Rubicon, p.4
Rubicon, page 4
“They’ve tried to push me out since the beginning of the war, when I would not give them what they wanted. When the war was going well, that simply meant that I had not understood, that I had not been able to grasp the crucial importance of the intelligence they claimed they had.” He paused, concentrating on what he was trying to explain. “Then, when it became obvious to everyone that none of the weapons of mass destruction existed, when it became obvious that the sources on which they had placed such great reliance had either been fools or liars, they wanted to get rid of me even more. They were resentful, and perhaps worried, that I knew what they had done and how badly they had misjudged things.”
Caulfield twisted the bottle around, moving it first one way then another, watching that back and forth movement as if it were a new-found metaphor for the repeated stupidities of the world.
“I told them at one point - early on, when the vice-president and some of his people first started pressing the agency to make the case for war - that Chalabi was an exile, a man who wanted our help to go back to his country, and that everything an exile tells you is always at best an exaggeration.”
He shook his head at the irony of what had happened. With a look that was dismissive, unforgiving, and almost cruel, he stared into the middle distance.
“You read these descriptions of the vice-president in the public press: the dark view he supposedly has of the world, the belief that it is all a ‘Hobbesian’ struggle for survival. You read about some of the people who work for him - brilliant, fearless intellectuals; the brave new apostles of an American empire. And yet, once you get to know them, the vice-president and his people, you discover that they have not read a thing. Their ignorance is monumental. When I told them that business about not trusting exiles, I added that the thought was scarcely original with me: the principle had been set out as early as Machiavelli. They did not know this, and thought it supremely unimportant. As one of them put it: ‘This isn’t some graduate seminar.’”
“It is in the Third Book of the Discourses, if I remember correctly,” said Hart.
“Yes, precisely.”
“I should remember; it was just last year you first suggested I read it. But let’s get back to the agency for a minute. They can’t force you out before you reach retirement age, and that does not happen until after the election. No matter who wins the presidency, the director is going to be replaced. There is even a chance the next president might ask you.”
“I’ve been there too long. They’ll want someone new. Besides, I’ve seen enough; I’m ready to go. What’s happened, some of the things we are doing.... It isn’t what I signed up for.” Caulfield waved his hand in the air, a signal that he had already said enough. There were other, more important things, they had to talk about.
“What happened?” asked Hart, focused and alert. “After you got back to Langley today, after you testified?”
“I made a full report - a summary - of what was said. I emphasized that there was great concern inside the committee about another attack, another possible assassination.”
Caulfield began to run the edge of his thumb around the lip of the dark brown bottle, a thoughtful expression on his mouth. He seemed to sink inside himself, like someone used to being alone, even, and perhaps especially, when he was around other people.
“I said there was a particular concern that we use what sources we had in the Middle East - including especially Syrian intelligence - to find out how real such a threat might be.” Caulfield’s thumb stopped moving; he looked directly across the table at Hart. “You know something; I knew it right away. What is it? - Some rumor you’ve heard, something you picked up from someone you know overseas. You were just in Germany, a sudden trip, and you were only there a couple of days.”
“You know about that?” asked Hart. He was a little annoyed, and a little apprehensive. “Am I being watched?”
With a grim laugh, Caulfield threw his eyes toward the ceiling.
“Everybody is being watched, and listened to, and checked on, and kept track of. Its 1984 and Brave New World rolled into one: all the fear and punishment for anyone who gets out of line George Orwell described; all the mood-altering drugs and soft pornography Aldous Huxley said would be used to entertain and control the masses. Were you followed? No, not yet, at least that I know of. But the moment someone bought that ticket, your name showed up on someone’s computer; and each time you showed your passport....”
“What about you?” asked Hart. “Are you being watched, and listened to, and checked on, and kept track of?”
“Everything I do; everywhere I go. But I have learned to take precautions,” he remarked with a cryptic glance. He seemed to be amused by it, the irony that a spy might be spied upon; amused and at the same time almost embarrassed that things would come to this, watching over your shoulder for the same people you thought were at your side. “No one followed me here,” he added. “I’m certain of it. Now, tell me what you know so I can try to help.”
“Does the name Gunther Kramer mean anything to you?”
“I know the name very well. Why? He’s been dead for years.”
“He’s only been dead for three days. I was with him when he died. He was murdered.”
Caulfield was astonished. He bent forward, his eyes suddenly eager and intense.
“You’re positive it was him? Our information was that he died in l989, about the same time the Berlin Wall was coming down. You’re absolutely sure it was Gunther Kramer?”
“The piano player.”
“What?”
“It’s what my father called him. It was Gunther Kramer all right; he understood right away what it meant. And there is no mistake, given some of the things he said, that he knew my father - knew him rather well in fact. He worked for him, became a double agent. He wanted out of the east, and my father was going to help him.”
