Back Channel (51 page)

Finally, Agatha approached her. “Get back in the car.”

“Why? What are we doing?”

“My job is to get you where you have to be, same as before. Major Madison will take care of the disposal.”

Margo looked at the prone figures on the grass.
Disposal,
her mind echoed for her, and she knew better than to ask for details.

“I would usually do it, but, as he points out, this is his city, and a lot of people owe him favors. Besides, by now they probably think he’s with you, since he’s not at his duty post. He called to say he’d be late, and I imagine his colonel tore him a new one. Anyway, when he gets to the Pentagon, someone will be tasked with asking him where
GREENHILL
is. It’s better if he doesn’t have to lie when he says he doesn’t know. Better for you, and better for his family.”

Major Madison was kneeling in the darkness. Agatha bundled Margo into the car. “I didn’t get to thank him.”

“If we survive tomorrow, you can thank him at your leisure. If we don’t, it won’t make any difference.”

A week ago, the cold rationality of the answer would have made Margo shiver. That was a week ago. Tonight, she was a jangled bundle of nerves, but managed nevertheless to focus on practicalities.

“We’re going to the townhouse?”

“Not a chance,” said Agatha. She was intermittently rubbing her injured wrist, and Margo suspected that, cast or no, the minder had broken it afresh in the struggle. “That’s the most natural place for them to look. Also, as you yourself pointed out, we don’t know whom we can trust.”

They had turned south on Fourth Street. The blocky shadow of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare was on their left.

“Can I trust you?” Margo asked.

“Not entirely.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I never spoke to Bundy. I told you my orders were through the chain of command. The truth is, I spoke to the man who used to be deputy head of my section in Plans. He isn’t connected to the Agency any longer.”

Margo had her hand on the door, ready to jump out of the car. “Jack Ziegler,” she breathed.

“Jack Ziegler,” Agatha echoed. “He’s the one who called me in and sent me to find you. First, though, he gave me this big speech about how the secret negotiations amount to surrender to the Reds, and so on—you get the idea.” She lifted her bad hand, stretched the fingers. “He figured I’d have a special animus toward them, and he’s right. He’s right about the back channel, too. The President is making a mistake. If we make a deal, the Soviets will continue to spend and grow and build and—well, it doesn’t matter. I told you he sent me. But that’s all over with.”

“I wish I could believe that.”

“You saw what just happened. You have no idea how much trouble I’m going to be in with Jack Ziegler. And he’s not a guy to be in trouble with.”

Margo was watching her face. “You’re saying you changed sides.”

“Not exactly. I think the President is wrong, but I don’t want to be
a part of what Jack Ziegler is doing. Not any more.” Agatha was furious now, the heat coming off her in waves. “Not after I saw the puukko knife in Kevin’s pocket.”

Margo’s hand went to her mouth. It wasn’t the Soviets who had murdered Dr. Harrington after all. It was the man Agatha had left for dead on the Mall. Murdered her after first torturing her with the knife …

“I assume they were questioning her about your whereabouts,” Agatha said. “Jack Ziegler told me that he’d guarantee your safety if I tracked you down. He knew I’d never turn you over otherwise. I’ve grown fond of you, Margo.” A heavy pause. “But he was lying. Maybe I knew all along. There’s a reason Kevin had another puukko on the Mall.”

Margo watched the older woman flexing the broken wrist, and, for a moment, ached with empathetic gratitude. A puukko knife. For questioning her. To be left beside her body so that the authorities would think the Soviets had done it, just as they’d left the other puukko beside Dr. Harrington, to make the crisis worse.

Margo shut her eyes, trying not to imagine the unimaginable fate from which Agatha Milner and Miles Madison had rescued her. The madness simply spiraled. The murder of Doris Harrington hadn’t even been for the purpose of interrogation. It was meant to point Washington in the wrong direction.

Those in the Ziegler faction, she realized, weren’t just trying to forestall the back-channel negotiations. They actually wanted war.

Meaning that the safety of nineteen-year-old Margo Jensen was suddenly, and literally, the most important thing in the world.

The dream had come true.

