The Good Assassin: A Novel Read online

  Praise for

  AN HONORABLE MAN

  “Paul Vidich’s tense, muscular thriller delivers suspense and intelligence circa 1953: Korea, Stalin, the Cold War, rage brilliantly, and the hall of mirrors confronting reluctant agent George Mueller reflects myriad questions. Just how personal is the political? Is the past ever past? An Honorable Man asks universal questions whose shadows linger even now. Paul Vidich’s immensely assured debut, a requiem to a time, is intensely alive, dark, silken with facts, replete with promise.”

  —Jayne Anne Phillips, New York Times bestselling author of Quiet Dell and Machine Dreams

  “A cool, knowing, and quietly devastating thriller that vaults Paul Vidich into the ranks of such thinking-man’s spy novelists as Joseph Kanon and Alan Furst. Like them, Vidich conjures not only a riveting mystery but a poignant cast of characters, a vibrant evocation of time and place, and a rich excavation of human paradox.”

  —Stephen Schiff, writer and co-executive producer of the hit FX series The Americans

  “An Honorable Man is an unputdownable mole hunt written in terse, noirish prose, driving us inexorably forward. In George Mueller, Paul Vidich has created a perfectly stoic companion to guide us through the intrigues of the red-baiting fifties. And the story itself has the comforting feel of a classic of the genre, rediscovered in some dusty attic, a wonderful gift from the past.”

  —Olen Steinhauer, New York Times bestselling author of All the Old Knives

  “Cold War spy fiction in the grand tradition—neatly plotted betrayals in that shadow world where no one can be trusted and agents are haunted by their own moral compromises.”

  —Joseph Kanon, New York Times bestselling author of Istanbul Passage and The Good German

  “An Honorable Man is that rare beast: a good, old-fashioned spy novel. But like the best of its kind, it understands that the genre is about something more: betrayal, paranoia, unease, and sacrifice. For a book about the Cold War, it left me with a warm, satisfied glow.”

  —John Connolly, #1 internationally bestselling author of A Song of Shadows

  “A richly atmospheric and emotionally complex . . . tale of spies versus spies in the Cold War. . . . Vidich writes with an economy of style that acclaimed espionage novelists might do well to emulate. This looks like the launch of a great career in spy fiction.”

  —Booklist (starred review)

  “A moody debut spy novel inspired by real events. . . . Dead-on Cold War fiction. Noir to the bone.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Paul Vidich is a very strong new voice in spy fiction. The writing is powerful, the setting real, the characters magnetic. Vidich portrays the paranoia of America’s anti-communist moment brilliantly, and he captures the gray, gritty realities of counterintelligence. If you love Charles McCarry, read Vidich.”

  —Adam Brookes, author of Night Heron

  “If you like movies such as Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy or Tom Hanks’ 2015 spy flick A Bridge of Spies, you need to read this book.”

  —The Real Spy Book

  “Taut storytelling. . . . Reminiscent of old-school John Le Carré spy thrillers.”

  —Judith D. Collins Must Reads

  “This dark and twisty story kept me biting my nails while glued to every page. I literally couldn’t put it down. . . . If you like a good spy novel, then I’m recommending this one.”

  —Popcorn Reads

  “An Honorable Man is a chilling tale of espionage set in 1950s Washington, D.C.”

  —CBSLocal.com

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  For Joe and Arturo, with love

  Blessed are the dead that the rain falls on.

  —F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

  PART I

  1

  * * *

  WASHINGTON, D.C., 1958

  IT WAS all set in motion over lunch at Harvey’s when the director made a casual request that caught George Mueller off guard. The request came out of nowhere in the midst of the director’s rambling on about the unfortunate state of affairs in Cuba. Mueller thought it an odd, but harmless favor, and it didn’t require anything of him that he wasn’t willing to freely give—but still it was unexpected.

  “Toby Graham is a good man and good men are hard to keep. They get tired, or fed up with the goddamned bureaucracy we’ve become, or squeamish about the work, or they want a bigger house. They move on. We think he is leaving us. I want to know what’s on his mind.”

