Dan Fesperman: The Double Game

I wandered a while, intending to mingle. But these were careful people, and every conversation dropped in volume the moment I moved within range. After a while it became mildly amusing, like making the signal come and go on an old radio by touching the antenna.

I worked my way back toward Dad just as a commotion erupted across the room, over by the bar. Once again Cabot, the fellow in the wheelchair, was in the thick of things, except this time a trim fellow in silver hair was leaning down into his face, gesturing emphatically. The tendons stood out in the man’s neck and his hands slashed the air. Someone off to the side in a bright blue suit tried to intervene.

“Honestly, Breece, what’s the harm in it!” The gesturing man wheeled on him.

“Goddammit, Stu. Stay out of this!”

Cabot spoke up, but his voice was too low for me to hear the words.

“The guy named Breece looks familiar,” I said. “Has he been in the Post, or on TV?”

“Not if he can help it. Breece Preston is allergic to publicity. But not to attention, as you can see. Poor old Cabot, Preston will eat him alive. Just look at the way he’s-”

Dad halted in midsentence. He looked away from the scene and placed a hand on my arm.

“Why don’t we get some air?” he said. “I see that the smokers have begun firing up their weapons of mass destruction.”

Something had upset him. Or maybe he’d had his fill of old farts refighting past battles. I followed him onto the porch, but not before watching Preston lean down and poke Cabot in the chest, which drew a swift reaction from a husky young man positioned behind the wheelchair. This in turn prompted a challenge from a stout fellow standing behind Preston, fiftyish but sporting a mullet, which made him stand out in this crowd like a carnival wrestler among retired professors. The last thing I heard as the door shut was raised voices, like on a schoolyard when a fight breaks out.

“Think they’ll come to blows?” I asked, out in the sea breeze. “The one in the mullet looked ready to rumble.”

Dad shook his head and stared out at the ocean. He looked a little pale, but maybe it was the light from the overcast sky. By the time we returned, order had been restored. Preston, Cabot, and their protectors were in separate corners. Nethercutt’s wife was off to the side, talking to the older woman, Val, who’d called Lemaster a pariah.

“So do you think that was Lemaster up in the balcony?” I asked.

“No idea.” He turned away toward the bar.

Later at dinner, when it was just the two of us down on the waterfront at the Mohegan Cafe, I tried to pry out more details about the various players.

“Was the guy in the electric blue suit Mr. Henson?”

“Stu never did know how to dress for the occasion.”

“Wasn’t he a CIA station chief in Europe?”

“Here and there.”

“What do you think Breece Preston and Giles Cabot were arguing about?”

“Haven’t the foggiest.” A pause, then a frown. “Breece was always a bully at heart.”

“Is he still with the Agency?”

“Goodness, no. But he’s still in the business.”

“Consulting?”

“You’ve probably heard of his outfit. Baron Associates. Contracts with the Pentagon, wherever the troops happen to be mired at the moment.”

“Intelligence gathering?”

“Of a sort. His type always goes private eventually.”

“Good money, probably.”

“That’s part of it. It’s more for the freedom. Once you’re outside the velvet rope you no longer have to play by the rules.”

“Wouldn’t that be breaking the law?”

“Where, in Afghanistan? Iraq? Some narco-state? Breece prefers to operate in places where the law has disappeared. If you ever spot one of his people in your rearview mirror, pull over to let them pass.”

“You mean like the guy with the mullet?”

Dad looked away, dabbing a napkin at his mouth as if he’d received a blow.

“Where’s our waitress?” he said. “I need a refill. Pass me that steak sauce, will you?”

I knew better than to press the point, especially when the next topic he raised was Redskins football, which he loathed and I loved. The next morning, before I was awake, he took the early ferry to catch his flight back to Vienna. I hadn’t seen him since.

I considered telephoning him. He would probably get a kick out of all this, especially the Bingham touch with its George Smiley connection. He might even have some leads on who’d done it. It would be midnight there, but he’d always been a night owl.

Then I recalled his continuing silence about Lemaster. In all the years since ’84 he still hadn’t explained their friendship to my satisfaction, despite plenty of opportunities. Let it wait, I decided. For the moment this secret would be mine alone.

The funny thing was, I hadn’t opened any of the cited books in ages, nor had I read a single spy novel. Dad and I both lost interest almost the moment the Berlin Wall came down in ’89. For a while I gamely kept up with Lemaster’s output. Maybe I felt obligated after having burned him in the Post. But he soon lost his edge, tilting toward rightist political themes and straying into techno-thrillers-beloved by the Pentagon but disdained by his oldest fans. Folly hadn’t made an appearance since ‘91, and the title of that book, A Final Folly, says all you need to know about how the damn thing ended.

Friends whose literary judgment I trusted occasionally recommended new practitioners, authors who set their spies amid contemporary intrigue in Latin America, Asia, or in the so-called War on Terror. But something in the actions of those brave young men and women who hammered down The Wall seemed to have forever sealed my portal of fascination with the secret world. Spy novels, like the Cold War, lay entombed in my past.

Or so I told myself. For two hundred dollars an hour I suppose some shrink would have explained that fear was what really prevented me from returning, a fear of confronting everything else I’d left behind-my marriage to April, my newspaper career, my hopes of again living abroad, and my fond dream that perhaps one day I, too, might write something worthwhile, even lasting.

All had vanished without a trace, unless you counted our son, David, who lived with his mother and had just turned eighteen-voting age, big on Obama but not so big on his dad. Not that I’d given him much reason to be. It was shocking how little had been required to erase everything-a false step in Belgrade, a few foolish lapses in Washington, a cascade of misjudgment, and here I was.

Yet now, with this cryptic note staring up from my lap like a summons, I felt connected to that previous era in a way I hadn’t been in ages, and my emotions were in an uproar. Even if this turned into a glorified scavenger hunt, maybe it was time to start looking for answers. At the very least, I should try to find the dead drop.

Already I was transformed. Seated there, with full heart and empty glass, I was no longer just a lonely PR man with a big paycheck and a spent imagination. I was Folly, I was Smiley, I was page one of a fresh new first edition. I was the boy I had once been, and the man I had never become.

As I scanned the opening paragraphs of Ashenden, a flash of insight told me exactly what I needed to do next. So I stood, ready to turn the page. Ready to turn them all.

I was on my way to the dead drop. Was that possible? More to the point, was it advisable? In my PR job at Ealing Wharton I’d warned off many a client from come-ons far more sophisticated than the cryptic letter that had just landed on my doorstep, and I was already wary of the sender’s motives. What sort of dirty work did he have in mind, and who would be ruined as a result? Perhaps he meant to do me harm.