The young man eased an arm over the Admiral’s stooped shoulders. The Admiral, beaming, leaned across the bar to catch Huxstep’s eye and nodded once. Huxstep went back to his drink. “I think I’ll take that refill now,” he told the bartender.
“You earned it,” Charlie remarked.
“He’s a grand old man,” Huxstep muttered. “Salt of the earth.”
“He’s lucky to have you,” the woman next to Snow ventured.
“It’s me who’s the lucky one,” Huxstep insisted.
“Lost something in your pocketbook?” Charlie asked Snow.
“Not anymore,” she said, and she came out with her wallet and asked for a check.
“You only just arrived,” the woman next to Snow said in a hurt voice. “You haven’t drunk the daiquiri I bought you.”
“The real action doesn’t start for another hour or so,” Charlie added.
“I’ve got to go,” Snow told the woman.
The bartender, the woman and Huxstep watched Snow disappear through the beads of the curtain. Charlie delivered his verdict with a shrug. “Wants to go for a dip but afraid of getting wet.”
The woman shook her head in disgust. “Story of my life.”
24
Snow was keeping an eye on the hotel lobby through the window behind the drugstore counter late the next morning when the elevator doors opened and the Admiral, suppressing a yawn, stepped out. His face was full of blotches, his hair disheveled. He wore backless bedroom slippers on his large bare feet and had an enormous terrycloth bathrobe wrapped around his lanky body. He threaded his fingers through his chalk-white hair as he shuffled across the lobby to the mail desk. The elderly man with two white poodles on leashes stopped to have a word with the Admiral. Snow left her seat at the counter and went to the phone booth at the back of the drugstore. She pushed a coin into the slot and dialed the hotel. Through the booth, through the drugstore window, she could see the desk clerk checking the Admiral’s cubbyhole and handing him a newspaper and his mail. The desk clerk turned his back on the Admiral and reached for the phone.
“Please, I want to speak to Admiral Toothacher.”
“Hang on.”
Snow could see the clerk calling the Admiral back to the desk.
The Admiral’s voice, hoarse, cranky, came over the line. “That you, Huxstep? Don’t you think it’s a bit early to be making plans for the night? You could at least wait until I have had my morning bath.”
Snow covered the mouthpiece with a hand. “This isn’t Huxstep.”
The Admiral, puzzled, asked, “Who is this?”
“Open the manila envelope you got in the mail this morning.”
“I beg your pardon.”
“Open it.”
Over the telephone Snow could hear the Admiral slitting open the envelope. Through the drugstore window she could see him start as he caught sight of the photographs. Taken with the Minox through a hole in her pocketbook, developed early that morning at the store where she bought the camera, one showed Toothacher whispering into the ear of the young man who looked half-Indian. Another showed the young man with an arm over the Admiral’s shoulder. The Admiral, visible over the boy’s shoulder, was flushed with excitement. In the lobby the Admiral shoved the photographs back into the envelope and looked around in panic. He came back on the line.
“Who are you?” he whispered harshly. “If you want money you’re barking up the wrong tree. All I have is my retirement checks and they barely cover my bar bill.”
“I don’t want money,” Snow said.
There was a long pause. “What do you want?”
“I want Silas Sibley set free. If he isn’t released, and soon, those photographs are going to wind up on every city desk in the country. I don’t think the Company would appreciate that. A former head of Naval Intelligence, a former CIA big shot spilling secrets in a gay bar.”
When Toothacher finally replied, Snow detected a note of pathos in his voice. “Whoever you are you’re making a terrible mistake. I don’t know any Silas Sibley. My God, I haven’t been associated with anyone or anything official in Washington for years.”
“I’m not bluffing,” Snow warned.
She could hear the Admiral breathing heavily into his end of the telephone connection. “Dear kind lady, if you have an ounce of charity in your heart I ask you, I beg you, don’t do this to me. Even if I wanted to help you I couldn’t. You’re blackmailing the wrong person. I don’t have the vaguest idea who this Silas Sibley is. I’m an old man. You can’t drag me through the mud like this. You’ll ruin me. Dear God in heaven, you absolutely have to believe me. I’m telling you the truth.”
