23

The raspy voice of the thickset man filtered through a haze of tobacco smoke. “Be careful,” he warned. “There are things I want to know and things I don’t want to know. I leave it to your intuition to distinguish between the two.”

Wanamaker could barely contain his excitement. Words spilled out. “The Admiral’s identified the author of the love letters,” he announced. He wondered if the thickset man had had the men’s room checked for bugs. As a precaution, he turned on the cold water faucet full blast. It occurred to him that the thickset man might think Wanamaker didn’t trust him, so he began to rinse his hands under the running water.

At the next sink the thickset man coughed up a grunt of satisfaction. He studied his image in the mirror as if he hadn’t seen it for a long time.

Wanamaker glanced uneasily at the door. “You sure we won’t be interrupted?” He pictured the two young men in loose-fitting sport jackets blocking with their bodies the door to the men’s room. “What if somebody has to pee very badly?”

“My people won’t prevent him from urinating. They will only prevent him from urinating here.”

Wanamaker opened his mouth to giggle at what he thought was a joke. Then he decided it hadn’t been meant as a joke and aborted the laugh. “About the love letters, the guy who sent them’s named Silas Sibley. You want to know how he ticked to Stufftingle? Or how the Admiral ticked to him?”

Sucking thoughtfully on his pipe, the thickset man said, “No.”

Leaving the faucet running, Wanamaker began drying his hands on a paper towel. “Then all that’s left to talk about is what we’re going to do to neutralize the leak.”

The thickset man pursed his lips and shook his head.

“You don’t want to know that either?”

“Definitely not. The only thing that interests me is Stufftingle. All I want to know is that it is back on track. How you get it back on track I leave in your very professional, and I assume very discreet, hands. I don’t really give a damn what you people do, so long as you don’t do it in the street and frighten old ladies walking their spaniels.”

“Yeah, well, there is still the small matter of locating the guy who wrote the love letters in the two weeks and two days left to us before the Ides, but my Admiral friend doesn’t foresee any great problem there because the asshole who wrote them doesn’t know we know he wrote them.”

The thickset man seemed disturbed about something. “We?”

“The Admiral and me.”

“The Admiral and you?”

“The Admiral figured out what Stufftingle was on his own—”

The thickset man turned on Wanamaker. “Someone outside your cell is aware of Stufftingle? I thought it was clearly understood—”

“There’s nothing to get nervous about because the Admiral’s all for it. He thinks it’s a first-class idea, something we should have done years ago. You have to understand about the Admiral. The thing that motivates him is nostalgia. He’s nostalgic for the days when an agent used a code name and left a sample of his Morse “fist” on file so the enemy couldn’t send phony messages over his call sign. He’s nostalgic for when everyone knew who the enemy was and anything you did to weaken or embarrass him or confuse him was legitimate, and you didn’t have to go sucking up to the turkeys from Congressional Oversight. Listen, the Admiral’s one of us. He’s offered to see the business of the leak—” Wanamaker started selecting his words carefully so as not to tell the thickset man something he didn’t want to know—”through to its logical conclusion, if you get what I mean without my actually going and spelling it out.”

“He’s going to plug the leak?”

“Him and Huxstep and Mildred. Right.”

“What will happen if they fail?”

“The Admiral’s anticipated that contingency. He’s cooked up a worst-case cover story. If the leaker goes public, we’ll claim he has a history of mental instability. The Admiral has a shrink up his sleeve who’s preparing a written diagnosis—schizophrenia, whatever. If we need to, we’ll pull that out of the files to protect ourselves.” Wanamaker shrugged a shoulder. “It’ll be our word against that of a lunatic.”

“Does this Admiral friend of yours”—Wanamaker didn’t miss the sarcasm here—”know about me?”

“He’s no dummy, the Admiral. He could find his way through a labyrinth of half-truths blindfolded. He’s figured out I must be reporting to someone in the superstructure, but he doesn’t know who. And you can bet he’s not going to find out from me.”

“That is precisely what I am betting,” the thickset man remarked. He flashed a thin smile at his reflection in the mirror and seemed genuinely gratified when his expression smiled back at him. When he spoke, he appeared to be addressing the reflection in the mirror. “Thank you for bringing me up-to-date,” he told it, and he reached into his jacket pocket to turn down the hearing aid.

“The pleasure—” Wanamaker started to say, but he saw that the thickset man could no longer hear him, and didn’t waste breath finishing the sentence.