Back Channel (26 page)

“I think this is everything, Doctor,” said one of the security officers.

“I believe it is, Walter.”

“Do you have any classified materials at your house?” At least he had the good grace to look embarrassed: Harrington had known him for ten years.

“No.”

“You realize we’ll have to check?”

“Of course.”

Another awkward moment. “Well, good luck, Doctor. Sorry about all this.”

Walter and his partner rolled their shopping carts out the door and off down the hall. As soon as they were gone, she dialed Borkland, her assistant, but there was no answer. The receptionist told her that he was in a meeting.

With his new boss.

Embarrassed afresh, Harrington rang off. Gwynn didn’t have the reach to pull this off, she told herself. The ambition, surely, but not the ability. On the other hand, McGeorge Bundy did. Crossing back to her now pristine desk, she wondered, not for the first time, why the President’s national security adviser, a man she had never before met, had summoned her to his West Wing office three nights ago and proceeded to grill her about every aspect of
SANTA GREEN
. Bundy might have simply been getting his facts straight as he sharpened his knife for her, but that seemed like a task several levels below his pay grade, particularly when he had the missiles in Cuba to worry about.

That was the proverbial joker in the deck: the missile crisis. Why on earth would a man with Bundy’s responsibilities waste a precious hour nailing down the details of what went wrong in Bulgaria? And why so many questions about her assessment of her agent,
GREENHILL
? It made no sense that Doris Harrington could see.

No matter, she told herself, grimly. Not her problem any more. She felt, suddenly, old. And alone. Her brother had died in the war. She hadn’t seen her sister in years. The agents she ran were all the family she had. And the last of them was now off limits, forever.

While Nana made her calls, Margo waited in the high-ceilinged library, long her favorite room, even though it had been forbidden to her as a child. The windows gave on two sides of the house. She stood in the front, studying the gravel drive as it made its winding way past the hedgerows. She wondered whether anybody was watching the house. Fomin had told her somebody was following her on campus the other night, but—as the vanished Niemeyer had pointed out—he might well have been lying. She half expected to see his battered brown Chevy climbing the hill toward the house. Or, if not Fomin, maybe Ainsley, or even Agatha, about whose fate Margo worried constantly, secretly blaming herself for whatever had happened.

Ainsley had called it a mugging, but the club of those who had deceived her grew larger by the hour.

She tipped her head against the glass, wondering. She realized that a part of her actually wanted someone to be watching, as a signal of her significance: just as somebody would surely have been watching her father. She studied the hedges. She saw movement, but it was only a squirrel. Beyond the bushes lay the gravel lane that didn’t appear on the maps, guarded by a
PRIVATE WAY
—
NO TRESPASSING
sign where it reached the county road. There were only six houses, all of them old and enormous, and after all these years the townspeople were still astonished that one of the owners was a Negro.

Even though Margo had lived in this mansion for considerably
more than half her life, she never felt that she belonged. Home to her was still her parents’ small house on Lincoln Avenue in New Rochelle. Growing up with Nana had been like being a visitor, a tourist in a foreign world. Niemeyer liked to describe spying as looking out of somebody else’s eyes. That was how Margo had spent her childhood after her parents died, concealed deep in her own head while somebody else used her mouth to say, “Yes, Nana,” and “Thank you, Nana,” and went to the fancy dinner parties and the ladies’ teas so that Claudia Jensen could show off her granddaughter’s exemplary poise and manners.

Margo had hated it here.

She crossed to the desk. There were two telephone lines in the house, and she used the second to call the operator. Several minutes later, she had the numbers for eleven Harringtons in Washington, D.C., and its environs. Margo tried them one by one. None of the seven that answered owned to knowing a Doris, although one belonged to a rather breathless gentleman who complimented her on her lovely voice and suggested that they get together for a drink.

She tried the State Department emergency number again. This time the duty officer was female, but she still acknowledged none of the code words, and insisted afresh that they had no Harrington.

Stymied.

