Q Clearance by Peter Benchley
"That's . . . creepy."
"Yeah, well . . . extremism in the defense of liberty and all that."
He took her arm and led her to the curb and flagged down a taxi. "I'm really sorry about—"
She put a finger across his lips and said, "That's okay. I understand."
"I know you do," he said, and he kissed her fingertips.
As he watched the taxi pull out into traffic, Burnham tried to interpret Eva's last look. It had been a smile, but a sad smile and clouded by a shadow of . . . what? Regret? Worry? Fear?
Forget it, he told himself, don't make more of it than there is. You feel guilty, so you're looking for trouble you think you deserve.
He crossed the avenue and started around the long oval of the South Lawn.
He detested the beeper, thought of it as a leash, resented being summoned, like a lady-in-waiting, back from his lunch hour. He had several other similarly piquant sentiments about the destruction of his privacy, and he encouraged himself to flush them now, before he got back to the White House, for no matter what outcry rose from his gut, his head reminded him that these were but the prices of proximity to the President. And the rewards—in excitement, fascination, self-esteem and the deliciously naughty enjoyment of other people's envy—^ were handsome compensation.
Besides, he should feel grateful that he had been allowed to steal an hour away from his wall-to-wall carpeted, temperature-controlled, electronically surveilled. Secret Service-protected cloister.
Gazing at the South Lawn as he walked, he wondered if it was true, as legend had it, that there were machine-gun emplacements beneath the greensward which, at the push of a button, would pop up and rake an unruly mob with computer-aimed tracers.
He had almost been taken to Camp David. The President had wanted him to go along, said he needed a sounding board, needed his Special Assistant for Perspective, but had changed his mind at the last minute—on the hunch that, since the gathering at Camp David was to include only the President's wife, two of their family lawyers and one of their sons, to resolve a sticky issue involving some bank loans incurred by the son (who persisted in spending his father's name like loose change whenever it could benefit him) and now under threat of default, Burnham might be regarded by Mrs. Wins-low as a ringer brought in by the President to reinforce his paternal inclination to let their delinquent offspring hang.
As it was, before the trip the President had played and replayed the situation with Burnham, casting him alternately as devil's advocate, hard-nosed patriarch, pushover pop, and mother.
Burnham was becoming accustomed to being a protean figure for the President. He was an alter ego for the man. He would argue any side of an issue, exposing weaknesses, dangers and hidden benefits.
The President trusted him implicitly, because, as he said one day, "You got no ax to grind, Tim. You've gone as high as you can go here, and you know it. I've shown you how worthless the Cabinet is, so you wouldn't want to go in there even if I'd put you there, which I won't. You're not a lawyer, so you can't have any ambition to be a judge. And you're not rich enough to be an ambassador. I created you, and you serve at my pleasure, which means that your main interest has to be me. You know it, and I know it, so I know when you argue with me you're doing it for my benefit—not like all the rest of them, who all got some constituency or other they suck up to, even if it's just the Harvard Club, B'nai Brith or The New York Review of goddanm Books." The President paused, squinted and said, "You writing your memoirs?"
"Me? No, sir."
"Good. I can't stand a man who's writing his memoirs. It skews his whole outlook. Everything he's mixed up in, he thinks of it in terms of himself: What do I think about this, how'm I doing, what does the President say about me, how'll history grade me? Shit! Only one man allowed to think like that around here, Tim, and you're lookin' at him."
"I know, Mr. President."
"I know you know, Tim, and that's why ... I got a little present for you."
"Sir?" Burnham lowered his eyes, humbly, prepared to accept a tie clip embossed with the Great Seal or a signed copy of the President's collected speeches.
"I been thinkin' about this, Tim, and I've decided: You're my man." The President paused for dramatic effect. "I want you to write my memoirs."
"Wha—Sir?"
