Second sight, p.37
Second Sight, page 37
“No.”
“Will you join us in London?”
“No. I can’t just cancel people out on a whim. My patients depend on me. And you can’t take Lori along as a chaperone. It’s too dangerous. I won’t have it … Ostrich chases. Jesus!”
“Are you interested in hearing why I want to make this trip?”
“Haven’t you already told me? I assume it has to do with memories.”
“It does. But you haven’t given me a chance to tell you which ones.”
Stephanie cut him off with a gesture. “Never mind.” She stood up and gathered her blanket around her. “Don’t tell me any more,” she said. “I’ll just bore you with psychobabble if you do.”
She went upstairs, leaping up the treads for the exercise as she always did with a thudding of bare feet, and when Christopher joined her in bed a few minutes later, she pretended to be asleep.
The next morning when she woke, he was gone.
THREE
1
AFTER YET ANOTHER MEMBER OF THE OUTFIT WAS ABDUCTED, drugged, flushed clean, and returned unharmed to his employers, Patchen invited the O. G. to join him for supper at the Club. Patchen himself dined there almost every night, never at the Members’ Table with the divorced, the widowed, the celibate, and the rest of the unwifed, but nearly always alone at a table with only one chair. He consumed half a bottle of wine from the private stock he kept in the Club cellar and swallowed the Club’s soft college dining hall food—overcooked fish or baked macaroni or Salisbury steak—that could be eaten with a fork or spoon without the aid of a knife. The O. G. had put him up for membership twenty years before so that he would have a cheap place to eat during Martha’s long sojourns in Guatemala, and Patchen had always used the Club primarily for that purpose. He liked the dull menu, the convenience of paying for his meals all at once when the bill came in at the end of the month, and, most of all, the freedom from tipping; giving money to waiters had irritated him ever since his honeymoon supper at Maxim’s. At first the other members had tried to make him welcome, but he had shown no interest in playing bridge or attending round table discussions on foreign policy or joining the Friday night Bridge Group, and at length they had given up. Nobody bothered him now; he was left in peace to eat his supper and read his book—or, more lately, to listen to a recorded work over the button earphones of a Sony Walkman, a far more private way of doing things. They liked him in the Club even if they only knew him by sight, a scar-faced figure dressed in black who, like the unhappy bastard Mordred in the King Arthur stories, had reasons for his mournful solitude only half-known even to himself; Patchen brought with him a certain shadowy panache, a hint that everyone who got in here could be trusted with the darkest secrets. They all knew what position he held, of course, and he was pointed out to guests: “That’s David Patchen, the head spy, over there in the corner—looks the part, doesn’t he?”
The O. G. was a different matter. He did not often eat at the Club. “If it wasn’t for the honor of the thing,” he said, “I’d just as soon go to McDonald’s.” But when he did come into the dining room he was overwhelmed by handshakes and greetings and by smiling old friends dropping by his table to swap yarns or introduce whomever they happened to be dining with. To avoid these interruptions, Patchen booked one of the small private dining rooms for their meeting. The O. G. arrived twenty minutes late, dressed in thick tweeds from the Outer Hebrides that smelled of spaniel and woodsmoke.
“Sorry to be behind time,” he said, accepting a glass of sherry, “I got held up by some fellows on the way in; Old Boys.” He mentioned a string of names and lifted his glass. “Absent friends.”
Plates of Belon oysters had already been served by the impatient waiter and the ice beneath the shells was half-melted. Patchen poured white wine from a half-bottle that also dripped ice water.
“Bâtard-Montrachet,” the O. G. said appreciatively; the Club wine list featured far less distinguished wines than this one. “You must have smuggled this in in your coat sleeve.”
“I keep some here for sentimental occasions.”
The O. G. ate a single oyster, then dropped his fork onto the ice. “These are those fake Nova Scotia Belons. Can’t stomach ’em. I’ll just drink the wine. Have you met Paul’s prodigal daughter?”
“No, I just missed her. I was out of the country, and then she and Paul went away.”
