Back Channel: A novel Page 6

  But Margo was shaking her head. “No,” she said. “Absolutely not. I am not going to Bulgaria with that boy.”

  Harrington wore glasses on a chain around her neck. She put them on, and her eyes were all at once large and demanding. “I didn’t ask you whether you are going to Bulgaria,” she said. “I asked you to sit.”

  Plainly, the older woman had already realized that her guest had been raised to respect the authority of elders. Margo sat.

  Warily.

  “Now, then,” said Harrington, ruffling her papers. “Shall we continue?”

  “I don’t think you understand. Bobby and I don’t get along. He doesn’t get along with anyone.”

  “So I gather. Nevertheless, Miss Jensen, you are his price, and your country has agreed to pay. The matter is out of our hands. You have no more choice than the rest of us.” She did not wait for Margo to contradict her. “Mr. Fischer, as I said, seems to regard you as a good-luck charm. Evidently, he won some famous game in your presence?”

  “Yes, in New York last December, against a man named Byrne, but—”

  “Then it’s settled, my dear. The mission parameters remain the same. There is no requirement that the two of you like each other, or even that you pretend to like each other. What Mr. Fischer has demanded is your company. He cannot demand that you enjoy his. Naturally, we will compensate you for your labors.”

  With every word out of Harrington’s mouth, Margo felt diminished. The assurance of payment only heightened the sense of having been bartered by her own government. Quite against her raising, she put her elbows on the table and rubbed her palms over her eyes. A rising exhaustion battled a rising fury. No one had actually deceived her, but their refusal to tell her whom she was to accompany until now had much the same effect. They hadn’t lied; they had simply deployed the truth rather cleverly.

  “You don’t know Bobby like I do,” Margo finally said. “He’s not just unpleasant or rude. I don’t care how brilliantly he plays chess. He’s crazy. That’s not just a word. He’s actually crazy. Half the time he’s a perfect gentleman or a shy little boy, but the rest of the time he’s seeing monsters under the bed. He thinks the Russians are going to murder him to keep him from winning the world championship. He isn’t joking. He really believes it. He thinks people are poisoning his food. He thinks Communists, Jews, and homosexuals are in a conspiracy to rule the world. Do you know what book he brought to Ithaca the last time he visited Tom? Mein Kampf! Do you have any idea what kind of man he is?”

  Again Harrington affected not to hear. “This is the way things are going to work, Miss Jensen. The Olympiad games begin every afternoon at three. Mr. Fischer sleeps late most mornings, I am given to understand, and rises for lunch. You will join him for lunch whenever possible, although I am told that he prefers to eat alone. In the afternoon, he likes to walk. You will walk with him. You will try to get him to talk to the Soviet players—Smyslov in particular. If he can get you past the security gorillas, you might even be introduced to Smyslov yourself. In any event, you will endeavor to listen to any conversation the two of them might hold, or between Mr. Fischer and any other Soviet or Iron Curtain player. We will not expect you to record the conversations, because there is no time to train you in the use of the proper equipment—and, besides, a microphone is precisely the sort of thing the gorillas will be looking for. You will listen as best you can, and then, when the round begins, you will return to your hotel room and make the best notes you can of what was said. Agatha will take possession of your notes each evening, and that will be the end of your responsibilities. You will fly home with the thanks of a grateful nation, along with a nice bit of cash, and you will resume your studies, and you will never again lay eyes on either Agatha or myself.”

  “Who’s Agatha?”

  “Your minder. Chaperone, if you like. You’ll meet her this evening. I believe you will find that the two of you have a good deal in common.”

  Margo digested this. “Mr. Borkland said all I would be doing in Bulgaria is watching the chess and enjoying the beach.”

