Back Channel (28 page)

Niemeyer thought the crowd in Washington was crazy, and they thought he was crazy. Maybe both sides were right. But Margo’s mind had leapt ahead.

“That’s not all your dad said, was it? This wasn’t just about the anniversary.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“He didn’t just bring up Eastern Europe and Cuba out of the blue. It must have been part of a larger conversation.” Priscilla was staring at her, as if recognizing at last the peculiar intelligence her brother had described. “You said he invited you and Phil home specially. And it wasn’t to share gossip about Bulgaria. He wanted to warn you, didn’t he? Just like his friends down at Forty warned him. That’s why everybody’s going off to Maine. That’s why you’re shipping the paintings and the gold.”

Priscilla was gazing out the window, on a landscape she might never see again. “Oh, you mean, did Dad tell us there are missiles in Cuba? Of course he did. He said it wouldn’t stay secret for long. He said Kennedy and Khrushchev were both so insecure that neither one would have the good sense to blink. He said there’s going to be a war. He said Stewart Airport is an emergency dispersal site for the Air Force, and we’re practically around the corner, and, well, a near miss … Anyway, he said we should get moving.” She was on her feet again, collecting the crockery. “Only Phil wouldn’t go. Maybe because of you. Maybe some other reason. Mom begged him, and he said he’d drive up if things looked really bad, but in the meantime he’d be safe enough in Ithaca.” Her laugh was harsh and tinny. “You know what? He wasn’t.”

Margo joined her at the sink, taking the dishes and drying them. “Again, I’m so sorry.”

Priscilla seemed not to hear. “Phil was worried about you,” she said, distantly. “Especially after Dad said you were in over your head. He told us that some of the people involved with the operation—the operation that I guess sent you over there?—he said some of them, well, it was kind of hard to be sure which side they were on.”

They think you were betrayed.
Margo stiffened, but Priscilla Littlejohn,
deep in her story, didn’t seem to notice. She picked up another cookie, took a bite, and resumed talking.

“I don’t want you to get the wrong idea. Dad wasn’t the sort to tell tales out of school. It came up because he was warning us. He wanted us to understand what kind of harebrained schemes the Administration had approved to try to find out what was going on in Cuba. That’s what he said, word for word—‘harebrained schemes.’ And when the Bulgaria ploy blew up, well, he said the woman in charge might lose her job. Bad operational security. Then Dad said something about how it was different in the old days, how everybody knew how to keep the secrets. And then it got funny.” She was still scrubbing dishes, her gaze fixed on the middle distance. “Phil was upset. He asked Dad if he was saying that you—well, he said ‘the student’—if the student in question had been double-crossed. Dad just shrugged. He said, ‘These days, who knows?’ Then he said the details didn’t matter. What mattered was that war was coming, and we had to get to Maine. Phil wouldn’t go; he said he had things to do in Ithaca first.”

Margo’s face burned. Her words dried up. Now she understood what Phil Littlejohn had been leading up to. He had been trying to find a way to invite her to join his family up in Maine. He wanted her safe.

The women stood side by side in the kitchen, each alone with her private grief. Margo had come to obtain information, but would leave with more than she wanted. Phil wasn’t one of the bad guys. He had been trying to help. Guilt and responsibility threatened to overwhelm her, and no matter how hard she tried to tell herself that it wasn’t her fault—that she had never flirted back or encouraged him in any way—she had to accept the bizarre truth. Had she never met Phil Littlejohn, he might still be alive.

“I’m sorry,” Margo said again, just to break the crushing silence. “I’m so sorry for your loss.”

Finally, Priscilla’s eyes sought out her guest once more. “I’m sorry, too, Margo. And it was good of you to come by, but I think it’s time you left. I have things to do, and, well, the truth is, you’re starting to give me the creeps.”

Priscilla walked her briskly to the door. One of the movers, stepping hastily out of her angry way, dropped a box of framed photographs, presumably from her father’s study. The glass on one shattered. Priscilla
let loose a stream of firm but quiet invective as the man stooped to collect the pieces.

“Just step over him,” Priscilla commanded.

“Wait,” said Margo, crouching.

“He doesn’t need help.”

But Margo wasn’t trying to help. She was tugging another photo from the box, one that had caught her eye.

