XI

Early Wednesday Morning

WASHINGTON, D.C. (AP) … The White House announced today that President Forsythe would be traveling aboard a Concorde SST for his Moscow trip Thursday.

This will be the first official trip for the supersonic aircraft, which was purchased last year to be used as Air Force One.

The section of the United States Embassy in Moscow that was designated intelligence territory—as if no one else in the huge building had any intelligence—was called the White Room. The name came from a curious little electronic device that generated what the scientists called “white noise”: random bits of electronic noise that could not be heard by the human ear, but that screwed up any electronic eavesdropping device such as phone taps and even some kinds of microwave scans.

The White Room at the Moscow embassy, quiet on this night, was in actuality a half-dozen rooms at the back of the main building including the basement, first and second floors, plus the corridors and stairwells, as well as a few other isolated rooms and offices scattered throughout the building.

Outside of those areas were signs posted at irregular intervals on the walls warning that: “Listeners are Everywhere”; “Button Your Lip and Save Your Life”; and one poster which showed a hapless little man in a crumpled suit behind bars which proclaimed: “Even Unintentional Espionage is a Federal Offense.”

Elsewhere in the embassy the staff was busy preparing for the president’s arrival in less than thirty-four hours. The staff here was jocular although tired, and the bad jokes flew almost as fast as the paper work.

The correct grade of gasoline for the presidential motorcade, properly inflated tires, Bacardi rum in stock because it was the president’s favorite drink, route security in cooperation with the Soviet Civil Police, accommodations for the presidential staff as well as the White House journalists, and a very sophisticated American-made defibrillation unit—everything had to be perfect. Although it was not public knowledge, the embassy had been informed by the chief White House physician that the president had a heart condition. Every detail was being planned. Every eventuality was being planned for.

Every eventuality, Mahoney thought as he entered the main front doors of the embassy and stopped at the marine guard’s desk. Every eventuality save one. That someone, somewhere, was going to try to kill the president of the United States with a Soviet-made laser device.

“We’re not signing in any longer?” Mahoney asked the young marine. The usual in/out log book was missing from the desk. Instead, a stack of blank three-by-five cards and a pen were neatly placed in front of the soldier.

“Yessir,” the young soldier said. He slid a blank card and the pen toward Mahoney. “Your name and time in on the card, sir.”

Mahoney signed his name and the time and pushed the card back to the marine. “When did this start?”

“This evening, sir. It was like this when I came on duty.”

Mahoney nodded. “Let me see the cards for the last six hours.”

The marine had placed the card in a small file box on the cabinet behind him and when he turned around he was shaking his head. “I’m sorry, sir, the in/out logs are closed.”

“On whose orders?”

“Mr. Carlisle’s, sir.”

Mahoney stared at the young man for a long moment, then shrugged. “I see,” he said and went down the corridor toward the elevator.

Upstairs, the White Room corridor was dark, and Mahoney shuffled down the hall to his office, unlocked the door and went inside. He did not turn on the light, but instead went behind his desk, sat down and stared out the window at the rain that was beginning to turn into wet snowflakes.

After awhile he poured himself a shot of whiskey from his bottle in a desk drawer, lit himself a cigar and again stared out the window as he smoked and drank, the whiskey not warming his insides this time, just laying sour in his stomach.

Once when Michael was eleven or twelve, Mahoney had taken him to his office, which at the time had been in the United Nations facility in New York City. His cover had been trade mission liaison between the American delegation and several of the delegations from Europe. His office was in a row of similar little cubicles, each occupied by a legitimate trade mission officer.

Michael had been impressed by the new building, by the foreigners in their strange garb, and by the immensity of it all, but in his father’s office he had wrinkled up his nose.

“What’s the matter, son?” Mahoney had asked, amused.

“I don’t like it here, Dad,” his son said.

“What’s the matter with it?”

“It’s too little.”

“The offices are a lot bigger upstairs.”

“I don’t mean that, Dad,” Michael said. “Everything is too little. I don’t want to work here when I grow up.”

“What do you want to do?”

“I want to work out in the woods. With the trees and the animals.”

Mahoney had heaved a tremendous sigh of relief that day and every day afterward whenever Michael reiterated his desire to become a forest ranger or game warden.

