“But it was Yarnell’s signal that the first phase of his operation was done.”
Owens averted his eyes. “After that it began to get nasty. Sergeant Innes, as well as his control officer, had bought the program, hook, line, and sinker—”
“According to Yarnell,” McGarvey interjected.
“According to Darby, all right.”
“So the question was asked, and presumably Yarnell gave him an answer to take back to his control officer. What then? Did it continue? I mean, did you give them more and more?”
“No,” Owens said. “It was time for the change.”
“For the next phase?” McGarvey prompted after a moment. Owens suddenly seemed less than eager to continue now that they had gotten this far. McGarvey lit them both another cigarette and then went into the kitchen, where he opened them each another beer. When he came back into the living room, the old man was sitting back in his overstuffed chair, his eyes closed. McGarvey stopped just inside the doorway and stared at the man. He could not see Owens’s chest rising or falling. For a terrible moment or so, he thought Owens was dead. But then the old man opened his eyes and looked over.
“I usually take a nap this time of the afternoon,” he apologized. “The beer and all makes me sleepy.”
“Go ahead,” McGarvey said, coming the rest of the way in and setting the beer down on the big oak coffee table. “I have plenty of time.”
Owens shook his head. “I’d just as soon go on. Get it over with.”
McGarvey figured what the old man meant was he wanted to finish the story so McGarvey would get the hell out of his house and leave him alone. It was just as well. McGarvey sat down and put his feet up.
“The next phase of the operation?” he prompted again.
“Darby wanted everything to be one hundred percent,” Owens picked it up. “He figured that the kid, no matter how good he and his control officer had become as a team, could not have passed over more than twenty-five or thirty percent of the material he had been given. It left a hell of a lot of fantastic misinformation rattling around in Innes’s head. Darby was crazy to get the entire bundle across. It was like fishing, he told me. ‘Getting nibbles is fun and all, watching the bobber going up and down gets the blood pumping, but I want the big strike, I want the bloody marlin, the sailfish, a whale.’ He changed his tactics from that point on. Sergeant Innes had been his pal, and now Darby set out to manufacture an enemy instead. It was something to watch how Darby used the same old charm, only now in reverse, to get the sergeant to understand that he was no longer trusted. It was subtle at first. So subtle, in fact, I don’t think Innes had any inkling for the first few weeks. But then we started to see it on the kid’s face, in the way he acted, in the things he said. Or didn’t say. I suspect he lost a lot of sleep in those days. I don’t think I could have taken it as long or as well as he did.”
“How did Yarnell manage to accomplish this, exactly?” McGarvey asked.
Owens shrugged. “It was nothing obvious at first. Darby just stopped sending some of the agency’s traffic through Innes. He began using some of the other operators. A few here and there at first, more and more as time went on.”
“He was counting on the other operators to mention it to Innes, I imagine. Make him think about it, worry about it.”
“Exactly,” Owens said. “And of course it worked. We all watched as Sergeant Innes disintegrated. That in itself wasn’t such a pretty sight.”
“But there was more.”
“Much more,” Owens said tiredly. “The most important parts were yet to come.”
The wind had started to blow in earnest now. McGarvey wondered if the return flight scheduled for eight that evening would be able to take off. Of course, if it did not, he could rent a car and drive back down to the city or stay in a motel here. Actually it did not matter one way or the other to him if he rested up here at this end or back in Washington. He had a feeling he knew what was coming in Owens’s story and what he would have to do about it ultimately, yet he wanted to stay to hear it to the end. And afterward, he wondered as he listened to the wind howl around the eaves … well, afterward he would just have to see.
“Did Sergeant Innes ever come to you or anyone other than Yarnell for advice or help?” McGarvey asked. “Did he ever once question why he was being cut off from the job he had been trained for and promoted to? For a year the kid was a superstar, now all of a sudden he’d developed a social disease.”
“He never said a word.”
“What about his mail to his wife? Was it monitored?”
“We opened his mail,” Owens said. “But he never mentioned a single thing about his work. Mostly he wrote about Moscow, the people, the weather, and the food — and about how much he missed her.”
“Not traitor talk,” McGarvey suggested gently, looking at his shoes.
“He was a cool customer. He was playing it close. I’d have done the same thing had I been in his place. At least I would have tried.”
McGarvey thought about himself and Kathleen in the early days. He’d never told his wife any secrets, of course, and yet a lot of his job had come home with him, had seeped into his relationship (enough to cause the divorce), seeped into his telephone calls when he was away, and into his letters, some of which had to be voluntarily censored. He was a professional. Sergeant Innes had supposedly begun as an amateur and had learned his tradecraft on the run from his Russian case officer. It did not make a lot of sense to McGarvey, the kid’s sudden professionalism, unless he was a cold fish after all, a young man with nerves of steel or without a conscience. But even then, when things apparently began to go sour at the embassy, he would have mentioned something in his letters, let some clue drop; at the very least he might hint to his wife that he no longer enjoyed Moscow, that he was homesick, that he was counting the days until he came home. An eighteen month assignment, Owens had said. By that time Sergeant Innes was getting to be a shorttimer. He said as much to Owens.
“Oh sure, by then Innes only had a few months to go. We discussed that very thing during our Monday planning sessions. It came down to two choices: either we could extend Innes, tack some extra time onto his assignment — which we figured would have made him and his case officer skittish — or we could push him into doing what Yarnell wanted from the beginning.”
“Which was?”
“For the kid to jump,” Owens said.
“Why?”
“To legitimize him, for one, and so that he would bring the rest of his disinformation over with him.”
They had their timetable then; it was some eighty-five or eighty-six days before Innes was to ship out. So Yarnell stepped up his efforts to convince the kid that his arrest was not only possible, but was indeed likely and imminent. More and more, Innes was isolated from the cryptographic section on little errands around the embassy. For two weeks he worked in the consular section processing visa applications. For nearly a month he worked keeping track of visiting American tourists of the VIP variety. Boring work for Innes.
The coup de grace came when Innes had barely a month to go. “Darby had made up this message to the DDO back at Langley. It was supposedly sent out over my signature. The flimsy was sitting on Darby’s desk when young Innes was brought upstairs. Darby contrived to have himself called out for a moment, leaving Innes plenty of time to go snooping and find the thing laying there out in the open. And we made sure he took the bait. Darby was watching from the next office through a peephole. He wasn’t going to go back in there until Innes read it. But it didn’t take very long, let me tell you. Of course, by that time Innes was getting pretty gun-shy. He was trying to cover his ass seven ways to Sunday. He picked up on that message within ten seconds of the moment Yarnell stepped out.”