  “Bill Borkland is a sweet man, my dear, but not fully informed. In an operation of this sensitivity, one does tend to compartmentalize.” Steepling her fingers. “Naturally, Miss Jensen, we would rather spare you this effort. But our analysts have judged Bobby Fischer wholly unreliable. Unfortunately, he is Smyslov’s chosen conduit. And as you are the only individual Mr. Fischer is likely to allow in his vicinity, you are the one who will have to report back on what happens. Once more, my dear, there is no choice. We have to penetrate Operation Anadyr so that we will know whether to prepare for a war. Or, perhaps, prepare to start one.” Closing the folder with a decisive snap. “And, to answer your earlier question, yes, Miss Jensen, I do know exactly what kind of a man Bobby Fischer is. I know about his mother’s medical training in Moscow and her peace activism, and how he despises all women. I know that he doesn’t trust President Kennedy because President Kennedy puts his hands in his pockets in public, and I know that he grows skittish and unmanageable when forced to sleep in the same place for more than a few nights running. I know that he is a paranoid, and, in the judgment of some of our wiser psychiatrists, is suffering from schizophrenia. I know the risk we are taking by using him for this mission, my dear. All the more reason that we were fortunate indeed that he insisted on your presence.”

  It was suddenly too much. Margo wanted none of these accolades. She wanted away from this airless room with its Marine guard, away from the web of secrets and conspiracies that just days ago had seduced her so willingly to its center. She wanted the simplicity of what she had had before.

  She said none of this; but Harrington’s pale eyes said she knew it all anyway.

  “You leave in the morning, Miss Jensen. You will fly to New York, then to London, then to Vienna, then to Sofia. From there you will take the train to Varna. The entire journey will occupy the better part of two days.”

  Margo swallowed. “I’ll be traveling all that time with—with Bobby?”

  “Dear me, no. No, my dear. You’ll travel with Agatha. Mr. Fischer is already on the way to Europe, along with the rest of the American team.” Serene again. “Wouldn’t fly with the others, poor lamb. Sailed on the New Amsterdam. Said he was worried the Russians might sabotage his plane.”

  SEVEN

  A Brief History of Santa

  I

  Harrington stood in the hallway, watching Borkland escort Margo out. The dotty smile remained pasted to her face in case the poor young woman turned around for a last look. Harrington could be many things at once and often was; just now, she wanted Margo to remember her as she had pretended to be. But the child never turned, an omission that warmed Harrington’s secret heart. There was more to the girl than the others suspected.

  That was a relief.

  Margo was now her agent, and therefore Harrington loved her like a daughter, as she loved them all. The chances of arrest were small, but, on the other hand, as Harrington pointed out sadly to her inner circle, if by some chance Margo did fall into the hands of the opposition, she was not the sort of prisoner whose release one negotiated. She was, as the Russians said, a zaychik, a little rabbit, meaning that she might be worth catching but wasn’t worth selling. Both sides did a lot of trading in those days, exchanging one captured agent for another, but rabbits tended to be left out of the general commerce. Harrington had omitted this tidbit from Margo’s briefing, and, as she told Borkland afterward, she felt occasional pangs of guilt about sending Margo off to possible incarceration. Although, even speaking to her intimates, Harrington never referred to her agent as anything but GREENHILL, the cryptonym she had been assigned for the duration of SANTA GREEN.

  Harrington’s own superior, an ugly little man called Gwynn, had been opposed to the operation from the start, and was bothered particularly by the role slated to be played by what he insisted on calling a nineteen-year-old child. He was unimpressed by Harrington’s protest that she had run much y
ounger agents during the war. The war, he pointed out, was twenty years ago: an unsubtle reference to Harrington’s age. For, although Gwynn was always angry at every woman but at Harrington in particular, he was just now particularly furious at the clever way in which she had circumvented his authority in getting the operation cleared.

  In time, she knew, he would find a way to exact vengeance.

  Even now, watching GREENHILL vanish around the corner, Harrington wondered whether the recruitment had been too fast. When Margo Jensen had first come to her attention, she had been unsure what to make of the girl. There were signs, certainly, that she was indeed special, just as Professor Niemeyer insisted; and it was also true that Bobby Fischer seemed quite taken with her. Since she needed Bobby, she needed Margo.