“So—what’s the plan exactly?” she finally asked.

With the crisis upon them, Agatha’s tone turned brisk. Margo had noticed this in Varna, too, how her minder, so mousy and quiet, would suddenly take control when the time arrived for decisions and plans. “Fomin’s message has to get to the President before the deadline. We can’t chance the townhouse. We can’t call anybody. We don’t know whom in the security apparatus we can trust. You have to speak to Kennedy directly. Nobody else.”

“And how do I do that?”

“First, we find you a place to sleep for a couple of hours. In the
morning I’ll bring you a change of clothes. Office attire. After that, you go to the White House.”

Margo’s turn to laugh. “And walk up to the gate and announce myself?”

“Hardly. Aside from the fact that the guards wouldn’t know you from Adam, I’m sure the ring around the place will be very tight—Ziegler’s people, the Russians, who knows?—and someone will be planted inside to stop you as well.”

“Then what are we going to do?”

“You go in as somebody else.” They passed Margo’s building and headed toward the waterfront. “Look. It’s not that hard to get into the White House. Maybe one day it will be, but right now it isn’t. An ID from a federal department, showing that you’re a senior official, will get you into the West Wing lobby. After that, you’ll have to figure out the rest.”

“I’m not a senior official. I’m nineteen.”

“Making a woman look older is a lot easier than making her look younger.” Agatha was tapping at her chin. “Getting you an ID will be trickier.”

“That’s right,” said Margo, mystified.

“Still. All we need is a black woman of roughly your build who has a senior executive-branch ID. A hat, a little makeup—the guards at the White House will never know the difference.”

“Even if you’re right, where are we going to find an ID like that?”

“We’re going to steal it.”

“That was very sloppy of you,” said the man in the gold-rimmed glasses, satisfaction patent in his voice. “First you let your little command post be overrun. Then three of your men, all armed, can’t stop two little girls.”

“They’re not little girls, and one of them is a trained killer.”

“And they had help.”

Ziegler looked up sharply. They were on the overgrown towpath along the old canal. The brown, fetid water might have been trapped there since the Civil War.

“Oh, yes,” Viktor continued. “My people observed. There was a Negro with a gun.”

“Your people were there and you didn’t do anything?”

“As you may recall, you instructed me in the clearest terms to commit no further acts of violence on your soil.” Viktor bared his teeth. “What I would really like to know, however, is why one of your people was carrying a puukko knife. No, don’t tell me. I can guess. You really are a fool, aren’t you?”

Jack Ziegler was bland. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“This,” said Viktor, drawing a puukko of his own, and making as if to lunge. There was macho comedy as they struggled. The Russian stepped away, laughing. “You really do believe it is possible to emerge victorious,” he said. “Remarkable.”

“You think I can’t take you?”

“I am talking about the war you are trying to start.”

“We didn’t start it. You know when it started? April of 1945.”

“When we defeated the fascists, and your country deemed it expedient to end our alliance?”

“When your country, contrary to your promises, occupied Czechoslovakia and Poland and installed puppet regimes.” They were walking again, back toward their vehicles. Ziegler was keeping his distance. “You tried to snap up Denmark, too, but the British were too fast for you.”

“You do not regard the dictators you support in Latin America as puppets?”

“I’m only saying your side started it.”

Viktor stifled a groan. Such splendid circularity. A Trotskyite could not have done better, the way those wreckers used to answer every question with
Because only the proletariat can do that!
There was no way to get through to such a man. Nevertheless, the Russian tried. “If you bomb Cuba, we shall be forced to retaliate. Then you will retaliate. And so on. You know that, of course. And perhaps you are right. You could do far more damage to us than we could do to you. But you would suffer casualties in the millions. Your way of life might never recover. Is that what you want?”

“The time for that debate was before your people put the missiles into Cuba.”

“Perhaps. But to practicalities.” All professional again. “Last night we had a good sense where
GREENHILL
would be hiding. We could have acted then. We didn’t. Now we don’t know. I thought this Milner was part of your group.”

“So did I.” Ziegler frowned. They were standing still now, the odoriferous wind whipping their coats. “She may still be. She was a little upset tonight, but she knows we’re right. She might yet decide to take care of the problem for us.”

