Checkpoint Charlie

“Nothing. Go back to Tahiti and lie on the beach. You’re too old.”

“You’re unkind but truthful.”

“How much were you paid?”

“One hundred thousand marks. About forty thousand dollars. Plus expenses — I spent those. Air fares, so forth.”

“Send an international money order for forty thousand dollars to the UNESCO children’s fund. When you get the receipt send it to me in Langley. If I don’t get it I’ll come to Tahiti after you.”

“What am I to live on?”

“Sorrow,” I told him. “We’ll send you a Care package now and then.”

“You probably ought to kill me.”

“I know,” I said, “but I don’t kill people. I never have and never will. It’s one of the silly crosses I bear. Auf wiedersehn, Karl.”

*   *   *

I MET Myerson in Pete Morgan’s office in Hong Kong. The rains were intense. The narrow passages of Kowloon ran with rancid floods. I scraped my wet shoes on Pete’s carpet and tossed my voluminous dripping raincoat on a chair and sank into the couch. “Have them send me up three or four roast beef sandwiches.”

Myerson had commandeered the desk. He lit a Havana. “Do you ever stop eating?”

“It takes a lot of food to sustain all this. You wouldn’t want me to faint from hunger.”

“It might be good for a laugh.” He squinted at Pete. “Any more defections since last week?”

“No, thank God. Things are easing back to normal. We’ve done some recruiting. It looks as if they — whoever they are — decided to abandon the attack rather than find a replacement for Jurgens.”

Myerson growled, “I don’t like leaving a file wide open. I want this one closed.” He glared at me.

Pete said, “How can we close it? We haven’t got any leads.”

I said, “That’s a matter of knowing where to look.”

Myerson blew smoke at me and waited.

Pete flushed. “Look, this whole mess was my responsibility. I can’t solve it but at least I can tender my resignation. It’s the only thing I can do in good conscience.” He dipped an envelope from his inside pocket and tossed it on the desk. “There’s the resignation. Maybe I’ll join old Jurgens in retirement on Tahiti.”

His voice sounded bitter. He got up and went slowly toward the door — too slowly: he was waiting for Myerson to tear up the letter of resignation. It was a bluff, meant to appear as a conscience-salve.

Myerson opened his mouth to stop him but I got in first. “If we refuse to accept that resignation, Pete, what will you do?”

He stopped and favored me with a sour smile. Then he shook his head. “Keep on going out the door, I guess. You’ve got to accept it. I blew this job. Everybody on the station knows it. Everybody in Langley will know it soon enough. How can I go on working in the Agency when everybody has good reason to ridicule me?”

“Would you accept a transfer?”

“I guess not. To tell you the truth I’m sick of the whole back-alley trade. I imagine I’ve been looking for an excuse to quit for a long time.”

“Not to mention the wherewithal,” I remarked.

“What?”

I said, “I’ll accept the idea that you’re sick and tired of the job. I’ll accept the idea that you’ve wanted to get out for quite a while. But you haven’t got enough time in, Pete. You’re ten years too young for a retirement pension. What do you intend to use for money?”

“I’ll get a job.” He mustered a smile. “You can live cheap in Papeete, I hear. Maybe I’ll become a beachcomber.”

Myerson stubbed his cigar out. The room reeked of its noxious fumes.

I said, “Pete, sit down.”

He didn’t move; he only shifted his feet and his bewildered gaze — it fled toward Myerson, who said to me, “What’s on your mind, Charlie?”

I said, “Not long ago we lost our station chief in Moscow, remember? We caught him selling secrets to the Comrades. The turnover in section chiefs is always pretty high, especially in the thankless unglamorous stations like this one. Gruelling work load, indifferent pay, not much patriotism left to bolster a man after the Bay of Pigs and all the assassination attempts and Vietnam and Watergate. It’s turned into a me-first world, hasn’t it. People see cynicism and corruption and greed all around them — they decide it just doesn’t matter any more, there aren’t any good sides or bad sides, the only thing to do is make sure you get your own piece of the action. We’ve seen it right here on this case with poor old Karl Jurgens. Twenty years ago it never would have entered his mind to betray his friends. But times have changed. Nothing’s sacred any more. You agree, Pete?”

Pete exhaled a gust of air. “Yeah, Charlie, I guess I do.”

I said to Myerson, “One of the chief functions of this station is to keep tabs on shipments of opium coming out of China and the Indochinese Montagnard country. Since we shut down the Saigon station that’s been one of the main preoccupations of Pete’s section.”

Myerson said drily, “Is this supposed to come as news to me?”

“It might have rung a bell with you — it did with me — when you mentioned you’d been getting complaints about the lack of East Asian forewarnings in Beirut and Marseilles and Mexico City. That’s one of the principal routes for the heroin traffic into the States.”

Myerson sat up.

I said, “Suddenly a senseless caper knocks off agents on this station — which just happens to have the effect of drying up drug-shipment information all along the route to America, thereby opening up that route to God knows how much heroin traffic — maybe enough to stockpile the dealer honchos with enough drugs to last a year on the street. Is that a coincidence, Pete?”

Pete had nothing to say.

I went back to Myerson. “I don’t know how much the opium people paid him to sabotage his own station. It must have been a hell of a lot of money — enough to finance his early retirement in style. In any case he was able to pay Jurgens out of it, forty thousand dollars, and set up several Swiss accounts, one of which probably is his own and contains the bulk of the money. Maybe he got half a million, maybe as much as a million. They can afford it. The heroin people deal in eight-figure sums.”

Myerson said, “Let me get this straight, Charlie. Are you accusing Pete of blowing his own network?”

“With regret, yes.”

Pete said, “I deny that.”

“Naturally,” I said. “The voice that hired Jurgens over the phone spoke German with an English-speaker’s accent. Jurgens said it could have been an American.”

“Proving nothing,” Pete said.

“I agree. But neither does it rule you out.”

“So?”

I said, “Jurgens was given a list of names of agents to be taken out. Those were the agents whose areas included the routes of the major drug shipments — Hong Kong, Taipei, Djakarta, Singapore and on toward the Middle East and France and Mexico. As chief of station you were the only executive with that information at your fingertips — the names and covers of all those agents. It couldn’t have been anybody else, Pete. You doubled your own agents.”

I turned to Myerson. “He wanted out. Maybe he can’t be blamed for that. But he had to get rich first.”

Pete said, “I deny it. It’s ridiculous.”

Myerson lit another Havana. “In that case you may as well go, Pete. I expect we’re finished with you for the moment.” He picked up Pete’s letter of resignation and put it into his pocket. “Now that we know what to look for we’ll be able to put men on it. I wouldn’t try to withdraw any money from Switzerland if I were you. Sooner or later we’ll find evidence against you and then we’ll come after you.”

“Even if you have to manufacture fake evidence.”

Myerson snarled. “What do you think this is? A game of croquet? You’re all finished, Pete — accept it.”

After Pete left the office I ate my sandwiches. Myerson glowered through his cigar smoke at the dreary rain outside the windows. “He won’t do anything dramatic, will he?”