by John Gardner
“Well, yes. But they certainly don’t know about the ones he’s meeting privately. The ones he’s used as unconscious agents—like Roosevelt’s right-hand man, Harry Hopkins, was used by Stalin’s people in World War II. KGB’re very good at running people who haven’t the remotest idea that they’re agents. We have names, dates, times. We haven’t told them about the unconscious agents at the highest level—and I do mean highest level, sir.”
(5)
PUCKY CURTISS HAD RECENTLY celebrated her thirtieth birthday, so as she waited for a taxi to take her to Grosvenor Square, she felt an upward surge of delight at the covetous glances thrown her way by passing males. It had been ever thus, but it did the power of good to Ms. Curtiss’ morale to know that men found her attractive, and—as one horny member of the Service put it—“rompworthy.” Standing there in her stylish, somewhat military cut, business suit, Ms. Curtiss looked all peaches and cream with a soft strawberry center. Indeed, when the time and partner matched up, she could be these things: soft, yielding, passionate and memorable. But Pucky was off men at the moment. A very longstanding relationship had ended in tears and a split which had left her emotions as naked as death itself. As her closest confidante, Bitsy Williams, had told her, early in the relationship, “men who don’t leave their wives for you in the first year are unlikely ever to do it.” She reminded Pucky of her astute words when the man in question had gone off to Greece for a second honeymoon with his wife, though it helped Pucky not one iota. It was not that she had wanted to marry the bastard. It was essentially a matter of pride. Bitsy worked in what the office called “Guest Relations,” which called for the handling of visiting firemen, foreign diplomats, and people who were of interest. In turn, this meant she was wise to the ways of philandering males.
The whole look which Pucky had cultivated throughout her life belied a true picture of herself. Sure, she could be as vulnerable as the next woman, yet beneath it all she was as hard as the proverbial nails, as tough as old boots, and her heart, it often had been said, was made of a small chip from the iceberg that sank the Titanic. In affairs of passion, she liked to maintain full control.
Pucky had been brought up in a hard school. Her father was a retired general, highly decorated and a legend from the Second World War. Her mother, who was a match for the general which was saying something, had been the daughter of an exceptionally courageous regiment. In layman’s terms, this meant she had been spawned by the regiment’s commanding officer.
Pucky was their youngest child, an accident after the almost yearly births of four sons. So she had grown up in a surrounding spirit of heavy competition. Two of her brothers were now army colonels, another was a major in the SAS, and the youngest—Pucky’s senior by three years—flew Harriers for the Royal Navy.
“How,” she would say to Bitsy, “does a girl follow that?” It was a rhetorical question because Pucky had followed it. Brilliantly. An athlete and academic at one of the best private schools in the country, she had gone on to read politics and economics at Oxford. There, someone at St. Anthony’s College spotted her, gave her an audition and eased the way into the secret world where she had acquitted herself well and risen to dazzling heights. It was said that she might possibly become the first female CSIS. She was certainly earmarked for Head of Research.
Though, to some extent, she had dreaded this morning’s meeting with the CIA’s London Resident, Dan Hochella did not, in the event, give Pucky Curtiss a bad time. The meeting was uneasy, but the Resident was too full of his own misery to use any subtlety on the lovely Ms. Curtiss.
“I’ve been summoned back to Langley,” he began when they were seated in the sterile room deep within the embassy.
“Summoned, Dan? What d’you mean, summoned?”
“They’ve told me to get my ass outta London, fast.” He shrugged, turned down the corners of his mouth and looked as though he were about to die of anguish. “I go Pan Am tonight.”
“Well, that’ll be lovely for you. I mean you’ll be able to see your people.” Pucky opened her eyes as wide as possible, a trick she had learned with men at the age of thirteen. It seldom failed.
“People?” He looked at her blankly.
“Oh, I suppose you’d say your folks.” She tossed her head, showing signs of petulance.
“I don’t wanna see my damned folks. They’re on the edge of a divorce again. You’d think my father would grow up. A banker of, what? He must be at least sixty-two, yet there’s always some little bimbo secretary or a favored minion.”
