Brindsley was initially speechless. When he did speak, he said, “You have any idea just how far out of line you are?”
“You tell me-tell me honestly for the first time.”
“You’ve broken every protocol in the book. And then some. Kenton Peters is the State Department; doesn’t matter who the secretary is or who’s in the White House. And you told him to kiss your ass. Used those very words!”
“And you know what he told me! He told me I was a fall guy. Used those very words!”
The sigh puffed Brindsley’s cheeks more fully than usual. “He doesn’t remember saying that.”
“He knows official telephone conversations to and from the Moscow office are recorded, as a matter of routine?”
The only sound in the room for several moments was the rasping of the deputy director’s heavy breathing.
“I’m going to forget you said that-along with its implications. And remind you whose property any tape is, recorded on FBI material on FBI premises.”
Miriam took the tiny cassette from her handbag and tossed it onto the man’s desk. “Just thought you’d like to hear the conversation for yourself.”
The speed with which the man grabbed the recording was surprising for someone of his size, his hand snatching out to enclose it like a lizard’s tongue plucking an insect in midflight. “This the only copy?”
“With two messages. One that’s on it, one that isn’t.”
“I don’t think I want to hear the second.”
“You do,” insisted Miriam. “And so does Peters and anyone else who thinks they’ve got the lid on whatever it is that has to be locked away forever. There’s too many people-too many chances for the smallest fuckup”-she nodded in the direction of the desk drawer into which Brindsley was putting the tape-“like an ill-considered remark being recorded-for anyone to believe they can control things from a distance of eight or ten thousand miles. This way, the way Peters wants to work and how you’ve been telling me to work, there’sgoing to be something that someone doesn’t know they’re saying or doing and all the demons are going to come out of Pandora’s box and land right in your laps!”
“Peters is sure he’s emptied the box.”
“How can he be?” demanded Miriam, careless of the exasperation.
“It’s his job to be.”
“You going to tell me what it’s really all about?”
“I don’t know!” protested the man. “That’s how tight it’s being kept. I pass everything you send to the director, the director liaises with Peters, Peters tells the director how to respond, I tell you. And I don’t like it any more than you do, but I’m five years from pension, so I don’t tell Peters to kiss my ass.”
“He want me fired?”
“Yes.”
Miriam felt the stir of apprehension, a hollowness. “You going to?”
“You got a good argument against it?”
“Peters sure he’s got the British under control?”
“Totally. Seems they’ve got as much to hide as we have.”
“But he can’t have the Russians …” She extended a cupped hand, closing her fingers. “But I have. Colonel Vadim Leonidovich Lestov, right here in the palm of my hand. You can’t afford to put anyone else on the case, not at this stage. It would be even greater madness than the way it’s being run at the moment.”
Brindsley’s smile was of resignation. “That’s what I told the director, even without knowing about Lestov.”
“What did he say?”
“That we didn’t have a choice but that your future with the Bureau, after this, hangs on the thinnest thread you ever saw. And that you had to be brought all the way from Moscow to be told that in person, so you’d believe it. So tell me you believe it.”
“I believe it.” She was going to survive!
“And don’t you ever again foul-mouth me like you have today.”
“I’m sorry. And I won’t.” It wasn’t Nathaniel Brindsley who was the cocksucker; it was Kenton Peters.
“Another thing you won’t ever do again is communicate outside this Bureau to anyone about anything.”
“I won’t,” promised Miriam. “But Nat, I need more than I’m getting, for all the reasons we’re talking about. It is OSS and their art-looting investigation unit, isn’t it?”
“That seemed to ring the alarm bell,” agreed Brindsley. “And because the OSS became the CIA after the war, that’s where the records are. Or were. And why Peters is sure everything’s either gone or locked away forever.”
“Who was Henry Packer?”
“Agency,” said Brindsley. “And was is the word. He’s out. Any idea how he was blown?”
Miriam shook her head. “None.”
“Could it have been the Brit, Muffin?”
“I don’t see how. As far as I was aware, Packer was Peters’s bodyguard. What was he really supposed to do?”
“Your guess is as good as mine.”
Miriam felt a sudden coldness. “You’re kidding!”
“I didn’t say anything. Don’t know anything.”
“It’s got to be a hell of a thing they want to stay covered up.”
“You still need me to tell you that?”
“Does Peters know who the guy is in the Yakutsk grave?”
“I guess so. I don’t.”
“And what he was doing in Yakutsk?”
Brindsley shrugged. “I don’t know!”
Miriam extended her hands again, a gesture of helplessness this time. “What the hell am I supposed to do?”
“Exactly what you have been doing. Passing back everything. Giving away nothing.”
“Monitoring, not investigating? I could have been told that in the beginning.”
“Now you have been. What about the Englishman?”
“Maybe you should tell Peters he was withdrawn to London the day before me. Left without telling me …” She made a vague gesture again toward the drawer containing the tape cassette. “I don’t understand how Peters’s remark about the British being fall guys squares with your telling me they’ve got as much to hide as us and are cooperating.”
“Neither do I,” admitted the man, miserably. “Like I said, I don’t enjoy working like this any more than you do.”
She was safe, Miriam abruptly realized. She might have gotten the thin-thread lecture, but after today she couldn’t be blamed for the failure of an investigation that had been intended to fail from the very beginning. As the awareness settled, she said, “How’s this going to be marked on my file?”
“I’m not sure that it is going to be marked,” said the department chief. He hesitated. “Is there another copy of the tape?”
“No,” lied Miriam. Altogether, she decided, everything had turned out very satisfactorily indeed. It would still be nice to have Peters kiss her ass; something, in fact, to look forward to with the tape she’d copied. It would be good to have more. To get which she needed to go on poking around, despite what she had been officially ordered to do. Do a Charlie Muffin, in fact. There was no way she could try to access the old OSS files without the Bureau finding out, but there were the Nazi prisoners at Yakutsk and New York was only an hour away from Washington on the shuttle.
Before her transfer to the overseas division, Miriam Bell had been attached to the FBI’s New York office and had twice found the records of the World Jewish Congress on Madison Avenue a mine of information about Nazi Germany and the Holocaust during war crime inquiries.
She was directed to the desk of a man whose nameplate said E. Ray Lewis. He was a small, balding, bearded man whose vaguely distracted ambience of an academic changed at once to obvious daydreams at her approach. Miriam was glad she’d worn the sweater that accentuated her cleavage. He promised to do whatever he could to help her when she showed him her Bureau shield and Miriam knew how he would have liked her to help him.
His fantasies went abruptly the moment she produced her list. He said, “I know without checking who most of them are. The others would be the same. You know what happened to them!”