The Chancellor Manuscript (10 page)

St. Claire settled back in the leather armchair and took several deep breaths. It was his way of approaching a crisis: in calm.

“Within the past twenty-four hours there have been two astonishing resignations,” he said. “Lieutenant General Bruce MacAndrew at the Pentagon, and Paul Bromley at GSA. Do you know either of them?”

“Yes. MacAndrew. I don’t know Bromley.”

“What’s your opinion of the general?”

“I’m high on him. He expresses opinions often at odds with a lot of people over there.”

“Exactly. He’s a moderating influence and yet very respected. But suddenly, just when he’s at the top of his career, he chucks it all away.”

“What makes you think his resignation has anything to do with the files?”

“Because Bromley’s did. I’ve just come from seeing him. Paul Bromley’s a sixty-five-year-old bureaucrat with the General Services Administration. He takes his job seriously.”

“I do know him,” interrupted Varak. “Or at least
of
him. A year or so ago he testified before a Senate hearing on cost overruns. He criticized the C-forty payments.”

“For which he was soundly rebuked. He was reduced to auditing congressional cafeterias, or some such equally vital statistic. But the powers at GSA made a mistake a month ago. They filed an unsatisfactory-service report that precluded a grade raise. Bromley sued them. He based the suit on his C-forty testimony.… That’s finished now. His resignation’s effective immediately.”

“Did he tell you why?”

“Yes. He received a telephone call.” Bravo paused. He closed his eyes. “Bromley has a daughter. She’s in her early thirties, married, lives outside Milwaukee. It’s her second marriage, and apparently it’s a good one. Her first was something else. She was still in her teens, her husband barely twenty. They were both into drugs, living in the streets. She sold herself to pay for narcotics. Bromley didn’t see his daughter for nearly three years. Until a man came to his house one day and said she’d been arrested for the murder of her husband.”

Varak did not have to be told the rest. A plea of temporary insanity had been entered by the girl’s attorneys. It was followed by several years of rehabilitation and psychiatric care. There was a felony record, complete with the ugly details. Bromley’s wife took their daughter to her parents’ home in Wisconsin. Some sort of normality returned. The girl got her head back, met and married an engineer who worked for a concern in the Midwest, and started having babies.

Now, ten years later, a telephone call meant the past could surface. Loudly, publicly. It would not only destroy the daughter but stigmatize a family. Unless Paul Bromley dropped his lawsuit and resigned from the General Services Administration.

Varak leaned forward in the couch. “Does the current husband know?”

“In substance, yes; perhaps not every detail. Of course, he’s not the only issue. They’d have to move, start over again. But it would be futile. They’d be found.”

“Naturally,” agreed Varak. “Did Bromley describe the voice on the telephone?”

“Yes. It was a whisper—?”

“For effect,” interjected Varak quietly. “It never fails.”

“Or for disguise. He couldn’t tell whether it was a man’s voice or a woman’s.”

“I see. Was there anything unusual in the speech pattern?”

“No. Bromley looked for that. He’s an accountant; the unusual attracts him. He said the oddest thing was the mechanical quality.”

“Could the voice have been recorded? A tape?”

“No. It responded to his statements. They could not have been anticipated.”

Varak sat back. “Why did he come to you?”

Bravo paused. When he spoke, there was a sadness in his voice, as if for some abstract reason he were holding himself responsible. “After Bromley’s C-forty testimony, I wanted to meet him. This middle-level bureaucrat who was willing to take on the Pentagon. I asked him to dinner.”

“Here?”

“No, of course not. We met at a country inn in Maryland.” Bravo stopped.

“You still haven’t told me why he got in touch with you.”

“Because I told him to. I never thought for a minute he’d get away with interfering with the Pentagon. I told him to contact me if there were reprisals.”

“Why are you convinced whoever called Bromley has the Hoover files? His daughter’s problems are a matter of court record.”

“Something the voice said. He told Bromley that he had all the ‘raw meat’ there was to have on him and his family. Do you know the significance of ‘raw meat’?”

“Yes,” replied Varak, his contempt apparent. “It was one of Hoover’s favorite expressions. Still, there’s an inconsistency. Bromley’s name begins with
B
.”

