The old servant, trembling, passed around the cakes and departed. Sebastian poured. He sipped from his bowl, taking in a lot of air with the hot liquid; Sebastian was a connoisseur of teas in the way that other men have a palate for wines. He pursed his lips and identified the leaf from which the tea had been brewed. “It’s hard to get passable green tea from Japan; most of them fertilize with chemicals now,” he said. “You’ve got to use oily fish and night soil to get the proper taste. Your man Percy Andrews brings me the right stuff from Tokyo when he comes to New York. He’s a silly sort of bird, Horace—he went to Princeton, can’t spell, none of them can—but he knows tea and he knows banking. I hope he’s as good at your side of the work.”
“He is.”
“Good,” said Sebastian. He nibbled at his strawberry tart, holding it, as he had held the tea bowl, in both hands, like a squirrel.
Horace felt affection rush into his chest. “Our side of it hasn’t been a worry to you all these years?”
“Of course not. It made the bank more private than it ever was, and that’s a very good thing. Then, you fellows have brought in ten times the business we had before. My only worry is my age.” Sebastian sucked more tea into his mouth and tapped himself on the breastbone. “This clock will stop someday soon. I’m older than your father was, you know. I want a good man taking my place in this office—you. You’re the nearest thing to a relative I’ve got. I keep on telling your inscrutable friend Philindros that. He listens in silence.”
“Maybe he doesn’t think quite as much of me as a banker as you do, Sebastian.”
“That’s not it. He thinks any fool can be president of a bank, but it takes real brains to do what you do. He wants you as his successor. It’s a great mistake to be too good at anything, Horace.” Sebastian touched his bloodless lips with a napkin. “When I left college I wanted to go to Montparnasse and write unpublished poems and have mistresses. I dreamt of rose-lipt maidens in a garret. But my father died young and the family glued me to this chair, and here I’ve been for sixty years.”
“Except for the roses of Picardy.”
“Too brief an escape. Ah, well!”
Sebastian poured more tea and offered another cake. The silver pot, thinned by a hundred years of polishing, could have been pierced like rice paper with a stiff forefinger.
2
At five, Sebastian departed. After walking him to the door, and putting him into the hands of his guards, Horace made his way across the long Hamadan carpet that covered the floor of the main hall. Years before, when camel’s hair was still obtainable, worn bits had been rewoven and now it showed splotches of brown in many shades, like a diseased lawn. Beneath the building lay the vaults, and beyond the door that led into the FIS safe rooms, D. & D. Laux’s traditional tones of mahogany paneling and oil portraits and Persian carpet gave way to gray steel and pastel paint and fluorescent light. FIS people were always on duty here, tending the computers and the radios. Day and night there was invisible but heavy armed security. The technicians were simply locked in the main vault; they could summon help or, in the worst emergency, empty the computers of all data, long before any attackers could blast their way into the safe. The release of nerve gas could prevent that, in any case. Horace used the same arrangements in Beirut.
Philindros was waiting inside a smaller vault, in a cubicle called the “talks room” that was used for meetings of this kind. He shook hands with Horace without rising from his chair. Horace sat down. Between them on a steel table was a chromium tray bearing a chromium thermos jug, filled with water, and two plastic glasses. Philindros wasn’t interested in Sebastian’s afternoon tea for himself, but for its lulling effect on others. He hardly ever came to the bank.
“I think we may have a flap building up over Ibn Awad,” Philindros said. He had stated no reason for summoning Horace home in his cable to Beirut, merely instructed him to be present in this place at this time; that was normal procedure, and it hadn’t surprised Horace.
Horace showed no surprise now, nor did he interrupt, while Philindros told him all that had happened in his meeting the previous morning with Lockwood and Julian.
“Your brother is going to be uncomfortable when you see him tomorrow,” Philindros said. “I told him yesterday, for the first time, that you had been the case officer on the Awad project.”
“He hadn’t assumed that already?”
