ASSEMBLED IN A WINDOWLESS STORAGE ROOM IN A BASEMENT OF Langley filled with empty watercoolers, the eight people around the conference table started, as always, with the family name and in short order narrowed the list down to one that had an Irish ring to it, but then spent the next half hour debating how it should be spelled. In the end the chairman, a station chief who reported directly to Crystal Quest, the new Deputy Director of Operations, turned to the agent known as Martin Odum, who had been following the discussion from a chair tilted back against the wall; as Martin’s “Odum” legend had been burned and he would be the person employing the new identity, it would save time if he settled on the spelling. Without a moment’s hesitation, Martin opted for Pippen with three p’s. “I’ve been reading newspaper stories about a young black basketball player at the University of Central Arkansas named Scottie Pippen,” Martin explained. “So I thought Pippen would have the advantage of being easy to remember.”
“Pippen it is,” announced the chairman and he turned to the selection of a Christian name to go with Pippen. The junior member of the Legend Committee, a Yale-educated aversion therapist, sarcastically suggested that they might want to go whole hog and use Scottie as the Christian name. Maggie Poole, who had read medieval French history as an Oxford undergraduate and liked to salt her conversation with French words, shook her head. “You’re all going to think I am off the wall but I came up with a name in my dreams last night that I consider parfait. Dante, as in Dante Alighieri?” She looked around the table expectantly.
The only other woman on the committee, a lexicographer on loan from the University of Chicago, groaned. “Problem with Dante Pippen,” she said, “is it wouldn’t go unnoticed. People tend to remember a name like that.”
“But don’t you see, that’s exactly what makes it an excellent choice,” exclaimed Maggie Poole. “Nobody thumbing down a list of names would suspect Dante Pippen of being a pseudonyme precisely because it stands out in a crowd.”
“She has a point,” agreed the committee’s doyen, a gargoyle-like CIA veteran who had started out creating legends for OSS agents during World War Two.
“I will admit I don’t dislike the sound of Dante,” ventured the aversion therapist.
The chairman looked at Martin. “What do you think?” he asked.
Martin repeated the names several times. Dante. Dante Pippen. “Uh-huh. I think it suits me. I can live with Dante Pippen.”
Once the committee had decided on a name, the rest of the cover story fell neatly into place.
“Our Dante Pippen is obviously Irish, born, say, in County Cork.”
“Where in County Cork?”
“I once vacationed in a seaport called Castletownbere,” said the aversion therapist.
“Castletownbere, Cork, has a good ring to it. We’ll send him there for a week of R and R. He can get a local map and the phone book, and fix in his head the names of the streets and hotels and stores.”
“Castletownbere is a fishing port. He would have worked on a salmon trawler as a teenager.”
“Then when the economy turned bad, he would have gone off to try his luck in the New World, where he will have picked up a lot about the history of the Irish in America—the potato famine of 1840 that brought the first Irish immigrants to our shores, the Civil War draft riots, that sort of thing.”
“If he comes from Castletownbere, he must be Catholic. For the price of a generous donation, we can probably get the local Castletownbere church to slip his name into its baptism records.”
“One fine day, like many, if not most, Irish men, he would have become fed up with the church.”
“A lapsed Catholic, then,” said the chairman, jotting the biographical detail down on his yellow pad.
“A very lapsed Catholic,” Martin piped up from his place along the wall.
“Just because he’s lapsed doesn’t mean his family will have lapsed.”
“Why don’t we give him a brother and a sister who are in the church but can’t be traced because they are no longer living under the name Pippen. Brother such and such. Sister such and such.”
“The brother could be a Jesuit priest in the Congo, converting the natives to Jesus at the bitter end of some crocodile infested river.”
“And the sister—let’s put her in a convent hospital in the back country of the Ivory Coast.”
“She will have taken a vow of silence, which means she couldn’t be interviewed even if someone got to her.”
“Is Dante Pippen a smoker or nonsmoker?
The chairman turned to Martin, who said, “I’ve been trying to cut down. If Dante Pippen is supposed to be a nonsmoker, it’ll give me an incentive to go cold turkey.”
“Nonsmoker it is, then.”
“Be careful you don’t put on weight. The CIA takes a dim view of overweight agents.”
“We ought to hire one or two—being obese would be a perfect cover.”
“Even if our Dante Pippen’s a lapsed Catholic, he would still have gone to Catholic school as a child. He would have been taught to believe that the seven sacraments—Baptism, Confirmation, Eucharist, Confession, Anointing of the Sick, Matrimony and Holy Orders—could see you through a lifetime of troubles.”