"I know, I know." The President raised a hand, as if to ward off an embarrassing effusion of gratitude. "It's a heavy burden. But you deserve it. Ever since that first day, I've known you're a man with a sense of history. You can handle it. Besides, I'll be sitting by your side, helping you with every damn comma."
Burnham was appalled. The thought of spending the remainder of his adult life sculpting self-serving reminiscences was a hell beyond imagining. And yet to decline was to buy himself a one-way ticket to disfavor.
So he said, "I don't know what to say."
"I know how you feel," the President said, patting his shoulder. "I felt that way when the Chief Justice administered my first oath of office. Don't say anything. Just take real good notes from now on."
He had obeyed, had begun to take copious notes which, he prayed fervently, he would never have to use, except perhaps as fuel for the novel he would write. From a hideout. In Botswana.
Now, as he approached the door to the West Basement, he saw twin black Cadillac limousines idling at the curb. He recognized the drivers, which told him that the two Cabinet officers with the President were the Secretaries of State and Defense, which meant that the meeting would also include Epstein and Duggan, which meant that the subject was, as Burnham had suspected, Honduras.
Ever since Ronald Reagan had, during his last year in office, orchestrated the invasion of Nicaragua by a ragtag band of Contras, Cuban exiles, American mercenaries and assorted outcasts and survivalists—an invasion that had been squashed in a debacle widely assessed as worse even than the Bay of Pigs—Honduras had taken over the role as plague upon the foreign policy of the United States.
Los Tegucigalpehos, as the guerrillas called themselves, had looked to the south and seen that kicking Yanqui ass could be a profitable enterprise, and, with the help of their Sandinista brethren, they were hell-bent on toppling their government and forming a Central American Revolutionary Confederation with Nicaragua. The Russians were sending AK-47s, the Cubans were sending Cubans, and Mu'ammar Qaddafi was offering to pay for the training and transportation of any American blacks eager to join the struggle against "the capitalist imperialist cabal."
President Winslow was the man in the middle, hectored by one extreme to get the hell out of Central America once and for damn-well all, and by the other to get the Communists out of Central America once and for damn-well all.
The most vocal pressure on the President was to go on prime-time television and resurrect the Monroe Doctrine with ringing rhetoric and then to launch, with the support of Congress (presuming he could get it), a full-scale, undisguised land-and-sea invasion of Honduras by America's Navy, Air Force and Marines. Secure America's back yard.
Once and for damn-well all.
Burnham had listened to every argument on every side a dozen times. He had spent whole evenings playing right-wing firebrand and left-wing appeaser, while the President abused him as a fool, a dunce, a maniac and a lily-livered pussy-whipped wimp.
Never, however, had the President asked Burnham for his own advice, and for that Burnham was grateful. He didn't know what he would say. All he knew for sure was that under no circumstances, ever, not in this life or any subsequent incarnation, would he agree to be President of the United States. The fact that no President had suddenly infarcted to death in office, or been hauled away in a wagon and left to watch cartoons for the rest of his natural life, was a miracle.
Burnham walked through the door of the West Basement, climbed the stairs, passed through Dyanna's office, his own and the President's private office, and opened the door to the Oval Office. He didn't knock; the President had told him not to.
''You'RE nuts!" E
Foster Pym sat in an upholstered chair and picked at the loose threads in a seam of the slipcover. He was sweating, maybe from the haste of his trip home after Eva called him, maybe from the news she had delivered.
"Nothing," he said. "They'll find nothing."
"Great! And then what? There is no such thing as a person without a past in this country. That's the worst thing they could find. Nothing."
"Not necessarily. When they get to a dead end, they'll have to come to me."
"And what'll you say? 'I can't remember'?"
"Precisely. I was a John Doe. There were hundreds of John Does. Thousands."
"They'll take fingerprints."
"They won't find a record."
"And? Weren't Americans fingerprinted when they joined the Army?"
"I ... I don't know. Perhaps my hands were mutilated during the war.''
"They'll check your teeth. They can tell if dental work was done abroad."
