Agent in Place (13 page)

Well, Tom decided as he got ready to leave the apartment, I’ll find out more about all this at the office. The first day back at work was always a heavy one, with a pile of mail and a list of possible news-items all waiting for his attention. He’d be willing to bet that the first joking comment he got would be, “Hey, Tom—do you see Holzheimer’s out after your job?”

Is that what’s really worrying me? he asked himself. No not altogether... Yet why the hell can’t I shake myself free of this small depression? Last night, even early this morning, I was on top of the world. Now—

No, he couldn’t explain it. But his misgivings didn’t vanish either. It was a serious-faced man who strode into the office, and once the greetings were over, the first joking comment was made and he had won his private bet. There was an additional remark, too, a question that he hadn’t been prepared for. “What was your idea in giving Holzheimer this break? Or didn’t you want your own sources to dry up on you?”

Tom stared blankly. “I don’t follow—”

“Come off it. They would freeze stiff if you’d given it your own by-line.”

“That’s a pretty sick joke.”

A small stare back at him, a laugh and a shrug of the shoulders. “Okay, okay—if that’s the way you want to play it.”

Let’s get to the bottom of this, Kelso told himself, and he telephoned his oldest friend at the
Times
in New York. The replies to his questions were meant to be soothing. Not to worry, just a rumour flying around, based on very little actually and the
Times
saw no cause for any alarm.

“What rumour?” Tom demanded. Everyone seemed to know what they were talking about, except himself.

“The typescript of the memorandum.”

“What about it?”

“Your machine, Tom.”

“
What
?”

“Yes. But even if you did copy the memorandum, what harm really? You didn’t break any—”

“I didn’t copy it. Never saw it—”

“And of course we wouldn’t have published it if we felt there was the remotest chance of breaching the security of the United States.”

“But I didn’t—”

“Tom, listen to me! The less said about this, the better for you. We’re trying to contain it within the paper, don’t want it spread abroad. You could get hurt by it, Tom, if your NATO friends thought you had pulled this off. Actually, I think you were right to want to see the memorandum in print. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have published it. So relax. We aren’t criticising you, even if your method was slightly—well, odd. We’ll stand by you, in any case. You know that, Tom.”

Tom said slowly, “I repeat, I did not—”

“See you before you leave for Brussels on the tenth. We’ll have all this under control by that time.”

The telephone went dead, leaving Tom staring at the receiver with grim set eyes. And what would be the use of going to Brussels if this gossip was not only controlled but completely disproved? He had seen journalists’ careers smashed by less than this. He was in deep trouble. And the hell of it was that he didn’t know why. Not yet, he told himself in sudden cold anger; but he’d find out, that was one thing for damned sure.

Along with
The New York Times
, there had been a series of shocks delivered that morning.

First, there was Tony Lawton, who—within two minutes of reading the Holzheimer page—was calling the Pentagon.

The Pentagon, in turn, was telephoning Shandon House.

There the Director had left a ruined breakfast for an all-hell-breaking-loose session in the filing-room. The entire NATO Memorandum was there, he could report. Completely safe. Security had not been breached. Of course, he’d make further checks, find out more details about access to the memorandum at Shandon; of course, he understood the future implications for the Institute if the fault lay with it. And, testily, he added the suggestion that the Pentagon might start investigating its own security: it had had the memorandum in its possession before sending it to Shandon.

Washington then stepped in, quietly, to contact the
Times
’s New York office. There, questions were coldly received and answered. No source could be divulged. Surely it was understood, in this day and age, that there was freedom of speech guaranteed in the Constitution? The
Times
stood by its reporter, Martin Holzheimer. What was more, this morning’s news had contained nothing to injure US security.

The office of the Secretary of Defence chose its own tactics. Again there was a long telephone call to the New York office of the
Times
, but now an attempt at conciliation: yes, yes, yes, total agreement that there was no breach of security in the publication of this part of the memorandum. And then, with everything flowing more smoothly, came a sudden stretch of white water: had Holzheimer known that there were two additional parts to the memorandum? Had he seen them? If so, security had not only been broken, but a highly dangerous situation created that could involve all members of NATO (and that, don’t forget, meant the United States too).

