Finally he found the appropriate form, poised a pen, and looked up at me.
“I don’t suppose you remember the number?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“No, naturally you don’t. It never occurs to anyone to jot down their passport number. Not sufficiently important.” He sniffed. “Your name?”
I paused, perhaps for dramatic effect.
“Oh, come now,” he said. He was really incredibly snotty. “Now, don’t tell me you’ve forgotten your name as well?”
“My name is Evan Michael Tanner,” I said. “If you’ve forgotten it, I don’t think you have much of a future with the State Department. I suggest you get off your ass and tell your boss the name of the stupid tourist who’s been taking up your time. Evan Michael Tanner. You go tell him Evan Michael Tanner is here, and you see what he says.”
But he remembered the name. It was delicious to watch his face mold itself into one expression after another. He reached for a buzzer and rang for the guards. We waited for them to come for me.
It didn’t get at all rough until they got me back to Washington. The guards kept me under surveillance until the snotty kid could report to someone higher up, and eventually some men more important than he came to interrogate me. They assured themselves that I was really Evan Tanner, found out that I was, and conducted me to a windowless room on the second floor. A guard made sure that I was not carrying a weapon. I was not. Then two of them stood in front of me while I sat in a swivel chair.
“There’s a report that you had the British plans,” one said.
“I do.”
“You have them with you?”
“Yes.”
“At this moment?”
“Yes.”
“Care to turn them over?”
“If you’ll show me CIA identification.”
“I’m not CIA.”
“Then get someone who is.”
They got someone who was, and I solemnly took off my jacket, unbuttoned my shirt, loosened my undershirt, and came up with the packet of papers the tall man had passed on to me in Dublin. The CIA man checked them out.
One of the State Department men asked if everything was there.
“I don’t know,” the CIA man said. “I have to use a phone.”
He went away. I sat with the two men. They offered me cigarettes, and I said I didn’t smoke and finally I remembered to tuck in my shirt and button it up and put the jacket on again.
The CIA man came back and said that as far as he could tell everything was there.
“I don’t know how the guard missed it. He frisked him for a gun.”
“Well, it wasn’t a gun,” the CIA man said.
“Still, he should have found it.”
“Forget it.” The CIA man turned to me. “Of course, those could have been copied,” he said.
“True.”
“Were they?”
“No.”
“Why the hell did you come here, Tanner? I don’t get it. Who are you working for?”
I didn’t say anything.
“What do you expect, a pat on the head and a ticket home? Did you know that you started six international incidents all by yourself?”
“I know.”
“I was just on the phone to Washington. They want you sent there in a private plane under a quadruple guard. Today, they said. We can’t get hold of a private plane today.”
“When, then?”
“Christ, I don’t know. Maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow morning. Who knows? Tanner, you honest to God amaze me, you really do. How in hell did you wind up in Beirut? I wish I knew more about you. I know you’re hotter than a grenade with the pin out and I know part of where you’ve been, but I don’t know the rest of it. Why don’t you tell me about it?”
“No.”
“They’ll ask the same questions in Washington. Make it easy for me. Brighten my day.”
“I can’t.”
“Did you really start a revolution?”
I didn’t answer that or any of the other questions he asked me. The whole business was very frustrating for him. He knew that I would be sent to CIA headquarters in Washington and that he would never find out the answers to any of his questions. The agency might keep him busy, but evidently he didn’t often run into anything as exciting as me and he was all curiosity, and I wasn’t helping him a bit.
They eventually locked me into the room with a double guard. The guards were decent enough fellows. The three of us played hearts. I won about seventy cents, but I refused to take the money. It didn’t seem right, somehow. After a few hours the CIA man came back with a few other men, and they handcuffed me rather elaborately and drove me to the Beirut airport. There was a smallish jet waiting at the runway. They loaded me into it along with four guards and the CIA man, and we took off for Washington.
No one had brought anything to read. Anyway, with the handcuffs on I couldn’t have turned the pages. It was a very boring trip.
Chapter 18
The jail cell in the basement of CIA headquarters in Washington was far more comfortable than the dank dark room in Istanbul. It was well lighted and very clean. There was a bed, a small dresser, and a shelf of paperback books. The books were mostly spy novels, I discovered. This struck me as very funny at first, but after I’d read them one after the other as one day followed another I lost sight of the humor of it all. It began to get to me after a while. I read the same spy novel twice and didn’t realize it until I was within twenty pages of the end.
The meals were good. Actually, there was no single dish that was as good as the pilaff I had had in Istanbul, but there was a great deal of variety in the cooking, and I’m sure the diet was more nutritious than toast and pilaff and pilaff. The only aspect of the two weeks I spent there that became absolutely unbearable was the endless routine of questioning. It went on and on, and they seemed determined to keep it up forever. It was the complete reverse of Istanbul-there I had been ignored, left entirely alone for days on end, and here I was questioned morning and noon and night, questioned endlessly, and over and over, until I was certain that the next session would be the one to break me.
“Who are you working for, Tanner?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“Why?”
“Those are my instructions.”
“We’re more important than your instructions, Tanner.”
“No, you’re not.”
“We’re the U.S. Government.”
“I’m working for the Government.”
“Oh, you are? That’s very interesting, Tanner. You’re working for the CIA?”
“No.”
“For whom, then?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“The U.S. Government?”
“Yes.”
“I think you’re crazy, Tanner.”
“That’s your privilege.”
“I think you’re full of shit, Tanner.”
“That’s your privilege.”
“You say you’re working for the U.S. Government?”
“Yes.”
“What department?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“Why? Because you don’t know?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“Who’s your boss?”
“I can’t tell you that, either.”
“Tell me something about this agency, Tanner. Is it like CIA?”
“In a way.”
“You can’t tell us the name?”
“No.”
“Can you tell us somebody who works for it?”
“No.”
“Suppose we give you a phone. You call somebody and make contact, okay? And then they can come and spring you, and we’ll all be happy. How does that sound, Tanner?”
“No.”
“No? Why the hell not?”
“I was instructed not to make contact.”
“So what the hell are you going to do? Sit here forever?”
“Sooner or later I’ll be contacted.”
“How? By voices talking to you in the night?”
“No.”
“Then, how, Tanner? Nobody knows you’re here. Nobody’s going to know unless you tell them. There were no leaks in Beirut. You came here on a hushed-up flight, and the CIA alone knows you’re in Washington. Now, how in hell is anybody going to get in touch with you?”