The meals were good. Actually, there was no single dish that was as good as the pilaff I had had in Istanbul, but there was a great deal of variety in the cooking, and I’m sure the diet was more nutritious than toast and pilaff and pilaff. The only aspect of the two weeks I spent there that became absolutely unbearable was the endless routine of questioning. It went on and on, and they seemed determined to keep it up forever. It was the complete reverse of Istanbul-there I had been ignored, left entirely alone for days on end, and here I was questioned morning and noon and night, questioned endlessly, and over and over, until I was certain that the next session would be the one to break me.
“Who are you working for, Tanner?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“Why?”
“Those are my instructions.”
“We’re more important than your instructions, Tanner.”
“No, you’re not.”
“We’re the U.S. Government.”
“I’m working for the Government.”
“Oh, you are? That’s very interesting, Tanner. You’re working for the CIA?”
“No.”
“For whom, then?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“The U.S. Government?”
“Yes.”
“I think you’re crazy, Tanner.”
“That’s your privilege.”
“I think you’re full of shit, Tanner.”
“That’s your privilege.”
“You say you’re working for the U.S. Government?”
“Yes.”
“What department?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“Why? Because you don’t know?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“Who’s your boss?”
“I can’t tell you that, either.”
“Tell me something about this agency, Tanner. Is it like CIA?”
“In a way.”
“You can’t tell us the name?”
“No.”
“Can you tell us somebody who works for it?”
“No.”
“Suppose we give you a phone. You call somebody and make contact, okay? And then they can come and spring you, and we’ll all be happy. How does that sound, Tanner?”
“No.”
“No? Why the hell not?”
“I was instructed not to make contact.”
“So what the hell are you going to do? Sit here forever?”
“Sooner or later I’ll be contacted.”
“How? By voices talking to you in the night?”
“No.”
“Then, how, Tanner? Nobody knows you’re here. Nobody’s going to know unless you tell them. There were no leaks in Beirut. You came here on a hushed-up flight, and the CIA alone knows you’re in Washington. Now, how in hell is anybody going to get in touch with you?”
“They will.”
“How?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“I can’t tell you, I can’t tell you, I can’t tell you. Like a broken record. Tanner, you son of a bitch, that’s the whole trouble, you bastard, you can’t tell us a thing. Who gave you those papers?”
“I can’t-”
“Shut up. Why did you turn them over to us?”
“Those were my instructions.”
“Really? I thought you couldn’t give us a thing, Tanner.”
“I was told to deliver the papers to the CIA if I could find no other alternative. It would have been better to deliver them to my superiors, but I could find no way to get into the country except through the American Embassy, and that meant delivering the papers to you. I was supposed to do it only if there was no other choice open and I couldn’t contact my own group or get to the States under my own power, so I gave the papers to you.”
“Were they copied?”
“Not while I had them.”
“Where did you take them?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“Were you on other business? Or were you just cruising around Europe with the papers in your pocket for a couple of weeks?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“You’re a son of a bitch, Tanner. I don’t believe a word you’re saying. We’ll keep you here until hell freezes, do you know that? Take him back to his cell. God, he gives me a pain-”
Well, what else could I do? I know they didn’t believe me. If they had swallowed my story, I would have doubted their competence. It was, admittedly, an absurd story.
But what else could I do? I had to get back to the States. It was my home, for one thing, and for another I was finding it increasingly exhausting to be on the run. I could not endure being a hunted man forever. Obviously I had to go back home and had to straighten everything out, somehow.
And so the story. I was working for a governmental agency, it was secret, it was important, and the CIA didn’t know about it. I couldn’t make contact, I couldn’t give out information, I couldn’t do much of anything but sit on my cot and read spy novels or sit on my chair and say “I can’t tell you” until everybody got sick of listening to it. I had no idea what would happen eventually. I did not particularly want to think about it. It seemed impossible that they would let me go, and it was even less likely that they would release me to another country, or bring me to trial, or-
I couldn’t imagine what they would do to me. Unless they would merely keep me in my cell forever, and that did not seem very likely. Sooner or later they would tire of questioning me. And then what? Would they release me?
They might. Not in a matter of weeks, perhaps not in a matter of months, but sooner or later they would tire of housing me and realize that I was not going to tell them anything more than I had already told them. Their attempts to trap me in questioning sessions were getting nowhere. Whenever I was asked anything remotely tricky, I merely announced that I could not tell them the answer. It was an umbrella for every possible sort of storm. They couldn’t trap me. They couldn’t get anything out of me. They couldn’t do a thing.
Once I made a mistake. I asked one of them when they would let me go.
He grinned. “Tanner,” he said, “I can’t tell you.”
I laughed. Actually, I figured I had it coming.
“Tanner, would you like to know something? I’ll tell you something-we almost believe you. Almost. Why don’t you help us out?”
“How?”
“Give us one name. That’s all, one name. Just one person we can call up and find out if you’re really you. Just one little name, Tanner, and maybe you’ll be able to get out of here.”
“I can’t.”
“A phone number, then.”
“No.”
“Tanner, I realize that you’re gung ho. I realize you’re loaded up to your old wazoo with esprit de corps and all that. We’re very tall on those commodities around here, as far as that goes. God bless the agency, and long may she wave. And you probably feel the same way about your own group, right?”
“So?”
“What I’m getting at, Tanner, is we’re all of us willing to die for our country. And we’re even willing to go through hell for CIA. But there are certain contingencies, Tanner, that are not covered in the rule book. You don’t want to spend the rest of your life rotting in a stinking cell when your own people are a few blocks away and all you got to do is holler. You know something? They’re probably desperate for you to get in touch. They’re probably beginning to worry about you. Why not let me call them for you?”
“No.”
“Give me the initials, Tanner. Just the initials.”
“No.”
“It’s all a big lie, isn’t it? You a communist, Tanner? Or just a nut?”
“No.”
“I don’t believe a word of it, Tanner. Not a word.”
“That’s your privilege.”
“You’ll stay here the rest of your life. The rest of your goddam life. Is that what you want?”
“No.”