OMEGA–7

IT WAS PECULIAR. THERE WAS AN UNHOLY EXHILARATION ABOUT IT. IF I had felt oppressed for the last hour by the conviction that I was being watched, this much confirmation was relief: I began to gulp in whole swallows of breath as if a stocking had been removed from my head. Indeed, I was close to happy. I was also on the edge of unruly panic.

In childhood I had always thought of myself as the feckless son of a very brave man, and I could tell the story of my life by the attempts I have made to climb out of the pit. If you think of yourself as a coward, the rashest course usually proves to be wise. My father’s Luger, captured by him during OSS days, and in his will bequeathed to me, was in a case in my closet. I could get it out and do a little reconnoitering.

I rebelled. I was hardly prepared to go into the woods. I would have to, yes, get ready. An occupation so exorbitantly professional as mine obviously develops a few personal powers even when one is, oneself, far from extraordinary. On occasion, I could force my mind into preparing for a near impossible situation. Of course, this ability was a curiously exaggerated faculty. One could also have been a contest winner on one of those television shows where you had to find the answer to a riddle while hell was popping forth on the stage and the audience roared. To clear my mind and focus my will, I confess that I liked to use a certain text from the Book of Common Prayer.

Let me admit that the words were hardly said in prayer. If I now repeated to myself the Collect for Fridays—Lord Jesus Christ, by your death you took away the sting of death: grant to us your servants so to follow in faith where you have led the way, that we may at length fall asleep peacefully in you— I was trying not to shrive myself for battle so much as to return my agitations to the deep. Repeating this prayer, if need be, ten times, my prep school years would always appear before me, and the fatal-drowse-in-chapel, as we used to call it at St. Matthew’s, would also return. I would “fall asleep peacefully” in someone, or in something, and awaken, after a five- or ten-second cut-out, to face in the direction my mind wished to follow. Every man to his own mnemonic! I came out of these ten seconds with the recognition that I must not sit beside Kittredge and keep guard until dawn. It might be prudent to sit in this chair and take care of my life, but it would lose my love. That is an outrageously romantic equation, yet I saw it as the logic of love—which usually reduces itself to a single equation. Love is outrageous. One must endanger oneself to preserve it—a likely reason why so few people stay in love. I was obliged to discover who the prowler might be.

I removed my father’s Luger from its case and slipped a loaded 9mm magazine out of the side pocket, inserted the clip into the handle, drew back the slide, snapped it forward, heard the round go home to the breech. To the gun lover, that is a satisfying sound (and I was a gun lover at this moment). Next, I stepped to our bedroom door, opened it, locked it, pocketed the key, and, weapon in hand, strolled down the hall.

My father used to say that the Luger was Germany’s most dependable contribution to gracious living. In profile, his captured Luger is as handsome as Sherlock Holmes, and its heft in one’s palm can make you feel like a good shot in much the way a fine horse will offer suggestions to your seat that you may yet become a good rider. I felt ready.

The Keep is a house with seven doors, a mark, we often say, of the luck it is ready to bestow. We have a front door on the old house, and a back one, as well as a side entrance for the Cunard (which gives on a stairway to the beach at low tide), a door at each end of the Camp, plus the pantry exit to the woodshed and a cellar hatch.

I took the pantry door. There was no illumination from nearby windows, and the wind was loud enough, I figured, to overpower any grating of the hinges or the bolt. So it proved. I emerged with no loud announcement.

Outside, the darkness was massive, a cavern. I took comfort that the ground was wet, my steps were stilled. I had not felt so alive (in just this way) since a sojourn near to fifteen years ago in Vietnam—in truth, I had not taken ten silent steps before I was back to whatever I learned on the few patrols where I went along with a platoon on a search-and-destroy. There is much to be said for feeling alert in one’s toes and fingertips, in one’s eyes, nostrils, ears, even to the taste of the air on one’s tongue.

