The Once and Future Spy Page 7

  “I was passing through,” the Weeder said. “I thought I’d stop by and say hello.”

  “Old time’s sake, that sort of thing?”

  “Old time’s sake,” the Weeder agreed.

  “There’s nothing you’re looking for? No tidbit of information you want to get your hands on without going through channels?”

  “Now that you mention it—”

  Linkletter sighed again; it came across as a long drawn-out comment on the human condition. “I have not been a Company archivist for twenty-two years, eighteen months and eighteen days—and head archivist for the last eighteen years, seven months and no days—for nothing, my young friend.”

  The Weeder leaned toward Linkletter. “Have you ever come across a reference to something called Kabir?”

  “Are you thinking of applying there for a teaching position?” Linkletter asked with a small guttural laugh that sounded like a hiccup. “I’m not sure you speak the language.”

  “What language would that be?” the Weeder wanted to know.

  “Persian, some Kurdish, some Arabic, various strains of Turkic. You are talking about Amir Kabir College, formerly the Polytechnic College of Tehran University. As a matter of fact, the Company has been keeping rather close tabs on this particular institute of quote unquote higher learning for some time now. The dossier would take you a week to speed-read through.”

  “What’s so special about Amir Kabir College?”

  “Why, it’s a nuclear research center—the only one in Iran. That’s what’s special. It houses a five-megawatt research reactor,” Linkletter added. “If my memory serves me, and I will be the first to concede that it almost always does, the reactor has a fuel load of five kilograms of enriched uranium, which is enough to construct a nuclear weapon if the ayatollahs can get the technology right. Which so far, thanks to God, they have shown no signs of doing.” Linkletter lowered his head as if he intended to butt it against something. “Amir Kabir College is crossfiled under the heading ‘Islamic bomb.’ You see what I am driving at?”

  In the Weeder’s experience there was a magical moment when you were working out any puzzle—it came when a single piece fitted in that suddenly allowed you to see the entire picture. This was such a moment. He saw what Linkletter was driving at, all right, and more. He saw what Wanamaker was up to. He saw what Stufftingle was all about. He saw why American nationals wouldn’t be warned. In his mind’s eye he saw the Nagasaki-type bomb and the Nagasaki-type explosion, and the mushroom cloud spiraling up into the sky over Amir Kabir College in Tehran.

  “I’ll bet,” the Weeder told Linkletter, “the ayatollahs have lasers to separate weapons-grade uranium from ordinary uranium.”

  “As a matter of fact,” Linkletter said, “there is a school of Company thought which holds that the four lasers supposedly stolen from France in 1978 wound up in Tehran.”

  “At Amir Kabir College?”

  “It would be the logical home for them.”

  Linkletter, pouting, depressed the button on his intercom again. “Tea,” he cried in desperation, “should not be beyond the capacity of the Company to produce in a period of time that has some relation to when the request was made.”

  “Feel free,” the secretary retorted, “to dispense with my services when you judge they are no longer useful. Get someone else to run your errands. If you can.”

  Smiling blandly, the archivist nodded to himself as if he had confirmed something he already knew. “The secretarial instinct,” he informed the Weeder, “is being bred out of the species. What, I put it to you, is this world coming to?” He eyed the Weeder with something akin to physical desire. “Why did you ask me about Kabir? What do you know that we don’t?”

  “I know,” the Weeder said quietly, “that the world is not centered.”

  The archivist nodded grimly. “If you ask me, it may even be upside down.”

  17

  Waiting to have his pass and thumbprint verified in the lobby, the Weeder considered the options. It was crystal clear what Wanamaker was up to. (How could he have failed to see it before?) Rods. Hair triggers. Wedges. It wasn’t terrorists who were going to explode a primitive atomic device; it was Wanamaker and his people at Operations Subgroup Charlie. They had smuggled enough uranium into Tehran—probably onto the campus of Tehran University itself—to go critical and set off an uncontrolled chain reaction, otherwise (here the Weeder mimicked in his head the voice of his physicist friend) known as an atomic explosion. 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? one of Wanamaker’s people had asked. Why indeed? They were going to blow up Tehran University and Tehran, along with the Ayatollah and his army of anti-American fanatics, and make that part of the world congenial. The explosion would be primitive enough so that everyone would assume the Iranians had been trying to put together an Islamic bomb at the Kabir College reactor, which had gone off accidentally. Play with fire, the editorials would say, and you get burned.

