‘Some fucking corral,’ I said, gesturing around the room.
‘It’ll grow on you,’ Ryder said. ‘Want some coffee?’
‘It isn’t working.’
Ryder walked over to the machine, pulled a ballpoint pen out of his pocket, and inserted it into a slot by the selector panel.
‘Black or white?’
‘White.’
Ryder manipulated the ballpoint and a plastic cup dropped and started to fill with coffee. He had always had healer’s hands with anything mechanical.
‘Bob, I know there are budget problems in the CIA, but this is a helluvan office for a Deputy Director.’
‘There are reasons.’
I didn’t press him. I knew Bob would not play games with me, but his tone reminded me that although he was a close friend, he was also a man I would always prefer to have on my side, not as an enemy.
In the latest shake-up, he had become number three in the Company. His position wasn’t very secure, but throughout his career it had always been like that: he was a survivor, but always out of step. In the days when covert operations had ruled the CIA, Ryder had been considered an intellectual who held on to his position in the field only by ingenuity and personal courage. Now, in the age of the electronic spy, when the unthinkable had happened and a former head of the rival National Security Agency had been named as director of the CIA, Ryder was identified with the no longer fashionable ‘black ops boys’ when he was in fact more cerebral than most of the youngsters who were rising in the new regime.
The bond between us was almost conventional, in his world if not in mine: I had once saved his life.
It had happened in West Africa, during Ryder’s first field assignment—a posting he had wangled despite having failed Ranger training and all the other physical tests that were normal for operational agents. There had been an attempted coup and, in the aftermath, while observing troop movements, he had almost been shot by a drunken soldier with whom he had been unable to deal physically. I had come on them by accident and managed to get Ryder to safety. The incident would have ended his career—probably in ridicule—especially as his would have been almost the only blood shed in a virtually bloodless coup. It could also have damaged mine, as I would have lost all credibility as a neutral observer.
His private joke about the OK Corral was a reference to the vow he had made after the West African incident never to need such help again. He was still not a physical man but his small-arms skills were near perfect, and he had become a devotee of what he called The Doc Holliday School of Interpersonal Relations, which, in his own phrase, relied heavily on the concealed derringer and the ‘shoot ‘em in the back while they’re still at the bar’ approach to physical confrontations.
And he had changed in other ways too. Though we were contemporaries, his hair showed more signs of gray and his face had acquired a permanently wary look, that of someone who had been too long in the jungle.
‘So what the hell is going on?’ I said when he handed me the coffee. ‘How did you get involved? And why did you have to pretend I might be arrested?’
‘There’s no pretense,’ Ryder said. ‘I had to get permission direct from Langley to bring you into this basement. We’re here because this meeting isn’t official. What’s said within these walls is on my personal responsibility. It’s still not certain that you’ll be able to leave Fort Benedict without being arrested.’
‘Bob, this is getting completely surreal,’ I said. ‘What in God’s name could I possibly be arrested for? Is this something to do with what happened on the plane? With Haxler and that mad red-baiter Inman?’
‘That’s part of it. But it goes back much further. I’ve been involved from the beginning.’
‘What beginning?’
‘The Allenby business.’
That stopped me for a moment. Then I said, ‘What has Allenby got to do with the CIA? For God’s sake will you tell me what is going on here?’
‘Yes,’ Ryder said quietly. ‘I’ll tell you what’s going on. I’ll tell you what happened on the plane and why you’re in danger of being arrested, but it won’t make any sense unless we start with Allenby. First, I want you to tell me what you know about the Allenby affair. You’re talking only to me. There are no bugs. I give you my word. I’ve swept the place personally.’
‘What do you want to know?’
‘I want to know what you think this is about,’ Ryder said. ‘Pretend that the scandal is just about to break and I’m your lawyer. Brief me.’
‘Well, first off, I hardly know Louise Allenby,’ I began. ‘Until this started, I didn’t know much more about her than most people who read the gossip columns: that she was the daughter of Kent Allenby, the Louisiana shipping magnate-Louisiana, that is, as in Panama and Liberia. I knew Louise was supposed to have been very much her own woman, thirtyish, career of her own as a fashion designer until she was killed in a car crash in London, very stylish, a looker, her own best clotheshorse. Then, about a month ago, a journalist called Fred Wint—an Australian freelance, drunken, vicious bastard, as unreliable as hell—started peddling a story around Fleet Street about how Louise Allenby died. Officially, she was supposed to have been knocked down by a car one morning while she was shopping in Chelsea. Hit and run. Driver never found. Inquest gave an open verdict.’
‘And how did Wint say she died?’ Ryder said.
‘He claims that it didn’t happen at around nine-thirty in the morning, as it was supposed to. He says the police found her body at five a.m. and though there were tire marks on her, she was dead before the car touched her. Wint says there was a cover-up and he’s acting as intermediary for someone who can prove it. He’s been to just four editors—all the biggest-spending populars—and he’s talking big money: bids over fifty thousand pounds to open. He’s offering lots of titillating detail but not the whole story, and no proof. He wants money up front first.’