Yet, in the time I spent emerging from the open end of the shed, and slipping into the woods, it was evident that I was as likely to bump into some unknown party on guard as to slip up unheard on whoever might be observing our house. The night, as I say, was black, and the wind was strong. When it blew at its best, I could take ten quick strides and never hear my steps on the wet pine carpet, nor, for that matter, the whipping of a branch. So I saw soon enough that to learn anything, I would have to circle the house at a distance, then, every forty or fifty paces, work back to the lights. If sufficiently careful, I ought to be able to come up on anyone from behind, assuming, that is, that they were stationed in place. Or were they prowling like me? Did I have to watch my back? I traveled in circles more ways than one.

I must have been out for a full twenty minutes before I came across the first guard. Sitting on a stump was a man in a poncho with a walkie-talkie in his hand. I saw him from fifty feet away, his attention fixed on my front door, his body revealed in silhouette by the light above our entry, and his posture attentive, although not enormously so, no different from a hunter who has been waiting in a blind for a deer. By the posture of his body, I suspected that his assignment was to report on his walkie-talkie so soon as anyone was sighted.

I passed through a moment when I was tempted to shoot him. Raising the Luger, I lined up the dark object of his head, dramatically back-lit in my front sight, and knew I could do it—legally and spiritually. I can never remember feeling so sure of myself with a handgun; in truth, it was fifteen years since I had fired one in anger and that had been in Vietnam in the middle of a sudden and ferocious fire fight where everyone was shooting off all they had, and I, as unbalanced and blind as any grunt on war fever, emptied a .357 Magnum into a bush whose looks I did not like, although in contrast to the war movies I had seen, no Oriental with a dazed look tumbled out of the foliage, rather the bush was blasted away. Magnum force!

That had been combat mania laced with considerable funk (and pot!) and connected to little else in my life, but this impulse now came from the center of myself as cold and implacable as the desire to carry Kittredge down to the Vault. I felt—in a word—evil, and enjoyed it, and took pride in the way my hand did not quiver. I had never held a pistol as steadily in training. Yet I also knew it would not be wise to shoot him. He had to be part of a team. I would explode a situation I did not yet comprehend. Besides, the situation did not feel dangerous, not in these familiar woods, not now. The night seemed pendant, as if both of us, guard and myself, were waiting for a further event.

So I stepped back from that man with his walkie-talkie, and continued my tour around the house. I felt balanced, cool, dangerous to others, and attuned to the wet aromatic of the evergreens about me. In such a splendid state, I must have gone fifty paces around the larger perimeter I had drawn for myself before stealing in again toward the hub, but this time saw no one near the Camp, not by either door. On the next approach, however, moving in toward the Cunard where the beach stairs descended to the rock shelf, I could detect a bit of movement that seemed to belong more to a man than a shrub. Then I heard a poncho flap. The sound was as loud as a mainsail catching the wind. Another guard.

I could hardly discern him. He was but a darkness within other darkness. The Cunard, as described, projected in cantilever above the house to give a view of Blue Hill Bay. I was hidden at this moment in the inky invisibility of the rock shelf beneath the cantilever. To go forward could reveal me. I retreated therefore. I was hardly out from underneath, however, before a light went on in the long living room of the Cunard, and from my angle, I could look up through our picture window to see the head and shoulders of a man I knew but could not yet name. I could swear all the same that he was good Langley kin. Yes, this was one of us.