Snow whispered, “Whose truth? Which truth?” And then she severed the connection.
25
The wind off Nantucket had picked up, the seas too. On top of everything else the Weeder was seasick. He had vomited twice already (into a wastepaper basket, supplied in haste by Mildred) and had not been able to hold down any food for the past twenty-four hours. Although she hadn’t thrown up Mildred was faring no better. She kept her eyes tightly closed most of the time, claiming the motion of the boat made her dizzy when she opened them.
Of the three only Huxstep was operational. He reacted to the Weeder and Mildred the way people who aren’t seasick usually react to those who are-it made him feel very superior and more cruel than usual. He described meals he had eaten and threatened to light a cigar until Mildred moaned something about shooting him if he did.
Around midafternoon the radiotelephone crackled into life. Huxstep switched from the loudspeaker to the handphone, listened for a long moment to someone issuing instructions, snapped “Right as rain, Admiral,” and hung up. He knelt on the deck next to the Weeder. “Listen up. It seems like you’re getting a phone call in five or ten minutes. It’s your lady friend from Concord. She’s being plugged through from a hookup in the Justice Department. Here’s the story. She’s been told you are tucked into a bed with starched sheets and hospital corners in a private Company asylum. Without being specific you confirm that. You do a lot of listening, a little talking. Got it?”
“What makes you think I’ll do as you ask?” the Weeder demanded.
Huxstep sneered. “If you screw up I’ll light a cigar and blow smoke in your face.”
Mildred, lying on the bunk with her eyes closed, said, “You don’t want your lady friend becoming suspicious, do you? The Admiral might decide she was better off dead than red, you see what I mean?”
The radiotelephone came alive a few minutes later. Huxstep adjusted the toggle switch so that both the loudspeaker and the hand phone would work, and put the phone into the Weeder’s free hand. He kept a finger on the toggle switch in case he had to cut off the conversation.
The Weeder heard an operator’s voice patching through the call. “I have your party,” she said. There was a burst of static, which cleared. A man’s voice asked, “Is Sibley on the line?”
The Weeder said, “I’m here.”
The line clicked several times. Snow’s voice, slightly breathless, said, “Thanks, Michael. Silas, is that you?”
“Snow?”
“Oh, Silas. Thank God. How are you? Where are you?”
The Weeder regarded Huxstep. He kept one hand on the toggle switch. With the other he fingered a cigar. “I’m in a hospital,” the Weeder replied. “I’m getting on great. Really. How are you?”
There was a surge of static on the line. When it cleared Snow could be heard calling, “Are you still there, Silas? What’s causing all this static?”
Snow’s voice seemed to come from far away, from another world. The Weeder made an effort to project himself into her world, to imagine it. But there was an unbridgeable abyss between her world and his. Huxstep was gesturing for him to reply. He keyed the telephone and said, “The Company doesn’t use regular telephone lines for obvious reasons.”
“Silas, you’re not furious with me, are you?”
“No. You did the righ
t thing.”
“Oh God, if you only knew how relieved I am to hear you say that.”
“Tell me what you’re up to,” the Weeder asked. He was desperate to keep the conversation going. It was the last one he would ever have with her. “Have you been taking any photographs? Are you invading anyone’s privacy?”
“Actually, yes. Remember the time you were vacationing at a farm and followed someone you shouldn’t have?”
For a moment the Weeder didn’t know what she was talking about. Then it came to him. He hadn’t been vacationing at a farm; he had been going through basic training at the Farm. And the person he had followed had been Admiral Toothacher. Show was trying to tell him something. He flashed a sheepish grin in Huxstep’s direction. “I remember,” he told Snow.
“Well, it gave me an idea and I did the same thing. Only I took pictures.”
The Weeder felt a rush of excitement. So she believed him after all! “Are you going to publish them?” he asked.
“That depends. You can’t just go and publish photos of someone- you have to get him to give you a release.”
“Sounds like you’re on to something good,” the Weeder said. “I hope you can pull it off.”
