The Company_ A Novel Of The CIA Part 14

"How?"

"Barium... meals."

"Barium meals?" Jack repeated to Miss Sipp. "What the h.e.l.l is that?"

"Not something you'll find at one of those fast food kiosks on the Kurfurstendamm," she said with a knowing frown.

"Barium what?" Truscott demanded.

"Meals. I'm gonna feed... feed stuff back to a single addressee at a time. It will be radioactive, in a manner of speaking-I'll be able to trace... it and see who saw what, when. I'll stamp everything... ORCON-dissemination controlled by originator. All copies numbered. Then we'll... we'll see which operations get blown and... figure out from that who's betraying us... us."

"You're giving away some of the family jewels," Truscott noted uneasily.

"G.o.dd.a.m.n mole will give away more of them if we don't catch him."

"I suppose you know what you're doing," the General mumbled.

"I suppose... I do," the Sorcerer agreed.

The Sorcerer had begun the arduous process of walking back his cat with the distribution list on the Vishnevsky exfiltration. As far as he could figure there had been nine warm bodies on the Washington end who were party to the operation: the director of Central Intelligence and his deputy director, four people in the Operations Directorate, the cipher clerk who had deciphered the Sorcerer's cables, the routing officer in Communications who controlled the physical distribution of traffic inside c.o.c.kroach Alley, and of course Jim Angleton, the counterintelligence swami who vetted all would-be defectors to weed out the "bad 'uns."

The permutations weren't limited to the people on the in-house distribution list. Kim Philby, as MI6's broker in Washington, was known to have access to all the top Company bra.s.s, up to and including the director, whose door was always open to the official nuncio from the British cousins. Any of them might have confided in Philby even though he wasn't on the distribution list. If someone had whispered in Philby s ear, he might have pa.s.sed on to the head of MI6 the information that the Yanks were bringing across a defector who claimed to be able to finger a Soviet mole in MI6. "C," as the chief was called, might then have convened a small war council to deal with what could only be described as a seismic event in the secret Cold War struggle of intelligence services. If Philby wasn't the culprit-Torriti understood that the evidence pointing to him was only circ.u.mstantial-the mole could be anyone who learned of the Vishnevsky affair on a back channel.

Philby was also known to be bosom buddies with Jim Angleton, his sidekick from their Ryder Street days. According to what the Sorcerer had picked up (during casual phone conversations with several old cronies toiling in the dungeons on the Reflecting Pool), the birds of a feather, Philby and Angleton, nocked to a Georgetown watering hole for lunch most Fridays. Angleton obviously trusted Philby. Would he have pa.s.sed on the meat of a "Flash" cable to his British pal? Would his pal have quietly pa.s.sed it on to "C?" Would "C" have let the cat out of the bag to prepare for the worst?

Torriti meant to find out.

Burning midnight oil, devouring quant.i.ties of PX whiskey that had even Miss Sipp counting the empties in the wastebasket, Torriti meticulously prepared his barium meals.

Item: The Sorcerer had recently managed to have a hand-carved wooden bust of Stalin delivered to an office in the Pankow headquarters of the East German Intelligence Service. Hidden inside the base of the bust was a battery-operated microphone, a tiny tape machine and a burst-transmitter that broadcast, at 2 A.M. every second day, the conversations on the tape. The initial "get" from the microphone revealed that the East Germans had initiated a program, code-named ACTION J, to discredit the Allied-zone Germans by sending threatening letters purporting to come from West Germany to Holocaust survivors. The letters, signed "A German SS officer" would say: "We didn't gas enough Jews. Some day we'll finish what we started." Revealing ACTION J would blow the existence of the microphone hidden in the room in which the operation was being planned.

Item: The Rabbi had traded the names of two KGB case officers working under diplomatic cover out of the Soviet emba.s.sy in Washington for the whereabouts of a former n.a.z.i germ warfare specialist in Syria, which the Sorcerer had acquired from the Gehlen Org (which, in turn, had purchased the information from a member of the Muhabarat, the Egyptian Intelligence Service). Judging from past experience, if the ident.i.ty of the KGB officers fell into the hands of the Soviet mole, the Russians would find excuses (a death in the family, a son broke a leg skiing) to quickly pull the two back to the Soviet Union. If the two remained in Washington it would mean the Sorcerer's cable containing the names had not been blown.

