10

Wanamaker took Webb aside and lectured him about rank having its privileges. Webb swallowed his pride and moved out of his office, doubling up with Parker so that the Admiral would have a place to hang his hat. Toothacher personally presided over the purification of Webb’s cubbyhole of an office. “Kindly vacuum under the desk,” he instructed the black maintenance man who turned up in response to his urgent requests. “It might not be a bad idea to shake the rug out the window. Better still, take it with you when you leave. The ashtrays, the books on the shelves, the magazines on the coffee table can also go. The coffee table too. I don’t drink coffee. And kindly don’t forget to wash the windows and sterilize the desk top.”

“Wouldn’t it be simpler if I removed the desk with the coffee table?” the maintenance man inquired with a straight face.

“If you can replace it with a new one I would leap at the offer,” Toothacher cooed. “If not, moisten a cloth with some sort of detergent and scrub it squeaky clean.”

The Admiral eventually settled warily into the only chair left in the room, scraped it up to the sterilized desk and started sorting through his notes. When Wanamaker had described the paper trail as “thin” he had been exaggerating. In fact it was almost nonexistent. The handful of written references to “rods,” “hair triggers,” “wedges,” “Stufftingle” and “Ides” had never traveled beyond the four incredibly soiled walls of Wanamaker’s inner sanctum, or so Wanamaker would have him believe. Wanamaker, Mildred, Parker and Webb at various times had access to the paper trail; each scrap of paper in Wanamaker’s battleship-gray safe bore the initials of anyone who read it. That seemed as good a place to start as any.

The Admiral pulled a single sheet of typing paper from the middle of the pile in a drawer (never having been touched by human hands, it would be relatively germ free) and began to compose a chart. Down the left-hand side of the paper he entered the names of the four people involved in Stufftingle. Across the top he listed the dates at which various elements of the operation (rods, hair triggers, wedges, Stufftingle, Ides) had fallen into place. Across the bottom he put the dates the love letters had been delivered into Wanamaker’s clammy hands. Then he attempted to cross-check to see who had known what when. The result was disappointing. Parker, a specialist on getting people and things across Mideast borders undetected, had joined the Stufftingle team eighteen months before; he had known, according to the paper trail, about rods and hair triggers and wedges, but had never been let in on Ides. Mildred had been on sick leave (“female problems,” according to Wanamaker) when wedges, whatever they were, became operational. Webb, who had worked in the field with the anti-Khomeini Iranians before being posted back to Washington, had slipped a disc and been out of action when the element known as hair triggers was introduced.

Wanamaker, on the other hand, had his initials on every scrap of paper, which meant that he was familiar with all the pieces. Which was to be expected since he was, after all, in charge of the operation. Was it possible that Wanamaker was writing the love letters to himself? The Admiral had seen odder things in his day.

Toothacher set aside his chart and placed the first of the four thick dossiers in his in-basket on the desk. Perhaps the key to who had leaked Stufftingle was to be found not in the paper trail but in the biographies of the four principal players. One of them might be jealous of Wanamaker or hold a grudge against him for a slight, real or imagined. The Admiral would pore over the dossiers to see which of the four had crossed paths before. He would pry loose rocks and search for worms of treachery—the tiny discrepancy, the microscopic incongruity that would help him unravel the mystery. Insofar as there was only one truth, and it was knowable, he was determined to discover it.