The Once and Future Spy

by Robert Littell

  It was an odd trend of thought for a sunny Sunday morning. Were the Weeder’s anonymous love letters to Wanamaker his way of getting back at him, seventeen years after the fact? Or was there more to it than met the eye? Was the Weeder—laboring away in his SoHo cubbyhole on a project far from the mainstreams of history, and notably unsuccessful in establishing long-lasting relationships with the women in his life—was he validating his maleness by jousting in the modern manner with an old foe? Was he taking out his frustrations on someone who was doing roughly the same thing he was doing, and for the same employer? Or as Admiral Toothacher used to say when he outlined alternative scenarios in his course on the fundamentals of intelligence methodology: All of the above, or none of the above, or any combination thereof.

  In short: Whose truth? Which truth?

  The Weeder was still mining this vein of thought as he keyed his computer and brought the menu up onto his screen. It had been a slow night. There was an interesting item in the Chinese Bin; Savinkov had discovered that the FBI had staked out a dead letter drop of his behind the radiator in the men’s room at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. The Weeder weighed the information for a moment, decided not to disseminate it. The last thing in the world he wanted was for the FBI to call off the stakeout. Savinkov might notice the stakeout had been canceled and conclude that the FBI knew that he knew the dead drop had been compromised, at which point Savinkov, an old pro, would suspect his conversations were being overheard.

  The Weeder punched another code into his computer, calling up the new material in Farmer’s Almanac. There were pinpoints of light on the screen. Letters appeared. Words began to coalesce into phrases, sentences.

  “Who? Who? Who? … Who?”

  “Why? Why? … Why? Why?”

  “Me? Why would I do it?”

  “… any of your people … qualms, moral or operational.”

  “… not the answer.”

  “Or all of the above. Or none … Or any combination …”

  The Weeder smiled. That would be Admiral Toothacher speaking.

  “He knows the code name …”

  “He knows the date …”

  “… curiouser and curiouser.”

  There was a pause as the computer scanned. The Weeder was hardly aware of the whirring of the tapes coming from behind the partition. More words began to appear on the screen.

  “… target …”

  “… center at Kabir … an American five-megawatt …”

  “… ninety-three percent enriched uranium … enough for a …”

  “Laser enrichment tech …”

  “… separate weapon-grade uranium from ordinary …”

  “…or move to plutonium two thirty-nine …”

  “… Nagasaki-type bomb …”

  “… Nagasaki-type explosion …”

  15

  A Puerto Rican handyman wearing a spotless white knee-length surgical smock was putting up the last lithograph in the office of the new Deputy Director for Intelligence as the Weeder was ushered in.

  “Higher,” ordered the DDI, whose name was Rudd. He peered at the Weeder over granny glasses that had slipped down along his nose and waved him toward one of the two chairs drawn up facing his desk. “That may be a shade too high,” he told his handyman. “What’s your opinion, Mr. Sibley?”

  “I’d move it more to the left so it’s off center. I hate things that are centered.”

  “I’m not sure I agree,” the DDI said. He flashed a lopsided smile that had more pain than pleasure in it. “Things that are centered are very … satisfying.” He turned to the handyman. “Lower it, Henry, if you will, about two inches. Right there. That’s fine.”

  The handyman marked the spot and tapped in a nail and hung the frame from it. Stepping back, he studied the placement of the lithograph. “I think I agree with your friend here,” he said.

  “If I decide to change things,” the DDI said crisply, “I’ll give you a buzz.”

  “Say the word,” the handyman said. He gathered up his tools in a rectangular metal basket and left, closing the door behind him.

  The DDI nodded toward the lithograph. “It’s a Maillol, in case you’re interested. Number twenty-three of fifty. In those days they kept the print run small in order to keep the value up.” The DDI, who was in his shirt sleeves, toyed with one of his gold cuff links as he studied his guest over the granny glasses. “Trip down all right?”

  “I caught a noon shuttle from LaGuardia. I sat next to a lady stockbroker who wore too much perfume. Other than that there was no problem.”

  “Now that they’ve banned cigarettes I suppose the next thing they ought to do is ban perfume.”

  The Weeder nodded. “They ought to put a warning on the flasks. ‘The Surgeon General has determined that perfume can be hazardous to your health.’ “

  “You found the car without any trouble?” the DDI asked.

  “It was nice of you to lay it on.”

  “I’m told you’re known as the Weeder. Where does the name come from?”

  “It’s English, I think. Our friends at MI5 and MI6 call the academic types who sort through old dossiers weeders. I was trained as a historian, which is another way of saying I like browsing through files and I’m not allergic to dust. When I came on board I was put to work in the archives. When someone filed a request for a dossier under the Freedom of Information Act, I had to weed through the files to see what could be safely given out, and what had to be plowed under. My boss, Mr. Linkletter, had done a tour in the London bureau—he took to calling me the Weeder. The name stuck. It was sort of an in-house joke.”

  “You must have come across a lot of dirty laundry in your day,” the DDI mused. He smiled another of his lopsided smiles that seemed to invite a reply.

