The Company_ A Novel Of The CIA Part 4

Stella said, "You've told me before but I always forget. What's that mean again?"

Leo supplied the English translation: "To the success of our hopeless task!"

Stella swallowed a yawn. "Right now my hopeless task is to keep my eyes open. I'm going to hit the hay. Are you coming, Leo, baby?"

"Are you coming, Leo, baby?" Jack cooed, mimicking Stella.

Leo threw a dark look in Jack's direction as he trailed after Stella and disappeared into the room at the end of the hallway.

In the early hours of the morning, as the first ash-gray streaks of first light broke against the Harkness Quadrangle, Leo came awake to discover Stella missing from the narrow bed. Padding sleepily through the silent apartment he heard the scratching of a needle going round and round in the end grooves of a record in the living room. Yevgeny was fast asleep on the old couch under the window with the torn shade, his arm trailing down to the linoleum, the tips of his fingers wedged in Trevelyan's masterpiece on the American Revolution so he wouldn't lose his place. Leo gently lifted the needle from the record and switched offYevgeny's reading lamp. As his eyes became accustomed to the darkness he noticed a flicker of light under Jack's door on one side of the living room. Expecting to catch Jack burning the midnight oil, he gripped the k.n.o.b and softly turned it and inched the door open.

Inside a sputtering candle splashed quivering shadows onto the peeling wallpaper. One of the shadows belonged to Stella. She was wearing one of Leo's sleeveless Yale rowing s.h.i.+rts and slouched on the bed, her back against the wall, her long bare legs stretched out and parted wide. Another shadow was cast by Jack. He was kneeling on the floor between Stella's silvery thighs, his head bent forward. Sifting through the murky images, Leo's sleep-fogged brain decided it had stumbled on Jack wors.h.i.+pping at an altar.

In the half-darkness, Leo could make out Stella's face. She was looking straight at him, a faint smile of complicity on her slightly parted lips.

Working out of an empty office that his old law firm put at his disposition whenever he came to Manhattan, Frank Wisner wound up the meeting with E. (for Elliott) Winstrom Ebbitt II and walked him over to the bank of elevators. "I'm real pleased Bill Donovan made sure our paths crossed," he drawled, stretching his Mississippi vowels like rubber bands and letting them snap back on the consonants. The Wiz, as Wisner was affectionately nicknamed in the Company, was the deputy head, behind Allen Dulles, of what some journalists had dubbed the dirty tricks department of the fledgling Central Intelligence Agency. A ruggedly handsome OSS veteran, he favored his visitor with one of his legendary gap-toothed smiles. "Welcome aboard, Ebby," he declared, offering a resolute paw.

Nodding, Ebby took it. "It was flattering to be asked to join such a distinguished team."

As Ebby climbed into the elevator, the Wiz slapped him on the back. "We'll see how flattered you feel when I kick a.s.s over some operation that didn't end up the way I thought it should. Cloud Club, sixteen thirty tomorrow."

Ebby got off the elevator two floors below to pick up a briefcase full of legal briefs from his desk. He pushed through the double doors with "Donovan, Leisure, Newton, Lumbard & Irvine" and "Attorneys at Law" etched in gold letters across the thick gla.s.s. Except for the two Negro cleaning ladies vacuuming the wall-to-wall carpets, the offices were deserted. Heading back to the elevators, Ebby stopped to pen a note in his small, precise handwriting to his secretary. "Kindly cancel my four o'clock and keep my calendar clear for the afternoon. Try and get me fifteen minutes with Mr. Donovan anytime in the morning. Also, please Thermofax my outstanding dossiers and leave the copies on Ken Brill's desk. Tell him I'd take it as a favor if he could bring himself up to speed on all the material by Monday latest." He scribbled "E.E." across the bottom of the page and stuck it under a paperweight on the blotter.

Moments later the revolving door at Number Two Wall Street spilled Ebby into a late afternoon heat wave. Loosening his tie, he flagged down a cab, gave the driver an address on Park and Eighty-eighth and told him to take his sweet time getting there. He wasn't looking forward to the storm that was about to burst.

Eleonora (p.r.o.nounced with an Italian lilt ever since the young Eleanor Krandal had spent a junior semester at Radcliffe studying Etruscan jewelry at the Villa Giulia in Rome) was painting her fingernails for the dinner party that night when Ebby, stirring an absinth and water with a silver swizzle stick, wandered into the bedroom. "Darling, where have you been?" she cried with a frown. "The Wilsons invited us for eight, which means we have to cross their threshold not a split second later than eight-thirtyish. I heard Mr. Harriman was coming-"

"Manny have a good day?"

