The defection of a j lew.., p.2
The Defection of A. J. Lewinter, page 2
“O.K., Mr. Lawson, could I ask you to let it run to the end?” Diamond said.
The camera zoomed out, lost its focus, then regained it. A passing bus blocked the scene for a moment. Lewinter was about to get into the back seat of a waiting limousine when he turned abruptly to Pogodin and began gesturing toward the embassy.
“Looks like the bastard’s having second thoughts,” someone said.
Diamond didn’t bother to answer, and the flat figures on the screen went through their silent motions. Pogodin said something to the Armenian, who sprinted back into the embassy and returned with a small plastic flight bag. The three men got into the back of the car and it drove off camera. The screen went white as the end of the film flapped on the reel. The lights came on and the four men around the table squinted self-consciously.
“Do we have any idea what was in the bag?” Steve Ferri asked.
“That’s the million-dollar question,” Diamond said.
“How come Tokyo Control…”
Diamond cut off Ferri with a wave of his hand. “Mr. Lawson, I wonder if I could trouble you to rewind that later. And thank you very much.”
The door clicked closed behind the projectionist.
Sitting at the head of the table, his back to the vertical Venetian blinds, Diamond took stock of the situation. The men around him should have been familiar faces; he had, after all, worked alongside them for years. But this was the first time he had presided over them. And the new perspective (Diamond was occupying the deputy assistant secretary’s seat) made all the difference. That much was clear from a glance at Bob Billings and Steve Ferri—both of whom confronted Diamond with faces he couldn’t quite place. They were too hard, too distant, too elaborately casual. The only one who seemed completely familiar was Gordon Rogers, a pink-cheeked smile—his flag of insecurity—playing across his soft features. Diamond could handle Rogers. But Billings and Fern, Billings with his hard profile and Ferri with his hard eyes, yes, Billings and Ferri would be another matter.
There were no ground rules for the terrain Diamond was about to cross, and so he stepped off evasively. “Well, gentlemen,” he said, “it’s really hit the fan this time.”
Steve Fern walked over to the window and opened the blinds. Bars of sunlight slanted across the carpet. “Isn’t that judgment premature?” he asked. Ferri had spent twelve years as an officer in the army, where he had acquired a flat, vaguely Southern accent. When he spoke, his thin lips and jaw hardly moved; he seemed to talk through clenched teeth, a physical trait that gave his words a sense of blunt authority. “If the chief were here, I suspect he’d want us to move cautiously on this one.”
“Not everybody has your feel for the deputy assistant secretary, Steve,” Diamond said. “The fact is that he’s over in Bethesda with endocarditis and I’m here in the catbird seat.” He avoided Ferri’s eyes. “Look,” he said, “there isn’t a man in this room who isn’t in trouble. We’re in charge of security for the MIRV program and we’ve screwed up.”
Diamond settled deeper into the unfamiliar chair and stretched his legs. He cut a casually elegant figure; a man in his mid forties, slouching gracefully, sleeves rolled above his elbows, a thick shock of brown hair falling across his forehead. He looked as if he could cope. But he wondered if he could. Everything seemed to be happening at once. First there had been that incredible scene ten days ago in his office with the deputy assistant secretary gasping for air on the carpet. And then, less than a week later, the job. And now the defection. On top of all this there was Sarah, the one problem he could have avoided—but chose not to.
And yet he hadn’t felt this elated—there was no other word for it—since his days at the Agency. Somehow the problems nourished him, feeding his ego, energizing his ambition. The old equations that had constituted his life were suddenly obliterated, and the new ones seemed infinitely more inviting. If he handled the defection smoothly, Diamond had little doubt that the job of Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Security Policy would be permanently his. The girl was another story, a love story, and he hadn’t had a love story in his life since he’d gotten married.
“I still think you’re exaggerating,” Ferri said, and looked at Billings to see if he would back him up. But Billings remained silent; if he was going to tangle with Diamond, he, not Fern, would pick the moment.
