The Old Boys Read online

  OTHER NOVELS BY CHARLES MCCARRY

  Lucky Bastard

  Shelley’s Heart

  Second Sight

  The Bride of the Wilderness

  The Last Supper

  The Better Angels

  The Secret Lovers

  The Tears of Autumn

  The Miernik Dossier

  Copyright

  First published in the United States in 2004 by

  The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.

  Woodstock & New York

  WOODSTOCK:

  One Overlook Drive

  Woodstock, NY 12498

  www.overlookpress.com

  [for individual orders, bulk and special sales, contact our Woodstock office]

  NEW YORK:

  141 Wooster Street

  New York, NY 10012

  Copyright © 2004 by Charles McCarry

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  ISBN 978-1-4683-0030-7

  For E. F. L. and N. C. S.

  Contents

  Other Novels By Charles Mccarry

  Copyright

  Prologue

  One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Two

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Three

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Four

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Five

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Six

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Seven

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Eight

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Nine

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Ten

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Epilogue

  To The Reader

  PROLOGUE

  On the night that Paul Christopher vanished, he and I dined together at his house on O Street: cold watercress soup, very rare cold roast beef, undercooked asparagus, pears and cheese, a respectable bottle of Oregonian pinot noir. It was a fine evening in May. The windows were open. We smelled azaleas in the garden and saw reflected in mirrors and window glass the last bruised colors of the sunset. There was nothing special about the occasion. Paul and I are cousins who lived around the corner from each other, and before he went away we used to join up for dinner a couple of times a month. My name is Horace Christopher Hubbard. His middle name is Hubbard.

  The dinner was the usual one: small portions, small noises of cutlery on china, small talk. Paul’s stomach had been shrunk by the decade he spent in a Chinese prison, and his appetite for deep conversation, never large, was extinguished altogether by Maoist interrogators. This reluctance to waste words drove away his much younger second wife, a woman who never found a bone she did not want to worry. He lived alone now, visited from time to time by his two daughters, whom he loved, and a few friends who were not interested in asking questions. Paul is fifteen years older than me—too large a difference to make equality possible. Since childhood I have admired him greatly—his intelligence, his courage, his adeptness above all; seldom a wrong move or word from Paul. As a youngster I tried to be like him in as many ways as possible.

  Of course this was hopeless. Nevertheless, there are many connections besides blood between us. We both served for many years in the Outfit, as we Old Boys call the U.S. intelligence service, never among ourselves referring to it by the three vulgar initials employed by headline writers and other outsiders. I doubt that I would have become a spy if Paul had not led the way. And unless you count a remote ancestor who was captured by the Mohawk Indians, Paul and I are the only members of our families to have gone to jail— even though he was innocent of the charges the Chinese laid against him, whereas I was as guilty as sin. I broke not only the law but also all the rules by confessing, as a witness in a presidential impeachment trial in the United States Senate, that I had used a supercomputer belonging to the Outfit to steal a presidential election. After pleading guilty I was sentenced to five years behind bars and served every day of my term in a federal prison for gentlemen in Pennsylvania. I was deprived by the court of my government pension, frog-marched through the media, and taken to the cleaners by lawyers—just deserts in all cases. I was able to pay the legal bills because Paul loaned me the money. He visited me in prison twice a month, bringing books, magazines, and gourmet snacks from fancy grocers. Underneath all that self-control, Paul is a bit of a sybarite.

  The Paul Christopher who disappeared was in his seventies but still in excellent condition—not a gray hair in his dark blond thatch, not an extra pound on his body. He looked not at all like my side of the family, but like pictures of his mother. She looked like someone Dürer would have drawn. Paul had always been good at games and he still looked and in fact was athletic, playing tennis with younger opponents, running every morning in the park, and in summer digging and then refilling ditches in the stony soil of the family’s summer place in Massachusetts. In China, as part of the hard labor to which he had been sentenced, he had single-handedly dug a perfectly straight ditch several miles long in the flinty earth near his prison. It has since been covered over, but if you know what to look for you can see it in old spy satellite photos. I suppose he developed a liking for this kind of solitary hard labor, or a need to be reminded of it. His mind remained as it had always been, contemplative yet swirling with neatly filed arcane facts, haunted by memories that I myself could not have borne, and against all odds, utterly sane.

