Part 55 (1/2)
He decided to change the subject. ”You still short-handed over in PR?”
Millie sighed. ”Geraldine's decided to take that private sector job. And Florence is out on maternity leave-hey, she had an ultrasonograph yesterday and found out the baby is a girl. She was disappointed-her husband was hoping for a boy-but I told her she ought to count her blessings.”
Jack was barely following the conversation. ”Why's that?” he asked absently.
”I told her I was speaking from experience-it's hard enough to live with one man, two is twice as difficult. I mean, first off, when you have two men under the same roof they outnumber you-”
Jack was suddenly gaping into Millie's eyes. ”What did you say?”
”I said two men in the house outnumber you-”
”Two men outnumber the wife?”
”What's wrong, Jack?”
”And the two men who outnumber the wife-one is the husband and the other is the firstborn son!”
”Well, yeah. It was just a joke, Jack.”
”So if Florence were to give birth to a baby boy, I could send her a note saying 'Congratulations on the Second Man?'”
”Well, sure. If you count the husband as the first man.”
Ebby had been on target: the answer was staring him in the face, it was just a matter of coming at the problem from the right direction. Jack bounded from the couch, plucked his sports jacket off the back of it and headed for the front door.
”Where are you going. Jack?”
”To find the first man.”
Adelle was at her wit's end. She'd spoken with Director Colby twice in the past five weeks. The first time, he'd phoned her to apologize for hustling Leo off to Asia on such short notice; he'd asked her to pack a suitcase and had sent a car around to pick it up. When three weeks had gone by without word from Leo, Adelle had put in a call to the Director. It had taken her three more calls and two days to get past the gatekeepers. Not to worry, Colby had said when she finally managed to speak with him. Leo was fine and engaged in vital work for the Company; with Leo's help, Colby had said, he had high hopes that some extremely important matters might be cleared up. He was sorry he couldn't tell her more. Naturally he counted on her discretion; the fewer people who knew Leo was out of town, the better. Adelle had asked if she could get a letter through to her husband; the Director had given her a post-office box number that she could write to and had promised to call her the moment he had more news. Her two letters sent to the post-box had gone unanswered. Now, five weeks after their return from France, she still had no direct word from Leo. Vanessa was starting to ask questions; Daddy had never disappeared before like this, she noted. Another week and he'd miss Philip Swett's eightieth-birthday s.h.i.+ndig, a Georgetown bash that was expected to attract Congressmen and Cabinet members and Supreme Court justices, perhaps even the Vice President. Vanessa, who doted on her father, looked so worried that Adelle swore her to secrecy and told Leo had been sent to Asia on an extremely important mission. Why would the Company pack the Soviet Division chief off to Asia? Vanessa wanted to know. It wasn't logical, was it? It wasn't necessarily illogical, Adelle said. Soviet Russia stretched across the continent to Asia; according to the newspapers, there were Soviet submarine and missile bases on the Kamchatka Peninsula that would be of great interest to the Central Intelligence Agency.
The answer satisfied Vanessa but it left Adelle with the queasy feeling that Colby was being less than straightforward with her. She decided then and there to see if her father could find out where Leo had been sent to, and why.
Philip Swett had grown hard-of-hearing with age and Adelle had to repeat the story several times before her father grasped the problem. ”You trying to tell me you haven't seen hide nor hair of that husband of yours in five weeks?” he demanded.
”Not a word, Daddy.”
”And that Colby fellow said he'd packed him off to Malaysia?”
”Not Malaysia, Daddy. Asia.”
”By golly, I'll get to the bottom of this,” Swett swore. And he put in a call to Henry Kissinger over at the State Department.
Kissinger returned the call within the hour. ”Phil, what can I do for you?” he asked.
Swett explained that his son-in-law, Leo Kritzky, who happened to be the Soviet Division chief over at Langley, seemed to have dropped from sight. Colby was giving his daughter a song and dance about Kritzky being off on a mission to Asia.
”Where's the problem?” Kissinger demanded. Here he was, trying to trim American foreign policy sails to weather the Presidential impeachment tempest brewing in Congress; he didn't have the time or the energy to track down missing CIA personnel.
”Tarnation, Henry, the boy's been gone for five weeks and there hasn't been a letter, a phone call, nothing.”
Kissinger's office rang Swett back that afternoon. One of the Secretary's aides had checked with Langley. It seemed as if Kritzky was on a personal mission for the DCI. The Company had declined to give out any further information and had made it clear that it didn't appreciate inquiries of this nature.
