“Well, how the hell will you get out?”
“My superiors will have me released.”
“How will they find you?”
“They’ll find me.”
And they did.
They found me after breakfast. I had been in the jail cell for over three weeks, and by then I was past the point of wondering how long I could hold up under questioning. I knew by then that I could hold up forever. The questioning had tapered off now. Sometimes two or three days would go by without a session, and the sessions themselves were getting shorter and less vicious.
Until one morning after breakfast a guard came and turned the key in my cell door. One of the CIA men was with him. “They’ve come for you, Tanner. Get your things.”
What things? All I had were the clothes I was wearing.
“And follow me. They found out you were here, finally. God knows how. I guess we’ve got a leak we don’t know about. You come with me. You know something, Tanner? I didn’t believe they’d ever come for you. I didn’t believe there was anybody to come. I thought you’d sit in that cell forever.”
“So did I.”
“You can’t blame us, you know. Put yourself in our position, you’d have done the same thing. Am I right?”
“You’re right.”
“So you don’t blame us?”
“Of course not.”
“Some of the things we said-”
“Just part of the interrogation. Forget it.”
“Well, okay, Tanner. You’re all right, Tanner.”
Two men in dark suits were waiting in the front lobby. One of them said, “Phil Martin,” and extended a hand. I shook it. The other said, “Klausner, Joe Klausner,” and I shook his hand.
“The Chief just heard about you,” Martin said. “It took us a long time. You’ve been here three weeks?”
“About that.”
“Christ.”
“It wasn’t so bad.”
“I’ll bet,” Martin said. “The car’s out front. The Chief wants to see you right away. There’s a bottle in the car if you want a drink first. You look as though you could use it.”
There was a half pint of blended whiskey in the glove compartment. I took a long drink, capped it, and put it back. The three of us sat in the front of the car with me in the middle. Phil was driving. Joe turned in his seat as soon as we had pulled away from the curb. He stared out the back window.
After a few blocks he said, “Yeah, they’re following us. Two cars double-teaming our play. A brown Pontiac and a light gray Ford. See ’em?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Goddam CIA. Tell you the truth, I’m happy to see ’ em there. If they’re tailing us, it means they still don’t know where our offices are. Which is just as well. Lose ’em, Phil.”
“There would have to be two of them. Those boys don’t even go to the john by themselves.”
“So just lose ’em.”
Phil lost them. He went around blocks, dashed the wrong way on one-way streets, and shook both our tails in less than ten minutes. “It’s a hell of a thing,” he said, “when you have to worry more about your friends than your enemies. The Chief is very anxious to see you, Tanner. He didn’t know you were one of ours. He suspected it when we got rumbles about the bit in Macedonia. Dallmann had contacts in Macedonia. Dallmann’s dead, you know.”
“I know.”
“Well,” Phil said.
We rode the rest of the way in silence. Phil dropped us in front of a shoe-repair shop in a Negro slum. Joe and I entered a building by the door to the right of the shop and climbed three flights of squeaking stairs to the apartment on the top floor. He knocked. A deep voice invited us inside. Joe opened the door, and we went in.
Joe said, “Here’s Tanner, Chief.”
“Good. Any trouble with CIA?”
“None there. They followed us, but Phil outran them. He’s good at that.”
“Yes,” the Chief said. “He’s a good man.”
“You want me to stick around?”
“No, that’s all, Joe.”
“Check.”
Joe left and closed the door. The Chief was a round-faced man, bald on top, with fleshy hands that remained in perfect repose on the desk in front of him. The desk was empty of papers. There was a box labeled IN and another labeled OUT. Both were empty. There was a globe on the desk and a map of the world on the wall behind him.
“Evan Michael Tanner,” the Chief said. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Tanner.”
We shook hands. He motioned me to a chair, and I sat down.
“Dallmann’s dead,” he said. “I suppose you knew?”
“Yes.”
“Shot down in Dublin, ironically enough. It must have happened just after he passed the papers to you.”
I nodded.
“I suspected you might be Dallmann’s man when we first began to get reports on you. We’re not like the boys at the Central Intelligence Agency, you know. I don’t believe in teamwork. I never have. It may be useful in some types of operations, but not in our type. Do you follow me, Tanner?”
“Yes,” I said.
“I encourage my men to develop their own operatives. Keep them secret, don’t let me know about them. When one of our men goes out on something, he goes alone. If he’s in trouble, he can’t call for help. If he’s caught, I don’t know him. So I didn’t know you were one of Dallmann’s group. I suspected it, as I said, but I wasn’t sure. I became somewhat more certain when we received reports of the incident in Macedonia.” He smiled for the first time. “That was excellent work, Tanner. That was one of the neatest bits of work in years.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“It may well turn out to have been the biggest wedge driven in Yugoslav hegemony since the end of the war. They were astonished when that revolt broke out. Astonished. The last thing anyone expected was a blowup in Macedonia. I know Dallmann had things planned in that area. I suppose that was why you made your first trip to Istanbul?”
“That’s right.”
“And of course that fell in. Brilliant work of yours, picking up Dallmann in Dublin afterward. And then having the nerve to carry through with the Macedonian plans. Most men would have settled for the British papers and brought them straight home. Dallmann would be proud of you, Tanner.”
I didn’t say anything. Dallmann-the tall man-must have guessed I was on his team from the Istanbul fiasco.
The Chief looked down at his hands. “Strange situation in Ireland,” he said. “The Irish filched that set of plans out of London as neat as anything. The British didn’t even know who had them. But we knew and we couldn’t let them stay in Irish hands. Irish security isn’t the best in the world, you know. And those plans were fairly vital. Dallmann took them away in a matter of days. Another power could have done the same thing. We had to do the job first for two reasons. To get them away from the Irish and to teach Downing Street an important lesson in security. First nonsexual security scandal they’ve had in some time. Ought to keep them on their toes, don’t you think?”
We both got a good laugh out of that one.
“The CIA give you a hard time, Tanner?”
“It wasn’t too bad.”
“You don’t sleep, do you? Got that from your records. That must come in handy.”
“It does.”
“Um-hum. Imagine it would. Sorry I had to put you through three weeks of CIA interrogation. Understand you didn’t tell them a thing.”
“I had to give them the plans.”
“Well, that was all right. Couldn’t be helped.” He chuckled. “You must have given them the willies. You know their standard interrogation procedure? Nothing fancy, just let a man fall asleep, then wake him up and question him, then let him drift off to sleep again, then more questioning. They hit you at your weakest point that way. But they couldn’t do that to you, could they?”
“No.”
“Very handy. Never thought of insomnia as a survival mechanism. Very interesting.”
“Yes, sir.”
He got to his feet. “You have contacts with fringe groups and nut groups throughout the world, don’t you? Professional? Or a sideline?”