest lectures on the fundamentals of intelligence methodology. “So what governments are you stabbing in the back these days?” the Weeder asked Wanamaker as they stood in front of the statue of Nate.

  Wanamaker, suddenly expressionless, was all business. “What’s your clearance?”

  “High enoug
h so I can know if the President can know.” The Weeder noticed Wanamaker’s clothes. He had dressed his squat American body in a rumpled Italian suit. As far as the Weeder could see, neither did anything for the other.

  “Sorry,” Wanamaker shot back. And he flashed his smug mailorder smile that never failed to set the Weeder’s teeth on edge.

  “Maybe I’ll ask around,” the Weeder said. He would have given anything to wipe the smile off Wanamaker’s face.

  “Maybe you won’t ask around,” Wanamaker snapped in annoyance.

  “What’ll happen if I do? What’ll happen if I find out? Will the world come to an end? Or even better, your career?”

  “If you were to find out”—other members of the class of 1973 were approaching so Wanamaker lowered his voice—”I suppose I’d have to get you murdered.”

  It was a challenge if the Weeder ever heard one. Like Nate, there was never one he wouldn’t rise to. It had taken the Weeder two months to discover that Wanamaker had been farmed out to an interagency working group; another month to learn about the existence of Operations Subgroup Charlie; several more weeks to get hold of the subgroup’s telephone number (the Weeder finally wormed it out of a secretary in Disbursing who believed the story about Yale wanting to offer Wanamaker an honorary degree).

  At which point the Weeder had slipped Wanamaker’s phone number onto the list that his IBM mainframe was monitoring.

  14

  The streets of lower Manhattan were teeming with New Yorkers who had seeped out of their apartments at the first hint of sunshine. Most of them, the Weeder noticed, were going around in twos; he couldn’t help thinking that from a historical point of view, it was curious that the basic social unit of Western civilization had become the couple. In older, more heroic times, men had been able to validate their maleness in ways that had nothing to do with women: hunting, fighting, voyages of exploration, or in Nate’s case, confronting death with courage. Nowadays it appeared as if most men validated their maleness by seducing women. Which meant that no matter how the deed was dressed up, seduction was essentially a self-serving activity. The women the Weeder had been intimate with in his life—his ex-wife for one, the half dozen or so who had come before and after her also—seemed to have sensed this; seemed to have held part of themselves back, as if the principal sentiment they had for the men in their lives was resentment.