Swett recognized a brush off when he saw one. By golly, he was going to have a word with that Colby fellow if he ran into him. There had been a time when Harry Truman tried out his speeches on Swett, when Dwight Eisenhower sought his advice, when young John Kennedy ruminated aloud in his presence about the imbecility of allowing the Central Intelligence Agency to organize an invasion of Cuba. Come to think of it, Charles de Gaulle had put his finger on the problem before he died four years before: Old age was a s.h.i.+pwreck, he'd said. This time next week Swett would be pus.h.i.+ng eighty from the wrong side. Pretty soon folks wouldn't even return his calls.
Stretching out on the couch, Philip Swett made a mental note to phone his daughter when he woke up from his afternoon nap. Chances were Kritzky was off in Malaysia, just as Colby said; chances were he'd be back in time for Swett's d.a.m.n birthday party. Swett wouldn't lose any sleep if he didn't show up. Always wondered what the devil his mule of a daughter saw in Kritzky. Recently she'd dropped hints that their marriage wasn't all that swell. Well, if she decided to divorce that Jewish fellow, he for one wouldn't shed any tears...
Philip Swett's lids twitched shut over his eyes with a strange weightiness, blotting out the light with such finality he wondered if he would ever see it again.
A filament of moonlight stole through the gap between the curtains on the window and etched a silver seam into the wooden planking on the floor. Wide-awake on the giant bed, Manny pressed his ear against Nellie's spinal column and eavesdropped on her breathing. The night before, high on daiquiris and Beaujolais Nouveau, they had wandered back to her apartment from a small French restaurant in Georgetown. Manny had been quieter than usual. Kicking off her shoes and curling up on the couch next to him, Nellie had sensed he was preoccupied with something other than her. ”I could take your mind off it,” she had murmured, teasingly pressing her lips into his ear, her breast into his arm. And shrugging off the shoulder straps of the silky black mini-dress, she'd done just that. There had been an impatient exploration of possibilities on the couch. Then they'd padded into the bedroom and made love a second time with lazy premeditation, spreadeagled across fresh sheets scented with lilac. Afterward, losing all sense of time, they had talked in undertones until traffic ceased to move through the street below Nellie's apartment.
In the early hours of the morning Nellie had gotten around to the subject that was mystifying her. ”So why?”
”Why what?”
”Why tonight? Why did you f.u.c.k me?”
”I didn't f.u.c.k you, Nellie. I made love to you.”
”Oh, you certainly did, Manny. But you haven't answered the question. Why tonight?”
”I figured out that the object of intercourse is intimacy, and not the other way round. For reasons I can't explain it suddenly seemed very important-I needed a close friend close.”
”That may be the nicest thing a man's ever said to me, Manny,” she had whispered in the slow, husky rasp of someone slipping into delicious unconsciousness. ”Incest definitely beats... masturbation.”
Now, while she slept, Manny's thoughts drifted back to his most recent session with ae/PINNACLE. Late in the afternoon he'd debriefed Kukushkin in the living room of Agatha's apartment near Rockville, scribbling furiously even though the tape recorder was capturing every word the Russian uttered. Kukushkin seemed edgier than usual, prowling the room as he delivered the latest batch of serials.
-Moscow Centre had forged the letter from Chinese Premier Minister Chou En-lai, published in an African newspaper the previous month, which seemed to suggest that Chou considered the Cultural Revolution to have been a political error.
-the KGB was financing a costly world-wide campaign in support of ratification of the Revised ABM Treaty, limiting the Soviet Union and the United States to one anti-ballistic missile site each.
-the Russians, convinced that Nixon was lying when he claimed to have cancelled the American biological weapons program in the late 1960s, had gone ahead with their own program, with the result that they were now capable of arming intercontinental ballistic missile warheads with anthrax bacteria and smallpox viruses.
-the Kremlin had reason to believe that Taiwan was attempting to buy nuclear technology from South Africa, developed over the past few years in partners.h.i.+p with Israel.
-the KGB had buried bugs inside the electric typewriters used in the American emba.s.sy in Moscow while the typewriters were being s.h.i.+pped from Finland on Soviet trains; the bugs transmitted what was being typed to a nearby listening post in short bursts and on a frequency used by television transmitters so that security sweeps through emba.s.sy detected nothing out of the ordinary.
”So, Manny, there it is-your weekly ration of secrets.”
”Is everything normal at the emba.s.sy?”
Kukushkin had settled onto the couch and had looked at his wrist.w.a.tch; he wanted to be back at the emba.s.sy when his wife returned from the dentist. ”I think so.”