Seven Silent Men

by Behn, Noel;

  Brew lowered his head, rubbed his temples. “Of course, this is random speculation. Maybe there’s a perfectly logical explanation that—” He looked up to see Yates hurrying out the door. “What’s the matter?”

  Yates hardly heard. He had, at long last, found something he’d been searching so long for, the reason for the déjà vu, for the feeling he had experienced Mormon State before.

  “Yates, what in Christ’s name is happening?” Brew stood at the door watching Billy high-step away. “Yates?”

  “Cover for me, Brew. I should be back tomorrow. Cover for me.”

  … And Billy Yates drove through the night and morning and afternoon and by early evening was in Maryland and nearing his destination.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Heeled-high and taffetaed she stood adrift looking out over a dim, distant world of demi-court and dusty pomp. A world of silent bugle, abandoned spear and waiting steed. A lost laughter and unstepped quadrille. A place of civility and form. Of familiarity. Privilege. Youth. Her chin jutted high, for she was Patricia Trask Sproul Ardmore Amory, sired by the merchant barons of Baltimore, twice wed into the British peerage, twice a countess but never a duchess. Her eyes were clear, her vision partial to a memory of parasols and esplanade. Nothing much had happened. Time was simply passing.

  “Mister Yates, how nice of you to drop in without calling.” She motioned away the butler who had admitted him to the somber Virginia mansion built by her great-great-grandfather. “Are you planning to stay for dinner?”

  “Only to talk to your husband and leave,” Yates assured her. “I’m sorry I didn’t call in advance.”

  “Barrett is napping. Do amuse yourself until he comes down.” She withdrew, saying, “I’ll set another place for dinner.”

  Billy Yates rather liked Lady Pat, as his classmates at the FBI’s training academy used to call her. He knew the feelings were not mutual, which was all right with him. After all, how chummy does a future agent want to be with J. Edgar Hoover’s alleged paramour?

  If the most fanciful of rumors were to be believed, Pat was the fabled Carmella Hebbelman, who long ago during Prohibition danced and drank the night away with Edgar in Zion, Illinois.

  When saner heads and logic prevailed, a confirmable story told how Lady Pat and Hoover were first introduced in 1942. World War II was in full rage, and Patricia had returned to America with her second titled British husband, the Earl of Ardmore. Ardmore, who was in England’s secret service, had come to this country to confer with OSS chief William J. “Wild Bill” Donovan on the formation of Anglo-U.S. training programs for espionage operatives. Ardmore had created several such curriculums for Britain. Among the aides accompanying him and his wife was Patricia’s cousin Orin G. Trask. Trask, a thirty-year-old scholar with a penchant for criminology, was in London researching a book on Scotland Yard when war with Germany broke out. He stayed on and joined his cousin-in-law’s unit. Development of training programs for espionage whetted Trask’s appetite for similar programs in crime fighting. Trask, as early as 1941, envisioned the FBI transcending Scotland Yard as the dominant post-war law-enforcement entity … saw a great university of criminology being established by the Bureau, a university of his design.

  When the Earl of Ardmore and Pat were asked to a small dinner party that J. Edgar Hoover was to attend, Trask wangled an invitation and cornered Hoover. The FBI Director was intrigued by what the young American had to say. He was more taken by Trask’s stately cousin Patricia. Patricia had been bred to believe in men. She avidly believed in cousin Orin and his work. She believed in Ardmore and his work. The same was immediately true for J. Edgar Hoover. That was the beginning.

  How often and how surreptitiously Lady Pat and Edgar met during the war is problematic. It couldn’t have been often. She was back in England for the duration, made only two quick junkets to America, both with her husband. J. Edgar Hoover was not known to have gone to England. But he did write, ostensibly to Orin Trask. Trask’s letters back to Hoover contained sealed messages from Pat.

