3

“Welcome 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.