The
Times
went back to square one. The second and third parts of the memorandum, if they existed, were not its concern. Mr. Holzheimer had neither seen nor heard of them. He refused to divulge his source of information on the first part of the memorandum, which was his constitutional right. Prior to publication there had been intensive study of the text of this section of the NATO Memorandum, as well as considerable investigation of the place from which it had originated. It was found (
a
) to be authentic, and (
b
) to contain no actual military information. In fact, its publication was a service rendered to the American people, who ought to know some of the vital opinions that were held in certain influential circles of Western Europe, opinions that might influence the possible future of the United States.

The impasse seemed complete.

It was then that Tony Lawton decided to make his own move. Frankly, today’s little bombshell might be a fascinating debate for some people in New York or a red-faced embarrassment to others in Washington; but for a NATO Intelligence agent in Moscow (and for eight others scattered through Eastern Europe in sensitive assignments) there could be imminent arrest, interrogation, death.

You can’t bloody well waste any more time, Lawton warned himself. Ninety minutes already wasted in well-meaning talk. Get hold of Brad Gillon.

He telephoned Brad at once, using his private number and avoiding the office switchboard. “Brad—I’m flying in to New York. I’ll be there by two o’clock. Cancel the three-Martini lunch, and see me in your office.”

“See you here?” Brad sounded startled.

“That’s right. And if you haven’t read your
Times
this morning—” A delicate pause.

Gillon reflected for a moment, and came up with the proper assumption. “I have. But what’s the excitement? No infringement on security as far as I saw.”

That’s what
you
think, old boy. “No?” Tony asked blandly.

Gillon said, “Okay. Come to the twenty-second floor. I’ll tell the receptionist that Mr. Cook is delivering his manuscript. She’ll announce you at once.”

“Two o’clock,” Tony reaffirmed. That would give him time to drop in at Shandon for a quick check on his way to New York. Bless the Cessna that he could call upon in an emergency, making this hop-skip-and-jump journey plannable.

* * *

From its marble-coated walls to its array of high-speed elevators, the large and busy lobby of the building in which the publishing house of Frankel, Merritt and Gillon occupied three floors, was definitely impressive. Tony Lawton was both subdued and amused as he faced the young woman who sat on the other side of a vast gun-metal desk in the twenty-second floor’s reception office. It was an interior room, small and antiseptic, with one giant abstract mural representing—? Tony had several interpretations, but repressed them as he looked at the virginal face of this latter-day Cerberus. “Mr. Cook,” she repeated, voice frank mid-Western, dress chic Madison Avenue. Languidly, she picked up the telephone and announced him; but her eyes, outlined with heavy black fringes, took a visitor’s measure as efficiently as any guard back at Shandon’s main gate. “You can go in, Mr. Cook. That door—” she nodded to one of three. “I’m sorry Mr. Gillon’s secretary is still out to lunch, but if you go straight through, you can’t miss his office. It’s the corner one—on your right.”

Tony entered an enormous stretch of windowless space, divided by shoulder-high partitions to form a beehive of cubicles. Bright lights, the air conditioned to Alaskan temperatures, people beginning to gear up after lunch (mostly young women; only two men in sight), machines machines everywhere, a forest of them, ready to add and subtract, and type, and transpose, and copy, and possibly do your thinking for you. But “straight through” did bring him to a row of closed doors. The corner one, on his right, had Gillon’s name in very small letters—typical of Brad, Tony thought with pleasure.

“How to deflate a male author,” Tony said as he closed the door behind him. “By the time he reaches here, he’s walking on his knees.”

“Or demanding a flat twenty per cent royalty,” Brad Gillon said with a shake of his head.

Tony gave him a warm handshake and the room a quick glance: a wooden desk piled with galley-proofs and manuscripts, jacket designs in the raw stage propped for consideration on a battered leather armchair, books climbing the walls wherever there wasn’t a window. “Now I know I’m really in a publishing house,” he said, as he cleared a small space on the desk, zipped open his briefcase and brought out a newspaper. “Ballast,” he explained. “Tried to look like a pregnant writer. How am I doing?”

