The conference room had wrap-around plate glass; it was a corner suite. The view of the stormy city was striking.
Two men awaited me. The ashtray was a litter of butts and the styrofoam coffee cups had nothing left in them but smeared brown stains. Young Leonard Myers hurried like an officious bellboy to relieve me of the B-4 bag. “I hope you’ve got a spare suit in here. You’re drenched. How was the flight? Bill, I guess you know Charlie Dark?”
“Only by reputation.” The tall man came to shake my hand. “Good to meet you, Charlie. I’m Bill Jaeger, chief of station down here.”
When the amenities were out of the way and we’d sent out for sandwiches I settled my amplitude into a wooden armchair at the table. It was a bit of a squeeze. “Now, what’s the flap?”
Myers said, “Didn’t Rice brief you?”
“No.”
“That figures,” Jaeger said. “I may be stepping out of line but it baffles me how Rice keeps his job.”
I let it lie. It wouldn’t have been useful to explain to Jaeger that Rice keeps his job only because of me. Either Jaeger would refuse to believe it or he’d resent my conceit.
“The flap,” Myers said, “goes by the names of Beth Hilley and Iwan Stenback. They purport to be journalists.”
Jaeger made a face. “Underground press. They’re tearing our station to pieces.”
“Systematically,” Myers said. “Causing a great deal of embarrassment for both the Australians and us.” Then a wan smile. “You and I were sent in to get rid of them for Bill. Actually that’s not quite accurate. You were sent to get rid of them. I was sent to hold your coat.” With his collegiate good looks Myers was the picture of earnest innocence but I’d known him a while — sometimes he was astonishingly naive but he was brighter than he seemed: a quick study. One day he’d be in charge of a department.
A girl brought us a tray of sandwiches and rattled something at Jaeger in ’Stryne — I didn’t get but one word in four; the accent was more impenetrable than Cockney. Jaeger said, “I’ll have to call them back later.” The girl smiled, nodded, and departed, legs swishing; Myers’ eyes followed her until she was gone.
Jaeger was one of those lanky Gary Cooperish people who seem to have flexible bones rather than joints. I knew him as he knew me: by reputation. Easygoing but efficient — a good station chief, reliable, but not the sort you’d want running a vital station in a danger zone. He was a good diplomat and knew how to avoid ruffling feathers; he was the kind of executive you assigned to a friendly country rather than a potential enemy.
He said, “Iwan Stenback publishes a weekly rag called Sydney Exposed. Part soft-core porn, part yellow gossip and cheap scandal, part health food recipes and diagrams for Yoga positions, part radical-left editorializing. Until recently it didn’t have much of a circulation — mostly just freaks. Very youth-oriented. Always just skirting the libel and obscenity laws. Then a couple of months ago Stenback hired a hot new reporter by the name of Beth Hilley. Since then the circulation’s shot up like a Titan missile because the rag announced in a page-one box under Hilley’s byline that they were going to start naming and identifying American C.I.A. spies who were working undercover in Australia.”
Myers said, “It’s happened before, of course. In Greece that time, and—”
I cut him off. “Have they made good on the threat?”
Jaeger said in his dry way, “So far they’ve named seven of our people.”
“Accurately?”
“Yes.”
I decided I liked him. He didn’t make apologies; he didn’t waffle. He looked like a cowboy and talked with a prairie twang, but I suspected there was nothing wrong with his brain.
I said, “Where’d they get the names?”
“We think one or two of our people may have been indiscreet. They aren’t all paragons, the people we buy information from. And in a country like this they’re not scared into secrecy — they don’t need to worry about jackboots in the hall at midnight. In some ways it’s harder to run a secure intelligence network in a free country than it is in a dictatorship.”
“You’ve made efforts to plug the leaks?”
“Yes, sure. I think I know how it may have happened. I’m told Beth Hilley’s attractive — seductive as hell.”
“You’ve never seen her?”
“No. Not many people have, evidently. I’m sure she goes under a variety of cover identities. After all, if her face were known, people wouldn’t talk to her.”
“Is ‘Beth Hilley’ a pen-name?”
“No.” Jaeger deferred to Myers.
“Born in Australia but schooled in England and Switzerland.” Myers was reading from his notebook. “Beth Hilley’s her real name. She’s twenty-seven. The Berne file suggests she may have had contact with members of the Baader-Meinhof gang. In any case she returned to Australia a year ago with a head full of radical revolutionary anti-capitalist theory.”
Jaeger said, “Typical immature anti-establishment Anti-American notions. Australia already has a socialist government but that doesn’t seem to satisfy these idiots. They want blood. Preferably blue. It doesn’t seem to penetrate their thick heads that this capitalist free-enterprise system they hate so much has graduated more people out of poverty than any other system in history.”
“Still,” I said, wanting to get him off his political stump, “for an idiot she seems to have done a capable professional espionage job against us.”
“Every week,” Myers said, “the name of another of our agents appears in Sydney Exposed. They promise to keep doing it until they’ve named every last American spy in Australia, New Zealand, and New Guinea.”
“Can they make good on the threat?”
Jaeger smiled. “We don’t know. But they’ve done it so far.”
Myers said, “We’re working with the Australians on this — they don’t like it any better than we do. It embarrasses them as much as it does us. After all, the Australian government knows we’re here. But they can’t be seen to infringe the freedom of the press, and obviously Washington can’t be seen to bully the press of an independent nation. It’s got to be handled in such a way that it doesn’t look like official repression. That’s why you’re here, Charlie. To think of something clever.”
“At least Rice hasn’t lost faith in my ability to work miracles,” I remarked. I brooded at Myers, then at Jaeger. They seemed to be waiting for me to provide an instantaneous solution to their difficulty. “My problem,” I confessed, “is a deep-down fanaticism in behalf of absolute freedom of the press. Wherever censorship begins, that’s where tyranny begins.”
“I agree,” said Jaeger, “but the Australian press tends to be a bit lurid anyway, and this particular rag goes far beyond the limits of responsible journalism.”
That was putting it diplomatically. The real issue was the fact that Sydney Exposed was blowing the covers off our agents. When you expose an agent you render him inoperable. The newspaper was systematically closing down our network. Given the premise that the survival of nations depends on the accuracy of their intelligence, we had no choice but to stop publication of these revelations. Yet I could not bring myself to think in terms of strong-arm methods. There has to be a difference between the good guys and the bad guys.
I said, “Has anyone tried to reason with them?”
Jaeger said, “I had a talk with Stenback. He listened politely, then laughed in my face.”
“Tell me about him.”
“Sort of a guru type. Brown scraggly beard shot with gray. Wears his hair in a ponytail. Myers has the official details.”
Myers turned a page in his notebook. “Thirty-four years old. Born in Sweden. Was a lieutenant in the Swedish army — a crack shot, by the way. Emigrated here five years ago. Naturalized Australian citizen. Background reports indicate he used to hang out with American Vietnam draft dodgers in Sweden. Earlier his father was a quisling in Norway during the War, which may explain why Stenback grew up with a chip on his shoulder. Before he came down here he worked a while as a legman on a few of the cheap London tabloids, publishing cheap filthy innuendoes about prominent Members of Parliament and the like. Digging up dirt seems to be his mission in life — the worse it smells the better he likes it.” Myers closed the notebook. “Rice would prefer it if you arranged a fatal accident for them, Charlie.”