The Better Angels

by Charles McCarry

  “Perhaps I should go on with this story of mine a little further,” Patrick said. “Then we can talk again. It may come to a point where I’d want to talk to Frosty.”

  This repetition of the President’s nickname irritated Julian. What right had Patrick to use it? To Patrick, Julian said, “I doubt that your researches will ever carry you to that point.”

  “I hope not,” Patrick replied, rising from the bench. “Really I do.” He dropped his cigarette into a marble bowl filled with sand, and drew a line in the sand with his index finger. “The mysterious desert,” he said. “You remember what a force Ibn Awad was, Julian?”

  “They seemed to think a lot of him in his part of the world. But Hagreb is a very small country.”

  “So was Galilee. You know, I followed Awad on those pilgrimages of his, when he was praying at all the great mosques of Islam. He’d walk barefoot into the Muslim cities—Damascus, Baghdad, Cairo, all of them—and people would just rise up out of the dust and follow him. The streets would be choked with humanity. Yet the babble would die. There was silence—total silence. Thousands would follow Awad to the mosque to pray—they’d be all over the ground outside, a great sea of the poor.”

  Julian listened, studying Patrick’s tone. He was speaking in a conversational voice. He seemed to be moved by the memory of the events he was describing. Julian waited, unspeaking, for Patrick to take him inside. Patrick, with a shrug, let him find his own way back.

  Charlotte, when she returned from saying good-bye to Julian and Emily, found Patrick walking around his little garden, smoking again. She waited until they could no longer hear the Hubbards’ footsteps on the brick sidewalk or the crackle of their bodyguards’ radios. Then she spoke.

  “Was it a success?”

  “A stand-off. Julian’s reaction was what you’d expect—he won’t dignify such an accusation with a denial.”

  Charlotte made herself a fresh Scotch and milk. She sank onto the bench where Patrick and Julian had been sitting and, reaching beneath it, turned a valve that shut down the fountain.

  “My hair will go funny in the mist,” she explained. Patrick was frowning; he liked the fountain. “Emily is a delicious girl, don’t you think?”

  “Yes.”

  “She’s quite mad about Julian, you know.”

  Patrick gave his wife a look. Her eyes were bright above the rim of her glass and her skirt was spread beautifully on the bench; Charlotte’s clothes always behaved perfectly for her. Patrick made an impatient gesture and Charlotte came back to the subject.

  “Do try and remember,” she said, “that Clive Wilmot can be a swine. He may just be having you on for the hell of it, or he may be playing a deeper game.”

  “A deeper game? Do you say that, actually still use those words?”

  “Joke. But Clive’s no joke.”

  “Neither is Julian.”

  Charlotte drank, daintily. “I do wish you could see some humor in Julian,” she said. “He’s really rather sweet, the way he loves that great booby Frosty Lockwood. But of course you love Lockwood as well.”

  “Love Lockwood? For twenty years I’ve hoped he was the enemy of my enemies, that’s all.”

  “And you don’t love Julian at all, do you? You’re a very human chap, Patrick. But the past is the past, and Julian can’t help Caroline being Caroline any more than you can. It’s well to remember that.”

  “I remember a lot more than just Caroline.” Patrick wasn’t able to go on speaking. This only lasted for a moment. “Julian symbolizes something I hate.”

  “Yes, but you two have been useful to one another.” Charlotte gave one of her dazzling smiles. “He may not be what you’ve always wanted. But think about the alternative.” Her smile brightened. “One can live without love better than one can live in chains in Alaska.”

  Patrick’s head was in his hands, but he was listening to Charlotte. He had never acted against her advice without doing himself harm. He pinched out his cigarette and with its dead end drew a design in the white sand—the helix within a circle that had been the symbol of the revolutionary army he and Caroline and the others had wanted to be born in the East Village. They had never got beyond designing the symbol, and now here he was in a toy garden that had cost enough to arm a battalion of guerrillas, chatting with a wife who had the blood of Stuarts running in her veins.