“Exaggerating?” Diamond said. He was careful to keep his voice, if not his words, polite. “Christ, from the very beginning this whole affair has been one big fuck-up.” He flipped open a manila folder and began to rummage through a sheaf of onionskin papers. “Here’s a report from the Investigative and Personnel Branch—that’s your bailiwick, Steve. Three weeks before Lewinter applied for permission to attend a symposium in Japan, your people reported that Lewinter bought”—Diamond ran his finger across the page—” bought five hundred Chlor-Trimeton hay-fever pills and a dozen plastic bottles of Head and Shoulders dandruff shampoo. According to this report, we also knew that he had gone to his dentist—a Doctor Donald Fishkin in Boston—and retrieved his dental records. In some corner of this huge security network of ours an alarm bell should have gone off. But what happens? Lewinter applies for permission to go to Japan—and someone named Stefano Ferri, the director of the Investigative and Personnel Branch, signs the chit.” And Diamond flattened the wrinkled paper on the table.
“What’s so unusual about someone buying hay-fever pills in bulk?” Ferri said aggressively, but his voice was just off pitch. “And Head and Shoulders—really, come on, Leo. As for the dental records, we checked that out two days after it occurred. And it so happens that Lewinter had a fight with your Doctor Fishkin and was asking around for another dentist.”
“Have you ever heard of anybody buying five hundred pills?” Diamond asked. “Not unless he doesn’t expect to be able to get more. It’s my hunch that if you opened Lewinter’s flight bag, you’d find the pills, the shampoo, and Doctor Fishkin’s X rays.”
“I don’t know, Leo, it seems to me you’re reading too much into this,” Gordon Rogers said. “In view of what happened, I grant you we should have done more than put a routine surveillance on him in Tokyo. But if we lock up everybody in the MIRV program who buys pills in bulk, well, we’re going to have our hands full.” Rogers, a slightly effeminate man with thick, soft lips, cleared his throat, satisfied that he had made what he thought was a good point.
“I hope that the secretary of defense can find it in his heart to be as charitable as you,” Diamond said. “But don’t count on it. When I left his office late last night, he was waiting for a phone call from the President. I want to tell you something, the air conditioner was on full blast—but the secretary of defense was sweating bullets. And if we had any sense, we’d be doing the same. Next to the Single Integrated Operations Plan and the National Strategic Target List, we’re dealing with the most crucial element of national security that exists.”
“I’m sweating, all right,” Rogers said, and he plucked a soft white handkerchief with his initials on it from a pocket and began patting his brow. “When in heaven’s name are we going to get a smaller conference room or a larger air conditioner? My Lord, you don’t see the strategic planning people down the hall putting up with this sort of thing.”
“What about the office space reorganization?” Fern chimed in. “With the chief laid up, we’re likely to get shafted when they start giving out the square footage. You’ve got to keep at them. It’s the squeaky wheel that gets the oil. Maybe I ought to send you a copy of the memo I worked up for the chief. Jesus, I’ve got filing cabinets in the janitor’s closet and three assistants falling over each other in a six-by-six cubbyhole that was meant to hold a water cooler.”
Diamond felt as if he were straining against a rudder, trying to hold a sailboat on course in a stiff wind. “I’m as anxious about getting what’s coming to us as the next man,” he said, “but can’t we put that on a back burner for the moment?” Without waiting for an answer, Diamond walked over to a cabinet near the door. “Listen to this,” he said, and snapped on a tape recorder.
“Hey, George, this is me,” said a voice that seemed to come from the end of a tunnel.
“Where the hell”ve you and Honeybucket been?”
“In Marunouchi,” the voice answered. “Everything’s fine. Our friend just treated me to five and a half hours of Noh. Now we’re in Roppongi. Honeybucket’s across the street in an antique shop. I’ll stick with him through dinner and tuck him in at the hotel.”
Diamond switched off the tape recorder.
“Jesus,” Rogers said. “That god damn Chapin. What an idiot.”
