Back Channel (54 page)

Kennedy was perplexed. “That’s it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“That’s the entire message?”

“Yes, Mr. President.”

“I asked you to call me Jack when we’re alone.” But the teasing was distracted, automatic. He put down his glass too hard. He seemed angry, and his next words told her why. “That might not be enough. Anybody could have overheard Khrushchev saying that. An aide. A translator. For all I know, it was in
The Washington Post.
” He smacked his fist into his open palm. “I’m sorry, Margo. I can’t go to Taylor and LeMay with ‘I know it’s Khrushchev because he flirted with my wife.’ They’ll laugh me out of the room.”

“You don’t have to,” she said softly.

“What was that?”

“I said, you don’t have to, sir. You don’t have to justify your decision to them. You’re the President of the United States. It doesn’t matter
if they believe you’re really dealing with the General Secretary. It only matters if you believe it.”

The gray-green eyes widened, and it was as if he was seeing her for the first time not as a messenger or potential conquest but as a mind.

An instant later, everything was motion. Kennedy was striding toward the door. His secretary had stepped in and was inviting Margo to follow her. She showed her into what was obviously somebody’s office, with files and papers and a half-covered typewriter.

“You’re to wait here,” the secretary said. “Can I bring you anything?”

Margo blinked. It had been days or more since what she had wanted had mattered. She needed a moment to readjust. Perhaps the nightmare was over after all.

“I’d like to call my grandmother,” she said.

“Of course. I’ll get you an outside line.”

“So we have failed,” said Viktor Vaganian. They were in the safe house, sitting in the kitchen while their fellow conspirators cleansed the place of evidence. The Russian was spreading thick butter on black bread. “I am relieved, in a way. I would not want my country to be humiliated in this fashion, but I also would not want a war.”

Ziegler was pacing. “There wouldn’t have been a war. Maybe your guys would have tried a little something in Berlin, but that would have been it.” His fists were clenched. “We were so close. So close.”

“It makes no difference.” He finished the bread, began carving another heavy slice. “I shall be summoned home. Perhaps they will shoot me. Perhaps Comrade Khrushchev will fall and I will be among the victors. There is no way to tell.” He was drinking beer rather than vodka, and wiping his mouth with his sleeve. “Perhaps you should come with me.”

“Why would I do that?”

“Your government will likely try you for treason.”

Ziegler laughed. “Won’t happen. I have powerful friends, believe me. And the Kennedys, well, they’re pragmatists. They won’t want to take on—”

The doorbell rang. One of the others went to answer, and returned a moment later with Jerry Ainsley.

“What do you want?” asked Ziegler, nastily.

“I’m here to arrest you,” he said. “I assume you won’t be resisting.”

“You can’t arrest me. You’re unarmed, number one, and, number two, you’re Agency. You have no domestic jurisdiction.”

“But I do,” said Agent Stilwell, stepping into the room. “Mr. Ziegler, you are under arrest. Captain Vaganian is to return to his embassy at once.”

Ziegler went purple with fury. For a bad moment, Viktor thought he might actually draw a weapon—or, far worse, blurt out the truth, that he and Stilwell had made a deal. Whereas, as even the Russians knew, with Hoover there was never a deal, there was simply the director himself, skulking in the shadows, using to his advantage whatever information he gleaned.

But Ziegler controlled himself. His anger softened into a smirk. He used two fingers to remove his weapon, and put out his hands for the cuffs.

The house was full of agents now. Viktor gathered his associates and headed for the door. Half the neighborhood lined the street. The Russians were walking along the sidewalk, under the wary escort of a pair of FBI agents, when Vaganian felt a sudden terrible pain in both legs.

He cried out and collapsed.

One of the agents knelt beside him. The other was chasing a woman into the crowd.

Viktor lay on the pavement, sweating in sharp red pain. They would never catch her, of course, and he would never know whether the attack had been staged. He did know that both of his kneecaps had been crushed, and that in all likelihood he would never walk again. He even found a grim admiration for the swiftness and skill with which Agatha Milner had taken out both knees with one roundhouse kick.

