Back Channel (48 page)

The national security adviser waited, but there was no response. The Kennedys were actually chastened, which was what he wanted. Bruised egos were irrelevant. No doubt LeMay in time would be made to pay a price for his rudeness, but not now. They had to focus on the matter at hand.

“Mr. President, we face the deadline of noon tomorrow.” Bundy lifted a palm like a conjurer. “You have promised the ExComm that we will begin military action at that time unless we have a deal.”

The President had moved to his rocker. His face was a mask of distress, but he said nothing.

“We need Khrushchev’s answer,” the attorney general pointed out. “Until we have an answer, we don’t know if we have a deal or not. We don’t know if Fomin is really in touch with Khrushchev or not.”

“Yes, sir. The trouble is, without
GREENHILL
, we can’t get the answer.”

The President brightened. “Fine. We’ll just send someone else.”

“No, sir. We really can’t do that.”

Bobby took up the refrain. “Why not? G
REENHILL
is just an intermediary. Fomin is just an intermediary. The messages are being carried between the President and Khrushchev. What difference does it really make who carries them?”

Bundy recognized the frustration in Bobby’s voice, and knew he had to avoid sounding too professorial. The Kennedys were an impetuous clan, not thin-skinned, precisely, but quick to detect condescension. He addressed himself to the older brother.

“Mr. President, with respect, we have discussed this before. Aleksandr Fomin is a suspicious man. He went to a lot of trouble to establish that he could trust
GREENHILL
. If we send in someone else, we’ll make things worse. Remember, he has already delivered Khrushchev’s reply to our demand for clarification. Now we will be asking him to deliver it again. He’ll wonder why. Remember, he was there. He knows there was shooting. If he learns that we’ve lost track of his chosen conduit, he will assume the worst. That assumption in turn will persuade him that we’re unreliable. He will tell Khrushchev not to trust us, and Khrushchev will retreat behind the above-the-line negotiations, and we won’t be able to get him back to the table by noon tomorrow. In short, if we put in a substitute, there’s going to be war.”

The attorney general had a suggestion. “So let’s not tell him the real reason. We tell him
GREENHILL
is sick or had an accident or something.”

“With respect, Bobby, Khrushchev survived Stalin and Beria. This was an era when getting sick or having an accident meant disgrace or arrest or worse. There is no lie we can tell that he will believe. Now, we’re hiding the fact that a Secret Service agent was on the scene and got shot. Fomin will accept that sort of concealment. But the matter of the conduit stands on a different footing. Either we produce
GREENHILL
or we tell Taylor and LeMay to get ready.”

“Then what do we do?” asked Bobby.

“We find her,” said the national security adviser. “Fast.”

The President’s rocker had nearly stopped. “How do we do that, Mac? Without using federal agencies? What do you advise?”

“And there’s another problem,” said the attorney general. “The way that you describe her current state of mind, even if we can track her down, she might not trust whoever we send. She’ll run a mile.”

Behind the round lenses, Bundy’s eyes were calm. “I believe that I may have just the individual for the job.”

“You were on the scene,” said Jack Ziegler. “How could you let this happen?”

“There were complications.”

“You mean, like shooting a federal agent.”

Viktor hesitated. Even the capitalists, with all of their stolen wealth, could not possibly tap every telephone in the city. He was in a booth, five blocks north of the Yenching Palace. Ziegler was in another booth, miles away.

“That was not intentional,” the Russian finally said.

“How about letting
GREENHILL
get away? Was that intentional?”

“Perhaps she will not deliver the message. Perhaps we have frightened her off.”

Ziegler did not laugh exactly. The sound he made was more like biting on tinfoil. “You’ve been watching her for a week. Does she strike you as the sort of girl who gets frightened off?”

“Everyone has a breaking point.”

“Not this girl. She’s in this for her father. Okay? This is her tribute to him. Finishing his work. She isn’t going to stop.”

“Then she is to be admired. But her motive makes no difference. There are not many places where she can go. We will cover the most likely.”

“No.” The American’s voice was sharp. “We’ll take it from here.”

“I think not.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You requested our assistance. We have rendered it. But we do not take orders from you.”

“Don’t interfere, Viktor Borisovich. You don’t want to get in my way.”

