“Hubbard, did your father tell you anything about VQ/CATHETER?”
“I don’t know who or what that is.” I didn’t, which was just as well. Bill Harvey seemed to receive one’s verbal output with as much close metering as a polygraph machine.
“I don’t believe you do,” he said. “Good.”
In the next moment, however, I divined that VQ/CATHETER might be a cryptonym for the Berlin tunnel. It was not considered good procedure to go in for analogical or poetic connections between the operation and the cryptonym, but I could see where VQ/CATHETER would be exactly to King William’s taste.
Whereupon, he looked me over once more, and said, “Is your yap able to maintain itself within allowable parameters?”
“I’m closemouthed. My cousins accuse me of being a bit of a clam.”
He broke out the revolver beneath his left arm, opened the chamber, removed the bullets, rotated the cylinder, replaced the bullets, closed the breech, and stuck it back in his holster. The butt of the handle looked out at me again from his armpit. He had done it all with an easy delicacy, as if it were the equivalent of a tea-pouring ceremony.
“I’m going to use you,” he said. “You’re not smart enough yet for the street, but I’ve perused some of the stuff you’ve done on our hotel people. You show a sense of network. Not everybody has that.”
“Check.”
“You can say ‘yessir’ if you want to.”
“Yessir.”
“When it gets on my nerves, I’ll let you know.”
“Righto.”
“What did they tell you Downtown? About what I need?”
No one had told me anything. I had the feeling, however, that I would do well to reply. “They said you needed a gofer. A good gofer.”
“I need a great one, but I’ll settle for a good fellow.”
“If you’re thinking of me, I’ll do my best.”
“Listen to a job description first. My gofer doesn’t go out for coffee. He goes along for the ride.”
“Sir?”
“He sits next to me in my bulletproof ultra-high-steel-alloy Cadillac, which, when it comes to resisting Soviet armor-penetrating XRF-70s, is no more bulletproof than ultra-high-alloy wet newspaper.”
“Yessir.”
“You can get killed sitting next to me. Those Soviet rockets do the job. And their look-alike for our bazooka does not look like us at all. Their bazooka telescopes down into a cylindrical case about the size of a 300mm telephoto lens. Read me?”
“I think so.”
“Expatiate.”
“A terrorist could dress himself up to look like a photographer. At an intersection, he could open his case, extend his bazooka, and hit your car.”
“With you sitting next to me.”
“Yessir.”
He began to chuckle. Once again phlegm revolved in his throat. Despite myself, I thought of the taffy you see in an amusement-park mixing machine. When it was up to texture, he hawked it neatly into a handkerchief and lit a cigarette. His hands were the equal of his delicate mouth, and cupped the cigarette with finesse, two fingertips bringing the moist end to his cupid’s-bow lips which pursed forward to suck in a full measured heartbeat of smoke.
“When the car door is opened,” said Harvey, “you will not always step out before me. Sometimes I will go first. Why?”
“I don’t have an answer.”
“The flunky gets out first. The sniper, if there is one, will be waiting for the second man. What do you say to that, Hubbard? Are you afraid of buying an explosive bullet in a vulnerable area?”
“No, sir.”
“Take a good look at me. Do I appear to be the kind of man you want to die sitting, or standing, next to?” He said this so quietly that I was, indeed, leaning across the desk.
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you it was an honor.”
“Why?” he persisted.
“Given your achievements, Mr. Harvey, the personal sacrifice would not be meaningless.”
He nodded. “You’re twenty-three?”
“Yessir.”
“You get down to essences fairly well for a kid. If you want to know the truth, I told my wife to take a look at you because I liked the way you wrote your reports. You’re not getting this job because my wife likes you, but because I think you can help me. You can finish up what you’re doing Downtown, then take the junior who came in after you, groom him into what you’ve been carrying, and figure to start with me next Monday, at this office, 9:00 A.M.” He put a finger on either side of his nose as if to center his thoughts. “Drop your German course. Put your time for the next few days into handgun work. We have an arrangement with the Army to use their pistol range in the NCO Club. Get in some hours before Monday.” He stood up to shake hands with me, then lifted his leg and farted. “The French got a word for it,” he said.
