Back Channel: A novel

by Stephen L Carter

  III

  Just before Thanksgiving, a lawyer arrived, representing not the government but the Kennedy family. His name was Chancellor. He was about seventy, and skinny as a rail, with a shock of startlingly white hair. And he had plainly done this before, for he was donnish and reassuring yet cautious and firm, everybody’s favorite grandfather, dignified to the point of funereal in his smoothly understated black suit.

  “You look well, Miss Jensen,” he announced as if he hadn’t seen her in a long time. They were in the study, facing each other across the desk. Nana had offered to sit in, but Margo had assured her that she would be fine.

  “Thank you,” she said, and waited.

  “I know you’ve been through a terrible ordeal. I want you to know that my clients are terribly sorry for everything that’s happened. They very much want to make it up to you.”

  To prove it, the lawyer had brought along an impressive sheaf of papers for Margo to sign and a handsome check for Margo to accept in return for her perpetual relinquishment of the right to discuss publicly any part of what may or may not have occurred in Washington over the period from twenty-third October through first November last, et cetera, et cetera. And the part that amused her most, even as she shoved both back at him and gently shook her head, was that he plainly believed that he was trying to purchase her silence about a presidential dalliance. She could read in his clever eyes the thinly veiled judgment of his class, contempt for a woman skilled enough to snare her prey but sufficiently amateurish not to keep her hooks in him. He despised her, and perhaps the man he was protecting as well: and his scorn was the surest sign that the deception was holding.

  “This isn’t a negotiation,” he explained as he packed everything away. “There won’t be a second offer.”

  “I understand.”

  “I hope you understand as well that the family takes its reputation seriously. Part of my responsibility is to see to it that no defamation should occur.”

  “Of course.”

  “Thank you for taking the time to see me, Miss Jensen.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Chancellor,” she said, and shook his hand mannishly.

  In the grand foyer, the lawyer took a last look around, as if satisfying his curiosity: yes, there were Negroes who were neither singers nor boxers yet lived this way. Or perhaps he was totting up the family assets, in case, despite his warning, defamation should occur after all. Then he was gone, never turning. He’d kept a chauffeur waiting. Margo stood in the window, watching them descend the gravel drive, pass the stone lion, and disappear.

  “Are you okay, Miss Margo?” murmured Muriel, materializing beside her.

  “Never better.”

  “You look peaked.”

  “I feel wonderful.”

  This was a lie. She felt somewhere well to the south of criminal. But her crime had no remedy just yet.

  IV

  On the Monday after Thanksgiving, McGeorge Bundy came. He didn’t call first, and he arrived without ceremony: no driver, no aides, just the President’s national security adviser, all five foot seven of him, standing on the front step in the whirling autumn wind, and inviting her for a walk. Like Harrington and Agatha and Ainsley, he plainly mistrusted walls.

  They strolled along the river above the possibly poisonous rushes, hands thrust in the pockets of heavy jackets: the same route, as it happened, that she had walked twice with Ainsley.

  “The crisis is officially over,” Bundy said. “I’m sure you saw the news reports when the cargo ships left Cuba with the disassembled missiles aboard. The bombers, too, are being withdrawn. And that will be that. We won, Miss Jensen. And without you I’m not sure we could have done it.”

  She mumbled something about being glad to do her small part.

  “I’m serious. I want you to remember that, always. What you did for your country, and at enormous risk.”

  Margo allowed herself a small chuckle. “I’m not likely to forget.”

  They were on the promontory now, the wrecked dock down below. The same smashed red boat from her childhood, now just rotted timbers, faintly crimson, mostly mud. A week and a half ago, she had stood at this very spot with Jerry Ainsley. She was about to mention the fact, but had a shrewd suspicion that Bundy already knew.

  “Let me tell you why I’m here,” he said, facing not Margo but the water. “I would like you to consider coming to work for me.”

  She shook her head, trying to loosen the cobwebs. She could not possibly have heard him right.

