12

Wanamaker 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.