The Spy in a Box

by Ralph Dennis

  Hall remained where he was until the Lear was a tiny speck in the sky.

  Two days later Frank Springs was ordered in from El Salvador to replace Will Hall. Within a matter of hours, Hall was on a commercial jet headed north to Washington.

  CHAPTER TWO

  He brooded from a distance, away from Washington and the Company. His resignation was written on his first day back and accepted, he thought, with too much pleasure by the Director. Afterall, the thinking went, Hall had been wrong about the situation in Costa Verde and he had let his feelings get in the way of what the Company and the United States wanted. It did not matter what Hall thought about the way they had gone around him for the hit on Paul Marcos. And it did not matter that he felt wronged because they had run a dirty operation in his backyard without informing him about it.

  “An executive decision,” the Assistant Director said.

  Executive decision was as exact as it ever got. It could mean the President had given his okay. Or it could have been decided at a lower rung, perhaps by someone at the South American desk.

  So, Hall brooded at a distance. North Carolina seemed far enough away. He had his back pay, and a token severance from the Company and there was the trust fund he hadn’t touched during his years with the government. An inheritance from his mother. It was enough to live on comfortably for ten or fifteen years if he never worked at all.

  His mother had been a Harker, one of the big tobacco families in Winston-Salem. Not close enough to the center of the Harker money for the inheritance to be worth millions but there was enough stock to matter when the cancer scare came and Harker Tobacco diversified. Harker investments in fast food and drugs and soft drinks prospered. By the time Hall’s mother died, the stock was worth four times what it had been worth when the sole products of Harker were four kinds of cigarettes and two kinds of plug chewing tobacco.

  And Hall owned the house in Blowing Rock. It was really a summer mountain cottage. The walls were fitted stone and there was a wide porch that looked over a straight drop of thousands of feet. At the bottom was the Gap. On the other side of the Gap was Grandfather Mountain.

  Hall remembered beautiful summers spent there, peaceful weeks as a boy when he and his mother and an aunt lived in the house and his father, working in Winston-Salem, came to join them on the weekends.

  After the house was cleaned and a crew of carpenters weatherproofed it, Will Hall moved in. It was December and there was snow and the air was clean and brisk. Hall spent his days reading and watching television. On the weekends, if the highways were clear, he drove his old black BMW in one direction or the other. Toward Raleigh or Durham and, at times, to Chapel Hill. Each was a different kind of weekend. He’d stay at a hotel or a motel. The days were for aimless wandering. At night he went looking for music. Country and western at a road-house near Raleigh, a string quartet at Duke and rock and roll at the Cat’s Cradle in Chapel Hill.

  And all that time, he watched the news from Costa Verde. It was no surprise to him, in January, two weeks before the election, that Valdez and his goon squads broke the moderate faction and jailed the leaders. The left wing, the rebels, was smashed in a massive army sweep through the northern provinces. There was no quarter given. Rebels who surrendered were executed on the spot.

  The President of Costa Verde declared a state of emergency and suspended the elections, he said, until a calm and peace returned to his country.

  It would never happen, Hall knew.

  The state-sanctioned murder squads swept through the midnight and pre-dawn streets of the cities. The victims were the supporters of the moderate and the left-wing causes. Whole families were murdered along roadsides or killed and tossed in trash dumps.

  So much for the Company. So much for the choice the Company had made.

  His tan faded in the winter sun.

  No longer brooding. Instead, he remembered. His father had died his first year at Yale. His mother, who had been over-ruled by her husband when she wanted Will to attend Duke University, died during his final semester. He’d been rootless, at odds with himself. He had thought that the natural extension of his education would be graduate work in history. It was for that reason he made an appointment with Professor Charles Edward Rockwall. Over tea, alone in one end of the huge College lounge, Rockwall gave Hall no chance to ask his question about graduate study and a life in teaching.

  “I have had my eye on you from the beginning,” he told Hall. And then he talked of his generation’s secret war, vague tales of his World War Two experiences in the O.S.S. “Wild Bill” Donavan and Allan Dulles and the old boy network of gentlemen who fought that improbable war and won their share of it.