  “The past is the past—you’re absolutely right,” Patrick said.

  “But no one ever forgets it. Coming back from Baghdad, something happened to me. My old self was shocked back to life. I don’t know what caused it—coming face to face with poor Hassan, maybe.”

  “Poor Hassan? My dear Patrick! He’s the greatest murderer of his age.”

  Patrick glared; Charlotte looked down into her glass.

  “I remembered what it was I used to love,” Patrick said. “I used to love an idea. There was a time when everyone I loved loved the same idea.”

  “And that’s why you loved Caroline?”

  Patrick didn’t hear. He wanted to say aloud what was on his mind. He lived by the sound of his own voice. Unspoken thoughts had no reality for him. He had to bring words out of his subconscious, hear them vibrate; this was necessary to him in the way a painter must see color on a canvas or a poet lines on a page in order to know what lies within him, hiding.

  “The idea was this: that people like Julian—people like your family used to be, Charlotte—had done enough harm. That it had to stop.”

  “You still believe that?”

  Patrick pointed a finger at her. “Yes. I’d forgotten how much I believe it. No harm ever comes to Julian and his kind. They take over everything with a smile. We even gave them our idea because we hadn’t the power to make it work. Gave it to them!”

  “They haven’t done so badly with it.”

  Patrick didn’t listen. “Julian thinks he can control anything. Lockwood, me, himself. Perhaps some harm ought to come to him, so he’ll know the taste of it.”

  “Oh, dear,” said Charlotte. “I don’t like the sound of that.”

  10

  A dozen Thoroughbred yearlings, fleeing from some alarm that had rung in the nerves of the herd, galloped wildly around the pasture, their bright hides flowing together like that of a single radiant animal. Lockwood watched the colts with pleasure as he and Julian stood together by the white board fence that enclosed the paddock. The President was as tall as Julian, but rawboned and weather-burnt. He wore his country clothes—scarred boots, old whipcords, a battered Stetson—and he smelled of horse and crushed grass; a moment before, he had kneeled in the dew to handle an ailing foal, and the knees of his trousers were stained green. It was early yet. Lockwood and Julian were just beginning to feel the sun on their shoulders, and a haze lay on the wooded hills that encircled Lockwood’s farm in the Bluegrass of Kentucky.

  Julian had just told Lockwood about Patrick Graham’s suspicions about the manner in which Ibn Awad had died. It was Julian’s helicopter, lifting off for the return trip to Washington, that had frightened the colts. Now, as the noise of the machine receded, they stopped running; the herd divided itself into individuals again and resumed grazing.

  Lockwood turned his back on the animals and gazed at the porticoed mansion, standing some distance away on a little hill at the end of an avenue of flaunting oaks. The sight of the house, white and ancient, gave Lockwood peace. More and more, as his first term drew to a close, he came here in order to be alone. No reporters were permitted to follow him; no member of the Cabinet or congressman or senator had ever flown down for consultations. Julian came and went as the need arose.

  Lockwood himself didn’t really belong here, as much as he loved the place with its colony of barns, its long marches of white fence, its southern voices calling and laughing in the quiet. Polly’s family had built the house before the Civil War, naming it Live Oaks for its avenue of trees, and her father, ruined by his love for horses, had lost it when she was a girl. Lockwood, when he was still a s
enator, bought it back for her and used what little money he had to make it look again as it must have looked a century before, when there had been famous parties here. Paintings of belles in ball gowns, Polly’s aunts and cousins, had been hung on the walls again, and Polly had found most of the old furniture in the houses of her relations, and returned it to its rightful place. She’d brought the gardens back.

  Lockwood said, “You mean Patrick intends to go after us on this?”

  “That’s what he was saying to me.”

  “Have you done anything?”

  “I spoke to Jack Philindros. He’s the authority on this question. I asked him to fly down here this morning.”

