The Once and Future Spy (2 page)

T
he shuttle from Guantánamo taxied to the bitter end of a remote runway at the Bethesda Naval Air Station. Portable steps were
rolled up to the fuselage. A petty officer with a handlebar mustache cracked the door, then stepped aside deferentially. Hunched
over like a parenthesis, Rear Admiral J. Pepper Toothacher (retired) appeared in the doorway. Listed on the plane’s manifest
as a Navy dentist deadheading into D.C. for a symposium on wisdom teeth, he was in his late fifties, but his chalk-colored
hair made him seem a dozen years older. His first wife (as he called her, though never to her face) had been after him for
years to dye it, but the Admiral flatly refused; every white hair, he liked to say, represented a secret that would go to
the grave with him.

Wearing spit-shined oxfords, aviator glasses with trifocal lenses and civilian sport clothes that might have fit him before
he went on a macrobiotic binge, the Admiral had the lean, hungry look that comes from pecking cocktail peanuts at one happy
hour too many; retirement was slowly boring him to death. With his sloping shoulders, his sunken cheeks, his mournful face,
his pasty complexion, his bulging eyes that seemed to take in absolutely everything, he could have passed for a perfect Polonius
spying from behind a silver arras; the archetypal
fin de race
nobleman who knew not only where the various bodies were buried, but what they had died of—and who had profited from their
deaths and could be accused of murder if the need arose.

The Admiral sucked air into his lungs until his rib cage ached, then plunged down the steps and danced a little one-legged
jig on the tarmac to celebrate his safe arrival back on earth. The celebration was cut short when he caught sight of the hulking
figure of Chief Petty Officer M. Huxstep (also retired) leaning insolently against the door of a car pool Chevrolet. The Admiral
organized the various limbs of his lanky body so that they would function more or less harmoniously and ambled over to Huxstep.

“Of all people,” the Admiral remarked.

“Small world,” Huxstep agreed.

The Admiral cocked his head. “What is the cube of one twenty-one?” he demanded.

Huxstep yawned. “Too easy,” he said.

“You’re playing for time,” the Admiral said.

“Don’t need time. One twenty-one cubed is one seven seven one five six one.”

“How about the cube root of 12,812,904?”

Huxstep, who always looked bored, managed to look more bored than usual. “The third power of twenty-three point four.”

The Admiral pouted in bewilderment. “How do you do it?”

“How does the Admiral tie his shoelaces?” Huxstep retorted. He indicated with an imperious toss of his head that the seaman
deuce struggling with the Admiral’s two Vuitton suitcases was to deposit them in the trunk compartment. Toothacher favored
the automobile with a baleful stare. “Don’t pretend this was the very best you could do,” he admonished Huxstep.

“I was instructed not to draw attention to the Admiral’s presence in Washington,” Huxstep said.

“You might have at least washed the beast.” The Admiral dusted the passenger seat with a handkerchief and settled uneasily
into it, but pointedly left the door on his side of the car open. Huxstep, whose short cropped hair and eyes were the color
of pewter, snorted loudly enough for the Admiral to hear him as he strode around to the passenger side and kicked it closed.
He climbed in behind the wheel and gunned the motor. The Chevrolet lunged toward the gate in the chain link fence.

The Admiral nodded vaguely at the Marines in full battle dress guarding the gate, sniffed delicately at the interior of the
car, checked the ashtray for butts, wrinkled up an incredibly Roman nose when he
found one. He investigated the glove compartment and discovered Huxstep’s handgun hidden under the road maps. It was a Smith
& Wesson. 357 Magnum, a weapon that punched a hole the size of a fist in anything it hit. “I see you are armed,” Admiral Toothacher
noted. “Couldn’t you have selected something slightly more”—he racked his brain for the appropriate word—
“discreet?”

“A derringer, for instance? Or a walking stick that opens into a sword?”

