"Say there's a very hot authorization on its way by special courier. She's to handle it herself. Or Gates is. No secretaries, no lower decks, no answering back, no raised eyebrows. You want slavish, mute obedience. Say it's signed by you, and the highest ministerial confirmation in the land will follow soonest. Why are you shaking your head at me?" He slapped him. "I don't like you shaking your head at me. Don't do it."
Palfrey managed a tearful smile while he held a hand to his lip. "I'd be jokier, Leonard, that's all. Specially if it's as big as this. Maisie likes a laugh. So does Pearly. 'Hey Maisie! Wait till you get a load of this one! It'll blow your socks off!' Clever gal, you see. Gets bored. Hates us all. Only interested in who's next up the guillotine steps."
"Then that's how you play it, isn't it?" said Burr, putting a friendly hand on Palfrey's shoulder. "Just don't fox with me, Harry, or the next one up the steps is you."
All eagerness to oblige, Palfrey lifted the receiver of the green Whitehall internal telephone and, under Burr's gaze, dialled the five digits that every River rat learns at his mother's knee.
Deputy Assistant Attorney General Ed Prescott was a man's man, as Yale men of his generation tend to be, and when Joe Strelski entered his big white office in downtown Miami after being kept waiting half an hour in the anteroom, Ed gave him the news as one man should to another, cutting out the bullshit, straight from the shoulder the way a man likes it, whether he's old New England stock like Ed, or plain Kentucky hillbilly like Strelski. Because frankly, Joe, those boys have fucked me over too: dragged me here from Washington to do this thing, had me turn down some very attractive work at a time when everyone, and I mean everyone, even the guys right up there, needs the work. Joe, I have to say it to you ― these people have not been square with us. So I want you to appreciate we're together in this. It's been a year of your life, but by the time I've put my house back in order it will have been a year of my life too. And at my age, Joe ― well, hell, how many years do I have?
"I'm sorry for you, Ed," said Strelski.
And if Ed Prescott caught the undertone, he preferred to let it pass him by, in the interest of being two men together, solving a shared dilemma.
"Joe, just exactly how much did the Brits tell you about this undercover man they had, this Pine, this fellow with the names?"
Strelski did not fail to notice the past tense.
"Not too much," said Strelski.
"So how much?" said Prescott, man-to-man.
"He wasn't a professional. He was some kind of volunteer."
"A walk-in? I never trusted walk-ins, Joe. In the days when the Agency paid me the compliment of consulting me from time to time, back in the Cold War, which seems like a century ago, I always counselled caution toward these would-be Soviet defectors clamouring to make us a present of their wares. What, else did they tell you about him, Joe, or did they keep him wrapped in a flattering shroud of mystery?"
Strelski's manner was deliberately deadpan. With men like Prescott that was all you could do: parry until you had worked out what he wanted you to say, then either say it, or plead the Fifth, or tell him to shove it up his ass.
"They told me they had structured him in some way," he replied. "They'd given him extra background to make him more attractive to the target."
"
"Burr."
"Did Burr tell you the nature of this background at all, Joe?"
"No."
"Did Burr indicate to you how much background was there already, and how much came out of the makeup box?"
"No."
"Memory is a whore, Joe. Think back. Did he tell you that this man was alleged to have committed a homicide? Maybe more than one?"
"No."
"Smuggled drugs? In Cairo as well as Britain? Maybe in Switzerland also? We're checking."
"He was not specific. He said they had fitted the guy out with this background, and that now that he had this back-pound we could have Apostoll badmouth one of Roper's lieutenants and figure Roper would take to the new guy as a signer. Roper uses signers. So they gave him a signer. He likes his people flaky. So they gave him flaky."
"So the Brits were witting to Apostoll. I don't think I knew ."
"Sure they were. We made a meeting with him. Burr, Agent Flynn and myself."
"Was that wise, Joe?"
"It was collaboration," said Strelski with a tightening of his tie. "We were into collaboration, remember? It's come apart, the seams a little. But in those days we had joint planning."
