The Once and Future Spy (6 page)

W
anamaker nodded to the two young men in loose-fitting sport jackets who stood guard on either side of the door to the men’s
room. Then he lifted his arms over his head. One of the young men began to pat him down.

Wanamaker rolled his eyes and rocked his head in mock boredom. “I am not armed,” he said.

“We are not looking for weapons,” the second young man told Wanamaker. “We are looking for tape recorders. We are looking
for microphones.”

“I am not wired either,” Wanamaker said.

“There is no such thing as being too careful,” observed the young man who was frisking Wanamaker. He stood up and snapped
his head in the direction of the door. Wanamaker pushed through it. A haze of vile-smelling tobacco smoke filled the white-tiled
room. The thickset man was wringing his hands dry under a hot air nozzle. The rush of air ceased abruptly. Spotting Wanamaker,
the thickset man reached into his pocket and turned up the hearing aid. “In a nutshell, what has the Admiral come up with?”
he asked.

“In a nutshell, nothing. Zero. Zilch.”

“He must have an inkling, an intuition, the beginnings of a theory,” he insisted.

“He thinks maybe I’m sending the love letters to myself because I don’t have the stomach to go through with it.”

“Are you?”

Wanamaker sneered.

“I’ve been quietly nosing around,” the thickset man announced. “The oversight people don’t appear to be on to anything out
of the ordinary. As far as I can determine, the congressional pulse is normal.”

“That’s a comfort,” Wanamaker said sarcastically. “Because my pulse isn’t normal. I got a new love letter in the mail yesterday.”

Again the thickset man waited with seemingly infinite patience for Wanamaker to continue.

Wanamaker hated dealing with people who had perfect control of their emotions. He couldn’t resist asking, “Don’t you want
to know what it said?”

“Am I wrong in assuming you intend to tell me?”

Wanamaker shrugged a shoulder. “It said
Stufftingle
; it said
Ides of March
. Whoever sent the love letter knows the code name of the operation and the date.”

The thickset man sucked on his pipe and exhaled into Wanamaker’s face. The aroma of tobacco overpowered the odor coming from
the camphor tablets in the urinals. “I see,” the thickset man finally said.

“What is it you see?” Wanamaker asked.

“I see that you are dealing with an isolated person who, for some reason as yet unbeknownst to us, has decided to bait you
and you alone. If he had gone to
The Washington Post
, we would be reading about Stufftingle in the newspaper. If he had gone to the Director or the oversight people, you would
have been called on the carpet by now. No. No. The thing is not to lose your nerve. There’s still three weeks before the deadline—plenty
of time for the Admiral to get to the bottom of it.”

“That’s easy for you to say. It’s my head that’s on the platter.”

“We always foresaw the possibility of something going wrong—of the operation being traced back to you. You would of course
deny everything, and as there is no paper trail, who could prove you wrong?”

“Who?” Wanamaker agreed eagerly. He liked to think he knew the answer.

“If worse came to worst you were prepared to fall on your sword.”

“Not eager. But prepared,” Wanamaker confirmed.

“The late Director often spoke about you. If I told you what he said, your ears would burn.”

Wanamaker understood he was being buttered up, but he found the experience pleasant anyhow. “I liked him a lot too,” he said.

The thickset man turned reverential. He might have been pledging allegiance. “We owe it to him,” he said. “We owe it to his
memory.”

Wanamaker nodded in grudging agreement.

I
t was the one weekend in two when the Weeder didn’t have visitation rights with Martin. So he spent the morning drowning his
aching emptiness in history. He wandered around an outdoor flea market lusting after a pre-Revolutionary powder horn and a
Pennsylvania rifle engraved with the initials of the German-immigrant gunsmith who made it and a narrow truckle bed and a
collection of Continental coins and a worn leather portmanteau with the date 1776 embossed on it. He almost bought a copy
of Frederick’s
Instructions to His Generals
but abandoned the idea when he discovered the asking price. Reluctantly. Washington, the Weeder remembered, had kept a copy
of Frederick’s
Instructions
on his desk during the battles of Long Island and, later, Harlem Heights. The Weeder wondered if Nate had noticed the book
when he was summoned to the Commander-in-Chief’s headquarters. Knowing Nate, knowing his love for books, he thought it more
than likely. The Weeder made a mental note to check if the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library had a copy of Frederick’s
Instructions
next time he got up to Yale.

At mid-morning the Weeder headed south toward SoHo and the loft. Even though it was Sunday he couldn’t resist seeing if his
computer had come up with anything interesting on Farmer’s Almanac. Wanamaker often worked Saturdays and sometimes late into
Saturday night; he was one of those people who had to be pried away from his
desk. Operation Stufftingle consumed most of his working hours, most of his thoughts; all (if you read between the computer’s
neatly typed lines) of his passion. But what was he up to? Operations Subgroup Charlie, the Weeder knew, was keeping track
of a handful of terrorist cells in the Middle East; almost all the chitchat that the Weeder had picked up when he first programmed
his computer to eavesdrop on Wanamaker dealt with details of various terrorist groups: where they got their money or their
arms or their marching orders. But when Wanamaker and Parker and Webb and a woman called Mildred were alone, the conversations
had taken another turn. In the beginning there had been a lot of airy right-wing rhetoric. “America,” one of the early Wanamaker
intercepts had said, “occupies some hypothetical middle ground in international disputes, feebly supporting the side we want
to win, feebly opposing the side we want to lose.” “What we have to do,” another person had chimed in, “is commit ourselves
to the hilt even if it means taking risks.” “Bite the bullet,” someone had agreed, “set matters right.” “Why become a world
power if we are afraid to wield that power so that the world functions in a way that is congenial to us?” someone else had
asked.