The chairman scribbled another note on his pad. “That’s a good point,” he said. “We’ll get someone to teach him rosaries in Latin—he could slip them into the conversation to lend credibility to the new identity.”
“Which brings us to his occupation. What exactly does our Dante Pippen do in life?”
The chairman picked up Martin Odum’s 201 Central Registry folder and extracted the bio file. “Oh, dear, our Martin Odum can be said to be a renaissance man only if one defines renaissance narrowly. He was born in Lebanon County, Pennsylvania, and spent the first eight years of his life in a Pennsylvania backwater called Jonestown, where his father owned a small factory manufacturing underwear for the U.S. Army during World War Two. After the war the underwear business went bankrupt and the elder Odum moved the family to Crown Heights, Brooklyn, to start an electrical appliance business. Crown Heights is where Martin was brought up.”
“Being brought up in Brooklyn is not the most auspicious beginning for a renaissance man, even defined narrowly,” quipped Maggie Poole. She twisted in her seat toward Martin. “I’m not ruffling your feathers, am I?”
Martin only smiled.
“Yes, well,” the chairman continued, “our man majored in commerce and minored in Russian at a Long Island state college but never seems to have earned a degree. During vacations he climbed the lower alps in the more modest American mountain ranges. At loose ends, he joined the army to see the world and wound up, God knows why, toiling for military intelligence, where he focused on anticommunist dissidents in the satellite states of Eastern Europe. Do I have that right, Martin? Ah, here’s something positively intriguing. When he was younger he worked in the private sector with explosives—”
Maggie Poole turned to Martin. “What précisément did you do with explosives?”
Martin rocked his chair off the wall onto its four legs. “It was a summer job, really. I worked for a construction company demolishing old buildings that were going to be replaced, then blasting through bedrock to make way for the subbasement garages. I was the guy who shouted through a bullhorn for everyone to clear the area.”
“But do you know anything about dynamite?”
“I picked up a bit here and a bit there hanging around the dynamiters. I bought some books and studied the subject. By the end of the summer I had my own blasting license.”
“Did you fabricate dynamite or just light the fuses?”
“Either, or. When I first came to work for the Company,” Martin said, “I spent a month or two making letter bombs, then I got promoted to rigging portable phones so that we could detonate them from a distance. I also worked with pentaerythritol tetranitrate, which you know as PETN, an explosive of choice for terrorists. You can mix it with latex to give it plasticity and mold it to fit into anything—a telephone, a radio, a teddy bear, a cigar. You get a big bang out of relatively small amounts of PETN, and in the absence of a detonator, it’s extremely stable. PETN isn’t readily available on the open market but anyone with a blasting license, which Martin Odum has, can obtain the ingredients for roughly twenty dollars the pound. The explosive, incidentally, can pass through any airport X-ray machine in operation today.”
“Well, that opens up some intriguing possibilities,” the chairman informed the others.
“He could have done a stint as an explosive specialist at a shale quarry in Colorado, then been fired for something or other—”
“Stealing PETN and selling it on the open market—”
“Sleeping with the boss’s wife—”
“Homosexualité, even.”
Martin piped up from the wall. “If you don’t mind, I draw the line at having homosexuality in my legend.”
“We’ll figure out why he was fired later. What we have here is an Irish Catholic—”
“Lapsed. Don’t forget he’s lapsed.”
“—a lapsed Irish Catholic who worked with explosives in the private sector.”
“Only to be fired for an as yet undetermined offense.”
“At which point he became a free-lance explosive expert.”
“We may have a problem here,” said the chairman, tapping a fore-finger on one page of Martin Odum’s 201 folder. “Our Martin Odum is circumcised. Dante Pippen, lapsed or not, is an Irish Catholic. How do we explain the fact that he’s circumcised.”
The committee kicked around several possibilities. It was Maggie Poole who invented a suitable fiction. “In the unlikely event the question should come up, he could say he was talked into it by his first American girlfriend, who thought she would have less chance of catching a venereal disease from him if he were circumcised. Pippen could say the operation was performed in a New York clinic. It shouldn’t be too difficult to plant a medical record at a clinic to backstop the story.”
“Moving on, could he have been a member, at one point, of the IRA?”
“An IRA dynamiter! Now that’s creative. It’s not something the Russians or East Europeans could verify because the IRA is more secretive than the KGB.”
“We could give him an arrest record in England. Arrested, questioned about an IRA bombing or two, released for lack of evidence.”
“We could even plant small items in the press about the arrests.”
“We are mining a rich vein,” declared the chairman, his eyes bulging with enthusiasm. “What do you think, Martin?”
“I like it,” Martin said from his seat. “Crystal Quest will like it, too. Dante Pippen is exactly the kind of legend that will open doors.”