  “You’re smart, you’re brave, and you say what you think. You don’t let rank intimidate you. We need people like you in Washington, and in national security particularly. And of course Niemeyer thinks the world of you.” Her continued silence seemed to irritate him. “We’d be happy to have you next summer, but I was also thinking of something long-term. When you’ve finished your education, say.”

  “I don’t know if I’m going back to school,” she said after a moment’s thought.

  “Of course you are. You have academia written all over you. I see you as a professor one day.”

  “Ha” was all she said, turning away so that he wouldn’t notice the color in her cheeks.

  “You did wonderfully well, Miss Jensen. I told you before that the nation owes you a debt, and it’s true. We can never repay you. If at any time there is anything I can do for you, you need only call.”

  “Thank you,” she managed, but the excessive tone of his remarks had become a warning gong. There was something else, something she wasn’t going to like hearing.

  “So now we have a problem, Miss Jensen.” Bundy turned his face deliberately into the wind, and she had to lean close to hear him. Again she was impressed by his instinctive avoidance of prying ears. “Your mission was successful, the country owes you, but we need to find a way to guarantee your silence.”

  “You mean, other than sending Mr. Chancellor to bribe me.”

  “That wasn’t me, and it wasn’t the President, either. It was done, let us say, automatically. Once the rumors started flying—well, there’s a way the family deals with such matters. It isn’t pretty, but it’s the way it’s done.”

  “If there’s a way of handling it automatically, it must happen quite often.”

  Margo was secretly proud of the clever sauciness of her reply, but Bundy remained unimpressed. “I took you as above that sort of comment,” he said, and for a moment his voice was Nana and her mother rolled into one. “Never mind. It can’t have been easy. And no doubt there will come a time—perhaps in the President’s memoirs, perhaps later—when the truth can be told. I hope so. You deserve the accolades of history.” He pursed his lips, as if in disapproval of the next words he would speak. “Nevertheless, Miss Jensen, now is now, and I still have to ask. What is it you want? What’s the price for your silence?”

  “I don’t have a price.”

  “The point is—”

  “I’m not going to talk about it, Mr. Bundy. I promised I won’t, so I won’t. I know Washington doesn’t work that way, but in my family, a promise is a promise. You don’t have to buy me off or threaten me. You don’t have to persuade me of the vital importance of keeping the secret. I’ll keep it.”

  “Of course,” he said, and for a moment Margo thought she was being mocked, and squared for another battle. Then she realized that he accepted her vow, that he perhaps had even counted on it. “Nevertheless, you should be aware that you now officially have a very wealthy distant relation who’s recently died and who has left you a significant amount of money, currently on deposit in your name—”

  “I don’t want it.”

  “I know. But you have to take it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the kind of people we have in Washington only trust what they think they own.” He raised both hands to forestall her objection. “I know you’ll never be owned, Miss Jensen. I know it and you know it. But there’s no reason they have to know it. You can give the money to charity if you lik
e. You can convert it to cash and burn it in the fire. The one thing you mustn’t do is turn it down.”

  “Give it to Agatha,” she said tartly. “She’s sacrificed a lot more than I have.”

  “I’m afraid we can’t do that, Miss Jensen. We don’t know where she is.”

  Margo drew a long breath. “You’re saying Jack Ziegler got her.”

  “No,” said Bundy, with fierce confidence. “He didn’t.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “We’re sure.” He glanced around: finally, the true point of the visit. “And you haven’t heard from her? She hasn’t visited, called, sent you a note?”

  Margo walked him to his rented car.

  “I’m serious about the job offer, Miss Jensen. I like people who are smart, reliable, combative, and discreet. You’d be perfect for my staff.”

  “I’ll think about it,” she said, turning her face away to hide her excitement.

  “Do, please.” All at once he sounded diffident and uneasy, the Boston Brahmin after all. “The President joins in the offer. He says he likes the idea of having you closer.”

  Suddenly they were both embarrassed, and in a great hurry to say their goodbyes. Watching the President’s special assistant for national security affairs back into the turnaround and make his way down the gravel drive, she reminded herself that he was just the messenger.

  V

  And where was Agatha Milner?