  The Weeder smiled back noncommittally. If the new DDI had an appetite for dirty laundry, he ought to feed him Operations Subgroup Charlie and Stufftingle. A terrorist group was going to try and explode a primitive atomic device at some place called Kabir on the Ides of March. But Wanamaker didn’t seem to be doing anything, as far as the Weeder could make out, to stop it. Even American nationals in the target zone, wherever that was, would not be warned. If that wasn’t dirty laundry, what was?

  “My predecessor,” Rudd was saying, “tells me you run a highly sensitive No Distribution operation. He says you report directly to the DDI. No chain of command. No cutouts. You want to put me in the picture?”

  The Weeder said, “My pleasure.” He glanced again at the Maillol lithograph; he still thought it would look better off center. “About ten years ago, in the late seventies, our technical people discovered that an ordinary telephone picked up conversation even when it was on its cradle. The telephone transmitted tiny impulses that could be isolated and converted into recognizable speech. The hurdle was that the equipment used to pick up these impulses was bulky and had to operate in the immediate vicinity of the telephone being targeted. The tech boys worked on the problem. What they came up with was equipment that was more sensitive and could operate at almost any distance from the target telephone. The impulses were still incredibly weak when they arrived at the monitoring station, but with the help of a computer programmed to read the impulses, we were able to get recognizable speech. The bottom line is that we are able to transform a cradled telephone into a bug.”

  The DDI’s eyebrows actually danced. “Are you telling me that you can sit in your loft in SoHo and dial any number in America and eavesdrop on conversations near the phone?”

  “That’s about it,” the Weeder said. “The way I figure, if you steal documents you can never know for sure whether what you find out you were meant to find out. You can never know if you are stealing the right documents. But when you steal conversations you’re getting a look into someone’s head—you’re getting a glimpse of the thought process. And that’s worth its weight in gold.”

  Rudd glanced uneasily at the phone on his desk. “Could the opposition be doin
g the same thing to us?”

  “Not likely—we monitor their computer capability carefully. They don’t have the know-how. Yet.”

  “How did you come to run this operation?”

  The Weeder shrugged. “I picked up a working knowledge of Russian at college, and the Russians were obviously going to be our principal target. I knew how to program computers. I was bored stiff working in Mr. Linkletter’s archives. I hated Washington. When they offered me the opportunity to run an operation of my own in New York, I jumped at the chance.”

  “How long have you been at it?”

  “Eight months now.”

  “How are you funded?”

  “Our budget is buried in computer procurement. We’re a cheap date. Two salaries. One rent. One IBM mainframe. And since we never actually phone up anyone, we don’t even have a phone bill outside the basic trunk line fee.”

  “How many phones are you listening in on?”

  “We’re a pilot program, Mr. Rudd. We have one computer and two hundred and fifty trunk lines. At any given moment we target roughly two hundred forty numbers. My computer converts the impulses into recognizable speech. Since it would be impossible to read through everything—during any twenty-four-hour period we collect a mountain of intercepted conversations—I program the computer to scan for key words or phrases. My colleague and I monitor the juicy parts of the conversations.”

  The DDI’s face screwed up so intently it looked as if his skin had been under water too long. “What you’re doing is illegal—the Company has no charter to operate in America.”

  “As I understand it, that’s why we’re run on a No Distribution basis and I report directly to you.”

  “That doesn’t get us off the hook.”

  “If it helps any, most of our targets are Russians or East Europeans working out of the United Nations or the various Washington embassies.”

  The DDI treated himself to a deep breath. “What kind of stuff have you come up with so far?”

  “Nuggets. For instance, we learned two days ago that Savinkov is getting one of his cipher clerks to sell us the February key to the embassy’s class seven messages.”

  “How do you disseminate?”

  “The nuggets I write up so they look as if they come from conventional intercepts. The rest I burn. My problem is to refine the computer program so that I get more wheat and less chaff. Your predecessor said that when we got the wrinkles out he would push for funds to increase our computer capacity so we could listen in on two thousand five hundred phones at a time. If things went well we eventually hoped to target twenty-five thousand.”

  The DDI scratched absently at a very red lobe of a very large ear. The Weeder wondered whether Rudd was a closet drinker; if the secrets were too heavy it might be the only way to cope with the workload. “You mentioned,” the DDI said, “that most of your targets were Russians or East Europeans. I’d like to hear about the exceptions.”

  A sheepish grin crept onto the Weeder’s face. “Your predecessor was hauled over the coals once by Senator Woodbridge.”

  “I remember that,” the DDI chuckled. “I was his sword carrier when he went up to the Hill to face the music. Woodbridge must have been having his period that day—he was as bitchy as a dog in heat.”

  “I was instructed to add Senator Woodbridge to my list,” the Weeder said. “When I came down to Langley, which was usually once every month or six weeks, I gave your predecessor the transcripts.”

  “Did he get anything on Woodbridge?”

  “Nothing he could use.”

  “Any other targets who aren’t Russians or East Europeans?”