In later years, the events of the next couple of hours remained hazy in Margo’s memory. She sat in the office, eating the sandwich the secretary had brought her from the mess and washing it down with milk. Possibly she dozed a bit. She had a sense of frenetic activity just beyond the range of her perceptions, as if people were running here and there, but offstage. At one point, two men she didn’t know peered through the doorway, one wearing Air Force blue festooned with ribbons, the other in glasses and an expensive suit.

“Is that her?” said the military man.

“That’s her.”

“A coed?”

“That’s right, General. Nineteen years old.”

“Brave kid. She should get some kind of medal.”

“Maybe so.”

“Not that I trust the Commies further than I can throw them,” said the general, the two of them chatting as if she weren’t even in the room. She might even have dreamed them, because, when she looked again, the pair was gone and the secretary was back. Margo’s lunch dishes had magically disappeared.

“Are you up for some company, honey?”

She sat up straighter. “Of course. Thanks.”

McGeorge Bundy stepped into the room, shutting the door behind
him. “Your nation owes you a great debt, Miss Jensen,” he began. “Even though the world will never know of your contribution—”

“It’s over?”

“Not quite. There’s still a chance that they might renege. But, for the moment, war seems to have been averted.” Behind the glasses, his eyes were exhausted. “Unfortunately, we shall have to call upon your assistance one final time.”

“You mean, I have to see Fomin again.”

“That’s exactly what I mean, Miss Jensen. I apologize. But there are some final details to be worked out, and, at the moment, I believe you are the only one he will trust. Remember, they shot at him last night, too.”

A beat.

“Who’s ‘they’?” she asked. “You must know by now.”

“I can’t tell you everything. Some of their people are being deported. Some of our people are under arrest.”

“And Ainsley?”

“What about him?”

“Is he under arrest?”

“Jericho Ainsley? Goodness, no. Why would we arrest him? He saved your life last night, Miss Jensen. And he also tipped off the Bureau to where the conspirators had their safe house.”

“If he knew about the safe house, it’s because he was one of them! He tried to kill me last night!”

She was on her feet now, and every bit as tall as the diminutive Bundy. But he responded to her anger only with amusement.

“No, Miss Jensen. He didn’t. Evidently, you ran away before he could explain that he was pointing his gun not at you but at the man standing behind you. Look. You can talk to him yourself.”

“He’s here in the building?”

“We thought it unlikely that you would trust anyone else to take you to the rendezvous with Colonel Fomin.”

They met on the park bench across from the National Gallery of Art. The late-afternoon sun was low and listless. There was no wind, but the chill was rising all the same.

“You have done well,” said Fomin. “Will they be arranging a suitable reward for you?”

“I just want to go back to what I was doing before.”

“Your life will never be the same. You understand this. I refer not only to the memories that will plague you—some wonderful, some horrible, all of them impossible to escape—no, I refer to you. The changes in you. You are not the person that you were a month ago, or even a week ago. You belong to them now.”

“I don’t belong to anybody but myself.”

“
Chush.
Nonsense. The fact that you are here tells me that you are no longer your own woman.” He nodded toward the street, where a pair of quite obvious watchers kept vigil. “Have they sent you to tell me we have an agreement? Or does your war party wish to change the deal?”

“The President agrees to your terms.”

She expected him to exhibit some sign of relief, or joy, or satisfaction. Again his calm surprised her. “And is that all?”

“No. In exchange for your additional conditions, the—the White House also has additional conditions.”

Fomin detected the hesitation. “The White House. Not the President.”

Margo chose not to answer. Her hands were on the bench, fingers pressed into the cold wood. “I also have reasons of my own for wanting to see you.”

“First tell me the conditions. Then we will discuss your reasons.”

She tilted her head back, remembering Bundy’s words. “Violence has been done on our soil, to our people. There has to be a reckoning. That’s the first condition.”

“What you are telling me is that they believe Captain Vaganian was responsible for what happened to Dr. Harrington.”

“Was he?”

