The Second Saladin - Страница 10

“You’re not going to read us the whole thing?” somebody in the dark wanted to know. “I agree we’ve got a crisis, but nothing is worth that.”

Sam’s laughter was loudest.

“No,” said Yost. “But we thought you should have the context at least available.”

But Trewitt couldn’t let it pass from consciousness so easily. It haunted him, just as Chardy, the fallen hero, in his way haunted him. Chardy’s performance before Melman, for one thing, was so strange. Trewitt had read it over and over, trying to master its secrets, the secret weight of the messages between the words. But there were none. Poor Chardy: Melman just barbecued him. Chardy had so little to offer in his defense, and on the stand, under oath, was vague and apologetic, either deeply disturbed or quite stupid or … playing a deeper game than anybody could imagine.

He confessed so easily to all the operational sins, all the mistakes, the failures in judgment, the follies in action. Trewitt could almost remember verbatim:

M: And you actually crossed into Kurdistan and led combat operations? Against all orders, against all policies, against every written or unwritten rule of the Agency. You actually led combat operations, disguised as a Kurd?

C: Uh. Yeah. I guess I did.

M: Mr. Chardy, one source even places you at an ambush site deep in Iraq, near Rawāndūz.

C: Yeah. I got a tank that day. Really waxed that —

M: Mr. Chardy. Did it ever occur to you, while you were playing cowboy, how humiliating it would have been to this country, how embarrassing, how degrading, to have one of its intelligence operatives captured deep within a Soviet-sponsored state with armed insurgents?

C: Yeah. I just didn’t think they’d get me. (Laughs)

“Trewitt. Trewitt!”

“Ah. Yessir.” Caught dreaming again. “The next slide.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

He punched the button and the Kurd disappeared.

Somebody whistled.

“Yes, she’s a fine-looking woman, isn’t she?” Yost said.

“Chardy wouldn’t talk about her at the hearings,” Melman said. “He said it was private; it wasn’t our business.”

The picture of Johanna was recent. Her face was strong, fair, and somehow bold. The nose a trifle large, the chin a trifle strong, the mouth a trifle straight. Her blond hair was a mess, and it didn’t matter. She was all earnest angles. Her eyes were softened behind large circular hornrims and a tendril of hair had fallen across her face. She looked a bit irritated, or late or just grumpy. She’s also beautiful, Trewitt realized, in an odd, strong way, an unconventional collection of peculiarities that come together in an unusual and appealing way. Jesus, she’s good-looking.

“One of the Technical Services people got this just last week in Boston, where she teaches at Mr. Melman’s alma mater,” Yost said.

“The Harvard staff didn’t look like that when I was there.” Sam again.

“Somehow Miss Hull managed to get into Kurdistan,” Yost continued. “We don’t know how. She wouldn’t speak to State Department debriefers when she finally got back. But she’s the key to this whole thing. Chardy had a ‘relationship’ with her, in the mountains.”

The word “relationship,” coming at Trewitt through the vague dark in which Yost was just a shape up front, sounded odd in the man’s voice; Yost didn’t care, as a rule, to speculate on a certain range of human behavior involving sexual or emotional passion; he was a man of facts and numbers. Yet he said it anyway, seemed to force it out.

“Chardy will love her still,” Miles Lanahan said. The sharpness of his voice cut through the air. “He’s that kind of guy.”

The woman on the wall regarded them with icy superiority. She was wearing a turtleneck and a tweed sports coat. The shot must have been taken from half a mile away through some giant secret lens, for the distance was foreshortened dramatically and behind her some turreted old hulk of a house, with keeps and ramparts and dozens of gables, all woven with a century’s worth of vines, loomed dramatically. It’s so Boston, so Cambridge, thought Trewitt.

“Chardy had no brief to cross into Kurdistan. This woman had no right. But they both were there, in the absolute middle of it, with Ulu Beg. They were there for the end. In a sense they were the end.”

Yost is discreet in his summary, Trewitt thought. The prosaic truth is that sometime in March of 1975 the Shah of Iran, at Joseph Danzig’s urging and sponsorship, signed a secret treaty with Ahmed Hassam al-Bakr of Iraq. The Kurdish revolution, which was proceeding so splendidly, became expendable. Danzig gave the order; the CIA obeyed it.

The Kurds were cut off, their matériel impounded; they were exiled from Iran.