  Lockwood nodded, and looked to the northern horizon, as though searching for an approaching helicopter. Philindros was the Director of Foreign Intelligence. He wasn’t a man Lockwood saw very often.

  “Can we talk to Patrick, explain?”

  “He’d never understand,” said Julian. “It was hard enough for you to believe what we had to do. It’s taken me years to accept it. How could a man like Patrick Graham possibly grasp all the shades of judgment that went into that decision?”

  “He isn’t stupid. Anyone who knew the truth would understand.”

  Julian didn’t reply and Lockwood gave him a bleak smile. It was always the President’s first instinct to tell the truth. Julian believed in silence and in the possibility of controlling men and situations.

  The colts began to gallop again and the earth quivered beneath their hooves. Julian felt it through the soles of his shoes. Lockwood turned to watch; he couldn’t get enough of the sight of horses. Julian, with his aviator’s eye, saw the sun flash on the perspex of an approaching helicopter, and in a moment heard the clatter of its engine.

  “That’s Philindros,” he said.

  “Has he been down here since that night?” Lockwood asked.

  Julian shook his head.

  “Then he’ll see changes in the place.”

  The President started the long uphill walk across the lawns to the house. When he moved he lost all his awkwardness; he was still an athlete at sixty. As he walked, he watched Philindros’s helicopter settle with its rotors winking onto the landing pad.

  Philindros had come prepared for everything except the questions Lockwood was asking him. The operation against Ibn Awad had lain quiet for three years. Why should it now start talking in its sleep? Philindros gave Julian Hubbard a hard look; the man might have told him what was in store at five that morning, when he ordered him over the telephone to fly to the farm in time for breakfast.

  He and Julian were seated with the President on a lawn enclosed by high hedges; masses of climbing roses, white and lavender, had woven themselves into the evergreen. A cloth had been spread on a round table, and a black man, not one of the Navy’s Filipinos who had served every other President, laid out breakfast for them. Philindros had no appetite for the hot cakes and fried ham, but he did have a great thirst. A large pitcher of fresh orange juice stood before him, losing its chill. Philindros wished that Lockwood would take some juice so that he could wet his own throat. Lockwood showed no interest in the juice, or in his food either, and Philindros would not touch his breakfast before the President had done so. He was not awed, merely patient and polite; Philindros had always made it a rule to let a superior make the first move in any situation. Now, after listening to the President’s long list of questions, he cleared his dry throat and spoke in his usual measured way.

  “Mr. President, if the history of intelligence activities in this country tells us anything, it is this: there is no such thing in an open society as a secure espionage apparatus.”

  “Jack, I’m not interested in philosophical principles,” Lockwood said. “We’re discussing a specific case.”

  Philindros had never seen Lockwood so sharp-edged. He and this President, Philindros’s third since he became Director of Foreign Intelligence, hardly knew one another. Lockwood had been content to let the intelligence service run itself. His two predecessors had been ravenous for information, especially about the quirks of other heads of state; Lockwood accepted briefings, but seemed to make his own judgments of men. Philindros had been appointed to a ten-year term, and no President could relieve him before the end of his term or keep him after it expired. The head of intelligence had ceased serving at the pleasure of the President as one of the reforms that followed the great CIA scandals of the seventies.

  Philindros had been a young officer in those days, and he remembered very well what had happened. The old CIA had been laid waste, its reputation twisted and its spirit destroyed. Brilliant men, loyal officers who had thought themselves the most trusted men in America, had been sacrificed in cold blood by the reformers. Philindros had spent his whole career haunted by the ghosts of his ruined friends. They had never understood why no one had seen the obvious truth: that the attempts at assassination, the overthrow of governments overseas, the betrayal of allies, the perversions of the Constitution, had all been ordered in secret by Presidents. Presidents had misused the intelligence apparatus, and then put the blame for what happened on the apparatus they had corrupted. The men of the CIA, trained to trust no one, had put their trust in princes, and paid the price. Philindros knew it, and never forgot it.