"When Miss Utterback picked him up, the teacher told her Manny'd been frightened when the air raid siren shrieked and all the children had to take cover under their little tables. These atomic alerts scare me, too. How was your day?"

"Frank Wisner asked me up to Carter Ledyard for a chat this afternoon."

Eleonora glanced up from her nails in mild interest. "Did he?"

Ebby noticed that every last hair on his wife's gorgeous head was in place, which meant that she'd stopped by the hairdresser's after the lunch with her Radcliffe girlfriends at the Automat on Broadway. He wondered, not for the first time, what had happened to the eager girl who'd been waiting when the banana boat back from the war had deposited him on a Manhattan dock draped with an enormous banner reading "Welcome Home-Well Done." In those days she had been filled with impatience-to have herself folded into his arms, no matter they hadn't seen each other in four years; to climb into the rack with him, no matter she was a virgin; to walk down the aisle on her father's arm and agree to love and honor and obey, though she'd made it crystal clear from day one that the obey part was a mere formality. During the first years of their marriage it was her money- from a trust fund, from her salary as a part-time jewelry buyer for Bergdorf's-that had put him through Columbia Law. Once he had his degree and had been hired by "Wild" Bill Donovan, his old boss at OSS who was back practicing law in New York, Eleonora more or less decided to retire and begin living in the style to which she wanted to become accustomed.

Across the bedroom, Eleonora held up one hand to the light and examined her nails. Ebby decided there was no point in beating around the bush. "The Wiz offered me a job. I accepted."

"Is Frank Wisner back at Carter Ledyard? I suppose that Was.h.i.+ngton thing didn't work out for him. I hope you talked salary? Knowing you, darling, I'm sure you would never be the first to raise the ugly subject of money. Did he say anything about an eventual partners.h.i.+p? You ought to play your cards carefully-Mr. Donovan might be willing to give you a junior partners.h.i.+p to keep from losing you. On the other hand. Daddy won't be disappointed if you go to Carter Ledyard. He and Mr. Wisner know each other from Yale-they were both Skull and Bones. He could put in a good word-"

Ebby puffed up two pillows and stretched out on the cream-colored bedspread. "Frank Wisner hasn't gone back to Carter Ledyard."

"Darling, you might take your shoes off."

He undid his laces and kicked off his shoes. "The Wiz's still in government service."

"I thought you said you saw him at Carter Ledyard."

Ebby started over again. "Frank has the use of an office there when he's in town. He asked me up and offered me a job. I'm joining him in Was.h.i.+ngton. You'll be pleased to know I did raise the ugly subject of money. I'll be starting at GS-12, which pays six-thousand four-hundred dollars."

Eleonora concentrated on s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g the cap back onto the nail polish. "Darling, if this is some sort of silly prank..." She began waving her fingers in the air to dry her nails but stopped when she caught sight of his eyes. "You're being serious, Eb, aren't you? You're not becoming involved with that ridiculous Central Agency Mr. Donovan and you were talking about over brandy the other night, for heavens sake."

"I'm afraid I am."

Eleonora undid the knot on the belt of the silk robe and shrugged it off her delicate shoulders; it fell in a heap on the floor, where it would stay until the Cuban maid straightened up the room the next morning. Ebby noticed his wife was wearing one of those newfangled slips that doubled as a bra.s.siere and pushed up her small pointed b.r.e.a.s.t.s. "I thought you'd grown up, Eb," she was saying as she slipped into a black Fogarty number with a pinched waist and a frilly skirt. Taking it for granted that she could talk him out of this silly idea, she backed up to him so he could close the zipper.

"That's just it," Ebby said, sitting up to wrestle with the zipper. "I have grown up. I've had it up to here with company mergers and stock issues and trust funds for spoiled grandchildren. Frank Wisner says the country is at peril and he's not the only one to think so. Mr. Luce called this the American century, but at the halfway mark it's beginning to look more and more like the Soviet century. The Czechoslovak President, Mr. Masaryk, was thrown out of a window and the last free East European country went down the drain. Then we lost China to the Reds. If we don't get cracking France and Italy will go Communist and our whole position in Europe will be in jeopardy." He gave up on the zipper and touched the back of his hand to the nape other neck. "A lot of the old OSS crowd are signing on, Eleonora. The Wiz was very convincing-he said he couldn't find people with my experience in clandestine operations on every street corner. I couldn't refuse him. You do see that?"