Item: The Sorcerer had organized a phone tap in the office of Walter Albrecht's closest collaborator, his wife, Lotte, who worked in the Central Committee building at the intersection of Lothringerstra.s.se and Prenzlauer Alice in the center of East Berlin. One of the barium meals would contain a transcript of a conversation between Ulbricht and his wife in which Ulbricht said rude things about his Socialist Unity Party rival Wilhelm Zaisser. The Russians, if they got wind of the tap via the Soviet mole, would make a "routine" security check on Lotte's office and discover the phone tap.

Item: An East German agent who had fled West with the tens of thousands of East German emigres streaming across the open border had eventually landed a job working for the Messerschmidt Company. Berlin Base had stumbled across his ident.i.ty while debriefing a low level Karlshorst defector and Gehlen's Org had "doubled" the agent, who now delivered to his East German handlers technical reports filled with disinformation. The East German agent was debriefed by his Karlshorst handlers during monthly visits to his aging mother in East Berlin. A barium meal from the Sorcerer identifying the doubled agent would blow the operation; the agent in question would undoubtedly fail to return to West Berlin the next time he visited his mother.

Item: The Sorcerer had personally recruited a maid who worked at the Blue House the East German government dacha in Prerow, which was the Security Ministy's official resort on the Baltic coast. The maid turned out to be a sister of one of the prost.i.tutes in the West German wh.o.r.ehouse above the nightclub Berlin-Schoneberg that Torriti visited whenever he had a free hour to debrief he hookers. If a barium meal reporting snippets of conversation from bigwigs vacationing at the Blue House was pa.s.sed on to the Soviets by their mole, the maid would certainly be arrested and her reports would dry up.

Item: The Sorcerer had a Watcher in an attic taking photographs with a lone telephoto lens of the personnel who appeared at the windows in the KGB base in the former hospital at Karlshorst on the outskirts of Berlin. Using these photos, Berlin Base was compiling a "Who's Who in Soviet Intelligence" sc.r.a.pbook. A barium meal status report on this operation that fell into Soviet hands would lead to the arrest of the photographer and the end of Berlin Base's sc.r.a.pbook project.

Item: The Sorcerer had seen a copy of a field report prepared by E. Winstrom Ebbitt II, the CIA officer he'd kicked out of Berlin Base for shooting off his mouth about Torriti's medicinal alcohol habit. Ebbitt, now working out of Frankfurt Station, had recently been put in charge of Albania ops because of some obscure qualification relating to Albania. He was currently training a group of Albanian emigres in a secret base near Heidelberg. In the next few days, Ebbitt planned to fly his commando group to the British base near Medina on Malta and then sneak them onto the Albanian coast near Durres from a sailing yacht. From there they were supposed to work their way inland to Tirane and a.s.sa.s.sinate Enver Hoxha, the malevolent Stalinist leader of the Peoples Republic of Albania. Torriti's barium meal would take the form of a private "Eyes Only" cable to the Special Policy Committee that coordinated British-American operations against Albania; Kim Philby, as the ranking MI6 man in Washington, happened to be the British member of this committee. The Sorcerer would warn the committee that Ebbitt had gotten his priorities a.s.s-backward. Hoxha lived and worked in "Le Bloc," a sealed compound in Tirane. He was said to pa.s.s between his villa and his office through a secret tunnel. A far better (not to mention more realistic) target, Torriti would suggest, would be the submarine pens that the Soviets were constructing at the Albanian port of Saseno which, if completed, would give the Russians control of the Adriatic. If Ebbitt's commando found a reception committee waiting for them on the beach when they came ash.o.r.e, it would indicate that this Message had leaked, via the mole, to the Russians in Washington.

Item: Last but not least, he would send off a barium meal to Angleton giving details of the latest "get" that the courier code-named RAINBOW had delivered from her source, known as SNIPER. One of the items particularly intriguing: SNIPER was important enough in the East German hierarchy to have been invited to hear a pep talk given by none other than Marshal Georgi Konstantinovich Zhukov during a recent visit to Berlin; in the course of the talk, Zhukov-who had masterminded the Soviet a.s.sault on Berlin in 1945-let slip that, in the event of war, senior troop commanders expected to reach the English Channel on the tenth day of hostilities. If the Russians got wind of a leak at this level of the East German superstructure, the SNIPER source would dry up very quickly, and RAINBOW would fail to turn up for her dance course in the small theater on Hardenbergstra.s.se in West Berlin.

10.

BERLIN, TUESDAY, APRIL 17, 1951.