  It was dark by the time we finished our meal. As the light failed the many pictures in the long room suddenly were illuminated by little frame lights switched on
by automatic timers. In Paul’s paintings, mostly inherited and mostly romantic, honeyed shafts of sunlight fell through windows, revealing a beautiful face or a perfect pear or some other trick of pigment—images the two of us had known all our lives. In an Edward Hicks painting I had never liked, vacant-eyed cows and sheep grazed among lamblike wolves and lions in the Peaceable Kingdom. Though not present in these pictures, our childhood also became in some way present: spectral cats of my boyhood, long ago gone to cat heaven, curled up beneath the paintings on sofas and chairs. Ghostly old dogs snored on old familiar rugs.

  Finishing the wine, sitting in the dark surrounded by these pools of light and color, Paul and I talked for a while about the Christophers and the Hubbards, who have married one another for generations, sowing confusion at baptisms. Paul’s father and mine, born on the same day of boy-girl Christopher twins who married Hubbards, looked so much alike—tall bony horse-faced men like me—that strangers mistook them for twins even though one was dark and the other blond.

  Around nine o’clock we ran out of things to say. Paul suggested that he walk me home. This was unusual; I supposed he had some errand to run after dropping me off, a bottle of milk, a newspaper. On the front steps, after twisting the key in the lock, he handed it to me. “New key,” he said. New alarm code, too.” He told me the code, a familiar name easy to remember, easy to enter on the alphanumeric pad. “Got it?”

  “Yes.”

  Paul nodded, as if something important had been settled. We walked on narrow frost-heaved pavement through quiet streets, sniffed by small dogs whose leashes were held by lofty government servants and two-hundred-dollar-an-hour lawyers. It was a Friday night. Once or twice we were crowded off the sidewalk by halfnaked, lovely teenage girls from the suburbs who had driven into the city to make the Georgetown scene.

  In front of my house, a very small wooden one, Paul said, “Horace, I have a favor to ask.”

  He spoke in an unusually strong voice. I was apprehensive. First the key and the alarm code. Now this.

  I said, “Go on.”

  “I want you to be the executor of my will.”

  I felt a certain relief. “Gladly,” I said. “But I’m a convicted felon.” “That makes no difference; I’ve checked. I’ve already paid Stephanie her share and set up trusts for Zarah and Lori. All that’s left is remnants from the past. Things the girls shouldn’t be bothered with.”

  “All right. What are your instructions?”

  “I’ve put them in writing,” Paul replied. “You’ll find a notarized letter addressed to yourself and my will in a safe under the desk in my study.” He smiled.”You’ll have to use all your old secret powers to find the safe. It’s hidden.”

  “I don’t doubt it. And to open it?”

  He handed me half a notebook page with the combination written across the top in his spidery foreign handwriting, learned as a child in German schools.

  “Do you expect I may have to open the safe any time soon?” I asked.

  Paul said,”I’m healthy as a horse. The combination is a date.”

  I looked. So it was—a year from tomorrow.

  “Open it on that day.” Paul said, “or before, if circumstances seem to warrant it.”

  “What circumstances?”

  “You’ll know, Cousin,” said Paul. He shook my hand, gave a little salute that turned into a wave, and walked away.

  Dramatic gestures were not Paul Christopher’s style. His behavior worried me. What on earth was he up to? I knew that it was impossible to follow Paul without being detected, so I went inside my house, switched on the television set, and sat down in the dark to watch Key Largo. Half an hour later, about the time Lauren Bacall spits in Edward G. Robinson’s face, I left by the back door, got into my car, and working to strict rules of tradecraft as I might have done in Beijing thirty years before, drove by a circuitous route to Paul’s house.

  There was no more light inside the house than there had been when I left, but through the window I could see that Paul was talking to a slender black man, not an American. They were standing. The man was very tall, he towered over Paul, with a handsome Arab face and a beautifully barbered white beard. The suit he wore fit his whiplike body perfectly, and could only have been cut in London.

  The man inside handed Paul a large yellow envelope. Paul opened it and withdrew a piece of paper. No, a photograph. I focused the glasses. I thought I saw a face in the photograph. No, a hand. Holding something. A book? A letter?

  Inside, Paul carried the photograph to one of the picture lamps and studied it for a long moment. He looked away, studied it again. And when he lifted his impassive face it seemed to me, impossible though such a thing might be, that tears glistened in his eyes.

  A trick of the light and the mind, I thought. What right had I to see him so? I went away. When I came back in the morning, Paul was gone, like the cats that were no more.