Eleonora pulled free from his clumsy fingers and padded across the room in her stockinged feet to study herself in the full-length mirror. "I married a brilliant attorney with a bright future-"

"Do you love me or my law degree?"

She regarded him in the mirror. "To be perfectly honest, darling, both. I love you in the context of your work. Daddy is an attorney, my two uncles are attorneys, my brother has one more year at Harvard Law and then he'll join Daddy's firm. How could I possibly explain to them that my husband has decided to throw away a thirty-seven-thousand-dollar-a-year position in one of the smartest firms on Wall Street for a six-thousand-a-year job-doing what? You've fought your war, Eb. Let someone else fight this one. How many times do you need to be a hero in one lifetime?" Her skirt flaring above her delicate ankles, Eleonora wheeled around to face her husband. "Look, let's both of us simmer down and enjoy ourselves at the Wilsons. Then you'll sleep on it, Eb. Things will look clearer in the cold light of morning."

I've accepted Franks offer," Ebby insisted. "I don't intend to go back on that."

Eleonora's beautiful eyes turned flinty. "Whatever you do, you'll never match your father unless someone stands you in front of a firing squad."

"My father has nothing to do with this."

She looked around for her shoes. "You really don't expect me to transplant Immanuel to a semi-attached stucco house in some dingy Was.h.i.+ngton suburb so you can take a six-thousand-a-year job spying on Communists who are spying on Americans who are spying on Communists."

Ebby said dryly, "It's sixty-four-hundred, and that doesn't include the two-hundred-dollar longevity increase for my two years in the OSS."

Eleonora let her voice grow husky. "If you abandon a promising career you'll be abandoning a wife and a son with it. I'm just not the 'Whither thou goest' type."

"I don't suppose you are," Ebby remarked in a voice hollow with melancholy for what might have been.

With a deft gesture that, as far as Ebby could see, only the female of the species had mastered, Eleonora reached behind her shoulders blades with both hands and did up the zipper. "You'd better throw something on if you don't want us to be late for the Wilsons," she snapped. She spotted her stiletto-heeled pumps under a chair. Slipping her feet into them, she stomped from the bedroom.

The Otis elevator lifting Ebby with motionless speed to the sixty-sixth floor of the Chrysler Building was thick with cigar smoke and the latest news bulletins. "It's not a rumor," a middle-aged woman reported excitedly. "I caught it on the hackies radio-the North Koreans have invaded South Korea. Its our nightmare come true-ma.s.ses of them poured across the thirty-eighth parallel this morning."

"Moscow obviously put them up to it," said one man. "Stalin is testing our mettle."

"Do you think Mr. Truman will fight?" asked a young woman whose black veil masked the upper half of her face.

"He was solid as bedrock on Berlin," observed another man.

"Berlin happens to be in the heart of Europe," noted an elderly gentleman. "South Korea is a suburb of j.a.pan. Any idiot can see this is the wrong war in the wrong place."

"I heard the Presidents ordered the Seventh Fleet to sea," the first man said.

"My fiance is a reserve naval aviator," the young woman put in. "I just spoke with him on the telephone. He's worried sick he's going to be called back to service."

The operator, an elderly Negro wearing a crisp brown uniform with gold piping, braked the elevator to a smooth stop and slid back the heavy gold grill with a gloved hand. "Eighty-second Airbornes been put on alert," he announced. "Reason I know, got a nephew happens to be a radio operator with the Eighty-second." Without missing a beat he added, "Final stop, Chrysler Cloud Club."

Ebby, half an hour early, shouldered through the crowd milling excitedly around the bar and ordered a scotch on the rocks. He was listening to the ice crackle in the gla.s.s, rehas.h.i.+ng the waspish conversation he'd had with Eleonora over breakfast, when he felt a tug on his elbow. He glanced over his shoulder. "Berks.h.i.+re!" he cried, calling Bill Colby by his wartime OSS code name. "I thought you were in Was.h.i.+ngton with the Labor Relations people. Don't tell me the Wiz snared you, too."

Colby nodded. "I was with the NLRB until the old warlock worked his magic on me. You've heard the news?"

"Difficult not to hear it. People who generally clam up in elevators were holding a seminar on whether Truman's going to take the country to war."

