The Better Angels

by Charles McCarry

  “The ambassador could do that, sir. I don’t know how effective it might be. You haven’t met Awad; to him, you’re a faraway figure without much reality. You have to remember, he’s never even been up in an airplane. The United States is as remote to him as the planets are to you.”

  “You say he’s out in the desert by himself. I assume you know where, exactly.”

  “We have a radio fix on his tent; there’s a transmitter in the pole. We think he’s going to meet Hassan.”

  “Follow him.”

  “The landscape there is as bare as a tabletop. As bright as this.” Philindros looked around at the floodlights. “He’d see us. He’d turn back; he’d give the bombs to Hassan another time. We’d lose all we have.”

  Lockwood nodded, absorbing this information. “Suppose I ordered a plane and flew to Hagreb now. Could you get me to him? Could I talk to him?”

  This idea made Lockwood glow. He gave Philindros a triumphant look.

  Philindros said, “No doubt you could get to him by helicopter from Hagreb City. I don’t know how you could do this in secret, Mr. President.”

  “Secret, hell! I’ll go on all networks and tell the people exactly what’s going on, exactly what I’m trying to prevent.”

  “You mean, tell the truth to the world?”

  Lockwood gave his raucous laugh. “Right! What’s wrong with the truth?”

  Philindros cleared his throat. “The truth works very slowly,” he said. “Much slower than Hassan Abdallah. If you go on television before you go to Hagreb, you’ll be warning them. You’ll be too late.”

  “If I don’t go, they’ll do the same thing anyway. The bombs will go off,” Lockwood said. “What, exactly, have we got to lose by coming out in the open like decent men?”

  Philindros took a step backwards. It was Julian who answered. “Everything,” he said. “In the best case, Ibn Awad will simply deny the plot. What evidence do we have?”

  “Jack’s report. The bombs.”

  “We don’t know where the bombs are. Why should Awad tell us? He’s perceived by the world as a man of peace and healing, a saintly figure.”

  “We have proof that he’s mad.”

  “We have a medical opinion of American doctors. Who paid the doctors, Jack?”

  “They were all staff physicians of the FIS,” Philindros said. “American spies. Who in the world would believe them?” Julian said. “Suppose you should fail altogether? Suppose you go to Hagreb in a blaze of publicity and talk to Ibn Awad, and he then gives the bombs to the Eye of Gaza. A city, perhaps two cities, would be destroyed. We’re talking about a hundred thousand dead on television.”

  Lockwood gave a shudder, like an animal bothered by stinging insects. “You’re assuming I’ll fail,” he said. “Why should I fail?”

  Philindros gave Julian a look of appeal.

  “Because Ibn Awad is insane,” Julian said.

  Lockwood looked from one man to the other and turned his back on them. He folded his arms and bowed his head, and spoke without turning. “What you two fellows are saying is that Ibn Awad and the Eye of Gaza cannot be stopped. We’re helpless.”

  Philindros let a moment pass, waiting to see if Julian would speak. Julian said nothing. He knew what must happen next, and he could have stopped it. He didn’t. He never understood why, though in years to come he relived this scene again and again in his memory.

  “No, Mr. President,” Philindros said, “I don’t think we’re helpless. I’m doing what the law requires me to do. I’m informing the President of the facts.”

  Lockwood said, “You never go beyond facts?”

  “No, sir. But let me repeat a fact. Ibn Awad is a manic-depressive. Just now he’s in a manic period. But he has deep depressions, too. When he’s in the depressive cycle he talks openly and often about suicide. He disguises his suicidal urge with rhetoric about sacrificing his life in a way that will glorify God, but suicide is what he means.”

  “You want me to hope he’ll commit suicide? Even lunatics don’t kill themselves at their moment of triumph. Ibn Awad is on the verge of destroying Israel by fire.”

  “Nobody knows that but us—and Ibn Awad.”

  The meaning of Philindros’s words did not register at once. Then Lockwood understood and he took a lunging step towards the other man. The violence of his movement made the coins jingle in his pockets.