“Evidently not. He may have taken it for granted I’d have the good taste not to use his own brother to commit official murder.” Philandros did not employ euphemisms.
“He thinks my involvement gives you some sort of hold over the President?”
“Yes. And of course, it does.”
Horace took in this information as Philindros knew he would; it was a fact among others. He and Philindros knew each other as well as either of them could be known. They had come through the shambles of the CIA together because they were then too young and too junior, but only just, not to be purged. Both knew well enough that Lockwood would play any card in his hand to save himself if he had to defend the assassination in public. Philindros had taken away his trump. He could not imply, as Kennedy had done after the Bay of Pigs, “It’s my responsibility, but it’s their fault.” Not when the brother of the President’s closest aide had put the gun into the assassin’s hand.
“How did Patrick Graham ever get onto this’?” Horace asked. “I don’t know. It’s a pity we don’t know who he saw in Baghdad.”
“Yes. Had he come to me first in Beirut I might have been able to keep an eye on him. But he didn’t.”
“You got no hint from him?”
“He mentioned the Eye of Gaza.”
“Hassan?”
“Patrick was still panting when he came to me in Beirut. We know Hassan slips in and out of Baghdad. The Iraqis won’t touch him. It’s possible.”
“How could Hassan, even Hassan, know anything? He never got the bombs; he never got near Talil.”
“If there were any bombs. Lockwood knows we couldn’t find them?”
“Yes.”
Horace scratched his cheek. “Who could have put Patrick Graham and Hassan Abdallah together?”
Philindros pointed to the computers, the long whispering row of them, on one of the television screens that covered one wall of the talks room. “We’re scanning. The source may pop up.”
They discussed the history of the operation. This was not information that could be put on the air and into the computers. When everything was done verbally, when there were no records, even trained men like Philindros and Horace Hubbard sometimes forgot to tell one another things that later turned out to be vitally important. Horace went over his part of it—the subtle handling of Prince Talil, the painstaking physical and technical arrangements he had made to assure that he alone controlled events.
“This is by way of rehearsal,” Philindros said. “You’ll have to tell your brother all this.”
“All?”
“That’s the President’s order. I want it carried out. Nothing omitted.”
Horace received this instruction with outward calm. He could not imagine how Julian would weather this tale—the brutal narration of detail upon detail. Julian would have to accept that he and Lockwood had been responsible for doing murder. Horace knew Julian had always believed Lockwood incapable of such an act; the whole world, even his enemies, believed him incapable of it. Horace already knew that he, Horace, was a murderer; when he entered on his vocation he began living with the realization that he was prepared to become a murderer. Could Julian admit such a thing about himself, about Lockwood? Had they thought about it? Had they watched the news of it on television, even? Horace doubted it, from what he knew of men who were in love with power. It was one thing to hear a man you loved as a second Lincoln give an order to kill a man halfway around the world. It was another thing to be lifted up to the coffin and forced to put your bare hand on the corpse.
Horace loved his brother, but all his life he ha
d been exasperated by people who thought as Julian did. Julian believed that some men did good in the world and others did evil, and that he had joined the right side. Julian, all his life, had wanted to see the world perfected in one man—first their father, now Lockwood.
Horace, on the other hand, perceived that nothing ran unmixed in men or causes or nations. Evil was permanent and it was everywhere. What mattered was that it should be channeled, tricked into working for your own side. That was what an intelligence service was for. That was why Horace had spent his life in espionage.
“Are they panicked by this?” Horace asked.
“Not yet. But the political conventions are next month, and the election—the last American presidential election of the 1900s, think of it—takes place in November.”
“They suspect Mallory?”
“They didn’t say so, but he’s the usual suspect when anything threatens them,” Philindros said. “If Mallory’s found a way to use Graham as a cat’s-paw, after what Graham did to him four years ago, then Lockwood and Julian ought to be worried.”
“Is that possible?”
