Back Channel (58 page)

“Which makes me an amateur.”

“Precisely.”

Margo stood. “I’ll always wonder, you know: How much of the planning was yours. How much was Fomin’s. And whether you’d worked together before.”

“Miss Jensen, I really think—”

“You must have already known each other, I guess. Otherwise, there would have been no reason for him to approach you. Fomin knew how to reach you, didn’t he? And he came to you on Khrushchev’s orders and said there were missiles in Cuba and he needed a go-between to serve as a back channel, somebody trustworthy and ambitious but utterly unobtrusive. Maybe you asked him if it would be safe, and he lied and said yes, and so, since you knew my father,
and maybe felt a little guilty about letting him get blown to bits, you thought this would be good for my career. So you gave him my name. Then you sent somebody—maybe Vale, maybe Mr. Khorozian—to see Bobby Fischer to make sure he’d demand the company of his good-luck charm in Varna. All Bobby remembers is that the man came in a shiny old green car, and offered him a lot of money.”

“There are a lot of green cars, Miss Jensen.”

She refused to let him deflect her. “And after that you took yourself out of the loop—probably by design—and events took on a momentum of their own. But the part I’ll really wonder about is whether you’d have gone down this road if you’d known what it would cost. Your ex-wife died because of this plan. Doesn’t that bother you a little?”

He was shaking his head. His expression was troubled but unreadable. “You have a magnificent imagination, Miss Jensen.”

“Does Fomin?” He looked startled, and she rushed right on. “Do you know what he told me the last time we met? That the Gestapo had a report of another man fleeing the farmhouse just before they found my father. A short, heavyset man, they said. And the interesting part is that he fled after the explosion, not before. Almost as if he’d waited to make sure Donald Jensen was blown to bits.” She was on her feet. “Goodbye, Professor Niemeyer.”

Margo didn’t close the door behind her. She didn’t smile at Mrs. Khorozian. Her heels clocked along the hall. She shoved open the doors and burst into the sunshine. She felt unstoppable. Descending the very steps where the fake alum had snapped her photo a million years ago, she felt the future stretching endlessly ahead of her.

Until a sudden prickly shiver brought her to a halt.

Margo stood on the walkway, glancing around. She felt watched. But around the Quad she saw only students, all ignoring her as they hurried along their various ways.

She turned and looked at Niemeyer’s corner office.

He stood in the window, watching her without expression.

For a moment she felt she should march back in and apologize, or in
some other way make peace. But she shook off the conciliatory mood. She was done with him. She was free. It was all over.

That is, unless, of course …

Margo crossed the Quad, not looking back. At the northern edge of campus, she walked along the gorge where Fall Creek cut through the middle of Ithaca. She descended the muddy wooden steps to the pedestrian bridge.

Agatha Milner was waiting at the near end. She had cut her hair short and wore jeans and a thick sweater to go with her hooded parka, adding plenty of bulk and obscuring her face. No surveillance team would have recognized her.

“What did he say?” she asked.

“He denied it.”

“Do you believe him?”

Hesitation. “I don’t know. I can’t be sure.”

Agatha’s smile was flinty. “You do know, Margo. You just don’t want it to be true.” She counted on her fingers. “He killed Littlejohn, or he had Vale do it, or he told Fomin, which amounts to the same thing. That poor man who was tortured in the swamp. That would never have happened except for his grand scheme. He would willingly have sacrificed your life for the sake of his operation. The way he sacrificed Dr. Harrington’s.”

“He couldn’t have known they would go that far!”

“Couldn’t he? Aren’t you the one who told me that the first rule of conflict theory is to keep your adversary guessing? To strike out in ways that look like the acts of madmen? Do you really imagine that Niemeyer is so simple that he thinks nobody else knows the winning strategy?”

Margo was near panic. “But that’s all assuming that he’s guilty. That he and Fomin are”—even now she could scarcely pronounce the words—“agent and handler. And we can’t know that for sure. Don’t you think we should gather more evidence?”