  My side, the Weeder thought, is going to commit an atrocity. But what could he do to stop it? He couldn’t waltz up to the DDI, or the Director himself, and blow the whistle. Wanamaker was a Company employee, which made Stufftingle a Company operation. He couldn’t take his evidence to The Washington Post or the Intelligence Oversight Committee without ruining the Company and depriving America of its first line of defense; there were many in the press or in Congress who would relish the opportunity to castrate the Company on the basis of Stufftingle. The Weeder wouldn’t—he couldn’t!—give them the chance. He had meant what he said about being a patriot.

  Which left Wanamaker. He would send him a last love letter announcing that Stufftingle had been exposed—that if a primitive atomic device devastated Kabir College, the world would learn that Wanamaker was responsible for the explosion. Under these circumstances there would be no question of going ahead with the plot. The Weeder, meanwhile, would pull Stufftingle and Wanamaker from his computer hit list, would hide the printouts that had accumulated and take off for New England to let the dust settle. It wasn’t a perfect plan. But then, as Admiral Toothacher used to say in his guest lectures at the Farm, the perfect was the enemy of the good.

  The Weeder’s eyes wandered to the inscription on one wall of the lobby. He had read it a hundred times without giving it a second thought, without weighing the implications of such a phrase being in such a building. “And ye shall know the truth,” the inscription read, “and the truth shall make you free.”

  Whose truth? Which truth?

  18

  I’m up to the part where my man Nate takes two steps forward:

  I SEE IT IN MY MIND’S EYE: A MORNING fog saturated with sunlight would have dampened the sound of reveille. Nate would probably not have heard it in any case. Sitting Indian-style on a deer skin inside his tent, he was deeply engrossed in M. de Ramsay’s Travels of Cyrus, Prince of Persia (given to him, on his graduation from Yale, by his younger brother Richard, who was the great-grandfather of my great-grandfather). Nate loved reading about the heroes of antiquity. He often daydreamed about them, imagining what life had been like back in the time of the Iliad; imagining, too, how he would have conducted himself had he lived then. He liked to think he had the makings of a hero. But he wasn’t absolutely sure.

  It was Lieutenant Colonel T. Knowlton’s sixteen-year-old son, Frederick, who roused Nate from his reading and summoned him to the meeting. The Colonel, his father, wanted his four captains (Nate among them), his lieutenants, his ensigns to muster in a field outside the camp immediately. Nate’s tent mate, W. Hull, rolled over in his blanket and opened an eye and asked what time it was. “Time to move your ass,” I can hear Nate replying in a voice full of playfulness. “Time to beat the lobsters and win the war and get on with the business of constructing a country.”

  Hull might have snorted in derision. “Spare me,” he said, or words to that effect.

  Laughing, Nate would have mar
ked his page in Travels of Cyrus with a slip of paper—I don’t see him turning back the corners of pages the way some who have less respect for books do—and headed for the muster field.