He reflected now, however, that despite all the precautions, despite the fact that Michael had grown up to become a forest scientist, he had been dragged into the fray. All Mahoney’s dreams for keeping his children insulated from his work had vanished. It had come as he had feared it might come all along.

Mahoney finished his whiskey, turned on his desk lamp, and put an Officer Contact form in his typewriter and began writing a report on his contact with Zamyatin, starting with Marge’s phone call, and including the fact that his telephone had been bugged.

He worked for nearly two hours leaving nothing out, ignoring no speculation including the fact that it was a very real possibility that Carlisle himself was involved in a plot to assassinate the president.

The wind was blowing hard, streaking the snow against the window behind him, and howling around the building’s corners, making him shiver.

Mahoney was very careful in his report not to step out of the bounds of his conversation with the Russian. Where the data seemed to support Zamyatin, Mahoney included them just that way. And where the facts seemed to point merely toward a Soviet plot to discredit Carlisle, Mahoney reported them without any special emphasis.

In this instance Mahoney was doing nothing more than acting as a conduit. A pipeline from Zamyatin to the intelligence pool. He would let the accusations, at least on paper, come from other quarters.

When he was finished it was nearly three in the morning, and he was dead tired. His eyes burned, his back was sore from sitting in one position, and he knew that when he got to his feet his legs would ache terribly.

He lit himself another cigar and poured himself a second drink, then sat back in his chair to read over the half-dozen closely spaced typewritten pages he had completed.

These kinds of reports were supposed to be subjective. They were judged not only by their raw content, but on such things as the validity of the officer making the report. If the officer was a man such as Mahoney with long experience and a record of solid accomplishments, the report was taken quite seriously. Especially the sections of the report that contained such phrases as: “I believe that…”; “In my opinion…”; and “Considering past experience…”

But in this instance Mahoney had carefully avoided those terminologies. Instead he had called speculations just that, not gracing those thoughts with words like “opinion” or “believe.”

He finally placed the report in a blank file folder and stuffed it beneath a stack of jackets on one corner of his desk. He stood up and stretched.

His legs throbbed, hurting him all the way up to his hips as he shut off his lamp and hobbled around his desk to the door.

Carlisle’s office was two floors up and was checked like other White Room offices only at infrequent intervals during the night. The Citadel, as some of the staffers referred to Carlisle’s domain, was the holy of holy places in the embassy, along with the ambassador’s office. No one ever approached the door to either office without a direct invitation. And since embassy security as a whole was quite good, it was felt that infrequent checks by the night O.D. was sufficient.

Mahoney slipped out into the dimly lit corridor, closing and locking his door behind him, then silently made his way to the stairwell door, went through it and started the climb.

Deep inside of him where there should have been a wellspring of emotions, there was nothing but a dull, flat ache. He had blanked out his thoughts about his children, and of necessity his wife as well. It was a trick of the trade he had learned long ago.

“If you are on a mission, if you have a lot of straight thinking to do, your personal life must not intrude,” he had told a junior staff conference once. “You have only so much mental and emotional energy available, and if you are to do a good job you mustn’t squander it on thinking about your wife’s new hairdo, or your mistress missing her last period. Those kinds of things will just slow you down.”

He came to the landing one floor above his, and he had to stop a moment to catch his breath, to ease the pain in his legs.

Things at the White House would now be rising to a fever pitch as preparations for the president’s trip went into full swing. Out at Andrews Air Force Base, the ground crew would be working hand in hand with the flight crew going over Air Force One with a fine-toothed comb. In times past, in other Air Force One aircraft, the president was supplied with a parachute. The only man aboard to be so equipped. But Mahoney idly wondered what was done to protect the president in an SST. Surely there was no possibility of parachuting from an airplane that flew 1,400 miles per hour nearly twelve miles above the earth. Perhaps the aircraft was equipped with an ejection seat.

Mahoney continued his climb and at Carlisle’s floor he opened the stairwell door a crack and peered out. The corridor here was only dimly lit, just like the downstairs halls, and it was deserted.

He withdrew a slender steel needle from a narrow leather case he kept in his pocket, slipped into the corridor and hurried to Carlisle’s office door.

In less than thirty seconds he had picked the lock, entered the office, and had locked the door behind him.