  Except that matters were not quite so cut-and-dried. Something was off about the case; Harrington had sensed it from the start.

  She just wasn’t sure what it was.

  Later, in her final debriefing before separation from government employ, Harrington would tell the inquisitors that she had no regrets about fighting for the operation, notwithstanding its disastrous end.

  What about the fate of your agent? they would ask. Any regrets about that? Would you change the plan if you could?

  And she would look at them very straight and say: No. No regrets. War’s war.

  II

  Alone again, Harrington tucked her papers beneath her arm and headed for the elevator. People looked up as she passed their desks, then glanced away. They all knew she had done a thing or two in the war, even if they didn’t know exactly what. The junior officers in her department traded tales in hushed voices. One rumor said she had nearly been captured by the Gestapo in Vienna and had killed two men making her escape. Another had it that she had been the spotter on the ground in Prague when Kubiš and Gabcik, aided by British Intelligence, assassinated Reinhard Heydrich. Harrington never said if any of the stories were true.

  Although Margo had taken her for an academic, Harrington was a career intelligence officer, and had been decorated by three Allied governments for her service in the war. She was a soldier’s sister and a soldier’s daughter, and her great-uncle, a Union cavalry officer, had helped Philip Sheridan chase down Jubal Early’s army in the Shenandoah Valley, sealing the fate of Richmond, and ending the Civil War. The only direction any member of her family ever moved was forward. And Harrington herself had been marching hard toward her goal since she first got wind of the message from Smyslov on Curaçao.

  “Think of it this way,” she might have said, were she given to explaining her motives, which she was not. “If a colonel had whispered in Napoleon’s ear that he’d met a peasant who claimed to know a man who could tell them Nelson’s plans for the Battle of Trafalgar, don’t you think Napoleon might have sent someone to find out?”

  She was fascinated—so fascinated that she put aside a really quite promising ploy involving a corrupt Indonesian general to look into it. Maybe there were missiles in Cuba, maybe there weren’t. The Soviets were moving something—and everybody on Capitol Hill had an opinion. The Agency was getting nowhere.

  A perfect opening for Harrington’s contrarian talent.

  By the time the Smyslov approach came to her attention, it had already been dismissed by the Agency, no further action to be taken. Fischer was unstable or Smyslov was a plant: in either case, the best way to deal with the proffer was to file and forget. Harrington at this time had no formal involvement in the case. But she was sufficiently intrigued to gather in her living room one evening three or four like-minded souls from agencies every bit as faceless as hers: like-minded in the sense that they shared her frustration at the bureaucratization of intelligence gathering. Her guests knew nothing about what had happened on Curaçao, and the only member of the group who had even heard Smyslov’s name remembered him less for his chess than for his opera singing, for he had been a prodigy in both fields. But they knew that the Soviets were sending men and materiel and gigantic crates to Cuba, and they were as frantic as everyone else to learn what was inside.

  “I believe I might be able to help,” said Harrington.

  She laid the case before them, and cajoled and argued and charmed and browbeat until they provided what she wanted. A young man from CIA Counterintelligence gave her access to certain “serials,” as they were called: the scattered and disjointed bits of fact and conjecture that were supposed to add up to an index of Soviet intentions, and even operations. A fellow Radcliffe alumna and Harrington protégée provided certain records from HTLINGUAL, the Agency’s secret program to intercept, open, and copy letters to and from specified targets within the United States, notwithstanding the prohibitions on domestic surveillance written into the Agency’s charter. And a professor of something, an engineer from Purdue who spent his spare hours consulting for the newly created National Reconnaissance Office, was inveigled into providing her raw U-2 surveillance photographs of certain naval movements in the Black Sea, material up until then gathering dust because it lacked apparent significance.

  It was from this modest start that Harrington went over to the offensive. She spent the month of June painstakingly crafting a brief in support of her position that the approach to Bobby Fischer was worth pursuing.

  In early July, she shared the memorandum with her superior, Gwynn.

  Who rejected it out of hand, scrawling unfavorable notations in blood-red ink all along the margins.

