Marco Polo, If You Can by William F. Buckley

Author:William F. Buckley
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504018524
Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road

CHAPTER 13

Already, Rufus had given instructions to the FBI. He was to be called the next time any post office handled a letter addressed to Frau Ilse Müller, No. 48 Mittelstrasse, East Berlin. In two hours he had a call from New York. He gave instructions, and then called J. Edgar Hoover.

At 6 P.M. Hoover, Rufus, and three technicians were at the principal laboratory of the FBI, in the cellar of the vast building on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington.

They stood, staring down at an envelope, steamed open, and its one-page enclosure—a newspaper clipping, at the top of which had been typed in German, “Use. Thought this would interest you.” It was a report from the Herald Tribune by Red Smith on the Czech—U.S. hockey game.

Rufus said, “My guess is, with what we’ve been giving them, you’re not going to find any cryptographic paraphrases. The KGB will want the whole thing. It’s got to be there. Microphotography. Can’t be anything else.”

“Unless we’re on the wrong trail,” suggested the Director of the FBI, never entirely reconciled to his subordinate position in Operation Tango.

“That’s correct. We could be wrong. But we have gone to a great deal of trouble, and we have lost an agent, to identify this woman. The photographs”—he pointed to the dossier that included copies of past correspondence, almost always clippings, directed to Ilse Müller—“wouldn’t show up microphotography. But now we have the envelope and the original enclosure. We must proceed with total caution.” He looked at the principal laboratory specialist. “Everything we have planned depends on this letter’s being delivered to the address with minimum delay. But we must know”—he pointed to the letter—“if that little piece of airmail has in it five pages of minutes of the National Security Council.”

The technicians went to work. Hoover invited Rufus to his august office. In order to reach the Director’s desk it was necessary to walk through the huge room, its walls sagging with pictures, testimonials, newspaper headlines, plaques acquired by the Director during the preceding thirty-five years. He walked slowly, in the event Rufus wished to linger over the collection. Rufus, entirely without mannerism save for the distressing habit of relapsing occasionally into a totally impenetrable silence, knew less by intuition than by craft the endocrinological requirements of certain types of human nature; so that he said, his eyes skimming the walls, “What a very impressive office, Mr. Hoover. Abundant evidence of how greatly you have contributed to the national security.”

“Well,” said Hoover, his facial muscles now relaxed, “we all have a job to do.”

He sat at his desk, pushed a button, and a secretary materialized as quickly as if she had been hiding behind the curtain. “I’ll take coffee. You, Rufus?… One coffee, one tea, and I don’t need to tell you to be quick about it.”

They talked, but with increasing tension. Rufus had learned early to steel himself against disappointment, and on one occasion several years back had made a fairly respectable calculation that in his own experience he had been disappointed about ninety percent of the time.

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