The Touch of Treason (3 page)

Instead Perry reached into the case and from a blue folder removed two sheets of heavy bond paper with the great seal on top.

My dear Fuller, Three of my advisers in the field of intelligence agree—and they seldom agree on anything—that you more than any other living person have predicted correctly the likely conduct of the USSR based on the past behavior of specific leaders. Your knowledge of the system, they tell me, is profound.

They always began with flattery. Who was impervious, especially on this stationery? He wondered who had drafted the letter.

I am told that your advice to previous presidents has proved to be of even greater value than was anticipated. My concern is that while the principles of your system have been understood, no one else has yet demonstrated his ability to use those principles as effectively in the application to actual impending situations of great moment. Can you—with speed if possible—set down your method in such a manner that successors to my present National Security Adviser, of lesser or greater knowledge than the incumbent, will be able to see that your methods will be used even by future generations responsible for the safekeeping of the nation?

Lest you think this request discretionary rather than imperative, I need only to remind you that the Soviet leaders are presumably as concerned about the proliferation of our respective nuclear arsenals as we are, and also as concerned about the leader of some client state with covert nuclear capability seeking to trigger an irreversible cataclysm between the Soviets and ourselves. We must keep up with their thinking so that if fast action is called for, the chances for misunderstandings are curtailed.
We
need your guidance urgently in a form useable by others before it is late.

Fuller looked up at Perry. “He’s worried about my dying.”

Perry, motivated by politeness, started to object.

Fuller stopped him with a wave of his hand. “At my age, I think about it, too.” His eyes returned to the letter.

I ask you to accept this burden in the full knowledge that it is an imposition you would abjure were you not as concerned as I am about the avoidance of misunderstandings that could lead to war.

Mr. Perry is empowered to discuss all terms and conditions. 1 trust your answer will be in the affirmative.

Fuller looked up at Perry’s anxious face. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I’m afraid the answer is no.”

Perry’s face crusted with dismay. He had been told not to fail. He tried to smile. “With all respect, Professor Fuller, I believe you’d rather leave this legacy than any other.”

“Why me again?” Fuller said.

“Nicolaevsky is dead. Shub is dead.”

I, too, soon, Fuller thought. They will have to get used to going to the younger generation. Those who had lived through it would be gone. His prescience had never been based on subjective impressions but on transmittable guidelines, and he had taught those guidelines to others. It was not his fault that the government hadn’t yet found a satisfactory interpreter of his method.

“What about some of the younger people?”

“It was discussed at length,” Perry said.

“What about Tarasova? She’s twenty years younger. I taught her everything.”

Perry had looked down, as if embarrassed by what he knew. “She’s an émigré.”

“Forty years ago, Mr. Perry!”

“They wanted the perspective of someone born in this country.”

“That’s nonsense. A method has nothing to do with one’s place of birth.”

“He wants you, not one of your students.”

For a moment Fuller had been tempted to say that he and Tarasova could work together on this, but he knew that was not possible. And so when Perry waited him out, Fuller finally said, “When I finish this one, will I be free to die?”

Perry, after so many years of surreptitious work, still had the laugh of a civilized man, textured with pain. “You’ll outlive us all,” he said. “We’ll see to it.”

Fuller protested the security arrangements that Perry told him would be installed. “Terrorists are multinational,” he said. “They have institutionalized the gratuitous act, killing the wrong people as easily as victims selected with purpose. Is my life more in danger because I will be writing this manuscript for you?”

“If they know about it.”

Finally they shook hands. It would all be arranged Perry’s way, foredoomed. Perry slipped his papers back into the attaché, closed the case, then restrapped it to his wrist in the name of a security that Fuller knew no one in the world could feel any longer.

*

Now, after months of work on the manuscript, Fuller longed to be freed of his duties to history. He was more sensible than Trotsky, he would tell himself each day as he locked the safe in his study. For he allowed no one except Leona into the small room in which he worked. The door was deadbolt-locked when he was inside as well as outside. Trotsky was guarded by idealistic students and by Mexican police, neither a reliable category. Fuller’s safety, on the one hand, was in Perry’s charge, and Perry had given him Randall, a professional whose sole responsibility was to see that no harm came to Martin Fuller. Fuller referred to Randall behind his back as “my spook,” but he appreciated that because of Randall his mail was safe to open, his phone line untapped, there were no bugs in his study or elsewhere in his home, and that, since he’d begun work on this project, an elaborate fire and burglary warning system had been installed in his home in Westchester at federal expense. Whenever Fuller opened the safe in the early morning, that act was registered by a green light on a board somewhere nearby. When Fuller, his work for the day finished, closed the safe some hours later, the light went out. If anyone not familiar with the combination tried to open the safe, or even jostled it—as Leona found out it was so sensitive you could not brush it accidentally with a broom—Randall or one of his lieutenants would be at the house within minutes. And he knew that if the phone lines from the house, though they were underground, were ever cut, the red light would go on instantly, even before the prospective intruder could enter.

Randall had pleaded with Fuller to make a carbon as he worked so that a safety copy could be lodged somewhere. Fuller said he couldn’t be bothered with carbon paper. Randall suggested a copying machine be brought in and the manuscript reproduced under Fuller’s watchful supervision. “That will give you two things to worry about,” Fuller said. “My copy and the safety copy. And how can you make safe what I have not yet put down on paper?”

