I was on my way to the dead drop. Was that possible? More to the point, was it advisable? In my PR job at Ealing Wharton I’d warned off many a client from come-ons far more sophisticated than the cryptic letter that had just landed on my doorstep, and I was already wary of the sender’s motives. What sort of dirty work did he have in mind, and who would be ruined as a result? Perhaps he meant to do me harm.
Curiosity overcame caution, if only because of all the times as a boy when I’d imagined setting out on just this sort of spy’s errand-flashlight in hand, an eye out for surveillance, the moon peeping over my shoulder. In those days I was usually on my way to meet a girl, run an errand for Dad, or share a toke by the Danube.
But this was the real thing, or some prankster’s version of it, and as I stepped onto O Street a swell of giddiness caught in my throat like laughter. For the moment, any chance of danger seemed worth the price of admission.
I took precautions nonetheless. To give the streets time to empty and darken, I waited a few hours before leaving the house. I also scrounged up an old canister of pepper spray. To pass the time before zero hour I took down some old books to reacquaint myself with my favorite spies. Their debuts were of particular interest since I was preparing for my own, and I discovered eerie similarities.
In Le Carre’s Call for the Dead, George Smiley is summoned from sleep by a ringing telephone. In The Miernik Dossier, Charles McCarry’s Paul Christopher is yanked from bed in Geneva by the doorbell. In Berlin Game, Len Deighton’s Bernard Samson waits in the midnight cold of Checkpoint Charlie for a contact who never shows. And in Knee Knockers, Lemaster’s Richard Folly is lured into the murk of predawn Prague. Such a lonely procession of nocturnal seekers. Literally and figuratively they were all in the dark. Now, so was I, an unlikely initiate to the midnight brethren.
As mandated by page 47 of The Double Game, my tradecraft involved a series of switchbacks to ensure no one was following. It felt childish, especially when I spotted a neighbor walking her dog-an Alsatian, meaning it must be Mrs. Pierce from over on Dumbarton. I called out in greeting, but the woman who turned was slimmer, younger. Possibly taking me for a mugger, she quickened her stride, and to avoid alarming her further I doubled back toward P Street. Fortunately there was only a block to go, and I tempered my sheepishness with the knowledge that, while Georgetown was hardly Berlin, these chockablock townhouses had harbored many a spook and spymaster at the height of the Cold War.
CIA chief Allen Dulles had lived right around the corner. So had Frank Wisner, the doomed zealot whose mania for covert action sent hundreds of operatives to their deaths. In the fifties and sixties, dozens of Agency men had lived here, gossiping and drinking with pundits and policy makers at rollicking dinner parties that included plenty of charming guests from abroad-British mole Kim Philby, for one.
Dad and I lived here then, during a two-year home posting from ’62 to ’64, back when the can-do luster of American spying peaked and began its long, steady decline in the wake of the Kennedy assassination.
I remember Dad pointing out Dulles at a cocktail gathering and admonishing me, “Be nice if he speaks to you. He just lost his job because of the Bay of Pigs”-which sounded to me like some kind of farming disaster.
At the age of seven I spotted Mr. Wisner at a neighbor’s garden party one Sunday afternoon. At the time I had a crush on his daughter, who was several years older, so I was paying close attention to all things Wisner. Even a kid could tell that her dad seemed pale and beleaguered, a man at the end of his rope, although I had no way of knowing that years earlier he’d suffered a nervous breakdown in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Hungary.
A year later, after we moved back overseas to, of all places, Budapest, my father heard that Mr. Wisner had blown out his brains with a shotgun. I recall feeling bad for his daughter, and wondering if I could improve my standing with a sympathy card.
But my most vivid Georgetown memory was of an autumn afternoon just before my eighth birthday, when murder was the talk of the town. A woman was shot to death on the towpath of the C amp;O Canal, a pleasant greenway where everybody walked their dogs. The Post identified her as Mary Pinchot Meyer, sister-in-law of Benjamin Bradlee, who identified the body. All I knew of Mr. Bradlee was that he was the dad of a schoolmate a grade behind me, although the story said he was the Washington bureau chief for Newsweek, which sounded important. It felt strange seeing our neighbors’ names in a crime story, and I read over Dad’s shoulder as he drank his morning coffee.
“Shouldn’t you be getting ready for school, sport?”
“I’m done.”
“Teeth brushed?”
I bared them fiercely, and he turned back to his reading. A few seconds later he chuckled under his breath.
“What’s so funny?”
“Oh, it describes this poor woman’s ex-husband, Cord Meyer, as a ‘local author and lecturer.’ You remember Mr. Meyer, don’t you?”
I did, mostly because he was the only person I’d ever met named “Cord.” Still is.
“I thought he worked with Mr. Wisner?”
“He does. The paper is being discreet.”
“What’s ‘discreet’ mean?”
“You could look it up. Increase your word power, like in Reader’s Digest. ”
Dad hated Reader’s Digest, so I took it for a joke, although I didn’t get it.
“Don’t you be wandering over to the towpath. That’s police business, not yours. And if you cross Wisconsin Avenue on your bike, for God’s sake, walk it across.”
