Saving the Queen (6 page)

“All of them?”

“Yes, all of them. They aren't short of man power. And they know that maybe thirty-five to fifty members of the graduating classes ended up with us, and they will work years to try to find out (a) who and (b) what are they up to.”

Black yearned to see Anthony. He needed to
talk
. Four weeks had now gone by, and his life had fallen—hardened—into a pattern. Two or three evenings a week he spent with Sally, the others reading. He began to feel a restlessness that neither books nor exercise nor sex could satisfy, and he couldn't diagnose it, which worried him. He called Anthony on the phone not knowing exactly why. The obvious reason—that Anthony was still his closest friend—was blurred by an inchoate resentment that Black's dissatisfactions, his awful feeling of emptiness, restlessness, directionlessness, were something General Trust was somehow responsible for. Black ruled against an introspective examination of his motives, deciding, simply, to call his best friend. In doing so he found himself conforming not resentfully, but with a combination of good sportsmanship and institutional pride, to the specified procedures.

He made the call from a pay telephone in central Washington. He dropped the requisite coins in the slot, and the number rang. A strange voice answered, a man's voice.

“I want to speak to Mr. Trust.”

“Who is calling?”

He hesitated only slightly. “Mr. Truax.”

Anthony's voice came on in a matter of seconds. There was in it the formal strain (somebody-in-the-room). But the undisguised pleasure that flooded his clipped words was what Black most longed for and needed: He had had intensive corporate solicitude for weeks now, and wanted, now, individual solicitude, and the opportunity he still felt he needed to confide, confide with someone with whom his relations were of long standing, uncomplicated by sex, moodiness, petulance, jealousy. He struggled to make his request appear—if not exactly casual—at least something less than imperative.

“Listen, I just called to ask—you coming this way soon?” He paused, but only for a moment, fearing that Anthony's schedule might yield a negative before he could know the underlying urgency of the invitation. “If not, I'll get up to New York to see you.”

Anthony absorbed the whole of the message, as if through a single electrode. His hesitation was purely administrative. Though he did say, “Hang on a minute while I check my schedule,” Black knew that he would be seeing him about as soon as the transportation system between New York and Washington could get him there.

It was less than a minute.

“I'll see you tomorrow, Geoffrey. But look, I can't make it till nine. We'll have a late dinner. It will have to be at your place. Buy a hamburger. Goddammit, buy a steak, you stingy bastard.”

Blackford did more than that. Early in the morning, before his class on Contact with “Harry,” he went to the delicatessen and bought steak and caviar, potatoes, and vodka, two wines, French rolls, some celergy remoulade, and an ice-cream cake. When Anthony rang the bell, Blackford followed exemplary procedure. First he turned off the overhead light. Then he raised the curtain slightly, permitting him a view of the caller, two stories below. The curtain then went down, the light on, and the release button was depressed.

Anthony put his arms around Black, bussing him, in the French manner, on both cheeks. It was late, so Black started directly with the vodka and caviar, and they talked until two in the morning. Anthony waited until Black talked and talked about his experiences, his questions, his doubts, his anxiety—what was the nature of the anxiety? What was the restlessness he felt? When oh when would he have some idea of what specifically he would be doing? How was he doing as far as the Agency was concerned? Did Anthony receive any reports on him? How do you measure progress? How do you keep from going crazy with loneliness?

“Fortunately, I'm used to Sally never asking me anything about my work, because she decided some time after she learned long division that the limits of her scientific understanding had been reached. But at Yale I could talk to her about
personal
experiences, about the teachers, about other guys. Now I have to make all that up, and it's driving me nuts. I invented a character called Costello who is allegedly taking a course in advanced structural physics with me, and I found myself night after night describing Costello and his general attitudes, and by God
now
she wants me to bring Costello to dinner next time, so
tomorrow
I'm going to have to kill the poor bastard off, or have him leave to see his sick mother in Canada. It's driving me crazy.”

Anthony was soothing—and understanding, Blackford thought later. In a way, what he said was boiler plate. But what else could he say? He had seen it before, with other deep-cover agents. It won't always be this way, he said, because precisely the point of a deep-cover agent is that he is destined to lead a normal public life, as in due course Black would be doing. And
that
life you can talk about as freely as you care to, and to anyone you like. The duties of such an agent are very carefully calculated not to occupy so much of his time as to run the risk of blowing the cover.