Philindros tried to go on speaking but he was able to utter nothing more than a hoarse croak. He shook his head in annoyance. His throat had closed; this always happened to him when he had to talk for any length of time in an air-conditioned room. He poured water from the thermos and drank, throwing back his head so as to bathe the whole parched lining of his throat.
“Who knows?” he said at last. “Your brother is our best hope of finding out. He’s always had a string on Graham. Maybe he still has.”
Philindros knew the interconnecting histories of most powerful Americans. He didn’t keep files or run investigations; that was forbidden. He merely listened and observed and remembered. He had made himself, a man who came from outside the elite, an expert on the power structure of the United States. He was capable of electrifying insights; Horace thought that he must be the descendant of a line of undiscovered geniuses, unlettered men who had been locked away in the Greek mountains by poverty or the Turks, and that their genes had finally come into their own in Philindros’s subtle and elusive mind. Jack Philindros, Horace knew, believed that the CIA had died because of a hidden but fatal weakness. Its men, the most brilliant ever brought together in one organization, understood every country in the world except their own. They never studied the United States because they never imagined that it could become an enemy and attack them. When the onslaught came, they were helpless to defend themselves. Philindros would not let that happen to his FIS.
Philindros, intense, leaned towards Horace; he even lifted a hand. “I wonder, Horace,” he said, “if your brother realizes that there’s not going to be any way out of this for Lockwood. Even if they hush Graham, the other side will find another outlet. You see that don’t you?”
“Oh, yes. Julian will, too. It may take him a little time.”
“And in the meantime, he’ll look for a solution.”
“I suppose he will. Wouldn’t you?” Horace made a gesture that acknowledged their long friendship. “Wouldn’t I?”
“Yes. But if all else failed, you wouldn’t fall on your own sword to save Lockwood.”
“You think that Julian might?”
Philindros shrugged. He stood up and turned the combination lock that was mounted on the inside of the door of the talks room.
“I’ll leave you now,” he said. “Talk to your brother. Think some more. You’ll have to stick around as long as the White House wants you.”
Philindros, having unlocked the door, stood for a moment in silence, watching the row of television screens. The image of a tall woman wearing a long starched coat, like those worn by physicians on hospital rounds, appeared on one of the monitors. She was standing by a computer unit, and she put her hand on its metal surface and cocked her head, as if listening for some particular sound. For the first time, Philindros smiled; his teeth were as perfect as an actor’s.
“There’s Rose,” he said.
Rose MacKenzie was the officer in charge of the night operation. She was a two-interest person. Electronics was her vocation; she could hear distress in the hum of a computer, and fix the trouble, in the way an old-time mechanic diagnosed breakdown in the cough of a flivver’s engine. Her other interest was Horace Hubbard; they had been lovers and colleagues for a long time; she’d been with Horace when Talil died. That’s how they spoke of the Awad operation: as the time when Talil died.
Philindros pressed a button and the lens of the closed-circuit camera zoomed in on Rose MacKenzie. She heard the change in the tone of the equipment—few others would have done so—and lifted her face. It was a spare face, freckled; her bright hair was pulled back tight for work; her ears were quite large. Her wide mouth curved in a smile.
“I think she knows you’re here,” Philindros said. “She’s doing the scan on Hassan and Graham, No one else could. You can talk to her about all this as much as you like. She was with you in Hagreb, after all.”
He raised a hand in farewell and left. Horace looked at Rose’s screen, and she was still there, grinning into the camera. Her lips opened and formed a word. Horace read the silent syllable: “When?”
She couldn’t see him and he couldn’t answer her through twenty feet of steel and reinforced concrete. Rose was locked in for the night.
Horace refused the car that awaited him in the garage, and went into the street alone. Dark had fallen, and Hanover Square was empty. He walked west towards the Hudson through the deserted streets to the building where Rose lived. She’d phoned ahead; Condon, her security man, was expecting him.
