Dan Fesperman - The Double Game

Rather than freaking out, I began to relax, fortified by the moment of solidarity with Dad. I realized then that I was ready for any question.

“All set,” the technician said.

I flexed my hand and drummed my fingers on the table.

“Don’t do that,” he said.

The young fellow in black introduced himself.

“I’m Peter West.” Then, gesturing toward the suit, “This is Arnold Harrison.”

“Am I really supposed to believe those names?”

“Believe what you want, as long as you answer the questions completely and truthfully. Are you ready to do that?”

“Fire away.”

West started me off with a series of easy questions to establish a baseline response. Name, age, home address, and so on, although about halfway through they threw in a wild card.

“Have you ever had sexual relations with Austrian national Litzi Strauss?”

“Yes.”

West checked with the technician, who nodded.

“Within the past week?”

I decided to test the machine.

“No.”

Another look. The techie shook his head. West frowned and tried again.

“Have you had sexual relations with Austrian national Litzi Strauss at any time during the past seven days?”

“Yes.”

A nod. A short time later they got down to business.

“Tonight at the bookstore, did the Russians take possession of the Lothar Heinemann book?”

“There was no Lothar Heinemann book.”

West didn’t even bother to check with the techie.

“We monitored your phone conversation. We know there was a book, whether Lothar’s name was on it or not. Did the Russians take possession of it?”

“Not to my knowledge. I told them I’d put it in a burn box. That got their attention long enough for me to get away.”

West raised an eyebrow and nodded.

“Not bad. Where was it really?”

“In the desk. A locked drawer. If you haven’t found it by now then I guess they have it.”

West looked over at the white coat. Then he frowned.

“You’re lying.”

“So you really haven’t found it?”

“Answer the question.”

“I got rid of it.”

“Where?”

“Down the coal chute. A flap behind the file cabinet.”

West seemed surprised when my answer passed muster.

“How did you know to put it there?”

“Earlier instructions. I’m a good listener.”

West looked at Harrison, who shrugged. The CIA must already have checked the cellar but come up empty. Maybe the Russians had it. Then I remembered the scrape of footsteps I thought I’d heard below. Lothar must have arranged for someone to be there to retrieve it. Many of those old cellars, I knew, had connecting doors that had been installed during the Second World War so that people could escape through their neighbors’ houses in case their own homes collapsed in an air raid. Ziegler himself might have been down there, the old rat. I smiled.

“Why are you smiling?”

“It was a good book. I enjoyed reading it.”

“Why didn’t you take notes?”

“Lothar asked me not to.”

West shook his head, seemingly unable to comprehend the idea that I’d actually done as I was told.

“Tell us about the contents.”

The questions continued in this vein for the next hour or so. I kept my answers as vague as possible, which wasn’t all that difficult considering that I truly couldn’t remember the material down to the finer details in the way that West wanted. I knew the names of the bookstores, of course, because they were ones I’d visited myself, and I easily remembered all the code names. But the dates and times, the sequences of the various couriers, and the finer points on who learned what, and when, and from whom, had already faded, so much so that after a while West finally threw in the towel.

“Shit, this is worthless.”

“You think Lothar still has the book, don’t you.” I said. “Him or one of his people.”

West shrugged.

“As long as it’s not the other guys.”

“Why do you even want it, after all this time? To expose it or bury it?”

“You’re not cleared for that answer. Let’s just say that maybe it’s not so bad that you don’t remember too much. But obviously you formed some sort of conclusion after reading it, or you wouldn’t have said what you did to Lothar on the phone.”

“About Lemaster being guilty? That was Lothar’s conclusion. I didn’t say it was mine.”

“But your handler still wants to know, doesn’t he?”

“Yes. I take it you know his name.”

“Giles Cabot has made himself pretty obvious lately. Especially by Agency standards.”

“Pretty neat trick for a guy in a wheelchair.”

“You were up there for the Nethercutt funeral, weren’t you? That’s probably when you came to his attention.”

“Probably.”

“How did he first make contact? Was it that weekend?”

“No. Later.”

I led them through the process, from that first anonymous message in Georgetown, typed on my own stationery, right up to the messages he’d sent me in Prague. I said nothing of what I’d learned about my father’s past, or Litzi’s, which meant I said very little about the events in Budapest. Neither of them seemed troubled by my apparent omissions. In fact, West seemed downright charmed and intrigued by my account.

“Christ,” he said. “It’s like something you’d read in a novel.”

“I think that was the point.”

“Well, we’d like you to finish it for us,” Harrison said. “Write one last chapter, then close the cover for good. If you’re up for it.”

Now they had me. Almost.

“Why not use one of your own people?”

Harrison cast a nervous glance at the technician.

“Let’s talk generally for a moment, shall we?”

He pulled up a chair and motioned to the technician to clear away his tools. The man in the white coat stripped me of the various monitors and sensors, then packed up his briefcase and left. No one said good-bye as he shut the door.

“You ask a very good question,” Harrison said. “Let’s just say that the work that needs to be done is likely to occur on territory outside our authorized area of operations. Places where a private citizen is certainly free to do as he chooses, even a particularly nosy and intrusive one, but not an employee of the Central Intelligence Agency.”

“So you want me to go to Block Island, to where Cabot lives?”

“We want you to bring this matter to a conclusion. If it involves activities on U.S. soil, then we’re not permitted to have a role in it. So you would be free to determine the latitude of the work within your own discretion as a private, law-abiding citizen.”

I almost laughed. Lawyers, I thought. Spies were powerless once you let lawyers into the equation. Maybe this explained why legal thrillers had overtaken espionage novels on bestseller lists in the wake of the Cold War.

“Okay, then. What is it that you don’t want me to do?”

“Find Cabot’s stash, then dispose of it.”

“His stash?”

West picked up the thread.

“All the Angleton people had one after they retired. So did the Dark Lord himself, as it turned out. Things that were never supposed to leave the building, but somehow did anyway, most of it having to do with all the stuff that no one knew they were up to.”

“Like the running of Headlight, Taillight, and Blinker.”

“Precisely,” Harrison said.

“And even poor old Mary Meyer’s diary?”

“Actually, that turned up in one of Angleton’s safes at Langley. Apparently it was just a curiosity for him.”

“Strange man. I had a run-in with him once, when I was a kid.”

“We know,” Harrison said. “That was in his safe, too, in an old daybook.”