‘What kind of titillating details?’ Ryder said. ‘What are the police supposed to have covered up?’
‘A lot of stuff to make a tabloid editor salivate. Wint says Louise Allenby was wearing a five-thousand-pound fashion fur from one of her own boutiques, but a cheap chain-store dress underneath that was three sizes too big for her. And nothing else. No underwear, no jewelry, no shoes, no stockings or tights. And Louise Allenby was known, apparently, for her chic and the fact that she never ever wore anything she hadn’t designed herself.’
Ryder nodded. ‘Anything else?’
‘Oh yes. The police are supposed to have overlooked the fact that she was doped up to the eyeballs.’
‘Is the idea that she OD’d?’ Ryder prompted.
I gave him a tight grin. ‘If only,’ I said. ‘No, this is the point where the tabloid boys go into orbit—or would if Wint weren’t so unreliable or if their own people could turn up anything. The story is that Louise Allenby had been at a party—a very wild, crazy party with plenty of dope, booze, and sexy fun and games and a lot of very well-known people.’
I paused. ‘Including Mr. John Railton.’
‘Did you know she was at the party?’
‘Vaguely. I glimpsed her once, but I didn’t know that I was directly involved in the way she was supposed to have died.’
‘Which was?’
‘Wint’s version is that she died in a sleeping bag—while raising money for charity.’ I managed a grin. ‘At this point the tabloids have to order special type to get the headlines big enough. Louise Allenby and a number of other women volunteered to let themselves be raffled off. One hundred pounds a ticket. Each one hid inside a sleeping bag; they crouched right down inside to conceal their identity. Wint says Allenby was high and suffocated herself.’
‘While you, presumably, were a couple of sleeping bags away?’
‘More or less. But I didn’t know who the women were, except for the one I drew.’
I broke off and took a sip of almost cold coffee. Even knowing Ryder as well as I did, it was impossible to c
onvey the real atmosphere of the party. In the newspapers, the story would run on stylized lines, all the triggers to excite the reader as predictably as food to a lab rat: police corruption, cover-up, orgy, group sex, drugs, mate swapping, heiress dead… you could take your pick for the heads and subheads. But I wasn’t managing to convey to Ryder the friendly, good-humored atmosphere of the warm, firelit rooms, the feeling of coziness with the long drapes closing out the winter bleakness. In other circumstances, I would have admitted to Bob that it was one of the most enjoyable nights of my life, a memory I had relived, scene by scene, countless times.
My own mood had been crucial and I couldn’t explain that adequately either. The divorce was dragging on and I was tired of the worry and the depression and the constraints the court and the lawyers were trying to put on me; I wanted Nancy back and I had just found out about Sellinger. The merger talks were beginning and I thought the divorce had killed any chances of my getting the presidency and I’d gone to the party feeling rebellious, angry, and raunchy and just ready for the excitement of the sleeping-bag game.
I’d known the hostess, Kate, for years and slept with her joyfully once after a party at Oxford. We had never repeated it, but we had remained friends and I trusted her and liked her crazy ways which had taken her a couple of times around the world and through several marriages. She had told me about the game, and led me by the hand, laughing, demanding my check. Then she had squeezed the hand and whispered: ‘Trust me. It’s strictly for fun. The women are all in the mood, and they’re all free agents.’ Then she had added, with a final squeeze, ‘And they’re all worth winning.’
‘Did you see Louise Allenby at all during the game?’ Ryder asked.
‘No.’
‘Did anyone tell you the names of anyone who was playing?’
‘No.’
‘So you saw only the woman you won?’
I smiled. ‘It sounds funny to think of winning her. Later, there was so much more to it. Her name was Jennifer Ross. We had an affair. It didn’t go on for long but …’ I stopped, looking for words.
‘Bob,’ I said, ‘a friend once said to me that with sex, the vocabulary is hopeless, so when something is superlative, it’s best to bypass all the clichés and just say ‘It was nice.’ The affair with… Miss Ross was nice.’ I didn’t tell him my nickname for her: Seagull.
Bob grunted.
‘And you were so wrapped up in the beginning of this superlative affair that you didn’t notice anything that was going on in the other sleeping bags?’
‘We weren’t even there,’ I said. ‘I took her away to another part of the house.’
As I said it, I had a sudden image of myself carrying Seagull, still in the sleeping bag, to an attic bedroom at the very top of the house. I thought how the papers might put it—or a witty lawyer: that I’d behaved like a dog who had been given a very special marrow bone and carried his treasure as far away as possible so no one could see it or take it away.
‘And you didn’t come down again?’
‘Once. To the kitchen to get some drinks.’
‘And you didn’t see anything?’
‘Let’s say I saw a lot of very interesting human configurations here and there, but I didn’t see Louise Allenby.’
‘That’s it?’
‘Just about.’
Ryder shrugged and changed position on the edge of the desk.
