Legends

ASSEMBLED IN A WINDOWLESS STORAGE ROOM IN A BASEMENT OF Langley filled with empty watercoolers, the eight people around the conference table started, as always, with the family name and in short order narrowed the list down to one that had an Irish ring to it, but then spent the next half hour debating how it should be spelled. In the end the chairman, a station chief who reported directly to Crystal Quest, the new Deputy Director of Operations, turned to the agent known as Martin Odum, who had been following the discussion from a chair tilted back against the wall; as Martin’s “Odum” legend had been burned and he would be the person employing the new identity, it would save time if he settled on the spelling. Without a moment’s hesitation, Martin opted for Pippen with three p’s. “I’ve been reading newspaper stories about a young black basketball player at the University of Central Arkansas named Scottie Pippen,” Martin explained. “So I thought Pippen would have the advantage of being easy to remember.”

“Pippen it is,” announced the chairman and he turned to the selection of a Christian name to go with Pippen. The junior member of the Legend Committee, a Yale-educated aversion therapist, sarcastically suggested that they might want to go whole hog and use Scottie as the Christian name. Maggie Poole, who had read medieval French history as an Oxford undergraduate and liked to salt her conversation with French words, shook her head. “You’re all going to think I am off the wall but I came up with a name in my dreams last night that I consider parfait. Dante, as in Dante Alighieri?” She looked around the table expectantly.

The only other woman on the committee, a lexicographer on loan from the University of Chicago, groaned. “Problem with Dante Pippen,” she said, “is it wouldn’t go unnoticed. People tend to remember a name like that.”

“But don’t you see, that’s exactly what makes it an excellent choice,” exclaimed Maggie Poole. “Nobody thumbing down a list of names would suspect Dante Pippen of being a pseudonyme precisely because it stands out in a crowd.”

“She has a point,” agreed the committee’s doyen, a gargoyle-like CIA veteran who had started out creating legends for OSS agents during World War Two.

“I will admit I don’t dislike the sound of Dante,” ventured the aversion therapist.

The chairman looked at Martin. “What do you think?” he asked.

Martin repeated the names several times. Dante. Dante Pippen. “Uh-huh. I think it suits me. I can live with Dante Pippen.”

Once the committee had decided on a name, the rest of the cover story fell neatly into place.

“Our Dante Pippen is obviously Irish, born, say, in County Cork.”

“Where in County Cork?”

“I once vacationed in a seaport called Castletownbere,” said the aversion therapist.

“Castletownbere, Cork, has a good ring to it. We’ll send him there for a week of R and R. He can get a local map and the phone book, and fix in his head the names of the streets and hotels and stores.”

“Castletownbere is a fishing port. He would have worked on a salmon trawler as a teenager.”

“Then when the economy turned bad, he would have gone off to try his luck in the New World, where he will have picked up a lot about the history of the Irish in America—the potato famine of 1840 that brought the first Irish immigrants to our shores, the Civil War draft riots, that sort of thing.”

“If he comes from Castletownbere, he must be Catholic. For the price of a generous donation, we can probably get the local Castletownbere church to slip his name into its baptism records.”

“One fine day, like many, if not most, Irish men, he would have become fed up with the church.”

“A lapsed Catholic, then,” said the chairman, jotting the biographical detail down on his yellow pad.

“A very lapsed Catholic,” Martin piped up from his place along the wall.

“Just because he’s lapsed doesn’t mean his family will have lapsed.”

“Why don’t we give him a brother and a sister who are in the church but can’t be traced because they are no longer living under the name Pippen. Brother such and such. Sister such and such.”

“The brother could be a Jesuit priest in the Congo, converting the natives to Jesus at the bitter end of some crocodile infested river.”

“And the sister—let’s put her in a convent hospital in the back country of the Ivory Coast.”

“She will have taken a vow of silence, which means she couldn’t be interviewed even if someone got to her.”

“Is Dante Pippen a smoker or nonsmoker?

The chairman turned to Martin, who said, “I’ve been trying to cut down. If Dante Pippen is supposed to be a nonsmoker, it’ll give me an incentive to go cold turkey.”

“Nonsmoker it is, then.”

“Be careful you don’t put on weight. The CIA takes a dim view of overweight agents.”

“We ought to hire one or two—being obese would be a perfect cover.”