  It was noon. Mueller remembered the time well. The restaurant was empty at that hour and the director, who arrived early to the office, had taken to lunching before the place filled with a boisterous crowd of eavesdropping Capitol Hill staffers. The director had drained his second gin martini right after the first.

  Mueller had come down by train from New Haven for their annual lunch, which had started the year he left the Agency, and now five years on had devolved into a quaint ritual. Mueller didn’t allow himself to look interested when the request came. He didn’t want to give the director the satisfaction of seeing truth in his prediction that Mueller would become bored teaching privileged undergraduates, so he let the director make his case at length. Mueller listened indifferently and his expression had the flat affect of a judge at trial. The director held the last olive in his snaggletooth and withdrew the flagged toothpick, which he stuck in the warm French bread neither of them had touched. He slid an oyster into his mouth. He wore a slate blue suit with crimson pocket square and matching bow tie. He was older, but his effort to dress fashionably was young, and smart rimless spectacles rested on his thick nose. His gray hair had thinned and whatever he’d lost on his head now erupted from his eyebrows. The director shifted the conversation, as he was wont to do, to the unrelated topic of college teaching, going on at length on his theory of pedagogy.

  “And that too,” the director said suddenly, “is why I asked you here. You know how a man can change. Even the best of us miss the signs, and then when we see them we don’t know whether to promote the change or contain it.”

  Mueller didn’t find the director’s remark surprising. It was just like him to be vague and Mueller didn’t take the trouble to respond.

  “It’s a small assignment,” the director said. “A small favor. Probably a week of your time. You’ll get paid well. I can be generous with people on the outside, and I’m sure you can use the extra income. Nothing dangerous or scandalous,” he assured Mueller.

  “What’s on Graham’s mind?” the director repeated laconically. The emphasis implied by the repetition belied the casual tone of his voice. “That’s what I want to know. What’s he thinking?”

  “Thinking?”

  “Is he happy? You know him, don’t you?”

  Mueller did know Graham. They’d been undergraduates together, where they met racing sculls, matched against each other on the Thames and the Connecticut River, beginning as rivals and remaining that way through the war, and then as colleagues in Vienna in ’48. The director had their file and would know their history.

  “I need someone I can trust,” the director said. “Someone he will trust. Not an insider. Friends?”

  “Friendly enough to grab a drink after work.”

  “You still on the wagon?”

&nb
sp; Mueller hated that phrase. What wagon? And why was being on the wagon synonymous with being sober? He was inclined to challenge the director on his choice of speech, but he knew wisdom in the English language lay in the simile, so he casually repeated, “Still on the wagon.” He lifted his half-finished Coca-Cola to prove his claim. “Wine occasionally.”

  “Campus life has been good for you. I don’t trust men who won’t drink with me.”

  Mueller had heard the director use the line before. It was one of those repetitions that came unconsciously, and if you knew the person long enough you knew it was a tic that came out like a prejudice, but now the director’s words lacked his usual cheerful mocking tone. He seemed preoccupied.

  “We need to know what’s on his mind,” the director said again. “You’re familiar with his type of work.”

  Mueller didn’t need an explanation, for these things were known among the men who shared the fraternity of intelligence. To ask a question was to suggest a suspicion. Trust was the fragile bond that held them together. Agents did things that made them useful in the field, but memories were dangerous with men who left, retired, or were forced out. Details of covert operations. Compromising reports of unfortunate mistakes. The truth beneath plausible denials. Agents stuck together, but that was not who Mueller was. He had stayed away from his old colleagues except for his annual lunch with the director.

  “We can’t erase a man’s memory, but we can judge his loyalty.” The director looked at Mueller and an evanescent smile broke through his grim visage. “He may want to take time off. Like you. He’s been working hard.”