I returned to the woodshed, keeping my distance from the first guard. I was not in any particular fear for Kittredge. The stranger in the Cunard—familiar to me in that one quick look—had not appeared threatening so much as gravely concerned. Indeed, I was sufficiently sure of this perception to put the Luger in the drawer of an old cupboard in the pantry, as though everything would be set needlessly askew if I walked forward, gun in hand. The reconnaissance I had just undertaken in the woods, while of mixed returns for my ego (since it had been good to do it, but once done, of limited value), had succeeded nonetheless in honoring my anxiety. I had determined who the visitor was—the glimpse of his face had come into focus. He was a high official from the Office of Security, and I knew him. I knew him well. Arnie Rosen. Reed Arnold Rosen. Now, in the time I had consumed in coming back to the house, he had moved from the Cunard to the den, and it was there that I came in on him sitting in my favorite chair, smoking a pipe. Reed Arnold Rosen, once Arnie, then Ned, now Reed these days to friends and coworkers. I qualified, probably, as both. Arnie Rosen and I had gone through training together at the Farm, and seen much of each other soon after as assistants to Harlot. Was it twenty-seven years ago? Yes, I knew Reed and he knew me. It was just that by the measure of our careers, he had prospered more than myself.

All the same, I had an unholy impulse to use the old nickname, Arnie.

“Hello, Reed,” I said.

“Harry, you’re looking fit.”

I knew I was not appearing fit in his eyes. “I’m a mess,” I said, “but then it’s wet in the boondocks.”

He nodded. “I was out a little earlier.” His three-piece suit hardly showed it—English worsted and a London tailor had taken him equably through the damp.

If human beings had pedigrees as finely nurtured as dogs, our best people (whether born as Scotch-Irish, Ukrainian, Italian, or Lithuanian) would have put the ethnicity behind—we look to be one breed. We are what our vocational environment has made us: American Intelligence. It grated on me a little that I, who belonged to a pretty good kennel, had, at this point, with my professional life awash (not to dwell on my muddied clothes), less of the look than Rosen. His neat, medium-sized body and close-cropped gray hair, short sharp nose, tight upper lip (which always looked as if it were being squeezed against his capped front teeth), even his silver-rimmed eyeglasses fit the gray suit he was wearing about the way a foxglove sits in the sconces of its stalk.

All the same, I was glad to see him. To find that my inquisitor (whom I must have been awaiting for months) was as civilized a top cop as old Ned Rosen, allowed me to feel—there is no end to the logic of these organizational matters—back in the Company again.

“It was a bit of a jaunt to get to your woods,” he said.

How he had improved since the old days. When we trained together, Rosen, who had been Phi Beta Kappa at Columbia, Mensa, et cetera, had also been—in a word—adenoidal. His nasal intelligence kept boring forward. He was a fellow to be rejected by in-groups before they even formed.

Now, he was married to a nice gray Episcopalian lady with whom, in fact, I had once had a memorable date in Montevideo, and he had obviously learned a lot from her. The nasality had metamorphosed into the resonance of a high government official.

“Yes,” he said, “you look damp, and I’m not dry.”

Enough of the warm-up, however.

“Did you telephone Kittredge tonight?” I asked.

He took his pause, more in decorum than caution. “About Hugh Montague?”

“Yes.”

“Harry, I didn’t telephone her. I brought the news.”

“When?”

“A while ago.”

He must have arrived not long after I had made my call from the Bell Telephone icebox on the coast road. So he had been here when I came back. His walkie-talkie people had heard me approaching through the woods, had heard, conceivably, how my teeth were chattering with cold as I tried to find the key for my door. They would have reported this to the small button he kept in his ear.

I got up to stir the fire and was able to verify that, yes, in his right ear was a buff-colored ear-piece.

“What have you been doing since you arrived?” I asked.

“Trying to think.”

“Where were you doing this?”

“Well, for the most part—in one of the guest bedrooms.” He took a puff on his pipe.

“Are those your ladies-in-waiting outside?”

“One would hope so.”

“I counted two.”

“In fact,” said Reed, “there are three of us out there.”

“All for me?”

“Harry, it’s a complicated business.”

“Why don’t you invite them in?” I asked. “We have other guest rooms.”

He shook his head. “My men,” he said, “are prepared to wait.”

“Expecting more people?”

“Harry, let’s not play ping-pong. I have to discuss a situation which is out of hand.”

That meant no one at Langley had a clue what to do next.