Fifteen minutes later he had thoroughly searched Carlisle’s office, his desk and file cabinets, and had slipped downstairs to the embassy library where he took his usual spot at the windowbox seat. Only now his wellspring of emotions was not blank, it was seething.

There had not been one single shred of paperwork on operation LOOK SEE in Carlisle’s office. There was nothing on Zamyatin’s children. No communiqués about his own children. Nothing in the daily logs about Mahoney and his contacts with Zamyatin. And nothing about the activities of the last weekend at Dzerzhinsky Square.

Mahoney had found, however, dozens of files showing, step by step, every movement the president would be making from the moment he got off Air Force One at Vnukovo Airport until he got back on.

And the most damning file of all contained only a single sheet of paper. It was a personal dossier on Nikolai Gamov, Nobel Prize winner, and head of the Democratic Movement of Soviet artists, writers, and scientists.

It was snowing so hard now that Mahoney could not see the gravel courtyard or brick wall below him, only the swirling gray snowflakes soft against a totally black background.

He stared out the window and the moving snow seemed to draw him forward. A, he told himself. Carlisle was indeed the nigger in the woodpile. He was engineering the Democratic Movement in an attempt on the president’s life. Or B, all of this was a setup. Some kind of a twisted conspiracy. But for what purpose? For whose gain?

Slowly, the same name that had cropped up so many times in Mahoney’s thinking over the past few days formed again in his mind.

Congdon. Perhaps he still held the key.

Mahoney got up, his legs much better than before, left the library, and worked his way through the maze of corridors to the housing wing of the embassy building.

At Congdon’s apartment door he stopped a moment to listen before he knocked softly. There had been no sound from within, but a moment after he knocked he could hear someone coming, then the door swung open.

George Congdon, wearing nothing more than a pair of rumpled trousers and a dirty T-shirt, no shoes or socks on his feet, his hair mussed and his eyes red-rimmed and bloodshot, peered out at Mahoney standing in the corridor.

For a moment neither man spoke, but then Congdon cleared his throat. “You’ve come to see the kids?” he asked hopefully. His voice seemed raw.

“I came to see you, George,” Mahoney said gently. “May I come in?”

Congdon just stood there holding on to the doorframe with one hand. He hadn’t shaved in what looked like a day or more, and he looked as if he was on the verge of collapse.

“I could use a drink,” Mahoney prompted, and Congdon seemed to come slightly out of his daze. He moved aside and let Mahoney into the apartment.

A blanket and a crumpled pillow were spread out on the couch, and Congdon brushed past Mahoney and lay down, throwing an arm over his eyes.

“The kids are asleep in my bedroom. You know where the liquor is,” Congdon said.

Mahoney went into the kitchen, which was immaculately clean, and poured himself a stiff shot of whiskey from the liquor cabinet next to the sink. He drank it down in one swallow, rinsed the glass and came back into the living room.

“Zamyatin’s oldest daughter, Sandra, cleaned up the kitchen before she went to bed. She’s quite a girl,” Congdon said from the couch.

Mahoney sat down in an easy chair across from Congdon and studied his old friend’s nearly inert form for a long time.

Congdon had always been a fastidious man. Neat not only about his dress and his personal appearance, but neat about his thinking.

“Everything has its place, and there is a place for everything,” he used to say. “It is our job to see that the square pegs get put into the square holes, and the round pegs get stuck in the round holes, and not vice versa. Simple. No?”

“Carlisle is sitting on you, George. What has he got?”

Congdon didn’t move, didn’t speak, and for a moment didn’t appear even to be breathing.

“It’s too late for him now,” Mahoney said. “Can’t you see that? I know what is going on. He can’t do anything to you.”

Congdon slowly withdrew his arm from across his eyes, turned his head and looked up at Mahoney. There were tears in his eyes, and Mahoney’s heart skipped a beat.

“What is it, George? What has that madman got on you?”

“My wife,” Congdon said, his voice low and raspy.

Mahoney leaned forward to better hear him. “What about her?”

“Jesus … Jesus … Jesus…” Congdon stammered, the tears streaming down his cheeks.

Mahoney tried to think. One year ago Janet Congdon had died of cancer. One day she had discovered several lumps in both of her breasts, had gone to the American doctor here in the embassy, and within ten days had been shipped back to the hospital in Washington, D.C., where she died.

