He sat in a bar debating whether to call the woman from the plane. It felt strange even to be asking himself the question. He was monogamous, for reasons of personal sanity as well as security. The conviction that he was happily married was central to his sense of well-being. But he felt a restlessness, a pull toward adventure and doom, an impulse like the feeling one gets occasionally on a high balcony looking out over the edge of the railing.
Jump, said Rogers to himself. He saw the French woman in his mind’s eye, arrayed on a bed of soft pillows and white linen.
He went to the phone and dialed the number of the Madison.
I’ll invite her to dinner, Rogers told himself. Who knows what will come of it? We’ll have a meal together. An innocent flirtation.
“Good evening, the Madison,” said the hotel operator.
“The room of Madame Godard, please,” said Rogers. He felt as nervous as a teenager on his first date.
Ring-ring, ring-ring.
What would he say when she answered? Hello. I am infatuated with you. I can’t get you out of my mind. No, obviously not that. He would think of something when she answered.
Ring-ring, ring-ring.
Rogers’s palms were sweating. He heard a voice. It was the operator.
“I’m sorry, sir. There’s no answer.”
Rogers went back to the bar and had another whisky. He waited thirty minutes and called the hotel again.
The same nervous wait. Again, no answer.
He decided to have dinner at his favorite French restaurant, Jean-Pierre on K Street. When he arrived and saw the soft banquettes and the delicate watercolors on the wall, he called the hotel again.
“Madame Godard, please.”
“One moment,” said the operator.
Ring-ring.
“Allo…”
It was a man’s voice. Rogers thought he could hear a woman’s voice in the background, singing.
“Allo?”
The man had a French accent.
Perhaps it’s just the bellhop, Rogers told himself.
“Hello,” said Rogers. “Is Madame Godard there?”
“Un instant,” said the man in French.
“Hello,” said a woman’s voice.
“Veronique,” said Rogers. “This is Tom, the man from the plane.”
“Who?” said the voice.
“The man from the plane,” repeated Rogers.
“Oh yes. Hello,” she said in a lower voice. She sounded embarrassed.
“I though perhaps you might be free for dinner this evening,” said Rogers.
She lowered her voice almost to a whisper.
“Not tonight. I am busy. Perhaps another time.”
“Yes, perhaps,” said Rogers, knowing that he wouldn’t call again.
“I am glad that you called,” said the woman in a voice that was barely audible. Rogers pictured her standing in a bathrobe, talking on the telephone in a whisper while her boyfriend jealously paced the room. It was a perverse sort of satisfaction, but not very lasting. The Frenchman, after all, had Madame Godard.
“I think you are beautiful,” said Rogers. What did it matter now? He could say whatever he wanted.
She gave a slight laugh that was, at once, a protest of modesty and a further seduction.
“Goodbye,” said Rogers.
He looked at the phone fondly, a last remnant of the woman, before hanging it up.
“C’est dommage,” Rogers said to the headwaiter as he returned to his seat. The waiter smiled indulgently.
Rogers ordered medallions of venison with chestnut puree, a house specialty. After drinking down most of a bottle of Burgundy, he wondered if perhaps there was an angel in heaven with the task of keeping him faithful to his wife, despite his own flights of desire. He tried to remember the priest’s admonition in school long ago. Was the adulterous wish the same in the eyes of God as the act itself? Surely not. But he couldn’t quite remember. Perhaps he was getting old.
A shuttle bus arrived at the hotel at 9:00 A.M. It had smoked windows, so that any KGB agents who happened to be cruising along the George Washington Parkway couldn’t be sure just who was taking the exit for the Central Intelligence Agency. The bus deposited Rogers in the basement of the building. He passed through security and took the elevator to the wing where the DDP and his minions planned their global escapades. A secretary in a distant outer office welcomed Rogers, gave him coffee, and took him down the hall.
The agency’s headquarters looked so clean and wholesome. Someone had once told Rogers that it had been designed to look like a university campus. A place where people smoked pipes and went to seminars. How distant that image was, Rogers thought, from the world that he inhabited.
“The problem with your operational plan is that there isn’t any plan,” said John Marsh.
Rogers listened impassively. He was seated in a conference room with Marsh and Stone. The room was decorated with photographs of past heads of the clandestine service. A gallery of chiselled features, measured judgments, stiff upper lips.
“I had thought these issues were resolved a month ago, only to find that they were not,” continued Marsh.
Marsh made an interesting contrast to Rogers. He was shorter, neater, tighter, meaner. Where Rogers looked relaxed and informal in his corduroy suit, Marsh was dressed fastidiously, like a salesman at a Brooks Brothers store. He wore a blue pinstripe suit, a white shirt with a button-down collar that rolled just so, a yellow tie, striped suspenders, and a pair of black tasseled mocassins. His hair was combed back tightly against his head. If someone had told Marsh that his head looked as smooth and hard as a bullet, he probably would have felt flattered.
“At the risk of sounding immodest,” Marsh went on, “I must point out that the central problem in the PRQ is the same one that I tried to bring to Tom’s attention in the cable to him in Kuwait. Which was, shall we say, mislaid.” He chided Rogers in the curt, bloodless way that a schoolteacher corrects a dull pupil.
“It shouldn’t be necessary to remind someone of Tom’s experience and standing…”
Rogers noted that he was being discussed in the third person. He had a momentary desire to punch Marsh in the face.
“…that the essence of any successful intelligence operation is control.
“An uncontrolled agent is like an unguided missile,” continued Marsh. “We have no hook, no handle, to manipulate his behavior. The uncontrolled agent can go running off in whatever direction he pleases, talk to whomever he likes, do or not do what we request-as it suits his fancy. In my opinion it’s better not to deal with such a person at all, regardless of how well placed he may be, because the potential for mischief is so great. I regard it as essential, especially in an organization like Fatah that is already thoroughly penetrated by the Soviets, that we work only with people who are under discipline.”
As he finished his discourse, Marsh took a white linen handkerchief from his breast pocket and dabbed it against his mouth. Rogers decided he had been right in a judgment he made several years ago: Marsh was a pompous ass.
Rogers offered a brief defense of his recommendations in the PECOCK case, repeating the same arguments he had made in the PRQ. He spoke calmly and carefully, trying to sound like himself and not a misshapen version of Marsh.
“Control would certainly be preferable,” said Rogers, “if it were possible. But I don’t think it is in this case. At least not yet. We’re dealing with someone at the top of his organization, who believes in his cause. He isn’t a defector. He isn’t a crook. He isn’t a pervert. If we want control, we should go after somebody who is less important and more vulnerable. Somebody who will be more susceptible to pressure.”
“That’s defeatism,” said Marsh. “You are assuming you can’t recruit the agent through financial incentives when, by your own admission, you haven’t really tried.”
You fool, thought Rogers. You wouldn’t know a potential agent if he walked up and bit you on the ass.