It occurred to her to try Bobby Fischer. After all, it was one of Bobby’s acquaintances who had passed on to American intelligence the original contact from Smyslov. But according to Tom, Bobby was furious at her for deserting him in Varna, and considered it her fault that he’d messed up his analysis of the adjourned position against Botvinnik.

“I don’t think he wants to hear from you right now,” Tom had said, and the reproach in his voice suggested that he still wasn’t ready to believe that nothing had happened between them.

She’d asked him to let Bobby know she wanted to talk to him, but she knew nothing would come of it. Another avenue closed. And so she was left with a bizarre truth: three nights ago, a colonel in Soviet Intelligence had driven her through the streets of Ithaca, and today she could find nobody who wanted to hear the story.

Maybe she should just walk up to the White House gate and tell the guard she has an urgent message for the President.

Margo laughed but didn’t like the sound of it—screechy and
overdone—and she might seriously have started to wonder whether something was wrong with her had not Muriel chosen that moment to summon her to the kitchen telephone.

“Is it Uncle Eddie?” Margo asked as they walked along the hallway.

“No, Miss Margo. Mrs. Jensen says she can’t reach Mr. Wesley. He’s in Europe or one of those places.”

Another hope broken.

“She’s gone to her nap,” Muriel added, handing her the phone.

“Hello?”

The breathless, familiar voice of her best friend. “Margo, it’s Annalise. Listen. Something’s happened.”

“What is it? Is it Tom?”

“You should sit down.”

“Just tell me. Please.”

“It’s Phil Littlejohn. Somebody ran him over with a car outside his frat last night. He’s dead.”

Down the grassy slope to the south of the mansion was the small playhouse where her brother used to tease her so relentlessly. Inside was a little bench, and that was where Margo sat, hunched so that she couldn’t be seen from the house, the same way she used to sit when her grandmother’s wrath would chase her away, setting off dark-red storms of fear and self-loathing in her young brain. She felt the echoes even now.

“It was an accident,” she whispered, voice tinny and distant to her own ear. “Just an accident. Nothing to do with you. Nothing.”

An accident. A coincidence. A tragedy, but not because—

Not because—

“He was following me around. Asking questions. But that’s not why it happened. It’s not.”

A hit-and-run, Annalise had said.

No, there weren’t any leads.

Yes, just last night, around midnight: that is, about the time Margo was standing on the portico sipping hot chocolate.

“Nothing to do with you,” she told herself again.

Margo had to believe it, because the alternative was incomprehensible.

“Incomprehensible,” she said aloud, then laughed, remembering.

She had sat on this very bench in high school, too old for the playhouse but not too old to seek out a spot where she could be alone when the pain of being ignored or despised by the white students became too much for her. The word
incomprehensible
sparked the memory because it had six syllables, and six-syllable words had been her passion, ever since Mrs. Hochberg, her tenth-grade English teacher, had introduced them to the double dactyl, a form of comic verse with precise rules of rhyme and meter, beginning with two nonsense words and containing a real word of six syllables, with a stress on the fourth. They were called double-dactyl words. Double-dactyl words, double-dactyl poems: Margo had been hooked from the first—not least because her instant mastery of the complicated game had altered her destiny.

In those days, Margo’s most hated adversary had been a tall blonde cheerleader named Melody Davidson, chased by all the boys Margo secretly liked. Back then, Margo had been quiet rather than combative, and Melody zinged her at will, knowing she would never fight back. Margo was one of the two or three best students by class rank, but submissive in the face of confrontation, and therefore an ideal target for bullies. She remembered the day they had read aloud in English class the double dactyls they’d composed as homework. Most of them were poorly done and didn’t begin to follow the very precise rules, but Melody’s was brilliant:

The class was stunned. Mrs. Hochberg was angrily commanding Melody to stay after school to do the assignment over, reminding her that personal attacks were not permitted in the classroom, and
threatening a note to her parents, but Melody’s cold blue eyes, fixed on Margo, glittered malicious delight at her successful coup.

