Slowly, annoyance creeped into Denisov’s soft, careful voice. “Since you know I have listened to the BBC on shortwave, even that I have the possession of a shortwave radio, you must certainly tell your agents to keep you informed on the condition of my radio. When it is broken, I cannot use it.”
Gogol kept smiling. “The Committee for Interior Inquiries in Section Ten supplied us with the information about your radio; we did not request it. You know what they are over there. If they did not justify their allocations, perhaps they would be reorganized out of existence. I do not spy upon my personnel; you have my trust.”
“Then I wish you would request that the Committee for Interior Inquiries send around a man to repair my radio so that the next time they have the need to report on my behavior, they will have something of interest to report and something that is accurate.”
“I am sorry that the radio doesn’t work, Dmitri.”
Again silence.
“You are going to the United States tonight, through the usual northern channel into Stockholm. Your papers will be waiting in Section Four.”
“And my nationality?”
“Dieter Jorgensen, from the Dagblat Svenska.”
“A Swedish journalist in the United States?”
“Yes. To the United Nations.” Gogol paused. “We have to know what the game is that they are playing now. Why has Leo Tunney been away for twenty years and why has the Agency resurrected him now?”
“You are certain this is an operation?”
“No, but it is only logical.”
“Logical? It would seem more of an embarrassment to the CIA than to us.”
“The political right wing in the United States is attempting to escalate the struggle against us. It might be part of that. We have to know, we have to find out how he stayed alive.”
“If he is Leo Tunney.”
“Yes. That, too. And what his mission is.”
“He was definitely an agent then?”
“We have proofs.”
“May I see them?”
“You must accept my statement, Denisov.”
“We have our own people in the United States, I don’t understand why I—”
“Yes, but there are too many leaks in the network. The FBI has too many spies but they do not know you. And you were in Southeast Asia at that time, perhaps you can understand what the problem has become—”
“The incident in England—”
“Yes. You were not completely at blame there but that is in the past. We have ‘burrowed’ you long enough. I must know three things, Denisov, about this priest: Why has he come into the light again? What does he know? And is he Leo Tunney?”
“What can he know?” Denisov said.
Gogol pursed his lips. “There are matters beyond you. There are concerns that are not your concern.”
“I am not privy to any more information than your predecessor offered in other matters, Gogol. How am I to act?”
“As my camera. As my eyes and my ears.”
Denisov suddenly felt tired. “And when that is determined?”
“Observation,” Gogol began, as though reciting a prayer. “And then Resolution.”
“If he presents a problem.”
“The problem exists. He is a mystery. All our mysteries are problems to us because mysteries cannot exist.”
“My family is in Gorki—”
“I know. We have notified them to return right after the funeral of your wife’s uncle. Now to you. Paymaster has the credentials and the money and the tickets. Denisov.” He leaned forward. “Be careful with the money. We are still attempting to make sense of your accounts from the mission in Britain.”
“It was a confusing time,” he said.
“Yes.” The subject of accounts was a sensitive one for Denisov. He had fiddled his expenses, as always, and everyone knew it but they could not grasp the truth in the numbers. “Yes, but you must be accountable.”
Denisov rose because he knew the interview was over.
“Dmitri Ilyich,” Gogol said.
Denisov waited.
“We must know.”
“I understand.”
“And your radio.”
Denisov looked puzzled.
Gogol permitted the faintest of smiles. “In your absence, Dmitri Ilyich, it will be repaired.”
3
The elevator doors closed. Rita Macklin leaned against the wall of the cage as it began its slow ascent to the ninth floor of the National Press Building at Fourteenth and K streets in the governmental heart of the city. It was nearly midnight, she guessed; she never wore a watch, a peculiar foible for one in her profession. Two days, she thought, it had all taken two straight days. She felt the tiredness nearly overwhelm her for a moment, she felt dirty, burned out; she wanted a bath, she wanted to sleep but there was still a little more to be done.
Still, Rita thought, her eyes closed for a moment against the harsh light flooding the small moving cage, still, two days wasn’t bad when you considered the odds against winning anything at all.
The doors opened and she hitched up the strap of the Sony tape recorder over her thin shoulder and gripped her purse tightly in the other hand and trudged off. The old corridors were dimly lit at this hour — as they had been at night since President Nixon declared an energy crisis in the winter of 1973—and the lighting gave a sinister, unreal quality to the halls, as though Rita were entering a movie set.
The World Information Syndicate offices were near the end of the corridor. And Kaiser was still there.
Rita carefully opened the door with her key and then stood for a moment in the corridor, listening, waiting to be certain it was Kaiser inside and not some goddam spook from the FBI or the CIA going through the files. Kaiser called this caution her professional paranoia, it went with the territory of the job: Think the unthinkable and then guess a little bit more.
“Kaiser? Is that you, Kaiser?”
“No, but is that you?”
Rita let the door shut behind her and she moved into the shadows of the outer office. Kaiser was alone in the second room of the suite, a single lamp illuminating him at the double desk, the green filing cabinets arrayed on one wall behind him.
Kaiser was a heavy, bald man with black, bushy eyebrows and a gross belly that pushed hard against the edge of the desk as he sat. He was always there, it seemed to her, always at the same desk, all day and sometimes, like now, all night. Across from the double desks that were butted into each other to form one monstrous, littered surface was a battered leather couch, of the kind that once was found in nearly every pressroom in the country. On some nights, Kaiser made it his bed. When Rita Macklin had come to work for him nearly three years ago — she was the best reporter on the Green Bay Press-Gazette, she said, and she showered him with her clippings — she had guessed that Kaiser was an old man. He wasn’t really. Nearly fifty now, but he looked as though he had lived two lives in those fifty years. His hands trembled with the palsy of too many strong drinks — but Kaiser was never in a bar, never upstairs in the National Press Club, never seen at lunch with a source or a publisher. His teeth were yellow with nicotine and neglect, his breath was foul, his stomach rumbled at odd moments, his thick glasses were mended with Scotch tape; he was a huge, shambling wreck of a man whose outward appearance nevertheless carried an aura of massive dignity and vitality.
Rita Macklin sat down on the couch across from him and sighed as she sank back into the leather. She slipped off her shoes and reached down without looking to rub one stockinged foot.
“Women who wear shoes like that deserve to have their feet hurt. A good reporter takes care of his feet first of all. The legs go first.”