  “Are you telling me that bringing about Ibn Awad’s … suicide is among FIS’s capabilities?”

  Philindros said, “Yes.” The simple word alone, without his usual care to follow it with an honorific.

  “There must be an alternative.”

  “Perhaps there is, sir. You have all the information FIS can provide. It’s your province, Mr. President, to make the decision.”

  “Kill a man?” Lockwood said. ‘Assassinate somebody?”

  Philindros didn’t bother to look in Julian’s direction. His eyes were on the President.

  “You’re offering me a cup of poison,” Lockwood said.

  Something moved in the depths of Philindros’s opaque brown eyes. It was gone in an instant. He waited. There was no sign of expectation in his face; his expression was as neutral as his voice.

  Julian thought, There is no alternative. Ibn Awad, thousands of miles away in the desert, is forcing Lockwood to kill him.

  Lockwood looked into Julian’s eyes and read the thought. The President cleared his throat. “Mr. Director,” he said. His voice failed. He turned his eyes away from Philindros and, with a convulsive movement, nodded his head.

  He turned and strode across the grass. The Secret Service men, waiting on the gravel walk, spoke into their crackling radios. “Mr. President,” Philindros said.

  Lockwood continued to walk away, taking long strides over the wet ground. Philindros repeated himself. Lockwood turned. Philindros waited where he was and the President returned to him.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” Philindros said, “but I don’t understand whether you’ve just given me an instruction.”

  “I think you understand, Jack,” Lockwood said.

  “No, Mr. President, I do not.”

  No two men had ever seen each other’s face more clearly. The lights emphasized every bitter line in Lockwood’s. Philindros had the profile of a Greek statue, nose growing straight down from his brow. In plain words, he told Lockwood how Ibn Awad could be killed. Again he waited.

  Julian knew well enough what Philindros wanted from Lockwood, and why he wanted it. So did Lockwood. Some of Philindros’s predecessors had killed for Presidents, killed on the basis of a hint, a gesture, a nod of the head. They took the guilt on themselves. But the time when freedom from guilt was counted among the rights of Presidents was over. Philindros was willing to be an instrument. That was his duty. But he would not commit murder without making Lockwood—as a man and as President—the author of the crime.

  “I must have a clear, spoken order,” Philindros said. “Do you instruct me, Mr. President, to use the assets of the Foreign Intelligence Service to bring about the violent death of Ibn Awad and to gain possession of the two nuclear devices now in his possession?”

  Lockwood breathed in and out, one great breath. Philindros wrenched the answer from him.

  “Yes,” he said; and strode away. His Secret Service guards closed in around him, some of them trotting to keep up, as he hurried towards the house.

  Julian and Philindros followed more slowly, and by the time they reached the porch, Lockwood had vanished upstairs.

  Polly was asleep and the house was quiet except for its own noises—the creak of timbers, the rhythmic tick of a grandfather clock which sounded louder, owing to some trick of acoustics, in the downstairs hall than in the room, three doors deeper in the house, where it stood. There was a smell of fresh wax on the gleaming pine floors.

  “Do you want to use the scrambler phone?” Julian asked.

  “No. The message has to pass directly from me to the field man; I’ll be in Langley
in time.” Philindros looked, at his watch. “It’s only nine in the morning in Hagreb; we have till noon, their time.”

  “Well, then.”

  “If the situation changes…”

  “Will it?”

  “I doubt it. If it does, the President will know.”

  Julian nodded. He picked up an ordinary phone and ordered the helicopter readied. Then he drove Philindros back to the pad. The helicopter blades were turning long before they arrived. Julian stopped the Jeep in the woods while they were still far enough away from the stuttering machine to hear one another.

  “Shall I fly down tomorrow to give the President a report?”

  “I imagine it will be on the news.”

  “Yes, but the details …”

  One of the greyhounds put his paws on the back of Julian’s seat and, snuffing and whining, licked his face. Julian pushed the animal away; it wanted to play and he had to hold its squirming body off with one hand while he finished talking to Philindros.