Caulfield nodded in agreement. “We would have, too; but events got ahead of us. No one expected the Soviet Union to collapse. No one had ever imagined that it would happen that quickly, with so little warning. All of a sudden East Germany did not exist. Everyone who had been part of the communist security apparatus changed their names and disappeared, tried to pass for someone else. Kramer must have realized that he could not go back to Germany, that even if he could prove that he had been working for us, he would only be seen as a spy without honor, someone who sold his services to the highest bidder. But he was alive and living in Hamburg all these years?”
“Not in Hamburg; he lived in Damascus.”
Caulfield gave a sigh of something more than approval, of appreciation for the talent, the guile, the courage and the sheer daring with which Gunther Kramer had pulled it off, managed to make the world believe he was dead, while he lived on, safe in the last place on earth anyone would ever have thought to look for him.
“But you met him in Hamburg. He came there from Damascus to see you?”
“And it cost him his life.”
“He could have passed on whatever he has to someone in Damascus, but he chose to tell you. Why? Because of your father, I imagine. He must have thought he could trust you.”
“He thought he had to warn me.”
“Warn you?”
“He believed that someone was going to be assassinated. I think he thought there was a chance it might be me.”
Caulfield pursed his lips, balancing the probabilities, trying to decide whether, from the point of view of what a terrorist might hope to achieve, the murder of a senator made sense.
“If he thought that, he would have been right for two reasons. You’re a rising star, someone who might one day be president. If you were to be assassinated it takes away part of the country’s future.”
“And the other reason?” asked Hart as he got up from the table and put his empty beer bottle in the garbage beneath the sink.
“You don’t get secret service protection. Killing you is as easy as shooting a stranger on the street.”
Hart looked out the window at the moonlit night, wondering at what Caulfield had just said: how easy it would be, if someone wanted to kill him.
“Not in a presidential year,” he remarked, surprised at the assurance with which he heard himself say it. He turned around and caught the skepticism in Caulfield’s eyes. “If they want to disrupt the election, show the world that democracy isn’t safe even in the United States, they’ll try to kill the president. Think what would happen: the vice-president becomes president, but only for the few months left in the term. The election is thrown into utter chaos, each party blaming the other for what has happened. If we’re full of fear and anger now, imagine what that would do!”
“What else did Gunther Kramer tell you? He must have had some basis for what he told you, specific information about a planned assassination.”
Hart he came back to the table, sat down, and studied his hands.
“It was very strange. He said that everyone he talked to, all his sources, seemed sure that something was going to happen, that something had been set in motion, but no one seemed to know anything about who was involved or where the order was coming from.”
Caulfield stroked his chin, a look of grave concern on his face.
“Our worst nightmare: a sleeper cell, waiting to carry out a mission given years in advance. It is the perfect cover: it can’t be traced back to anyone. What else did he say?”
“The last thing he told me before he died. The code name for this is Rubicon. Can you find out if anything like that has been picked up in any of the electronic surveillance the agency has been doing? And again, the Syrians – they must know something. If Kramer learned about it, then….”
“I’ll see what I can find out. I have to be careful; I’m not supposed to be doing much of anything these days except sitting in my office filling out forms.”
Hart looked at Raymond Caulfield, nearing the end of his long years of service, ignored and almost forgotten, and wondered whether, had his father lived, the same thing would have happened to him. Theirs was the generation that had fought the great war and then watched, as they grew older, how another generation let others do their fighting for them and forgot how to keep the peace.
“How well did you know Gunther Kramer, back then?”
A wistful look, a remembrance of better times, made a brief, passing appearance in the older man’s dark-circled eyes.
“I thought I knew everything about him, though I never actually met him. He was something of a legend, a man of unusual culture and intelligence. That was rare among East German agents. Your father came to admire him, as only your father could.”
“I don’t quite understand: ‘as only my father could.’”
“Max was a very wise, well-educated man. He had read everything on the Russian Revolution; everything of Marx and Engles, and Lenin, too. He studied all the time, and, in addition, had a facility with languages that the rest of us could only envy.”
A thin, distant smile, full of the knowledge of the past, slipped almost unnoticed across his lips. He spoke now in a different voice, richer and more secure.
“He understood what it must have been like for someone like Gunther Kramer - brilliant, gifted - to grow up in a regime that brutal and corrupt. Max thought that in an odd way it must have made him even more deeply intelligent than he might otherwise have become - the constant need to watch every word, tailor every action, so that it seemed to be in conformity with what was expected and demanded of a good member of the party. Think of living your life knowing that a single misspoken word could land you in the gulag or in front of a firing squad.”
Caulfield rose from the table. He had the slightly distracted air of a man with much on his mind.
“You won’t...?” Hart started to ask. Immediately, he shook his head in apology.