“Not bad at all,” said Brad, eyeing Tony’s tweed jacket, turtle neck, disarranged hair, and unpolished loafers. He himself was in shirt-sleeves, with a slight loosening at the broad knot of his restrained blue tie. “You do throw yourself into your role, Tony.”

“I was a writer, once: mostly aspiring,” Tony reminded him. He was already taking a chair to face Brad across the desk. And then, just as abruptly, voice and manner changed. “You still know some people over at the
Times
, don’t you?”

Brad recovered from the direct approach, and made a guess at Tony’s train of thought. “Don’t ask me to try and persuade them—”

“To reveal the source of Holzheimer’s little piece? Of course not. The idea never crossed my mind.”

“Didn’t it?” Brad’s serious face was lightened by a wide smile.

“I simply want you to take a wise, reliable friend aside, and tell him what he should know.”

“And that is?”

“The real reason behind all this fuss from Washington about the surfacing of the NATO Memorandum.”

“I’d like to hear that myself.”

“You shall, you shall. But first let me give you the background.”

“Off the record?”

“For you and your wise, reliable friend—no. For others, yes.”

“Good. If you want me to approach anyone about the NATO Memorandum, I’ve got to be able to tell him—”

“All the facts,” Tony agreed. “Here they are. The memorandum consisted of three parts, all inter-related. The second and third parts were considered so important for future American policies, that the entire document was given top-secret rating and a transatlantic journey to Washington by courier. After being studied there, it was delivered—again by courier—to Shandon House. And, as at the Pentagon, only people with the highest security clearance were put to work on it.”

“The Pentagon wanted a double check on its own long-range projections?”

“Perhaps to strengthen its own final report, which would be submitted to your policy-makers for their serious consideration.” Tony shrugged. “But the point is this: no copies of the memorandum were ever made; all working notes were shredded and burned at the end of each day; there was constant supervision, even surveillance. Once the job of analysis and evaluation was over, the various parts of the memorandum were linked together again by heavy staples, placed in one folder, and filed securely away. That was ten days ago.”

“Why the delay in returning it to Washington?”

“It was waiting for Shandon’s own top-secret report to be completed. Tomorrow is the deadline on that.”

“And they go back together to Washington?”

Tony nodded. “Standard operating procedure.” He added, trying to control his annoyance and not succeeding, “But why the Pentagon ever sent it to Shandon in the first place—” He buttoned his lip.

“Supercaution. Understandable, if some of the contents of the memorandum might influence American policy. There has to be double and triple checking of the facts, Tony.”

“I can see that,” Tony said, but he was still depressed.

“You think the leak came from Shandon?”

“It’s possible. That is what we are trying to nail down. I’ve been in Shandon’s filing-room—a couple of hours ago, in fact. It’s a bank vault. No outsider could get in there without dynamite. And no insider without supervision. So they say.” Tony frowned, not so much at that problem as at the way he had sidetracked himself. Brad’s questions had been good enough to let him stray. “The point I want to make is this: the memorandum, intact, is now filed in its correct folder at Shandon. So, if someone at Shandon did take it out, he must have separated the three parts, copied one of them to hand over to a reporter, and then put everything all back in place again. But here’s the main question: what happened to the second and third parts while he was typing out the first?”

“Perhaps Part I was all that he took.”

Tony shook his head. He wouldn’t have the time needed to separate the three parts. Remember, he was in that filing-room
under supervision
. He might get a chance to snatch the NATO folder and put it under his jacket, but that would be all the time available to him—a minute or less. No, he took the whole bloody thing.”

“You think he actually photographed the entire memorandum and sent it to Moscow?”

“The KGB wanted it. We know that.”

“Ah—” said Brad, remembering his last meeting with Tony. “Vladimir Konov? Now I see what is really bugging you. Konov arrived last Tuesday in Washington, didn’t he?”