Before long, he realized there wasn’t much there. It was mostly a collection of bank statements and bills, and correspondence with various brokerages. The Harvard Building Fund hoped to be remembered in his will, and Sprint wanted him as a customer.
McBride looked up. “Anything interesting?”
Adrienne shook her head, closed the diary, and set it down on the coffee table. “It’s poetry” she told him. “He was writing poetry in his old age.”
“You’re kidding,” McBride reacted, unable to hide his disappointment.
“Look for yourself,” she said, and removing the rubber band from a packet of envelopes, began to go through them, one by one. Meanwhile, McBride scrutinized the old man’s bills, looking for God knows what. The minutes dragged by.
After a while, Adrienne reported, “It’s almost all receipts. He bought his shoes at Church’s, his books on Main Street, and his slacks at Beecroft & Vane. Filled his prescriptions at Rite-Aid.” She looked up. “I’m not getting anywhere.”
McBride shrugged, and turned his attention to the photo album. Opening it to the picture of Crane arriving at the Institute, he stared at it for a long while, trying to remember.
Adrienne noticed. “Where’s Kussnacht?” she asked.
“Just north of Zurich. It’s the Institute’s headquarters.” He stopped talking, frowned.
“What?” she demanded.
McBride shook his head. “I’ve been trying to patch it together, you know? To figure out when—exactly when—I became Jeffrey Duran? And the last thing I remember, the last thing I really remember, is that I was at the Institute. I’d come to Switzerland to talk about something or other with Opdahl. I was supposed to have lunch with him.”
“The guy who had the falling out with Crane?”
McBride nodded, then turned the page to the group photo on the terrace in Murren. “He looks like his father,” he told her. “Opdahl, I mean.” And staring at the broad face and hooded eyes, McBride suffered the same dark shudder that he’d felt only minutes before. It was the kind of sensation that brought to mind the saying about someone stepping on your grave. He shook it off. “We’d better keep rolling,” he said.
“Mmmmmm.” Rain began to thrum on the roof, falling beyond the windows in ropy shafts of silver. Adrienne opened an 8 1/2 by 11 manila envelope—glanced inside, and returned it to the table. “What’s that?” McBride asked.
“Newspaper clippings,” she replied. “Obituaries and stuff.”
McBride shrugged, and picked up the yellow legal pad—which looked as if it had never been used. As he riffled the pages, however, an envelope dropped to the table—and he saw that there was a letter, or the first draft of a letter, on the very last pages of the pad.
Leaving the envelope where it lay, he focused on the handwritten, crossed-out and much corrected scribble in the recesses of the pad. Gunnar—it began.
McBride paused. No “Dear,” there—so no love lost. And what was stranger: why would someone begin a letter on the inside of a legal pad—indeed, at the very end of the pad, writing from the last page toward the front? It was a trivial question, of course, and the answer occurred to him as soon as it was asked: because Crane had been carrying the pad around with him, scribbling secretly in public places, and didn’t want passersby to glimpse a word.
The simple answer is:
McBride paused again. “Gunnar—The simple answer is…” What’s the question? McBride wondered.
I’m aghast at what you propose. Jericho is beyond belief, and I cannot imagine what twisted rationalizations were employed to justify it. To this day, I find the memory of my earlier passivity impossible to bear. A single plane goes down in Africa, and a million people die?
Where was your research? What were you thinking? Did we even—ever—have a fellow in Rwanda?
Whatever you were thinking, I won’t be party to another such disaster—which, make no mistake, Jericho must certainly become. Indeed, it promises to make its predecessor seem like a practice run. So you will not have the signature you require. It will not be forthcoming. And if, somehow, you find a way to proceed, I promise you that I will do everything in my power to prevent Jericho from coming to pass.
Let me remind you, Gunnar, of some first principles—which it would seem that you’ve forgotten. Our enterprise was established amid the ruins of World War II. In the aftermath of that catastrophe, the West dithered its way into a Cold War that promised to add yet another Roman numeral to the serialized slaughter of the previous world wars. To prevent that, some of us came together to establish the utility over which you now preside.
Your father was one of us. Indeed, he was one of the best of us.
But all of us were of a part, eight men from half as many countries who’d labored long and hard in the cause of freedom—men from the OSS, the SOE and other services, who shared the same perception: that some power, some third class of individuals, aside from the leaders and the scholars, must exist—and that this third class must take upon itself the task of thwarting civilization’s mistakes…
No more Hitlers. No more Stalins. No more Maos.
Never again.
The risks that we’ve taken have been unimaginable, the more so for the fact that we have never enjoyed the sanctions and immunities that are the natural lot of those in government service.
If we go down, we go down for good—and hard—and it must all come out—not just Batista, but Papa as well, and all the rest. Are you prepared for that? I doubt it.
The truth is, the Institute has always been a parapolitical enterprise—a third force, not unlike the Triads and the Mafia. All such institutions begin life as secret combatants, embarked upon a political mission of noble dimensions. Often, perhaps inevitably, when they lose their raison d’être—which is to say, when their cause has been finally won or lost—they do not go away, but devolve into criminal organizations.
And that, I fear, is what has happened to the Institute under your direction: in the beginning we slew monsters—hard targets whose identities we all agreed upon. And now, with the Cold War a thing of the past, our targets have become softer and softer. The truth is, the Institute should have been shut down when Gorbachev asked for peace…
“Look at this,” McBride said, handing the letter to Adrienne. “It’s incredible.”
He watched Adrienne read for a while, thinking about the way the Institute had used its fellows to explore obscure technologies and practices that could be used in mind control operations (his own study, involving “animist therapeutics” and the Third World was a classic example).
“Jesus,” she whispered. Looked up, and asked, “What’s this about ‘Papa’? Is that his father or… Hemingway?”
“I don’t know,” McBride said. “Right now, I’m more worried about ‘Jericho.’“ His eye fell on the envelope that, earlier, had fallen from between the pages of the same legal pad. Addressed to Calvin Crane, Florida, it had no stamp or return address. Hand delivered, then, McBride thought.
Opening it, he found a single page of unsigned text:
My Dear Cal,
I confess I was shocked by the piety and recklessness of your recent letter, which arrived by mail only yesterday. What were you thinking, to put such things on paper?
Perhaps it is your age that’s made you careless—but is it possible that it has also made you pious? No one needs to remind me of “the first principles” on which this enterprise was founded. I live with them every day, as did my father—as, once, did you.
Neither is it necessary (or desirable) for us to discuss the operation that you have so carelessly mentioned in your letter. Your role in these affairs has long been at an end. I will not discuss events in Africa—or any other activity—with you. On the contrary, it’s apparent that my decision to keep you informed of operations, even after your retirement, was a mistake.