The Thin Line
Griswold had been absent from the Union Club for several of our postprandial sessions, but now he sat there, to all appearances sound asleep. His shaggy white mustache puffed outward regularly under the force of his exhalations.
I said, "He can't have been away on business. He must be retired."
"Retired from what?" said Baranov skeptically. "You don't believe all those fairy tales he tells us, do you?"
"I don't know," said Jennings. "Most of them seem quite plausible."
"That's a matter of opinion," said Baranov. "For one thing, all those tales of spy and counterspy—I'll bet he gets them out of his imagination. Look here, I'm sure he's never left the country. What kind of a spy would never leave the country? What's there to do in the United States?"
Griswold's glass of scotch and soda, quite full, suspended midway even as he slept and (as ever) in no danger of spilling, moved slightly, as though operated by remote control, in the direction of his lips. It moved further and finally reached those lips. Griswold, with no sign of having awakened, sipped delicately, removed the glass and said, "I don't admit I have never left the country."
His eyes opened and he said, "And if I had never done so, there would still be plenty to occupy an agent right here at home. There is an honorable list of those who died right here under the Stars and Stripes—like Archie Davidson, to name just one."
Archie Davidson [said Griswold] never left the United States, something which you uninformeds seem to think is true of me. Throughout his dozen years of service for the Department, however, Archie was never without something to do.
Does it occur to you gentlemen that there are well over a hundred foreign embassies and an even larger number of consulates in the United States?
Every single one of them must gather information that is of service to their nation, as our embassies and consulates do abroad in the service of our nation. Information gathering must be carried out more or less clandestinely and, in the case of a number of embassies, illegally, and for purposes that menace the security of our country.
Furthermore, the internal political battles of various nations are fought out on the territory of the United States. Various terrorist groups, or dissidents, or freedom fighters (they're called different things, according to viewpoint) operate here.
All these things must engage our attention and Archie was an excellent worker: unobtrusive, skilled and persuasive.
That he be persuasive was important, for one of the tasks of any skilled agent is that he manage to gain the confidence of someone on the other side. Someone working for the enemy is clearly a particularly reliable source of information, whether he is a defector on principle, a greedy fellow in search of money or other rewards, or simply an overconfident blabbermouth. Naturally, a defector on principle is the most reliable source and the one most likely to take large risks.
There was no one like Archie for finding the enemy who would work with us out of conviction and, at the time under discussion, he had one. We knew none of the details, of course, but the Department was pretty sure he had one. It was the easiest way of accounting for the nature and reliability of the information he fed us. ' Nor did we try to find out what his source was. It makes sense not to do so.
When one has a spy in the enemy camp, the fewer who know his identity, the safer the spy and the connection. Even if the agent were to communicate the identity to a thoroughly reliable co-worker, the communication itself would be a point of weakness. Messages can be intercepted and interpreted, words overheard, gestures understood. The behavior of two people can serve as a more reliable lead for enemy eyes, than the behavior of one, the behavior of three still more so, and so on.
It is best, then, if there is a thin line between agent and enemy informer, a very thin line. If only the agent knows the informer, that is best. The informer himself feels more secure if he is confident that only one person knows what he is doing. He will then speak more freely. Archie had the ability to inspire that kind of confidence and he could do so because he had the conscious knowledge that he never double-crossed.
It was a very special loss to us when Archie was killed.
There was no way of telling that he had been killed in the line of duty. No one left a calling card. He was merely found dead in a doorway in a dubious street of one of our large eastern cities.
He had been knifed, and the knife had been withdrawn and was gone. His wallet was also gone, and it might be taken for granted that it was an ordinary mugging.
That is what the local police took it for, at any rate. Archie was not a well-known person; he had a professional unobtrusiveness and his cover was that of a clerk in a liquor store, so there was no reason for the police to give it special attention or for the press to stir much.
Nor could the Department take a very active interest. In the first place, we didn't find out about it till well after the fact. In the second, it would have been counterproductive to adopt too high a profile in the matter.
The killing might conceivably have been an ordinary mugging with no connection whatever to Archie's work. In that case, it would certainly be a bad move to allow anyone watching the Department (and of course we are under surveillance by dozens of groups of undesirables) to learn, definitely, that Archie was an agent. That could lead them to other agents and could endanger much of our work. In particular, it might endanger the enemy informer that Archie was using and that we might perhaps salvage.
