The Double Game by Dan Fesperman

sunlight, so the bindings wouldn’t fade. The espionage first editions were on the far left, easy to spot by the shiny plastic covers over the dust jackets, the mark of a collector, although he’d read every copy at least twice. Dad certainly wouldn’t have needed hours to remember Tommy Hambledon, and it again occurred to me that he might be playing at least an advisory role for my mysterious controller.
    “Funny you should ask,” I said. “I’ve been going through some old Lemasters.”
    “You make it sound more like business than pleasure.”
    “In a way, it is.”
    “How so?”
    “Are you sure you don’t already know?”
    He frowned, puzzled. It seemed genuine.
    “I’m here on a freelance assignment. Trying to ease back into a little journalism.”
    “Wonderful!” He’d hated it when I gave up writing, and he almost never asked about my work at Ealing Wharton. “What’s the story?”
    “Something you might be able to help me with. Vanity Fair wants a piece on the espionage career of Edwin Lemaster. That’s why I’ve been going through the books. Searching for clues to what he was really up to.”
    Dad wrinkled his nose.
    “Who put you on to this?”
    The one question I didn’t want to answer. Dad was as sharp as ever.
    “I got a tip in the mail. Anonymous.”
    “The most reckless kind, for all concerned. Didn’t you take a big enough bite out of him the first time?”
    “You act like that was my fault.”
    He shrugged. I sipped coffee, waiting to see if he’d take sides. Maybe he already had.
    “You know, I came across a review a few years ago that dated his entire decline as a novelist to that interview of yours.”
    “Never saw it.”
    But I had, of course, and one particular paragraph had lodged in my mind:
Ever since his “confession,” Lemaster has lost his edge, seemingly more interested in proving his loyalty than in honing his craft. His latest book, a techno-thriller in which Uncle Sam’s minions are portrayed only in the brightest hues of red, white and blue, completes his descent into mediocrity.
    “The funny thing,” Dad said, “is that Agency people didn’t even raise an eyebrow about the whole confessional part.”
    “Really?”
    “It was his other slip that pissed them off.”
    “There was another slip?”
    “Think about it. Think of everything he told you.”
    I did. I drew a blank until my father filled it in.
    “‘I was looking for the Don Tollesons of the world.’ He was a mole hunter.”
    “Well, yeah. That was pretty obvious.”
    “And what does that tell you about who he worked for?”
    “The Soviet desk?”
    “Oh, come on.”
    “Jim Angleton?” My father smiled but said nothing. “I didn’t think Counterintelligence had its own field men. Not overseas, anyway.”
    “Nobody else thought so, either, including most of the CIA.”
    “So it was off the books?”
    “Everyone’s except Angleton’s, which he kept in a safe.”
    Angleton yet again. Dead for more than twenty years, yet still coming up in my memories, and in my conversations with both David and Dad. And why not? Everything I’d ever read about him made him sound like the bizarre creation of some novelist, which of course made him seem real, eternal. He was the original Cold Warrior, one of the first to play the postwar game again the Soviets and play it well. In his hobbies, as in his work, he was a detail man, a miniaturist—tying flies, breeding orchids, combing files, hunting moles, deconstructing poems. Deeply suspicious, yet blinded by Anglophilia and his friendship with Kim Philby, whose betrayal drove him over the edge. And now I’d learned that Ed Lemaster had secretly worked for him.
    “Turns out,” Dad continued, “that Angleton had three operatives, all of them ostensibly employed by the Soviet desk but in reality reporting to him. Which meant they were paid twice, of course.”
    “So even within the Agency they were double agents, sort of.”
    “That’s certainly how