I take it from your silence, Forrest said, that you’re concerned about my clearance. You’re wondering if I might be on their side, or possibly an unwitting pawn. That’s fair. Let us operate on the premise that you will do nothing when things I say are true, and you will drink from your water glass when things are false.
It would obviously be a very serious thing, Hillsinger said, to divulge classified or operational information to any individual not holding official clearance.
I appreciate your candor, Forrest said, so I will match it. If you take that approach, you’ll end up in jail.
Yes, Hillsinger said. I was recruited for the Subotin Wise Men panel.
By the Director? Forrest said.
Yes.
Himself?
Yes.
What did he say, exactly? Forrest said.
He said he wanted me to go to the Farm to look at a defector. He said to block out the weekend.
What did you find when you got there? Forrest said.
First, a pile of memos summarizing the views of the first defector, Astrakhov.
Was there anything odd about them?
It seemed like Angleton was giving a lot away.
Did that concern you?
Personally? No.
Why not? Forrest said.
I assumed the Director had ordered it.
Have you ever heard of anyone in Counterintelligence, let alone Angleton himself, asking for a Wise Men panel?
Hillsinger did not answer the question.
The memos you read were fakes, Forrest said. The details, the troop counts, the contingency plans. All fabrications. Did that possibility occur to you?
No.
Did you really have no sense of danger?
Hillsinger drank from his water glass.
There is a memo, Forrest continued, in restricted circulation. Only the Director and three or four others have seen it. This memo is from Angleton’s shop. It contains the names of five senior CIA staff who are, in the view of Counterintelligence, prime candidates for what they believe to be one or more high-level KGB penetrations of the CIA.
And? Hillsinger said.
Your name is on top of the list.
66
Penny opened her eyes. There were low voices in the barn. George was awake, looking out through a gap in the hay bales.
Penny sat up and climbed out, waving for George to stay. She crept along the one firm, uncreaking plank to the end of the loft, where she could see down into the stalls. She was surprised to see Cyrus’s son Matthew. Then she heard Sheila, who was the opposite of calm.
“He can come back here—Edward Peck can bring him back,” Matthew said, “but the tattooing is only on North.”
“He ain’t going.”
“His momma’s on the barge. Betsy works today.”
“He’s been sleeping with the puppies—he smells like dog. The other sheep’ll push him off.”
“Cyrus says you got to come to North, too.”
“I can’t.”
There was a pause.
Then Sheila was shrieking no no no. Matthew must have approached the little dog bed where Colt was, maybe tried to take the newborn with him by force. Then the barn door opened and closed and Penny could hear Sheila breathing hard. Everything else was quiet.
67
“You must have been cold,” Jim said when Lila came in shortly after dawn.
She took off her dress and lay down next to him.
“Yes,” she said. “I was cold.”
Lila could not, in fact, remember if she had been cold or not. It would have been better to be cold. As it was, she was merely clear: she was in love with Billy Quick. She had fought all night against it—against the feeling that had driven her out of the living room, out of her bed, even out of the Seven Chapel. She’d prayed as a last resort, but even her prayers were lies. She was in love with Billy Quick.
Lila had felt, there in front of the fire, when she had said I loved it, something like an intuition of survival—this preposterous joy. She could feel its velocity even now. It was no longer possible for her to say that Billy Quick was not involved, for example that he was an effect rather than the cause.
What followed this velocity, though, what it inevitably produced, was paralysis. Her guilt absorbed everything—all bravery, all thirst for action. Her husband stood accused of treason. The name Lila Hillsinger was on secret lists in secret offices in at least two countries, and as far away as Moscow. Organizations with vast resources had acted against her. Her son was shivering on an island that other children thought as terrifying as a graveyard. Her sister was dead. Lila had left a trail of, if not destruction, certainly of agony.
And yet, to her eternal shame what most troubled her now was that she did not know exactly what Billy Quick had thought, during her moment of weakness there in front of the fire. He was an observant man, fully capable of parsing shadows. He would have noticed.
68
Catta stood at the water’s edge for a long time. The sky was pink and the moving water was cold. He took off his heavy shoes and what remained of his shirt and waded out twenty feet. Then he dove.
The current caught him when he was still underwater, and when Catta came up, his breathing was out of control. He was instantly both tired and afraid. Penny’s headland went by too quickly, and then he passed the long, sharp edge of Sisters, going too fast, still swimming but being carried sideways into the bay at high speed. His fingers and toes were numb now, and there was a distance in his limbs, as if they belonged to someone else. This kind—this depth of cold was new. How long could he last? Ahead of him was the bay, wide and crescent-shaped, with the Long Beach on one side and the Atlantic on the other. As it was now, there was nothing to stop the current from taking him straight past the beach and out of the bay into the open sea. There was no land to speak of between Seven Island and Spain, and if he were to let go for just a moment, if he would simply drift, then the tide would carry him across the ocean. The Spaniards would find his broken corpse. They would see the number seven on his arm. They would be amazed.
And then his luck changed. Catta fought the current into the mouth of the bay, the wide water enclosing the Long Beach, and at the mouth it broadened out somewhat, its force diffused, the concentration less. He made some progress toward the beach. That was better, but he could not relax—this change might not be real, his reprieve could be just an eddy. The tide could easily be waiting for him closer to the shore. He pulled harder, to build momentum. He was closer to the beach now than he had been sixty seconds ago, which was good, but Catta still had a clear sense of the water all around him moving backward, of the tide’s enormous wishes guiding him out to sea. Then all around him, everything went slack. He pulled deeper, kicked harder, put all reserves into a last push toward the beach. When his feet finally touched bottom, Catta paused for a few seconds there in the freezing surf, trying to breathe, and then, once it was clear that he would live, trying to fix in his mind that absolute peril, that blankness out beyond the bay. That, he thought, was something he should remember.
69