The Once and Future Spy Read Free

government conspiracy to spend less money. Coffee? Tea? Something with a kick
     to it?”
    “Tea,” the Admiral said without enthusiasm. He eyed the surroundings with a distaste he usually reserved for chain hotels
     and tried to console himself with the silver lining—the $250 per diem, the nights that would presumably be free, the candles
     that he would gleefully burn at both ends.
    Wanamaker hovered over the armchair like a rain cloud. “With or without?”
    “Either or.”
    Wanamaker scurried across the room and crawled into a squeaking wooden swivel chair behind an embarrassingly small desk whoseglass top was nearly opaque with cottage cheese stains. He depressed a lever on the squawk box. “Two teas. Pronto.”
    A burst of static filtered back through the box. It seemed to say, “With or without?”
    “More static,” Wanamaker muttered. He punched a lever and yelled into the squawk box, “With. Without. Either or.”
    The Admiral, sniffing, caught a whiff of staleness, of mildew, of stubbed-out cigars, of synthetic carpet heavy with dust.
     He glanced at the windows, which were covered with grime. They probably hadn’t been opened, the room probably hadn’t been
     aired, in years. Decades even. What had he gotten himself into? He peered at Wanamaker squirming nervously in his squeaking
     chair. His shapeless clothes looked sweat-stained, his hair matted. When he moved his head suddenly, crystals of dandruff
     could be seen drifting down through the sunlight onto his shoulders, which bore the unmistakable traces of previous flurries.
     The Admiral understood what Huxstep had been getting at when he said Wanamaker bathed every day but never changed the water.
    Wanamaker twisted a paper clip, fingered a tin of Schimmelpennincks as he attempted to break the ice with his old boss, his
     icon, his mentor, his father figure. “You will have noticed that in deference to you I have not lighted a cigar,” he commented.
    “You might have emptied the ashtrays,” the Admiral said absently.
    Wanamaker’s pudgy lips hinted at a pudgy smile. “You will be wondering why I invited you.”
    The Admiral didn’t say anything. He was concentrating on trying not to breathe.
    Observing Toothacher, Wanamaker recalled with visceral pleasure his seven-year tour as the Admiral’s man Friday. There had
     been many in the intelligence community who had written Toothacher off as a professional devil’s advocate—someone who had
     no illusions about winning the cold war but simply relished fighting it. Only the chosen few, Wanamaker among them, suspected
     that the river ran deeper; that the Admiral was a true believer. He detested the Bolsheviks with a passion. And he would go
     to any lengths to irritate them. Back in his salad days, when everyone was wildly dropping agents behind the Iron Curtain,
     the Admiral had come up with the idea of dropping shortwave radios and parachutes and letting the Russians fall over one another
     looking for nonexistent agents. Later, when everyonein the West was desperately trying to penetrate the Soviet High Command, he had run Naval Intelligence as if it
had
penetrated the Soviet High Command. When the Russians picked up the clues that the Admiral had left scattered around, they
     launched a mole hunt that all but crippled the High Command for years. Pushing for bigger budgets, Toothacher had made enemies
     on the Senate Armed Services Committee and had been shunted over to the CIA, where he wound up working for James Jesus Angleton’s
     Praetorian Guard, the counterintelligence elite, the born-again pessimists to whom the worst case was always the most likely,
     the most interesting, the most stimulating; above all, the most congenial. Somewhere along the way there had been a whiff
     of scandal; as part of a surveillance training exercise, a young recruit at the CIA’s Farm had tailed the Admiral and filed
     a report on the company he kept. Toothacher had been hauled on the carpet and