‘That’s about what I figured,’ he said. ‘You’re still at version A.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘I’ll call it version A for convenience. That’s the story Wint first took around Fleet Street. Now he’s come up with another version. He took it to one editor only, Herbert Rice-Williams of the Express. He claimed he’s just received new documents; that he still didn’t know whom he was acting for, that he was doing it for the money. Rice-Williams read the documents, saw there was a lot more to it than some well-known people screwing around in sleeping bags, and contacted SIS.’
‘And what was this version B?’
‘The punch line is that Louise Allenby didn’t suffocate accidentally. She was murdered.’
‘Did Wint say who did it?’
‘No. But he did claim to know why: he said it was because she was working for us.’
‘For the CIA? Christ. Was she?’
‘It’s a tricky one,’ Ryder said carefully. ‘She had worked for us several times, as a freelance. At the time of her death, she was supposed to have been working on something she thought we’d want: in your business, you’d call it developing an outline before trying to sell the story.’
‘And what was the story?’
‘You’re not going to like this,’ Ryder said quietly. ‘She was supposed to have been investigating you. Specifically, she was trying to prove that you are the man the Soviets are counting on to feed them information about Starburst.’
‘For God’s sake!’ I exploded. ‘This is some kind of put-on. You can’t be serious.’ I stopped short. ‘Bob, I’m beginning to get the nasty feeling that I know what’s happening here. I have a feeling you may just have been suckered into the latest round of the war between Paul Sellinger and me. I think I may just know who’s feeding this crap to Wint.
‘No. That’s not it,’ Ryder said. ‘Forget Sellinger.’
‘Bob,’ I said irritably, ‘there’s no way I can ever forget Paul Sellinger. I’m at war with him twenty-four hours a day and I’m telling you. I know just how far that bastard would go to discredit me.’
‘John, we go back a long way,’ Ryder said slowly. ‘Long enough for you to know I’m not a complete clown.’
‘Yes. I know that.’
‘Then give me credit for knowing what’s going on in World News. If there was no more to this than Paul Sellinger putting Wint up to floating crappy stories around Fleet Street to discredit you, you don’t seriously imagine I’d be here, do you? So sit still and listen to the rest of it, because your career—and a helluva lot more—depends on it.’
This time the tone really made me uneasy. He was serious as well as irritated and there was no trace of friendship.
‘We’ll start with the background,’ Ryder said. ‘For almost two years we’ve been getting feedback from behind the Curtain that the Russians weren’t too worried about Starburst. And the reason they weren’t worried was because they were counting on an intelligence breakthrough: leaked information that would enable them to neutralize the whole system. It was good feedback, from sources I personally trust. Then worse came. It was fleshed out by a defector who came over to the West Germans. He claimed that the KGB had a mole in London who was being prepared as the conduit for the Starburst information.’
Ryder smiled wryly. ‘A mole in London isn’t exactly a novel idea; they’ve already uncovered enough to form a cricket team. But the defector said this one was special, off the usual nets— not in the intelligence services or the government where the vetting had been really screwed up tight after the previous shambles, but someone highly placed in the media.’
Ryder paused and took another sip of coffee.
‘According to the defector, the mole had already won his spurs with Moscow, especially on dissidents. He claimed that really delicate stuff—names of dissident scientists, details of how their networks functioned, stuff like that—was known to a very few trusted Western correspondents and had gotten back to the KGB via the mole in London. He said the mole had passed other information too—about U.S. activities in the Gulf and South Africa and the Horn—but that he’d been allowed to go inactive to cut down the risk of him being spotted before Starburst, which was his big task.’
Ryder reached down and picked up a large black briefcase he had left resting beside his foot.
‘Now, one of the reasons we’re here in this sleazy basement and not in the base security office is that I wanted to scare you: and the best way of doing that is to show you a few documents you aren’t supposed to see. So don’t explode, or protest or rave at me. Just sit qui
etly and read.’
7
Ryder opened his document case and took out three manila folders. Without speaking, he handed me the first one. I opened it and before I was halfway through it, Ryder had achieved his purpose: I was well and truly scared.
The file contained several Soviet official documents, with U.S. government translations attached. The translator had called them Investigation and Arrest Summaries, but they were quite simply the official file of a purge.
One document described how a group of scientists met every Sunday in a Moscow flat to brief Jewish and other dissidents who had been banned from working, and kept them up to date with developments in various scientific fields. Many dissident scientists were afraid to attend and the information was passed on to them through what was known as the ‘network.’ I knew about the briefings already: a former World News Moscow bureau chief, Jay Wellesley, had been one of those trusted by the network and they had fed him information about the condition of the leading scientists in the labor camps and in prison.
The document listed seventeen arrests and the names were all familiar. Wellesley had called me when I was chief of correspondents and asked to be pulled out of Moscow because he feared he might be interrogated by the Soviets. I had agreed and I could still remember Wellesley’s relief and gratitude when we had met in Vienna and he had told me the situation and how he was sure he had gotten out hours before being arrested himself—-and he had given me the names.
The translation of the document said that the arrests had resulted from information received from ‘our regular contact in London,’ who had passed it to the KGB Vienna station.
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