“You’re dead on your feet.”
“There are some details,” Hanley said vaguely.
“At least let me drive you over to the Ag building then. The streets aren’t safe at this hour.”
And so Hanley sat in the long, black car next to the Old Man as the chauffeur guided it down the winding driveway from the White House onto Pennsylvania Avenue. It was a short trip.
There was a cold feeling to the night air. November, Hanley thought. It was November already.
“Devereaux was wrong in this,” Galloway said, lighting his pipe in the dark confines of the rear compartment of the limousine.
“No. I don’t think so.”
“He didn’t have to give all that information to that reporter. It wasn’t necessary to make any deal.”
“No,” Hanley said quietly. “He needed leverage. In case none of this got out and the whole thing was suppressed. Do you think the Administration would have gotten rid of the Adviser if there hadn’t been a story in the Post?”
“Dammit. He’s a goddam agent. He doesn’t set policy. He took too much on himself.”
“Yes,” Hanley said. There was no point in continuing the argument. Galloway was determined from the first not to understand. And he would have been happier in the Agency anyway, Hanley realized. He had no affection at all for the Section.
Hanley gazed out the window at the great white obelisk of the Washington Monument on the Ellipse. Two red airplane warning lights blinked like the eyes of a ghost from the top of the monument.
“He could have been wrong at the most basic level,” Galloway said. The pipe had gone out and he snapped at his lighter for a flame but it was out of fuel. “Damn.” He looked at Hanley but Hanley shrugged; he had no matches. “There might have been nothing, Hanley, nothing at all in the journal. All of this could have been for nothing.”
“We knew there was a journal,” Hanley said.
“Yes, yes, but it could have all been that crap about the soul and about Tunney’s love life among the natives.” Suddenly, Galloway laughed as though he had said something very funny. But Hanley stared at him until the laughter ended.
The limousine stopped at the side entrance of the darkened Agriculture building.
Hanley stared at Galloway for a long moment as though he were about to speak. Galloway watched him uncomfortably. But then Hanley decided to say nothing. He opened the door of the black car and got out without a word.
The silence annoyed the Old Man nearly as much as words.
37
The war was not long. The silos were destroyed and the Chinese, after an interval of blood, withdrew slowly across the face of Cambodia. There were more refugees, of course, but that was inevitable. They streamed out of the jungle toward the Thai border, and more refugee camps were set up and more international hand-wringing took place in the councils of great powers and in the United Nations; still the refugees came and were settled in camps and waited; and still some died, slowly, wasting from disease and starvation.
The public was frightened by the war. The Administration was criticized; a congressional investigation was ordered and even held; and yet, there was a curious lack of momentum to all the events, as though it was all too complex to keep the attention of the public for long.
Vanderglass, chief of security for InterComBank and an old Agency hand from Vietnam days, was already under arrest on various charges, including conspiracy to commit murder. The New York Stock Exchange had announced after the close of business Wednesday that it was halting trade in shares of InterComBank stock while the Securities and Exchange Commission made an audit.
Other arrests swiftly followed. But no one mentioned the chairman of the bank, Henry Fraser, who had isolated himself in layers of bureaucracy. There might be a question of “overzealousness” on the part of some bank personnel — that is the way one of the investigators would phrase it — but there was no question of connecting Fraser with criminal matters. After all, Fraser was a friend of the National Security Adviser and several other key members of the Administration.
Rita Macklin’s stories in the Washington Post and in other newspapers would continue for a week, each story detailing a fresh aspect of the Tunney matter, including the Church of Rome’s secret treaty with the Soviet Union. The outcry among American Catholics was predictable.
TransAsia was dead, of course, everyone agreed on that. There was a war in Cambodia now as the Chinese moved swiftly to destroy the missile silos. And there was no profit to be made in someone else’s war.
Trading in shares of InterComBank was resumed after several days and an SEC investigation that uncovered no financial trickery in the administration of Henry L. Fraser. Indeed, the chairman of the International Commerce Bank of New York found that guilt and embarrassment were temporary mantles and that they slid slowly and painlessly off his shoulders within a few weeks. The bank had not lost money; in fact, the bank was more prosperous than ever. And there were still a few political and financial commentators in the media who thought that Henry L. Fraser had been picked as a convenient whipping boy by liberal elements in the press. TransAsia, after all, was a good idea, an attempt to put the war in Vietnam behind us; hadn’t we propped up our old enemies of Japan and Germany and Italy after the Second World War? What was the difference between helping them and helping the People’s Republic of Vietnam?
For his part, Henry L. Fraser continued his good deeds and was named chairman of a new relief effort mounted to aid the starving refugees from Cambodia. Fraser was vice-chairman of the Tri-Global Committee and he took seriously his role as an international humanitarian.
Vanderglass, the former chief of security with InterComBank, was prepared to stand trial. He would not involve his superior officer in any alleged criminal matters. There was some speculation among those in the prosecuting team that the case against Vanderglass was very weak — because of national security considerations that precluded introduction of some evidence.
The Vatican, surprised by the sharp reaction among American Catholics to the proposed Prague Concordance, decided for the time being to withhold announcement of the treaty. In Poland, new worker unrest provoked a sudden, ugly Soviet response. Tanks from the Warsaw Pact countries intruded briefly on Polish soil. In Rome, the Pope announced that he intended to revisit the United States in the spring to explain his pastoral role to the faithful.
Everything had changed yet everything remained the same. In a small column devoted to bureaucratic listings, L’Osservatore Romano, the official newspaper of the Vatican State, announced that a formal move was under way to disband the dwindling Order of the Fathers of the Holy Word.
Denisov was in the camp in the Maryland mountains, still being debriefed by members of R Section. His life was not grueling. The debriefings occupied the mornings, but in the afternoons he had time for private pleasures. Devereaux had seen to it that he had access to a very sophisticated stereo system and all the recordings of the D’Oyly Carte opera company. Once, when he expressed a sense of loneliness to one of the debriefers, they sent him a prostitute from a nearby town. Denisov was quite amazed but not displeased. He heard nothing of his family; in fact, they were sent by midnight car to Gorki and were never seen in official Moscow society again.
And Henry L. Fraser, who had survived many things in his fifty-seven years, survived all that had happened. He did better than survive; he continued to triumph as chairman of InterComBank and a leading spokesman for a certain political point of view. November dissolved into full winter. Other matters occupied the public attention.