  ONE

  1

  Just before Thanksgiving, Paul Christopher’s ashes were delivered by a Chinese official to the American consulate in Beijing. According to the Chinese, Christopher had died a few weeks before in Ulugqat, a remote mountain village near the border with Tajikistan and Afghanistan in the extreme northwest corner of the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. No information about the circumstances or cause of Christopher’s death was provided. Evidently the Chinese regarded Christopher’s age, as recorded on his passport, as reason enough for his demise. Not that they returned his passport or any personal effects. Regrettably, all these items had been burned along with his corpse at the people’s crematorium in Urümqui, a large city not far from Ulugqat.

  This news came to me by telephone. The caller, an old China hand named David Wong, half Chinese, half Ashkenazi, just happened to be in Beijing with a satellite phone at his disposal. I did not ask him the source of his information; David knew all the right people in China. He was a walking history of U.S. covert action in East Asia, a fomenter of revolutions and uprisings. He had worked for me when I was chief of station in what was then called Peking. Now he eked out his Outfit pension as a consultant to American corporations doing business in the new China. He looked, gestured, and sounded like a full-blooded Han in Mandarin, Cantonese and several tribal dialects, but resembled Groucho Marx when speaking English.

  In Grouchoesque tones, he apologized for being the bearer of sad tidings.

  “No apology necessary,” I said.”I’m grateful. Just ashes, you say?”

  “That’s right,” he said. “In a nice red-and-gilt urn.”

  “Any idea what Paul was doing in Xinjiang?”

  “No. The country around Ulugqat is still a forbidden zone.”

  It is a forbidden zone because it contains forced labor camps for enemies of the regime, mostly intellectuals who, because of their education and exceptional intelligence, are useful as workers in prison factories producing high-quality goods for export to the United States. And because it is not far from the places where China manufactures and tests nuclear warheads and missiles.

  “And then,” David said, “there’s the curious fact that Christopher served his time in a prison not far from Ulugqat.”

  “Did the Chinese delivery boys seem aware of that?”

  “Not just aware. Fascinated. As I understand it, they suggested to our people that it explains everything. Nostalgic American, grateful to his wise captors, revisits scene of his self-discovery and redemption.”

  “They actually said that?”

  “Yes. They think, or say they do, that Christopher found peace and laid him down to sleep in the great Chinese desert, which raises a question: Why didn’t they bury him in his chosen soil instead of cremating him and shipping what purport to be his ashes to Washington?”

  Interesting thought, David Wong’s specialty. In the heyday of Maoism, Christopher had been held prisoner in an abandoned Buddhist temple in the middle of a bleak desert—waterless, featureless, unpeopled. He was the only inmate. His sentence expressed a certain
Maoist-Confucian ingenuity: “Death with ten years’ observation of the results.” This meant that Paul could have been executed at any moment if he was deemed to lack remorse for his counterrevolutionary crimes. Or, just as capriciously, could have had his sentence commuted if he showed the right spirit and confessed. At a press conference, of course.

  Because he actually was innocent of spying on China (almost alone of all the countries in the Communist world), Paul refused to confess to the crime of espionage. He was interrogated for ten years, himself on his knees on a stone floor, his interrogator asking the same maddeningly stupid questions day after day after day. In the end, after being furnished by sources I shall not name with certain incentives to release him, his interrogators believed him. Or said they did, which was quite enough. They let him go—into my custody because I was then posted to Beijing. Immediately thereafter the Chinese intelligence service noticed a warmer and more fraternal attitude on the part of the Outfit. They received bushels of intercepts of communications of the Soviet high command among other goodies, such as a shipment of not-quite-American tanks, along with not exactly American advisers who told them how to deploy those tanks to kill the latest Russian armor.

  2

  I don’t know how they do it nowadays, but during the Cold War the Outfit evaluated intelligence reports as follows: A, B, C, D for the reliability of the source and 1, 2, 3, 4 for the accuracy of the information. A-1 meant that the source was unimpeachable and the information unquestionably true, while D-4 indicated that the source was totally unreliable and the information demonstrably false. Every day, a hive of analysts graded the homework of thousands of sources by comparing raw reports from the field with every other report in the files, plus scholarly knowledge, in order to guess its value. In my long career I never saw an A-1 and only a handful of D-4s. In nine out of ten cases, the designation was C-3, source usually reliable, information possibly true. Logically, this meant that the usually reliable source was sometimes unreliable and that the information described as possibly true could just as possibly be false. It follows that U.S. intelligence spent hundreds of billions of dollars over a period of forty years ferreting out vital information that we did not, as a matter of principle, choose to believe—or for that matter, disbelieve.