“Bromley explained that, although of course I didn’t tell him about the files. At both the Pentagon and the bureau he had a code name: Viper.”

“As though he were an enemy agent.”

“Exactly.”

“What about MacAndrew? Do we have anything?”

“I think so. We’ve been interested in him for a number of years. He was one of the few soldiers who believed utterly in the civilian control of the military. Frankly, one day he might have been a candidate for Inver Brass. We studied him; it was before you arrived. There was a lapse in his service record. The symbols indicated that the period
in question—eight months in 1950—had been removed to G-Two, PSA.”

“Psychiatric Systems Analyses,” said Varak. “On his level that’s usually reserved for defectors.”

“Yes. We were stunned, naturally. We traced the G-Two abstract and found that it, too, had been removed. All that remained was the phrase ‘Courier Delivered, FBI DS.’ Domestic Security. I’m sure you can guess the rest.”

“Yes,” said Varak. “You got his FBI file, and there was nothing there. You cross-checked with Domestic Security. Still nothing. ‘Raw meat.’ ”

“Precisely. Every paper, every insert, every addendum related to Security crossed Hoover’s desk. And as we know, ‘Security’ took on the widest possible range. Sexual activities, drinking habits, marriage and family confidences, the most personal details of the subjects’ lives—none were too remote or insignificant. Hoover pored over those dossiers like Croesus with his gold. Three Presidents wanted to replace him. None did.”

Varak leaned forward. “The question is, what was in MacAndrew’s service record? There’s nothing to prevent us from asking him now.”

“Us?”

“It can be arranged.”

“Through an intermediary?”

“Yes. A blind. There’ll be no connection.”

“I’m sure of that,” said Bravo. “But then what? Assuming you find some character flaw, sexual or otherwise, what have you got? MacAndrew wouldn’t still have his maximum clearance if it were a permanent condition.”

“It’s more information. Somewhere the data will pinpoint the weakness in the chain. It’ll break.”

“That’s what you’ve been counting on, isn’t it?”

“Yes. It’ll happen. Whoever stole the files has a first-rate mind, but it will happen.”

Both men fell silent, Varak waiting for approval, Bravo deep in thought.

“That chain won’t be broken easily,” St. Claire said. “You’re the best there is, and you’re no closer now than you were three months ago. You say a ‘first-rate mind,’ but we don’t know that. We don’t know if we’re dealing with a mind or minds. One man or many.”

“If it’s one,” agreed Varak, “we’re not even sure it’s a man.”

“But whoever it is, the first moves have been made.”

“Then, let me put someone on MacAndrew.”

“Wait …” Bravo clasped his hands beneath his chin. “An intermediary? A blind?”

“Yes. Untraceable.”

“Bear with me for a moment. I haven’t really thought it out; you can help. Basically, it’s your strategy.”

Varak glanced at St. Claire. The diplomat continued. “Am I correct in assuming that a blind, as you use the term with respect to interrogation or surveillance, is someone who finds out what you have to know without your being involved?”

“That’s right. The blind has his or her own reasons for wanting the same information. The trick is to get it from him without his knowing what you’re doing.”

“The blind, then, is chosen with extreme care.” It was a statement.

“More often than not, it’s a question of finding someone with the same interests,” answered Varak. “It can be difficult.”

“But we could enlist the aid of an investigatory agency. I mean, it’s within our capability to alert the authorities—or even a newspaper—to the possibility that Hoover’s files survived his death.”

“Certainly. The result would be to drive whoever has them further underground.”

Bravo rose from the chair and paced aimlessly. “There’s been almost no mention of those files in the newspapers. It’s odd, because their existence was known. It’s as though no one wants to talk about them.”

“Out of print, out of mind, out of danger,” said Varak.

“Yes, exactly. All Washington. Even the media. No one knows whether he’s part of the files or not. So there’s silence. And when men are silent, the triumph of evil follows. Burke was right about that. We can see it happening.”

“On the other hand,” countered the intelligence man, “breaking the silence isn’t always the answer.”

“That depends on who breaks it.” Bravo stopped his pacing. “Tell me, under the harshest, most professional microscope could any of those involved in Hoover’s death be unearthed?”

“None,” was the firm reply.