“Tell anyone at the agency?” replied Caulfield, not the least bit wounded. “Of course not. There are only four or five people there I still trust; all of them, like me, about to be retired. None of them are in a position to help, and besides, I would not want to put them at risk.”
“At risk?”
“The agency frowns on the sort of back-channel communication you and I have had for the last several years. Technically, despite your position on the committee, I could be charged with divulging classified information. The director, and those to whom he reports, only allow themselves to do that. If I were ever caught, the least they would do to me is to take away my pension. It’s worth it,” he added before Hart could say anything. “There are still some of us left that think the country can be saved from what these people have done to it.”
“Kramer told me something else,” said Hart as Caulfield got ready to leave.
Caulfield detected the hesitation, the note of caution, in Hart’s voice.
“About this assassination plot - or about your father?”
Hart gave him a sharp, searching look.
“Why would you think it was something about...? What is it you know?”
“What did he tell you?” asked Caulfield with a steady, even glance.
Somewhere in the distance a dog barked in the night. Another dog, farther on, answered back.
“That my father was murdered; that he did not die of a heart attack, the way it was reported.”
“I never wanted to believe that,” said Caulfield after a long, anguished silence. “I never wanted to, and yet, deep down, I suppose I always....”
“Kramer said he was murdered because of something he had learned, something he was on the point of proving? Is that possible? Could that have happened?”
“I don’t know that, I don’t know what he might have learned.”
“Kramer said that he found out that there was an organized effort to doctor the intelligence, to establish sources that reported whatever these people wanted to hear. They wanted a way to cast doubt on anything that suggested that there wasn’t a threat.”
“Max had very good sources - probably the best we had. There were high officials in the Iraqi government who would not talk to anyone else. It must have been frustrating for him,” mused Caulfield, “when everything he found out was being discredited by sources he either did not trust or did not know anything about. If he discovered that this was being done on purpose, nothing would have stopped him from getting to the bottom of it.”
Hart peered straight into his eyes.
“Kramer said that my father found out that there was a group that had its own operatives, both here and abroad. Some of them were former agents who had been let go as unreliable or politically motivated. Is that possible? Could there have been - could there still be - an organization like that? Could they have killed my father?”
“The government is full of people who helped privatize a war; who set up phony companies that made fortunes providing private security forces to do things that did not have to be reported. The agency is full of people who believe that nothing is beyond the pale, that any means are permissible if they give you what you think you need. So, is it possible? Yes, without any question. Did it happen? I don’t know, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it had.”
“Setting up different sources, manufacturing intelligence, killing my father when he found out – that isn’t something a few disaffected agents could have done. Someone had to be in charge, someone had to be giving direction.”
Caulfield gave him a long, searching look.
“Someone outside the agency,” he said finally, “someone with serious political power, someone who could pull together all the different strings, someone….”
“Someone like the vice-president?”
“I told you that he and the people around him hadn’t read Machiavelli. That doesn’t mean that they weren’t fully capable of being Machiavellian. I’ve seen the way they operate, the threats, the intimidation, the willingness to lie to anyone. There isn’t anything they wouldn’t do.”
“Including murder?”
“If what Gunther Kramer told you is true, your father was a threat to everything they wanted. Would they have murdered him? Without a second thought. But, listen to me, Bobby. Don’t try to find out anything; don’t ask questions. They’re too dangerous; they have people everywhere.”
He shook hands and promised to find out what he could. Hart turned out the kitchen lights, and under cover of darkness Raymond Caulfield disappeared.
It was nearly eleven, eight o’clock on the west coast. Upstairs in the bedroom he had not shared with her in months, Bobby Hart sat on the edge of the bed and tried to call his wife. It rang and rang until, calling anyone else, he would have hung up; but this was Helen, and he let it ring some more, though he knew she would not answer, were he to let it ring all night. He wanted her to know it was he who was calling and that he was there, the other end of the line, and that he was thinking of nothing else but her. Finally, he hung up and for a long time stared out the window as the trees outside rustled gently, very gently, in the wind.
Chapter Five
The hallway of the Willard Hotel was jammed. People were coming and going, everyone in a hurry, all of them part of a presidential campaign in which changes were still being made. A pair of secret service agents stood outside Prentice Alworth’s suite. One of them checked Hart’s identification while the other spoke into a tiny microphone he wore strapped to his wrist. A few moments later, the door opened and Bobby Hart was invited inside.
“It will be just a few minutes, Senator,” said a thin young man in a dark suit. “The governor is just finishing up a call.”
Two bookish looking young men stood together at a window going over what appeared to be the text of a speech. Sitting, or rather slumped in the corner of a sofa, an older man with a shock of unruly gray hair was picking at his teeth while he digested an endless series of polling numbers.
“And to think that all this time I thought you just invented the number you needed.”
