Free Stained Glass by William F. Buckley Page A

to the extended wrist of Colonel Bristol. Outside both doors an armed marine was waiting to escort the colonel to the office of the deputy. It was all maximum security. Nobody knew that Blackford Oakes was a member of the Central Intelligence Agency at this point except the archivist, Colonel Bristol, the deputy, the Director and the Russians.
    The Director spread the papers on his desk, and as he went over them one by one he handed them wordlessly to his deputy, Jim Sanderson. Then he said, “I remember this one, Jim. He cracked the big one in London last January. Came close to going down along with the Brit. Rufus’s preference is always for not taking any chances. I personally authorized him to extricate Oakes. Here we are again, I guess you could say, up against the consequences of Western sentimentality. How the hell do you suppose they found out about him? None of the Brits have any idea he was our man. I know we aren’t supposed to think the Commies are superhuman, but it beats me how they find out about some of these things. Now, Joseph Stalin, Secretary of the Communist Party of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, having discovered that one young Yalie, Oakes, CIA, is working at St. Anselm’s rebuilding Wintergrin’s church, has it all figured out: “ We’re behind Wintergrin! Never mind that we’ve been investing in Adenauer for seven years. So the Soviet ambassador calls on the Secretary of State and chews and chews and chews his ass—sometimes I envy the ambassador, Jim—and says unless we ‘take care of the situation,’ Stalin will take care of the situation in his own way. Of course, he doesn’t tell us what Stalin would do, and he doesn’t tell us what we’re supposed to do. It isn’t as easy as recalling Oakes—the Secretary suggested that. No, sir, he wants much more. But he isn’t willing to say what.”
    Knowing his boss, Jim Sanderson knew he was expected to give concentrated thought to what was being said; knew he wasn’t supposed to comment until the Director’s ruminative questions stopped being rhetorical. He did most of his thinking by soliloquy, preferably in the presence of one other person. Toward the end of his introverted trance, he would actually consult.
    The Director leaned back and puffed on his pipe, which had lain unused on his table for ten minutes, suggesting the gravity of the emergency.
    â€œI tell you what let’s do, Jim. Let’s drive out and see Rufus. He’s the best; and he has the advantage of knowing this Oakes, in case the recommendation we come up with requires some action at his end.”
    Rufus, yielding to the entreaties of his wife, had finally agreed, after thirteen years abroad, to repatriation. The war years had been spent in England, the postwar years in France. Not given to expressing his feelings, he hadn’t told his wife—hadn’t succeeded, really, in informing himself just why he was averse to returning to America, even for a visit. After the Oakes crisis in London early in the year, he was ready to move back to their cottage in the French countryside and resume the tending of his beloved roses. The night after Viscount Kirk was killed, he took Muriel to the theater, and on to dinner at the Connaught. He ordered a whiskey—his first drink since taking on the case—and she drew courage to ask, Wouldn’t he now, nearing sixty, take her back to America? They were childless, but her sister lived in Baltimore, and Rufus had two very old friends in Washington who always visited him when they traveled in England and France, giving him much pleasure. She asked why he resisted returning, and he forced himself to think the question through. He was silent—Muriel was no longer exasperated by this tic of her husband’s, rooted in him, against which no force of man or nature was effective: when Rufus was thinking, generals, prime ministers and wives