  For a while longer, the mystery occupied Bundy’s time. After meeting Margo on the morning of October 29, she had vanished—except, of course, for her brief reappearance that same afternoon to cave in Viktor Vaganian’s knees. Both FBI and CIA were searching for her, but neither had turned up a trace. Probably the Russians were looking, too.

  “I suppose that just breaking Vaganian’s knees was a way of respecting his diplomatic immunity,” said Bundy to his wife, one of his few confidants.

  “That isn’t terribly amusing, dear.”

  “She could very easily have killed him. She wanted us to know that.”

  Following his release from custody, Jack Ziegler, too, had disappeared, presumably to avoid Agatha’s wrath. He had friends everywhere who would protect him, and doubtless was mounting his defenses. But passive waiting was not natural to the traveling salesmen of the clandestine world, and it was assumed that at some point he would commence his own private hunt for Agatha.

  “They deserve each other,” said a Langley deputy director during a meeting to announce no progress in the search. “She may have switched sides at the end, but remember that she was part of his cabal.”

  Gradually, this came to be the accepted wisdom. The search for Agatha Milner was moved to a back burner, and then to one even farther to the rear. There were too many immediate crises demanding the attention of those tasked with protecting the nation. Tracking two ex-spies who were fighting a private war against each other was a waste of resources. As long as they weren’t killing bystanders, they weren’t the government’s problem.

  Bundy reluctantly acceded to this view. But, as he told his wife, he continued to worry. Suppose Agatha Milner’s list of enemies wasn’t limited to those who worked directly with Jack Ziegler. The chain of events that had led to the death of Doris Harrington comprised many links. From Agatha’s point of view, there was plenty of blame to go around. Sooner or later, she was bound to aim higher.

  VI

  On the afternoon of New Year’s Eve, Bundy was in his office, trying to catch up on paperwork while tamping down several freshly brewing crises. He and his wife were supposed to go out later. He had warned her that he might have to work late, and she had been married to him long enough to understand that “might” often cloaked an imperative. Nevertheless, he was determined, for once, to make it home on time.

  There was more information to be entered into the Cuba file, including the confirmation that the last bombers were gone. There were the continuing protests from the Commonwealth nations over Dean Acheson’s speech suggesting that Great Britain was no longer a world power. And then there was the matter of recommending that the resignation of one William Borkland, formerly Dr. Harrington’s chief aide, not be accepted, and that Borkland instead be promoted to serve as acting deputy assistant secretary of state for intelligence and analysis.

  A very peculiar case.

  The incumbent, the ambitious Alfred Gwynn, had surprised everyone three days ago by requesting reassignment, effective immediately. From the stories Bundy had managed to put together, Gwynn had received a strange envelope at the office just before Christmas. When he opened it, he went pale, grabbed his hat and coat, and fled the building. He hadn’t been back since.

  Esman, as usual, had a theory:

  “Look at it this way. We were searching for the leak that told Fomin that GREENHILL was our asset. You took that one away from me, and at the time I was puzzled, but eventually I saw what you’d worked out: we had things backward. There never was any leak to Fomin. The whole operation was Fomin’s from the start. Getting Vasily Smyslov to drop his hints to Bobby Fischer, then somehow pressuring Fischer to demand that GREENHILL accompany him to Varna—the whole plan was intended, even before we knew the missiles existed, to set up the back channel. Khrushchev yielded to his hard-liners by putting the missiles in, but he’s a wise old dog. So, at the same time that he approved Anadyr, he also instructed Fomin to find a way to let him negotiate in secret to get the missiles out again.”

  “Then why not turn down the hard-liners in the first place? Why all of this rigamarole?”

  “Because the hard-liners had to see how we’d respond: the planes in the air, missiles on alert, forces ready to invade. Khrushchev could never have gotten them to stand down unless they saw what we were willing to do.” Esman adjusted the thick glasses. “Anyway, you figured that the operation was Fomin’s. At that point, you immediately decided to stop my leak investigation. You didn’t want the identity of Fomin’s collaborator disclosed. We both know why. I don’t think we need to go into details.”

