Back Channel: A novel

by Stephen L Carter

  It occurred to her that she had never made a plan to leave the city—for example, to visit her younger sister in San Diego—in part because she had always assumed that she would be at her desk until the end, helping the President struggle to contain the crisis.

  But someone else sat at her desk now, and Harrington had no idea how the negotiations were proceeding. She had become, in national security terms, an unperson.

  She went to the kitchen for some apple juice. The arguing couple had vanished, but in the alley a man was down on his knees, working on his motorcycle. Back on the living-room sofa, she sipped her juice and reasoned things through. That a surveillance operation of this scale would begin so suddenly could only mean that some emergency had arisen. She wasn’t sure who was responsible for the large team of watchers, but she very much doubted that they were there for Doris Harrington. They might be official; they might be the other thing. Either way, Harrington herself was a woman of late middle age; if they wanted her, they would have come through the door and taken her.

  Which meant that they were there for Margo. It occurred to her that she should probably warn the girl. Unfortunately, she had no idea how GREENHILL could be reached.

  So she sat, and watched television, and, like the rest of America, waited.

  FORTY-NINE

  Half Disclosures

  I

  “McCone knows,” said Bundy, alone in the Oval Office with the Kennedy brothers. “He was kind enough to drop by my suite to tell me in private that the Agency has become aware, as he puts it, that I’m running an illegal intelligence operation out of the White House.”

  “How did he find out?” asked Bobby.

  “He won’t tell me that. Only that his people have worked it out. But it seems that he didn’t get the key piece until this morning. A message came to him, through channels he declines to identify, that GREENHILL is safe, and under the protection of the Agency.”

  “She’s safe,” breathed the President.

  “And under the protection of the Agency,” Bundy said again. It was imperative that they understand the point. “McCone says that our operation—well, he thinks it’s my operation—my operation went off the rails, but one of his people was able to pick up the pieces. I’m sorry, but the director has a habit of mixing his metaphors.” He shrugged. “Anyway, the only good to come out of this is that I don’t think McCone actually has her.”

  “You just said she’s under his protection!” Bobby protested.

  “No. I quoted him as saying that GREENHILL is under the protection of the Agency. We fenced a little—I never admitted that there was an operation, he never precisely admitted having her—but I got the idea that the message had reached McCone that one of his people had her, and he was as frustrated as I was. You’ll remember that certain channels exist to get information into the right hands in the Agency without a source being identified. It seems that one of those channels was activated early this morning. The message actually sent was: ‘Tell Bundy she’s safe and she’ll make the meetings.’ McCone’s people put that together with other clues they’d developed and worked out that ‘she’ meant GREENHILL. But he doesn’t know who sent the message.”

  The attorney general was marching around the office. “That’s ridiculous. How many people can he have in the Washington area who are unaccounted for and who’d have the skills—and the chutzpah—to do something like this? I’m sure there’s some way to track him down.” He pointed. “Get him on the phone, Mac. Tell him the President needs to know who has her.”

  “I can’t do that, Bobby.”

  “Why not?” asked the President.

  “Because McCone believes—or chooses to believe—that this is my own operation, mounted independently, and illegally. You can’t be involved, sir.” He closed his folder. “We can assume that McCone is doing exactly what you just described. He absolutely will figure out where she is. But there’s no chance he’s going to share the results with me unless I order it in your name. And then he’ll know.”

  “Maybe it’s time to cut the Agency in,” said Bobby. “Maybe he’s right. We’re amateurs at this kind of thing.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea. For one thing, the Agency will want to take over the operation.”

  “Would that be so terrible?”

  “You know how they are. They’ll have half a dozen people following GREENHILL every minute. Fomin is bound to notice. He’ll get spooked, believe me. He’ll be on the next plane to Moscow, and five minutes later the Soviet Embassy will be burning its papers and destroying its code machines. When they burn their papers, we’re at war.” The Kennedys, Bundy knew, hated his didactic mode, but there were times when only instruction would do. “And there’s another reason. This way, if the operation goes wrong, the blame rests on me and nobody else. If the Agency gets involved, then it’s official policy. You won’t be able to paint me as a rogue official conducting a bit of private enterprise.”

  “If it goes wrong,” said Bobby, “nobody will care about who’s to blame.”

  “I beg to differ, Mr. Attorney General. Nowadays, historians hardly care about anything else.”

  The President was exasperated. “Come on, Mac. You heard them in there. They want war. The whole table. Unless GREENHILL gets back to us with evidence that we’re really dealing with Khrushchev, we’re bombing those missile sites tomorrow noon. And we don’t even know where she is.”

  II

  They were in yet another diner, this one in Silver Spring. Jerry seemed to know them all. What he liked about diners, he said, was that nobody who was anybody ever dropped in. You could talk to anyone you liked about anything you liked, without worrying about chance encounters.

  He turned out to have a friend, a mountainous blonde named Sally, who had a dress shop nearby and had opened it for him, in defiance of Maryland’s Sunday-closing laws. As Margo tried on outfits, she had found herself preening for him a bit, and enjoying in return the appreciative look in his eyes. And although she knew it was all playacting, she nevertheless found—for the hour they spent in the shop, at least—that she felt almost calm, and entirely disconnected from the world that was on the verge of tearing itself to pieces.

