TWO
When the doorbell rang at eleven o'clock that morning, David Canning was studying the leaves of his schefflera plant for signs of the mealybugs he had routed with insecticide a week ago. Seven feet tall and with two hundred leaves, the schefflera was more accurately a tree than a house plant. He had purchased it last month and was already as attached to it as he had once been, as a boy, to a beagle puppy. The tree offered none of the lively companionship that came with owning a pet; however, Canning found great satisfaction in caring for it — watering, misting, sponging, spraying with Malathion — and in watching it respond with continued good health and delicate new shoots.
Satisfied that the mealybugs had not regenerated, he went to the door, expecting to find a salesman on the other side.
Instead, McAlister was standing in the hall. He was wearing a five-hundred-dollar raincoat and was just pulling the hood back from his head. He was alone, and that was unusual; he always traveled with one or two aides and a bodyguard. McAlister glanced at the round magnifying glass in Canning's hand, then up at his face. He smiled. “Sherlock Holmes, I presume.”
“I was just examining my tree,” Canning said.
“You're a wonderful straight man. Examining your tree?”
“Come in and have a look.”
McAlister crossed the living room to the schefflera. He moved with grace and consummate self-assurance. He was slender: five ten, a hundred forty pounds. But he was in no way a small man, Canning thought. His intelligence, cunning, and self-possession were more impressive than size and muscle. His oblong face was square-jawed and deeply tanned. Inhumanly blue eyes, an electrifying shade that existed nowhere else beyond the technicolor fantasies on a Cinema-Scope screen, were accentuated by old-fashioned hornrimmed glasses. His lips were full but bloodless. He looked like a Boston Brahmin, which he was: at twenty-one he had come into control of a two-million-dollar trust fund. His dark hair was gray at the temples, an attribute he used, as did bankers and politicians, to make himself seem fatherly, experienced, and trustworthy. He was experienced and trustworthy; but he was too shrewd and calculating ever to seem fatherly. In spite of his gray hair he appeared ten years younger than his fifty-one. Standing now with his fists balled on his hips, he had the aura of a cocky young man.
“By God, it is a tree!”
“I told you,” Canning said, joining him in front of the schefflera. He was taller and heavier than McAlister: six one, a hundred seventy pounds. In college he had been on the basketball team. He was lean, almost lanky, with long arms and large hands. He was wearing only jeans and a blue T-shirt, but his clothes were as neat, clean, and well pressed as were McAlister's expensive suit and coat. Everything about Canning was neat, from his full-but-not-long razor-cut hair to his brightly polished loafers.
“What's it doing here?” McAlister asked.
“Growing.”
“That's all?”
“That's all I ask of it.”
“What were you doing with the magnifying glass?”
“The tree had mealybugs. I took care of them, but they can come back. You have to check every few days for signs of them.”
“What are mealybugs?”
Canning knew McAlister wasn't just making small talk. He had a bottomless curiosity, a need to know something about everything; yet his knowledge was not merely anecdotal, for he knew many things well. A lunchtime conversation with him could be fascinating. The talk might range from primitive art to current developments in the biological sciences, and from there, to pop music to Beethoven to Chinese cooking to automobile comparisons to American history. He was a Renaissance man — and he was more than that.
“Mealybugs are tiny,” Canning said. “You need a magnifying glass to see them. They're covered with white fuzz that makes them look like cotton fluff. They attach themselves to the undersides of the leaves, along the leaf veins, and especially in the green sheaths that protect new shoots. They suck the plant's juices, destroy it.”
“Vampires.”
“In a way.”
“I meet them daily. In fact, I want to talk to you about mealybugs.”
“The human kind.”
“That's right.” He stripped off his coat and almost dropped it on a nearby chair. Then he caught himself and handed it to Canning, who had a neatness fetish well known to anyone who had ever worked with him. As Canning hung the coat in the carefully ordered foyer closet, McAlister said, “Would it be possible to fix some coffee, David?”
“Already done,” he said, leading McAlister into the kitchen. “I made a fresh pot this morning. Cream? Sugar?”
“Cream,” McAlister said. “No sugar.”
“A breakfast roll?”
“Yes, that would be nice. I didn't have time to eat this morning.”
Motioning to the table that stood by the large mullioned window, Canning said, “Sit down. Everything'll be ready in a few minutes.”
Of the four available chairs McAlister took that one which faced the living-room archway and which put him in a defensible corner. He chose not to sit with his back to the window. Instead, the glass was on his right side, so that he could look through it but probably could not be seen by anyone in the gardened courtyard outside.
He's a natural-born agent, Canning thought.
But McAlister would never spend a day in the field. He always started at the top — and did his job as well as he could have done had he started at the bottom. He had served as Secretary of State during the previous administration's first term, then moved over to the White House, where he occupied the chief advisory post during half of the second term. He had quit that position when, in the midst of a White House scandal, the President had asked him to lie to a grand jury. Now, with the opposition party in power, McAlister had another important job, for he was a man whose widely recognized integrity made it possible for him to function under Republicans or Democrats. In February he had been appointed to the directorship of the Central Intelligence Agency, armed with a Presidential mandate to clean up that dangerously autonomous, corrupt organization. The McAlister nomination was approved swiftly by the Senate, one month to the day after the new President was inaugurated. McAlister had been at the agency — cooperating with the Justice Department in exposing crimes that had been committed by agency men — ever since the end of February, seven headline-filled months ago.
Canning had been in this business more than six months. He'd been a CIA operative for twenty years, ever since he was twenty-five. During the cold war he carried out dozens of missions in the Netherlands, West Germany, East Germany, and France. He had gone secretly behind the Iron Curtain on seven separate occasions, usually to bring out an important defector. Then he was transferred Stateside and put in charge of the agency's Asian desk, where the Vietnam mess required the attendance of a man who had gone through years of combat, both hot and cold. After fourteen months in the office, Canning returned to field work and established new CIA primary networks in Thailand, Cambodia, and South Vietnam. He operated easily and well in Asia. His fastidious personal habits, his compulsive neatness, appealed to the middle-and upper-class Asians who were his contacts, for many of them still thought of Westerners as quasi-barbarians who bathed too seldom and carried their linen-wrapped snot in their hip pockets. Likewise, they appreciated Canning's Byzantine mind, which, while it was complex and rich and full of classic oriental cunning, was ordered like a vast file cabinet. Asia was, he felt, the perfect place for him to spend the next decade and a half in the completion of a solid, even admirable career.