Toothacher sighed in frustration. “Another thing—you might have had the decency to give the sailor back there a hand with
my bags.”

That was too much for Huxstep. “I would like to respectfully point out that the Admiral has been on the ground five fucking
minutes and he has so far managed to complain about the car I am driving and the handgun I am carrying and the bags I did
not help some sailor with the lowest fucking rank in the entire United States of America Navy put into the trunk.”

“If I really wanted to be picky,” the Admiral said sweetly, “I would comment on your sentence structure.”

Huxstep snorted again and tucked the stray hairs that appeared back up into his nostrils with delicate clockwise thrusts of
his thick pinky.

The Admiral closed his eyes in pain. “Tidying up?” he baited Huxstep.

The driver glanced sideways at his passenger. “Fuck the Admiral.”

“Tch, tch,” cooed Toothacher. He caught Huxstep’s eye and batted both of his lids in a conspiratorial double wink.

Huxstep melted, cleared his throat, tried to swallow the emotion that welled up, failed. “I
am
glad to see the Admiral after all these years,” he mumbled awkwardly. “The truth is, when I heard the Admiral was coming,
I volunteered to meet him.”

Toothacher nodded emphatically. “If I had known you were available I would have insisted on you as a condition of my coming.”
He muttered under his breath, “What a fool I was not to specify the make of the automobile.”

Huxstep produced what, coming from him, passed for a laugh. “Just like old times,” he said. “The Admiral was always preoccupied
with the perks.”

“Since when is it a crime for a man to know what he’s worth?” Toothacher asked defiantly.

“Since when,” Huxstep agreed affably.

Heading toward downtown Washington, Huxstep broke a silence. “So the Admiral is walking back another cat.”

“And who in heaven’s name planted that idea in your head?”

“I just assumed, the Admiral being here and all. And them laying on a car and driver.”

“Where are you taking me?”

“To meet the man I work for, Mister R for Roger Wanamaker.”

“Roger Wanamaker,” Toothacher repeated, narrowing his eyes to stir an almost photographic memory. He nodded carefully as it
came to him. “He was my man Friday when I ran Naval Intelligence. Mid-thirties. The kind of face that normally comes equipped
with a lisp. Weak chin. A nose with a knob on it. Broke it at Yale, if I recall, playing intramural squash. Disheveled hair
full of static electricity and dandruff. Always overweight, always dieting; he used to eat low-calorie cottage cheese at his
desk. I could tell which dossiers he’d seen because they had cottage cheese on them. He was the sloppiest individual I ever
had the displeasure to work with. But the sloppiness masked an intellectual rigor. He collected details the way other men
collected lint in their trouser cuffs, had a nose for the oddball operation, which is why I took him with me when I was kicked
upstairs to Counterintelligence.”

Huxstep laughed under his breath. “I remember the Admiral saying something about misery loving company.”

“How’d you wind up in Wanamaker’s shop?” Toothacher asked.

“The Navy gave me the boot because of a dumb manslaughter conviction. I was at loose ends. I heard on the grapevine that Mister
Wanamaker was recruiting for a hush-hush antiterrorist operation. You don’t mind I gave your name as a reference when I applied?”

The Admiral was following his own thoughts. “I recall another thing about friend Wanamaker,” he said. “Everyone called him
Friday. You called him Bright Eyes. You spread it around that he bathed every day but never changed the water. He didn’t appreciate
your sense of humor.”

Huxstep elevated his chin a notch. “The ones who don’t know how to laugh at themselves I ignore.”

“Error,” the Admiral observed wryly. “In our business they are the ones you must pay attention to.”