“Take care of yourself, Silas. You have to, you know, because when you get out of there I’ll be waiting for you.”
“I promise to be a good boy,” the Weeder said.
“I need to tell you something, Silas.” Another burst of static drowned her out. “… to exchange vows when you are. Hang in there, okay?”
“Concentrate on your photography project-that way you’ll have less time to worry about me.”
“I will, Silas. Well, good-bye for now.”
“Good-bye.”
Huxstep flipped the toggle switch. “I think you did all right,” he said.
“I think so too,” the Weeder agreed.
For the first time in days the emotion he was suppressing wasn’t fear but hope.
26
The meeting took place on the Ides of March in the elevator on the minus-four level of a downtown Washington office building. The Attorney General was clearly depressed; it looked as if an operation far more imaginative than the Iran-Contra affair had come to a dead end. Sucking on the stem of a dead pipe, he turned up his hearing aid and said, “We can thank our lucky star the FBI came to me with the letter he wrote to Savinkov. I hate to think of the consequences if they had gone directly to the Company.”
Wanamaker asked worriedly, “Won’t they come around asking questions when nobody gets back to them?”
“I told them they had stumbled on an ongoing operation,” the Attorney General said. “I talked national security. As far as the FBI’s concerned the matter ends there.”
Wanamaker shook his head in irritation. “Who would have thought the asshole was working for Savinkov? I suppose that means we have to dismantle Stufftingle.”
The Attorney General shifted his gaze to the third man in the elevator. The Admiral’s eyes were rimmed with red and clouded with worry. For him the worst case was still the most likely, the most interesting, the most stimulating. But for once in his life it wasn’t the most congenial. So he argued the best case. “I went out to the boat to interrogate him,” he told the Attorney General. “He tried to convince me he was a Russian mole, but I don’t believe it. There are a dozen holes in his story.”
“Don’t make the mistake of trying to tell me what you think I want to hear,” warned the Attorney General.
The Admiral bridled. “I grant you the great problem with the intelligence community is it inevitably caters to its clients. That was never my style when I ran Naval Intelligence. It is not my style now. I operate on the principle that, whether it is convenient or not, there is only one truth.”
The Attorney General seemed unimpressed. “How do you explain someone admitting to be a Soviet agent when he isn’t? It’s a bit farfetched, if you ask me. Kind of thing that happens in one of those le Carré books but not in real life.”
“Why did he post a love letter to Savinkov in a dead drop?” Wanamaker chimed in. “Why did he leave the pawn ticket? Explain that?”
The Admiral ignored Wanamaker and addressed the Attorney General directly. “Savinkov’s an old pro-he probably realized the FBI was on to that particular drop. If Savinkov knew, then the Weeder knew; don’t forget he was targeting Savinkov on his eavesdropping program. Which means when the Weeder planted the letter and the pawn ticket behind the radiator, he intended them to fall into the hands of the FBI and eventually the Company. Remember, he thought the Company was behind Stufftingle. He was a patriot-he wanted to head off what he considered an atrocity. He calculated that if the Company thought Savinkov had been tipped off about Stufftingle, the operation would have to be permanently canceled.”
The Attorney General digested this while he lit his pipe. He filled the elevator with a cloud of vile-smelling smoke. “When you come right down to it,” he finally said, “it really doesn’t matter whether we can prove he is a Soviet agent. The possibility clearly exists that he may be, which means the possibility also exists that our Russian friends know about Stufftingle and will expose us if we go ahead with it.” He issued his orders to Wanamaker. “Dismantle Stufftingle. Destroy the uranium. Pull out the people who know about it. Burn your records. Cover your tracks.”
“What do I do with the Weeder?” Wanamaker asked.
The Admiral spoke up before the Attorney General could answer. “There is no reason to do anything with the Weeder. All he wanted was to head off Stufftingle. Now that it’s canceled he’ll play ball.”
Both the Attorney General and Wanamaker stared at the Admiral. “There’s no way we can turn him loose on the streets as if nothing happened,” Wanamaker said. “The Weeder’s a walking bomb, not to mention a Russian agent.”