Then, too, we didn't really care whether Archie was killed by an ordinary mugger or by the enemy. We don't deal in revenge at the Department. We're not going to waste our time finding out who killed one of our men so that we can kill in return. Our work is more important than melodrama of that sort. Besides, even if Archie were killed, let us say, at the orders of an important foreign embassy, the actual murderer might well be a hired hophead, who wouldn't even remember the details of the hiring.
No, what was important to us was Archie's work, not Archie. And the most important part of his work at the time he was killed was his link to the enemy informer— that thin line that was so thin it stretched between two people only, and that was snapped when one of those two people was killed.
Unless, of course, Archie had somehow managed to give information that could allow us to reconstruct the thin line. It didn't seem likely that he could have done so, but it would have been his duty to do so if he could and this therefore had to be followed up.
Naturally, I was the one sent to deal with the police. My air of calm authority always worked well with them and smoothed the troubled waters that inevitably arose when the local law-enforcement people thought they were going to be overwhelmed by the Feds.
I spent considerable time in indirection that served to obscure the exact reason why Washington might be interested, but I won't bother you with that. I will tell it far more directly than it actually was.
I said, "Was he still alive when he was found?"
"Hell no. He'd been dead at least three hours." "Too bad. It's always nice when there's still life in them and they can say something."
"You mean like 'The man who killed me was—' and then they croak before they can get the word out?"
"We like them to get the word out. He didn't leave any messages, I suppose?"
"You mean, written in his own blood on the sidewalk?" The homicide man seemed to be trying to get a rise out of me, but I didn't oblige. He said, "There was some blood soaked into the jacket he was wearing, but none near or on his hands. What's more, there was nothing scrabbled in the dust; no words formed out of banana peels and other garbage. Listen, his wallet was gone and it was all we could do to work out his identity."
"His pockets were searched?"
"Of course."
"Anything interesting? Do you have a list?"
"I have better than that," said the detective. "Here's the stuff itself." He upended a plastic bag and let it all spill out on his desk.
I went over the material. Keys, change, a small pocket comb, a memo book, an eyeglass case, a ball-point pen. I looked through the memo book. There was nothing in it, though several of the leaves were torn out. A good agent puts as little on paper as possible. If for some reason he must record something, he gets rid of it as soon as possible.
"Anything else?" I asked.
The detective shook the plastic bag wordlessly. A little wad of paper fell out to his apparent surprise. I picked it up and spread it out. It said in straggly capital letters: CALL TAXICAB.
The paper was from the memo book. I used the ballpoint to make marks on a piece of scrap paper on the desk. It was the right color and thickness.
I said, "Was this written after he was stabbed?"
The detective shrugged. "Could be."
"Which pocket was this found in? Was it found wadded? Where was the pen?"
We had to locate the officer who had first found Archie and the detective who had then arrived on the scene. The results seemed conclusive. The paper, wadded, was in the left jacket pocket; the fountain-pen with Archie's right hand holding it in the right jacket pocket. If no one had considered all this, it was because no importance was attached to the murder.
It was clear, however, that Archie's last effort, like the good agent he was, gave us important information. It had to be some reference to his contact, some way of reconstituting the thin line.
I considered. Archie didn't say which taxicab to call. Was it a particular company? Did he use a particular company and could we find out which it was? Was there some message we could gather if we used the Yellow Pages and turned to the "taxicab" entry? Or was it something else?
I thought very intensively for a minute or so and then took a course of action that located the enemy informer and reconstituted the link. Before the other side located the informer and dealt with him, we had had time to gather some important items of information that helped in the satisfactory resolution of the Cuban missile crisis. So it was a happy ending—
"No you don't," I said, tramping hard on his shoe to keep him awake. "You haven't told us the important thing."
Griswold frowned. "Certainly, I did. I took a course of action that located the enemy informer and—''
"Yes, but how? What taxicab company did you call?"
"I didn't call any. Good God, man, don't tell me you don't understand. When you make a local phone call, you dial seven numbers. Each number, from 2 to 9, has three letters associated with it, dating back to the days when exchanges had names. We have ABC in the 2 position, DEF in the 3 position and so on. It's possible to give a telephone number in terms of letters if there are no 1's or 0's in it. There are no letters at all associated with 1; and only a Z associated with 0 on some dials.
"So I didn't call any taxicab company. I dialed T-A-X-I-C-A-B, which in numbers is 829-4222. That was the contact point. Undoubtedly, Archie found it easier to remember the word than the number combination and when dying, the word was all he remembered—so he scrawled it in desperation."