The tour I had made, Luger in fist, was still working like a spansule, calming to anxiety. I felt as if my wits had returned. Clear and overt danger was the obvious prescription for my spiritual malformations.

“Ned,” I asked, “would you like a drink?”

“Do you keep Glenlivet?”

“We do.”

He chose to go on about its merits. That was annoying. I did not need to hear any of the palaver he had picked up while motoring about Scotland and its distilleries one summer vacation with his gray Scotch bride. Withdrawing a bottle from the den cupboard, I served our Glenlivet neat—screw him if after all that praise he secretly wanted ice. Then I said, “Why are you here?”

I could see he wanted to enjoy the fireplace and the Scotch a little longer.

“Yes,” he said, “we have to get to it.”

“I’m honored that they sent you,” I told him.

“I may be dishonored in the morning,” he replied. “This trip is on me.”

“Not authorized?”

“Not altogether. You see, I wanted to arrive quickly.”

“Well,” I said, “we won’t be playing ping-pong, will we?”

It was out of character for him not to cover his delicate behind; no one knew better than Rosen that we can be the most paper-haunted bureaucracy of them all. So there are times when we pay a lot of attention to getting the right paper. We feel happier when unorthodox actions can be traced to a piece of the stuff. If, from time to time, we are obliged to move without a program, statute, directive, memo, or presidential finding, it is a naked feeling. Rosen had no paper.

“I hope you are prepared to get into it,” he said.

“You can start up,” I said.

As a way of assent, he gave a grin. Since he was keeping his pipe in his mouth, it resulted in a grimace. “Did Kittredge,” he inquired, “provide any details about what she heard vis-à-vis Harlot?”

“I’m afraid my wife was not coherent.”

“Harlot,” said Rosen, “left his house three days ago, went out alone in his boat, which, as you may know, was not uncharacteristic of him. He was proud of his ability to skipper that boat solo, physical disability and all. But he did not return. This morning, the Coast Guard found the craft drifting, checked its registration, and called us. Would you believe it? The boat papers listed the Langley personnel office extension as the telephone number to ring for next of kin! Meanwhile, the body of a man in a considerable state of disrepair washed up on a mud flat in Chesapeake Bay. Coast Guard was notified, and soon after my office was on the scene. Just before lunch today.”

“I understand you’re calling it a suicide.”

“We will probably call it that. Hopefully, the press could decide that’s worth no more than an obituary.”

“Is it murder?”

“Can’t say. Not yet.”

“How did you get here?” I asked. “Did you fly to Bar Harbor Airport?”

“In my plane. I have added a pilot’s license to my small assortment of virtues.”

“There’s always something new to learn about you, Reed.”

My praise, you would think, was edged, but he couldn’t keep from showing his pleasure. Once after Richard Helms had rescued a few of Hugh Montague’s less savory chestnuts from a congressional inquiry, Harlot, in recognition of the debt, was quick to offer the Director a large compliment. “You, Dick,” Harlot had said, “are so aptly named. One small craft after another to skipper through the fearful breeze.” That was a little thick, I thought, but Helms, who looked as much to the point as an ice pick, and was certainly on guard around Harlot, still couldn’t keep from beaming at such homage to his now masterly moniker. Later, Harlot remarked, “Depend on it, Harry, the vanity of the high officeholder never bottoms out.”

Ergo, I had gone my way to put Rosen on automatic feed. I was thinking to catch him while he was munching.

“As you were flying up here,” I inquired, “you didn’t stop off in Bath, Maine, did you?”

He went so far as to take his pipe out of his mouth. “Most certainly not.” He took his pause. “I must say,” he added, “the thought occurred to me. We are on to your friend Chloe.”

“Was it the FBI who paid her a visit tonight?”

“Not by way of us.”

“How about the DEA?”

“Ditto. I could swear.”

“Who, then, ransacked her trailer?”

“What?” He seemed genuinely surprised.

