“What are you, a human sensitive plant? My God!”
He made his nod solemn. He’d better hurry.
Megan shrugged. “Well, you’re predictable enough in most other ways. I suppose if this is a hangup, you’re entitled to it.”
“That’s what I like about democracy. Everybody’s entitled to his hangups.” Brook reached for his hat.
“To hell with democracy!” Megan said. “Go take your walk and hurry back.”
He found a drugstore nearby. In the booth he dropped a dime and dialed. The voice on the other end said, “Yes?”
“Brook,” said Brook.
“Oh, yes. Good little gadget, that buzzer.”
“You go to hell,” Brook said. “You’ll never know what you stopped.”
“Never mind that rot,” the voice said. “How soon can you get down here?”
“Fifteen or twenty minutes, but—”
“No buts,” said the voice.
“Chief—”
“If the girl gets sore, find another one.”
“Yes. But this one—”
“Priority deal,” the voice said.
Brook sighed and hung up.
The building had the usual uniformed guard in his after-hours post at a desk in the lobby; Brook showed his I.D. and was admitted with a reluctant wave. The elevator took him to an upper floor. There was another guard here. Beyond the guard, over a set of frosted doors, was the legend: Federation for Art and Cultural Exchange. The second guard said, “Good evening, Mr. Brook,” but scrutinized his identity card even more carefully than the man downstairs. Brook started forward. “Just a moment, sir,” the guard said. “Super.”
“Duper,” Brook said.
The guard at once became bristly.
Brook grinned. “Excuse me. Not duper. Suds. Super Suds. I never could remember these damn passwords. Do I qualify for admission to the Holy of Holies?”
“I have my orders, sir,” the guard said, unsmiling, and pressed a button on his desk. A voice in the communicator said, “Yes?” and the guard said, “Peter Brook. One-nine-four-four-six-two.”
“It’s about time,” the voice said. “Let the bastard through.”
The guard pressed another button; it unlocked the frosted doors, and Brook went in. He had to go through office after empty office. Finally he came to an unmarked door. He braced himself and barged in with a show of confidence.
“My arithritic mother could have made it sooner.”
“It’s only eighteen minutes, sir—”
“Check your watch. Or your eyes. It’s been nineteen minutes thirty-five seconds. Sit down.”
Holloway was at his desk. Looking back down the years, Brook could recall no occasion when he had seen Holloway anywhere else. He could have been paralyzed from the waist down for all Brook knew. That desk was his home and his church. If he led any sort of life elsewhere, it was the best-kept secret in Washington.
In appearance he was unremarkable. He seemed to inhabit a gray area — gray hair, gray complexion, gray eyes with all the warmth of the North Atlantic, and Brook had never seen him in anything but a gray suit. His department knew nothing about their chief but the facts in his career dossier: a major in OSS during World War II in Normandy; after the war a post in State Department Security; then the Central Intelligence Agency, where he had risen to a supervisory and finally the executive level before being named Director of Operations in the Federation for Art and Cultural Exchange — FACE — which in its true function had as much to do with art and culture as the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan; less. From scraps picked up here and there — not, certainly, from Holloway — his agents deduced that he had once led a peripatetic existence, unbelievable as that was: Zanzibar, Hainan, Aden, Capetown, Pnompenh were mentioned; and a dangerous one, which was not hard to believe at all; standing or seated before that wound-up spring of a man behind his desk, his people could readily credit him with his share of kills and narrow escapes; he knew everything there was to know about violent death.
Perhaps that explained his tension. He sat in his chair like a catapult about to be triggered. It made Brook think sometimes that Holloway hated his swivel chair; that he kept himself seated there only through the fiercest self-discipline, because remaining in the seat was best for FACE and the United States of America. He was hard on everyone around him. No man Brook knew loved him; no man Brook knew, including himself, would not have laid down his life at Holloway’s nod.
The Director held up a sheet of paper.
“Not again,” Brook muttered.
“Again,” Holloway said.
Brook looked at the ten telephone numbers written on the paper. Holloway held the paper up for another few seconds, then put it back on his desk face down. Brook took a breath and repeated the ten numbers.
“Good,” Holloway said. “Forgetting the basics is how agents get killed. That’s how Fred Wilkinson got it in Tokyo.”
“Wilkinson? Baldy Wilkinson?”
“You knew him?”
“I had him as an instructor in Organization when I first joined CIA. I remember looking forward to his lectures because he talked a lot about foreign women. Baldy didn’t like lecturing. Always wanted to get back in the field.”
“He went back and that’s where he got his. He let somebody get close to him while he was waiting for a meet. Something a kid fresh from Operations school wouldn’t do.” Holloway pushed a sheaf of papers across the desk. “Here’s the story.”
Brook read fast under Holloway’s eye; Holloway had instituted a rapid-reading course for all his trainees, and by now it was a habit with Brook. Fred Wilkinson, veteran security agent... trying to contact Aleksei Krylov, cultural attaché, Soviet Embassy, Tokyo... strong preliminary indications Krylov wished to defect... Wilkinson’s body found floating in moat around Emperor’s palace... cause of death, several stab wounds with icepick-like weapon...
“Bad,” Brook said, looking up.
“Worse,” Holloway said, with his coldwater stare. “It was a foulup. I’d sent Wilkinson out of FACE last year, when it was obvious to me he was over the hill. CIA took him, and they were coordinating this. They gave Wilkinson the run. Even sent him to me for my opinion. Because he’d been one of my agents. I told them he’d had it, but they assigned him anyway under a FACE cover. Part of this is my fault. I should have put my foot down. I didn’t.”
Brook could scarcely believe his ears. Holloway confessing to human error? “Why doesn’t CIA make the run themselves?”
“It can’t be a regular agent, certainly not a resident, who contacts Krylov. With Krylov in Japan, and Japan so touchy about its Asian image, if anything should happen — if even part of the cover is blown — it has to look as if there’s no official connection. So now, after the foulup, it’s been handed over to FACE, which should have had it in the first place.”
And that was all the requiem the late Fred Wilkinson was going to get out of Holloway, Brook thought. Aloud he said, not thinking, “We’ve got it now?”
“Didn’t I just say so?” Holloway said. Brook wished he would turn the icewater off. “You’ve got it.”
“Yes, sir.” Brook sighed; and that was his requiem to Megan Jones. “Deadline?”
“Your jet leaves Washington International for Albuquerque at seven fifteen tomorrow morning. That gives you plenty of time to study the folder. You can sleep on the plane.”
“Thank you, sir,” Brook said.
“Good agents,” Holloway said, “don’t get sarcastic.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Oh, you’re good enough, although not half as good as you think you are. At least I haven’t fired you.”
“Or kicked me upstairs.”
“The only direction a man can go in this organization, Brook, is down. Your job is to stay where you are. As long as you do, you’re good. Well, good enough.”