“Charming girl. Strange first name, but that’s her mother’s doing. She’s the spitting image of Paul. Actually, of his mother. She’s got the Christopher brain, too.”
“That’s a relief.”
“Not everybody would say so. High I. Q.’s and loyal hearts have been a mixed blessing to that family. It’s a pity you didn’t meet; she’s first-class material—speaks the languages, remembers the details. She says she spotted you coming out of my house the other day.”
Patchen finished his oysters and rang the bell for the waiter. “I thought that might be her. How did she know who I was?”
“Barney furnished a description. He made quite an impression on her—got to her young; very jesuitical from the sound of it, but of course that was Barney’s M. O.”
“Then I’m lucky to be alive. Does she know what happened to Wolkowicz?”
“Just newspaper stuff. Or so she says. I don’t think she suspects that you and her father were the ones who did poor Barney in. Best to leave that between her and Paul, I’d say. Anyway, they’re off to the races in the Maghrib.”
The upstairs waiter, elderly, black, and footsore, entered carrying a heavy tray bearing their next course. He set it down with a groan. Gazing over the O. G.’s shoulder at the five uneaten oysters on his plate, he nudged him sharply under the right shoulder blade with an index finger.
“Take ‘em away, Albert,” the O. G. said. “I don’t like ’em.”
“What’s the matter with them?”
“Not salty enough; not chewy enough; not real oysters. Tell ‘em downstairs to get the genuine article, will you?”
“I’ll tell them. They won’t listen.”
Albert dropped the main dish onto the bare table and poured more wine, filling the glasses to the rim, then plunged the empty bottle upside down into the ice bucket. “No need to come back, Albert,” Patchen said. “We’ll ring before we leave.” The old man shuffled away.
“We’ve lost another one,” Patchen said, after the door closed.
The O. G. looked up with mild interest from his mushy swordfish steak. “Where from?”
“Headquarters.”
“Headquarters.” The O. G. spoke the word without inflection, but this was a startling turn of events. The other Beautiful Dreamers had been kidnapped on foreign soil, all in the Middle East or in European countries that followed a policy of appeasing Arab terrorists to protect their own citizens from murder and abduction. But Headquarters? That was a different kettle of fish. “Who was it this time?” the O. G. asked.
“A man named Walpole, from counter-intelligence.”
The O. G.’s mental filing system clicked into operation. “I remember him,” he said. “Tall fellow from Rhode Island with a bald head and a Brigade of Guards mustache. Hearty laugh. Good mind for detail. Went to Wesleyan. What happened?”
“He went to the men’s room at the movies last Saturday afternoon and didn’t come back. He reappeared a week later, completely flushed out.”
“Happy as a clam like all the others?”
“Yes. But there was a difference. This time there was no video tape.”
“Then you don’t know what he told them?”
“No, but that doesn’t matter so much. We know what he knew.”
“Which was what?”
“Anti-terrorist ops.”
“Ah. It doesn’t sound like they hit a random target.”
“Why should they? They’ve got a lot of reliable information out of the others. What he told them is not the point.”
“It’s not? Then what is the point?”
“The video tape. They pinned a note to Walpole saying they’re going to hand the tape over to Patrick Graham.”
“Sugar!” said the O. G.
Patrick Graham was a famous television journalist, one of the new breed who were part leading man and part Grand Inquisitor. He had a long history of animosity toward the Outfit. This was partly political, because Graham in his youth had been a campus agitator and still believed that the United States of America was the chief enemy of the masses. But mostly it was personal. Even though he was wealthy and famous now, and married to the daughter of an English earl, his origins were humble, and as a scholarship student at Yale he had suffered rebuffs, real and fancied, from lesser men who had better pedigrees; in his heart he regarded the Outfit as the most exclusive fraternity in American history and he bitterly resented the fact that he had never been tapped for membership. He devoted a considerable share of his great talent and energy to discovering and exposing its secrets. It was Graham who broke the Wolkowicz story ten years before and he was still pursuing it long after the victim was in his grave. He had a particular hatred for Patchen because he believed that he had arranged Wolkowicz’s murder and staged it as a suicide. He was not disturbed by the idea of official murder; it confirmed his dark view of the Outfit’s real, though diabolically concealed, nature and methods.