Eventually the theoretical discussions had given way to something more concrete. The Weeder had picked it up the very day
he had gotten the bright idea of programming the computer to register noun-rich sentences. The words
rods
and
hair triggers
and
wedges
had leapt off the printout page. For days Wanamaker could talk about little else. The Weeder had assumed that rods and hair
triggers had to do with guns, that wedges were some sort of plastic explosive. It seemed as if Wanamaker’s Operations Subgroup
had stumbled across a terrorist assassination plot. And the Weeder had stumbled across Wanamaker stumbling across it.

The idea of targeting his computer on Wanamaker had come to the Weeder after he had run into him at a Yale reunion the previous
spring. The Weeder had been staring out at the sea of faces in the lecture hall when he spotted Wanamaker in a back row. To
hide his confusion he had looked down at his three-by-five index cards spread out on the lectern. Sentences were splashed
across them as if they had spilled from tubes of pigment. Phrases trickled down the margins. There was a secret code of asterisks
and arrows and underlined words to remind him that some detail was particularly juicy, that it went to what he thought of
as the heart of a matter. When the Weeder was
still an undergraduate at Yale, a professor of Colonial military history had caught a glimpse of his raw notes and had concluded
he would never amount to much as a historian; too unfocused to be scholarly, he said, too willing to fill historical gaps
with figments of his imagination. If only the professor, long buried, could have seen him lecturing to this gathering of alumni
at a class reunion.

“Which brings me to what we don’t know,” the Weeder had heard himself saying. “We have a fairly complete picture of what happened
to the subject of my study before September fifteenth. We certainly know what happened to him on the twenty-second. But the
week between the two is missing—it’s a blank, a black hole in history. Where did he go during the missing week? Whom did he
contact? What, if anything, did he accomplish? I have discovered a hint buried in an old orderly book that codes were involved,
which would suggest that a message might have been sent back. I’ve also come across reminiscences written many years after
the events in question by one of the subject’s brothers, Enoch. In it he refers to someone in Brooklyn whom Nate was supposed
to get in touch with, a patriot who would provide him with a cover story—Nate would pretend to be an itinerant artisan boarding
with families while he repaired shoes. Enoch appeared to know exactly what had happened to his brother during the missing
week and claimed to have gotten the information from A. Hamilton in a letter that has unfortunately been lost. I am hot on
the trail of the A. Hamilton letter, as well as any record that may have been kept by the patriot in Brooklyn. With their
help I hope to solve one of the great mysteries of American history—to tell the world what happened to the subject of my study
during the missing week.”

There had been applause. Nothing to register on the Richter scale, but polite. The professor who had invited the Weeder to
give the lecture had lunged forward to shake his hand. Collecting his index cards on the lectern, the Weeder had glanced at
his former roommate, Wanamaker, in the last row.

He was stifling a yawn.

Once again the Weeder had been struck by the tendency of people who haven’t seen each other for long periods to pick up, emotionally
speaking, precisely where they had left off.

He and Wanamaker had roomed together in Branford College until the incident; the accident; the murder. Wanamaker, afterward,
had put
out his hand and said he hoped there would be no hard feelings. Trying the capsules had been her idea, he explained. He merely
told her where she could find some. If he hadn’t helped her, somebody else would have. As for what happened to her well, nobody
could have foreseen that; nobody could have taken precautions.

If the Weeder had been hoping to avoid Wanamaker at the reunion, he ran out of luck after the alumni luncheon under the blue-and-white
striped awning. By coincidence they bumped into each other near the statue of Nate outside Connecticut Hall, the one with
his feet tied at the ankles, his wrists tied behind his back, his fists clenched—in fear? in anger? in exhilaration (the Weeder’s
pet theory, unproven) at the prospect of putting one over on the enemy?

“That was an interesting talk you gave this morning,” Wanamaker remarked.

“I didn’t think you heard a word I said,” the Weeder retorted.

“Actually, I didn’t. I was just being polite.” Wanamaker hadn’t been able to cap the giggle that bubbled to the surface.

“Well,” the Weeder said, “everyone steps out of character now and then.” He eyed Wanamaker suspiciously. He knew that Wanamaker
worked for the Company. As new recruits, their paths had crossed during basic training at the Farm; they had even found themselves
in the same classroom when the famous Admiral Toothacher turned up for three days of guest lectures on the fundamentals of
intelligence methodology. “So what governments are you stabbing in the back these days?” the Weeder asked Wanamaker as they
stood in front of the statue of Nate.

Wanamaker, suddenly expressionless, was all business. “What’s your clearance?”

“High enough so I can know if the President can know.” The Weeder noticed Wanamaker’s clothes. He had dressed his squat American
body in a rumpled Italian suit. As far as the Weeder could see, neither did anything for the other.

“Sorry,” Wanamaker shot back. And he flashed his smug mailorder smile that never failed to set the Weeder’s teeth on edge.

“Maybe I’ll ask around,” the Weeder said. He would have given anything to wipe the smile off Wanamaker’s face.

“Maybe you won’t ask around,” Wanamaker snapped in annoyance.

“What’ll happen if I do? What’ll happen if I find out? Will the world come to an end? Or even better, your career?”

“If you were to find out”—other members of the class of 1973 were approaching so Wanamaker lowered his voice—”I suppose I’d
have to get you murdered.”

It was a challenge if the Weeder ever heard one. Like Nate, there was never one he wouldn’t rise to. It had taken the Weeder
two months to discover that Wanamaker had been farmed out to an interagency working group; another month to learn about the
existence of Operations Subgroup Charlie; several more weeks to get hold of the subgroup’s telephone number (the Weeder finally
wormed it out of a secretary in Disbursing who believed the story about Yale wanting to offer Wanamaker an honorary degree).

At which point the Weeder had slipped Wanamaker’s phone number onto the list that his IBM mainframe was monitoring.