This is especially true if the journalist can reasonably expect that someone else—one of those trolling for a favorable relationship with the press lobbyists from the Willard, for example—would happily reach for the check.
Roscoe J. Danton—a tall, starting to get a little plump, thirty-eight-year-old who was employed by The Washington Times-Post—was, depending on to whom one might talk, either near the bottom of the list of first-tier journalists, or at the very top of the second tier.
Roscoe walked into the Old Ebbitt, nodded at the ever affable Tony the Maître d’ at his stand, and walked on to the bar along the wall behind Tony. He continued slowly down it—toward the rear—and had gone perhaps halfway when he spotted the people he had agreed to meet.
They were two women, and they were sitting at a banquette. The one he had talked to said that he would have no trouble spotting them: “Look for two thirtyish blondes at one of the banquettes at the end of the bar.”
The description, Roscoe decided, was not entirely accurate. While both were bleached blonde, one of them was far closer to fiftyish than thirtyish, and the younger one was on the cusp of fortyish.
But there being no other banquette holding two blondes, Roscoe walked to their table.
Roscoe began, “Excuse me—”
“Sit down, Mr. Danton,” the older of the two immediately said.
The younger one patted the red leather next to her.
Roscoe Danton sat down.
“Whatever this is, I don’t have much time,” he announced. “There’s a press conference at four-fifteen.”
“This won’t take long,” the olde
r one said. “And I really think it will be worth your time.”
A waiter appeared.
The older woman signaled the waiter to bring what she and her companion were drinking, and then asked, “Mr. Danton?”
“What is that you’re having?”
“A Bombay martini, no vegetables,” she said.
“That should give me courage to face the mob,” he said, smiled at the waiter, and told him, “The same for me, please.”
The older woman waited until the waiter had left and then reached to the fluffy lace collar at her neck. She unbuttoned two buttons, put her hand inside, and withdrew a plastic card. It was attached with an alligator clip to what looked like a dog-tag chain. She pressed the clip, removed the card, more or less concealed it in her hand, and laid it flat on the tablecloth.
“Make sure the waiter doesn’t see that, please,” she said as she withdrew her hand.
Danton held his hand to at least partially conceal the card and took a good look at it.
The card bore the woman’s photograph, the seal of the Central Intelligence Agency, a number, some stripes of various colors, and her name, Eleanor Dillworth.
It clearly was an employee identification card. Danton had enough experience at the CIA complex just across the Potomac River in Langley, Virginia, to know that while it was not one of the very coveted Any Area/Any Time cards worn by very senior CIA officers with as much élan as a four-star general wears his stars in the Pentagon, this one identified someone fairly high up in the hierarchy.
He met Miss Dillworth’s eyes, and slid the card back across the table.
The younger blonde took a nearly identical card from her purse and laid it before Danton. It said her name was Patricia Davies Wilson.
“I told them I had lost that when I was fired,” Mrs. Wilson said. “And kept it as a souvenir.”
Danton met her eyes, too, but said nothing.
She took the card back, and put it in her purse.
“What’s this all about?” he finally asked when his silence didn’t elicit the response it was supposed to.
Miss Dillworth held up her finger as a signal to wait.