“Nor you in mine.”

The man in the gold-rimmed glasses hung up the phone and hurried to the waiting taxi. “Send people to site one and site two. Tell them to watch out for Americans. You and I will cover site three.”

As the cab turned left and raced across Rock Creek Park, Viktor gave himself over to his thoughts. Ziegler was not merely uncultured. He was a barbarian, and, worse, drunk with power. He actually wanted to kill the young woman, when all that was necessary was to detain her long enough to prevent her from delivering her last message. But it was obvious, too, that his faction and Jack Ziegler’s no longer possessed the common interest that had bound them for the past month. Viktor wanted to stop the back-channel negotiations because of the strategic importance of Operation Anadyr. If the General Secretary showed fortitude, he believed, the Americans and their weak President would back down from the final confrontation. And once the Cuban missiles were operational, able to reach Washington in mere minutes, the time when the capitalists could dictate terms would come crashing to its end, once and for all.

Whereas Ziegler, it was becoming clear, had a very different motive. He actually wanted a war, a nuclear war, preferring to fight now, when he thought his country would prevail. That such a man had been his partner in this enterprise chilled his soul.

“Drive faster,” he commanded.

Later, Miles Madison would tell investigators that it was only the sheerest luck that he was home that night. Until recently, he had pulled the three-to-eleven shift in the Pod two weeks out of every three, and Sunday, October 28, fell smack in the middle of his fortnight. But with the nation’s military now at
DEFCON 2
, the Pod personnel were doubled, and he had been moved to eleven-to-seven. So, when the doorbell rang at a quarter past nine, he was at home, dressing for his shift, rather than bunkered in a Pentagon subbasement, manning three tele-printers and six telephones. He was not expecting any visitors at this hour, but he had learned long ago not to allow his expectations to limit his perceptions. When he opened the door and found a trembling and disheveled Margo Jensen on the front step, he didn’t waste time with silly questions. He swept her inside with one heavy hand, even as his gaze raked the street for danger.

Why did you let her in? asked the investigators.

“I’m a Marine. We help people.”

But couldn’t you see she was on the run?

“All I knew was, she was scared. She was the granddaughter of a dear friend, and I was supposed to be watching out for her, and she was frightened out of her wits.”

So what did you do?

“I let her in. Sat her down. Made her a cup of coffee.”

And did you call the police?

“I didn’t call anybody. Not at first. I wanted to hear her story.”

Doris Harrington was at her front window, watching the blue car across the street. It had pulled up ten minutes ago, and the driver was still behind the wheel. One of ours or one of theirs? she wondered, not at all facetiously, because the lessons of Vienna were never far away. If she had learned anything in her months behind enemy lines, it was that everybody belonged to somebody. She had just decided to open the safe and take out her gun when the telephone rang.

“Dr. Harrington?”

“Yes?”

“It’s Mac Bundy. We have a small problem. I was hoping you could come down and give us a little help.”

“What kind of problem, Mr. Bundy?”

“I’d rather not say over an open line.”

She parted the curtain again. “Does this blue car belong to you?”

“Yes. The driver’s name is Parke, with an ‘e.’ He’ll knock in five minutes. Can you be ready?”

She looked down at her housecoat. “I’ll be ready,” she said.

“Thank you, Doctor. See you shortly.”

In the event, he was kind enough to give her ten minutes. The knock came as she was fixing her makeup. The man at the door looked sheepish. He was tall and blond, and his nose looked as if it had once been broken, and had a bad mend. “Sorry to call you out so late, ma’am. But it’s the White House.”

“I understand, Mr.…?”

“Parke, ma’am. With the ‘e’ at the end.”

“That’s quite a story, Margo.”

“I’m not making it up.”

The Major was trimming his cigar with a shiny gold cutter. “I didn’t say you were. As a matter of fact, most of it makes sense. The factions, all that. I was on the Joint Staff. I know all about the infighting, the
jealousy, the way good men chafe at taking orders from civilians who don’t know the first thing about what we do.”

He held the cigar in front of his nose, rolled it back and forth. Margo said nothing. She sensed that Miles Madison had a point to make.