2
I GROOMED MY REPLACEMENT SO CONSCIENTIOUSLY THAT BY THE END OF the week, he was carrying out my old tasks as well as myself. Perhaps better—his German was better. Religiously, I went each morning to pistol practice, and began to believe that I might yet become a decent shot. I had fantasies that Mr. Harvey would run into an ambush from which he would be rescued by the path cleared to safety through the ice-cold aim of my pistol.
Nine A.M. on Monday morning I reported to Base Chief’s office in BOZO, ready for the job, but I did not ride out in his black Cadillac that day. No call came. I stayed at my new desk, which was as innocent of work papers as my first desk at the Department of Defense; the next glimpse I had of Mr. Harvey was not until Tuesday afternoon when he passed in the aisle, saw me, grunted in displeasure, as if to say, “What in hell will we do with you?” and moved on quickly. Wednesday, I did not see him at all. I found myself on the phone talking to my replacement about the networks in East Berlin. I was homesick for Downtown.
Thursday afternoon Mr. Harvey came along at a hard fast rolling gait down the hall, saw me again, wagged a thumb for me to follow, and I sat beside him at last in the rear seat of the Cadillac. There had been no time to pick up my overcoat, and the February air was cold whenever I had to get out of the car to walk with him into another office.
He was having a vendetta with the State Department, and so had taken every opportunity to spread our Base functions into more and more abodes around West Berlin. While we still had a substantial wing at the Consulate, where the bulk of our administrative work was done (which meant that most of our employees were still there), his contempt for the place was in the code name he used, the Ukraine. “Tell the top asshole over in procurement—what’s his name?”
“Ferguson,” an assistant would say.
“Tell Ferguson to get going on that tape order.”
Besides the Ukraine, we had Downtown, and BOZO, and GIBLETS, and seven safe houses, and a translation mill off the English Garden called CRUMPETS, and one out at Tempelhof Airport in a warehouse near Customs labelled SWIVET (in recognition, I suppose, of how something was always going wrong at Customs). We also had more than a dozen subsidiaries to visit. Everything from an import-export bank to a sausage exporter. We got around. Traveling with Chief Harvey was close to my idea of what it must have been like to ride around with General Patton. Maybe George Patton lived in Bill Harvey’s mind as well. My father told me once that Patton could measure the fighting morale of an outfit by driving his Jeep into their perimeter. On one occasion, visiting a field hospital, he had slapped a soldier who he believed was a malingerer. Something in the whine of the invalid’s voice suggested to the General that the man was a carrier for a spiritual disease that would yet undermine the Third Army. “Patton had his instinct and was bound to act on it,” my father said.
Harvey could always pick out what was wrong in an office. It might be a broken-down cable machine, a telephone switchboard, a secretary indisposed, or a section chief who was getting ready to resign, but Harvey took it in. “I want you to sign on for another two years in Berlin,” he would say to the secti
on chief, “we need you,” and give the secretary an afternoon off as he was leaving. He would kick the cable machine, and sometimes it would start. He would pass eight juniors working in a corridor at eight jammed desks, stop at one, pick up a cable that had just come in, nod, say, “This operation is going to heat up in a couple of days—keep an eye on it,” and move on. He was God, if God was not too tall, thick in the middle, and had goggle eyes. For that matter, God drank like a fish and hardly slept.
It took me a while to realize his virtue was often his vice. He was not efficient. If unable to decide a matter instinctively, he might never decide it. But what an instinct! One day in the Cadillac, he said to me, “I had a job to give you when I told you to come aboard. Now I’ve forgotten it.” He stared at me, he blinked those bloodshot eyes most carefully, then he said, “Oh, yes, KU/CLOAKROOM.”
“KU/CLOAKROOM, sir?”
“A loose end. It’s been bothering the hell out of me. I need a bright young fellow to chase it down.” He held up his hand at the look of full perplexity I was doing my best to offer.
“Let me fill you in,” he said.
As I had discovered on the first ride, Mr. Harvey was depending on more than my pistol for his firepower. The driver had a shotgun on a mount between the front seats, and the security man in the passenger slot next to him held a Thompson submachine gun. I would hear more than once that a tommy gun was, for close range, Mr. Harvey’s weapon of choice. “Part of my FBI heritage,” he would inform you. Now, as if he had already said too much in hearing of the others, Chief Harvey pressed a button to raise the glass divider behind the front seat, then murmured in his low voice, “We have what could be a security problem. I’m putting you to work on the preliminaries.”