“Jesus, Dan, it’s not always that easy for one’s people.” She leaned forward, as though about to share some great secret. “My people’re always having some drama, but it usually works out. It’ll be super for you.”
Desperate Dan made a humphing noise. “They’re gonna roast me, that’s for sure. I’ll get posted to some outlandish place and lose seniority.”
“Why should they do that?” Pucky knew damned well exactly why they should do that, but she had a sharper mind than Dan Hochella. He was quite good-looking and well-built, she thought, in that particular American football star way: all shoulders and teeth.
“You know why, Pucky. We’re all gonna be restructured when the new Russia finally emerges. The politicos are already straining at the leash. Budgets’ll be shot to hell. Then there’s this business with Sunray, and the crock you people have given us from Brightwater.”
“What crock?”
“The crock of shit about Sunray.”
“We’ve given you every last ounce we’ve got.” She allowed her face to go blank, a look of innocence which reached far into the back of her mind yet was visible in her eyes. She even willed herself to think she was a virgin.
“Nuts, Pucky. Nuts and double nuts.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means what it says. Your crew has given us a little rich vein on Sunray, but not the whole nine yards. You’ve kept something back for yourselves, like bloody agents in place. They always do it—keep back something for insurance—now your Office’s doing it. …”
“That’s just not true. They’re still working on him.”
“Good. I have an official request here asking for one of our interrogators to be allowed to sit in. It comes flash and most urgent from the D.C.I. himself.”
“Put it in writing and I’ll take it back to the CSIS myself, but I doubt if it’ll do any good. They’re damned touchy that lot down at Warminster. …”
“It is in writing.” He all but threw a heavy cream envelope onto the desk. “The point is that our intelligentsia are getting ultra touchy. Shit, Puck, have you seen the signals? Bloodshed and mayhem, people killed for Chrissake; and your retired Joe is now wandering around somewhere with the asset. Our asset. Langley wants to know what your man’s up to.”
Pucky put on her serious, slightly angry, face and snapped back, “As it happens, I come with equally purposeful concerns. To put it bluntly, my Chief wants to know what your gang have done with the asset and our man. They’re both missing, Dan, and we have need-to-know where the hell they’ve gone. The CSIS is concerned for our man’s safety. He wants you to let Langley know we’re not happy. Blue Boy, as I have to call him, came back into the operation from a happy retirement. There’ll be all hell to pay if he’s been flushed down the tubes. If something chancy’s happened to him, you can forget anything else we learn from Erik the Red. It’s that serious, Dan.”
Hochella began to look even more mournful. He spluttered for a few moments, then said they had better go and talk about it over lunch, which they ate at the Connaught, Ms. Curtiss making sure that Mr. Hochella picked up the tab. They parted amicably, with a vague agreement to keep in touch, and a definite understanding that each would return to their superiors with messages of doom.
It was almost four thirty when Pucky got back to the office to find Shirley, her slightly shop-soiled secretary, in a tizzy. The Chief wanted to see her. He had been calling constantly for two hour
s.
The meeting was still going on in the Chief’s office: Worboys pacing the floor, and Arthur Railton looking calm in one of the more comfortable chairs. They made Pucky go through everything.
“Stalemate, then?” The Chief looked around as though he hoped they would all agree with him.
“So it would seem, sir.” Pucky had emphasized that she had given as good as she had got.
“Right, Worboys, get onto Grosvenor Square and tell them their request is denied—the sit-in at Warminster, that is—they find our man for us.”
“You want it laid on with a trowel, or kept cool but firm?”
“Lay it on like a stonemason building a wall.”
“Let’s hope they don’t find him, then,” from Arthur Railton. “Knowing Herb he’ll be mightily pissed off—sorry, sir—if anyone butts in on his private interrogation.”
