Harper leaned back in his chair, looking at some distant spot on the white ceiling.
“Are you married, Mr. MacKay?”
“No, sir.”
“How old are you?”
“Thirty-seven next birthday.”
There was a long silence and then Harper slowly sat up in his chair and faced the desk. He seemed to be watching the ash on his cigar. Then his head came up slowly.
“You needn’t give reasons; and I’ll ask no questions. But I want you both to say what you would do as of now. You first, Nolan.”
“The election is tomorrow. I should wait for the result. If Powell wins I should go ahead with a full investigation.”
“And you, Mr. MacKay?”
“I should wait for the election results but I should go ahead with the investigation whether Powell wins or loses.”
Harper half-smiled. “You force me to cheat. I will ask a question. Nolan, why does it depend on Powell winning?”
“The influence that Dempsey could wield on a President could have devastating results. But only on a President.”
Harper nodded. “And you, Mr. MacKay?”
“To me what matters is that if Dempsey is being used to influence Powell it’s because the Soviets intended that. Whether Powell knows or not is of vital importance, too. But most important of all is, have the Soviets tried to do this?”
Harper shook his head and said softly, “I go ahead with everything you’ve said except that. The most important thing at the moment is, if it has happened, can we prove it?” He closed his eyes as if to exclude everything except what he was saying. “I want you to imagine what happens if the worst turns out to be true. From tomorrow night we should have until the twentieth of January to establish hard evidence. Evidence that high officials would find credible, and sufficient to impeach a President-Elect; or, if not that, so destroy his credibility that his position would be hopeless. And who do I tell, gentlemen? The incumbent President who represents the opposing Party? The Chief Justice who has no power to act? This would have to be for Congress if it went that far; and you can imagine the damage it would do to this country—to the world, perhaps. The trauma of Watergate would seem like light relief compared with this.” He turned to them both.
“Nolan, wait until tomorrow night after the result is declared. If something went wrong I could be accused, perhaps rightly, of influencing the election. Then, whatever the result, you go ahead. Let me know what resources you need and I will arrange them. And Mr. MacKay, would you object if I asked my friend Magnusson if you could be attached to Langley for a period?”
“No, sir.”
“I think you should cover anything that concerns Europe. That should be your official position, anyway.”
He stood up. “You must keep this between the three of us. Nolan. And I should like you to read again the Fourth Amendment. You, too, Mr. MacKay.”
MacKay slept until midday, shaved and bathed, and leisurely breakfasted watching TV.
He read through the Fourth Amendment in a copy of the Constitution that Nolan had found for him. And, because he was British, he turned back to the first page where it said, “We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice …” And he read on and on through all the Articles and Amendments. He felt a great warmth for those men two centuries ago who had argued and fought to ensure that the abuses and privileges of Europe’s monarchs and despots could never happen in their new country. Even two hundred years later it was still of its time. The old-fashioned words still applied. It was often abused, and frequently difficult to practise, but it was there. A bench mark, a rock in a sea of troubles. He thought of Morton Harper and Nolan. They hadn’t dodged the issue, and when Harper had said that they should read again the Fourth Amendment he had meant it. Not as a cover for himself but as a reminder of the other side of the coin.
Magnusson telephoned and gave him the OK and, despite being on an insecure line, told him to watch his step. He was treading on very thin ice, Magnusson said, and the bouquets could easily turn into brickbats.
In the late afternoon Nolan telephoned to say he would be along about eleven. His mother was going to have three weeks with them in Washington and he was meeting her at the airport, at nine.
MacKay had met Nolan’s wife. She was an admiral’s daughter who had met Nolan when he was a Navy flier in the Korean war. A pretty girl with a sense of humour and well used to the vagaries of service life that kept men at long stretches from their families. The five-year-old daughter was some consolation. Nolan was a frequent visitor to London, generally on his way to Berlin, and there was clearance between CIA and SIS for an exchange of a wide range of intelligence between SF14 and Nolan’s Russian section. MacKay envied Nolan his vast resources and the American valued the British organization’s uncanny, instinctive analysis of the KGB
