The Double Game

37

“How many fingers?”

An older fellow with gin blossoms and yellow teeth asked me that question. His face was only a foot from mine. He wore a gray pin-striped suit, tie loosened at the neck.

“Three,” I answered. I was groggy, just coming around.

“How many now?”

“Where the hell am I?”

“He’s fine,” a second man said from somewhere behind me. I twisted in the chair to see him but couldn’t turn more than a few inches because I was strapped around the waist and chest. My hands were bound at my sides, and my feet were bungee-corded to the legs of the chair.

“What the fuck is happening?”

“See? That stuff wears off in an hour, then it’s gone in seconds. Just like I told you.”

An hour. Then it must be close to nine p.m. I had a headache, but the guy was pretty much right, because I seemed to be thinking fairly clearly. I looked around at what I could see of the room. Small and antiseptic, somebody’s office. An American flag in the corner and a picture of the president on the wall. It didn’t look like the sort of place where someone would beat you, waterboard you, or hook up your genitals to electrodes, but these days I suppose you never knew for sure. The important thing was that there was no sign of either Ron Curtin or the Hammerhead.

The first fellow who’d held up his fingers backed away a few feet and inspected me with a rather forlorn expression, as if he’d seen better specimens.

“Should we give him coffee?”

“No. It’ll skew the results. Just wait another few minutes.”

“Could somebody please tell me where I am, and what this is all about? And maybe loosen these ropes.” My hands were numb.

The second man moved into view. Mid-twenties and full of himself. Black stretch pants and a black synthetic top, with his hair mussed. One of the guys who’d grabbed me, probably. The other fellow in the suit tilted his head in a pose of curiosity, but he no longer looked worried.

“I’m staying for the questioning.” he said.

“Of course.”

“I really need to pee,” I said.

“Give him some water. He probably needs a drink.”

“Oh, yeah,” I said, “that’ll help.”

“Get him a jar, or a glass from the canteen. I’ll unzip him.”

“Are you serious?”

He was. The suit left the room. The cocky young man in black squatted in front of me like a prostitute eager to conclude business and move on to the next customer. He unbuckled my belt and unzipped my trousers as I squirmed in the chair. Then he frowned, seemingly uncertain about what to do next.

“Scared to touch it, or worried I’ll get it all over you?”

“You right-handed?”

“What?”

“Are you right-handed?”

“Yes.”

He untied my right hand. The suit brought in a McDonald’s cup. Medium. The way my bladder felt, maybe they should’ve supersized. I flexed the wrist of my free hand, which tingled as the feeling returned, then went about my business while the young guy held the cup with surprising poise. If it hadn’t been such a relief I probably would’ve done something stupid and juvenile like spraying him.

The suit wrinkled his nose and took away the cup, which was filled alarmingly close to the brim. Then the other guy pushed up a small table to my right and set down a full glass of water, which I greedily drained.

“Got anything to eat?”

“Later.”

“Mind telling me where I am?”

“The U.S. embassy. You better be damn glad we got to you first.”

“Actually, that’s not how I remember it.”

“Okay, but we got you.”

“The other guys were Russian?”

“Just like old times, huh? And believe me, you wouldn’t be peeing into any cups with those guys.”

“A samovar, you think?”

“Funny. In your pants, more like it.”

“You guys are the best.”

But in spite of everything, I was relieved. Being abducted and then bound to a chair by my countrymen might still lead just about anywhere, I supposed, but it seemed preferable to the alternative.

“Does my father know I’m here?”

“He has no idea about any of this.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“You’ll be released into his custody. Provided you cooperate.”

I exhaled slowly. By now my head was completely clear, and I felt better after the water. Maybe I would be all right.

The suit returned, this time with a man in a white lab coat carrying a silver hard-shell briefcase, which he placed on the table and snapped open. The guy in black removed the rest of my bindings and backed away toward the door. Then, without a word, the man in the lab coat unrolled a black band, wrapped it tightly around my right biceps, and secured it with Velcro, as if he was about to take my blood pressure. He secured two thinner bands around my chest and began connecting sensors to the fingers on my right hand.

They were hooking me up to a polygraph. I was about to be fluttered.

I suppose it could have been an aftereffect of the knockout drug, but for a moment I experienced a sensation close to dizziness. It was as if the room was in motion and I was whirling on a long comet tail of history, preparing to land at the very point where all of this had started half a century ago, when Dad had been in an identical position. They’d hooked him up to an older version of the same machine and placed him before an inquisitor, all in the name of security. A moment that changed our lives, and now I would relive it. But I doubted my captors felt that way. To them this was more like battlefield cleanup, carting the last litters of the wounded from a very old and dormant field of action.

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.”

I was amazed, even charmed in an eerie sort of way.

“But what we didn’t find were things like his appointment logs, all those accounts of every lunch and every Agency visit he ever got from goddamn Kim Philby.”

“I can see why he’d have stashed those.”

“You and every two-bit historian who ever came up with a cheap conspiracy theory,” West said.

“Maybe he sent them to Area Fifty-one. Have you checked Roswell?”

West laughed. Harrison wasn’t amused.

“We think Nethercutt had a stash as well, and that after he died his old rival Cabot came over from next door and found it. That’s probably what set off this whole thing.”

It made sense. It also explained some of the contacts and documents Cabot had come up with. New information would have made him feel empowered enough to reopen his old investigation.