  They chose a frilly silver affair, a bit more formal than the ones Bundy had selected for her five previous rendezvous with Kennedy: closer to a ball gown than a party dress. Studying herself in the mirror, she felt more confident, more professional, more adult, more like Claudia’s granddaughter and Donald’s daughter.

  “I’ll have to let it out a little,” said Sally.

  “That’s really not necessary,” said Margo. “And I don’t know if we have time.”

  “How long?” asked Ainsley.

  “Two days. It’s a busy season. Maybe two and a half.” She frowned. “But I’m not really sure. I’m supposed to be going to my sister’s in North Carolina. You know, just in case.”

  “We need it in one hour.”

  Sally grinned. “Ninety minutes.”

  As they drove away, Margo couldn’t help asking him where he knew Sally from. His reply sounded as if it had been memorized for an exam; and yet she knew already that he was the sort of student who took his lessons to heart.

  “It’s useful to make all kinds of friends,” he said. “Wherever you are, you never know what talents you’ll need, what neighborhoods you’ll have to hide in, what cars you’ll need to borrow.”

  She couldn’t help herself. “Did they teach you that in the CIA?”

  “To tell you the truth, I learned it from my father.”

  “Is he still alive?”

  “No, he’s been dead ten years. I was a late baby. He was in his sixties when I was born.”

  Still Margo pressed her luck. “Was he in the same business as you?”

  “My father?” He laughed. “No. All he ever did was make money and lose it again. He started out as a peddler in the street and wound up running a bank. He was a Scottish immigrant from a long line of farmers, but
after he founded his bank he started telling people his Scottish accent was English, on the ground that Americans can’t tell the difference. He even claimed that his ancestor was knighted by William the Conqueror. He was married three times—I’m a product of wife number two—and on his deathbed he gathered all six children and begged us to tell the world he died in a brothel. And you know what? Just last year, some book about the titans of Wall Street reported gleefully that Donnan Ainsley died in bed with a prostitute.”

  Jericho Ainsley seemed terrifically unimpressed by the story, but Margo secretly found it a thrilling coincidence that he, too, should have a father who managed to fool the world about both how he lived and how he died.

  Five miles away, she used the pay phone at a service station to call the apartment. The woman she knew as Carol had tried her four times, Patsy said, still cross.

  Margo apologized, and asked if there were any other messages.

  “No. There was some guy who called twice asking for Danielle. A wrong number, I guess.”

  “I guess,” said Margo, and thanked her. She promised to be home as soon as she could, and Patsy hung up before Margo could tell her that somebody would be watching to make sure she wasn’t bothered again.

  Danielle meant six-thirty tonight.

  From a separate pay phone, she called the number Bundy had given her. The usual woman answered, and Margo used the code words to let her know that she was safe but refused to say where she was.

  The pickup for the meeting with the President—disguised as talk about dinner the day after tomorrow—was set for seven-thirty p.m.

  III

  Now, as they sat in a grimy booth, Ainsley was all business again, setting out the lay of the land.

  “First of all, you should be aware that I’ve sent a message to Bundy to tell him you’ve landed on your feet and you’ll make your meetings tonight. Don’t worry. The message isn’t traceable, but I’m sure it’ll get where it’s supposed to go, if only because the Agency can’t stand the man, and the director will enjoy throwing it in his face.”

  She wasn’t sure what she was supposed to say, so she played with her wilted salad and just nodded.

  “Second, just in case, we aren’t going back to my apartment. Not until all of this is over. I’ll find us a place to spend the hours until you meet Fomin.” Margo felt uneasy as the coils of his concentration, competence, and ability to plan continued to draw her into greater dependency, but she saw no way out, and wasn’t sure she wanted one.

  “Okay,” she said, studying her sandwich.

  “This leads to the third point,” he continued. “If Jack Ziegler knows about the negotiations, there’s a good shot that he knows about the Yenching Palace. He’ll be watching.”

  “I can skip the restaurant and just go to the fallback,” she pointed out.

  “Not tonight. You can’t take the chance. From what you tell me, this message has to get through.”

  “True.” She took a tiny bite of her BLT. She was less hungry than she had thought she’d be. “It has to.”

  “If you miss two meetings in a row, Fomin will get suspicious.” His eyes kept straying to the window, and she could feel him cataloguing cars driving in and out of the parking lot. “Also, Ziegler might follow him from the Yenching Palace to the fallback. Fomin is bound to notice, and he’ll run.”

  “I’m not so sure,” said Margo, showing off for him. “If just spotting a tail would spook Fomin into abandoning the negotiations, all Ziegler would have to do is show himself, at any time, and the back channel would be closed down. I think Fomin’s built of stronger stuff. Niemeyer told me he was part of what happened with the Rosenbergs and the hydrogen bomb and all that. He didn’t run home after that operation fell apart. And from what Fomin says, Khrushchev is desperate. He needs this deal.”

  “If it is Khrushchev.”

