Back Channel (47 page)

“I wait in the car while you study the area. At six-fifteen, I get out and start walking. If you see anything you don’t like, you’ll get me out. Otherwise, I meet with Fomin, I leave, I walk four blocks north,
and you’ll drive past me on the side street to take me to the meeting with Kennedy.”

“And?”

“Don’t trust anyone who says he or she has been sent for me.”

“And?”

This final instruction was the only one hard for her to pronounce. “If anything happens to you, run.”

Bundy had at last acceded to Bobby Kennedy’s repeated demands. He had agreed to put one eye—one only—on Margo. A lone Secret Service agent would be dispatched to the scene. Any more would spook Fomin, but one man alone should be able to remain concealed. He was worried that McCone might have the same idea. Once the Agency had the secret of the back channel, Bundy didn’t think it would take much work for their analysts to track down the location of the meetings. And if Hoover, too, were somehow to winkle out what was going on, the neighborhood around the Yenching Palace might be downright crowded tonight.

Jack Ziegler was several miles away from the Yenching Palace. He hated being far from the action, but he also appreciated the wisdom of Viktor’s construction. Viktor had diplomatic immunity. Should any violence transpire, Viktor could not even be questioned by the authorities; he could only be confined to his embassy and then deported. Whereas Jack Ziegler—well, he had a larger picture in mind. He had come to realize that preventing
GREENHILL
’s message from getting through wouldn’t be enough. He and his associates could not act properly unless they knew the actual content of the message.

He needed
GREENHILL
herself—her living, breathing body—so that they might have another talk.

Viktor would take care of that.

At six-sixteen, Margo stepped out of the car, locked the door, and began her walk. Jerry Ainsley had warned her not to be overcautious. Anybody watching would expect a degree of nervousness, he had explained, so she shouldn’t try to hide moderate anxiety. But Fomin had to see her confident and calm, or he would start wondering whether there was something he, too, should be worried about.

A brisk northerly wind smacked her across the face as she turned up Connecticut Avenue. She leaned into it, shortening her stride. She went over both plans in her mind—Bundy’s and Ainsley’s—and marveled at how many heads she was wearing under her single hat.

At six-twenty-eight, she vanished into the restaurant. Three separate watchers dutifully whispered the fact of her arrival into three walkie-talkies.

Everybody settled down to wait.

“Your President is to be commended for his restraint.”

“That restraint may be coming to an end.”

Fomin lifted an eyebrow. His plate as usual was heaped with egg rolls, but he barely touched them. “So the war party in your country might be gaining influence?”

She remembered one of Niemeyer’s favorite mots: Ideology makes us stupid.

“You shot down a plane. I don’t think somebody has to be a reactionary or a fascist to want to shoot back.”

“Do you believe, then, that there is no war party in America?”

“I’m not saying that—”

“Good. Because the Comrade General Secretary does not share your somewhat sanguine view. He does not doubt for a moment that they are swiftly becoming ascendant.” The dark eyes smoldered. “Nor do I.”

“I understand that, but—”

“Miss Jensen. Let me be as clear as I can. If I were to be persuaded that the war party is gaining power over your President—if, for example, they were to interfere successfully with these negotiations—I would advise the Comrade General Secretary to break off the back channel and prepare for war.” He made a show of eating, but without enthusiasm. “We stand at the edge of the precipice, Miss Jensen. The
path back from the brink is a narrow one. You must deliver the message precisely as I shall relate it.”

Margo felt terribly tired. “I always do.”

Fomin’s face was gray. It took her some minutes to work out that what she was reading there was defeat.

“You may tell your President that the Comrade General Secretary agrees to all of his terms.” He picked at his food. “We will remove the offensive weapons from Cuba. We will accept in response his public agreement not to invade Cuba. But there is more.” He frowned past her toward the door, but when she turned, she saw no reason for alarm.

“Very well,” she said.

“The General Secretary will also require your President’s private promise to remove the missiles from Turkey and Italy within a year.”

