The Double Game (40 page)

Did I believe him, or was he just trying to scare me?

“I want you to put Ziegler back on the line so I can make the necessary arrangements. He will piss and moan, but he’ll get the job done, and when he hangs up he’s going to tell you what to do next. But I don’t want you doing anything further—
nothing,
do you hear me? not even take a piss—until you’ve finished reading it. Then I want you to call me. From the phone at Der Flügel, not from your own. That’s when I’ll give you the name. Understood?”

“That could take hours.”

“My prose isn’t that bad, Cage. It’s the only way this will work. If you leave the store before then, with or without the book, then I promise you’ll never get a chance to even read page one. You must trust me on that.”

“Okay.”

“Good. Give the phone to Ziegler. Is that fool of a clerk Klaus there?”

“Yes.”

“Then pray to God he doesn’t handle the arrangements. Good luck, Cage. And happy reading. I hope I’ll be speaking to you again.”

I handed the phone to Ziegler, who by now was very grave in manner. He said little as Lothar talked to him other than the occasional “Yes,” nodding all the while. A few minutes later he hung up. The first thing he did was order Klaus home.

“On your way out, put the ‘Closed’ sign in the window. I’ll write a note explaining to our customers that there has been a family emergency.”

It reminded me of the note in the window at Antikvariat Drebitko, which didn’t seem like a good omen, but of course neither Klaus nor Ziegler knew about that. So Klaus merely nodded, seeming relieved to be escaping a situation that had suddenly turned tense and serious. Ziegler waited for the office door to close before addressing me. He took a set of keys from a drawer and put them on the desk.

“This is my spare set. You’ll need to lock up when you’re done. Then I want you to put them into this envelope and drop them back through the mail slot. Do you understand?”

“I’ll be locking up?”

“
Pay attention,
will you?”

“I understand. I’ll lock up, then put the keys back through the mail slot, inside the envelope. Where will you be?”

He shook his head, as if that wasn’t relevant.

“This is the most important part, so listen closely. You are not to take any notes. None. When you are finished reading, you must move the filing cabinet away from the wall. This one here.” He tapped it. “Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Behind it you’ll find an opening to an old coal chute that used to come into the building from the alley in the back. Drop the book into the chute. Don’t worry about its condition, just drop it there and then slide the filing cabinet back into place, do you understand?”

“I understand.”

“After you’ve done that, you will let yourself out of the store as previously instructed.”

“Okay. And then?”

He threw his hands in the air and shook his head, as if to say that was none of his business and never would be, no matter what happened to me. It wasn’t exactly reassuring, but by then I was eager to begin reading.

“If you are quite clear on all these matters of procedure, then I will leave you to your work. Good-bye.”

He departed in a rush. Moments later I heard the lock smack home on the outer door. All was silent. It was just me and the book. I sat down at the desk and turned to page one. The book was in German, of course, but here’s the rough translation of Lothar’s opening sentence:

On this particular Wednesday in Budapest, the spy known as Headlight had decided to employ a different sort of courier. A boy, no more than ten years old, and an American at that. He was one of the privileged specimens from the embassy, although you never would’ve guessed it from his loose and ungainly brown shorts, which were just like those worn by all the grimy locals that numbered among his playmates.

He was an intelligent boy, the American, and carefree in the way that only an outsider could be in this capital of closely held secrets. Yet there was something inherently wary in his gaze and demeanor, as if life itself up to now had been one long covert action. In other words, he was the perfect choice for the task at hand.

Well, Lothar certainly knew how to start things off. Not only was I hooked, I was already oblivious to any thought of the forces that would soon begin gathering outside the walls of Der Flügel, waiting impatiently for me to emerge.

Even if I’d been aware, I’m not sure it would have slowed me down. This was the first spy novel I’d read since the Wall had come down, and for all I knew it might be my last. So I sure as hell was going to make the most it. I turned the page, eager for more.

