Back Channel (10 page)

Smyslov wasn’t in Varna.

Grandmaster Smyslov had fallen ill, the Soviet captain told the
assembled journalists, and had been replaced by Grandmaster Yefim Geller.

Who, coincidentally, spoke no English.

Nobody had shared any of this with Margo until she arrived in Varna, although she suspected that Agatha knew, because at each stop along the two-day journey they had been met by a quiet man who had pressed pages from metal briefcases into the minder’s hands, waited while she read, and locked the papers away again. The quiet men were all different, but they possessed the same rigid face and gazed at Margo with the same unashamedly suspicious eyes. One of the many reports Agatha read must have alerted her to Smyslov’s absence; she simply had chosen not to pass the tidings on to Margo.

We follow the plan,
Agatha said on the first night, after Margo read the news in the English version of the tournament bulletin. They were strolling in the surf, slacks rolled up, because, according to Agatha, even the best directional microphones were confounded by the waves.

I thought Smyslov was the plan,
said Margo.

We don’t give up, said Agatha. We improvise. You’re going to have to stay closer.

To Bobby? No. I can’t.

As close as you can, honey. As close as he’ll let you. A message might still come, and he can’t be relied on to pass it to us.
She raised a warning finger, then pointed at the hotel.
And no names.

Margo had reluctantly conceded the point. The crates, she reminded herself. Harrington’s briefing. Anadyr. Finding out. This was what she had signed up for. Nana would say she had a duty; for that matter, so would Professor Niemeyer.

So Margo agreed. She would stick closer to Bobby.

And yet Agatha’s command of the moment had come as a growing surprise. She was a small, prim woman, possessed of the inoffensive manner Margo associated with shopgirls and librarians. Agatha Milner seemed the perfect chaperone. Her brown hair was always in a bun, and she wore a pair of rimless glasses, which she called spectacles. She was perhaps thirty, although her meekness made her age difficult to judge: at times she seemed a good deal younger. Agatha was shy to the point of diffidence. She spoke little, and Margo found her singularly unimpressive, particularly in comparison with the ebullient brilliance
of Dr. Harrington back at the State Department. But the quiet men who greeted them on their stops at airports and train stations all treated Agatha with an elaborate courtesy. Margo couldn’t think why. In her own world, obsequiousness of that sort usually meant that a woman was related to or perhaps the wife of a powerful man, but here she sensed something else going on. They were in Vienna before the answer struck her.

The quiet men were all afraid of mousy little Agatha.

Margo wondered why.

“Did you see my game against Unzicker?” Fischer repeated, now in the proud-little-boy tones Margo much preferred. They were farther from the surf than she would have wished, but the beach was crowded down there, and Bobby hated crowds. “He should never have played bishop-takes on the fifteenth move, but I would have beaten him anyhow. And the rook sac at the end!” he crowed—“sac” being short for “sacrifice” in chess parlance. “You should have seen his face fall apart.”

“It was a very nice move, Bobby,” she said, knowing what he needed. She found a smile somewhere.

“I don’t know. Maybe my rook sac against Najdorf the other day was better. What do you think?”

“You’re the genius, Bobby,” she said dutifully, and watched his face glow with a child’s delight.

“We should celebrate,” he declared, not meeting her gaze. “We should have dinner. In fact, why don’t you come up to my room? I’ll order a couple of steaks. We’ll celebrate.”

This was the sort of invitation Margo was learning to tiptoe around. “Don’t you have to get ready for the next game?”

“Day off. Come on. You can even get wine if you want.” This reluctantly, for Bobby didn’t drink. Nor did he have much experience of the opposite sex, although another member of the American team, mistaking her, as everyone did, for Bobby’s girlfriend, had regaled her with unwanted tales of a woman they had sneaked into the young man’s room at a tournament in South America a couple of years ago. Margo had no way to tell whether a single word was true.

As it happened, Margo had visited Bobby’s room at least once a day, according to Agatha’s strict instructions, and he had yet to behave as anything but a gentleman.

“It would be my pleasure, Bobby,” she said, resignedly.

“But not your friend Agatha. She can’t come.”

Margo was taken by surprise. “She’s very nice.”