There it was. Fomin had understood the prisoner’s dilemma after all. Each side would get a part of what it wanted: Kennedy’s public wouldn’t know about the deal, yet Khrushchev could trumpet the result to his hard-liners. The exchange relied entirely on trust: Khrushchev would have to believe that Kennedy would keep his word.

Always assuming that Kennedy accepted the deal.

“I will convey the General Secretary’s message,” she said formally.

“You also asked for evidence that I do indeed speak for the General Secretary.” His heavy gaze, ordinarily so intense, were focused on the middle distance. “You may inform your President that the Comrade General Secretary very much enjoyed sitting beside Mrs. Kennedy at dinner on the first night of the summit. You may further inform your President that Mrs. Kennedy on that occasion asked the Comrade General Secretary not to bore her with statistics. We presume that your President will be able to confirm this with Mrs. Kennedy. And that this evidence will be sufficient.”

She saw no point in lying. “I have no way to tell, Mr. Fomin. I hope it will be enough.”

“You must see to it.” Flatly. “And there is something else.” She waited. The eyes cut her way again, but carried little of their former fire. “We have worried up until now only about the hotheads on your side. Now, unfortunately, the hotheads on my side also know about the back channel.” He managed a smile. “There is even some reason to believe that your hotheads have told my hotheads.”

“I can’t believe that.”

“Why not? If you considered these negotiations to constitute a treacherous surrender, would you not use all measures to end them? Even trying to manipulate your enemy into doing the work for you?”

Now she understood his distraction; or thought she did. She spoke softly, even, to her own surprise, affectionately: “Are you saying you’re in danger?”

“No, Miss Jensen.” All at once the intensity was back. “I am not the one who is under threat.”

She left the restaurant and turned north this time, because Ainsley would be waiting on Rodman Street. He had warned her that Bundy might consider it worth the risk to have someone watching her this time. She didn’t bother to look around: She knew she’d never spot the surveillance. The night was growing colder. She walked faster than usual, knowing how urgent the message was. This was it: the end of the negotiation. True, the President had assured her on Friday that the crisis was over, and had been wrong. But this time felt different. The choice was there to be made. Either Kennedy would accept that he really was negotiating with Khrushchev, or tomorrow the world would go to war. Margo wondered whether she should have accepted Major Madison’s offer to get her safely to Ohio; or if, even now, she should be searching for a way to reach Garrison. But another part of her—a secret, proud, ambitious self, so deep inside that she sometimes forgot it was there—wondered, if she succeeded, what her future might be like. The one thing she was sure of was that Donald Jensen would be proud of his daughter for trying.

Bright with this calming thought, she strode purposefully up the avenue. Had she been less distracted, she might have noticed the two men in long coats who had emerged from the bar two doors up from the restaurant and fallen into step a dozen paces behind her. But she heard the shriek—no question about that—the sudden wail of a woman who happened to be passing by and saw the men pull their guns.

Margo spun around.

And everything happened very fast.

There were gunshots, several of them. Later, she could not quite get the sequence right. A couple were muffled spits, two or three others were loud booms, another made a sound like a firecracker. But in her head it all registered afterward in a series of bright flashes of disordered memory:

The woman who had shrieked, lying bloody on the sidewalk.

Jericho Ainsley, looming over a car, pointing his gun directly at Margo, yelling words she couldn’t make out.

Aleks Fomin, standing half a block away, just outside the restaurant, also yelling, but at something across the street.

Warren, her Secret Service driver, materializing from somewhere, gun in hand, grabbing for her arm, then stumbling, holding his chest.

The Cornell alum who’d snapped her picture, tonight sans funny hat and camera, shoving a protesting Fomin back inside the restaurant.

The man with gold-rimmed glasses beckoning from a taxi, urging her to join him.

Ainsley’s gun still tracking her as she crouched and moved.

Margo herself, darting between parked cars.

Ainsley shouting: “Margo, no! It’s okay!”

The man with the gold-rimmed glasses, shaking his head, shouting at her not to listen, tugging at her sleeve. “He’s one of them!”

The taxi driver drawing a shotgun from somewhere, pointing it in Ainsley’s direction, firing off a round as the CIA man ducked behind a car.

The other man shoving the gun down.