“Who’s this?”

“Oh. Well. That’s Phil, obviously. That’s me. Way too fat for shorts in those days. I tried to get Dad not to frame it. And the good-looking fellow in the captain’s hat is our cousin Jerry. This was on Nantucket, I think two years ago.”

“Jerry,” Margo echoed.

“First cousin on my mother’s side. He works for the State Department.” Priscilla looked at her strangely. “Family black sheep. He got in some kind of trouble overseas. He’s riding a desk at Foggy Bottom while they decide what to do with him.”

Margo looked up. They recruit families, Fomin had said. “Do you know how to get in touch with him?”

Doris Harrington wondered whether somebody was playing a bad joke. It was nearly ten o’clock, and she was sitting alone in a booth at an all-night diner in Bethesda. The phone call that found her at her house two hours ago included all the proper code words, and when she tried to protest that she was on the verge of retirement, the male caller, who declined to give his name, replied that her “immediate plans” made no difference.

So here she sat, still on her first slice of pie but sipping her third cup of coffee, watching the parking lot through the wide front windows. The diner announced its name in huge flashing neon letters, and the light played hypnotically over the shiny cars. The waitress poured more coffee without being asked. Harrington needed the coffee to stay awake, but knew she would regret it later on, when she tried to sleep.

The place the caller had chosen was well off the usual State Department path, and that was the only mercy, because, had anyone she knew spotted her, Harrington would have been mortified—not because she was in some hole-in-the-wall diner but because the only explanation for her presence at this time of night would be that she was involved in some sort of—

She sat straight. A young man had come in and was heading toward her. He was slim and towheaded and had eyes of a strange orange-gold. Smiling, he slid into the booth, across from her.

“Thank you for coming, Dr. Harrington. My name is Jerry Ainsley. I work for the State Department—”

“May I see your identification?” she asked coolly.

He opened his wallet, showed the laminated photograph threaded with blue.

“Very well, Mr. Ainsley. Would you mind telling me what I’m doing here?”

“A friend of yours would like to see you.”

“Oh?”

“She’s waiting in the car. I gather that she has quite the story to tell, but for some reason, Dr. Harrington, she won’t tell it to anybody but you.”

They were in the woods, walking along a path of hard, pitted dirt in Wheaton Regional Park. The park was closed for the evening, but Jerry knew a side way in. The first frost had come early. Leaves crunched beneath their feet. Ainsley was off in the trees, moving silently as he guarded their backs. Harrington was unsurprised at his evident skill: she had guessed almost from the moment they met that State might cut his paychecks but his orders came from the clowns across the river.

She had been somehow unsurprised to find Margo Jensen in the front seat of Ainsley’s Mercedes. She did not believe in fate, but she did believe in her distant Anglican God, and she had suspected that her path and
GREENHILL
’s might be crossing again. In unconscious mimicry of her former husband, Harrington had first rehearsed her onetime agent on the details of how she had wound up in Bethesda: the condolence call on the Littlejohns, the discovery that Ainsley was a cousin, cajoling Priscilla Littlejohn into calling with the cryptic message that “the person you met in front of the cathedral has to meet you urgently”—and Ainsley’s message back fifteen minutes later, that she should take the two o’clock train to New York City, where a friend of his would drive her to Baltimore, where in turn he would be waiting.

“He sounds very swift and well organized,” said Harrington, all skepticism. “Maybe too well organized.”

Margo spread her hands. “I don’t know how I’m supposed to answer that.”

“You’re not. I’m thinking aloud.”

“I’m telling you the truth.”

“I know you are, dear.”

The wind had changed direction. It had been swirling gently at their backs. Now, all at once, they were walking into an icy breeze. Harrington hoped it wasn’t a portent.

“Why don’t you tell me what this is all about,” Harrington finally said. “After that, we can worry about the logistics of your journey.”

In an instant, Margo was off. It was obvious that she needed to talk, and that Harrington was her chosen confessor. The older woman had seen this before in agents, and she fought not to be so swept up in the narrative that she failed to search for the tiny hesitations and inconsistencies that might suggest that
GREENHILL
was romancing, or nuts—or, recalling a couple of unfortunate cases, had been instructed to memorize a script.

She heard nothing but a desperate fluency, and relief in the telling.

