“What about the ladies?” Stone asked.
“They’re in the drawing room nattering away,” Lance said. “If they want us, they’ll hunt us down.” He had brought the decanter with him, and he refreshed Stone’s port glass and his own.
Stone waited patiently for him to begin.
“Stanford Hedger got out of Yale in the early sixties,” he said, “and he went straight into the Company, having been recruited well before graduation by a professor who later recruited me. It was a good time to join up; he was just completing his training when the Cuban invasion came along—hadn’t had a posting yet, so he couldn’t be blamed for what happened at the Bay of Pigs. But a lot of his superiors were blamed, and a lot of them left the Company, leaving an unusual amount of room for early promotion. Stan was good at languages; he had French, Russian, German, and more than a smattering of Arabic. Later he came by Hebrew, which impressed the Israelis. He was still at the military language school in Monterey, California, when the Bay of Pigs invasion came to grief. It’s a wonderful school; they teach you things like perfect military German or Russian, the idea being that when they got ready to put somebody over a border, he’d blend in.
“Stan got put across what was then the East German border, dressed as a colonel—Stan looked a lot older than he was. He wrought havoc on the other side; he’d walk into a military command when the senior officer was out, flash some bogus orders signed by the Soviet commander, issue a lot of ridiculous orders, and it would take them days, sometimes weeks before they’d get everything straightened out again. He was one step ahead of them for three or four months, then, as they were closing in on him, he hit a West German worker on the head, stole his clothes, and rode back into West Berlin on the S-Bahn, the elevated railway that took several thousand essential workers back and forth to the East from the West every day. It was a bravura performance, almost entirely solo, and it brought him to the attention of the higher-ups—got him decorated, it did.”
“Not a bad start for a bright young man.”
“It was a lot better than not bad, and it helped that Stan came out of a background that the agency loved and trusted—Choate, Yale, and half a dozen of the very best clubs. His father worked for Wild Bill Donovan in the OSS during World War Two, and by that time he was the head of an important New York brokerage house. If you’d tossed the two dozen top men at the Company in a room together and told them to design the perfect agent, they would have come up with Stan.”
“What came next for him?”
“Vietnam. By ’sixty-five, he was on the ground there, in Laos, Thailand, wherever he could do the most good. He was one of two or three guys who invented Air America, the CIA-fronted airline that flew people, equipment, drugs, and all sorts of contraband all over Southeast Asia. He made some money out of that, legend has it.”
“Was he motivated by money?”
“Not at first, probably, but agents in that sort of situation suddenly start seeing it lying around on the ground in neatly tied bundles, and it’s hard not to pick up some of it. Stan spent it as fast as he made or stole it, though; he had an establishment in Saigon that included a townhouse that had formerly belonged to a French governor, a chauffeured Rolls-Royce of a certain vintage, and a mistress who was said to be the most beautiful and the most sexually adventurous female for a thousand miles in any direction. He entertained on a scale not often seen outside the loftier regions of French society—a superb cellar had come with the house—and his guests included everybody of importance who came through the city: journalists, presidential advisiors, senior military figures. It was said that the only reason Hanoi never tried to blow the house to smithereens was that all the servants were Viet Cong, and they reported everything that happened there. Stan, of course, maintained he was running them as double agents.”
Stone had to laugh.
“When the whole thing finally came crashing down, Stan got out on the last helicopter leaving the embassy. You remember a photograph of an American slugging somebody who was clinging to the chopper as it rose?”
“Yes.”
“Look closely, allow for age, and you’ll see that it was Stan. It made him more famous than ever, in certain circles.”
“What happened to the mistress?”
“Funny you should ask. Stan abandoned her at the end, but it’s said that, within a week of the fall of Saigon, she was living with the commandant of what had suddenly become Ho Chi Min City. She had the house all ready and waiting for him. Eventually, she got out of the country and ended up in LA, where she is now running the most exotic bordello the town has ever seen. I’ll give you the number, if you’re going to be out there anytime soon.”
“You never know. What did he do after Vietnam?”
“He had a number of dull postings after that, kept his head down until nobody remembered whose fault Vietnam had been. I met him in the early eighties, when I arrived at the Farm.”
“What farm was that?”
“The Farm is the training school for the covert side of the agency, and by that time, Stan was running it. It’s the intelligence equivalent of an army officer becoming the commandant at West Point.”
“I see.”
“I think Stan saw something of himself in me—though, of course, a slightly dimmer bulb—so he did a lot of mentoring with me and got me into the Monterey school.”
“What language?”
“Arabic; I initially learned it in bed from a Lebanese girlfriend at Yale, and after the Monterey school, I was very good with it. Stan saw that I got a Middle Eastern assignment, a good one. I still can’t tell you much about that, but it involved slinking around various deserts, in mufti, listening a lot. I was limited by my Western appearance, but I did all right. I became something of a specialist, too, at listening in on interrogations and interpreting not just language, but all of the subject’s words and actions. The downside was, I had to watch the interrogations through a two-way mirror, and they were never pretty.”
Stone didn’t want to think about that.
“The friction with Stan started when I began to develop my own sources and collaborators. He was working out of the Cairo embassy by then, his cover being something like agricultural attaché, and he ran a tight ship. When I wouldn’t share my contacts with him or anybody else, he began to ride me. I was mingling a lot in the upper reaches of Middle Eastern society, too, so some of my sources were very well placed. I’d write reports giving a lot of good information, which Stan would always say was worthless because I wouldn’t ascribe it to a verifiable source. Then I began getting reports past him, directly to Langley, which is against Company policy, and that drove him nuts. The Company has a chain of command, just like the military, and if you violate it, you have to be very, very careful. Stan’s problem was that my information in these reports nearly always turned out to be accurate, and it made Stan look bad that he hadn’t passed them on to Langley himself.”
“I can see how that might annoy him.”
“Then the explosion of the safe house happened, and after he recovered from that, I’ve been hearing from old friends, he became diminished in the eyes of his superiors and something of a has-been in the eyes of his inferiors. That’s when he really started going for the main chance.”
“And he hasn’t been caught at it?”