“I’m willing to wait, Margo. But not long. I’m good, but I’m not perfect. Sooner or later, they will track me down and they will kill me. And I want to finish my work first.” The minder fixed her with
that disapproving librarian’s stare. “And stop telling me we’re not sure. There are plenty of people in my business who can’t make up their minds whether some guy is the enemy or not. Know what we call them?”

“No.”

“Dead.”

Agatha slipped away along the sodden path, descending toward the gorge, and disappeared into the twilight.

That was all more than half a century ago. Margo Jensen, later Margo Waterman, has recently retired from her faculty position at Cornell. She’s been in and out of government over the years, and has taught at three or four different institutions, but Cornell, where she also received her doctorate, is the place she considers home. The national security bug bit her after all, just as Lorenz Niemeyer predicted that it would. He survived for some years, by the way, and when he died during the Clinton Administration, his obituary made the front page of the
Times,
above the fold. Margo professes to have no idea what became of Agatha Milner.

What about the other players in the tale? Jericho Ainsley, as you probably remember, rose through the ranks to become director of central intelligence, although a scandal would later force him from office. Jack Ziegler survived and even thrived. In the 1980s, he was indicted for arms trafficking—charges subsequently dropped, after two witnesses vanished and the rest decided to lose their memories.

President Kennedy kept his side of the bargain, withdrawing the Jupiter missiles from Italy and Turkey within a year. Khrushchev kept his less known side, too. Faced with growing opposition after the Cuba humiliation, in 1964 he agreed, with remarkably little resistance, to retire as General Secretary.

Margo’s friend Annalise Seaver, as you probably know, became a power in the Republican Party. Her friend Jerri dropped out of Cornell the following year and found her way to Hollywood, where she
worked for many years as a publicist. Margo never heard again from her Washington roommate Patsy, but when Hope married a young man from her church the following year, Margo was in the wedding. Nate Esman left government shortly after these events to pursue graduate work in computer science. He rose to become chief technologist at Hewlett-Packard, back in the days when Silicon Valley was young, and later cofounded a venture-capital firm.

As to how I got wind of this story, it began at my father’s memorial service a few years ago, when I overheard an African-American woman of some years, a member of what Claudia Jensen would have called one of the old families, asking another woman, someone she hadn’t seen in decades, if she knew what had become of little Margo.

“Who?”

“The one who had the affair with JFK. You remember.”

This line naturally intrigued me, but when I approached them, both women clammed up. After that I returned to my other work, but the notion that some black woman had been involved with the thirty-fifth President of the United States continued to tantalize. I pored over a couple of Kennedy biographies but found no mention. One was written by an acquaintance of mine, but when I asked him, he only laughed. “That rumor’s been around forever. Nobody believes it.”

Acting on the assumption that Margo, whoever she was, would also have been a member of one of those old families, I studied genealogy tables until I narrowed the possibilities to three. When I learned that Margo Jensen had actually worked in Washington briefly during the Kennedy Administration, I went back to my friend the biographer, who in turn directed me to a Kennedy retainer who’d been one of his sources. This man, now over ninety but with a mind clear as a bell, remembered that Margo had once been arrested at the White House. Nobody knew why, he said. But the national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, was the one who got her out.

Armed with this skimpy information, I still wasn’t sure what I had. Certainly there wasn’t enough here to justify a direct approach. Once more I put the research aside. And once more it wouldn’t leave me alone.

Finally, I gave in. I had to have the details. Before I made my approach, I visited Vera Madison, an old friend of my parents, who
has a lovely condominium in a retirement community on Hilton Head. After a bit of prodding, she was kind enough to share her late husband’s diaries. After that, I was home free.

I tracked Margo to Garrison, where she still summers at her late grandmother’s house. She was surprised that anyone had worked it all out, and even helped me frame my central question in a way that was relatively inoffensive. Only later did it occur to me that she had been eager to talk to someone about what had happened, if only to set the record straight. She had heard, she said, that I was sniffing around. Sooner or later, the tale might come out, and she wanted her version on the record.

