Thomas Perry - Sleeping Dogs

Her face retained its look of intense concentration. “But why were they after us—after you? You were in Brighton only for the day, and even I didn’t know we’d be there before this morning.”

He looked as puzzled as he could. “That’s something I’ve got to find out. I came to England ten years ago, and since then I’ve been in the deepest cover. Even the chief of station in London doesn’t know. I’d say our troubles must have started in the United States.”

“A mole?” she said. “A Bulgarian mole inside the CIA?”

He let his puzzlement turn to frustration. “That’s the hard part. There’s no telling the nationality in a case like this. The information could have come to the KGB, and they may have passed it on to Bulgarians in this area.”

She looked very sad. “Poor Peter and Jimmy. They weren’t up to this sort of thing at all.”

He stared out the window at the flat green countryside sweeping past, and strained for something to give her, like a present. “I’m going to tell you something that’s absolutely secret. Very few people even inside the Western intelligence community have heard it, and I’m not cleared by your government to be one of them. There’s a special room inside a building near Whitehall. It’s a big room in a basement, and outside the door there are always two sergeants of the Royal Marines, fully armed and at attention on two-hour shifts. Inside the room are hundreds of identical black-velvet boxes, with little gold plates on them engraved with the names of the heroes of the secret wars. When a member of England’s intelligence services does something spectacular, there’s a quiet ceremony where he’s given a medal. Because who he is and what he did must be kept secret, the medal is put inside the little velvet box and kept in trust by the government. But years later, when the man dies and the secret is no longer crucial to national security, the Queen invites his family to the Palace for an audience and gives them the box. But it’s not just for professionals. A lot of the boxes in that room are set aside for people like your friends, just regular citizens who maybe got involved by accident, or performed some service when the need arose. For the moment their families and friends are going to think that Jimmy and Peter were killed by robbers or something—whatever story the government puts out for the press. But someday they’ll get a little printed invitation to come visit the Queen, and then they’ll know.”

Margaret stared at him, and in her eyes he could see that she wanted to be able to tell the story, to go to Peter’s sister or Jimmy’s mother in some private room of the gigantic old country houses they lived in and whisper the lie he had offered her. Then there was no telling where it would go, and he knew it wouldn’t hold up. “You’ve got to keep that to yourself,” he said. “If it ever got out, the Russians would do anything to get into that room and read the citations—the ones for the last fifty years, anyway.”

“But you know, and now I know,” she said. “Michael, if I could tell just one or two people … and after all, it’s their secret, theirs and mine, not yours.”

He wavered as he thought about her. If she told it, she would probably make up lots of details that would make it sound more authentic, but he couldn’t chance it. “It’s a deep secret. None of them would ever have told an American, even one who’s been here for years trying to protect their country.”

“Then, how do you know?”

He sighed, as though he were giving in against his better judgment. “A few years ago, a man from MI6 managed to get inside a Soviet communications post in Afghanistan. How that happened, and how he got out, I can’t go into. But he ended up with me. He’d seen some things: the specification plates on the equipment, written texts on the computer screens and so on. The problem was, he didn’t speak Russian. He’d looked at them, but there was no way he could remember them because they meant nothing to him; just gibberish. His own people tried hypnotism, locking him in a sensory-deprivation chamber, everything. But they knew that we’d experimented with certain drugs. I can’t name them, but chemically they’re several generations beyond truth serums.

“This Englishman came to my house and met a doctor we’d flown in from Langley. The doctor shot him up, and he started to draw. He drew for days. He drew the Russian letters he’d seen on the computer screens, and made diagrams and maps. He saw everything all over again, and traced it on paper. But he also started to talk. It was endless, compulsive talk about all kinds of things that he’d kept secret. He told me about sexual experiences, childhood lies and things his parents hadn’t caught him at, secret fears and worries that he’d never resolved. It turned out he was from an old family that had been involved in British secrets for generations. The way it sounded, they were recruited by their fathers about the time they left Eton for Oxford, so they’d be sure to study hard and read the right books. Anyway, one thing he told me about was the room with the velvet boxes. When he’d been in the service only a few months, they called him in and showed him around. There were boxes in there for his father, who had helped crack some German code, and his great-grandfather, who’d done something or other in the Boer War, and I think somebody was in the Crimea. He kept raving on about the medals—the Victoria Cross, the Distinguished Service Order and I don’t know what else.

“The whole thing seemed to bother him a lot. At first I thought it was because when he got the tour he was so green. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-two, and seeing all those medals made him think he could never amount to anything compared to all of his ancestors. After the drug wore off, I asked him about it, and he said that wasn’t it. By now he had a few medals and citations in a box of his own. It was the secrets that bothered him. A lot of the things from a hundred years ago are still current: secret family contacts in Russia and East Germany, for instance, that have been kept up for generations. If those got out, the Russians would have whole families put up against a wall. Things change on the surface, but not underneath, in the world where spies live. It all seemed to him like a string that might unravel. If one thing came out, it could be traced to something else, and so on.”

“But this is different,” she muttered. “What can it possibly hurt to give their families something to hold on to?”

“It’s not different,” he said. “Knowledge is dangerous. You’d be doing them no favors.” He wondered if he had sounded ominous enough, but it made her stop asking, and he had to be satisfied with that.

As the train rattled on toward London, he stared out at the grass and trees. He wondered if he detected in himself some annoyance at her for luring him out into the world where they could find him, but decided he did not. She had made such a small, innocent offer, and the consequences had been huge and abrupt. It wasn’t even a problem she could have imagined. But now he had to work his way out. He had done exactly what he had promised himself he would never do. He had become lazy and comfortable and forgetful. It had been so stupid that it now struck him as a kind of miracle. For some time, maybe for years, he had kept up a few hollow rituals and observed a few minimal precautions, but it was only out of habit.

He remembered a day nearly fifteen years ago in New York, when he had waited for a man named Danny Catanno to come home from a night at the theater. He had sat in the dim light the man had left burning in the huge living room and contemplated the nature of human beings. This man no longer called himself Danny Catanno. He had been an accountant for a friend of the Castiglione family in Chicago, changing a few dollars into apartment houses and putting particular people on the payroll as managers or handymen or gardeners. But one day Danny Catanno had bought himself a BMW and paid for it in cash. Somehow the IRS had gotten curious about it because it had cost sixty thousand dollars that had not come through a bank account. Within a few days Catanno was sitting in a room somewhere that was full of men who could not afford BMWs but were good enough at arithmetic to prove to Danny that he couldn’t either.