Worboys departed, and the CSIS gazed upon Ms. Pucky Curtiss as though she were a precious icon. “Ms. Curtiss, please sit down.” He gave her one of his rare benign smiles: the one which, Pucky thought, he would give to some heathen he was about to convert to Presbyterian ways. For all her courage, that kind of smile scared the crap out of her. She sat.
“Could you remind me of your field experience?” The CSIS still smiled, and she thought, probably because Art Railton was there, of Shakespeare: Richard of Gloucester in Henry VI plotting for the crown that will make him Richard III:
Why, I can smile, and murder whiles I smile,
And cry ‘Content’ to that which grieves my heart.
And wet my cheeks with artificial tears,
And frame my face to all occasions.
No wonder the Railton family used Shakespeare like the Bible. When it came to the artifice of the secret trade, William S. wrote the book, she thought before she spoke—
“I have no direct field experience, sir.” Suddenly aware that Arthur Railton was sitting very still, as though waiting for some huge event to take place, like the parting of the Red Sea, she added, “And I’m not likely to get any now the main enemy target’s changed beyond recognition.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that. We’ll require field officers there for many years to come. Then, of course, there are our friends. Always have to keep an eye on them, my dear.” He leaned forward in a more conspiratorial hunch. “But you’ve done certain things, I know that, Ms. Curtiss. You’ve couriered, for instance.”
“Emptied a couple of letterboxes, yes. I also took a package to the Prague Resident last year. I wouldn’t call that field work.”
“Maybe,” the CSIS clucked. “Maybe, and maybe not. You have done the courses though. …” It was not really a question, but a kind of statement, left drifting in the air like a wraith.
Pucky nodded. She was getting incredibly dangerous vibes from Art. “Just the usual, sir. Tradecraft One and Two; Evasion; Documents; False Flag One; and the short crypto course.”
“Enough. How did she do, Arthur?” The thin face flashed suddenly towards Art Railton, like someone trying to left foot an opponent.
“Alpha Plus on all of them. She’s marked as capable of field work and speaks French, German and Spanish like a native.”
“Like an Afghan tribesman to be honest.” As she said it, Pucky knew she should not be joking.
“The point is, Ms. Curtiss.” The Chief looked as though he were standing in front of a Sunday morning congregation and about to deliver a sermon. “The point is that there are two possibilities regarding Kruger and …”
“Blue Boy, sir,” Art reminded him.
“I think we can dispense with the cryptos, Railton. Two possibilities regarding Kruger and old Passau. Either they’re the victims of foul play, or Kruger’s got Passau holed up somewhere and is drying him out. Something by which we might just benefit.” His pause was studied. “Now, we know that the first option is out. Just after you went off to see our beloved brother in Christ at Grosvenor Square, Kruger telephoned us. We know he’s safe, and he’s with Passau. However, we would like to feel that our friends in Washington and at Langley really believe the first option is very much on the cards.”
“Oh, I think they will, sir.” Time to be bright and positive, Pucky considered.
“Yes, well, that’s good. Meanwhile we really don’t want Kruger to be running around with Passau on his own. If they could be corralled and shipped back here until all the work’s done, it might be a good idea, yes?”
“I see the point, sir. Yes.”
“Well, Arthur here thinks he knows where Kruger might be.”
“He does?”
“Arthur, repeat to the lady what you’ve said to me.”
Herbie, Art Railton told her, had been very close to his father, Naldo Railton. “He was barely fourteen or fifteen when Naldo took him from an OSS officer in Berlin. It was during the interregnum, when the OSS eventually became the CIA. They worked together, on various matters, for years, and Naldo often told me they could almost read one another’s handwriting by ESP. They were that close.”
Now, Naldo lived in Virginia. “I think Herb would make straight for him, and it won’t take long for our American brothers to figure the same thing. They have dossiers six inches thick on both Kruger and my father. But they’re a pair of wily old players. It’s my guess that my old man has already got Herbie stashed away with Maestro Passau. He’ll be watching both their backs, and my mother’ll be running interference. By tonight, U.S. time, the FBI and CIA’ll have my ma and pa under surveillance, but I don’t fancy anyone’s chances of getting really near, or thinking that pa’ll lead them straight to Herb.”