“Some agents,” Anthony said, “have regular, full-time jobs, and what they do for us either is done after hours, or else is in some way related to the job they are holding down.… In your case, your work is for the foundation, to be done more or less at your own pace. If it becomes necessary to have physical evidence of the work you have done, that can be arranged. And remember, there will be one man in London you will see on an entirely candid basis—your superior. You'll be talking to him as candidly as to me. More so, because he will know your assignment.

“And”—this took Black a little by surprise, even as Anthony's language did when it shucked off the aw-shucks integument he usually wrapped it up in—“you'll find something strange. Something not so lonely. There's a funny incorpprealized solidarity out there. You don't know who they are, but you
do
know that you are all straining to achieve the same end, and a day comes when their invisible forms are as palpable as the members of your swimming team.

“But,” he said, “that takes a while. It took me about a year, and I'm not a deep-cover agent. I'm not sure whether that means you'll have it sooner or later. But you will have it.”

Black woke up feeling better, and rather keen to experience the practical test to which, he had been told, Harry would put him. Blackford was to draw up a plan for transmitting to Contact X an envelope containing five thousand dollars in cash. In other words, a fairly thick envelope. Contact X, a woman, was unknown to him; Black would have only a telephone number for her. The rendezvous must be for later than 5:30, giving X time to get away from her work, and before 6:30, when X was due at home. The conversation over the telephone should not last longer than thirty seconds. Truax's code name: Angel: X's reply, in response to Angel's identification, would be:

“
Could you please wait until I get a pencil?”

If a different answer was given, Blackford should apologize for ringing the wrong number.

Blackford should now devise a plan of maximum simplicity, least likely to alert anyone who might be tailing him, or the person he was contacting. The plan required that he specify: an identification for X, an identification for himself, time, place, technique, and emergency signals. The minimum physical contact, the better. Blackford was told to take as long as he wanted.

He called Harry back into the room an hour later.

“How's this?” He handed Harry the text of the telephone message he would give Contact X. It read:

This is Angel.

(Assume contact gives proper reply.)

Tonight, at 5:36, approach the newsstand at the ground floor of the National Press Building. The first magazine on the bottom rack, all the way to the left, is usually
Yachting
. Behind it is usually another copy of
Yachting
. Whatever is behind the outside issue, the envelope will be clipped to the inside of it at 5:35. At 5:36, ask the newsstand vendor whether he carries
Yachting
. If he's busy talking to someone else, just say, “
Yachting?
” If by 5:38 no one has asked that question, within the earshot of someone six feet away, I'll remove the envelope. If when you ask for
Yachting
, you hear someone say: “It's last month's issue,” walk away without purchasing the magazine. Any questions?

He looked up at Harry.

“I figure you don't need more identification than that, is that right?”

Harry pursed his lips. “What if the magazine behind
Yachting
is a man's muscle magazine. She going to be forced to buy it because the money is inside?”

Blackford was ready.

“If that's the case, I'll slide a decorous magazine behind the
Yachting
, or else I'll put
Yachting
behind the muscle magazine.”

“All right,” said Harry. “Now: Work it out as if you needed a receipt—how does she hand it to you?

“After that, work it out so that you need to find out first
where
the contact usually goes after the office, so that you don't have to derail her to an arbitrary drop, like the National Press Club.

“After that, work it out so that the contact has to work alongside a companion who can't know anything that's going on.

“After that, work it out so that the package you have to deliver is the size of a portable typewriter.

“After that, call me.”

Black enjoyed the variables, and he indulged himself in a formulaic way of writing them out. By the end of the afternoon, Harry was well pleased, and gave him the address to which he should report the next day.

When he got home, the telephone was ringing. It was Sally, in some excitement. Her roommate, during the year Sally spent studying in Paris as an exchange student from Vassar, had married the Shah of Sinrah, or, more accurately, had been married by the Shah of Sinrah. Well, this morning the White House social secretary had tracked Sally down at Congressman Gordon's office to say that the Empress had requested that her old roommate be invited to the dinner being given for the Shah. And that the invitation extended to Miss Partridge's escort, but his name would have to be given right away to the Secret Service.