Until now Patchen had dealt with Graham by ignoring him, a policy that turned him into an even more dangerous enemy.
“Have they actually given Patrick the tape?” the O. G. asked. He called Graham by his first name because, in his day, he had been polite to the announcer (as he called him), even accepting invitations to cocktail parties, though never to dinner, at his elegant house just down O Street from Christopher’s.
“Not yet, as far as I know,” Patchen replied.
“Patrick’ll be in seventh heaven,” the O. G. said, as if genuinely happy for him. “All the rest of them will have a fit because he’s scooped them again. It will be a plague of locusts. It could be the end of the Outfit.”
“No, that won’t be enough to put it out of its misery,” Patchen said. “I wish it were.”
The O. G. frowned. “You do? You’ll have to explain that to me. Why do you wish such a thing?”
“Because in my opinion,” Patchen said, “we’re going to have to destroy the village in order to save it.”
The O. G. had always maintained that any good operation could be described in a single sentence. A single sentence was all Patchen needed to describe his plan, and when he had uttered it the O. G. reached across the table and gripped his forearm in such a way that the enthusiasm and admiration he felt for his protégé ran from one man to another like a current of electricity.
“Bless you,” he said. “That’s brilliant. But you can’t tell anybody who works for you what you’re up to. It would destroy the whole purpose.”
“Exactly,” Patchen said. “But I can’t do it alone.”
“Don’t worry, son,” the O. G. said. “You won’t be alone.” He gave Patchen’s forearm, the dead one, another squeeze. “I’m proud of you.”
2
THE SENTENCE THAT PATCHEN MURMURED TO THE O. G. OVER THEIR inedible supper at the Club was this: “If I were the next Beautiful Dreamer we could start all over again.”
There was no need for him to explain his idea. The O. G. grasped its perfection and its simplicity as soon as the words were spoken. If Patchen’s memory was emptied by an enemy like those of the others who had been kidnapped, the Outfit could not continue to exist. There could be no going back to what had existed before; something new would have to be created to take the Outfit’s place—something that would recapture the energy, the patriotism, the audacity, the sheer fun of the Outfit in its youth.
Both Patchen and the O. G. had believed for a long time that a way must be found for American espionage to start over again. The Cold War was over. Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism (always, as the O. G. liked to say, “a lie wrapped up in a sham surrounded by a delusion”) had collapsed under the weight of its own pathology. The old secret alliances against the Russian Communists, built up over half a century by the O. G. and Patchen and their operatives, had outlived their usefulness. A new world was in the making. A new intelligence service was required to study it, to understand it, to discover America’s real enemies and to help her real friends.
The Outfit in its present form could not do the job. Its methods were outdated, its purposes irrelevant. Its best people, the brilliant, intrepid eccentrics recruited by the O. G., were gone, having grown old in the service or been driven out of it by wave after wave of exposés in the press, investigations in Congress, reforms by the Executive, and mutilating internal reorganizations imposed from above. The combined effect of these assaults on the Outfit over many years had been to render it almost incapable of operating as a secret intelligence service. Its agents in the field could no longer behave as spies must behave—with duplicity, ruthlessness, cold logic, and utter unquestioning devotion to their cause (that is to say, like idealists)—without fearing that they might be called home, frog-marched through the media, and indicted on felony charges.
This state of affairs was a triumph for the Outfit’s foes, foreign and domestic. Some of the Outfit’s own former officials had gone so far as to testify before Congress or talk to the press about “legalizing” the Outfit’s activities. This was an absurd notion on the face of it—the very purpose of a secret intelligence service is to carry out illegal actions with the unacknowledged blessing of its government—but it was eagerly taken up by goodhearted, patriotic people as well as by others, like Patrick Graham, who instinctively loved their country’s enemies better than they loved their country. Little by little the Outfit had been robbed of its reputation and its élan, and of all but a few of the tools it needed to carry out its mission. Now, according to the same people who had reduced the Outfit to this feeble condition, even the mission had disappeared.