  “I have a couple of journalists from The Washington Post who were getting too close to some of our Latin American operations—your predecessor wanted to know their sources. I have a couple of assistants to the congressmen who control the Company’s purse strings. I have three businessmen who do a lot of import-export business with the Saudis. I have two, maybe three, antinuclear types—one’s a well-known movie star. I think the late Director himself asked your predecessor to see what we could come up with on her.”

  “That’s it?” Again, a lopsided smile that invited the confession of sins appeared on the DDI’s face.

  The Weeder was on the verge of mentioning Wanamaker. But what could he say? That he had targeted his Yale roommate because he once fed LSD to the Weeder’s girlfriend, who then jumped to her death from a fifth-floor window? The DDI, who had fingers in a lot of pies, might know that Admiral Toothacher was walking back a cat for Wanamaker; might put two and two together and realize the love letters came from the Weeder. And he would be out on his ear, job-hunting in academia.

  The Weeder shook his head. “That’s it.”

  “Okay. Here’s what I want you to do. I want you to scrub all targets that are non-Russian, non-East European. I want you to destroy every trace of these intercepts. If our friends at Oversight ever get wind of what you’re up to, they might sit still for it if the targets are Russians and East Europeans. But they’ll go straight through the roof—we’ll have a major scandal on our hands—if they find out we’re bugging journalists and one of their own.”

  The Weeder nodded. “Only foreign nationals from here on out.”

  The DDI glanced at his watch, which was gold and curved so that it hugged his wrist. “Why do you stay with the Company, Mr. Sibley? With your skills you could command a lot of money in the marketplace.”

  “To use a very old-fashioned word,” the Weeder replied, “I consider myself a patriot. I want to be useful.”

  “Do you have a feeling you are being useful?”

  “I see myself as a small cog in a large machine that is America’s first line of defense,” the Weeder said, and he meant every word.

  “You believe in this Company of ours?”

  “I believe in this country of ours. To the extent that the Company protects the country, I believe in the Company.”

  The DDI stood up and offered his hand across the desk. The Weeder stood on his side and accepted it. “I am told you are a descendant of …” the DDI started to say.

  The Weeder cut him off. “Not of him. Of his brother. My greatgrandfather’s great-grandfather was his brother.”

  “Good bloodline,” the DDI commented. “When will you be coming down to Washington again?”

  “I have three weeks leave on the books,” the Weeder said. “I was planning to take them now if you see no objection.”

  “What do you do with yourself for R and R? Are you an angler? A skier? A mountain climber?”

  The Weeder grinned sheepishly. “I am a bookworm, Mr. Rudd. For play, I bury myself in the corners of libraries and read.”

  16

  The head archivist, E. Everard Linkletter, was tickled to see the Weeder. He polished his eyeglasses with the tip of his tie and fitted them back over his eyes. “Always a pleasure to see one of my old boys,” he chirped. Linkletter, who had the delicate bone structure of a bird and eyes that watered at the hint of an emotion, lifted a mountain of dossiers off his desk and set them down on the floor. “Pull over a chair. I’ll get us some Darjeeling. Things haven’t been the same since we lost you. You had a way with computers, didn’t you? Oh, dear, which of these buttons do you think connects me with the woman who claims to be my secretary?” He tried them one after the other, shouting, “Anybody home?” at each stop until he found signs of life. “Tea for two, two for tea,” he called. He looked at the Weeder and rolled his head from side to side in satisfaction. “You haven’t decayed as much as you might have,” he said.

  “You never change,” the Weeder said, but Linkletter swatted away the compliment as if it were an insect. “I’m feeling very short and very fat today,” he said morosely. He pouted as if the words themselves had a bad taste. “And very old—too old, too old. You know what they say about old age? Old age, they say, is not for sissies. Well, I’m not sure where that leaves me. My sight’s going. My hearing’s going. My lower back, my
knees have long since gone. My digestion is reasonable if I don’t drink too much. But who wants to go through what’s left of life not drinking too much? Tell me what you are up to these days, Silas?”

  The Weeder offered up one of his sheepish grins. “This is not the kind of shop where you want to ask that sort of question.”

  Linkletter sighed. “Don’t I know it. The only thing that keeps me chained to my desk is my appetite for the pension I get in two years, three months and twelve days.”

  He pulled a fresh pack of menthol cigarettes from a desk drawer, slid the cellophane wrapper off it and placed it on the blotter halfway between himself and his guest. “I don’t remember if you smoke,” he remarked.

  The Weeder said he didn’t and never had.

  “Neither do I anymore,” Linkletter said with sudden enthusiasm. “But my victory over the weed is meaningless if there is no temptation. In order to feel superior to cigarettes you have to lust after them.” Linkletter swiveled impatiently toward his intercom and stabbed at a button. “Where, where, where in God’s name is my tea?” he cried plaintively.

  “Tea,” an aggravated voice replied, “requires boiling water. Boiling water requires the application of heat. The application of heat requires time.”

  Turning back to the Weeder, Linkletter spread his hands in embarrassment. “You would think they were bringing it all the way from India,” he said. “Well, now, to what whim of wind do I owe the pleasure of your calling at my port?”