  The director lowered his voice as two Capitol Hill staffers walked by, and he leaned toward Mueller, close enough for Mueller to smell the cloying alcohol. His cheeks had a rosy, happy blush. Mueller thought the director had aged in the intervening year—gained weight, eyes dimmed, lost his smugness—worn down by the bitter rivalries among temperamental politicians who called him to confess before closed-door congressional hearings.

  “You will work with the FBI’s man in Havana. Frank Pryce.”

  The director pushed a file toward Mueller, and Mueller didn’t push it back, which was a mistake. When he saw the yellow-stamped “top secret” and “eyes only” he found himself uncomfortably reluctant to give them up. An old adrenaline conspired against his hesitation.

  “We’ve gotten over the rivalries,” the director said. “That soap opera doesn’t play well with the White House. We won the turf war so now we can be magnanimous. They can be useful here. If there is a success they can take credit and we won’t have to dirty our hands.”

  The file before Mueller described Pryce’s discovery—suspicion, the director amended when he saw Mueller raise an eyebrow.

  “Pryce believes the arms embargo against Batista has been breached. Weapons are getting through. There has been a lot of self-righteous chest-beating on Capitol Hill that we put guns in the hands of a dictator who turned them on his citizens. Congress and the press whine that our State Department’s noble intentions with the embargo came too late, offered too little. That we’re coddling a tyrant.” The director smiled. “Our public outrage against dictators we secretly prop up is one of our glorious hypocrisies.” He licked the last drop of gin from his glass. “Pryce thinks it’s Graham.”

  The director looked at Mueller. “Pryce won’t give his sources. The mob? Hotel wiretaps?” The director arched an eyebrow. “I want to know what Pryce knows. I want to know what he thinks is going on.” He nodded. “You try and find out.”

  He popped the last olive in his mouth. “We can’t be ostriches about this. Has Graham become a risk? Has he gone around the embargo on his own? We hire good men and give them latitude. It goes without saying that Graham shouldn’t know we are asking questions.”

  Mueller tolerated the director’s continued presumption that he’d take the assignment, and he knew that each time he didn’t object he compromised his ability to decline.

  “Pryce will have the details. He knows what we want. Batista’s people are in the dark.”

  Disdain and scorn rose in the director’s voice when he mentioned the Cuban dictator by name. “Abjectly corrupt. A fat worthless head of state. God knows how we pick our allies.”

  Mueller didn’t agree to the assignment at their lunch, but his silence was confederate to the director’s request. He knew one week was an impossibly optimistic estimate of the time he’d be in Cuba, but the idea that he would escape campus lethargy had tart appeal. His sabbatical was upon him, but he’d lost interest in his research on the puns and paradoxes in Hamlet, a lively but binocularly narrow topic, and he was out of sorts with his life. He had arrived at New Haven and was disappointed by the petty academic squabbling, and in his first year he had found that he had time on his hands, was prone to being morose, and longed for the clarity of his old job. He poured his deep ambivalence about the conduct of the Cold War spy game, and how it sacrificed good men for abstract principles, into two paperback novels that were transparently autobiographical, thinking it was a way to make a little money. Teaching and his writing had been a retirement that appealed to his solitary personality, but in time he saw himself as his ex-colleagues saw him, a middle-aged man who belonged to that tragic class of spy prematurely removed from the game—for whom academic life thickened the waist and atrophied instincts. A chess master suddenly withdrawn from a championship match to a rural Connecticut life.

  Mueller had stood back from campus life, as he had learned to do in the field, but being an outsider—essential for a spy—made it hard to be a civilian. He’d been appalled to discover that he’d exchanged the rank hypocrisy of Agency work for petulant campus politics.

  “I’m happy where I am,” he said to the director. They stood on the sidewalk outside Harvey’s. “I don’t have the time for this.”

  “If he is your friend,” the director said, “you should do this. Lockwood made your arrangements.”

  They parted quietly. The sun was high. Its lurid glare scorched the street. They walked in opposite directions into the sparse population out in Washington’s oppressive humidity. Mueller was lanky and handsome, but nondescript in a gray suit, and boyish even in his robust middle age. He felt no urgency in life and no zeal, at least not any longer, and all this gave him a blandness that didn’t draw the stranger’s eye as he strolled to Union Station.