Fuller was aware that those who came to visit, whether from the U.S. or abroad, even the students who hung around to refresh themselves and him in what seemed to outsiders like abstruse debate, had had at least a cursory check without their knowledge. The problem was, of course, that so many people who were interested in Martin Fuller had what Randall referred to as “difficult backgrounds.” The older ones may have once been Stalinists, Trotskyites, Lovestonites, or came from Asian and African countries that seemed to be unwilling or unable to provide background information on their own subjects. The younger ones were sometimes casual users of what Randall referred to as “controlled substances”; they sometimes lived out of wedlock and dressed intentionally in scruffy clothes; some of them had been to the Soviet Union in recent years as exchange students or tourists; others were former peaceniks making the usual migration of age from left to right. Fuller enjoyed the range of his guests and was purposefully delinquent in giving Randall the names of prospective visitors for
advance checks.

Once, when Randall was insistent about the strangers coming to a buffet dinner at the Fullers’, Fuller said, “Why don’t you tell me who’s coming to visit you this weekend.”

“Nobody interesting,” Randall said.

“Then I’ll lend you some of my guests,” Fuller said. “If you’re afraid to let them in your house, you can always frisk them first.”

Randall, who’d gone to Georgetown University before becoming a Secret Service officer, was sometimes embarrassed by his role. “This isn’t normal bodyguard duty,” he’d been told. “It isn’t something we can assign to just anybody. We need someone Fuller can respect, who understands the implications of what’s being guarded.” But Randall wondered whether he hadn’t become the instrument of the government’s paranoia. Fuller wasn’t writing of military secrets. He was describing his method of analyzing the past conduct of each member of the Soviet leadership, whose protégé each was, how he’d climbed the ladder. He had studied those people the way good constitutional lawyers study the justices of the Supreme Court so they could try to predict their future actions on given subjects. “Don’t let him die before he finishes,” Perry had said. “Not with what’s at stake.” Randall knew the number of nukes didn’t make the difference. Brains did. He was supposed to guard Fuller’s brain. Perry, always joking, had said, “Your job is to see that Fuller dies from natural causes. After the work is finished.”
I’m not God
Randall had wanted to shout at him. But he knew what Perry meant. Fuller himself had said
In previous centuries terrorists were crazy freelancers. Today they are psychopaths and ideologues trained by governments to traffic in premature death.
Randall remembered Perry saying, “The Soviets don’t want Fuller dead. They want to know what he’s telling us. Protect the manuscript first, then the man.”

But Randall, being human, had his own priorities. Once he had showed up at the house with what he called an interim query from Washington while the Fullers were still at breakfast and he observed with alarm that on a paper napkin next to Fuller’s bowl of cereal, there were eight pills and capsules, none of which he’d had a chance to have tested in the lab.

“Randall,” Fuller had said, “I’ve been taking mega vitamins for years.”

Randall had to admit to himself that Fuller, at the age of eighty-two, had the lean, physical vigor of a much younger man.

“Does Doc know you’re taking these?” Randall asked.

“Physicians,” Fuller said, “know as little about nutrition as about Soviet affairs.”

It was then that Leona Fuller said, “Those eight pills are his fountain of youth. See, I take them, too.”

Randall knew that Mrs. Fuller, that remarkable woman, was not an imitator. She had to be independently convinced of everything. If she was taking all those vitamins, they had to be safe.

After he finished his present work, Fuller would presumably be free to loaf for the first time in his long life, to travel not out of necessity, as he’d done for the government from time to time, nor on the run, as he’d done long ago when he and Leona had been part of the movement, but to places of their choice where he and Leona could take the sun, or read the best books again, or talk to intelligent strangers who knew or cared nothing about Soviet affairs. He wanted as much time as the higher powers would give him. Ever since he had abjured authoritarianism in all its forms, he’d thought of gods in the plural, the way the Greeks did, male and female, each with a specialty in mortal affairs. Monotheism was too simple. If you examined life long enough, nothing was simple. Except the clock that ticked relentlessly over everyone, tolling each year that would not return.

Randall knew that the President had once remarked that Martin Fuller looked like he would live forever. The President thought of Martin Fuller’s brain as a national asset of immeasurable worth to which no harm could be allowed to come. But the President’s wish was Randall’s responsibility. Few people knew that Randall had once had part of the responsibility for John Kennedy and then for Robert Kennedy. Randall was a realist; he lived in increasing fear that the successful conclusion of his assignment was ultimately impossible. Yet he found himself envying Fuller when he happened to see him emerge from his study after a fruitful morning’s work, his eyes exuberant with discovery. Fuller’s work gave Fuller life.

Randall had to put up with Fuller’s teasing. The old man would tell him, “Go off and worry about the missile defenses with those fellows at MIT. Talk to them about laser satellites and defense screens.”

“You are our first line of defense,” Randall would say in an attempt at banter but feeling like a manservant.

And Fuller would answer, “I am older than the Maginot Line, and as much use.”

Yet the time Fuller had received the Medal of Merit from the President in a private ceremony kept from the press, Fuller knew it was for that specific instance when his form of intelligence—insight based on intimate understanding of how Khrushchev thought—was said to have provided the key that enabled a red alert to be wound down so the adversaries could return to the bargaining table.

The President had said, “You are a greater asset than our coal reserves.”

And Fuller had replied, “Mr. President, your asset has arthritis.”

The President had been briefed, of course, and knew that Fuller steadfastly refused to take anything stronger than aspirin so as not to numb his brain as long as the work remained unfinished.

Nor had Randall been able to change Fuller’s lifelong habit of imbibing nourishment from interchanges with younger people, graduate students, former students, younger professors, specializing in Soviet historiography, intellectuals of the left and right who thought that debate with a mind such as Fuller’s enriched them. Randall realized that Fuller needed their adulation to sustain the rigor of daily work at his desk seven days a week, every week of the year, but Randall, like some men of his generation, distrusted young people.