“Or she might decide to assist
GREENHILL
instead.”

“It’s possible.”

“What do we do to prevent that? You don’t know where she is. You don’t know how to reach her. Has it occurred to you that she might simply deliver
GREENHILL
to a public phone booth, from which she might call the White House?”

“Then you won’t have your purge and I won’t have my war.” He puffed out a lot of air at the awful prospect. “But think about it. Whom can she call? Bundy? For all
GREENHILL
knows, he’s the reason she’s compromised.” An angry shake of the head. “So—what’s left for her to do? Call the President’s office? Assuming she can get through to his secretary, what exactly is she supposed to say? ‘Hi, this is Margo Jensen, I’m the one everybody thinks is having an affair with your boss, can I get in to see him, please?’ No. She won’t call. She’ll show up in person and insist on giving the message to the President herself. We’ll be watching. We’ll spot her.”

“You won’t.” The wind was howling now, but no rain was forecast. “Time and again, this girl has made fools of you. She is not even trained, but she has escaped you. She will be in disguise. I do not know how she will get into the White House, but she will get in.”

“Do you have a better idea?”

Viktor adjusted the gold-rimmed glasses. “I do.”

Every weekday morning, on her way to work, Victoria Elden stopped for coffee. A woman of some sophistication, Torie disdained both the foul brew from the cafeteria downstairs and the fouler brew from the percolator in the corridor. Her chosen source was a noisy café a block
north of the Labor Department, along Twelfth Street. Later, Torie was not able to pinpoint precisely what happened. She remembered nobody bumping into her or brushing her or shoving her. She didn’t even need her identification when she returned to the office with her tall, steaming cup, because she was friendly and warm and all the guards flirted with her; and besides, she brought them coffee, too. Only later that morning, when she happened to open her pocketbook to take out her compact, did she notice that her wallet was missing.

“Do you have the files?” asked Bernard Stilwell.

Jack Ziegler sat across from him in the FBI safe house. Of course their every word would be recorded, but it made no difference: no one but J. Edgar Hoover and his most trusted minions would ever hear the tapes.

Trusted minions like Agent Stilwell, who was tasked, Ziegler knew, with collecting embarrassing information about political leaders, to provide Hoover with ammunition for—well, for whatever his mad little mind might hatch.

Ziegler passed a folder across the table.

“This is one file,” Stilwell objected. “The deal was for three. Two from your clients, with information on the men most likely to be elected President in 1968 after JFK’s second term. One from the KGB archives that will help us make some arrests.”

“You get the other two when we get what we want.”

Ziegler could see the calculation in Stilwell’s eyes. The agent was said to be an excellent judge of what Hoover would approve or disapprove. Rarely did he use as his excuse the need to check with his boss.

“Very well,” said the FBI agent. “You get
GREENHILL
, we get the files. But do understand one thing, Mr. Ziegler.” A warning finger. “If this scheme goes south on you, we never met. Mention us to anybody, even in secret, and we’ll know within the hour. We’ll hunt you to the ends of the earth and shoot you down on sight.”

“Blah-blah-blah,” said Ziegler, unimpressed.

“And we’ll want those files available at the handover.”

“That won’t be a problem.”

The D.C. Transit bus crawled through the Monday-morning traffic on Pennsylvania Avenue. It was rush hour, and the bus was packed. The white people who thought they ran Washington were leaving the city in droves, but the Negroes who kept things running were on their way to work. Margo felt restless, hemmed in, needing to move. The effort of standing still—there were no seats—was making her half crazy. But even in her impatience and frustration, she saw the genius of Agatha’s idea. Ziegler’s people, the Russians—whoever was trying to stop her would be counting on her to rush to the White House as swiftly as she could. They would be watching cars, taxis, pedestrians. The notion that she would take her chances with the capital’s aging and unreliable buses might never occur to them.

Nevertheless, she kept leaning down to look out the windows for anyone taking too great an interest in this particular bus, and whenever she was jostled, she spun around, half expecting to find a puukko waving at her.