“I agree,” the Attorney General announced flatly. He nodded curtly at Wanamaker. “I leave the matter in your competent hands.” And he reached inside his jacket pocket and turned down his hearing aid to indicate the discussion was over.
The Admiral, in desperation, grabbed the Attorney General’s elbow. “You’re making a mistake,” he said urgently. “Terminating the Weeder could be dangerous.” He cast around wildly for arguments, came up instead with disjointed sentences. “… left footprints … letters … implicate Wanamaker and Subgroup Charlie … people in the wrong places could ask the right questions …” He stared into the Attorney General’s blank eyes and realized he hadn’t heard a word. The Admiral released his elbow, backed slowly out of the elevator to join Wanamaker. The two young men in loose-fitting sport jackets backed into the elevator. The doors slid closed.
“Do you want to take care of the matter or should I?” Wanamaker asked his former icon, his ex-father figure.
In a daze the Admiral mumbled, “I’ll break the news to Huxstep.”
27
The wind, the seas, had calmed down. The Weeder too. He clung to the buoy of hope Snow had thrown him from her world. The cliché-where there’s life there’s hope-had it backwards. Where there was hope there was life.
As soon as Mildred was able to open her eyes her spirits picked up and she began flirting with Huxstep. “I have an almost uncontrollable weakness for tattoos,” she confessed, pushing her breast into his wrist as she rolled back his right sleeve. She ran her fingers over the faded blue pennant tattooed on his biceps, tracing the words Give me liberty or give me death. “It must have hurt when they did that,” she said with respect.
Huxstep grunted. “Suffering pain is not something I remember.” He looked over at the Weeder, sitting on the deck with his right wrist handcuffed to the cement block. “Inflicting pain is another story.”
Mildred arched invisible eyebrows. “Let me see what you have on that other arm of yours,” she said huskily.
On the shelf above Huxstep’s head the radiotelephone speaker emitted a burst of static. The Admiral’s voice, more nasal than usual, could be heard over the static. “�
� you there? For God’s sake, answer.”
Huxstep flicked a switch onto broadcast and growled into the handphone. “Where else would I be?”
The Weeder, matching from the deck, braced himself for the verdict.
“… make the nearest landfall and put him ashore.”
Huxstep’s eyes narrowed imperceptibly in disappointment. He repeated the order to be sure he had gotten it right. “You want for me to make the nearest landfall and put him ashore?”
“Affirmative. I repeat. Affirmative.”
Mildred grabbed the phone out of Huxstep’s hand. “I want to speak to Mr. Wanamaker,” she shouted.
The Admiral’s voice crackled over the circuit. “I’m acting for Wanamaker. Today was the Ides of March. The ball game is terminated. In this business there are no extra innings. Put Huxstep back on.”
Huxstep took the phone. “I’m here.”
The Admiral pleaded, “If you love me, for God’s sake turn him loose.”
Huxstep winced at the word “love,” tried to swallow the emotion that welled up, failed. He muttered “Wilco” into the phone, clicked the toggle switch to Receive. The loudspeaker fell silent.
Mildred, her face contorted, her eyes reduced to slits, produced a minuscule handgun from under her skirt. “If you won’t do what has to be done, I will,” she whispered.
Huxstep appeared to hesitate. “The Admiral seemed pretty sure of himself.”
“The Admiral’s not running this show,” Mildred argued. “Mr. Wanamaker is. And I’m the one who’s Mr. Wanamaker’s man Friday, not you. You’re the jackass-of-all trades, like you said. For all we know someone may have been holding a gun to the Admiral’s head when he talked to you. For all we know it wasn’t even him but someone imitating him.”
“That’s a possibility,” Huxstep agreed. He seemed confused. Mildred hammered home her points. “It doesn’t make any sense to release him. He knows too much. Even if they’ve called off Stuff tingle he knows it existed. He knows about Mr. Wanamaker and Subgroup Charlie. He knows you tried to kill him in the parking lot. He knows we tried to kill him in the library, in that abandoned building. You’re crazy if you think he’s going to let bygones be bygones after all this spilled milk.”
The Once and Future Spy Page 26