  “Our class has an obligation,” Rockwall told Hall. “And a destiny that lesser men cannot imagine in their wildest dreams.”

  Two days after graduation, Hall met with the Assistant Director in an unmarked office near the Green in downtown New Haven. The interview seemed unstructured, casual, but Will Hall knew better. It was a masterful probe and counter-probe of his mind and his instincts.

  Later that month, while his former classmates toured Europe or vacationed at the beach or in the mountains, Hall underwent basic training at Fort Jackson. His record was specially coded. After completion of basic training, he was transferred to Fort Bragg for paratrooper instruction. A day before the ceremony to receive his jump badge, he was taken from the barracks late at night and flown to the Farm in Virginia. His service record and all evidence of his existence as a solder disappeared.

  He became a shadow figure.

  “Our class has an obligation.” He remembered Rockwall’s words during the long months of training at the Farm. Weapons, explosives, communication, languages and political realism for underdeveloped countries.

  He kept his faith, his high idealism in the face of the pragmatics of political warfare. He continued to believe all through his posting to Brazil and Chile, right up to his last year and a half in Costa Verde. Until that moment, near high noon, in San Nicolas when Paul Marcos died.

  Now, on the mountain, wandering the windy roads, he could no longer hear the exact tone Professor Rockwall had used. Was there humor there now? A whisper of cynicism?

  Rockwall’s words rolled in his mind a hundred ways. Until he no longer knew the proper inflection. Only Rockwall might have helped him. That was, however, no longer possible. Professor Rockwell had died of lung cancer in the Yale Medical Center during the first month of Hall’s posting to Costa Verde.

  Then it was February. A snowstorm dumped four inches on Blowing Rock. The last flakes were falling when Hall left his warm bed and added a split log to the banked coals in the fireplace grate. He made a pot of coffee in the kitchen and, bundled against the cold, he carried his mug to the wide porch and sat in one of the rockers and watched the last of the snow fall between him and the mountain across the Gap. It was restful, it was peaceful and so beautiful that he felt the changes in himself Washington and the power struggles, the backbiting and the betrayals, all seemed a million miles away. A speck of dust in the sea. It was done. The bitterness and the anger so shrunken and dried inside him that he could no longer find it.

  When the snow fall ended, he had breakfast and sat before the roaring fire and read Babel’s Red Cavalry Tales. He was still reading, and watching a new log catch fire, when he heard the three short beeps from the mail jeep horn. It was the driver’s way of telling him that he’d arrived. Hall put the book aside, pulled on some heavy boots and slogged through the snow to the mail box at the end of the driveway.

  The usual pitiful collection of mail. A bank statement. A real estate brochure. Announcement of a sale at The Hub, a men’s shop in Chapel Hill. Finally, a letter. He stopped, huddled over against the wind and opened it. Not a letter. A note, from Denise Lawton, a girl in graduate school at The University of North Carolina, inviting him to a party at her house this coming Saturday. He’d met her at the Cat’s Cradle one night and spent the weekend with her. It had been
a fun weekend, dancing to a new wave band at the Cradle, having dinner at a vegetarian restaurant she liked, walks around the campus, and best of all waking in the morning in her bed. That part surprised him, how much he liked the girl, and he had pulled back later. It was a lonely time for him and he didn’t want to over-estimate the emotions of a single weekend spent with a girl he hardly knew. Almost a month had passed. He hadn’t called her. The please call me if you can come and the single exclamation mark seemed almost pathetic.

  He continued his walk up the driveway. There was a magazine wrapped in a wide band of brown paper. And that was it. Inside the house, he tossed the unopened bank statement on the kitchen table. He knew there was still a healthy balance and it was too early to check it against his check book. Later. After he refilled his coffee mug, he looked at the note from Denise Lawton again. He was tempted. He wanted to see her again. Still, it was only Tuesday. He’d wait another day before he decided.

