Brian Haig - The Kingmaker

Mary finally came on and started with, “Hi, Sean. Listen, please, you’ve got to stop taunting my father. He said he thinks you’re putting dents in his car, but I insisted it couldn’t be you. I told him you’re not that immature or vindictive. He’s not as young as he used to be.”

I chuckled. “All I do is say my name and he gets all red and puffy. Between you and me… I don’t think he likes me.”

I could hear her sigh.

“Listen,” I said, “I just got back from New York, where I met with Milton Martin.”

“Bill’s old boss.”

“Right. A most delightful guy. Now, Bill told me he used to be Martin’s Cato. He said the two of them were inseparable, the Siamese twins of the State Department. Martin said that’s a big, nasty lie. He said your husband was a bag handler, a factotum with an inflated title, who went around exaggerating his value to his boss and blowing so much hot air it eventually got embarrassing. He said that’s why he kicked him upstairs to the White House. I’m just trying to see which one’s the dirty rotten liar.”

The line was quiet so long, I finally said, “Mary, you still there?”

“Sean, I don’t know what the truth is.”

“You don’t?”

A pained, even resentful tone crept into her voice. “Bill has a few flaws. Everybody does. I have to be frank with you about this, though, because I brought you in, and I don’t want you having illusions. Bill wasn’t always truthful about things. He’s very ambitious. He wasn’t above taking credit for things he had little to do with.”

“Isn’t everybody like that?”

“Bill is… more like that than others. I used to warn him about it, and he always insisted that’s how the game’s played in Washington. The meek never inherit the earth, not in D.C., he would always respond. He even took credit for some of my work. It was maddening, but what could I do? He was my husband.”

“So he wasn’t close with Martin?”

“He told everybody he was. I really don’t know, Sean. It’s, uh, well, it’s possible Bill thought it was truer than it was. He’s very vain. He could fool himself about his own importance.”

Note how tactfully she couched it. She was his wife, and therefore wasn’t going to blurt out the obvious-the man was a lousy, lying, self-inflated weasel.

“Okay.” I paused, and then said, “One other question. Your 1996 tax form listed an inheritance of nine hundred grand. Where’d that come from?”

“That was the year Bill’s mother died. She and her husband were well-to-do. His father died back in 1994 and everything passed to her. When she died, the estate passed to Bill.”

“His father was a Pepsi exec, right?”

“Yes. His name was William also. I adored him. In fact, he was the one who got Bill interested in the Soviet Union in the first place.”

“How so?”

“You may recall that Pepsi was the first big Western conglomerate to open operations in the Soviet Union.”

“That somehow escaped my notice.”

“Way back in 1961, the co-founder of Pepsi, Don Kendall, actually met with Khrushchev and talked him into letting Pepsi build a few plants. It was a big thing at the time, the first American corporation to get a foothold in the Communist capital of the world.”

“And this had something to do with Morrison’s father?”

“Bill’s father was in charge of the whole operation. He oversaw the construction of those first plants, marketed the products, oversaw the whole thing. It was his life’s work.”

“And did he speak Russian?”

“Fluently. He made countless trips over there. He even had an apartment in Moscow and another in Leningrad. When Bill was younger, he took him over a few times.”

I was getting a truly sickening feeling. If Eddie and his goons got wind of this, it spelled big trouble. The conclusion was inescapable-Morrison’s father was the perfect conduit for the Russians to make their payments.

Perhaps I’d been hasty overruling greed as a motive. Even if it wasn’t Morrison’s motive, the Russians would probably have insisted he take some cash. In every spy novel, spymasters invariably try to use money as the hook in the fish’s gullet. Then, if Morrison got cold feet, they could blackmail him into staying in the business.

But how to channel those payments? Well, there’s always the rub.

Aldrich Ames made himself vulnerable when he began driving to work every day in a flamboyant new Jaguar sedan. That car should have brought all kinds of suspicions in his direction-it didn’t, but it should have. Hanssen had better sense and lived frugally, while he had the Russians open a Swiss account, and buy him diamonds, and stockpile his earnings like a squirrel saves his stash of acorns for winter. The problem with that tack is that you don’t realize the benefits of your crime. There you are, slaving away and betraying your nation’s secrets, but where’s the instant gratification we Americans are so well-known for?

The problem is hiding or justifying those big lump-sum payments, because anytime a check larger than $10,000 gets cashed, federal law requires the bank to report it. And pretty soon the federal government’s knocking on your door, wanting to know why you’re not paying taxes on hidden income, and why there are no W-2 statements accompanying all those big payments. But if the payoff gets shuffled through your father’s account, probably one that was with a Russian bank in the first place, and lands in your lap as an inheritance, you’ve bypassed that scrutiny.

Money may not have been Morrison’s main motivation, but who’s going to turn down free cash when it’s offered? Not me: I rummage through public pay phones for wanton quarters.

I said, “Well, thanks.”

“Okay. Listen, I’m just telling you Bill has some fairly serious warts.”

“Right.” Maybe bigger warts than either of us knew.

“Sean, I, uh, I’m sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it. It’s not your fault.”

It didn’t help when I got back to my apartment that night and the late news revealed the newest government release on Morrison’s crimes. According to that voluble unnamed source, he’d not only given the Soviets the names of two of their agents whom we’d turned-both of whom were recalled and executed-but he’d also provided the Russians with our negotiating position toward the North Koreans on the nuclear issue, which the Russians had then generously passed along to the North Koreans.

A commentator came on and claimed that armed with that information, the North Koreans were able to persuade us to build them two nuclear plants for power generation while they continued building a nuclear bomb in a secret underground facility, which that secret document informed them we did not know about.

True or not, it sounded awful. I drifted off to sleep dreading the next nasty revelation. With Eddie, they’d only get better.

We caught the early bird to Kansas City the next morning. As the few leads Morrison had passed us failed to pan out, it was time to consort with our client again to see if we could coax something more useful out of him. Less technically, he’d screwed me, and I was going to put his nuts in a vise.

Katrina drew her usual assortment of stares and ogles as we boarded and passed down the aisle to our seats. This morning’s ensemble included hip-hugging, skintight, bell-bottomed jeans that were torn at strategic locations and a black spandex long-sleeved shirt that had only one shoulder and sleeve. The shirt came that way, too, and I’ll bet she paid full price.

No sooner were we belted in than Katrina pulled out an MP3 player, jammed a pair of earphones in her ears, cracked open a copy of Rolling Stone magazine, and stuffed her beaded nose inside. Overhearing the low throb of some kind of music, and with a profound sense of mature superiority, I dug into a newspaper filled with screechy articles and poisonous editorials about the pathetic bastard I was representing. I was tired and surly, and the flood of damning publicity heightened my gloomy mood. I was chewing with a vengeance the peanuts the stewardess brought me.