  A year and five months after peace was declared, the earl died. Patricia, Countess of Ardmore, was devastated. Notions she had not loved Ardmore were discredited. Suspicion grew as to how much control her cousin Orin Trask wielded over her.

  Since earliest childhood, independent, iron-minded Pat had always succumbed to Orin’s will. Though he was a year her junior, he had always acted as his cousin’s protector. She, on many occasions, acted as his. Rarely had Pat and Orin exchanged confidences. They were from private, nonconfiding stock. The idea that there had been any carnal relationship between them was farfetched. They were not a passionate or incestuous lot, the Trasks. Trask women, even before the great fortune had been amassed, married for convenience. Remained married and loyal and caring. Ruthless in defense of their own. Indefatigable in maintaining decorum. Which was why many friends doubted her relationship with Edgar ever ended in bed. A few insisted it had … that there was no way it could be avoided, since Orin wanted it that way.

  It had fallen to Orin to shake Pat free of her protracted grief and mourning. He had convinced her to abandon England and return to the family home in Virginia. To get out and be with people again. To reestablish her friendship with J. Edgar Hoover. Critics saw the steering of Pat back toward Edgar as Trask’s most self-serving manipulation of his titled cousin.

  J. Edgar, from their first meeting in 1942, had been ambivalent toward Orin Trask. He, assessed the young Virginia plutocrat as being at once brilliant, erratic, ambitious and merciless. Opportunistically, for Edgar, there was much to be gained by an alliance with Orin. The Trask family in and of itself was respected and wealthy and politically potent on Capitol Hill and throughout the southeastern seaboard. Orin’s avowed dedication to creating for the FBI a university-level training academy bearing Hoover’s name was appealing. Also to be considered was Orin’s cousin Pat, the Countess of Ardmore.

  In the wake of Hitler’s surrender, Edgar Hoover became increasingly disaffected with Orin, who was in Germany studying the structure and substance of Nazi police organizations. Trask was forever making public statements on his plans for the FBI Academy as well as shooting off unsolicited reports to Hoover. Twice he woke the Director with transatlantic phone calls, chitchat calls having no relevance. By late 1947 reports had filtered back to Hoover that Orin was not only consorting with known Nazis under the guise of research but was protecting several notorious Gestapo men, as well as an SD Ausland aide to Walter Schellenberg … that he might even be planning to smuggle one of them into the U.S. Edgar Hoover determined to sever his relationship with Trask. Patricia returned in time to dissuade him.

  Patricia came home to America and the Trask family estate, Three Oaks, in early 1948. It was there at Three Oaks where Edgar went to lunch with her. She related, as best she could, the tragic loss of her husband. But enough of me. What of you, Edgar? How goes it?

  And he told her, that afternoon and most every Thursday afternoon for years to come, for Thursday was “their” day, with Associate FBI Director Clyde Tolson outside in the car parked along the great circular gravel driveway even though he could have waited inside. Edgar complained, in lugubrious detail, of each of his own troubles … and always ended up with detestation and fears regarding Harry Truman and an emerging intelligence organization called CIA. Unlike the military’s dominant Counterintelligence Corps, the successor to OSS, which answered to the general of the Army group to which it was attached, CIA was to be a nonmilitary, unaffiliated organization answering directly to the President of the United States. Edgar had luxuriated in the fact that he alone, of all law-enforcement and intelligence-gathering heads, spoke directly to the President. But Harry Truman those days was speaking more and more to CIA boss Allen Dulles.

  Future peril to the side, Harry Truman had already inflicted a blow to FBI power and prestige by stripping the Bureau of its jurisdiction to operate in Europe as well as drastically limiting its activities in Central and South America. E
xcept for Mexico, the FBI had been reduced to a domestic service, not the international organization Edgar had come to envision. Worse yet, Allen Dulles’s CIA was the new glamour service. Young men who might have applied to become FBI agents were now, in epidemic numbers, flocking to CIA.