  “No,” Julian said. “No details. Not tomorrow, not ever. He knows enough.”

  Julian’s face was as impassive as Philindros’s. Only by guesswork could the spy know how much Julian hated him for what he had just made Lockwood do.

  In the rose garden where they were having breakfast three years afterwards, Lockwood watched the fly on his pancakes. The insect had trapped itself in the syrup. Lockwood lifted its struggling body on the blunt point of a butter knife and put it gently on the tablecloth. After a desperate effort its gummed wings regained the power of flight.

  “Julian was right to do what he did,” Lockwood said. “But now, I guess, we’d better have the whole story.”

  Philindros started to speak. Once again Lockwood held up a hand to stop him.

  “Deal with Julian. Give him all the evidence you have on the Awad case.”

  “All of it, sir?”

  Lockwood lifted his head. “Something wrong?”

  “No, but it’s an enormous file, going back twenty years. It would take days to read it.”

  “Digest it, then. Really only the last days are important, and the evidence of Awad’s insanity. And the bombs.”

  Lockwood rose to his feet. He had left his old hat on the lawn beside him and he stooped to pick it up. He looked at the sky from under its brim. The sun hung on the horizon like a spot of rouge on a powdery cheek. “Gonna have some weather,” Lockwood said.

  Philindros looked at Julian, and Julian got the President’s attention again. Lockwood wasn’t pleased to return to a subject he’d exhausted.

  “I want Julian to have a good briefing, Jack,” he said. “Every last little thing. I may have to defend this.”

  “I’ll have to bring back the man who handled the case. He’s still out there.”

  “Fine. Do it soon. Julian will talk to him.”

  Lockwood held out his hand. Philindros grasped it, intending to give it a quick pressure. Lockwood wouldn’t let him withdraw; he held Philindros’s small limber fingers in his own great horny ones and pulled him a step closer. Philindros felt the President’s breath on his face.

  “I can defend this, Jack, can’t I? In public? Everything’s as you reported?”

  “Yes, but there’s a problem, Mr. President.”

  Lockwood held on to Philindros. Julian moved around so that he could see the faces of both men. Philindros was uncomfortable. He was a small man between two very large ones.

  “It would have been better to have accepted a report on this at the time,” he said. “We never found the bombs. There’s no evidence—no physical evidence—that they existed.”

  Lockwood didn’t speak. Julian said, “Witnesses?”

  “Talil is gone, of course,” Philindros said. “But there’s the man we’re bringing back from the field, the one who handled Talil. He’ll tell you what happened, and you can be the judge.”

  “Who is he?” asked Lockwood.

  “Horace Hubbard,” Philindros said.

  TWO

  1

  H ORACE SPENT AN HOUR with Sebastian Laux, the president of D. & D. Laux & Co., while waiting for Philindros to come up to New York for their meeting. Old Laux had been in the OSS with Horace’s father; he and Elliott Hubbard had been dropped into Picardy together in 1944. “It was my job to talk French, your father’s to outwit the Germans,” Sebastian told Horace, not for the first time. “We must both of us have been adequate, because we came through all right. Lots of the younger men didn’t—it takes seasoning to feel intelligent fear. Elliott and I were old even then, by military standards.” He gave Horace tea, from a tinkling cart that was wheeled in at four o’clock by an employee whose aged skin was as yellowed and transparent as Sebastian’s own. The two old men, banker and servant, poised over the silver service, with the afternoon sun falling on them, looked like figures carved out of Pears soap.

  This tea ceremony was the chief thing Philindros had liked about D. & D. Laux & Co. when Horace, accompanied by his father, had introduced him to the place and to Sebastian. Philindros had admired the look of the old private bank from the outside—it was a Greek Revival temple in the Doric style, its marble facing blackened by the fumes of centuries; jostled on all sides by the vulgar glass towers of the financial district, D. & D. Laux & Co. was all but invisible to the passerby. But it was the elegant old man, pouring tea into Raku bowls and talking of his war adventures, that touched Philindros’s love for the right theatrical touch in a cover mechanism. “We slept rough, in the fields, Elliott and I,” Sebastian told him; “it was spring, the invasion was coming, we were dynamiting bridges and things; but what I remember after all these years is the smell of the fields in the morning: wildflowers, Mr. Philindros, a sea of blossoms—there really are roses in Picardy!”