“W
elcome aboard,” Wanamaker said, steering Admiral Toothacher through an outer office wasteland, past a receptionist in a plaid
miniskirt filing a broken nail, past a middle-aged female assistant wearing a 1930s scalp-hugging feathered hat with a black
veil that fell like a mask over half her face, into an inner sanctum that looked as if it had been furnished with hand-me-downs
from a congressional subcommittee examining explosive issues such as evaporation levels in Amazon rain forests. “Sorry about
the creature comforts,” Wanamaker apologized as he waved Toothacher into a lopsided armchair with stained imitation leather
upholstery. “We are the innocent victims of a government conspiracy to spend less money. Coffee? Tea? Something with a kick
to it?”

“Tea,” the Admiral said without enthusiasm. He eyed the surroundings with a distaste he usually reserved for chain hotels
and tried to console himself with the silver lining—the $250 per diem, the nights that would presumably be free, the candles
that he would gleefully burn at both ends.

Wanamaker hovered over the armchair like a rain cloud. “With or without?”

“Either or.”

Wanamaker scurried across the room and crawled into a squeaking wooden swivel chair behind an embarrassingly small desk whose
glass top was nearly opaque with cottage cheese stains. He depressed a lever on the squawk box. “Two teas. Pronto.”

A burst of static filtered back through the box. It seemed to say, “With or without?”

“More static,” Wanamaker muttered. He punched a lever and yelled into the squawk box, “With. Without. Either or.”

The Admiral, sniffing, caught a whiff of staleness, of mildew, of stubbed-out cigars, of synthetic carpet heavy with dust.
He glanced at the windows, which were covered with grime. They probably hadn’t been opened, the room probably hadn’t been
aired, in years. Decades even. What had he gotten himself into? He peered at Wanamaker squirming nervously in his squeaking
chair. His shapeless clothes looked sweat-stained, his hair matted. When he moved his head suddenly, crystals of dandruff
could be seen drifting down through the sunlight onto his shoulders, which bore the unmistakable traces of previous flurries.
The Admiral understood what Huxstep had been getting at when he said Wanamaker bathed every day but never changed the water.

Wanamaker twisted a paper clip, fingered a tin of Schimmelpennincks as he attempted to break the ice with his old boss, his
icon, his mentor, his father figure. “You will have noticed that in deference to you I have not lighted a cigar,” he commented.

“You might have emptied the ashtrays,” the Admiral said absently.

Wanamaker’s pudgy lips hinted at a pudgy smile. “You will be wondering why I invited you.”

The Admiral didn’t say anything. He was concentrating on trying not to breathe.

Observing Toothacher, Wanamaker recalled with visceral pleasure his seven-year tour as the Admiral’s man Friday. There had
been many in the intelligence community who had written Toothacher off as a professional devil’s advocate—someone who had
no illusions about winning the cold war but simply relished fighting it. Only the chosen few, Wanamaker among them, suspected
that the river ran deeper; that the Admiral was a true believer. He detested the Bolsheviks with a passion. And he would go
to any lengths to irritate them. Back in his salad days, when everyone was wildly dropping agents behind the Iron Curtain,
the Admiral had come up with the idea of dropping shortwave radios and parachutes and letting the Russians fall over one another
looking for nonexistent agents. Later, when everyone
in the West was desperately trying to penetrate the Soviet High Command, he had run Naval Intelligence as if it
had
penetrated the Soviet High Command. When the Russians picked up the clues that the Admiral had left scattered around, they
launched a mole hunt that all but crippled the High Command for years. Pushing for bigger budgets, Toothacher had made enemies
on the Senate Armed Services Committee and had been shunted over to the CIA, where he wound up working for James Jesus Angleton’s
Praetorian Guard, the counterintelligence elite, the born-again pessimists to whom the worst case was always the most likely,
the most interesting, the most stimulating; above all, the most congenial. Somewhere along the way there had been a whiff
of scandal; as part of a surveillance training exercise, a young recruit at the CIA’s Farm had tailed the Admiral and filed
a report on the company he kept. Toothacher had been hauled on the carpet and subjected to the indignity of a lie detector
test, which he had failed. At which point the Director of Central Intelligence, never one to wash dirty linen in public, had
pensioned Toothacher off to early retirement at the American Naval base in Guantánamo, Cuba.