Patchen and the O. G. did not agree that this was true. The three great ideologies of their lifetime had been capitalism, Communism, and anti-Americanism. Communism had been defeated but the other two remained, and in the years ahead the United States would be faced with far more powerful and intelligent adversaries than totalitarian Russia and China had ever been, peoples who were possessed of a far stronger reason than the Communists had ever had for hating her: she had defeated them utterly in war, compelling their unconditional surrender, and then lifted them up and healed them and given them back their nationhood and their place in history. How could such magnanimity ever be forgiven? How could people laboring under such an unbearable moral debt ever be trusted?
However right they were about this, they knew that there was no point in struggling against the conventional wisdom. In its great, early days under the O. G., the Outfit, manned by the flower of American youth, had been something almost entirely new in history, a secret intelligence service that was dedicated to doing good in the world by stealth. “If we said that out loud we’d be laughed out of town,” the O. G. had told Patchen soon after he took him into his confidence. “But by George, I know it can be done!”
With the help of Patchen and thousands of others, he had done it. He knew it could be done again—but this time in a way that would put it out of the reach of fools. The Patrick Grahams of this world, who had been tormenting the Outfit for so long, were dying to administer the coup de grace. Well, let them, as long as the Outfit chose the time and place and put the pistol into their hands.
3
PATRICK GRAHAM NEVER BELIEVED OR SAID OR ATE OR DRANK OR wore or displayed anything for any other purpose than to be admired by the best people. By this he meant conscientious objectors to capitalism and liberal democracy like himself who had been made rich by a system they despised. He loved the common people but lived in Georgetown in an imposing Federal house filled with the works of fashionable artists living and dead and owned a weatherbeaten twenty-room summer “cottage” on Chipmunk Island, off the coast of Maine. He played tennis on the White House courts, always using a Head Genesis racquet, and golf at Burning Tree with Ping Eye II clubs. He owned two of the largest and most powerful German automobiles that U. S. dollars could buy, dressed (when not on camera) in three-thousand-dollar suits tailored in Savile Row, ate only organically raised vegetables and meat from animals that had been fed natural fodder and humanely slaughtered, and now that California wines were admired by connoisseurs, drank nothing but undiluted chardonnays and cabernets sauvignons from small coastal vineyards, open to the Pacific winds, whose appellations were known only to the cognoscenti. He liked to see Republicans lose elections and Communist insurgents win wars of liberation; he gave all leftists the benefit of every possible doubt and greeted each new Soviet dictator as a possible messiah. Broadcasting from Moscow after the death of Leonid Brezhnev, he had described his successor, Yuri V. Andropov, the sometime head of the KGB who had been the Kremlin’s ambassador to Hungary during the popular uprising against Communist rule, as “the savior of Budapest.” During the Vietnam War he had escaped the draft by pursuing a graduate degree in political science at Yale University. He joined the antiwar movement, waved a Vietcong flag in marches for peace, and hoped in his heart that the enemy would win and thus demonstrate the hollowness of American ideas and life. He made a name for himself early as a journalist by tracking down the semi-literate black amputee who had been drafted in his place (and blown up by a mine in the Mekong delta) and interviewed him on national television as an example of the injustice imposed upon the wretched by a heartless Establishment. He spent eleven days in Vietnam preparing this broadcast and afterward hung photographs of himself in full war correspondent costume, Army fatigues and Australian bush hat, on the wall of his office; for a year or so after his return from the war zone he habitually shook hands with his left hand and smiled enigmatically when asked what was wrong with his right. Now that the Vietnam War was over he had the same sentimental admiration for terrorists as he had formerly had for Vietcong guerrillas. As intellectual fashion made it desirable to become an “anti-Zionist,” he believed as a matter of faith that Palestinians were helpless in the grip of their history but Jews had no right to mention theirs.