“No, she isn’t. She might say she’s on a fellowship, but she looks to me like a cop. Those eyes of hers, the way they see everything.”

“She’s a graduate student,” said Margo, hoping she was remembering the cover story right. “She studies languages—”

“She’s not a student. I don’t know what she is, but she’s not a student. I’d be careful of her if I were you.”

Margo stood looking at the sea—families bobbing; lone bathers farther out, sedately swimming. Here and there along the beach were hot springs, bubbling right through the rocks. She had heard that the sickly came from miles around for the cure. She spotted her minder up near the seawall, leafing through a local newspaper, and had to fight a grin. Agatha might fool the Bulgarians, but Bobby had seen through her at a glance.

“I’ll try to remember,” she said.

“You’ll be there the day after tomorrow, right? To watch me play Botvinnik?”

“Of course.”

“He’s the world champion. But with my good-luck charm in the room, I can beat him.”

“And if you beat him, you’re world champion?”

Bobby eyed her disdainfully. “Of course not. Everybody loses games. You get to be world champion by beating the champion in a match. Best of twenty-four games. But the Russians cheated me out of the chance, because they’re scared I’d win.”

Not wanting to tempt Bobby down that road again, Margo hunted for a change of topic. “It was very nice of you to invite me to Varna,” she said, with forced bonhomie. “I realized I haven’t thanked you. So—thank you, Bobby. I’m having a lovely time.”

Bobby had this way of twisting his head back and away to show skepticism. She’d seen him do it when analyzing the moves of lesser chess players. He did it now. “It wasn’t my idea for you to come.”

Margo stared. “You just said I was your good-luck charm.”

“I was being nice. I’m not superstitious. I don’t believe in luck. I believe in good moves.” He was gazing out to sea. “I do like having you here. I like you. But they suggested it.”

“Who did?”

“I don’t know. The guy who asked me to talk to Smyslov. He drove down in this big car to see me.” He rubbed his eyes. “I don’t have time for this. I have to go study.”

And he was away, striding fast on his long legs, leaving Margo alone and bewildered on the beach.

Night. She stood in the surf with Agatha, slacks hiked up, chilly water lapping at her ankles.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Agatha for the third or fourth time. Her pale face floated in the darkness like a ghostly balloon. Her tone was as placid as the gentle waves, almost placating, so perhaps she was worried by the fire in Margo’s eyes.

“Look. Dr. Harrington told me that I had to go to Bulgaria because Bobby asked for me. Mr. Borkland told me the same thing. And now Bobby says it isn’t true. He says somebody told him to invite me. He was happy about it, sure—he calls me a good-luck charm—but it wasn’t his idea. Do you get that? It wasn’t his idea. Dr. Harrington lied to me.”

The minder shook her head. The wind had blown a few strands of brown hair loose from her prim bun, but she made no effort to shove them back into place.

“It makes no difference who said what to whom,” she said.

“How can you say that? Of course it makes a difference. Don’t you realize that everything Dr. Harrington told me turned out to be wrong? Bobby was supposed to get a message from Smyslov, but Smyslov isn’t here, and the man who took his place doesn’t speak English. Bobby didn’t ask for me. That was a lie. They wanted me to come. Why? Why me? What makes me so special?”

Agatha slipped off her glasses and polished them with a handkerchief. Margo had already learned that the minder’s eyes were fine without them.

“It’s not part of my job to help you figure out how you got here,” said Agatha. “It’s my job to help you carry out your mission.”

“I thought it was Bobby’s mission.”

“He’s the conduit. You’re the carrier.”

“I don’t have the faintest idea what that means.”

“Yes, you do.” Agatha waved dismissively. Her hands were large and well controlled: you had the sense that she worked wonderfully with tools of all sorts. “And you can dump the wide-eyed innocent act. It’s not charming and it’s not necessary. There’s confusion at the top of the tree? So what? It doesn’t change the mission. Agents always encounter problems. They improvise.”

“I’m not an agent.” Somehow her protest seemed inadequate. “Come on, Agatha. I’m a college student. I don’t have any training.”

“If you had training, you’d be an officer. Officers are the ones who run agents. Agents are the people on the ground you recruit to do a specific job. They don’t do this kind of thing full-time.”