  Spying, Edgar warned Patricia, was murky business and un-American. Foreign business better done by Brits and Russkies and Swedes. America was a no-nonsense nation of right and wrong, good and bad, black and white and nothing in between. No gray areas, no shading. Every American boy and his brother was either moral or immoral. Not amoral like the French. Espionage by definition was gray and amoral.

  “With all this verbal diarrhea about cold wars and spies,” he told her, “I have a mind to give that sotted billygoat what he wants and let hell thunder.”

  The billygoat was a junior senator from the state of Wisconsin by the name of McCarthy, who in an informal poll of Washington correspondents had been voted the worst senator in the entire Senate, which was why he was desperately rummaging for a reelection campaign issue such as communists in government, Edgar explained to Patricia. Patricia thought it might be propitious if Edgar tossed McCarthy a random communist or so to see what effect it would have on Harry Truman.

  The matter of J. Edgar’s faltering prestige troubled Patricia mightily. After profound consideration she came truly to believe salvation lay with cousin Orin Trask and his plans for the great training center … an FBI university developing unique and exciting curriculums for crime detection and prevention, nurturing generations of elite super-operatives. Edgar, however, wanted nothing as grand as a university and was wary of Trask’s ideas on elitism.

  “The average FBI agent today is better than his counterpart at any time in history, and this is good enough for me,” Patricia’s journal would record Edgar having told her.

  When Orin G. Trask returned to the United States to teach at Johns Hopkins University, Edgar, at Patricia’s urging, suggested he develop plans for a modest new training facility, perhaps at the very same U.S. Marine Corps base at nearby Quantico, Virginia, where the current FBI Academy stood. Edgar proposed paying a small sum from his own pocket for this service. Trask gladly accepted the assignment but insisted on personally financing whatever was required at this juncture. Edgar acceded to the funding arrangement.

  Neither Edgar nor even Patricia foresaw the thoroughness, or the length of time, Trask would expend on the project. The first phase in itself, an analysis of every FBI procedure and investigation to that date, required five years of research by a hand-picked staff of think-tank experts Trask had assembled. With this knowledge in hand, a team of educators was brought in to evolve the actual curriculum for the future. Among the scholastics was the prestigious historian Barrett Amory.

  Trask and Amory had both served with espionage organizations during World War II, England’s SIS and America’s OSS respectively. Whereas Trask had been interested in criminology and law enforcement prior to working in the secret service and returned to it after, Amory had been interested in espionage prior to, during and immediately after his stint with OSS. Amory was older than Trask, and his first love was history; his second, psychology. Trask, on recruiting Amory, suggested Amory do an extensive history of the FBI for him. Amory obliged. Several years later he expanded the history to cover crime in America.

  In 1954 Barrett Amory joined the four-man steering committee entrusted with devising a curriculum for the new academy. By 1955 Amory and Trask were fast friends. During 1956 Amory moved into the great mansion, then shared by Trask and Patricia. On New Year’s Eve, 1957, he married Patricia. Nothing was known of their courtship or how Edgar took the news. All that could outwardly be noticed was that Patricia’s time was now divided among three men instead of two—Edgar, Trask and Barrett Amory.

  Orin Trask’s master plan for a new FBI training center and a curriculum was completed in 1959, ten years after work on it had begun. The achievement was remarkable, all fourteen volumes of it. What was presented, in exquisite detail, was not the “modest facility” Hoover had urged but a university more enormous and futuristic than any ever hinted at by Trask in almost two decades of conversation on the subject. J. Edgar Hoover, certain the Senate would never fund a project of such magnitude and cost, pigeonholed the leather-bound volumes without allowing anyone at the Bureau to see them, except Clyde Tolson.

  Orin Trask was not all that perturbed by the rejection. Knowing the airplane would fly was for him as important as going somewhere in it. He busied himself with myriad other projects. Amory too had much to occupy his time. It was Patricia alone who was determined the university be built and, using her wile and wealth, set forth to create a power base from which to lobby Congress.