“Will you join us in London?”
“No. I can’t just cancel people out on a whim. My patients depend on me. And you can’t take Lori along as a chaperone. It’s too dangerous. I won’t have it … Ostrich chases. Jesus!”
“Are you interested in hearing why I want to make this trip?”
“Haven’t you already told me? I assume it has to do with memories.”
“It does. But you haven’t given me a chance to tell you which ones.”
Stephanie cut him off with a gesture. “Never mind.” She stood up and gathered her blanket around her. “Don’t tell me any more,” she said. “I’ll just bore you with psychobabble if you do.”
She went upstairs, leaping up the treads for the exercise as she always did with a thudding of bare feet, and when Christopher joined her in bed a few minutes later, she pretended to be asleep.
The next morning when she woke, he was gone.
THREE
1
AFTER YET ANOTHER MEMBER OF THE OUTFIT WAS ABDUCTED, drugged, flushed clean, and returned unharmed to his employers, Patchen invited the O. G. to join him for supper at the Club. Patchen himself dined there almost every night, never at the Members’ Table with the divorced, the widowed, the celibate, and the rest of the unwifed, but nearly always alone at a table with only one chair. He consumed half a bottle of wine from the private stock he kept in the Club cellar and swallowed the Club’s soft college dining hall food—overcooked fish or baked macaroni or Salisbury steak—that could be eaten with a fork or spoon without the aid of a knife. The O. G. had put him up for membership twenty years before so that he would have a cheap place to eat during Martha’s long sojourns in Guatemala, and Patchen had always used the Club primarily for that purpose. He liked the dull menu, the convenience of paying for his meals all at once when the bill came in at the end of the month, and, most of all, the freedom from tipping; giving money to waiters had irritated him ever since his honeymoon supper at Maxim’s. At first the other members had tried to make him welcome, but he had shown no interest in playing bridge or attending round table discussions on foreign policy or joining the Friday night Bridge Group, and at length they had given up. Nobody bothered him now; he was left in peace to eat his supper and read his book—or, more lately, to listen to a recorded work over the button earphones of a Sony Walkman, a far more private way of doing things. They liked him in the Club even if they only knew him by sight, a scar-faced figure dressed in black who, like the unhappy bastard Mordred in the King Arthur stories, had reasons for his mournful solitude only half-known even to himself; Patchen brought with him a certain shadowy panache, a hint that everyone who got in here could be trusted with the darkest secrets. They all knew what position he held, of course, and he was pointed out to guests: “That’s David Patchen, the head spy, over there in the corner—looks the part, doesn’t he?”
The O. G. was a different matter. He did not often eat at the Club. “If it wasn’t for the honor of the thing,” he said, “I’d just as soon go to McDonald’s.” But when he did come into the dining room he was overwhelmed by handshakes and greetings and by smiling old friends dropping by his table to swap yarns or introduce whomever they happened to be dining with. To avoid these interruptions, Patchen booked one of the small private dining rooms for their meeting. The O. G. arrived twenty minutes late, dressed in thick tweeds from the Outer Hebrides that smelled of spaniel and woodsmoke.
“Sorry to be behind time,” he said, accepting a glass of sherry, “I got held up by some fellows on the way in; Old Boys.” He mentioned a string of names and lifted his glass. “Absent friends.”
Plates of Belon oysters had already been served by the impatient waiter and the ice beneath the shells was half-melted. Patchen poured white wine from a half-bottle that also dripped ice water.
“Bâtard-Montrachet,” the O. G. said appreciatively; the Club wine list featured far less distinguished wines than this one. “You must have smuggled this in in your coat sleeve.”
“I keep some here for sentimental occasions.”
The O. G. ate a single oyster, then dropped his fork onto the ice. “These are those fake Nova Scotia Belons. Can’t stomach ’em. I’ll just drink the wine. Have you met Paul’s prodigal daughter?”
“No, I just missed her. I was out of the country, and then she and Paul went away.”