“I called every engineering professor at George Washington trying to track you down.”

Black swallowed.

“You've got to admit it, Black, you haven't exactly hit George Washington like the Messiah, but never mind, the Messiah hasn't hit George Washington that way either. Anyway, I couldn't find you, so I gave your name just the same, and the Secret Service people cleared you in a couple of hours, and …”

“Sally! Hold it! Hold it a minute! You cleared me with the Secret Service? And
we're
going to
the White House
for
dinner
? When?”

“Tonight.”

“Tonight! What am I supposed to wear, my lacrosse uniform?”

“I knew you wouldn't have your tux with you, so if you'll look in your closet, you'll find Jim's, he's exactly your size. It wasn't easy to get it from him. He wanted to pose as you and go as my escort, but I told him
No incest
at the White House.”

“What time?” Black's heart was pumping, less with excitement than with acute pleasure—he had done a tourist's tour of the bottom part of the White House, his first, as recently as last Saturday; and he had never regretted giving Sally a key to his apartment.

“Eight. That gives you two hours. Get a cab and pick me up—no, you might have trouble getting one. The bar at the Hay-Adams—I'll get there at 7:30. You come there, and we'll saunter across Lafayette Park and have dinner with the Trumans and the Shahs. Black?”

“Yes.”

“What shall I call her?”

“Call who?”

“The Empress. I mean, I used to practically lend her my toothbrush, and it was only four years ago. Do I have to curtsy?”

“Americans don't curtsy.”

“Not even to the Queen of England?”

“Not even to the Queen of England.”

“How would you know—all you know is how to build bridges.”

“Sally, we are a
republican
country. Can you imagine Benjamin Franklin curtsying?”

“That's silly.”

“Well, can you imagine his wife curtsying?”

“Yes.”

“Look, we'll be in a receiving line. Do what the women ahead of you do. But don't call her Tootsie, or whatever you called her—”

“Michelle.”

“Well, don't call her Michelle. If it's impossible to call her Your Highness, just don't call her anything. That always works.”

“So do you. Stop talking. I'm going to start dressing.”

They met at the Hay-Adams and Sally ordered a daiquiri, Black a tom collins. He bent his head over obediently—he had become used to it—as Sally recombed his hair, and was embarrassed when she whispered, within earshot of the bartender, “You look divine tonight.”

He felt pretty divine, he thought to himself. He had taken to exercising in the morning and weekends, and was a trim 170 pounds, and his light suntan belied the troglodytic life spent plumbing the mysteries of the spooks. Sally was animated and sparkled like the window of a jewelry store, from whatever angle, her eyes, nose, ears, hands, throwing off rays of animation.

“Shall we have another?” It was 7:40.

“No,” he said, paying the bill. “Let's saunter.”

They had to walk slowly to avoid being early. Most of the guests were arriving in limousines, so there was no wait at the northwest gate when they showed their invitation to the guard. He checked it against a master list and waved them in. They walked leisurely on by the shadows cast by the descending sun on their right, around to the ground floor, and began to mingle with people for the most part twice and three times their age, looking at the brightly lit displays of china given to the predecessors of President Truman by affectionate, grateful, intimidated, and vanquished chiefs of state. Waiters with trays of drinks circulated. Sally refused, Black accepted champagne. Word passed around that the guests should now go up to the foyer, that the President and the Shah would be descending the staircase in a few moments. When they did, grandly, “Hail to the Chief” sounding out in majestical tempo by a division of the Marine Band, followed by the national anthem of Sinrah, the guests were stock-still. Truman, with Michelle, came down first, followed by the Emperor and Mrs. Truman. Truman was talking away, and smiling, and passed through the crowd purposefully to anchor the receiving line. He smiled robustly at faces he recognized. When he brushed by Black and Sally, they found themselves standing more or less at attention, which the President evidently noticed, because he paused, leaned over to Black, and whispered, “At ease.” Black smiled, and the aides who overheard the President chuckled. The Empress, meanwhile, spotted her former roommate, broke away from the President to embrace her. The Shah's expression, behind, was inscrutable, though Black, viewing it coolly, decided Michelle had better bear the Shah a son very quickly. He guessed that royal spontaneity in Sinrah was not a specialty of the house.