"I never had dental work done, not till I came here."
He waited for her next barrage, but none came. He wanted to be irritated at her hammering, but he couldn't summon the feeling. What she was doing was useful. Reassuring, now that he had greeted each interrogatory with a credible response.
"See!" he leaned forward and patted her hand. "Let them dig. They'll come up with a dry hole."
"What about my mother?"
Pym paused—not evasively, but because any thought of Louise was alien to him. He hadn't thought about her in years, in any context whatever. To him she was dead, as, for all he knew, she was in fact.
Eva anticipated him. "You can't say she's dead."
"No, but I can say I don't have the faintest idea where she is, or whether she's alive. I haven't seen the woman in nearly thirty years."
"Suppose they find her. How much did she know about you?"
Now Pym was uncomfortable, because he didn't have an answer. He knew how much he had told Louise—nothing— and he knew that she had been so obsessed with the resurrection of the Reich that she seemed incapable of any other concerns. Seemed. That was the key. He didn't know how perceptive she had been, how much she might have noticed, consciously or unconsciously, about him. Nor did he recall how careful he had been, way back then. How meticulously had he detailed his past for her? How had he excused his occasional late-night sorties into dark parks?
He decided to dismiss Louise as a threat. She was crazy then, she was probably even crazier now, and if an FBI agent should turn over a rock and find her the den mother of a bund in Hopewell, New Jersey, he would hardly be inclined to give much weight to her testimony.
He said, "Don't worry about her."
"We have to worry about her. Remember what Timothy said—a Nazi, a Communist or a Martian. Well, two out of three's pretty heavy."
"Never worry about things you cannot do anything about," Pym said, lecturing just a little. "We cannot do a thing about Louise."
"There's one thing we can do something about." Eva reached into her purse, took out the half-glasses and tossed them into Pym's lap. "We can stop. Right now. Before they catch us in the act. If they're watching me, you can bet they're watching Timothy when I'm with him."
Pym toyed with the glasses, tilting them back and forth in the lamplight to see if he could discern the plastic shield over the tiny lens in the nosepiece. "I'm afraid not," he said, and he folded the glasses and placed them on the arm of his chair.
"What does that mean? We can do what we damn please."
"Eva," Pym sighed, for suddenly he felt tired and old and trapped, "they are very happy with what we have given them so far. I don't know what's in those papers, but they're very happy. They want more."
"To hell with them."
Pym continued as if she hadn't spoken. "They want more than more. As they see it, they have the most valuable agent they could hope for—a mole in the Oval Office. They want you to start pumping Burnham for information."
"I won't do it."
Pym sighed again. He had to make her see that the decision had been taken from his hands. They were not agents any more; they were instruments.
He said, "What do you think they'll do to us if we refuse?"
"Nothing. Why should they? They should get down on their knees and thank us for what we did do." She snorted. "What do you think they'll do, kill us?"
"No. I don't think they'd bother. We're not worth the trouble."
"So?"
"If we refuse," Pym said with forced calm, "and they decide they can't trust us any more, they'll dump us."
"Dump us?"
"Make sure we get caught. You and me and your Mr. Burnham. Especially your Mr. Burnham."
"Why? Why would they do that?"
"It would be a great coup for them. Make the American government look stupid, ineffective and untrustworthy. Make the President look like a fool. It would wreck American intelligence and security operations. Their allies wouldn't share with them any more. You remember—no, you were too young—but when they found all those spies in the British services. Ml-5 and Ml-6 were the laughingstock of the Western world. Burgess and Maclean—and, later. Blunt—may have outlived their usefulness, but they had one last service to perform for Mother Russia. They turned British intelligence into a bad joke. It took years for the Brits to recover. And still nobody trusts them, not really." Pym paused. He could see by Eva's face that she was not yet convinced, so he said, "We're in so deep now that they'd have to sacrifice us. They couldn't take the chance that you or Mr. Burnham would be seized by a sudden fit of patriotism and decide to turn yourselves in. That way, the whole thing could be covered up and denied. There would be no coup. No. They will want to control it."