  The fog would have burned off early that September day, revealing the officers of Knowlton’s Rangers drawn up in a casual line on a field in Westchester. Two or three wore breeches and braces but no shirts. One still had the traces of shaving lather on his chin. Hull arrived at muster barefoot. A homemade pennant with a coiled snake and the words Don’t tread on me hung limply from a pole planted in the middle of the field. Knowlton, impeccably dressed, paced impatiently in front of his officers. Nate noticed a pistol with a silver hilt and an ivory grip jutting from the colonel’s waistband. In the early days of the rebellion Knowlton had held the stone-and-rail fence at the base of Breed’s Hill (during what became known as the Battle of Bunker Hill, even though it took place on Breed’s Hill) against General Howe’s flanking movement. The colonel was a soldier’s soldier. His Rangers, all volunteers, all handpicked, idolized him. Certainly Nate did, judging from the letters he wrote to his father. In one of them he swore he would walk through fire for Knowlton. The sun, rising above a distant treeline, angled over the colonel’s shoulder into Nate’s eyes. Squinting, he heard the colonel’s booming voice coming from the silhouette in front of the sun. “Men,” Knowlton was saying, “Long Island has been lost. Howe went and ferried fifteen thousand lobsters to Graves End Bay and quick-marched them through the unguarded Jamaica Pass to fall on us from the flank. Our boys, them that could, retreated onto the Brookland Heights and escaped, thanks to the Marbleheaders and their longboats, across the East River to Manhattan Island. The Commander-in-Chief has gone and ordered me to send someone to reconnoiter behind the lobster lines in Brookland. He has got to know where the next blow will fall.”

  Here Knowlton stopped pacing and, facing his officers, placed his hands on his hips. When he spoke again he didn’t beat around the bush. “What I want,” he said, “what I need, is a volunteer for a dirty, dangerous mission.”

  What he wants, Nate thought to himself, is someone who is willing to walk through fire.

  Nate was suddenly aware of the total lack of movement around him; his comrades seemed to have turned into statues. The colonel, observing this, grimaced in embarrassment. “Must I return to the Commander-in-Chief and report that none of his officers, not a one, had the courage to take a few steps forward? Surely the rebellion is destined to go down to defeat if this represents the general attitude.”

  I have imagined the scene a thousand times; imagined Knowlton furiously challenging his officers with his feverish eyes; imagined them avoiding his gaze; imagined what must have been going through Nate’s head. He would have been remembering Hickey tiptoeing along the floorboards of the dray until there was no more dray to tiptoe along. He would have been picturing the executed man dancing at the end of the rope until a tough cookie of a shirtman extinguished his hiccuping and his life. He would have felt his heart sinking under the weight of pure fear—spies, when caught, were hanged by the neck until they were stone dead. If I know my man Nate, he would have tested himself against that fear.

  Do you see it? I do. On that muggy September morning, with a faint breeze from Long Island Sound stirring the crabgrass and the sun lolling lazily over Knowlton’s shoulder, Nate found himself taking two steps forward.

  Back in their tent, Hull and Stephen Hempstead both tried to talk Nate out of his decision. “It’s one thing to stand up to the lobsters in battle,” Hull—who happened to be a Yale classmate of Nate’s—declared. “It’s another to be asked to undertake something that is unmanly, even dishonorable. Who in his right mind respects the character of a spy?”

  “No one,” Hempstead offered.

  “As soldiers,” Hull continued ardently, “we are bound to do our duty in the field. But we are not obliged to stain our honor by the sacrifice of integrity.”

  “For God’s sake, listen to him,” Hempstead begged. “Don’t play the hero.”

  “People who want to be heroes are raving mad,” Hull said.

  “People who want to be spies,” Hempstead agreed, “are raving mad.”

  But Nate, once fixed on a course of action, was not easily dissuaded. “You talk of dishonor,” he told his two friends. “I wish to be useful, and every kind of service to the cause becomes honorable by being useful.”

  Stephen Hempstead tried another approach. “You are making a big mistake if you think spying is useful. In the end it might even hurt the cause.”

  “Explain yourself,” Nate ordered.

  Hempstead looked at Hull, who nodded encouragement. “The way I figure it,” Hempstead said, “a spy can never know for sure whether what he finds out he was meant to find out. Not knowing, it’s just as likely he will pass on what the enemy wants passed on, as opposed to useful information.”

  Nate shook his head. “A spy ought to be able to discover the enemy’s capabilities,” he insisted, “and then divine his intentions from his capabilities.”

  “Just because the enemy has a capability don’t mean he’s going to use it,” Hull argued.

  “Why would he go to the trouble and expense of having a capability if he’s not going to make use of it?” Nate asked. He thought he had his friends there.

  Hull shrugged. “You will wind up having your neck stretched on a gibbet.”

  Nate only said, “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.”

  “It is sweeter to live for your country,” Hull shot back.