When Margo at last ran down, they walked together in silence for a bit. Harrington was remembering what was known in the trade as the second rule of intelligence—when you’re out, you’re out. She’d preached it herself in her lectures to the kiddies, and now and then to people she’d fired. When you’re out, you’re out. No matter how much you miss it, no matter what the temptation, you don’t get involved. Period. No contact. No clever ploys. You’re done, and you can’t buy your way back in with information. You shouldn’t even want to. If an old agent comes alive once more, you don’t debrief him yourself: you turn him over to your ex-employers and go back to bed.

Therefore, the first words out of Harrington’s mouth should have been a warning to say no more, and the second words should have summoned Jerry Ainsley, followed by crisp instructions to take
GREENHILL
and her story straight to Langley. Here was the key to resolving the Cuban missile crisis, and Margo belonged with the people who were on the inside, not with a washed-up former agent runner whose career had ended when her final operation was blown to pieces.

She opened her mouth, meaning to explain these things, but what came out was “Well, you are in a pickle, my dear. Let’s see what we can do to get you out of it, shall we?”

Because suddenly it all made sense. The late-night interview with Bundy. Her exclusion from the discussions about Cuba, and now her summary dismissal from State. The way her contacts went dead on her. Even—rough justice—the way Fomin had so cleverly manipulated matters that Margo had briefly suspected Harrington herself of being a Soviet agent.

“They gave you a lot of obstacles to overcome, dear. Checking to see if you’re really the right conduit, one supposes.” They were standing now, on a low bluff from which they could look down at the highway and the scattered lights of houses beyond. Harrington reached up and tucked a few loose strands of hair behind Margo’s ear. “I want you to come home with me now,” she said. “You can get some rest, and I’m going to make a couple of calls. Tomorrow is Saturday, and I suspect they’ll want to bring you in and brief you and so forth. But understand one thing.” Her voice hardened. “I won’t be your case officer. I won’t be involved at all.”

“But I came to you—”

“Listen, Miss Jensen. Listen carefully, my dear. This has been scripted. Your part in this whole contretemps. I don’t know by whom, but it doesn’t matter. You are going to be playing on a much larger stage now. A stage where the Harringtons and the Niemeyers and the Ainsleys of the world never tread. The people who will run the operation will likely be from the very top. They will keep this knowledge close. They won’t want second-level bureaucrats like me involved at all. Do you understand?”

“Yes, but—”

Harrington talked right over her. The lessons took hold after all. “What they want you to do is going to be dangerous. What Fomin told you is true. There are people on both sides who, should they discover the back-channel negotiations, will do whatever they can to keep them from succeeding. Secrecy will be your only protection. Do you still want to proceed?”

Margo swallowed but didn’t drop her gaze. “Yes.”

“Don’t just say what you think I want to hear.”

“I’m not. I’ve thought it through. I’m doing this.”

Harrington was impressed by the girl’s resolution, but she had heard the same determination in Carina’s voice the night she’d disappeared in Vienna. “Very well,” she said after a moment. “This, then,
is how things are going to work. I will make the calls on your behalf. I will ensure that your information gets to the right individuals. Once that task is done, I shall be stepping out of the picture.” To her surprise, she choked on the next words. “And you, my dear, must promise, absolutely promise, never, for any reason whatsoever, to contact me again.”

Margo spent the night at Doris Harrington’s small row house on P Street in Georgetown. She didn’t expect to sleep. Her day had been too full. Priscilla had telephoned Ainsley for her, and his swift, confident response had both exhilarated and frightened her. Within ten minutes he was back with instructions: catch such-and-such a train, look for such-and-such a car. Returning to Garrison, Margo had squared for a battle with Nana, but Claudia Jensen was surprisingly complaisant, only making her granddaughter promise not to leave Washington without calling on various family friends.

Now, as Margo tried to get comfortable in the narrow attic guestroom, she found her thoughts back in Poughkeepsie. During the conversation with Priscilla, an idea had teased at the corner of her mind, a question about the accident that had killed Phil Littlejohn. Something vital that she had missed. The key to the mystery. Alas, the harder she tried to grab the thought, the more tantalizingly it eluded her, and when Margo opened her eyes, it was nine in the morning, and she didn’t even remember trying.