“Charming girl. Strange first name, but that’s her mother’s doing. She’s the spitting image of Paul. Actually, of his mother. She’s got the Christopher brain, too.”
“That’s a relief.”
“Not everybody would say so. High I. Q.’s and loyal hearts have been a mixed blessing to that family. It’s a pity you didn’t meet; she’s first-class material—speaks the languages, remembers the details. She says she spotted you coming out of my house the other day.”
Patchen finished his oysters and rang the bell for the waiter. “I thought that might be her. How did she know who I was?”
“Barney furnished a description. He made quite an impression on her—got to her young; very jesuitical from the sound of it, but of course that was Barney’s M. O.”
“Then I’m lucky to be alive. Does she know what happened to Wolkowicz?”
“Just newspaper stuff. Or so she says. I don’t think she suspects that you and her father were the ones who did poor Barney in. Best to leave that between her and Paul, I’d say. Anyway, they’re off to the races in the Maghrib.”
The upstairs waiter, elderly, black, and footsore, entered carrying a heavy tray bearing their next course. He set it down with a groan. Gazing over the O. G.’s shoulder at the five uneaten oysters on his plate, he nudged him sharply under the right shoulder blade with an index finger.
“Take ‘em away, Albert,” the O. G. said. “I don’t like ’em.”
“What’s the matter with them?”
“Not salty enough; not chewy enough; not real oysters. Tell ‘em downstairs to get the genuine article, will you?”
“I’ll tell them. They won’t listen.”
Albert dropped the main dish onto the bare table and poured more wine, filling the glasses to the rim, then plunged the empty bottle upside down into the ice bucket. “No need to come back, Albert,” Patchen said. “We’ll ring before we leave.” The old man shuffled away.
“We’ve lost another one,” Patchen said, after the door closed.
The O. G. looked up with mild interest from his mushy swordfish steak. “Where from?”
“Headquarters.”
“Headquarters.” The O. G. spoke the word without inflection, but this was a startling turn of events. The other Beautiful Dreamers had been kidnapped on foreign soil, all in the Middle East or in European countries that followed a policy of appeasing Arab terrorists to protect their own citizens from murder and abduction. But Headquarters? That was a different kettle of fish. “Who was it this time?” the O. G. asked.
“A man named Walpole, from counter-intelligence.”
The O. G.’s mental filing system clicked into operation. “I remember him,” he said. “Tall fellow from Rhode Island with a bald head and a Brigade of Guards mustache. Hearty laugh. Good mind for detail. Went to Wesleyan. What happened?”
“He went to the men’s room at the movies last Saturday afternoon and didn’t come back. He reappeared a week later, completely flushed out.”
“Happy as a clam like all the others?”
“Yes. But there was a difference. This time there was no video tape.”
“Then you don’t know what he told them?”
“No, but that doesn’t matter so much. We know what he knew.”
“Which was what?”
“Anti-terrorist ops.”
“Ah. It doesn’t sound like they hit a random target.”
“Why should they? They’ve got a lot of reliable information out of the others. What he told them is not the point.”
“It’s not? Then what is the point?”
“The video tape. They pinned a note to Walpole saying they’re going to hand the tape over to Patrick Graham.”
“Sugar!” said the O. G.
Patrick Graham was a famous television journalist, one of the new breed who were part leading man and part Grand Inquisitor. He had a long history of animosity toward the Outfit. This was partly political, because Graham in his youth had been a campus agitator and still believed that the United States of America was the chief enemy of the masses. But mostly it was personal. Even though he was wealthy and famous now, and married to the daughter of an English earl, his origins were humble, and as a scholarship student at Yale he had suffered rebuffs, real and fancied, from lesser men who had better pedigrees; in his heart he regarded the Outfit as the most exclusive fraternity in American history and he bitterly resented the fact that he had never been tapped for membership. He devoted a considerable share of his great talent and energy to discovering and exposing its secrets. It was Graham who broke the Wolkowicz story ten years before and he was still pursuing it long after the victim was in his grave. He had a particular hatred for Patchen because he believed that he had arranged Wolkowicz’s murder and staged it as a suicide. He was not disturbed by the idea of official murder; it confirmed his dark view of the Outfit’s real, though diabolically concealed, nature and methods.
