I coughed again.
Then: what for…
And, a few seconds later:… what he did it’s Company business never tell us probably some espionage conviction doesn’t look like the type looks like a goddamned lawyer.
“Guess you’re not so sick after all,” the guard said, pulling the pan away after a few seconds.
“What a relief,” I said. “But don’t move that thing too far away.”
I knew, number one, that it was still working; and, number two, that there was nothing I could learn from this guy, who had been kept deliberately ignorant of who I was and where I was going.
In a short while I drifted back to a dreamless sleep.
The next time I awoke I was seated in the back of still another vehicle, this one a standard-issue government Chrysler. My limbs ached.
The driver was a tall, late-thirtyish man with a salt-and-pepper crew cut, wearing a dark blue parka.
We were entering a particularly rural section of Virginia now, somewhere outside of Reston, leaving behind the International Houses of Pancakes and the Osco Drugstores and the hundreds of little shopping malls for wooded, twisty two-lane roads. At first I wondered whether we were headed for Langley by some circuitous route, then I saw we were headed in another direction entirely.
This was safe-house country-the part of Virginia where the CIA maintains a number of private homes used for Agency business: meetings with agents, debriefing defectors, and such. Sometimes they’re apartments in large anonymous suburban buildings, but far more often they’re unremarkable split-level ranches with cheap furniture rented by the month, one-way mirrors in garish frames, vodka in the freezer, and vermouth in the refrigerator.
Ten minutes later we pulled up to a set of ornamental wrought-iron gates set into a wrought-iron fence over fifteen feet high. The gate and fence were spiked and looked high-security. Probably electrified. Then the gates swung open electrically, permitting us to enter a long, dark wooded expanse that suddenly ended after a few hundred yards, giving way to a long, circular drive in front of a large brick Georgian house that in the evening darkness seemed almost foreboding. One room on the third floor was lit up, a few on the second floor, and a large room on the first floor whose curtains were drawn. The outside entrance was lit up as well. I wondered what it cost the Agency to rent this impressive residence, and for how long.
“Well, sir,” the driver said. “Here we are.” He spoke with the soft twang you hear in so many government employees who have emigrated to Washington from the Virginia environs.
“Right,” I said. “Thanks for the lift.”
He nodded quite seriously. “Best of luck, sir.”
I got out of the car and walked slowly across the gravel drive and the flagstone entranceway, and as I approached the front door, it swung open.
PART III: THE SAFE HOUSE
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
The CIA in Crisis
President Reportedly Close to Naming New CIA Head
Some Wonder Whether a New Broom Can Really Sweep Clean
Is Spy Agency Out of Control?
BY MICHAEL HALPERN
STAFF REPORTER OF THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Amid ugly rumors swirling in Washington of vast illegal activity within the Central Intelligence Agency, the President is said to be close to naming a new director.
The latest speculation centers on a career Agency officer, Alexander Truslow, who is generally well regarded by Congress and the intelligence community.
But many observers are concerned that Mr. Truslow faces the difficult, even insurmountable, challenge of attempting to reign in a CIA that is widely believed to be out of control.
TWENTY-THREE
I should not have been at all surprised to see the man in the wheelchair, regarding me calmly as I entered the vast, ornate sitting room. James Tobias Thompson III had aged terribly since I’d last seen him, the incident that had ended my Agency career, but, far more tragically, had ended a wonderful woman’s life and paralyzed a man from the waist down.
“Good evening, Ben,” Toby said.
His voice, a low rasp, was just barely audible. He was a trim man in his late sixties, wearing a conservatively cut blue serge suit. His shoes-which rarely if ever touched the ground-were black brogues, polished to a high shine. His full head of hair, worn a little long for a man of his age, especially an Agency veteran, was pure white. In Paris, when I had last seen him, it was jet black with dabs of gray at the temples. His eyes were hazel; he looked both dignified and dispirited.
Toby’s wheelchair rested against an immense stone fireplace, in which, oddly, a great artificial fire blazed. Oddly, I say, because the room in which I stood, which must have been some fifty feet across and a hundred feet long, with a ceiling almost twenty feet high, was air-conditioned to an uncomfortably cold temperature. For some reason I remembered that Richard Nixon liked crackling fires in the air-conditioned Oval Office in the middle of the summer.
“Toby,” I said, approaching him slowly to shake his hand. But instead, he gestured to a chair that was a good thirty feet away from him.
Seated in a wing chair to one side of the fireplace was Charles Rossi. Not far away, on a small damask-upholstered sofa, were two young men in the cheap navy suits I always associated with the Agency’s security types. Almost certainly they were carrying weapons.
“Thanks for coming,” Toby said.
“Oh, don’t thank me,” I said, masking my bitterness. “Thank Mr. Rossi’s people. Or the Agency chemists.”
“I’m sorry,” Toby said. “Knowing you and your temperament, I didn’t think we could bring you in any other way.”
“You were quite clear,” Rossi interposed, “that you were unwilling to cooperate.”
“Well done,” I said. “That drug really saps the will. Do you plan to keep me on a drip to ensure compliance?”
“I think once you’ve heard us out fully, you’ll be more cooperative. If you decide not to cooperate, there’s nothing we can do about it. A caged animal makes a poor field agent.”
“Then go ahead,” I said.
The straight-back chair in which I sat seemed to have been placed especially for me in such a way that I could see and speak to Rossi and Thompson. Yet it was, I noticed, at a great distance from all of them.
“The Agency found you folks a nice safe house this time,” I said.
“It’s actually owned by an Agency retiree,” Toby said, smiling. “How’ve you been?”
“I’m fine, Toby. You look well.”
“As well as can be expected.”
“I’m sorry we’ve never had a chance to talk,” I said.
He shrugged and smiled again as if I’d made a flippant, foolish suggestion. “Agency rules,” he said. “Not mine. I wish we had, too.”
Rossi was watching me silently. I continued: “I can’t tell you how sorry-”
“Ben,” Toby interrupted. “Please don’t. I’ve never blamed you. These things happen. What happened to me was lousy, but what happened to you, to Laura…”
We fell silent for a moment. I listened to the hiss of the deep orange gas flames as they licked the ceramic pinecones.
“Molly,” I began.
Toby put up a hand to silence me. “She’s fine,” he said. “Fortunately-thanks to Charles-you are, too.”
“I think I’m owed a little explanation,” I said mildly.
“You are, Ben,” Toby agreed. “I’m sure you understand that this conversation isn’t taking place. There is no record of your flight to Washington, and the Boston police have already buried a report of random gunfire on Marlborough Street.”
I nodded.