“I’m nineteen years old.”

Agatha allowed herself a rare smile. “Dr. Harrington ran agents a lot younger than you in the war. She wouldn’t have sent you if she didn’t think you’re ready.”

Margo was intrigued. “How well do you know her?”

“Well enough to trust her judgment. If she thinks this is the way to find out whether there are missiles in Cuba, I believe her. If she says somebody is going to get a message to Bobby, then sooner or later somebody will. Sticking close to him might not be the most enjoyable job in the world, but he seems harmless, and he really does seem to like you a lot.”

“That wasn’t what I meant.” Agatha was looking up at the hotel, so Margo looked, too. The whitewashed towers of the hotel were gauzy and ghostly in the night fog. “I guess what I meant was”—she had trouble formulating the question—“I guess I wondered what she’s like. What makes her tick.”

To Margo’s surprise, Agatha answered. “If you’re asking me how she got into this line of work, I have no idea. But if you want to know what she’s like, well, I can tell you a story. I was the only girl in my class at the camp”—Margo was too savvy to ask which camp—“and the boys, well, as you can imagine, they weren’t happy about it. Dr. Harrington was one of the instructors. She’s a legend, believe me.” Agatha’s confident voice went gentle with awe. “Harrington’s done everything in her time. Everything. The stories I could tell you. Can’t
tell you.” A chuckle, and then the librarian was back. “Well. I wasn’t going to put up with any nonsense. I went to Harrington to complain about the boys. She said if I couldn’t get the better of those little snots—her very word—then I’d never be able to deal with the Reds. She told me to improvise. Then she threw me out of her office.”

“What did you do?”

“I improvised. After that, the boys left me alone.”

“Improvised how?”

Behind the rimless glasses, Agatha’s clear eyes narrowed, and for a moment Margo thought she might actually explain.

“We should get back,” the minder said firmly. “Bobby might be looking for you. Or some Russian might be looking for him.”

The summons arrived two days later.

“We’ve got a little problem,” said Gwynn without preamble, the instant Harrington stepped into his office and closed the door, and she knew at once what he meant:
she
had a problem. “Your agent’s been in Varna for a week now, staying at the fanciest resort on the Black Sea at ferocious expense, with, so far, nothing to show for it. True?”

“The expense isn’t ferocious,” she said. “This is Bulgaria we’re talking about.”

But Gwynn on his high horse, charging up his bureaucratic mountains, had a tendency to trample common sense and leave it in the dust. “It’s money, isn’t it? Comes out of the taxes paid by the American people, doesn’t it? Wasting pennies makes it easier to waste nickels, my late mother always said. And, by the way, Doctor, while we’re on the subject, I’ve been looking at these confirmations from the clowns across the river”—fingers stabbing at the pink carbon flimsies on his desk—“and it seems that you’ve been requisitioning resources about which I know nothing. True?”

Until this moment, it had never occurred to Harrington that Gwynn might have a mother. “Clearance isn’t required, as you know. It’s my operation, as you keep reminding me, so the competence rests with—”

Again he ignored her. With one hand he held a flimsy aloft; the other made a fist, punctuating his points with heavy swipes at the air. “You requested three more watchers, in addition to the one the Agency was good enough to lend you.” He put the page down, took up another.
“You requested vehicle surveillance, with audio as possible, whenever
GREENHILL
takes it upon herself to go into the city.”

“I’m worried that the Bulgarians might arrest her, and—”

“And when the clowns across the river, through their logistics division, denied these requests, you went over their heads. Not to your superior in the chain of command. That would be my humble self, but this is the first I’m hearing of any of this. To someone higher up. Another friend from the war, no doubt. Which friend, by the way, backed the Agency entirely.” His hands were folded now. His pug face was bright with satisfaction. “It is my inclination, Dr. Harrington, to terminate
QKPARCHMENT
as of this moment. Any thoughts?”

“S
ANTA GREEN
,” she said.

“I beg your pardon.”

“On this side of the river, the operation is
SANTA GREEN
. Not
QKPARCHMENT
. If it blows up, the Agency will be more than happy to pretend they never assigned it a cryptonym.”