Until now Patchen had dealt with Graham by ignoring him, a policy that turned him into an even more dangerous enemy.
“Have they actually given Patrick the tape?” the O. G. asked. He called Graham by his first name because, in his day, he had been polite to the announcer (as he called him), even accepting invitations to cocktail parties, though never to dinner, at his elegant house just down O Street from Christopher’s.
“Not yet, as far as I know,” Patchen replied.
“Patrick’ll be in seventh heaven,” the O. G. said, as if genuinely happy for him. “All the rest of them will have a fit because he’s scooped them again. It will be a plague of locusts. It could be the end of the Outfit.”
“No, that won’t be enough to put it out of its misery,” Patchen said. “I wish it were.”
The O. G. frowned. “You do? You’ll have to explain that to me. Why do you wish such a thing?”
“Because in my opinion,” Patchen said, “we’re going to have to destroy the village in order to save it.”
The O. G. had always maintained that any good operation could be described in a single sentence. A single sentence was all Patchen needed to describe his plan, and when he had uttered it the O. G. reached across the table and gripped his forearm in such a way that the enthusiasm and admiration he felt for his protégé ran from one man to another like a current of electricity.
“Bless you,” he said. “That’s brilliant. But you can’t tell anybody who works for you what you’re up to. It would destroy the whole purpose.”
“Exactly,” Patchen said. “But I can’t do it alone.”
“Don’t worry, son,” the O. G. said. “You won’t be alone.” He gave Patchen’s forearm, the dead one, another squeeze. “I’m proud of you.”
2
THE SENTENCE THAT PATCHEN MURMURED TO THE O. G. OVER THEIR inedible supper at the Club was this: “If I were the next Beautiful Dreamer we could start all over again.”
There was no need for him to explain his idea. The O. G. grasped its perfection and its simplicity as soon as the words were spoken. If Patchen’s memory was emptied by an enemy like those of the others who had been kidnapped, the Outfit could not continue to exist. There could be no going back to what had existed before; something new would have to be created to take the Outfit’s place—something that would recapture the energy, the patriotism, the audacity, the sheer fun of the Outfit in its youth.
Both Patchen and the O. G. had believed for a long time that a way must be found for American espionage to start over again. The Cold War was over. Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism (always, as the O. G. liked to say, “a lie wrapped up in a sham surrounded by a delusion”) had collapsed under the weight of its own pathology. The old secret alliances against the Russian Communists, built up over half a century by the O. G. and Patchen and their operatives, had outlived their usefulness. A new world was in the making. A new intelligence service was required to study it, to understand it, to discover America’s real enemies and to help her real friends.
The Outfit in its present form could not do the job. Its methods were outdated, its purposes irrelevant. Its best people, the brilliant, intrepid eccentrics recruited by the O. G., were gone, having grown old in the service or been driven out of it by wave after wave of exposés in the press, investigations in Congress, reforms by the Executive, and mutilating internal reorganizations imposed from above. The combined effect of these assaults on the Outfit over many years had been to render it almost incapable of operating as a secret intelligence service. Its agents in the field could no longer behave as spies must behave—with duplicity, ruthlessness, cold logic, and utter unquestioning devotion to their cause (that is to say, like idealists)—without fearing that they might be called home, frog-marched through the media, and indicted on felony charges.
This state of affairs was a triumph for the Outfit’s foes, foreign and domestic. Some of the Outfit’s own former officials had gone so far as to testify before Congress or talk to the press about “legalizing” the Outfit’s activities. This was an absurd notion on the face of it—the very purpose of a secret intelligence service is to carry out illegal actions with the unacknowledged blessing of its government—but it was eagerly taken up by goodhearted, patriotic people as well as by others, like Patrick Graham, who instinctively loved their country’s enemies better than they loved their country. Little by little the Outfit had been robbed of its reputation and its élan, and of all but a few of the tools it needed to carry out its mission. Now, according to the same people who had reduced the Outfit to this feeble condition, even the mission had disappeared.