“Yes, sir.”
Naturally I made a beeline for the towpath after school on my red Galaxy Flyer. To my disappointment, there was no sign of the crime, so I set out for the next best destination-the victim’s art studio in the Bradlees’ garage, on an alley behind N Street. The Post had evocatively described a freshly painted canvas, still wet from her final brushstrokes, drying on an easel in front of an electric fan.
I negotiated a dogleg turn up the alley, and to my morbid delight the garage was wide open, revealing a roomful of canvases, including the one in front of the fan. What I hadn’t bargained for were the two men who turned abruptly at the sound of my approach.
One was Mr. Bradlee, who relaxed the moment he recognized me. But the other man, taller and thinner, stared with probing eyes from behind thick, horn-rimmed glasses. He acted more like a cop than a neighbor, and when he took a step in my direction I nearly fell off my bike. Fortunately Mr. Bradlee put out a hand to stop him.
“It’s all right, Jim. It’s Warfield Cage’s boy.” Then, to me: “It’s Bill, right?”
“Yes, sir. I’m sorry if-”
The man named Jim interrupted.
“This isn’t your business, son. That’s what your father would tell you.”
It probably wasn’t his, either, but I’d been taught not to talk back to adults.
“Yes, sir.”
Then he said the strangest thing, reminding me of one of those folk tales where the troll offers a riddle for safe passage:
“Remember, son. Caution is the eldest child of wisdom. Now run along.”
“Yes, sir.”
I was shaky in the saddle until I reached the wide open spaces of Thirty-third Street. When I described the encounter to Dad, he chuckled just like he had while reading the Post.
“Sounds like Mr. Angleton,” he said. “Quoting Victor Hugo, no less.”
“Who’s he?”
“Victor Hugo?”
“Mr. Angleton.”
“Oh, sort of an ‘author and lecturer,’ like Mr. Meyer.”
“Why was he in that lady’s room?”
“Looking for secrets, I’d imagine. That’s mostly what he writes and lectures about.”
“What kind of secrets?”
“They wouldn’t be secrets if he went around telling everybody, would they?”
Not until my thirties did I find out from some book what they’d really been up to. By then I was working for Bradlee, who’d become executive editor of the Post, and I’d long since learned that Jim Angleton had been the CIA’s chief counterspy. They’d been looking for Mary Meyer’s diary, which described her affair with the late President Kennedy. Since she was something of a lefty, Angleton may also have wanted to scan it for clues to assist his infamous Great Mole Hunt, a paranoid quest in which he ruined the careers of so many trustworthy CIA men that he, too, was eventually forced out.
They found the diary. Bradlee gave it to Angleton, who promised to destroy it. Instead, telling no one, he stashed it in his files.
So that was my neighborhood, a high-toned ghetto of spies and policy makers. And here I was now, decades later, crossing the shadows of its maples and dogwoods as I zeroed in on yet another cache of secrets.
In case you’re wondering how I figured out the location, it was a breeze once I read the opening lines of Ashenden. The key sentence was right there on page one:
On the house at which Ashenden had been asked to call there was a board up to announce that it was for sale, the shutters were closed and there was no sign that anyone lived in it.
The passage perfectly described a detached house on P Street that my neighbors and I had long been complaining about. It had been gutted for renovation, then the developer went broke and boarded up the windows. In Georgetown you didn’t do that, so we raised a stink. City Hall finally sent a crew to replace the boards with tasteful shutters and post a “For Sale” sign. It had to be the place.
Normally a porch light was burning, but tonight the house was dark. As I crossed the tiny lawn I saw why-someone had removed the bulb. The front door had one of those big padlocks favored by real estate agents. Based on Folly’s tradecraft, I was looking for a yellow chalk mark on the bricks, but there was nothing out front. I went around to the left and spotted a yellow slash just below the rearmost window. I glanced back at the neighboring house, a mere fifteen feet away. The last thing I needed was someone reporting me to the cops, but all was quiet. The shutters were unlocked, and the sash opened easily when I pressed up against the glass. I climbed through the opening into an empty room that smelled of sawdust and fresh plaster.
I closed the shutters behind me and turned on the flashlight. Sweeping the walls with the beam, I spotted a buff-colored envelope propped on the mantelpiece like a note left for Santa. I fetched it, every footstep a hollow thud. Then it was time to leave, unless I wanted to become a poster boy for Neighborhood Watch.
In my impatience to get home, I ignored tradecraft and took the most direct route. As if to punish my haste, someone called out from behind me just as I reached my street.
“You’re out late tonight, Bill.”
It was the woman with the Alsatian, maybe thirty yards behind me at the end of the block. The dog was lit by the streetlamp, but she was in shadow.
“I am. And your name is…?”
“Mail service is so slow these days. But I’m glad you finally got delivery.”
She and the dog set off briskly in the opposite direction. I hurried after them, full of questions. But as soon as she rounded the corner a rear door opened on a car at the curb. No dome light, no headlights. I broke into a run as they climbed in. A black Lincoln Town Car, the kind embassies used, but the tags were unlit. The car pulled away. Brake lights glowed briefly as it paused at the next intersection, then it sped off.