Congdon had taken a thirty-day leave, but then had returned to Moscow where he had literally thrown himself into his work.

“Janet died of cancer,” Mahoney prompted, making his voice as gentle as he possibly could.

Congdon was shaking his head. “She was murdered. They killed her.”

It was like a knife cutting into Mahoney’s heart. He couldn’t find any words.

“Carlisle says he knows who engineered her death. He said he would tell me, if I cooperated. He says he will help me get the people, if I am a good boy.” His words were bitter.

Mahoney let his breath out with a deep sigh. “He’s using you, George. Janet died of cancer. She smoked. The doctors said it was lung cancer that spread. You saw the reports.”

“Carlisle says they introduced a carcinogen into a meal she ate at a Soviet restaurant. He says they do it all the time.”

“No,” Mahoney said. “Those chemicals can be detected. Carlisle is using you. Why? What do you know that he wants held back?”

Congdon just stared at him.

“He took Zamyatin’s children, and he says he’s got Michael, John, and the kids in custody back in the States. Can’t you see what he’s doing?”

Still Congdon held his silence.

“There’s a good chance that the president will be assassinated on Thursday. Carlisle may be the man behind it.”

“No,” Congdon finally said.

“What?”

Congdon sat up. “I mean I don’t know anything about that,” he said wearily. He had stopped crying.

“What did Carlisle tell you to keep from me?”

“It doesn’t make any sense, Wallace,” Congdon said almost beseechingly. “It doesn’t mean anything. It’s so goddamned useless. So meaningless.”

“What is?”

“All this time … all these days I thought you were working on the Mideast thing. The crises. Nuclear weapons. A Soviet plot to take over the oil wells. All this time.” Now there as a note of wonder in his voice.

None of this was making any sense, but Mahoney said nothing because it appeared as if Congdon was going to continue.

“Dzerzhinsky Square was working at full tilt. Washington … New York … the embassy in Mexico City … everywhere it was the same. All the stops had been pulled out. Or so it seemed.”

“What was it you discovered?”

“I went to Carlisle with it on Monday. It was so goddamned obvious.” Congdon was shaking his head in wonder. “And then the roof caved in. Carlisle said I was not to mention this to you. I was not even to mention our conversation. Nothing. I was to play dumb. On Thursday he’d return the favor. He’d help me.”

“And now?”

Congdon shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. Carlisle was wrong when he figured you were working on the Mideast thing. He was afraid you’d do something to screw up the president’s position on Thursday.” He looked at Mahoney. “Deficit spending you asked me about. I said I didn’t know anything about it.”

Mahoney had a blank look on his face.

“Well, that’s it, old friend. That’s all of it. The Russians are not deficit spending. Nor have they pulled in anything but rubles. No hard Western currency, Wallace. Only rubles and not many of them.”

Still Mahoney was not understanding, and it evidently showed on his face because Congdon sat forward on the couch.

“Don’t you see, Wallace?” he said. “All this time we were worried about some big Russian push worldwide when it was nothing more than some little rinkydink operation right here in Moscow.”

A glimmer of understanding began forming in Mahoney’s mind.

“Everything else was a sham. There have been no operations outside of Moscow. No one gives a shit about the Mideast crises, except maybe the military. The Dzerzhinsky Square meeting was probably mostly nothing but a sham as well. It all had to be. There was no money for anything else. No hard Western money. You can’t spend rubles in Washington or Lisbon or Mexico or even East Germany.”

Mahoney got up from his chair, his mind spinning.

“Don’t you see, Wallace, none of it really mattered. Even Carlisle will be able to see that now. It was all for nothing.”

Without a word Mahoney turned and headed for the door.

“Don’t you think she was poisoned, Wallace?” Congdon called after him.

At the door Mahoney hesitated a moment. “No, she wasn’t poisoned, George,” he said, and then he went out. He knew, finally, what was going on, what had been happening all along. Or at least he knew the highlights of the operation. Now all he needed were the details. And most importantly the reason why.

As he headed down the corridor toward the main embassy entrance, he reached inside his coat pocket and fingered his .45. He had found his gun in a desk drawer in Carlisle’s office and had taken it. At first he had hesitated, because in some respects Carlisle was right. Being armed presented a new factor into the operation. A new and probably dangerous factor.

Only now Mahoney was glad he had the gun.