Then all at once her mind was working again, and she knew it was time to move.

“Bundy sent me!” Gold Rims yelled. “We have to get you out of here!” And that was almost enough to get her to join him, but Harrington had warned her a million years ago to trust nobody in an emergency, and nobody was whom she decided to trust.

Nobody except Warren, who had taken a bullet aimed her way. She longed to go to him, but couldn’t. At a fitter moment, she would mourn him.

She ducked away from the man in the taxi and darted toward the shadows.

“Margo, stop!” shouted Ainsley, somewhere behind her.

Another round of gunshots.

She stayed low, moving along the line of cars. There were sirens in the distance, and she was betting that Ainsley couldn’t stay long. She was right. He lifted his head at the sharp wail of approaching sirens, took a last look in the direction she had run, then melted into the darkness.

Margo waited, but he didn’t reappear.

There were onlookers now, pointing and chattering and trying to decide whether to cover the body. She joined them, as wide-eyed and trembling as anyone in the group, but kept shuffling backward as the crowd grew. When the police began to move everyone away, she was already across the street, walking south. Ainsley would be waiting to the north, on Rodman Street, but just now her trust was exhausted. Though Margo needed help getting Fomin’s message to the President, there was no way she was getting into a car with a man who had just pointed a gun her way. Not until she knew who was trying to kill her.

She picked up the pace.

“She could be dead,” said Bobby Kennedy. “She could be in the wrong hands.”

The President stood behind the desk, staring out into the Rose Garden. He was bent slightly at the waist, one hand pressed against the window as he fought the pain, a posture he would never have adopted in public. Not all of the pain was physical. After the shootout in front of the restaurant, Margo had disappeared. The President had waited at the townhouse for an hour, in vain.

“Let’s not jump to conclusions,” he said. “She was scared. She could be hiding.”

The attorney general cut in eagerly, like a bully at a dance. “Hiding from whom? Who exactly do you think was out there shooting tonight? The Mafia?” He had chosen the silent Bundy as the object of his ire. “What’s that look mean? You don’t think the fire-breathers at the Pentagon are furious that we haven’t done anything about the U-2 being shot down? You don’t think a man like LeMay would do whatever he could to undermine our negotiations?” He turned to his brother. “The way he talks to you, Jack? It’s inexcusable. You should cashier him. Right now. Today.”

“Now, let’s slow down a minute,” said Bundy, careful to address himself to Bobby. “You may not like Curtis LeMay’s style. He’s rough and unfinished, compared to a lot of the people we deal with. But he built the Strategic Air Command pretty much single-handed. When
he took over SAC in 1948, it was the poor stepchild of the Air Force. A couple of dozen obsolete, worn-out bombers, and not even a base to call its own. When he left nine years later, he’d turned it into the mightiest airborne armada on the face of the earth. Something like six hundred B-52
S
, along with hundreds more support aircraft. Those bombers of ours that are orbiting at their ‘go’ points right now, scaring the willies out of Moscow? The others that will take their places when fuel runs low? We have those planes because of General LeMay. You may not like his style, Bobby. He may have a habit of saying what he thinks when everybody else is diplomatic or even just lies about what they’re thinking because your brother’s the President. But don’t mistake bluntness for disloyalty. And try to remember that what LeMay says, whether you like it or not, is going to represent the views of a lot of people around the table and out in the country. You may not like it, but you have to hear it.”

The Kennedy brothers were staring in astonishment. “Listen, Mac,” the attorney general began.

“Let me finish, please. I’m not given to a lot of long speeches, so let me be clear about this. General LeMay may not be the friendliest or most respectful man you’ll meet. His politics are to the right of Genghis Khan. But we have to be realists. He possesses considerable gifts as a strategic thinker. His men revere him. He helped organize the Berlin airlift in 1948. He wanted to fight, but when Washington said no, he did as he was told. Whatever else Curtis LeMay may be, he’s a good soldier and a thorough patriot. I can’t imagine any circumstances in which he would turn against his commander in chief. And that matters. We’re almost at war. If the balloon does go up, LeMay is the man you want running the Air Force.”