“It’s not only Chapin,” Diamond said. “It’s Tokyo Control—they violated every rule in the book. Chapin loses Lewinter, then he wastes three and a half hours waiting for him to show up at the hotel before he reports the fadeout. It turns out Control had movies of Lewinter going in and out of the Soviet Embassy, but they didn’t develop the film until forty-eight hours after he left the country. According to your own regulations, Gordon, those films are supposed to be turned in and developed three times a day, at the end of each shift. If I’m wrong, stop me.”
Rogers nodded lamely.
“Then there was the simple, elementary business of the code traffic,” Diamond went on. “Forty minutes after Lewinter stepped through the doors of that embassy, there was an unusual burst of after-hours code traffic to Moscow. Obviously something was up. Where the hell was Control?”
“The Russians had after-hours code traffic on twelve nights last month,” Rogers said. Diamond waited for him to say something else, but Rogers stopped there.
“O.K., forget Chapin, forget the films, forget the traffic,” Diamond said. He picked up another report. “One hour and forty-five minutes after Lewinter entered the embassy—a full hour before the plane with Lewinter and Pogodin on board took off for Moscow—Control had its hands on a report from a local agent. She was a Japanese charwoman who worked in the Soviet Embassy. She told them that an American had come in after closing hours, that the duty officer had hustled him into a room, that there was a flurry of excited phone calls from the main switchboard. The charwoman only spoke Russian; she didn’t understand English. She reported—now get this—she actually told Control she overheard snatches of an argument between Pogodin and Stanchev, their ambassador. The ambassador apparently lost the argument and stormed out, and right after that all the Japanese local hire were sent home early. This wasn’t even a jigsaw puzzle anymore. This was like one of those kids’ cutouts.”
Rogers was reduced to silence. He sat with his head resting between his hands, staring down at the table.
Robert Billings, a thin, aristocratic bureaucrat who prided himself on his ability to split hairs, refused to be ruffled. “I must say, Leo, it seems to me you’re going out of your way to put the pieces together so that the picture reflects badly on us. I read that report—all those reports went through my hands. The charwoman didn’t say she saw an American; she said she saw a man whom she thought was an American. She didn’t say she heard Pogodin and Stanchev arguing; she said she overheard an argument in a hail after which the ambassador hurried out. Not stormed out.”
Billings spoke offhandedly, the casual defender of the faith, the cool champion of his colleagues against Leo Diamond. As director of the Security Plans and Programs branch of the department, he ranked immediately under Diamond; as the senior member in length of service, he was acknowledged by everyone to be unsurpassed in technical expertise. Brilliant, devoted, totally committed to the department, he probably would have long ago been appointed chief if it had not been for his professorial, prissy personality.
“I’ll grant you that a leakproof security net might have caught him before he defected, but a really leakproof security net is out of character in this country,” Billings went on. “But you’ve missed the point”—Billings said this very quietly, letting the words carry their own weight—”yes, I’m quite certain you’ve missed the point. The quintessential question right now is not how he was allowed to defect, but rather what he took with him—other than hay-fever pills and hair tonic, of course. In a word, how much can he help our friends on the other side and how much can he hurt us? And I submit the answer, based on the available evidence, is: not very much at all.”
Leo Diamond doodled with a pencil, drawing various sized S’s on the yellow pad. “And what is the available evidence, as you see it, Bob?” he said, his eyes on the pad. Billings’ “you’ve missed the point” hung in the air between them.