Carrying their drinks, the two men made their way to one of the tall windows that offered a breathtaking view of Manhattan's grid-like streets and the two rivers bracketing the island. Ebby waved at the smog swirling across their line of sight as if he expected to dispel it. "Hudson's out there somewhere. On a clear day you can see across those parklands trailing off to the horizon behind the Palisades. Eleonora and I used to picnic there before we could afford restaurants."

"How is Eleonora? How's Immanuel?"

"They're both fine." Ebby touched his gla.s.s against Colby's. "Good to see you again, Bill. What's the word from the District of Columbia?"

Colby glanced around to make sure they couldn't be overheard. "We're going to war, Eb, that's what the Wiz told me and he ought to know." The pale eyes behind Colby's military-issue spectacles were, as always, imperturbable. The half smile that appeared on his face was the expression of a poker player who didn't want to give away his cards, or his lack of them. "Let the Communists get away with this," he added, "they're only going to test us somewhere else. And that somewhere else could be the Iranian oil fields or the English Channel."

Ebby knew the imperturbable eyes and the poker players smile well. He and Colby and another young American named Stewart Alsop had studied Morse from the same instructor at an English manor house before being parachuted into France as part of three-man Jedburgh teams (the name came from the Scottish town near the secret OSS training camp). Long after he'd returned to the states and married, Ebby would come awake in the early hours of the morning convinced he could hear the throttled-back drone of the Liberator banking toward England and the snap of the parachute spilling and catching the air as he drifted down toward the triangle of fires the maquis had ignited in a field. Ebby and Colby, a.s.signed to different Jedburgh teams, had crossed paths as they scurried around the French countryside, blowing up bridges to protect Patton's exposed right flank as his tanks raced north of the Yonne for the Rhine. Ebby's Jedburgh mission had ended with him inching his way through the jammed, jubilant streets of the newly liberated Paris in a s.h.i.+ny black Cadillac that had once belonged to Vichy Premier Pierre Laval. After the German surrender Ebby had tried to talk the OSS into transferring him to the Pacific theater but had wound up at a debriefing center the Americans had set up in a German Champagne factory outside Wiesbaden, trying to piece together the Soviet order of battle from Russian defectors. He might have stayed on in the postwar OSS if there had been a postwar OSS. When the j.a.panese capitulated, Truman decided America didn't need a central intelligence organization and disbanded it. The Presidential ax sent the OSS's a.n.a.lysts to the State Department (where they were as welcome as fleas in a rug), the cowboys to the War Department and Ebby, by then married to his pre-war sweetheart, back to Columbia Law School. And who did he come across there but his old sidekick from the Jedburgh days, Berks.h.i.+re, one year ahead of him but already talking vaguely of abandoning law when the Cold War intensified and Truman reckoned, in 1947, that America could use a central intelligence agency after all.

"I heard on the grapevine that Truman's flipped his lid at the CIA," Colby said. "He blames them for not providing early warning of the North Korean attack. He's right, of course. But with the nickel-and-dime budget Congress provides, they're lucky if they can predict anything beside Truman's moods. Heads are going to roll, you can believe it. The buzz on Capitol Hill is that the Admiral"-he was referring to the current DCI, Rear Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter-"will be job hunting before the year's out. The Wiz thinks Elsenhower's Chief of Staff at Normandy, Bedell Smith, may get the nod." Colby glanced at a wall clock, clicked gla.s.ses with Ebby again and they both tossed off their drinks. "We'd better be getting in," he said. "When the Wiz says sixteen thirty he doesn't mean sixteen thirty-one."

Near the bank of elevators a small sign directed visitors attending the S.M. Craw Management Symposium to a suite of private rooms at the far end of the corridor. Inside a vestibule two unsmiling young men in threepiece suits checked Colby's identification, then scrutinized Ebbys driver's license and his old laminated OSS ID card (which he'd retrieved from a s...o...b..x filled with his wartime citations, medals and discharge papers). Ticking off names on a clipboard, they motioned Ebby and Colby though the door with a sign on it reading, "S.M. Craw Symposium."

Several dozen men and a single woman were crowded around a makes.h.i.+ft bar. The only other woman in sight, wearing slacks and a man's vest over a ruffled s.h.i.+rt, was busy ladling punch into gla.s.ses and setting them out on the table. Ebby helped himself to a gla.s.s of punch, then turned to chat with a young man sporting a Cossack mustache. "My names Elliott Ebbitt," he told him. "Friends call me Ebby."