“I’m retiring in a couple of years. I don’t suppose your grandmother told you. I’ll be a lieutenant colonel by then. Haven’t decided if I’m going to try to make full bird. Anyway, when I’ve put in my twenty, a couple of partners and I are going into real-estate investing. Here and down in Florida.” Still he wasn’t satisfied with the cigar. He was using a slim metal tool with a perpendicular wooden handle to unplug the middle. “But the plan won’t work if Washington is blown to smithereens. And Florida—well, the Reds would have pretty much the whole state on their target list. Not because of Cuba. Because we have so many bases and ports and harbors down there.” His tone grew somber. “My point is, Margo, I have as much to lose as anybody. I don’t want this war. Nobody I know in the military wants it. It’s never the military who rattles America’s sabers. It’s the civilians who run the place. Have you noticed that?”

“I don’t know. I guess so.”

Another long draw on the cigar.

“And as for the spies—well, I’m in 7th Comm, as you know. I’ve been handling communications for a lot of their people for years. In Europe and Asia in the fifties. Here. A lot of the Agency people are a little crazy, and most of their schemes are half nuts. More than half. Like sending some college kid to Varna. Still. They’re not bad people.”

Margo wasn’t sure which of them he was trying to persuade. “Somebody shot at me tonight,” she said.

Still Miles Madison worked on his cigar, now brushing the leaves with some sort of steel comb. “But you don’t actually know that. In combat, you can’t always tell who’s shooting at whom.” He waved away her objection. “I know. I know. And a Secret Service agent got shot, except it’s not on the news, because they’re hushing it up, right?” His laugh was hearty, but, to her ear, a little forced. “Look. Let’s say I believe you. My best advice is to get in touch with the people who recruited you. You must have emergency codes and so on.”

“I can’t use them.” Margo studied the brown rug, its complex pattern marred by dozens of burnt spots from fallen ash. “There’s a leak somewhere.”

He hunched forward, put the unlit cigar in the obsidian tray, made a bucket of his large hands. “Then what exactly do you want me to do? Hide you? The wife and girls are in Cincinnati. My offer to send you to join them still stands, but you’ll have trouble now getting a seat. All the trains and buses out of Washington are booked solid. I might be able to get you on one of the shuttles the military’s running for families, but I suspect you won’t want to risk official transport. Of course, you can always go back to your grandmother’s house, but you’ll have the same problem getting there.”

“I don’t want to run away, Major Madison. That’s not why I’m asking for your help.”

Satisfied at last, he struck a long match and lit the cigar. “Then why?”

“You used to work in the White House Signals Office.”

“So?”

“So … I was hoping you could get me in.”

“Into where?”

“The White House.”

Miles Madison laughed. “You don’t want much, do you?”

Margo was long past embarrassment. “I have a message for the President,” she said tartly. “The White House is where he lives.”

The sharp eyes were still merry. He was puffing regularly on the cigar now. “You know, Margo, a few years ago, I was stationed in—it doesn’t matter where I was stationed. Somewhere in Europe. I was deputy military attaché at one of our embassies. Part of my job was transmitting secure messages. We had a spy out there—an agent, a foreign national—and he had information for us. He only trusted his control. Nobody else. The trouble was, his control got captured. We traded for him later. The point is, our agent didn’t dare come by the embassy. He wasn’t sure which of us he could trust. So—you know how he got the message in?”

She didn’t.

“He chalked it on the building across the street. Just a couple of code words. He figured that everybody would see them, so if there was a traitor in the embassy, he wouldn’t be able to stop a bunch of
people from sending urgent telexes to Washington to find out if anybody knew what the words meant. And that’s exactly what happened. It took a little longer, but the message wound up in the right hands.”

Margo was tempted. The story was warm and reassuring, and even made her feel safe. She could write the message somewhere and flee to Garrison and Nana; or Ithaca and Tom. Only—

“It wouldn’t work,” she said. “I can’t take the chance that the message doesn’t get through. I don’t know how Ziegler and his friends found out about what I’m doing. That means I don’t know whom I can trust. Even in the White House. I have to give the message to the President in person. That’s the only way to be sure it gets where it’s supposed to go.” She rubbed her eyes. She had been so happy. “And it’s not just that. The President told me there’s a deadline.”