  Philindros came directly to the point. For many years, Horace had been carrying out his FIS duties, with Sebastian’s knowledge, as the Near East representative of D. & D. Laux & Co.; Philindros proposed an enlargement of this arrangement.

  Work like Horace’s was supposed to have been eliminated by the reform of the intelligence community that followed the investigations of the CIA. Covert action was banished from the charter of the new Foreign Intelligence Service. But the very President who had destroyed the CIA soon believed that he could not maintain America’s position in the world, or his own power to make things happen, without the old secret apparatus; dark acts were sometimes necessary, and often good acts had to be performed in the dark. The old covert action staff, renamed and operating under new controls, was revived.

  In days past, men like Horace had worked out of American embassies, posing as diplomats. The State Department had always despised them, had felt sullied by their masquerade. The diplomatists put up with the spies because at that time only an embassy provided the things an intelligence service must have to operate abroad: secure storage of records, safe communications, untouchability of staff through diplomatic immunity. The computer had solved two of these problems. First, there was no longer any need to file paper; all information could be reduced to electronic impulses and stored in a central data bank. This information could be put beyond the reach of an enemy, could be erased by touching a button. Second, computer-related technology had produced radio equipment that could squirt a million words from one continent to another via satellite in a droplet of electric energy that required less than a millisecond to send or receive. Space was filled with particles of data traveling at the speed of light from computer to earth-bound computer. No power had the resources to sort them all out, much less decode them.

  Last, the immunity of intelligence agents was impossible to attain in the modern world. No diplomatic passport, no idea of sovereign territory, no flag, meant anything to men like Hassan Abdallah of the Eye of Gaza. They killed or kidnapped or tortured whom they chose, when they chose. These losses could not be prevented.

  Sebastian Laux, wearing a beautifully tailored suit that was ten years out of style, had eaten a strawberry tart while Phil
indros explained all this. The gold watch in Sebastian’s breast pocket, secured by a chain wound through the buttonhole in his lapel, chimed the half hour.

  “So you want to take your men out of the embassies and put them into my bank?” he said.

  “Yes. We anticipate large profits. There would be no financial risk to you or your stockholders. There would be no written contract, no trace of our agreement. Of course, a measure of control over the bank’s character would pass out of the hands of your family. Horace has suggested that that might trouble you.”

  The walls of Sebastian’s office were hung with oil portraits of earlier presidents. Many looked remarkably like Sebastian, their faces had a kind of pinched merriment, and half of them had his Christian name. There was also one especially fine screen of the Momoyama period. First-born sons had been bank presidents; younger ones had been missionaries and collectors.

  “My family opened D. & D. Laux & Co. in 1820,” Sebastian said to Philindros. “They’re all dead but me and my sisters, and as the three of us are very old and unmarried, control of this banking house will pass out of our hands whether we’re troubled about it or not. Bless Horace—he’s turned into a pretty good banker; and he is my godson—but the Laux blood has run out.”

  Philindros, therefore, bought out D. & D. Laux & Co. He opened branches in Brussels for Europe, Beirut for the Near East, Tokyo for the Far East, Sao Paulo for Latin America, and Johannesburg for Black Africa. The bankers who had always run D. & D. Laux & Co. for the benefit of the Laux family went on doing so. The business brought in by the dynamic young staff Philindros put into the branches made the bank richer than ever in its history. The computers and communications in New York were handled by Philindros’s technicians. Abroad, the banks provided men like Horace with all they needed: a reason to exist and travel, a reason to own elaborate data processing equipment and powerful radio transmitters and lock them up in massive vaults, and a reason to be secretive. Bankers were expected to be secretive. It was a more efficient system than the old one that had tied the CIA to the embassies, and a much more imaginative one. Besides, it gave Sebastian Laux a whiff of Picardy.