“So, what’re you suggesting?” Pucky already had a sinking feeling in her stomach.
“Well, Dan Hochella knows you, and he’s heading back to Washington. Apart from that, the American service would think of you merely as a desk agent. Most would probably never even recognize you.”
“Let me guess.” Pucky did not want it spelled out. “You’re going to suggest that I take a few weeks of my leave and visit the States, right?”
“Right.”
The CSIS nodded but said nothing.
“And I’m not going in as plain Patricia Ursula Curtiss, Civil Servant, but as Joan Doe, schoolmarm, or some other such, right?”
“Almost dead right. There’s a symposium next week at the University of Virginia, in Charlottesville. A get-together, lectures, small study groups of what our American cousins call ‘educators.’ We thought you could possibly be an ‘educator,’ Pucky.”
“From some red-brick campus? With a special knowledge of—she held up a hand to stop Arthur from filling in the gaps—“special knowledge of, say, the Napoleonic wars, or some other period of military endeavor.”
The CSIS tilted his hand, smiling a murderer’s smile, “Not quite but you’re almost there.”
They suggested that she should be barefaced and fly directly into Washington, then hop down to the Charlottesville-Albemarle County airport. “It’s only half an hour’s ride, and you needn’t go near UVa,” Art said. “That’s just there as a backup. But I’ll fill you in on how to get close to ma or pa, whichever’s the easiest.”
“You see, my dear.” The CSIS even more avuncular now. “We’ve got a great deal riding on Mr. Kruger’s interrogation of Louis Passau—particularly when the old guard at what used to be Moscow Center are doubtless shredding documents like mad. I’m sure he’d welcome help from home.”
Pucky got back to her apartment in Dolphin Square at eleven that night. In the meantime she had gone through a long briefing, complete with numerous options should they wish to bring the internationally famous Passau back to the U.K. She had acquired a new persona, money, credit cards and paper in the name of Pauline Una Cummings—and some extra identities—plus a return air ticket, economy class, B.A. In the morning, she would be off to sample the delights of the United States for the first time in her life. That she had never been to the U.S. before was considered a bonus by both Art Railton and the CSIS.
She looked at herself in the mirror and noted the puffy circles under her eyes; she felt fat and ugly, for the Khmer Rouge had just completed their monthly incursion.
“Oh, shit!” she said loudly. Then again, “Shit! I look like a bag lady.”
(6)
“IS THE BEST BLOODY SAFE house I ever been in.” Herbie gave his huge smile, opened his arms wide and did a strange, uncoordinated, but rather graceful pirouette. “Don’t you think so, Lou? The best bloody safe house ever.”
“Pleasant, I think. Yes, pleasant.” He looked older now, slumped in a large easy chair with his face the color of parchment. Herbie put it down to fatigue. The old boy had not slept properly since the Birthday Concert. Now, his eyes were slightly sunken and red, the skin around his neck sagged, and his hands trembled. It was the first time that Herbie had seen the shaking of his hands. They were large, solid, the hands of a manual worker—not a musician. “Very pleasant,” the Maestro said again, dropping his voice as though that was also shot with fatigue.
The house was certainly pleasant. Old, by American standards. Around the latter part of the eighteenth century, Herbie thought. Solid, red brick, nicely weathered, well-maintained with the window frames high-glossed, and one wall covered in Virginia creeper—what else?
To begin with, they sat in the car waiting for Naldo to come out and say all was well. He emerged after fifteen minutes. “She’s delighted. Stash the car away around the back, Herb. There’s a garage, an old barn really; takes about six cars and a couple of tractors.”
When the car was well out of sight, Herbie took Passau’s bag and went to the front again, where Naldo waited by the door.
“I’ll give you the twenty-five-cent tour.” He grinned and the old, boyish look that Herbie remembered so well came into his eyes and face. “The owner spent a fortune on having this place done over.”
“A ‘she’ you say, Nald?”
“Yes, a lady I know and trust. Dependable.”