“Where are they? I mean, specifically.”

“Both telephone men are in Australia, the Kimberly bush; they’ll never come back. They face indictments for homicide in the Marine Corps. The man who used the cover of ‘Salter’ is in Tel Aviv; nothing takes precedence over the Holy Land or the holy war. We feed him data on the Palestinian terrorists. He lives only for his cause, and we make it practical. The actress is in Majorca; she
settled
a debt and wants nothing more than what she’s got. The Englishman who handled the car and the Phase One relay is back with MI-Six. He made money from the Russians as a double courier in East Berlin; he knows I have the facts that could lead to his execution. You know about the doctor in Paris, the least of our concerns. Each had a motive, none can be traced. They’re thousands of miles away.”

St. Claire stared at Varak. “You left out someone. What about the man in the alarm room? The one who used the cover of ‘Krepps’?”

Varak returned Bravo’s look. “I killed him. The decision was mine, and I’d make it again.”

St. Claire nodded. “Then, what you’re saying is that all personnel, all the
facts
, are submerged beyond discovery. Hoover’s death could never be attributed to anything but natural causes.”

“Precisely. Natural causes.”

“So, if we used a blind, there would be no chance of that man discovering the truth. Hoover’s assassination is beyond reach.”

“Beyond reach.”

Bravo began to pace again. “I’ve never asked you why there was no autopsy.”

“Orders from the White House. Relayed very quietly, I understand.”

“The White House?”

“They had a reason. I gave it to them.”

St. Claire did not probe; he knew Varak had studied the White House structure and could surmise his strategy, which would be totally professional. “Beyond reach,” repeated Bravo. “That’s vitally important.”

“To whom?”

“To a blind not restricted by fact. To a man interested only in a concept. A theory that did not have to be proven at every turn. Such a man could raise alarms, quite possibly provoke whoever had the files into revealing themselves.”

“I don’t follow you. Without traceable facts there’s no motive for a blind. What could he hope to learn? What could we learn?”

“Perhaps a great deal. The key word is
fact”
St. Claire stared at the wall above Varak. It was strange, he reflected. He had not thought of Peter Chancellor in a long time. When he had thought of him—when he’d seen his name in a newspaper or a book supplement—it had always been with a bemused memory of a bewildered graduate student grappling for words six years ago. Chancellor had found the words since. A great many of them.

“I’m afraid I don’t understand you,” said Varak.

Bravo lowered his gaze. “Have you ever heard of a writer named Peter Chancellor?”

“Counterstrike!”
said Varak. “I read it. It frightened a lot of people over at Langley.”

“Still, it was fiction.”

“It was too close. This Chancellor used a lot of wrong terms and incorrect procedures but on the bottom line, he described what happened.”

“Because he wasn’t restricted by fact. Chancellor approaches a concept, finds a basic situation, and extracts
selected
facts and rearranges them to suit the reality as he perceives it. He is not bound by cause and effect; he
creates
it. You say he frightened a lot of people over in Langley. I believe that; he has a wide readership. And he researches in depth. Suppose it was known that he was researching a book on Hoover, on his last days.”

“On the
files,”
added Varak, sitting forward. “Use Chancellor as the blind. Tell him the files disappeared. When he starts probing, he’ll set off alarms, and we’ll be there.”

“Go to New York, Mr. Varak. Find out everything you can about him. The people around him, his life-style, his methods of work. Everything current. Chancellor has a conspiracy complex. We’re going to program him with a conspiracy he’ll find irresistible.”

“Mr. Peter Chancellor?” asked the operator.

Peter lifted his hand above the covers and tried to focus on his wristwatch. It was nearly ten o’clock; the morning breezes were billowing the drapes through the open doors of the porch.

“Yes?”

“Long distance from New York. Mr. Anthony Morgan calling. One moment, please.”

“Sure.” There was a click and a hum on the line. It stopped.

“Hi, Mr. Chancellor?”

Peter would know that voice anywhere. It belonged to his editor’s secretary. If she ever had a discouraging day, no one ever knew about it. “Hello, Radie? How are you?” Chancellor hoped she was better than he was.

“Fine. How’s California these days?”

“Bright, humid, shiny, green. Take your choice.”