Chardy, Beg, the woman Hull: they were caught on the wrong side of the wire.

Chardy was captured by Iraqi security forces; Beg and Hull and Beg’s people fled extreme Iraqi military pressure. Fled to where? Fled to nowhere. Trewitt knew that Yost wouldn’t mention it, that even the great Sam Melman wouldn’t mention it. But one passage from Chardy’s testimony before Melman came back to haunt him, now in this dark room among Agency elect, his own career suddenly accelerating, his own membership on the staff of an important operation suddenly achieved.

C: But what about the Kurds?

M: I’m sorry. The scope of this inquiry doesn’t include the Kurds.

The last details are remote, Trewitt knew. Nobody has ever examined them, no books exist, no journalists have exhumed it. Only the Melman report exists, and its treatment is cursory. Joseph Danzig himself has not commented yet. In the first volume of his memoirs, Missions for the White House, he promised to deal with the Kurdish situation at some length; but he has not yet published his second volume and somebody has said he may never. He’s making too much money giving speeches these days.

The fates of the three principals were, however, known: Chardy, captured, was taken to Baghdad and interrogated by a Russian KGB officer named Speshnev. His performance under pressure, Trewitt knew, was a matter of some debate. Some said he was a hero; some said he cracked wide open. He would not discuss it with Melman.

He was returned to the United States after six months in a Moscow prison.

Johanna Hull showed up in Rezā’iyeh by methods unknown in April of 1975 and returned to the United States, and her life at Harvard. She had lived quietly ever since. Except that three times she had tried to commit suicide.

Ulu Beg, one source reported, was finally captured by Iraqi security forces in May of 1975 and was last seen in a Baghdad prison.

The fate of his people — his tribe, his family, his sons — was unknown.

“Lights,” Yost said.

Trewitt fumbled a second too long for the switch but finally clicked it on.

The brightness flooded the room and men blinked and stretched after so long in the dark.

Yost stood at the front of the room.

“Briefly, that’s it,” he said. “I wanted to keep you informed. Chardy arrives tomorrow.”

“Lord, you’re bringing him here?”

“No, not to the Agency. We’re running this operation out of a sterile office in Rosslyn, just across the river from Georgetown.”

“Yost, I hope you can control this Chardy. He can be a real wild man.”

“I don’t think you understand,” Miles Lanahan said.

He smiled, showing dirty teeth. He was a small young man with a reputation for ruthless intelligence. He was no sentimentalist; the “old cowboy” stuff wouldn’t cut anything for him. He’d started out as a computer analyst working in “the pit,” Agency jargon for the video display terminal installation in the basement of Langley’s main building, and worked his way out in a record two years. Everybody was a little afraid of him, especially Trewitt.

“All right, Miles,” said Yost, “that’s enough.”

Down, boy, thought Trewitt.

But Miles had one more comment.

“The plan,” he said, “is not to control him.”

5

Chardy sometimes thought only the game had kept him sane. At the end of Saladin II, the worst time in the cellar, he thought not of Johanna or the Kurds or his country or his mission; they’d all ceased to sustain him. He thought of the game. He shot imaginary jumpers from all over a huge floor and willed them through the hoop. Magic, they floated and fell and never touched metal. The game expanded to fill his imagination, to push out all the dark corners, the cobwebs, the spooky little doubts. Later the game had become, if anything, bigger. Into it he poured all his energy, his natural fierceness, his frustrations and dissatisfactions, his resentment: his hate. The game, more loyal than any human or institution on this earth, absorbed them — and him.

And now, on the night before what he knew was the most important day of his life, the game was especially kind to him. For of late his shots would not fall, his legs had been thick and numb, his fingers clumsy. But all that was a memory: tonight he could not miss. From outside, inside, but usually from the baseline with no backboard for margin of error, he shot, the ball spinning to the rafters and dropping cleanly through. It was only a Y-league game, mostly ex-college jocks like himself, or black kids with no college to go to; and it took place in a dim old gym that smelled of sweat and varnish and sported a shadowy network of old iron girders across the ceiling.

But for Chardy there was nothing but basketball court, no outside world, no Speights or Melmans or Ulu Begs. It was an absolute place: you shot; it went in or it didn’t. There was no appeal, no politics, no subtle shading of results. It was a bucket or it wasn’t.