Patchen and the O. G. did not agree that this was true. The three great ideologies of their lifetime had been capitalism, Communism, and anti-Americanism. Communism had been defeated but the other two remained, and in the years ahead the United States would be faced with far more powerful and intelligent adversaries than totalitarian Russia and China had ever been, peoples who were possessed of a far stronger reason than the Communists had ever had for hating her: she had defeated them utterly in war, compelling their unconditional surrender, and then lifted them up and healed them and given them back their nationhood and their place in history. How could such magnanimity ever be forgiven? How could people laboring under such an unbearable moral debt ever be trusted?
However right they were about this, they knew that there was no point in struggling against the conventional wisdom. In its great, early days under the O. G., the Outfit, manned by the flower of American youth, had been something almost entirely new in history, a secret intelligence service that was dedicated to doing good in the world by stealth. “If we said that out loud we’d be laughed out of town,” the O. G. had told Patchen soon after he took him into his confidence. “But by George, I know it can be done!”
With the help of Patchen and thousands of others, he had done it. He knew it could be done again—but this time in a way that would put it out of the reach of fools. The Patrick Grahams of this world, who had been tormenting the Outfit for so long, were dying to administer the coup de grace. Well, let them, as long as the Outfit chose the time and place and put the pistol into their hands.
3
PATRICK GRAHAM NEVER BELIEVED OR SAID OR ATE OR DRANK OR wore or displayed anything for any other purpose than to be admired by the best people. By this he meant conscientious objectors to capitalism and liberal democracy like himself who had been made rich by a system they despised. He loved the common people but lived in Georgetown in an imposing Federal house filled with the works of fashionable artists living and dead and owned a weatherbeaten twenty-room summer “cottage” on Chipmunk Island, off the coast of Maine. He played tennis on the White House courts, always using a Head Genesis racquet, and golf at Burning Tree with Ping Eye II clubs. He owned two of the largest and most powerful German automobiles that U. S. dollars could buy, dressed (when not on camera) in three-thousand-dollar suits tailored in Savile Row, ate only organically raised vegetables and meat from animals that had been fed natural fodder and humanely slaughtered, and now that California wines were admired by connoisseurs, drank nothing but undiluted chardonnays and cabernets sauvignons from small coastal vineyards, open to the Pacific winds, whose appellations were known only to the cognoscenti. He liked to see Republicans lose elections and Communist insurgents win wars of liberation; he gave all leftists the benefit of every possible doubt and greeted each new Soviet dictator as a possible messiah. Broadcasting from Moscow after the death of Leonid Brezhnev, he had described his successor, Yuri V. Andropov, the sometime head of the KGB who had been the Kremlin’s ambassador to Hungary during the popular uprising against Communist rule, as “the savior of Budapest.” During the Vietnam War he had escaped the draft by pursuing a graduate degree in political science at Yale University. He joined the antiwar movement, waved a Vietcong flag in marches for peace, and hoped in his heart that the enemy would win and thus demonstrate the hollowness of American ideas and life. He made a name for himself early as a journalist by tracking down the semi-literate black amputee who had been drafted in his place (and blown up by a mine in the Mekong delta) and interviewed him on national television as an example of the injustice imposed upon the wretched by a heartless Establishment. He spent eleven days in Vietnam preparing this broadcast and afterward hung photographs of himself in full war correspondent costume, Army fatigues and Australian bush hat, on the wall of his office; for a year or so after his return from the war zone he habitually shook hands with his left hand and smiled enigmatically when asked what was wrong with his right. Now that the Vietnam War was over he had the same sentimental admiration for terrorists as he had formerly had for Vietcong guerrillas. As intellectual fashion made it desirable to become an “anti-Zionist,” he believed as a matter of faith that Palestinians were helpless in the grip of their history but Jews had no right to mention theirs.
