“Was the guy in the electric blue suit Mr. Henson?”
“Stu never did know how to dress for the occasion.”
“Wasn’t he a CIA station chief in Europe?”
“Here and there.”
“What do you think Breece Preston and Giles Cabot were arguing about?”
“Haven’t the foggiest.” A pause, then a frown. “Breece was always a bully at heart.”
“Is he still with the Agency?”
“Goodness, no. But he’s still in the business.”
“Consulting?”
“You’ve probably heard of his outfit. Baron Associates. Contracts with the Pentagon, wherever the troops happen to be mired at the moment.”
“Intelligence gathering?”
“Of a sort. His type always goes private eventually.”
“Good money, probably.”
“That’s part of it. It’s more for the freedom. Once you’re outside the velvet rope you no longer have to play by the rules.”
“Wouldn’t that be breaking the law?”
“Where, in Afghanistan? Iraq? Some narco-state? Breece prefers to operate in places where the law has disappeared. If you ever spot one of his people in your rearview mirror, pull over to let them pass.”
“You mean like the guy with the mullet?”
Dad looked away, dabbing a napkin at his mouth as if he’d received a blow.
“Where’s our waitress?” he said. “I need a refill. Pass me that steak sauce, will you?”
I knew better than to press the point, especially when the next topic he raised was Redskins football, which he loathed and I loved. The next morning, before I was awake, he took the early ferry to catch his flight back to Vienna. I hadn’t seen him since.
I considered telephoning him. He would probably get a kick out of all this, especially the Bingham touch with its George Smiley connection. He might even have some leads on who’d done it. It would be midnight there, but he’d always been a night owl.
Then I recalled his continuing silence about Lemaster. In all the years since ’84 he still hadn’t explained their friendship to my satisfaction, despite plenty of opportunities. Let it wait, I decided. For the moment this secret would be mine alone.
The funny thing was, I hadn’t opened any of the cited books in ages, nor had I read a single spy novel. Dad and I both lost interest almost the moment the Berlin Wall came down in ’89. For a while I gamely kept up with Lemaster’s output. Maybe I felt obligated after having burned him in the Post. But he soon lost his edge, tilting toward rightist political themes and straying into techno-thrillers-beloved by the Pentagon but disdained by his oldest fans. Folly hadn’t made an appearance since ‘91, and the title of that book, A Final Folly, says all you need to know about how the damn thing ended.
Friends whose literary judgment I trusted occasionally recommended new practitioners, authors who set their spies amid contemporary intrigue in Latin America, Asia, or in the so-called War on Terror. But something in the actions of those brave young men and women who hammered down The Wall seemed to have forever sealed my portal of fascination with the secret world. Spy novels, like the Cold War, lay entombed in my past.
Or so I told myself. For two hundred dollars an hour I suppose some shrink would have explained that fear was what really prevented me from returning, a fear of confronting everything else I’d left behind-my marriage to April, my newspaper career, my hopes of again living abroad, and my fond dream that perhaps one day I, too, might write something worthwhile, even lasting.
All had vanished without a trace, unless you counted our son, David, who lived with his mother and had just turned eighteen-voting age, big on Obama but not so big on his dad. Not that I’d given him much reason to be. It was shocking how little had been required to erase everything-a false step in Belgrade, a few foolish lapses in Washington, a cascade of misjudgment, and here I was.
Yet now, with this cryptic note staring up from my lap like a summons, I felt connected to that previous era in a way I hadn’t been in ages, and my emotions were in an uproar. Even if this turned into a glorified scavenger hunt, maybe it was time to start looking for answers. At the very least, I should try to find the dead drop.
Already I was transformed. Seated there, with full heart and empty glass, I was no longer just a lonely PR man with a big paycheck and a spent imagination. I was Folly, I was Smiley, I was page one of a fresh new first edition. I was the boy I had once been, and the man I had never become.
As I scanned the opening paragraphs of Ashenden, a flash of insight told me exactly what I needed to do next. So I stood, ready to turn the page. Ready to turn them all.
3
I was on my way to the dead drop. Was that possible? More to the point, was it advisable? In my PR job at Ealing Wharton I’d warned off many a client from come-ons far more sophisticated than the cryptic letter that had just landed on my doorstep, and I was already wary of the sender’s motives. What sort of dirty work did he have in mind, and who would be ruined as a result? Perhaps he meant to do me harm.
Curiosity overcame caution, if only because of all the times as a boy when I’d imagined setting out on just this sort of spy’s errand-flashlight in hand, an eye out for surveillance, the moon peeping over my shoulder. In those days I was usually on my way to meet a girl, run an errand for Dad, or share a toke by the Danube.
But this was the real thing, or some prankster’s version of it, and as I stepped onto O Street a swell of giddiness caught in my throat like laughter. For the moment, any chance of danger seemed worth the price of admission.
I took precautions nonetheless. To give the streets time to empty and darken, I waited a few hours before leaving the house. I also scrounged up an old canister of pepper spray. To pass the time before zero hour I took down some old books to reacquaint myself with my favorite spies. Their debuts were of particular interest since I was preparing for my own, and I discovered eerie similarities.
In Le Carre’s Call for the Dead, George Smiley is summoned from sleep by a ringing telephone. In The Miernik Dossier, Charles McCarry’s Paul Christopher is yanked from bed in Geneva by the doorbell. In Berlin Game, Len Deighton’s Bernard Samson waits in the midnight cold of Checkpoint Charlie for a contact who never shows. And in Knee Knockers, Lemaster’s Richard Folly is lured into the murk of predawn Prague. Such a lonely procession of nocturnal seekers. Literally and figuratively they were all in the dark. Now, so was I, an unlikely initiate to the midnight brethren.
As mandated by page 47 of The Double Game, my tradecraft involved a series of switchbacks to ensure no one was following. It felt childish, especially when I spotted a neighbor walking her dog-an Alsatian, meaning it must be Mrs. Pierce from over on Dumbarton. I called out in greeting, but the woman who turned was slimmer, younger. Possibly taking me for a mugger, she quickened her stride, and to avoid alarming her further I doubled back toward P Street. Fortunately there was only a block to go, and I tempered my sheepishness with the knowledge that, while Georgetown was hardly Berlin, these chockablock townhouses had harbored many a spook and spymaster at the height of the Cold War.
CIA chief Allen Dulles had lived right around the corner. So had Frank Wisner, the doomed zealot whose mania for covert action sent hundreds of operatives to their deaths. In the fifties and sixties, dozens of Agency men had lived here, gossiping and drinking with pundits and policy makers at rollicking dinner parties that included plenty of charming guests from abroad-British mole Kim Philby, for one.
Dad and I lived here then, during a two-year home posting from ’62 to ’64, back when the can-do luster of American spying peaked and began its long, steady decline in the wake of the Kennedy assassination.
I remember Dad pointing out Dulles at a cocktail gathering and admonishing me, “Be nice if he speaks to you. He just lost his job because of the Bay of Pigs”-which sounded to me like some kind of farming disaster.
At the age of seven I spotted Mr. Wisner at a neighbor’s garden party one Sunday afternoon. At the time I had a crush on his daughter, who was several years older, so I was paying close attention to all things Wisner. Even