“Terrific,” I said.
“Just paper-chasing,” he said. “Here’s the summary. A Berliner named Wolfgang, a student, a Bohemian, one of our petty-fry, organized some street riffraff a couple of years ago to throw a few stones at the Soviet Embassy in Bonn. It made the wire services. Since then we assume that Wolfgang’s been doubled.”
“By the East Germans, or the KGB?”
“Probably East Germans. Half the Krauts on our payroll are also feeding the SSD. Take that for granted. It’s all right. Half their Vopos are working for us. It’s no big deal either way. A thousand small-fry cost more, if you try to check out all their stories, than the information is worth.
“I see.” I was thinking of the work I had been doing the last few weeks.
“They’re like insects,” he said. “In quiet times, they feed in all directions. It’s not worth watching. But if a swarm of insects suddenly start moving in unison, what do you deduct?”
“A storm is coming?”
“You have it, kid. Something big and military is on the way. If the Russians ever decide to take us out of West Berlin, we’ll know in advance. That’s what the small-fry are for—big clambakes.” He reached forward, took a cocktail shaker out of an ice bucket, and poured himself a full martini. It was hard not to watch the way he held it, for his wrist reacted to every bump in the road with more subtlety than the car springs. The glass never lost a drop.
“All right,” he said, “we keep in loose touch with Wolfgang, and he checks in periodically with us. As I say, petty-fry. I do not go to sleep at night thinking about Wolfgang. Not, that is, until we have a flap. VQ/CATHETER, as you’ve gathered, is our most sensitive area of security. I won’t even allow the men who work on it to buy a chunk of strange.”
“Chunk of strange?”
“A piece of ass. Too risky, security-wise. If any of them get into a one-night stand, they are on order to furnish a detailed report to Security in the morning. Well, there’s one law of bureaucracy you can count on: The more you protect yourself against an eventuality, the more it will eventuate. One of our kids turns out to be a closet homosexual. He comes to us and admits to having sex with a German fellow. Name of the chunk: Franz. What does Franz look like? Young, insignificant, slim, dark. That description narrows it down to about four hundred East Berlin agents, West Berlin agents, and known double agents. We can muster photographs of most of this group. That’s a large number of photographs to make our sissy-boy go through. We need him back at work. He’s a specialist and we can’t afford to lose his time. Except now he confesses to a little more. ‘Yes,’ he tells us, ‘Franz did inquire about the work I do. Naturally, I wouldn’t tell him a thing, but Franz wanted to know if my job had anything to do with VQ/CATHETER! Then, Franz says it’s okay to talk to him because he has clearance from the Americans. He, too, is working with them!’”
This was worth a serious sip of the martini. “You better believe,” said Harvey, “that we put our specialist through a sweat. He must have looked at three hundred photographs before he narrowed it down to Wolfgang. Wolfgang is Franz. So we pored through our log of the Thirty-Day Back-Index, and our Thirty-One-to-Sixty-Day Back-Index, and then the Sixty-One-to-One-Hundred-and-Twenty, and there’s not one report has come in to us lately from Wolfgang. That can hardly be. Wolfgang used to be an active little punk. He liked being on retainer. Now, all we have are some chits which we have not yet paid because he’s sent them in from Hamburg. Not Berlin. What develops, on examination, is the kind of administrative nightmare you’re always fearing. Our files grew so quickly that we used up the space allotted for them. So some intermediate-level asshole at the Ukraine decided to fly the contents of the Thirty-, the Sixty-, and the Hundred-and-Twenty-Day Back-Index to Washington. All we had to do was rent one more building here, and we could have kept the stuff on hand, but the little lords of the budget do not allow that. Building rentals are local. Budgetarily speaking, you can’t spend two dimes on rental when there’s only one in the cup. Air freight, however, is another matter. Air freight is tucked into the Air Force budget, not ours. Air Force doesn’t care what we spend. Billionaires do not make a count of their dishwasher’s pimples. In consequence, a lot of files were sent off at one stroke of a pen by some incompetent in the Ukraine who did not check with my office. All he knew was that he had to find new file space for BOZO. He must have thought he was doing me a favor. Can you believe it? Whole branches and bags of potentially crucial material were air-freighted over to the Document Room back at Cockroach Alley in order to obtain a little more room here.”