“She called me. In panic. By her description, it was a thoroughgoing, insulting, highly professional job.”

“I’m at a loss.”

“Why are you interested in her?” I asked.

“I don’t know that I am. Is she relevant?”

“Ned, if we are to speak of my so-called friend Chloe, work with the facts. I happen to have coffee with her sometimes when I pass through Bath. And Chloe and I have no carnal knowledge of one another. Not at all. But, Ned, I’m desirous to know”—yes, the Glenlivet (after the Bushmills, after the Luger) was having an unanticipated effect; the good Scotch was making me testy—“yes, tell me, pal, what the hell has Chloe got to do with anything? She’s just a waitress.”

“Maybe yes, maybe no.”

I was coming around the buoy a bit late. “Did you opera lovers tap the phone here in this den? I did have a phone call from her tonight. So what?”

He held up his hand. I realized I was too angry. Was guilt getting into my voice? “Ease off, Harry,” he said, “ease off. Presumably your phone call with Chloe is on tape one place or another. I just didn’t have the means to tap into you directly. Nor,” he added, “the desire. I didn’t come here to strap you to the table and whip out the proctoscope.”

“Although you wouldn’t mind a conversation in depth.”

“I’d like to go equal to equal.”

“Do you know what is in the back of my mind right now?” I asked.

“The High Holies.”

Rosen was showing how unequal we were after all.

“Reed,” I told him, “I don’t know all that much about the High Holies.”

“Not by yourself, you don’t.” But we both knew: Much that was meaningless to me might be a gift for him. He sipped the last of his shot glass, and handed it over. “Let me drink a little more of this splendid Scotch,” he said, “and I’ll get into kilts.”

I managed to smile. It took a considerable rearranging of the local passions in my mouth.

“This has to be a hellish occasion for you,” he said. “Whether you believe it or not, it’s a hellish occasion for me.”

Well, now we were talking about the same thing. He must have some idea of how much paper I had carried out of Langley. I had an impulse to tell him it had not proved bothersome to that complex fellow, my conscience. In truth, it was amazing. While there might be a day when I would have to pay up on these accounts, I virtually looked forward to the occasion. I have a lot to tell you, Ned, I nearly told him now, of my feelings in this matter: I feel righteous.

Instead, I chose to be silent. Rosen said, “Harry, you’ve been mad as a boil for years. Maybe with reason. When a marriage breaks up, I think one has to say, ‘Don’t judge. Only God can apportion the fault.’ We’re all married to the Agency. If you’re ready for a separation, I’m not the one to sit in judgment. Not on you. Over the years, you’ve done work that would put us all to shame. Such bold and well turned stuff.”

I was trying to conceal my unprecedented pleasure. “Bold and well turned” had left me outrageously agog. Just as vain as a high official.

Rosen followed up by saying, “I’ll tell you in confidence that whatever lifting you’ve done, and I believe we have pretty good track on these rampages by now, still, fellow—” his voice had never been more resonant—“on my word, the sins are venial.”

It was his way of telling me to cooperate. Rosen over the years must have supplied Harlot with a good deal of stuff the Office of Security preferred to keep for themselves. Venial sins went on all the time. Information slipped through the cracks between State and us, Defense and us, NSC—yes, especially NSC—and us: we were merely good Americans who had invested in Leak Gardens.

Mortal sins were another matter. Mortal sins delivered papyrus to the Sovietskys, an incomparably less humorous business. While Rosen could not be absolutely certain that I was on the lower end of the venial-mortal scale, he was nonetheless making covert promises. Resignation from the service might be in order, he had all but said, rather than trial and/or discharge. Obviously, he needed my help. The questions surrounding Hugh Montague’s death were going to be orders of magnitude more vital than any of my peccadillos.

Perhaps it was just as well that I would have Ned for my interlocutor rather than some high-ranking Security baboon who would not know how many generations of Hubbards it had taken to shape the dear, shabby quiddities of the Keep.