“So it stands to reason,” West said, “that Cabot must also have a stash. He’s probably had one all along, but now it will have Nethercutt’s stuff, too, plus whatever you’ve sent him.”

“How am I supposed to find it?”

“Bait,” Harrison said. “One last item that you’ll send his way, juicy enough that he’ll want to put it away immediately for safekeeping.”

“Which is another reason you wanted Lothar’s book.”

“We’ll come up with something else. Any ideas?”

I shook my head.

“How were you communicating?” Harrison asked.

“It was pretty much a one-way street. He’d send messages, and I’d do as he asked. Litzi was reporting my movements for a while, but after that I have no idea how he was keeping tabs. The only other channel from my end was a dead drop, next to the Franz Josef statue in the Burggarten.”

Harrison shot a questioning glance at West.

“Worth a try,” West said. “He’s probably still got somebody checking it. Whatever we come up with, you can put it there the day you fly back. On your way to the airport, even. By the time it’s delivered you’ll be in place.”

“On Block Island?”

“I never said that. Never even mentioned it.”

“So where’s this bait, then?”

“We’ll come up with something. Then we’ll shoot it over to your father’s place before you leave. In the meantime, book a flight to Boston and a rental car. If you have any trouble getting a spot on the ferry, let us know and we’ll see to the arrangements.”

“You’re trusting me to handle the tradecraft once I’m there?”

“Once you’re on U.S. soil, we’re not trusting you to do anything. I hope that’s understood.”

“Perfectly.”

“But you’ve read all the books. Obviously you have some idea of how these things work. If he was expecting you, that would be one thing. But he won’t be.”

“What do I do with this stuff if I find it?”

West handed me a slip of paper.

“Here’s an address. By certified mail, if you please.”

It was a post office box in Herndon, Virginia, in care of someone named Elliott Wallace. Fake name, no doubt. An all-purpose conduit for all sorts of Agency detritus.

“You’re trusting this to the U.S. Postal Service?” I asked. “Whatever happened to dead drops?”

Harrison took over.

“This is an address that automatically receives special handling. Besides, setting up a dead drop in certain locales would imply operational activity.”

“So this is to keep the lawyers happy.”

“It’s for your own protection.”

“Maybe I should just destroy the material.”

“It’s U.S. government property. Anything that needs to be destroyed, we’ll manage.”

“With Breece Preston’s approval?”

Harrison looked over at West, who cleared his throat.

“Just use the address, Mr. Cage.”

“One final piece of business,” Harrison said. He handed me a pen and an official-looking sheet of paper. “Date and signature at the bottom, with your full name printed underneath.”

It was a document the Agency called a nondisclosure agreement. I’d seen Marty Ealing persuade people to sign them on behalf of some of our shadier clients. Basically it was a pledge not to disseminate or publish any information I obtained as a result of any employment for the Central Intelligence Agency.

“I thought I wasn’t working for you?”

“Not in any official capacity, no.”

“Then I’m not really employed, so this doesn’t apply to me.”

West looked uncomfortable. Harrison attempted to head me off at the pass.

“We’ve made these things stick before on far more tenuous associations. But if you don’t wish to sign it, fine. We’ll cease all association with you here and now, including any sort of security guarantees for your remaining time in Vienna.”

Nice people, aren’t they?

“What about on Block Island? Who guarantees my security there?”

Harrison sighed, exasperated. I refused to pick up the pen.

“How ’bout if we go off the record a minute, Bill?” It was West, easing into the role of good cop.

“I thought we already were.”

“Well, yes. But I mean way off the record.”

“Okay.”

“Ron Curtin is in custody. He was sitting in the back of that Russian van.”

“So they were working together, him and the Hammerhead.”

“Yes. After competing for a while they eventually joined forces. Let’s just say they both stood to be embarrassed by dredging up too much of the past. Frankly, they’re probably just as happy to let us take custody. That way they don’t have to fight over it now. Anybody but Giles Cabot or Vanity Fair, as far as they’re concerned. But if it makes you feel better, we’ll gladly make sure that both Curtin and the Russian remain in custody until you’re done. Deal?”

“What about afterward?”

“Then they’ll be worried about us. You’ll be off the hook.”

So I signed it. And in doing so presumably signed away any hopes for publishing a story. Just as well, perhaps, especially if a magazine piece would have meant exposing my father’s involvement, or Litzi’s. After all their painstaking effort to maintain their privacy, why blow their cover in an act of journalistic vanity, even if it meant I still had to work for Marty Ealing. Maybe I’d grown up. Just because the CIA’s motto said that the truth would set you free didn’t mean everyone had to know it.

“Tell me,” I asked, “was any of this meeting taped or recorded?”

“Do you seriously think we’d want this conversation appearing in any kind of official record?” Harrison said.

“Then why be so careful every time I mention what I might be doing on-”

“No need to say it.”

“See what I mean?”

He shrugged. “We’re careful because, well, you just never know, do you?”

“That would make a nice Agency motto if you ever get tired of the old one.”

Harrison opened the door. “I’m told that your father has been contacted and is waiting downstairs. We’ll maintain a security presence on your behalf for as long as you remain in Vienna, right up until the time you board a plane back to the States. Go anywhere else and you’re on your own.”

I then asked the question that had already started to nag at me.

“What will you do with this information? Use it, destroy it, or just bury it?”

He smiled.

“Good luck, Mr. Cage.”