Siro by David Ignatius (short books to read txt) 📕

boy, I want you to go back to your hotel and get a few hours’ rest. Because tonight I am going to take you on a tour of Istanbul nightlife.”

“Nightlife? What do you mean?”

“I mean Grade A, hundred-proof sleaze. Tonight, my friend, you are going to see varieties of the human experience that you have never imagined.”

“I dunno. I’ve been to Bangkok.”

“Trust me,” said Taylor. “Bangkok is tasteful compared to Istanbul.”

7

A copy of Taylor’s cable describing the operation on Horhor Street reached Edward Stone in Washington late in the afternoon. Technically, Stone wasn’t supposed to have a copy. He was not on the routing list of division chiefs and staff chiefs and desk officers who normally would see such a communication. But he had friends. And one of them, a little spark plug of a man named Harry Peltz, stopped by just as Stone was about to head off to one of that season’s endless round of retirement parties. Peltz had worked with Stone thirty years earlier in Berlin and now held down a sinecure in the European Division.

Stone was always surprised when people came to see him, even the regulars like Peltz. For he was trying, in his way, to be invisible. His office was small and austere, far from the busy corridors on the seventh floor inhabited by Hinkle and his coterie of special assistants. Stone’s office was like one of those London clubs that have no name on the door, so that you can’t find them unless you already know where they are. When he moved into this hideaway from the grand office he had occupied as chief of the Near East Division, Stone had brought just one thing with him. It was his framed epigram from Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, which read: “Gaze not too long into the abyss, lest the abyss gaze back at you.”

“You busy?” asked Peltz.

“Not at all,” said Stone. “I was just heading to Crane’s party.”

“You’ll like this one,” said Peltz with a wink. He entered the office, closed the door behind him, and handed Stone the cable from Istanbul.

Stone read the message and smiled. “This is a silly operation,” he said. “Why should I like it?”

“Because it’s enterprising.”

“I suppose so. At least someone is having some fun. Who is Mr. Amos B. Garrett, by the way?”

“Alan Taylor. Nice kid. Actually, he’s not a kid. He’s almost forty.”

“Still a kid in my book,” said Stone. He handed the cable back to Peltz. “I’ll wager you dollars to doughnuts his little foray won’t produce anything. Is that still a good bet, dollars to doughnuts?”

“Yeah. If they’re cheap doughnuts.”

“Keep me posted, would you?”

“Absolutely. As long as I’m around.”

Stone shook his head. “Don’t tell me you’re on the purge list.”

“So I hear.”

“I’m sorry. Maybe I can say something to someone. Although the front office doesn’t seem to take my suggestions too seriously these days.”

“Forget it,” said Peltz. “Who wants to work for these assholes anyway, right?”

Stone shook his head again and looked at his watch. “Forgive me,” he said. “I’m late for Crane’s party. Are you coming? We’ll have a drink on Hinkle.”

“No way,” said Peltz. “I’ve been to enough retirement parties the last few months to last a lifetime. Anyway, if I saw Hinkle I’d probably slug him. Where’s everybody going later?”

“I don’t know,” said Stone. “Probably to Oak Hill Inn. That’s where these affairs always seem to end up.”

“Maybe I’ll see you there,” said Peltz. He opened the door and ambled back down the hall toward the operations center, cable in hand.

The party was for Alton Crane, who was leaving the clandestine service after twenty-five years. It was held in the executive dining room on the seventh floor, just down the hall from the director’s office. In attendance were Crane’s semi-alcoholic wife, Betty, and his two sons—one with long hair and a beard who was “into carpentry,” the other with short, blow-dried hair who was selling stocks and bonds for the family firm. They were, in their genteel disarray, the standard Washington Wasp family of the late 1970s. The guests were all trying hard to be cheery, talking about what a great run Alton had had, and how much he must be looking forward to getting out of the business and doing a little sailing, or fishing, or whatever it was that he had been longing to do all these years. But everyone knew that Crane was being pushed out the door.

Hinkle made a brief appearance, thanked Crane for his many years of meritorious service, and presented him with an intelligence medal of the sort they give newly arrived KGB defectors to make them feel important. Then Hinkle left and went back to his office a few doors down the hall. He didn’t even stop to shake hands. The new director seemed to understand that he was intensely disliked by virtually everyone in the room. He had that much sense, at least.

Stone scanned the room. It was a picture of a generation in retreat. In one corner stood a cluster of old China hands, who had broken their picks against the impenetrable wall of Mao’s China only to see it suddenly open to America in the early 1970s; it was still impossible for most of them to imagine that the United States now conducted joint intelligence operations with Beijing. Nearby was the small remnant still fighting the war in Southeast Asia, still haunted by memories of agents left on hilltops in Laos and street corners in Saigon during the last desperate days. In another corner were the Arabists, who had spent their careers trying unsuccessfully to contain the world’s most intractable conflict and who had, in the process, taken on the elaborate politeness and deviousness of their agents in Beirut and Cairo. And in the middle of the room, embracing all the disparate factions, were the Russia hands; they counted it a blessing if they made it to retirement without being falsely accused