Now what kind of tradecraft was that, tipping off a target to surveillance? It felt more like thug behavior than espionage. Or was it a signal that someone would be guarding my flanks? Either way, I’d been put on notice. But why would someone with the resources to hire a burglar, a tail, and a driver with a limo need me? Maybe the envelope would tell me.
I shut the blinds, settled onto the couch, and slit open the envelope. Two pages were inside-generic white paper, although the typing was all too familiar. How many hours had this person spent on my Royal? The words “Use on line 11” were typed on the first page above a long strand of paired numbers, presumably for the book code. But in what book? And on what page?
Those questions were answered on the second sheet, although I gasped at its contents. A yellowed page 93, torn roughly from Lemaster’s first novel, Knee Knockers, was pasted to the paper. So was a sliced-out square from the book’s copyright page, which showed that the book was a first edition from 1969. More typescript was below.
This certainly ruled out my father as a suspect. He would sooner torture a small animal than carve up a cherished first edition. If tearing a page out of an old book sounds like no big deal, consider that a first edition of Knee Knockers now fetches up to $5,000, double that if it’s signed. A defaced volume is practically worthless. Mercenary considerations aside, to any bibliophile this was an act of malice, and it told me that someone was harboring quite a grudge, against either Lemaster or the owner of the book.
But enough of that. There was a book code to decipher, and the numbers were my guide. In each pair, the first one told me which word to count to on line 11, and the second told me which letter to use. Soon enough I had the message:
You were halfway there in eighty four. Finish the job. Instructions on line seventeen.
Line seventeen began a passage of dialogue between Folly and operative Karl Breeden:
“How long do you think I’ll need?” Breeden asked.
“Maybe two weeks,” Folly said. “Three tops.”
“Any travel?”
“Vienna for sure. Probably Budapest. We’ll communicate through the usual channels. Stay where you always do. Use the code name Dewey.”
“And from there?”
“Await my instructions in Vienna. I’ll be in touch.”
Clearly, these were my marching orders. Just as clearly, my quarry was Edwin Lemaster, or rather, the Lemaster who had once worked for the CIA. The message signed off with a sort of warning, typed at the bottom of the second sheet:
Management not responsible if you end up like Mr. Hambledon’s description on p. 78.
Hambledon. The name rang a bell, but I couldn’t place it. I checked page 78 of Knee Knockers and The Double Game, but came up empty. I flipped through Ashenden in case a Hambledon played a minor role, but he wasn’t there, either. Hambledon. I had read it long ago, but for the moment it was lost in the fog of memory.
The mantel clock struck two. Practical matters began to intervene. Ealing Wharton needed me in top form tomorrow, and I would be lucky to get four hours of sleep. I was due to testify on Capitol Hill on behalf of our newest client, makers of the Lattelicious Superluxe, a milk frother implicated in a dozen house fires. Some congressman, scenting an easy opportunity for publicity, had called for a hearing to examine how our client and its regulators had allowed such shoddy merchandise onto store shelves. My job was to take the heat alongside our client’s CEO, who was as clueless about PR as his technical people were about wiring. We were meeting at seven to prepare.
But all I could think about as I climbed into bed was whether I should continue this spy hunt, and if so, how quickly I might arrange time off for a trip to Europe. Vienna, of all places. Home not only to my dad, but to my richest boyhood memories.
I was being used, of course. I had no illusions about that. I had often watched my firm’s managing director, Marty Ealing, entice some congressman or other to do his bidding with a similar blend of flattery, intrigue, and misdirection. He always made them believe it was in their own interest, when usually it was in Marty’s. And by letting them lead the way, they were the ones who encountered any snares and booby traps.
Who, then, was using me, and toward what end? And how dangerous were the booby traps? Those questions kept me awake for the next hour or so, while the name Hambledon fluttered above me like a moth until I finally drifted off.
After what felt like only minutes, the alarm shrieked. I shut it off and lay in the sudden silence. That’s when the moth landed on my forehead and whispered its name:
Tommy Hambledon.
He was a spymaster created by author Manning Coles, the pen name of a British mixed doubles writing team-Adelaide Frances Oke Manning and Cyril Henry Coles. The latter worked for British Intelligence, the former for the war office. They wrote dozens of Tommy Hambledon books. My dad had fifteen, but I owned only one- Drink to Yesterday, the first in the series, published way back in 1940.
I threw on a robe, descended the stairs in slippered feet, and retrieved the volume from the highest shelf. Dust puffed from the jacket as I turned to page 78.
At the bottom of the page, Tommy Hambledon told an excited new recruit exactly what entering the spy trade was about to do to his life:
“Yes, it’s got you now, and it will never let you go. When once the job has taken hold you’ll find that nothing else in life has any kick in it, and apart from the job you’re dead. Neither the fields of home nor the arts of peace nor the love of women will suffice.”
Under my present circumstances it sounded more like an enticement than a warning, and even as I began mapping my morning strategy for defending the fallen virtue of the Lattelicious Superluxe, in the back of my mind I already knew one thing for sure.
Used or not, I was going to Vienna.