Margo did what in those days she always did at moments of confrontation: she dropped her gaze, as if her notes were suddenly of the most surpassing interest. She scribbled nonsense as the heat rose in her face, and she felt the judgmental stares of her classmates, her humiliation not in the least assuaged by Mrs. Hochberg’s lecturing her tormentor. Then she looked at the page and realized that what she had written wasn’t nonsense at all. She blinked. Years of slights and mockery by the white kids—and now, suddenly, a way to fight back.

At that moment, Margo’s life changed.

“Wait,” she’d said, very loud.

Mrs. Hochberg adjusted her thick glasses. “It’s okay, Margo. You don’t need to say anything. This wasn’t your fault, and you should ignore it. It’s my responsibility—”

For the first time in her life, but not the last, Margo interrupted a teacher. She was writing hard. An idea had come to her. “I’m not offended, Mrs. Hochberg. I thought Melody’s double dactyl was funny. I’d like to read mine now, if that’s okay.”

“Oh, um, of course, that’s fine,” said Mrs. Hochberg, quite taken aback.

And so Margo had marched to the front of the room, holding in trembling fingers the lined paper on which she had just rewritten her own double dactyl:

Stunned silence. Melody’s mouth hung open. Then the laughter began. Even some hooting. Mrs. Hochberg was on her feet, bellowing
her rule against personal attacks and telling both girls to see her after school.

Margo always thought of that afternoon as the moment she went over to the attack. She was still an outcast, to be sure, but she generally managed to give back as good as she got, and became known for her scary sharp tongue. After a while, the others teased her less. Some of them—not Melody, but others—even befriended her. That was why, when first Professor Bacon and then Professor Niemeyer began to talk about the theory of deterrence, Margo already had an instinctive appreciation of its intricacies. Even her answer on the fateful afternoon when Niemeyer asked whether she would put missiles in Cuba, was informed by her own experience. Niemeyer was wrong. She wasn’t being methodological. She was being, as one would put it in a double dactyl, autobiographal. When she answered his question, she was imagining herself as the United States and her tormentors as the Soviets. That was why she had said the likely American response would be reason enough not to put the missiles in. Only now did she admit the truth: a brilliant mind, even when combined with a sharp tongue, didn’t guarantee success.

As Phil Littlejohn could testify.

All at once, sitting still was too much. It was Mrs. Hochberg’s classroom all over again. She had been pushed around by the bullies—first Niemeyer, then Stilwell, then Harrington, now Fomin—but the time for submissiveness was done. This time, a double dactyl wouldn’t be enough. Her mind, on the other hand, was always available. She could think her way out.

As her father would have done.

Margo was on her feet. She all but ran back up to the house, and asked Muriel to tell Nana that she was borrowing the car.

“Mrs. Jensen will want to know where you’re going.”

“Out,” said Margo, like the teenager she still was.

She drove north along Route 9, not quite able to believe her own destination. Nana’s car was an old Cadillac, fiery red, with winged fenders and lots of chrome. Margo stepped hard on the gas. A part of her even hoped to get pulled over, but the one state police car she spotted didn’t
seem to care. She passed through Fishkill and Wappingers Falls, where she stopped to buy coffee and a newspaper. The dark-blue Chevy stopped, too, which scarcely surprised her, because it had locked onto her tail half a mile beyond the gates of Nana’s estate and never strayed more than two or three car lengths behind.

Margo almost smiled—she was still in the game after all—and then she remembered Littlejohn, and her buoyant mood died. She had forgotten to ask Annalise whether there were any arrangements yet.

In Hyde Park, she drove right past the cottage where Nana’s friend Eleanor Roosevelt lay dying. She found a diner and had lunch and read the paper. No mention of any missiles in Cuba. The press seemed more worried about the prospect of war between India and China than between the United States and the Soviet Union. Of course: the missiles were still a secret. Margo turned the page. In New York,
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
was drawing record audiences. She and Tom had talked about going, but Nana would have been appalled that her granddaughter wanted to see such filth.