"I'm John McAuliffe," said the young man, a flamboyant six-footer wearing an expensive three-piece linen suit custom-tailored by Bernard Witherill of New York. "Friends call me a lot of things behind my back and Jack to my face." He nodded toward the thin-faced, lean young man in a rumpled off-the-rack suit from the R.H. Macy Company. "This is my former friend Leo Kritzky."

Ebby took the bait. "Why former?"

"His former girlfriend crept into my bed late one night," Jack said with disarming frankness. "He figures I should have sent her packing. I keep reminding him that she's a terrific piece of a.s.s and I'm a perfectly normal h.o.m.o erectus."

"I was angry, but I'm not any more," Leo commented dryly. "I decided to leave the pretty girls to the men without imagination." He offered a hand to Ebby. "Pleased to meet you."

For a second Ebby thought Jack was putting him on but the brooding darkness in Leo's eyes and the frown-creases on his high forehead convinced him otherwise. Never comfortable with discussions of other people's private lives, he quickly changed the subject. "Where are you fellows coming from? And how did you wind up here?"

Leo said, "We're both graduating from Yale at the end of the month."

Jack said with a laugh, "We wound up here because we said yes when our rowing coach offered us Green Cups down at Mory's. Turns out he was head hunting for-" Jack was unsure whether you were supposed to p.r.o.nounce the words "Central Intelligence Agency" out loud, so he simply waved his hand at the crowd.

Leo asked, "How about you, Elliott?"

"I went from Yale to OSS the last year of the war. I suppose you could say I'm reenlisting."

"Did you see action?" Jack wanted to know.

"Some."

"Where?"

"France, mostly. By the time I crossed the Rhine, Hitler had shot a bullet into his brain and the Germans had thrown in the sponge."

The young woman who had been serving drinks tapped a spoon against a gla.s.s and the two dozen young men-what Jack called the "Arrow-s.h.i.+rt-c.u.m-starched-collar-crowd"-gravitated toward the folding chairs that had been set up in rows facing the floor-to-ceiling picture window with a view of the Empire State Building and downtown Manhattan. She stepped up to the gla.s.s lectern and tapped a long fingernail against the microphone to make sure it was working. "My name is Mildred Owen-Brack," she began. Clearly used to dealing with men who weren't used to dealing with women, she plowed on, "I'm going to walk you through the standard secrecy form which those of you who are alert will have discovered on your seats; those of you who are a bit slower will find you're sitting on them." There was a ripple of nervous laughter at Owen-Brack's attempt to break the ice. "When you came into this room you entered what the sociologists call a closed culture. The form commits you to submit to the CIA for prior review everything and anything you may write for publication about the CIA while you're serving and after you leave it. That includes articles, books of fact or fiction, screenplays, epic poems, opera librettos, Hallmark card verses, et cetera. It goes without saying but I will say it all the same: Only those who sign the agreement will remain in the room. Questions?"

Owen-Brack surveyed the faces in front of her. The lone female amid all the male recruits, a particularly good-looking dark-haired young woman wearing a knee-length skirt and a torso-hugging jacket lifted a very manicured hand. "I'm Millicent Pearlstein from Cincinnati." She cleared her throat in embarra.s.sment when she realized there had been no reason to say where she came from. "Okay. You're probably aware that your agreement imposes prior restraint on the First Amendment right of free speech, and as such it would stand a good chance of being thrown out by the courts."

Owen-Brack smiled sweetly. "You're obviously a lawyer, but you're missing the point," she explained with exaggerated politeness. "We're asking you to sign this form for your own safety. We're a secret organization protecting our secrets from the occasional employee who might be tempted to describe his employment in print. If someone tried to do that, he-or she-would certainly rub us the wrong way and we'd have to seriously consider terminating the offender along with the contract. So we're trying to make it legally uninviting for someone to rub us the wrong way. Hopefully the intriguing question of whether the Company's absolute need to protect its secrets outweighs the First Amendment right of free speech will never be put to the test."

Ebby leaned over to Colby, who was sitting on the aisle next to him. "Who's the man-eater?"

"She's the Company consigliere," he whispered back. "The Wiz says she's not someone whose feathers you want to ruffle."

Owen-Brack proceeded to read the two-paragraph contract aloud.

Afterward she went around collecting the signed forms, stuffed them in a folder and took a seat in the back of the room.