Horace put his key into the lock of Rose’s apartment and, as the bolt clicked, heard the quick thud and patter of many sets of paws as her cats leaped and ran to hiding places. Horace’s body was in New York, but its nervous system was still in Beirut, where the sun had been down for seven hours. He did not call Julian. He had a glass of brandy and got into Rose’s bed. She had made it with the several books she was reading—two inscrutable mathematical texts, the score of Don Giovanni, Cakes and Ale—still scattered inside the covers. Horace went to sleep at once.
Very early in the morning, he felt Rose’s long body, the skin still cold and the hair a little damp from her walk in the rain, pressed against his. He put an arm around her.
“Us first,” Rose whispered. “Then, my God, what I have to tell you!”
Rose could never sleep after lovemaking, and she leaped from the bed when they were done. Her hair was dry now, and it flew as she hurried from the bedroom. Horace put on a dressing gown and followed her to the kitchen. Rose had brought lox and cream cheese and bagels with her and she was on her knees in front of the cluttered refrigerator, removing small dishes of leftovers and putting them on the floor.
“Somewhere in this fridge there’s a bottle of sparkling Vouvray,” she said. Rose found the wine at the back of a shelf and handed it to Horace to be opened. They ate the delicatessen food from the paper it came in.
“You were going to tell me something,” Horace said.
“Ah. I woke Jack to tell him. He told you I’d been scanning for traces of that thing you’re working on. I started with other computers in Beirut.” Rose was a famous tapper; she could find a way, using her superb computers, to read the contents of any other computer in the world. She took another bite of her bagel. At the corner of her mouth there was a little spot of cream cheese and Horace reached over and wiped it off with his fingertip.
“And guess what?” continued Rose. “I found that a computer out there—the main data bank of Universal Energy—knew some things that only our computer was supposed to know.”
“How can that be?”
“They tapped us, obviously. They have a lot of our stuff on Ibn Awad; and it’s ours, all right; it’s in our handwriting.”
Rose drank sparkling Vouvray. She made another sandwich and cut it in half, part for Horace and part for herself. She was interested in phenomena, not in their i
mplications.
“But I thought our equipment was untappable.”
Rose chewed and swallowed. “What man has made,” she said, “man can understand.”
3
Horace had never visited his brother at work, in fact had never been inside the White House. He was surprised by the smallness of Julian’s quarters; there was no more than enough room for both their long bodies in Julian’s office, already crowded with a large desk, a file safe, a wall of books. Julian was the second most powerful man in the United States government, yet he worked pressed against a smudged wall in an office that didn’t even have a door leading into a corridor; Horace, hidden deep in the body of the same government, occupied an office in Beirut where kings and emirs and billionaire sheikhs, who often came there, would feel themselves in a space large enough, and rich enough, to befit their presence. Julian, like Sebastian Laux in his old suits, needed no display to signal who he was.
Horace took the one visitor’s chair, a soft leather easy chair whose worn springs sagged beneath his weight. His head was much lower than Julian’s, which was framed by the high back of a swivel chair. Julian’s desk was clear, nothing on its polished top except a telephone, a pen stand, a blotter; and a large framed photograph that Horace, who could see only the back of it, guessed must be Julian’s inscribed picture of President Lockwood. The one clear wall was crowded with framed photographs. Horace, looking at these while Julian finished a telephone call, saw that they were not the posed pictures of politicians that he might have expected to find, but a collection of family portraits. Their father was there in a naval uniform and in a Sunfish with Julian; Horace himself appeared as a captain of Marines and in an Exeter letter sweater; there were others—their grandparents; aunts and cousins; Julian’s children with their mother; Emily; Lipton, the gardener at the Harbor, who had been thought tetched by the great-aunts but who, as the boys knew, was made dreamy because he chewed the leaves of the marijuana that he grew in the greenhouse. Horace hadn’t seen, or thought about, most of these faces for years.
The Better Angels Page 13