36

Lothar was a fine storyteller, and if not for my urge to wring the significance from every detail, I would gladly have surrendered to his narrative powers. His tale briskly wound its way through all the cities I’d once called home. The names of his characters were easy enough to decipher: Earl LeGrange for Ed Lemaster. Jeff Anderson for Jim Angleton. Bartlett Pierce for Breece Preston. Warren Cave for my father. And me, of course, appearing simply as the Boy.

But Lothar’s most daring stunt was that all the code names were as real as the locations in which they operated: Headlight, Blinker, Taillight, Nijinsky, Dewey, Oleg, Leo, Thresher, and quite a few more. Somehow, through all his footwork, the indefatigable Lothar had tracked down everyone, Russians as well as Americans.

As their deeds unfolded it became clear that only Headlight, or Lemaster, was ever certain at any given time about what both sides were up to. But which one was he working for, and toward what end? Lothar’s art was that you weren’t sure, even as Headlight played both sides against the middle.

The McGuffin, or plot point on which the book hinged, was the question of whether the CIA would be able to keep the Soviets from getting their hands on a copy of NATO’s contingency war plans for central Europe. It was one of the novel’s few weak points, which led me to believe that Lothar had made it up. In fact, it was fairly easy to spot the moments when he was winging it, or finessing gaps in his knowledge. His prose may have been powerful, but his powers of invention were weak. This told me that however thoroughly he’d penetrated the operations of both sides, he had never uncovered any of the actual secrets they were trafficking in.

The Lemaster courier network he described was a complex feat of espionage genius, a multilayered structure in which secrets were passed within the covers of old espionage novels. In one of its more clever touches, the rarest books were used for passing the most important secrets. Was that Lothar’s creation, or Lemaster’s?

In Lothar’s version, at least, the information was passed by using book codes, with the code key being sent via separate channels, much as I’d already guessed. But here, too, the device felt unconvincing, which made me suspect Lothar never actually got his hands on a code key. On that point we both seemed to be guessing.

Lothar kept things interesting by setting up a series of close scrapes, and by showing the machinations of the rival spymasters as they tried to pinpoint what Headlight was really up to—Angleton in Washington, Oleg in Moscow. At various times both were convinced that they were getting the best of their rivals, only to believe in the next minute that they were being bamboozled.

Lothar let the reader go back and forth this way until the final twenty pages. In the climactic scene, Headlight passes the coveted NATO report to his Soviet handler in a meeting at a Vienna café—the Braunerhof, by God, with Headlight initiating the exchange by entering the very phone booth where Litzi and I had recently reunited. He places a coded call, walks to the newspaper table, and slips the report inside a copy of the German newspaper, the
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
He then leaves the café just as his Soviet handler takes the newspaper back to his own table and slips the report inside a briefcase.

So there it was. In Lothar Heinemann’s judgment, Lemaster was a Soviet double agent.

Even after days of believing that this might well be the case, the news hit me harder than I would have expected. I sat there remembering the Ed Lemaster of twenty-seven years ago, swirling wine in his glass and teasing me with his talk of having contemplated betrayal.

But had Lothar really witnessed such a decisive moment, or had he surmised it from his threads of evidence? Even if the former was true, had he really know the details of the item Lemaster placed inside the newspaper? Was the betrayal genuine, or had Lemaster been passing a clever bit of disinformation?

Lothar left unresolved the question of whether Lemaster’s first CIA handler, Breece Preston, had been in on the scheme or merely a dupe. Not that Preston would have appreciated either interpretation. Either way, he didn’t look reliable enough to entrust with millions of dollars to spy for your soldiers.

While Lothar’s verdict on Lemaster was clear, to me the jury was still out. And this was hardly the sort of “proof” I could publish in a magazine story, especially since I wouldn’t even be leaving the store with Lothar’s book. But at the very least, especially if Valerie Humphries’s account was accurate, Lothar’s findings showed Lemaster had been far cozier with the Soviets than his Washington handlers had ever realized or sanctioned. If he wasn’t a double, then he had run one hell of a rogue operation.