Frank Wisner strode up the lectern. "Welcome to the Pickle Factory," he drawled, using the in-house jargon for the Company. "My name is Frank Wisner. I'm the deputy to Allen Dulles, who is the Deputy Director/ Operations-that's DD-slash-o in Companyese. DD/0 refers both to the man who runs the Clandestine Service as well as the service itself." The Wiz wet his lips from a gla.s.s of punch. "The Truman Doctrine of 1947 promised that America would aid free peoples everywhere in the struggle against totalitarianism. The princ.i.p.al instrument of American foreign policy in this struggle is the Central Intelligence Agency. And the cutting edge of the CIA is the DD/0. So far we have a mixed record. We lost Czechoslovakia to the Communists but we saved France from economic collapse after the war, we saved Italy from an almost certain Communist victory in the elections and the Czech-style putsch that would have surely followed, we saved Greece from a Soviet-backed insurgency. Make no mistake about it-Western civilization is being attacked and a very thin line of patriots is manning the ramparts. We badly need to reinforce this line of patriots, which is why you've been invited here today. We're looking for driven, imaginative men and women"-the Wiz acknowledged Millicent Pearlstein with a gallant nod-"who are aggressive in pursuit of their goals and not afraid of taking risks-who, like Alice in Wonderland, can plunge into the unknown without worrying about how they are going to get out again. The bottom line is: There aren't any textbooks on spying, you have to invent it as you go along. I'll give you a case in point. Ten days ago, one of our officers who'd been trying to recruit a woman for five months discovered that she religiously read the astrology column in her local newspaper. So the morning he made his pitch, he arranged for the section on Capricorns to say that a financial offer that day would change their lives and solve their money problems-don't refuse it. The woman in question listened to the pitch and signed on the dotted line and is now reporting to us from a very sensitive emba.s.sy in a Communist country."

Part 5

In the back of the room Wisner's minder began tapping his wrist.w.a.tch. At the lectern, Wisner nodded imperceptibly. "You people have no doubt read a lot of cloak-and-dagger novels. If the impression you have of the Central Intelligence Agency comes from them you'll find you are seriously mistaken. The real world of espionage is less glamorous and more dangerous than those novels would lead you to believe. If you make it through our training program, you will spend your professional lives doing things you can't talk about to anyone outside the office, and that includes wives and girlfriends. We're looking for people who are comfortable living in the shadows and who can conduct imaginative operations that the US government can plausibly disclaim any responsibility for if things go right or wrong. What you do won't turn up in headlines on the front page-it won't appear on any page-unless you foul up. You'll be operating in the killing fields of the Cold War and you'll be playing for keeps. If you aren't completely comfortable with this, my advice to you is to seek employment with the Fuller Brush Company."

Wisner checked his own watch. "So much for the sermon from the Cloud Club. Owen-Brack will walk you though the nitty-gritty part of today's get-together-where and when you are to report, what you are to bring with you, when you will start to draw salary, what you are to tell people if they ask you what you're doing. She'll also give you a backstop, which is to say a mailing address and a phone number where a secretary will say you are away from your desk and offer to take a message. In the months ahead you're going to be away from your desk an awful lot."

The new recruits in the room laughed at this. At the lectern Wisner had a whispered conversation with Owen-Brack, after which he ducked out of the room one step behind his minder. Leaning toward the microphone, Owen-Brack said, "I'll begin by saying that the Company singled you out- and went to the trouble and expense of ordering up background security checks-because we need street-smart people who can burgle a safe and drink tea without rattling the cup. Chances are you're coming to us with only the second of these skills. We plan to teach you the first, along with the nuts and bolts of the espionage business, when you report for duty. For the record, you are S.M. Craw Management trainees from Sears, Roebuck. The first phase of your training-which will actually include a course in management in case you ever need to explain in detail what you were doing-will take place at the Craw offices behind the Hilton Inn off Route 95 in Springfield, Virginia, starting at 7:30 A.M. on the first Monday in July."

Pausing every now and then to hand out printed matter, Owen-Brack droned on for another twenty minutes. "That's more or less it," she finally said. She flashed another other guileless smiles. "With any luck I'll never see any of you again."

Jack lingered in the room after the others left. Owen-Brack was collecting her papers. "Forget something?" she inquired.

"Name's McAuliffe. John J. McAuliffe. Jack to my friends. I just thought what a crying shame to come all the way up to the Cloud Club and not take in the view. And the best way to take in the view is with a cup of Champagne in your fist-"

Tilting her head, Owen-Brack sized up Jack. She took in the three-piece linen suit, the cowboy boots, the tinted gla.s.ses, the dark hair slicked back and parted in the middle. "What's the J J stand for?" she asked. stand for?" she asked.