  In spite of having turned down the university plans, J. Edgar Hoover was impressed by Trask’s vision, was particularly taken by a teaching concept termed “cadreism,” in which certain experimental courses would be taught to small, handpicked units of trainees, groups as small as four or five men who would later serve together in the field. Edgar invited Orin to try out the concept at the present FBI Academy, which boasted a student population of slightly more than thirty. Trask declined, went on declining for years. Patricia finally interceded. Orin agreed, on the condition that he could select the students he wanted in his own way. Edgar agreed to that.

  Orin Trask began conducting one seminar a week in Elements of Crime Detection in the fall of 1963. It proved to be a startling, effective and popular course. And a most difficult one to get into. Trask selected only four trainees a term. Admittance became a badge of honor among the aspiring agents.

  The success of the experiment prompted expansion. Trask persuaded Barrett Amory to create a seminar of his own, which he did in 1966. Psychological Profiling and Comprehensive History of Crime were the two subjects Amory’s four trainees were taught.

  Trask had cautioned Amory that the seminars must never become clubs or fraternities, must avoid elitism and always remain part of the overall academy, must never become competitive with one another. This was easier said than done. The tiny groups, by the very selection process which created them, were elite. Pride in their own seminar and instructor prompted student competition between the groups. Oddly enough, it was Amory’s students who were the most aggressively competitive.

  On the other hand, the brothers-in-law, rather than compete, grew closer. Trask, having proved his point with the seminars, was wearying of them. Longed to get away and throw himself into several long-abandoned research interests. He urged Amory to join him on one of the projects. Amory was not interested. Even so, Trask spent more and more time around the old family estate where Amory and Patricia resided. Patricia’s tenacity had been partially responsible for Congress approving construction of a magnificent new FBI Academy at Quantico, but Orin showed no interest in this. While at the estate he was usually cloistered with Amory discussing some future plan or another. On occasion Trask addressed Amory’s seminars. The reverse never occurred. No one, including Amory, ever set foot in Trask’s seminar any more. This was starting to bother J. Edgar Hoover. Trask’s students were becoming too cliquish, too competitive with Amory’s students, who already were far too aggressive for the Director’s liking.

  J. Edgar Hoover decided to put an end to the seminar experiment, but before he could, Orin G. Trask died of a heart attack on December 20, 1969. He was sixty-seven years old. Patricia was sixty-eight. Barrett Amory was seventy-three. J. Edgar Hoover was seventy-five. Construction of a new academy had been under way for six months.

  Patricia’s grief was limitless. The present, like the future, eluded her. She slipped backward. Took to wearing the trappings of her bygone British past. The gowns, the parasols. Took to standing at the window and watching her garden and seeing things of yesterday that only she could see. Hearing things. Took to whispering to sweet Edmond, Earl of Ardmore. To blowing kisses to Orin.

  She didn’t abandon Barrett Amory. She tarried in the present long enough each day
to tend to his needs. This done, she returned to the garden. To Edmond. To Trask.

  Billy Yates, waiting now in the side room at Three Oaks, glanced across the grand foyer and into the main salon and saw her there, standing at the arched window in front of the garden … saw her in profile, her chin jutted upward, peering out through the glass. He knew all about her. Anyone who had studied with Barrett Amory did, but he knew even more. She didn’t like him. Didn’t like him being so bright, so independent … so Jewish.

  Billy Yates being Jewish but not looking Semitic provided him certain advantages, or so he thought. Often, not being recognized was like possessing a secret password, allowed him to cross behind enemy lines and watch his adversaries around their campfire … hear what they had to say … what they were planning. Most of the time he didn’t bother one way or the other. The whole religious issue had become tedious to him. Even so, he wasn’t taking chances. As Mom said, do everything twice as good as anyone else and maybe you’ll come out almost equal.