  Lockwood reached across the tablecloth and poured juice into Philindros’s glass, and with a wave of his hand urged him to drink and eat. Philindros drained the glass and felt the chill and sweetness spread down his throat and into his chest.

  “Do we in fact have a specific case yet?” Philindros asked. “All Julian really seems to be reporting is a series of hints and veiled statements made by Patrick Graham during a social encounter.”

  “Julian thinks it was more than that.”

  “Why?” Philindros addressed the question to Julian.

  “I’ve known Graham since we were in college. He could hardly have made it plainer that he was giving me a warning.”

  “A warning that he knows—or pretends to know—that the United States government was involved in the death of Ibn Awad? It’s not impossible that he could know that. But, Mr. President, it’s very, very unlikely.”

  Lockwood offered the plate of fried ham. It seemed to Philindros that the President was making these hospitable gestures for a purpose—to show that he wasn’t unnerved, that he was in control. There was, Philindros thought, a cold man beneath Lockwood’s shell of charm and humane talk. The presidency had toughened Lockwood. He knew how to defend himself now. He had learned how to sacrifice men in order to save his policies and his own reputation. Some Presidents came into office because they were ruthless; all were ruthless before they left.

  Only a man who was a perfect bureaucrat, without politics, could survive such men. Philindros had made himself into the perfect bureaucrat, and he had weeded out of the FIS any man who was capable of loving a President for his politics. No one in Philindros’s FIS would make the mistake of loving ideas or men, as the CIA had loved liberalism and its leaders. Philindros loved the truth—the bare bones of it put back together by intelligence and logic—and he had trained his men to be like him.

  Julian said, “Is it so unlikely that Graham could have picked up the truth, or part of it, Jack? He certainly has all kinds of sources.”

  “In theory there are no sources. The President is secure by definition, and we assume that you and I are, too. Only one other person in my shop knew about the operation—the FIS man in the field who carried out the actual recruitment of the assassin. He, too, is secure. And, as we know, the assassin is dead.”

  “He could have talked before he died,” Lockwood said.

  “We know he didn’t. Talil was held in the emir’s palace for the entire forty-eight hours between the time he killed his father and the time he was himself executed. We had transmitters in every room of the palace; we have tapes of every word spoken.”

  “Every word?”

  “Yes, sir. He stuck to the cover story to the end. He believ
ed the assassination was his own idea. He was handled very skillfully by the case officer.”

  Lockwood, as he listened to Philindros, had poured syrup on his pancakes and cut the stack into neat squares. Now he put down his knife and fork and fixed Philindros with a steady gaze.

  “So was I,” the President said. “‘Handled,’ as you call it.”

  Philindros was at any time a man of deliberate speech and movement, and now his body and voice were absolutely controlled.

  “Sir, with all respect, I won’t hear that said. You made your wishes plain. FIS carried them out. We had certain information, and certain means to act. You made the decision. We executed it—not, I may say, without misgivings on my part and great pain to our man in the field.”

  “Pain?”

  “There was a strong personal attachment between Prince Talil and our man. It went back many years. He—our man in the field—fought your decision.”

  “Fought it? How?”

  Philindros blinked, his first involuntary movement since the conversation began. It was a sign of embarrassment over what he said next. “By suggesting alternatives. It’s always been the policy of FIS, and, in recent years, of the White House as well, to prevent violence—and particularly, to prevent assassination.”

  “Could you have prevented this assassination?”

  “Perhaps. Time was very short. Would you have run the risk of testing alternatives?”

  The President’s eyes, dark blue and filled with sympathy and intelligence, were his fine feature, the equivalent of Eisenhower’s smile or Kennedy’s easy wit. Even on television they seemed to take the person who was looking at Lockwood into their depths. Much had been said and written about their warmth, but as he looked at Philindros they were very cold.

  “Let me ask you this, Mr. Director,” Lockwood said. “Why did you decide, on your own, that I shouldn’t be apprised of these options at the time we discussed removing Awad?”