  Bundy didn’t smile exactly, but he did give a curt nod of approval. Once more, Esman proved himself the smartest of the bunch.

  “No,” said Bundy, “we don’t need to go into details.”

  “But there was another leak, later. Somebody was giving information to the Ziegler faction, too—information that wound up in the hands of Colonel Vaganian. Maybe I should say the late Colonel Vaganian, seeing that we heard the Soviets shot him last month, broken knees and all. Anyway, the Ziegler faction had information from Langley, obviously, but they also had details from inside Dr. Harrington’s shop. And we know that Gwynn had a habit of referring to the operation as QKPARCHMENT rather than SANTA GREEN. So maybe there was a trade involved—you give us information, we’ll support your climb up the ladder—follow me?”

  Bundy said he believed he could stretch his mind around it, yes.

  “So Agatha figures it out, and she tells Gwynn she’s coming after him next—and, well, by now I bet he’s moved his family to Vancouver.”

  “I believe he’s requested a consular vacancy in Tierra del Fuego.”

  That conversation had taken place this morning. Secretary Rusk had already recommended that Gwynn’s transfer request be granted. A part of Bundy wanted to turn it down, just to let the wretched man sweat and suffer. Leave him to Agatha Milner’s vengeance. But there was no actual evidence to support Esman’s theory. If there had been, Gwynn could have been arrested and tried. Without it—well, there were times when McGeorge Bundy stifled his conscience for the sake of the nation, but in truth the Catholic moralist who lived deep inside him detested the loss of life, even when it was deserved.

  His hand hovered above the paper. Approve? Disapprove?

  He chose, and signed, and dropped the stack of papers on Janet’s desk. “Heading home,” he said.

  “Happy New Year, Mr. Bundy.”

  “What? Oh. Happy New Year to you, too.” He found a smile somewhere. “Anyway, this Administrati
on can’t possibly have a worse 1963 than 1962, right?”

  SIXTY-FIVE

  Back in the Pool

  I

  In January, Margo returned to Ithaca, and school. Once more the dean had been spoken to. Margo’s fall semester had been canceled. She would in effect start over. This would leave her a term behind her classmates, but she could make it up next summer. That is, unless she chose to accept Bundy’s invitation to spend more time in Washington; or perhaps Bill Borkland’s offer of an internship in a European capital of her choice.

  “It’s on the merits,” Borkland assured her. “The interest in you is genuine.”

  “You don’t understand,” Margo said kindly. “I don’t want anything from you.”

  Actually, her return to school could not have come at a better time. Relations with Nana had deteriorated swiftly after Jericho Ainsley arrived the day after Christmas and swept Margo away for two days and two nights. Nana was appalled; she had never heard of such a thing. A well-bred young lady would never go off with a man not her husband. And of course Margo’s poor parents must be rolling in their graves.

  “It isn’t that kind of trip,” Margo protested—an objection that met the sneering disdain Claudia Jensen reserved for those who tried to bury their sin beneath layers of lie. So her granddaughter gave up on that argument and simply announced that the world had changed.

  “Not for the better,” snapped Nana.

  Margo left anyway. Forty-eight hours later, she was back, but Nana scarcely stirred from her room for a day or so, even to take her meals.

  “She’s fine, Miss Margo,” said Muriel. “She just wants you to know she’s still mad.”

  “I think I know.”

  “Maybe if you apologize.”

  But Margo could neither apologize nor explain. She had gone away with Jerry Ainsley for reasons she considered good and sufficient. Of course, they could have avoided upsetting her grandmother by postponing the journey, but he would be off to his new posting on the first of the year, so now was the only time. He had organized the expedition with enormous caution, and although in truth she held but a single meeting, the extra day was necessary so that they might take a circuitous route, with Ainsley watching for surveillance the entire way. And while it is true that they shared a motel room for a night, the only purpose of the arrangement—so Margo would have insisted, had she admitted this fact to her grandmother, which she did not—was security. The security, too, was necessary, even though she could never tell Nana the truth: