Twenty-five minutes later Michaelson unlocked a steel box fitted into the lower drawer of his desk at the Brookings Institution—the Massachusetts Avenue headquarters for the eastern establishment’s permanent shadow cabinet. He took out a battered, mustard-colored, nine-by-twelve envelope. Although the date he’d written on the envelope the night he got it—2/23/94—lay some five years in the past, the envelope was on top of the files in the box because he’d dug it out the day before, just after Phillips’ provocative phone call.
“Richard, I need a favor,” Phillips had said a little over thirty hours earlier. “For you a potentially lucrative favor.”
“Perhaps, if it doesn’t involve lying, cheating, or stealing.”
“How do you feel about two out of three?”
Inside the envelope was a photograph of a hotel bill lying at a slight angle against the background of a different document featuring faded, elaborately old-fashioned handwriting. (Photograph, not photocopy, for Michaelson noticed a slight distortion in the printed letters, suggesting an enlargement made from a much smaller negative.) On June 13, 1987, apparently, a traveler had checked out of the St. Demetrius Hotel in Jessenice, Yugoslavia. The charge for two nights, three room-service meals, and one long-distance call had run to just under $450. The exiting guest had settled the bill with an American Express card issued to Imex Tradco, Inc.
Not quite seven years later, on February 23, 1994, a lawyer named Josh Logan had handed Michaelson the envelope during a reception at the Indian embassy. He had accompanied this tender with the none-too-comfortable explanation that “Jim Halliburton asked me to get this to you if anything happened.”
“Has something happened?” Michaelson had asked.
“He was admitted to Bethesda Naval Hospital at four o’clock this afternoon with nervous exhaustion.”
“Nervous exhaustion” in Washington is a multipurpose diagnosis that can mean anything from attempted suicide to an aversion to subpoenas. In Halliburton’s case, coming three months after his resignation from the White House staff, it had meant acute and apparently permanent neurasthenia; for in the years that had passed from that evening to this afternoon, Halliburton had never seen his home again.
Michaelson, in his early sixties and retired for several years from the Foreign Service, was thirteen years younger than Halliburton. Michaelson had served as everything from desk officer for Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to deputy chief of mission for the American embassy in New Delhi, before ultimately becoming Area Director for Near East and South Asian Affairs. He had crossed paths frequently with Halliburton, who had specialized in the same part of the world for the State Department until he joined the White House staff in the mid-eighties. That move had made Michaelson and Halliburton de facto rivals, for part of the job of each had become keeping a wary and confrontational eye on the other. (Congress didn’t stumble over Ollie North’s escapades all by itself.)
Michaelson handled the envelope with a practiced deftness that spared the little finger on his left hand. He had been without half of that finger ever since a heavily orchestrated late-seventies embassy riot whose participants had included an enthusiastic (but apparently nearsighted) chap with a Kalyshnikov assault rifle.
Aside from his seventy-four inches in height, the slightly maimed finger was Michaelson’s only remarkable physical feature. Dark brown eyes dominated his face, looking almost black because of the contrast with his white hair. His expressions usually covered the narrow range suggested by Talleyrand’s mot about the perfectly trained diplomat: surtout, pas trop de zèle. Detached, professorial interest, polite skepticism, dispassionate curiosity, gentle irony, or qualified approval were all that untrained observers were likely to read in his face or hear in his voice. The most important attribute produced by his training and experience was something that those who didn’t know him well spotted only rarely, and then in such bracing form that they were often shocked. This was the ability to look the truth in the face, no matter how appalling it generally was, and to accept it dispassionately without kidding himself.
The beginning and end of the Cold War served as nearly perfect bookends for Michaelson’s thirty-five eventful years as a Foreign Service officer. Stalin was still in power when Michaelson took the Foreign Service entrance examination, and the Berlin Wall had only a few years left to stand when he retired. In between he had been shot at twice that he knew of, counting the ricochet that cost him half a pinkie. Three times in a U.S. mission where he was in functional command he had ordered destruction of code books, which is the last thing you do before you turn things over to the marines. He had never turned things over to the marines.
He had established and for a few years run the State Department’s Interagency Liaison Office, which was Foggy Bottom’s first grudging admission that institutional survival required it to spy systematically on the CIA. (Michaelson had once commented that the Central Intelligence Agency’s only deficiencies were a weakness in local geography and a problem with basic arithmetic: It thought that the Department of State was located in Langley, Virginia, and that the country had only one branch of government.) In the early seventies he had told President Nixon that India would beat Pakistan in a war. President Nixon hadn’t wanted to hear that, which was bad, and the event had proved Michaelson correct, which was worse.
He had taken early retirement as a calculated gamble. While occupying an office at Brookings with other members of the government-in-waiting (or government-in-exile), he would write thin books and closely reasoned op-ed pieces; he would participate in symposiums; he would talk to reporters who wanted more than sound bites; he would mentor monographs on international affairs. And he would wait for a phone call from a pleasant-voiced woman asking him to hold, please, for the president’s chief of staff: We need a new national security adviser; or CIA director; or even (now) secretary of state—and the president would like to talk to you.
He was still waiting. There were still people around who could make that call happen. He sometimes did things for those people, and he jealously guarded their good opinion of him. And there were many people around who thought that call might one day come. They sometimes did things for him.
He and his wife had divorced a few years after the Indo-Pakistani War, when it had become clear he was probably never going to be Ambassador Michaelson. Somewhat testily, however, he had rejected the suspicions of Marjorie and others that his marriage had failed because of his career-limiting bluntness. Instead he blamed himself. He felt he should have sensed his wife’s ebbing confidence, her growing feeling that she was out of place in his world and no longer equal to the demands of a Washington very different from the one she had known in the fifties and sixties. He hadn’t. Surtout, pas assez de zèle. He knew colleagues who thought the disintegration of his marriage and the yawning ache it produced had deepened him, enhanced the human perspective that informed his dispassionate and often chillingly clinical analyses. He would rather have skipped the pain and taken his chances.
Michaelson had learned about the immediate background to Jim Halliburton’s mental illness eighteen months after getting the envelope from Logan. One of the independent counsel (as special prosecutors had come to be called) swarming around Washington at the time had sent a letter to Halliburton in care of Logan, who was representing him. The substance was straightforward: Halliburton was a subject of the investigation; the statute of limitations was about to expire; unless he waived that defense, he would be immediately indicted—which would mean he would have to start paying Logan’s hefty legal bills himself instead of passing them on to the Treasury.
“That’s what broke him,” Logan had told Michaelson with the biting lucidity of calibrated intoxication. “The sniveling little weasels didn’t have the guts either to pull the trigger or to lay down the gun. They were just going to leave him hanging. And the people he’d gone out on a limb for stopped returning his calls.”
During his career Michaelson had seen women in Iran publicly flogged for wearing lipstick. He had seen teenaged boys in Afghanistan strung up by their heels, castrated, and gutted for picking the wrong side in a civil war. But nothing he’d had to look at over three and a half decades of diplomacy had been harder for him than the spectacle of Jim Halliburton during the roughly annual visits Michaelson made to him at the VA Extended Care Facility in Rockville, Maryland. The mind that had mastered Arabic and Hindi was now reduced to incoherent mutterings about briefing Dean Rusk or Cyrus Vance the day before, the once-hard belly left flabby and grotesquely distended by inactivity and pureed food. Eyes that had been coolly analytic were now invaded by feral terror at the mention of standing up. And the thought Michaelson couldn’t altogether repress each time he drove away: I have seen the future, and it stinks.
Michaelson had kept Logan’s envelope all these years, long after Washington had forgotten Halliburton and whatever affair had enmeshed him, and long after all the independent counsel and congressional investigators had turned in their last expense accounts and folded up shop. He had kept it in adherence to a fundamental Washington principle: Information is currency, and you don’t throw some away just because you don’t know the denomination. He had also kept it as a pointed reminder, for among the first leaks and hints that had stimulated the investigation that ultimately blasted Halliburton’s mind were some disseminated in the line of duty by Richard Michaelson.
Michaelson didn’t know much more about the significance of the document inside the envelope now than he had five years before. But he could read. The traveler who had checked out of the St. Demetrius Hotel was Andrew Shepherd. And Imex Tradco had the same street address as Calvert Manor. That, rather than a thoughtful concern for Marjorie Randolph and her friend Patrice Helmsing, was why he had asked her to visit the house with him after Phillips’ phone call. And that was why he was going to call on Avery Phillips this afternoon.