The secretary with the repaired fingernail and the plaid miniskirt barged in with a tray and set it down on Wanamaker’s desk.
She caught sight of the Admiral sharpening the crease on his trousers with his fingers and discreetly averted her eyes as
she left. Wanamaker skidded a mug across the desk top toward the Admiral and offered him a saucer filled with tiny paper envelopes.
Toothacher poked at an envelope, read its label. “
Powdered milk!
“ He let his eyes take another turn around the room. (Was he looking for a way out?) He noticed the impossibly tacky color
photograph of the President hanging on the wall above the bricked-over chimney. He noticed the wilting plants in plastic flower
pots on a dusty battleship-gray combination safe. He noticed the conference table overflowing with empty cans of classic Coke
and diet cola and low-fat cottage cheese containers and paper plates with crusts of sandwiches on them. “My God, Wanamaker,”
the Admiral said in a fierce whisper, “what are we here?”

Wanamaker hit the lever on his squawk box. “No calls. No visitors. No nothing,” he barked. He swiveled three hundred and sixty
degrees in his chair, as if he were winding himself up, then settled back to stare at the Admiral. A muscle over Wanamaker’s
right eye twitched. “What we are here,” he said with quiet urgency, “is an
operations subgroup of SIAWG, which stands for Special Interagency Antiterrorist Working Group.”

“Is this a United States government agency?”

Wanamaker managed a nervous giggle. Clearly retirement had not dulled the Admiral’s appetite for irony. “Very quick,” Wanamaker
said. “Very clever.” He squirmed impatiently in his chair, then leaned forward and lowered his voice to indicate that the
conversation had crossed a threshold. “SIAWG was set up after the humiliating failure to rescue American hostages in Iran
in 1980. Our particular subgroup—we are Operations Subgroup Charlie—is staffed by Middle East experts. We save string on a
dozen terrorist organizations so secret the people in them aren’t always sure what cell they belong to.”

Watching his former protégé’s performance, the Admiral was reminded that Wanamaker had the narrowest range of emotions he
had ever come across in a
homo politicus
. He seemed to have winnowed his repertoire of facial expressions down to a derisive smirk, often, though not invariably,
accompanied by a giggle, and another expression that was expressionless. It was the expressionless expression that was being
deployed now, a tired army taking up position on a worn rampart. “I don’t quite see what your problem is,” the Admiral ventured.

Wanamaker began deforming another paper clip. “Our product is tightly held—it is BIGOT listed, stamped NODIS, NOFORM, ORCON,
stamped anything we can get our paws on. Despite this, we seem to have sprung a leak. Somebody outside our subgroup, somebody
outside our distribution list even, appears to have access to our product. To the product of our single most sensitive operation,
to be exact. Which is why you’re here. I am hoping you can walk back the cat and quietly plug the leak so we can get on with
our work.”

When it came to methodology the Admiral never leapt; he crawled in what he took to be the general direction of conclusions.
“What makes you think there has been a leak?” he inquired now.

A derisive smirk replaced the expression that was expressionless on Wanamaker’s face. He produced a cardboard portfolio from
a desk drawer. On the cover, in large block letters, was stamped BIGOT LIST and NODIS and NOFORM and ORCON. Inside the portfolio
was a page of computer printout paper protected by a transparent folder. Wanamaker handed the folder across the desk to the
Admiral.

Peering through the lower part of his trifocals, Toothacher studied the printout. “Rods,” he read out loud. Then, “Hair triggers.”
Then, “Wedges.”

Wanamaker felt better than he had in days. He was glad he had sent for his mentor. He was sure the Admiral wouldn’t disappoint
him. Like Mao Tse Tung, the Admiral understood that a journey of a thousand miles began with a single step.

Reading the four words on the printout in the transparent folder had been that first step.