  “You’re like Ziegler. You don’t think it’s him.”

  “I have my doubts. Look, Margo. Anybody who does what I do would doubt it. There’s always somebody who’s offering to sell you the crown jewels. And they’re almost always lumps of coal.”

  “Fomin’s not selling anything. He doesn’t want money.”

  “So it would seem.” He sipped his Coke, wiped his mouth with a gentle elegance that bespoke proper breeding. “That’s probably why Bundy’s willing to go along. Maybe why I am, too. Because Fomin wouldn’t seem to have anything to gain by making this whole thing up.” He took a bite of his cheeseburger, chewed thoughtfully for a moment. “In any case, I’ll be outside the whole time you’re with Fomin. I’ll be watching for Ziegler and his friends. The truth is, though, he’s not who I’m most worried about.”

  Margo put her water glass down with a snap. “You mean there’s somebody worse?”

  Jerry nodded, leaned close. “You’ve met our hard-liners. Wait until you meet theirs.”

  “Whose?” She saw it. “Fomin’s?”

  “Sure. You think the hawks on our side are the only ones who want to blow up the negotiations? Khrushchev has hawks of his own. We have some reason to think they’ve already killed a man. Tortured him, too. His body was fished out of a swamp in Flushing a few weeks ago. Usually the KGB would cut its own throat before it would do violence inside the States. They must be pretty desperate.” Another long gulp of cola. “As a matter of fact, if I were Jack Ziegler? I wouldn’t go near the Yenching Palace. But I’d make sure that my opposite number in the KGB knew exactly where it was and when Fomin would be there. Let them take care of the problem.”

  She felt a little faint. “And when you say take care of the problem—”

  “I mean, kill you both,” he said, and took a big chomp on his burger.

  FIFTY

  Points of View

  I

  “I do not like doing violence in a foreign country,” said Viktor Vagaman, adjusting his gold-rimmed spectacles. “I do not like doing violence at all. But there are times when service to the Motherland demands it. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” said the stocky man sitting across from him in the window of the small café across Connecticut Avenue from the Yenching Palace.

  The killer sipped his coffee. “Ideally, we would do harm only to the traitor Fomin. Others are doing what for them seems normal, even loyal. Fomin is a different matter. He has betrayed our own country.” His associate had an objection. “My impression is that Colonel Fomin is acting under the orders of General Secretary Khrushchev.”

  “Is that your impression?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you are a fool.” He spoke so quietly that none of the nearby diners could overhear. “The Comrade General Secretary would never be a party to this conspiracy. It was he who approved the operation to place the missiles in Cuba, for the purpose of defending the Motherland against surprise attack by the war faction.”

  The stocky man was unpersuaded. “Cooperating with the capitalists in this fashion is not like Fomin, either. He would not do this without authorization.”

  “Then the authorization does not come from the Comrade General Secretary.”

  “But—”

  “Comrade Fomin has been misled, my friend. If he paid more attention to doctrine and less to what he calls pragmatism, he would realize that no one in the Central Committee would give these orders. His failure to appreciate the extent to which he has been misled is itself the act of a man predisposed to treason. No,” he concluded, as if his associate had argued, “we cannot spare him.”

  “And the girl?”

  “We will do what is necessary, of course, to prevent a final deal. But she is fundamentally an American problem.”

  Had Viktor’s associate been more inquiring, he might have asked—later, in the postmortem, he himself was asked, and not gently—how it was possible that Fomin could at the same time be misled about the source of his orders and in a position to make an actual deal. But by that time the purge had become general, and the principal concern among surviving members of the intelli
gence directorate was saving their own skins.

  II

  The meeting with Fomin was set for half past six, and she was to proceed to the townhouse immediately after. At a quarter to the hour, she sat with Ainsley in the car, three blocks south of the restaurant and two blocks to the west, so that casual surveillance along Connecticut Avenue wouldn’t spot them.

  “Are you sure you understand the plan?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I just did.”

  “Then tell me again.”

  Margo chanced a glare, but she understood the purpose of his browbeating. If they ever had a margin for error, it had vanished when a friend he called to look in on his apartment reported back that checking was impossible, so tight was the surveillance.

  “I wait in the car while you study the area. At six-fifteen, I get out and start walking. If you see anything you don’t like, you’ll get me out. Otherwise, I meet with Fomin, I leave, I walk four blocks north, and you’ll drive past me on the side street to take me to the meeting with Kennedy.”

  “And?”

  “Don’t trust anyone who says he or she has been sent for me.”

  “And?”

  This final instruction was the only one hard for her to pronounce. “If anything happens to you, run.”

  III

  Bundy had at last acceded to Bobby Kennedy’s repeated demands. He had agreed to put one eye—one only—on Margo. A lone Secret Service agent would be dispatched to the scene. Any more would spook Fomin, but one man alone should be able to remain concealed. He was worried that McCone might have the same idea. Once the Agency had the secret of the back channel, Bundy didn’t think it would take much work for their analysts to track down the location of the meetings. And if Hoover, too, were somehow to winkle out what was going on, the neighborhood around the Yenching Palace might be downright crowded tonight.