But the book’s most diabolical section, as far as the CIA would have been concerned, was the acknowledgments page in the back. Each and every Agency operative portrayed in the book was thanked by name. All you had to do then was match their initials to those of the characters in the book to fill out the entire covert cast. No wonder the Agency had intervened to stop publication.

My handler would no doubt be pleased by these findings, which made me all the more satisfied with the idea of withholding them from the manipulative son of a bitch. And now I would finally learn his name.

I checked my watch. It was 7:43 p.m., dark by now, and I was hungry, thirsty, and needed to pee. I picked up Ziegler’s phone and punched in Lothar’s number. He answered right away.

“Heinz?”

“You’re finished?”

“It’s impressive.”

“The prose, or the contents?”

That’s when I realized that even after all this time, Lothar had retained his authorial vanity. The CIA had not only bottled up his secrets, it had deprived him of his literary moment—reviews, reaction, and, most important, readers. Lothar, who practically lived in bookstores, had never once seen his own work on a shelf or a display table, tucked in among his favorites. So now he was eager to hear at last from his one and only patron.

“Both. Best thing I’ve read in years.”

“Well … it has its problems, of course. But I’m gratified to hear you say it. Truly.”

“You seem pretty sure he’s guilty.”

“As sure as you can be in this business. Meaning not very.”

“But you were winging it on the book codes, weren’t you?”

“An educated guess. Our handler was always convinced that there must be something about the books themselves that held the key, but I never found it.”

“You promised me a name.”

“Try page one-nineteen. I believe you’ve already met him, however briefly. But don’t say it over the phone. By now I doubt we’re the only ones on Ziegler’s line.”

I thumbed quickly to the page, running my forefinger down the column of type until I saw the name Gil Cavanaugh, an assistant to the Angleton character. I was pretty sure I knew who that was, but checked the acknowledgments page, and there it was: Giles Cabot.

I thought back to the funeral on Block Island. Wils Nethercutt, the deceased, and his neighbor and onetime Agency rival, Giles Cabot, confined to a wheelchair even as he faced down a menacing Breece Preston. A perfectly logical choice, but nonetheless amazing. I’d been strung along across half of Europe by a frail invalid who must also be a bookworm. At least I knew where to find him.

“Do you have it?”

“I do. Thanks to your acknowledgments page.”

“A cheap shot at the Agency, but I couldn’t resist. The bastards owed me. Still do. Now for the hard part. Follow Ziegler’s instructions to the letter, but once you leave the store I doubt you’ll be going very far. I just hope that the right people get to you first.”

“Is that a guess, or do you know something?”

“A little of both.”

From out in the store I heard the sound of smashing glass.

“You’re right. Someone’s just broken in.”

“Get moving, Bill. Finish the job, then run like Zátopek.
Now!
”

I slammed the receiver and moved quickly to the file cabinet and wrenched it away from the wall. Footsteps pounded through the store. The doorknob rattled. I knelt and reached behind the cabinet, pulling the handle of an old metal flap hinged at the bottom, which opened onto a coal chute. I tossed in the book, wincing in spite of myself as it banged and tumbled. As I peered into the darkness of the cellar I thought I heard the scrape of leather soles below. The flap thumped back into place. I stood and shoved the cabinet back against the wall, then had just enough time to move back behind the desk before the office door splintered open with a crunch of shattered wood. Two men rushed me. One pinned my arms behind my back while the other shouted in heavily accented English, “The book. Where is the book?”

I’m not quite sure where my answer came from, probably some old paragraph from a long-ago rainy Saturday, author unknown. But it made all the difference.

“It’s in a burn box in the corner.” I nodded toward a shelf where Ziegler piled his old newspapers. “It’s set to activate in two minutes.”

A burn box is a spy device. You throw your secrets inside and lock it up. If anyone comes to take them, you push a button or punch in a number to incinerate everything inside before the enemy can retrieve a single scrap. My assailants knew this as well as I did, and my words created such an alarming sense of urgency in both of them that for a single decisive moment they forgot all about me and rushed toward the corner.

I darted out the office door toward the broken glass at the front of the store. They were still shouting and thrashing around as I stepped into the cool Vienna night.