"That's crazy! They'd be ratting on themselves, admitting they're spying."
"Don't you understand, Eva? They're allowed to spy. Those are the rules of the game. They're supposed to spy! All they'd be doing is acknowledging the obvious and proving that they're better at it than anyone else. It's nothing for them to be ashamed of. They'd crow!"
When Eva still didn't say a word, Pym decided to drive the last nail. "Mr. Burnham would go to jail, probably for life. He'd deny everything, but the evidence against him would be overwhelming. I'd go to jail too, and there I would die of old age unless, someday, the Americans offer to trade me for some low-level American diplomat—or perhaps a tourist— arrested in Moscow or Leningrad. Then I'd be sent home— it's funny, I don't think of it as home any more, haven't for years and years—where I'd be interrogated and, most probably, shot." He saw her hands jump in her lap, and he continued matter-of-factly. "Yes, they certainly wouldn't treat me as a hero for refusing to carry out an assignment. As for you, I really don't know. It depends—"
"Stop," Eva said.
Pym looked at her. She was pale and rigid. "I'm sorry," he said. "But it's true. All of it."
"How long?" she asked.
"I can't be sure. Until your Mr. Burnham loses his access to the President, I imagine, which is bound to happen sooner or later—they say this President is fickle that way—or until you lose your access to Mr. Burnham; perhaps his wife summons him back to the nest."
"She's filed for divorce."
"Ah. In that case—"
"I can't pump him for information."
"Why not?"
"One of the main reasons he trusts me is that I never ask him anything, ever. As far as he knows, and the President too, I know nothing about anything important, and I care less. If I start asking him questions, he'll get suspicious, and he's hardly the suspicious type, not in his state of mind."
"What state of mind is that?"
"He's in love with me."
"Good."
"Even if I wanted to, and I don't, I couldn't. He trusts me."
Pym frowned. "What does that have to do—"
"I can't betray him. I can't!"
"You're not betraying him now?"
"
“And your state of mind?" He wanted her to say it. "You're falling in love with him."
She looked at him, defiant, but he saw that she was gripping one index finger so hard that the knuckle shone white. "Yes."
"Don't," he said.
" 'Don't'? Oh, that's helpful. Thanks very much. I—"
"You mustn't! You have to keep doing what you're doing. Nothing more, just photographing his mail, and I'll tell them they'll have to wait for any extra tidbits. They'll buy that. They won't want to lose the pictures. By and by, if we're lucky, the President will tire of Mr. Burnham and adopt someone else. Once our source dries up, we can stop."
"Why will they let us?"
"There'll be no advantage to them to expose us. As far as they're concerned, we're still trustworthy, we pose no threat to them. You don't throw agents to the wolves without a reason."
"And Timothy?"
"They'll certainly want to leave him alone. He's perfect! He doesn't know what he's done. Five years from now, or ten years, perhaps he'll be a Cabinet officer or an ambassador or the president of a large company that makes high-technology components or even a prestigious journalist. He'll have a fat salary and a fine family and a life he'd do anything to protect. Suppose he receives a visit from someone who hints that there might be a few things in his past that he'd rather not have revealed, perhaps shows him photostats of some of the mail he never bothered to read, with a big Q-CLEARANCE stamp on it. Do you think he'd be willing to do a favor or two for this visitor?"
"So he'll never be free."
"I'm not saying that will happen, only that it will be worth their while to leave him in blissful ignorance. He may never be the wiser.''
"I feel sick."
"You can't afford to be sick. Not now. That's why it's so important that you don't fall in love with him."
"Too late," she said, with a crooked smile. Her eyes glistened like blue marbles in a pool of rainwater. "You're sure they'll let us go?" Her voice was clogged.
"Positive," he said. "Absolutely." He turned away, wishing he were a better liar.