Margo wasted no time in denial. We sat in her grandmother’s old study, surrounded by silver-framed photographs of her late husband, her three children, and her four grandchildren. A big nervous sheepdog kept padding in and out, perhaps to make sure that his mistress was being well treated. Margo gave me tea, along with cookies from the same bakery Priscilla Littlejohn had frequented, in Poughkeepsie—now run by the niece of the original owner—and as we sat in the corner, with a view down to the river and the same ruined dock, she told me her story, much as I have told it to you.

I returned the following morning, and the morning after that, until I had it all.

Or almost all.

“You haven’t told me what you thought of Kennedy,” I said toward the end.

“He was a great man,” she said, with a winning smile. “He would have done great things if he’d survived.” The smile vanished. “And you know, Mr. Carter, in the missile crisis, I don’t think there was anyone else who could have held the middle ground so well.”

“That’s not exactly what I meant.” I pondered the safest way to put the question. “I couldn’t help noticing how, toward the end, you got sort of vague about the details of your meetings with Kennedy. Particularly on that last Friday and Saturday. Those accounts sounded a little, um, truncated.”

“I told you everything I remember,” she said slyly. “Everything relevant.”

“So there might be things that happened that were irrelevant?”

“Most of life is irrelevant, Mr. Carter.” A lovely wink. “Although I must say those often tend to be the more wonderful parts.”

She had been working for decades on a double dactyl about the Kennedy years, she said, but somehow couldn’t get it done.

The last question I asked was why she had decided to accept the offer to spend the summer of 1963 working for Bundy.

Margo smiled.

“Was it just the experience you wanted?” No reply. “Did you maybe miss the excitement of being on the inside?” Still she had nothing to say, but her smile never wavered. “Or was it maybe because Kennedy wanted you nearby?”

At the door, she made me take a bag of those marvelous cookies.

“When you write your book,” she said, “do me one favor.” The hazel eyes grew solemn. “A way to make my life a little easier.”

“What’s that?”

“Make it a novel. Change all the locations. Which university I’m at. Which towns and cities. Where I’m from. All that. Most important, change the names. Mine especially.”

So I did.

Readers of my other fiction will remember Jack Ziegler as the villain of
The Emperor of Ocean Park.
His backstory is slightly different there than it is here, but Ziegler was always skilled at inventing a cover. Of course the heroic Major Madison of the instant novel is the Colonel Madison of
Emperor,
Misha Garland’s father-in-law: his daughter Kimberly, a toddler here, grows up to be Misha’s ambitious wife. Vera Madison is also in both novels, as is little Marilyn, who by the time of
Emperor
is known as Lindy. Agent Stilwell, the conduit to J. Edgar Hoover, plays a similar role in
Palace Council.
Eddie Wesley, mentioned briefly here as Claudia Jensen’s godson, features prominently in that book. There, as here, he works briefly in the Kennedy White House, exiting well before the events in the present story. Torie Elden, who oversees Margo’s work at the Labor Department, is present in several of
Palace
’s scenes. And poor Tristan Hadley, dismissed as an idiot by Lorenz Niemeyer in
chapter 3
of the instant tale, is in
Palace Council
the spurned suitor of Aurelia Treene. Finally, readers of my novel
Jericho’s Fall
will of course know what fate awaited Jericho Ainsley later in life.

This is a work of fiction, not a work of history, so there would be little point in listing all of the changes I have made to the chronology of the Cuban Missile Crisis. I have shoved around the dates and times of the meetings of the ExComm to suit my narrative, I have moved the Soviet responses to places where they better fit the story, and I have rewritten the remarks of the participants—and occasionally their identities. I have tried to remain true nevertheless to the thrust of the roles of particular historical figures in resolving the crisis itself. Some events—such as the evacuation of the White House on October 24, 1962—never occurred. On the other hand, the premise of my fictional evacuation—the false report of the launch of a Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile—did indeed happen, and on that very day. (The other two false reports that I mention were also delivered during the crisis, but not on that Wednesday; my point was to imagine the panic had all three reports come in at once.)