V.T. let out an embarrassed laugh and made a gesture of helplessness.
Karp smiled and indicated with a wave of his hand the office, and by extension the ramshackle investigation. "I guess this is the next best thing, then."
"Sad to say," said V.T. "Sad, sad to say."
In the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency, a man received a disturbing phone call. It was a journalist calling; remarkably, this journalist was not seeking information but supplying it. The CIA has this sort of relationship with quite a number of journalists, both domestic and foreign.
"Are you positive?" asked the CIA man.
"Positive," replied the journalist. "I got it from one of Schaller's staff guys. They were blown away when they read them. Schaller doesn't know whether to shit or go blind."
Schaller was a leading member of the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities-the Church committee.
The CIA man cursed briefly, then said, "This will take some controlling. All right, what's your take on Schaller's options?"
The journalist replied, "I think he'll have to use the Castro stuff but he had some of that already, and it all leads to dead ends. The other thing, the JFK items… I don't know. It's not exactly in his line of study, and he doesn't want to look like an asshole a couple of months before election. I think he'll pass it on."
"What, to Flores's operation?"
"Yeah."
"Which is not going anywhere."
"Which is definitely not going anywhere."
The CIA man thought about this for a while and then said, "Still, I'd like some insurance."
"Anything I can do…," offered the journalist.
"I'll be in touch."
After getting off the line, the CIA man made a call to the head of the little team that had prepared the documents for the Senate Select Committee's subpoena, and gave him the reaming of his life. Then he called several other people, including a former CIA deputy director for operations, and told them what had happened. None of them was pleased.
After that, he sat for a while, humming, tapping a pencil, making mental plans, and weighing risks. The first rule of secrecy is that every time you let someone new in on the secret, you increase the chances of exposure by a factor of two. Too many people knew about this thing already, and so if he wished to mobilize people to suppress the inadvertently leaked knowledge, it made sense to use only those who knew the story already. He went to a locked filing cabinet, unlocked it, and drew out a worn notebook. Opening it, he found a telephone number.
He dialed it, and while he waited for the call to go through, he locked the notebook away again.
It took a good while for the call to go through and then the CIA man had to make use of his still-fluent Spanish. Finally, in the town of Quetzaltenango, in Guatemala, a phone rang.
FIVE
In the weeks that ensued, Karp each morning left his furnished two-bedroom apartment in Arlington, took the metro to Federal Center, walked to the office, and there spent his days largely in reading. He had finished the Warren material and was now slogging through the recently released Church committee report on intelligence. The office of the Select Committee staff continued stinking of fresh paint and plaster dust, and still sounded with the thumps of heavy equipment being moved about. Increasingly, Karp was running into people he did not know, who claimed to work for him, or almost to work for him. He had nothing as yet for these people to do, which did not seem particularly disturbing to them, since they all seemed to have other jobs of some sort. There was a good deal of motion in the hallways, typewriters and Lexitron printers clattered away, people trailed reels of phone wire, telephones rang, and were occasionally answered. Crane was rarely in the office, as he had a series of private legal commitments still outstanding in Philadelphia. Karp had no idea what was going on.
Late in the morning of one of these trancelike days, Karp, befuddled with reading, wandered out of his office in search of coffee. Cup in hand, he went into the small bay that was supposed to hold a reception area and the clerical pool, but which still resembled the site of a terrorist bombing. There Bea Sondergard was standing like a ringmaster, directing a team of phone engineers, a crew building partitions, and three men with huge cartons from Xerox, carrying on at the same time a conversation with a short, bespectacled, red-bearded young man. Sondergard waved Karp over and pointed him at the other man.
"Butch, I want you to meet Charlie Ziller. Charlie's a loaner from Congressman Dobbs. Charlie, Butch Karp, your new boss." She coughed as plaster dust settled in a cloud around them. Karp shook hands with Ziller and said, "I'm sorry, we seem to be a little disorganized…"
At this Sondergard uttered a cackling laugh and raced off after the Xerox people who were, despite her instructions, moving their copier to the wrong room.
"Actually," said Karp, "it's a nonstop Chinese fire drill around here. Do you have a desk yet?"
Ziller grinned engagingly and shrugged. He looked about twenty-five and had small, bright blue eyes. "No, I'm going to have a cubicle when they're built, according to Bea."
"Great. So-you're a volunteer, or did you fuck up something important?"
A polite laugh. "No, I wangled it, in my subtle way. The Kennedy thing-just something I've always wondered about, and maybe this is a chance to be in on the real story."
"Another Camelot fan."
"I guess. My folks were in the administration then and it's something that hit them pretty hard. I was in junior high at the time. Sixth period, they announced over the PA. My math teacher burst into tears. I'll never forget it; it was… I don't know, like finding out you're adopted. It shook up the whole world, you know? Especially with us all being in the government. I guess it just feels like a natural thing for me to do."
"So what're you supposed to be doing for us?"
Ziller shrugged again. "The representative didn't specify. I'm just supposed to come over and make myself useful."
"Oh, yeah? Like how? Expand on your talents."
Ziller made a self-deprecating little writhe. "I'm a staffer. I can talk on the telephone. Type on the typewriter. Go to meetings. Have lunch. That's what we do here in the nation's capital."
"Okay," said Karp, "in that case, let's have lunch. You can show me your stuff."
Ziller took Karp to the Green Hat, a small multileveled saloon on Maryland off Third. They walked up the Hill and behind the Capitol, Ziller pointing out the sights knowledgeably. It turned out he was a third-generation civil servant; his father was a fairly high mandarin at State, his mother a budget officer at the General Services Administration. Ziller had been educated at American U. and was one of the rare natives of the town. He seemed happy to speak freely about himself, Washington ways, and his recent job, which was staffing the House Intelligence Committee. He touched amusingly on the idiosyncrasies of various congressional characters as well, pointing out several who were dining in that very place.