  Harrington asked for a face-to-face meeting. Grudgingly granted. Last appointment of the day, and he had to depart in fifteen minutes for a Georgetown dinner party.

  “This is the best shot we have,” she said.

  “Maybe if you’re aiming for your foot,” her superior smirked. Gwynn was no taller than five foot six and had come over from a position with one of the larger defense contractors. He approached life with an attitude of condescension, and had a reputation for wit.

  “Do you have a better idea?”

  “Yes. Leave it to the clowns across the river. Let them lay their heads on the block. One doesn’t actually see the virtue in putting one’s hoof in.”

  “Clowns across the river” being Gwynn’s standard but entirely unoriginal put-down of the Central Intelligence Agency.

  Harrington kept pressing. Gwynn listened to her arguments, and kept shaking his head. At the end of fifteen minutes, he locked his safe for the night, gathered up his coat and hat, and assured her that he would give her proposal a bit of thought; by morning, there was a letter on Harrington’s desk, signed by Gwynn, copy to her personnel file, ordering her to get her head out of the clouds and do some serious work.

  Harrington was an old hand—older by a decade and a half than her titular superior—and she knew that bureaucratic battles were never won but only lost. The key to avoiding defeat was carefully collecting markers, while always understanding the structure better than your adversary. She knew people; more important, people knew her, and some even owed her.

  III

  The rejection of her outline for SANTA GREEN did not slow Harrington down. She worshipped her great-uncle the Union cavalry officer, who’d had a tendency to ride off on missions of his own choosing, always pointing to poor lines of communication to explain why he had ignored orders. He got away with it because his mad schemes usually paid dividends. Harrington had inherited her ancestor’s personality. In mid-July, without awaiting authorization, she sent an intermediary to meet Bobby Fischer in New York.

  The intermediary—the very same Borkland who would later interview Margo in Niemeyer’s office—returned that evening, as exhausted as if he had gone ten rounds with a champion boxer. Bobby was willing, said Borkland, but only on the condition that they pay him money—a great deal of money—and also arrange for a certain young lady to accompany him.

  It is in Harrington’s memorandum of this conversation for the SANTA GREEN file that the asset subsequently known as GREENHILL makes her first appearance. Within two days, Harrington had a bit o
f background on her, most of it the result of intermittent surveillance conducted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation on GREENHILL’s roommate, a suspected radical. J. Edgar Hoover’s grim men rarely shared material with the spies, but Harrington had done Hoover the occasional rather grubby favor, and in return he now and then sent her files that might be useful. The coincidence of the connection to Bobby might have been God’s hand, or Harrington’s good fortune, but she was not about to reject it merely because she couldn’t explain it.

  After that, she went up to Vermont to visit Lorenz Niemeyer at his summer cottage. They had sandwiches and lemonade on the porch, where the susurrating insects provided a natural cover for their conversation. He didn’t want to hear operational details, said Niemeyer, although he still held his security clearance. And, no, he hadn’t had GREENHILL in class yet, but he had heard not entirely bad reports of her, and she was enrolled in his course on Conflict Theory in the coming fall. In the meanwhile—said Niemeyer—Harrington should pull the file on GREENHILL’s father.

  “What file?”

  “Just look. Donald Jensen was his name.”

  “Look where?”

  He told her.

  “Why would I want to do that?”

  “Because some talents run in the blood.”

  “That’s absurd.”

  “Just look.”

  Getting the file proved difficult. She had to cash in more favors, this time at the Defense Department. But at last she was able to see a redacted version. Even incomplete, the tale was impressive.

  Back up to Vermont: none of this could be discussed on the telephone.

  “You knew him?”

  “I did.”

  “Even so. Those are the father’s accomplishments. Not the daughter’s. What makes her special?”

  “I promised to look out for his family.”

  “Sending her into harm’s way is looking out for her?”

  Niemeyer had the good grace to look embarrassed: a thing that she had never before witnessed. “She’s ambitious. She wants to be noticed. This will send her straight to the top of people’s lists.”