“Such a thing is possible. But it is also possible that it was your own war party. You should look to punish your own traitors. We know perfectly well how to deal with ours. Vaganian will return to Moscow under arrest and stand trial. Will that satisfy them?”

“I believe so.”

“Then what is the second condition?”

“In addition, the General Secretary must agree, privately, that, within a year after the removal of the Jupiter missiles, he will resign
his office and retire.” When he said nothing, she added, “I am told that unless he agrees to this condition, the quarantine will remain in effect, the bombers will stay at their ‘go’ points, and the promise not to invade Cuba will be void.”

She felt embarrassed even saying the words. Fomin was silent for a bit, but when she chanced a look at him, he seemed to be smiling.

“Already there are plots against the Comrade General Secretary. There are many in the Party who would prefer new leadership. Under Comrade Stalin, nobody would have dared suggest such a thing. In this sense, Comrade Khrushchev has advanced the concrete conditions for socialism in our country. It is not right for a socialist people to be afraid of their own government.” He shut his eyes. “That your war party feels the need to threaten and bluster when they already hold the advantage is evidence of the utter corruption of the capitalist system. You would prevail against us, today, in a war. This is not a tribute to the superiority of your system. It is an outgrowth of the fact that we, not you, bore the brunt of the struggle against the fascists in the Great Patriotic War.”

“Colonel—”

He rode right over her. “But the struggle of the next decades will be ideological, not technological, and in that struggle we shall defeat you.”

“I think—”

“I find the additional term proposed by your war party offensive. However, I believe that the Comrade General Secretary has already considered the possibility of retirement. It is possible that he has already done his greatest service to the Motherland. I believe it is likely that he will agree.”

Margo let out a long breath. She actually sagged against the bench. Over. It was finally over.

“You said that you had a question of your own,” he reminded her.

“I do,” Margo said. She steeled herself. With the Cuban crisis resolved, it was time to deal with a crisis of her own. “You chose me for this role as your back channel.”

“You were the obvious choice.”

“I’m not so sure about that. In any case, it was you—you personally—who selected me. Is that fair?”

“I approved you.” His voice was flat. Again she sensed his dislike of being cross-examined by a woman.

“That implies that I was chosen by someone else.”

“Do you expect me to break operational security?”

She had rehearsed the next part since her epiphany at Ainsley’s apartment. “I think it’s more a matter of tying up a loose end.”

Margo talked for several minutes. According to the surveillance detail, Fomin shook his head several times, nodded once, then leaned over to whisper something. Finally, he stood and walked away, not looking back.

“She did well,” said the President. They were meeting in the residence this time, standing together on the balcony above the South Portico. “G
REENHILL
. An impressive young lady.”

“Yes, Mr. President.”

Kennedy caught something in his national security adviser’s voice. “Come on, Mac. Out with it.”

“It’s not really over.”

“Why not?”

“For one thing, we won’t have forces on the ground to be sure they crate those missiles. We’ll have to do visual inspection of the cargo ships as they leave Cuban waters.”

“That doesn’t strike me as a big problem.”

“No, sir. But there’s more. The negotiations included only the strategic warheads and the missiles. The Soviets still have the IL-28 bombers on the ground in Cuba, and they can reach our territory in minutes. It’s possible that they might be leaving behind tactical nuclear weapons, too. Short-range. Useless for attacking our territory, but useful in self-defense.”

Kennedy’s eyes narrowed. “Why didn’t you mention this, say, two days ago?”

“I decided that these were side issues, sir. Once the IRBMs and MRBMs were dealt with, we would be able to negotiate these out.”

“Is that really it, Mac?” That famous grin, this time ironic. “I was thinking maybe you didn’t mention it because you thought it would
derail the deal. You sat there and kept your mouth shut and hoped to hell General Taylor didn’t bring it up. Actually, I’m a little surprised that he didn’t. It had to be on his mind. Maybe you squared him earlier.” The President brushed a bit of lint from his sleeve. “Are you really that clever, Mac? Putting one over on me? On the entire national security apparatus of the United States?”