  • • •

  Mueller met CIA inspector general Lockwood a week later in the Rockefeller Center offices of Holiday magazine. Lockwood knew the editor, an old OSS colleague who’d agreed to hire Mueller to write an article on Havana’s night life so he’d have a cover story.

  It was a lunch meeting in a private dining room on the thirty-eighth floor that looked north to Central Park. Throughout the one hour Mueller’s eyes drifted to the panoramic view of that great rectangle of landscape design wedged between Fifth Avenue’s Beaux Arts mansions and Central Park West’s Gothic co-ops. A shoe box of greenery, he thought. Mueller looked for the metaphor in things. The right image, he told his students, was an aid to unreliable memory.

  “George?” Lockwood said. “You’re distracted. We need your full attention if you’re going to be a success here.”

  Mueller took his eyes off the canopy of trees. “Thinking about Graham.”

  Mueller had met Lockwood when he was division chief positioned for a senior leadership role in the Agency, and then he contracted polio during a trip to Asia on Agency business, which left him paralyzed from the waist down. He was a protégé of the director, who accommodated his handicap and made him inspector general, a fittingly senior staff job and suitable for a man confined to a wheelchair, but a dead end. Mueller had been impressed by Lockwood’s stoic dignity. Not once had he seen the man angry, resentful, or depressed. He was the same lanky WASP with a spit of unruly blond hair he brushed from his forehead, but all of him was now compressed into a black mechanical chassis he wheeled around with gloved hands.

  “You were talking a
bout the FBI,” Mueller said, looking at Lockwood, who was opposite him at the dining table laid with serviettes, silverware, bone china, and a flower centerpiece. Mueller met Lockwood’s skeptical gaze with a benign smile. Though he disapproved of the FBI’s aggressive tactics, and their altogether too heartfelt policing, he had it in him, he said, to cooperate. Dignity, formality, self-restraint. Gifts he allowed himself to believe he had. “I can work with them. We’re all mature here.”

  Mueller knew that Lockwood performed liaison work with the FBI through the president’s Foreign Intelligence Agency Board, and he was the architect of a rapprochement between the CIA and the FBI. How had he put it on their way up the elevator? “Intelligence has to be divorced from police work otherwise a Gestapo is created. We are separate but we cooperate. We’ve got the president yelling he wants someone to tell him what the hell is going on in Cuba. There are people from all over the place, different agencies, different interests, including the FBI, telling him different things, so this is all about that.”

  This? Mueller had asked.

  “The FBI is in Havana bugging hotel rooms where the mob stays—Lansky and Stassi and Trafficante. Taped conversations that the FBI makes into transcripts. They don’t know that we know, and they don’t know that we’ve discovered through our own channels that they think we may be responsible for those weapons. You can’t imagine the shit storm in the White House if the director of the FBI walked into the Oval Office with secret recordings that showed one of our assets was ignoring the State Department embargo. We are staying close to the FBI. Friends close, enemies closer, right, George?”

  “A bunch of spleeny dog-hearted farts.” This from the editor.

  Mueller turned to the man seated prominently at the head of the table. He almost laughed. As the one not drinking, Mueller was aware of the volume consumed by the other two. Mueller wondered how the editor would do anything productive when he got back to his desk. He had heard the man’s voice deepen with alcohol and then his humor had thickened too. He was a corpulent man, with thinning hair and piercing blue eyes. Lockwood had given Mueller background on the editor during the elevator ride. He was part of the original OSS contingent who’d come over to the Agency and chafed at the new rules. He became fed up with the growing bureaucracy and was deeply ambivalent about the conduct of the Cold War, and he’d left after the Korean Armistice, taking with him his resentments, his drinking, his opinions, which he offered freely as an editor—and he had his targets. He despised the head of the FBI and denounced him as an incontinent paranoid. England was another target for his readers: “Crumbling cold water castles not fit to sleep in.”