Another sip on the martini. “So we have to find Wolfgang. That faggot in CATHETER could have given more away to Wolfgang than he now cares to remember. Only Wolfgang can’t be found. Is he dead, or underground? He does not contact his case officer. He responds to no signals. Maybe Wolfgang has slipped over to the East with news about CATHETER? It’s a long shot, but I send a cable to the Snake Pit. Maybe they can find something on Wolfgang. Lo and behold, I get back a snotty reply. Just what I needed. ‘Owing to conditions in the Document Room, et cetera . . .’ Whoever sent it obviously did not realize the significance of a cable signed by a Chief of Station. I may be Chief of Base, not Station, but find me one Station in the world that counts for as much as Berlin Base. We are in the front line of the Cold War, except they don’t seem to know that back in Foggy Bottom. They don’t alert the newcomers to that fact. I am obliged to deal with bureaucratic backbiting in the shape of some indescribable turd named KU/CLOAK-ROOM. Ergo, I get ready to gun a few motors. I decide to blow KU/CLOAKROOM off the pot he is sitting on.”
“Wow,” I said.
“Nothing to what’s on the menu next, kid. I ask West German Desk in Washington to supply me with the identity of this KU/CLOAKROOM and they come back with the news that Bridge-Archive will be anti-forthcoming for seventy-two hours. You count them. Seventy-two hours. It’s due to a change in cryptonym. That son of a bitch CLOAKROOM knows he is in fucking trouble. I tell West German Desk to get Bridge-Archive to kick over the Seventy-two-hour Elapse and furnish Immediate Translation. Desk has to know I am angry. They send back a cable: WILL CONCUR. Only they can’t. They can’t concur. By procedure, they have had to move up to Bridge-Archive:Control, and som
eone there has put in a STOP. I can’t believe it. I’m facing forces. Wolfgang is in hiding, his records are buried in the Document Room, CATHETER is conceivably endangered, and somebody who may just turn out to be a mole has put STOP on my search. I don’t think there are twenty men in the Company who have sufficient clout to put STOP on me. Yet one of them has. Eighteen of those twenty, at the least, have to hate my guts for the best reason in the world. My family may not be quite up to the elevation of theirs (although it’s good enough stock, thank you) but, God, kid, my brain works faster,”—and he emptied his martini glass and turned it upside down—“yes, STOP, when expanded properly, reads: STOP HARVEY.”
He exhaled heavily. He glared at me. “Well,” he said, “you have to know when the other side has won the first round. Whether it was done to frustrate me, to protect Wolfgang, which is the extreme and worrisome possibility, or to safeguard CLOAKROOM, who may be some kind of intermediary, I can see one thing: CLOAKROOM is now my target. Other answers will be obtainable once I get my hands on him.” He sighed. “The trouble with being Chief of Base is that each week you get caught up in the crisis of the week. Other matters got me sidetracked. Besides, I know enough not to go up against Bridge-Archive: Control—Senior with half a deck. One needs to collect a few high cards. For one thing, if forces are protecting CLOAKROOM, they’ll take him through two or three cryptonyms. In that kind of shell game, you have to be able to concentrate on your objective. I don’t have the time. You do. As of now, you are promoted from gofer to junior troubleshooter.”
I hesitated to speak. My voice might not be faithful. I nodded.
“We’ll use a two-pronged attack,” he said. “First, you crank up the West German Desk at the I-J-K-L. They’re still on the titty. Total bureaucrats. They can’t wait for spring to paper-bag their lunch around the Reflecting Pool. Those people are soft as plop. They respond to unrelenting pressure. Get them on the trail of CLOAKROOM’s shift of saddlebags. It’ll take time. They will want to drag their feet. So, you keep shoving it up their ass. Give a poke every couple of days. I’ll throw in a nigger-dick from time to time. Bridge-Archive:Control may be able to lay a Seventy-two-hour Elapse on each new cryptonym for good old CLOAKROOM, but sooner or later they’ll run out of holds.”