  Nate didn’t appear convinced.

  Here’s Nate reporting to the Commander-in-Chief’s headquarters that same afternoon:

  FROM THE PORTICO OF THE ROGER Morris house on the lip of Coogan’s Bluff, Nate stared out at the small Dutch settlement of Haarlem visible on the flats next to the Haarlem River. Wiping sweat from his brow, the Commander-in-Chief came around from behind the house accompanied by a twenty-year-old major named A. Burr, who was an aide-de-camp to Old Put. Along with a handful of other staff officers, they had been exercising in the garden behind the house, seeing who could throw a heavy iron bar the farthest; as usual the Virginian had won the contest. (Behind his back it was whispered that he seemed to be able to win everything except the war.)

  The Commander-in-Chiefs features, Nate noticed immediately, looked more drawn than the last time he had seen him. It turned out that Congress had just sent word refusing permission to burn New York City to the ground. Burr had been dispatched by Old Put to headquarters to see if the Virginian considered that the final word on the subject. “What if we made out we never got the order?” Bun-asked. “What if we burned New York to the ground by accident?”

  The Virginian crankily swatted a fly that had landed on his breeches, then flicked the dead insect to the ground with a fingernail. “Rightly or wrongly, Congress rules and we are its servants,” he told Burr. “If we reverse these roles we will have lost even if we win.”

  Nate heard Burr say something about how the army might have a chance of defending the city. “Which army?” the Virginian, clearly in a black mood, sneered. “Sometimes I am not sure whether ours is one army or thirteen.”

  A. Hamilton, one of the Virginian’s bright young aides, offered the Commander-in-Chief his wig but was waved away. “I told Mr. Henry in Philadelphia, and I repeat it to you, Major Burr,” the Virginian said, “I date the ruin of my reputation from the day I took command of the American Armies.” The Commander-in-Chief glanced curiously at Nate, who was standing outside the front door. Hamilton whispered something in the general’s ear. “Just the man I’ve been waiting on,” the Virginian said. Gesturing for Nate to follow, he set off down the hallway, his riding boots pounding on Mr. Morris’s imported teak floorboards.

  The Virginian sank dejectedly onto a straight-backed chair behind a desk in the middle of the octagonal drawing room. Hamilton came in behind Nate and pulled the sliding doors closed. Nate looked out through the mullioned windows—some of the gene
ral’s aides were still tossing the iron bar behind the house and he could hear their cries as they egged one another on. He glanced at the Virginian and noticed him picking with a fingernail at a tooth brown with decay; several of the Virginian’s teeth seemed to be false and made of wood. Nate spotted two books on the desk and angled his head to read their titles. One was a worn copy of Frederick’s Instructions to His Generals, with tongues of paper jutting where someone had marked off pages. The other book was a leather-bound edition of Addison’s tragedy, Cato, easily the most popular English play of the day because of its talk of liberty.

  “State your name,” the general instructed Nate.

  Nate replied in a firm voice.

  “The mission is dangerous. Why are you volunteering?”

  “To use a very old-fashioned word, I consider myself a patriot. I want to be useful.”

  “You think risking your neck behind enemy lines will be useful?”

  “Excellency, I see myself as a small cog in a large machine that is America’s first line of defense.”

  “You believe in this army of ours?”

  “I believe in this country of ours, Excellency. To the extent that the army protects the country, I believe in the army.”

  “Well answered, in effect,” the Virginian said. He had caught Nate eyeing his copy of Cato, and asked, “Have you by chance read the Addison play?”

  “Several times, Excellency. I own a copy but left it with my other books at my father’s house in Connecticut.”

  “So you are a Connecticut man,” the Virginian said dryly. “I regret to tell you that that is not much of a recommendation these days. Hamilton here has been counting noses since the debacle on Long Island. It appears that six of the eight thousand men in the thirteen Connecticut militia regiments have vanished.”

  “Gone home to Connecticut, no doubt,” Hamilton said. “Did the same thing before the battle of Breed’s Hill. Their enlistments were up and nothing any of us said could convince them to stay.”