  The magazine. He slipped the paper wrapper aside and unfolded the magazine. The Truth Seeker.

  It wasn’t his usual reading matter. And he’d certainly never subscribed. He reached into the trashcan and retrieved the mailing wrapper. There was no mistake. His name and address. Hand written. Odd.

  He had never read The Truth Seeker, but he did know what it was. The magazine was a holdover from the Civil Rights and Anti-war movements. Around the Company, the hard liners considered the journal subversive. One of their last in-country illegal operations had been an attempt to close the magazine down. First they’d tried to attack the financing. It had been a failure. One of the big backers was a little old lady in New York whose background was spotless. Flora Tucker had opened her purse to The Truth Seeker when her favorite grandson died in a rice paddy in Vietnam. Her influence reached all the way to the White House. The Company backed away from her. The attack shifted toward the staff, the usual blackmail and slander approach. The editor, Enos Blackman, hadn’t fallen for any of the honey traps. Not for the pretty boys or the women. In fact, he’d laughed at it all, as if he’d known what was going on the whole time.

  The Company had to pull back before they’d settled upon the third phase of the attack. The Director of the F.B.I. caught wind of the operation and railed at the Company. In-country was the territory of the F.B.I and he was jealous and protective. He would not stand for meddling, even if it meant he had to go to the President.

  So, the Company got a black eye and little to show for an expensive undertaking.

  Hall carried the magazine into the living room. He put Babel aside and read the first article. It was a long, detailed account of the circumstances surrounding the right-wing coup in Chile. Most of the material was correct, though the writer missed some of the Company’s involvement in several key events. After he finished the article, he thumbed through the rest of the contents. An article on Cuban intervention in Africa. An article on the American efforts and counter-moves against Cuban influence.

  On the back, inside cover there was a listing of articles to be published in the March issue. Hall’s heart thudded, stopped and then started again.

  It was there, heading the list.

  William K. Hall, ex-Company field man, tells the truth about U.S. intervention in Costa Verdean political affairs and the untold story of the murder of Paul Marcos.

  Hall dropped the magazine on the floor and walked into the kitchen. He took down the bottle of black Jack Daniels and poured a stiff drink. Carrying the drink with him into the bedroom he packed an overnight bag. Then he sat on the bed and called the Winston-Salem airport. There was snow on the runways and no flights until the next morning. He booked the first flight leaving for New York.

  He had a restless night, a night when he drank too much.

  By nine the next morning, he was on the ground at LaGuardia and in a taxi headed for the city.

  At first, he thought of the Village as an unlikely location for the offices of a publication. On the other hand, consider the publication, he told himself. But that wasn’t fair. Another magazine, after it achieved some success and solid financial backing, might have moved into a better suite of offices, to a better address. Not The Truth Seeker. For its thirty years of publication, the same Sheridan Square address remained on the cover.

  Will Hall climbed the narrow flight of stairs that ran between a deli and a bar. The editorial offices were to the right, above the bar. The door to the outer offices was unlocked. Hall entered and stood at a chest high counter. Beyond the counter were three desks. There was a hand bell on the counter. Hall waited. After a couple of minutes, an incredibly pencil thin girl dressed in tan slacks and a bulky green sweater came from an office in the rear. She was munching a cookie. She stopped and brushed a few crumbs from her lips.

  “I’d like to see Mr. Blackman.”

  “He’s busy at the moment. If you …”

  “Tell him it’s William Hall.”

  For an instant he had the feeling she was going to jam the rest of her cookie into her mouth and leap the counter and hug him. She quivered and took a deep breath. “Of course, he’ll want to see you.”

  Enos Blackman. On the flight from Winston-Salem Hall remembered some of the dossier the Company had on file. Fought in World War Two. Three battle stars, two Purple Hearts, recommended for the Medal of Honor. Probably not awarded, though deserved, because it was near the end of the war. Returned to the States after the war with the idea of writing a novel. A summary of the novel, from an editor who rejected the book at Random House, began with the statement that the whole concept of Blackman’s novel was banal. That it was an allegory of Christ at the Battle of the Bulge. When the book found no publisher, Blackman clerked for a time for a bookshop in the Village. When the Korean War began, Blackman started The Truth Seeker on his savings. It was more a broadsheet than a journal at the time. Blackman argued against the Korean war from beginning to end as a battle to stop true determinism, the United States on the side of repression and dictatorship.