“Why the only evidence I have is the evidence we all have,” Billings said, still nonchalant. “Who, after all, is A. J. Lewinter? His security record”—Billings tossed a rolled-up computer print-out onto the table as if he were placing it in evidence—”is fairly nondescript. Age thirty-nine. I.Q. one forty-five. Graduated with honors from an Eastern ceramic school that nobody ever heard of named Alfred University. A fairly proficient specialist in the field of ceramics. Married. Two children. Divorced. Came to work four years ago on the MIRV program designing ceramic nose cones. Salary seventeen five. At the time he was given a security check. No debts. Heterosexual. No known perversions. Slightly left of center politically, but who up there at M.I.T. isn’t? At any rate, he wasn’t an activist. About the only extraordinary thing in his file is his passion for ecology—hardly a cause for alarm. Seven months ago he took up with a research assistant who seemed like another version of his wife. She was checked out. No debts. No known perversions. Slightly to the left politically.” Billings—the only man at the table other than Diamond who stood a chance of getting the top slot in the department—was veiy much in control of the conversation. “Mickey Pogodin may be in for a surprise when they start to debrief our Lewinter,” he continued, supremely confident. “Why are we worried? A specialist in ceramic nose cones defects and we go off the deep end? The Soviets are every bit as good as we are, perhaps better, in the field of ceramic nose cones. They could probably teach Lewinter a thing or two. It’s all so bland it’s hard to see why our Soviet friends even took him.”
Diamond finished blacking-in a particularly thick S and looked up, his lips pressed tightly together. Gordon Rogers wrote in a looseleaf notebook. Steve Ferri and Robert Billings stared at Diamond. The only sound in the room was the whirr of the air conditioner.
Diamond broke the silence. “I haven’t missed the point, Bob—but you have.” The challenge had been accepted. “The single most important piece of evidence is not that security record, which tells you next to nothing about Lewinter—about the real, living, breathing, flesh-and-blood Lewinter. The single most important piece of evidence—and the only one we should concern ourselves with at this point—is the fact that the Soviets took him. They allowed him to defect. They risked a diplomatic incident in Japan. They risked getting involved in the whole business of plants and misinformation. And they took him. That’s where the truth begins—the fact that they took him. They’re not stupid. Lewinter would have had to prove he was worth taking before they flew him off to Moscow.”
Diamond started in on another S and gave it up. “What do you think was in that late-hour code traffic between the embassy and Moscow?” he said. “We’ve got every damn reason to be worried about our bland Mr. Lewinter. Because they took him.“
4
I’M NOT A MATERIALIST,” Sarah said. “I just like things.”
“I gathered as much,” Diamond said. He looked around the room. Practically every flat surface was cluttered with Sarah’s “things”—sea shells, painted egg shells, rocks, ivory combs, French licorice tins, Japanese kokeshi dolls, paperweights, antique pocket watches, secondhand buttons. “I could never live in a place like this. Funny, I admire people who can, but for me it’s too distracting. It’s too … bouillabaisse.”
Sarah sat cross-legged on the bed, naked, angular, boyishly ripe—a fresh-cut flower on a strong stem. She studied Leo, propped up against a pile of brightly colored pillows, the toes of his right foot jutting from beneath the sheet. Sarah had had her share of love affairs, but she rarely brought the men home. Those that she did, she put to a private test—measuring them by their reaction to her collections. She wanted Leo to like them because she liked Leo. But she was put off by his ambivalence. She leaned across the bed, her long brown hair brushing his chest, and plucked a small mahogany box from the night table.
“What do you think of this?” she asked. “I picked it up in the Paris flea market on my last junket.”
“What is it?” Diamond said, instinctively noncommittal. He opened the lid. Inside, embedded in worn purple felt, were six bulb-shaped brass objects and a steel thermometer.
“I haven’t the faintest idea,” Sarah said, laughing at the private joke. “Can’t you like something without knowing what it is?”
“I liked you.” Diamond was playing games again—and that annoyed him. He had thought that with Sarah he could let down his guard. He had never entirely trusted anyone in his adult life and it was painful to begin now. Yet he wanted to try. He picked up one of the brass bulbs and turned it in his fingers, straining to make out the etched inscription. “It’s really quite nice. Really. But what is it? When you bought it, you must have known what you were buying.”
“But that’s just the point, Leo,” she said. “This is part of my I-don’t-know collection. I’ve got lots more.” And she slid off the bed, rummaged around a low shelf and began to pile boxes and odd-shaped objects on his lap. “For this particular collection, I only buy things when the man who sells them doesn’t know what they are.”
“There’s a guy in the department who could trace these things for you,” Diamond said. “He’d not only tell you what they are, but who made them and when.”