  When the Korean War ended, the magazine floundered for a long time, searching for a new issue. He found that cause in the Civil Rights upheavals of the early 1960’s. He marched in Alabama and Mississippi, a bear of a man who carried an old Army Colt .45 under his dirty raincoat. Once, when a Klan member tried to intimidate him, he pushed the raincoat open and showed the butt of the .45 and said, “I am not necessarily non-violent myself. You try me.”

  With the bad years behind them, the rough times, the magazine found plenty of backing during the Vietnam War. Still, from all appearances, Enos Blackman had not changed his style of living. He still looked as if he dressed from the rack at a local discount department store and he lived in a set of small rooms around the corner on Christopher Street.

  “Come in, Mr. Hall.” Enos Blackman was a thick tree trunk of a man, clean shaved, with a bald pate and the hairiest arms Hall had ever seen.

  “You know me?” Hall took the chair across the desk from Blackman.

  “Through letters and our telephone conversations.”

  “I’m not sure I’m the William K. Hall you think I am.”

  Blackman stared at Hall. Then he shook his head slowly from side-to-side. “Stella, bring me the picture.”

  The thin girl entered the office a minute later and dropped a glossy on Blackman’s desk. Before she left, she smiled at Hall. Blackman turned the photograph toward Hall.

  Someone, perhaps a photo editor, had marked the picture with a grease pencil, narrowing the photograph until it was a bust shot of Hall. From what Hall could see outside the markings, the photograph had been taken in a bookstore. The Intimate in Chapel Hill, Hall thought. He couldn’t, for the life of him, remember when the picture was taken.

  Hall pushed the glossy away. “That’s me.”

  “What is the problem, Mr. Hall?”

  “I didn’t write the article.”

  Blackman seemed puzzled. “Then you are a different William Keith Hall? Hall is a common name.”

  Hall sh
ook his head. “I’m the right William Hall. I was with the Company in South American. My last station there was Costa Verde.”

  “You’re going to have to spell this out for me.”

  “I know nothing about this article.”

  “I see.” Enos Blackman lifted a heavy hand and rubbed his eyes. “You’ve changed your mind about the article? You don’t want it published now?” Blackman lowered the hand and looked at Hall with red-rimmed, tired eyes. “We talked about this. I said they’d try to pressure you.”

  “I’ve had no pressure.”

  “I told you it wouldn’t be easy.” Blackman continued as if he hadn’t heard Hall. “I warned you that your convictions would have to be strong. I guess they weren’t as strong as you believed they were.” Blackman shook his head sadly at Hall. “Stella, has the check returned that we mailed Mr. Hall in North Carolina?”

  “Two days ago,” Stella said from beyond the doorway.

  Blackman left the office. When he returned, he dropped a cancelled check on the desk in front of him. Hall lifted the check and turned it in his hands. It was in the amount of a thousand dollars and it had been deposited to his bank in Blowing Rock. The signature on the back of the check looked good enough to be his own.

  Hall passed the check to Blackman. “Pretend I have amnesia. Tell me how it came about.”

  In late December, Blackman received a call, long distance, from North Carolina. The caller said that he was William K. Hall and that he wanted to offer The Truth Seeker an article on an important subject. Blackman was interested in the topic, the Company’s involvement in the political affairs of Costa Verde. He told the caller as much. Then he was even more excited to learn that the caller identified himself as a former station man with the Company. The article arrived at the journal office a few days later. It was all the caller had promised that it would be. Since then, there had been several phone calls and letters. The phone calls were usually on the weekends. The biography and the photo arrived and the payment, higher than The Truth Seeker could usually afford, was mailed to the Banford Street address in Blowing Rock.