IN ORDER TO HAVE DIPLOMATIC IMMUNITY, JACK-LIKE ALL COMPANY officers in Berlin-was carried on the books as a Foreign Service officer working out of the American consulate. With Secretary of State Dean Acheson, the architect of America's policy of containing Soviet expansionism, pa.s.sing through Berlin on a hit-and-run tour of front line consulates and emba.s.sies, Jack received one of the amba.s.sadors notorious "your presence is requested and required" invitations to a "happy hour" pour in the Secretary's honor. Milling around with the other junior CIA officers, Jack listened as one of the Company's Technical Service Division "elves," recently back from Washington, described the new Remington Rand Univac computer being installed in the Pickle Factory. "It's going to revolutionize information retrieval," the technician was explaining excitedly. "The disadvantage is that Univac s not very portable-as a matter of fact it fills a very large room. The advantage is that it can swallow all the phone books of all the cities in America. You punch in a name, the rotors whir and four or five minutes later it spits out a phone number."

d.a.m.n machines," someone cracked, "are going to take all the fun out of spying."

Jack laughed along with the others but only halfheartedly; his thoughts were on tonight's rendezvous in the rehearsal hall with RAINBOW, his sixteenth meeting with her since their paths first crossed two months before. For some time the s.n.a.t.c.hes of conversation between them had turned into a kind of coded shorthand; the things left unspoken loomed larger than the things said, and they both knew it. Tonight Jack meant to screw up his courage and say what was on his mind; in his guts. He wasn't sure she would stand still long enough to hear him out; if she heard him out, he didn't kn, if she would sock him in the solar plexus or melt into his arms.

Drifting away from the group, Jack wandered over to the bar and help himself to a fistful of pretzels and another whiskey sour. Turning back toward the room, rehearsing in his head what he would say to Lili if she gave him an opening, he suddenly found himself eyeball to eyeball with the austere Secretary of State.

"Good afternoon, I'm Dean Acheson."

The American amba.s.sador (who had helicoptered in from the emba.s.sy in Bonn), the consul general from Berlin, two senators and a bevy of highranking State Department political officers crowded around. "Sir, my name is John McAuliffe."

"What do you do here?"

Jack cleared his throat. "I work for you, Mr. Secretary," he said weakly.

"I didn't catch that."

"I work for you. In the emba.s.sy."

The amba.s.sador tried to take Acheson's elbow and steer him toward the buffet of popcorn and open sandwiches but the Secretary of State wasn't finished quizzing Jack. "And what do you do in the emba.s.sy, Mr. McAuliffe?"

Jack looked around for help. The two senators were staring off into s.p.a.ce. The political officers were concentrating on their fingernails. "I work in the political section, sir."

Acheson was starring to get annoyed. "And what precisely do you do in the political section, young man?"

Jack swallowed hard. "I write reports, Mr. Secretary, that I hope will be useful..."

Suddenly the penny dropped. Acheson's mouth fell open and he nodded. "I think I see. Well, good luck to you, Mr. McAuliffe." The Secretary of State mouthed the words "Sorry about that" and turned quickly away.

RAINBOW had come to look forward to her twice weekly meetings with Jack; living as she did in the bleak Soviet side of the city, locked into a relationship with a man twenty-seven years her senior, she savored the brief encounters during which she was made to feel desirable, and desired. For the past several weeks Lili had no longer turned modestly away when she reached under her sweat shirt and into her bra.s.siere to pull out the small square of silk filled with minuscule handwriting. Now, for the first time, Jack s.n.a.t.c.hed the silk, warm from her breast, and pressed it to his lips. Lili, startled, lowered her eyes for an instant, then looked up questioningly into his as Jack grazed one of her small b.r.e.a.s.t.s with his knuckles and kissed her softly on the corner of her thin lips. "Please, oh please, understand that you have arrived at the frontier of our intimacy," she pleaded, her voice reduced to a husky whisper. "There can be no crossing over. In another world, in another life..." She managed a forlorn smile and Jack caught a glimpse of what her face would look like when she had grown old. "Jack the Ripper," she murmured. "Jackhammer. Jack rabbit."

"Jesus H. Christ, where do you discover all these Jacks?"

"Herr Professor has a wonderful dictionary of American slang, yes? It has long been my habit to learn several new words every day. I was up to grab forty winks when I met you. I skipped ahead to the Jacks."

"Have you told Herr Professor about me?"

"He has never asked me and I have not raised the subject. What he does-the information he sends to you-it is out of an antique idealism. Herr Professor wears shirts with studs instead of b.u.t.tons, and old-fashioned starched collars that he changes daily; he is clearly ill at ease with the latest fashions in clothing and political ideas. He gathers the information and writes it out meticulously on the silk in order to turn the clock back. He counts on me take care of the details of the delivery."

"We could become lovers," Jack breathed.

"In mysterious ways we are already lovers," Lili corrected him.

"I want you-"

"You have as much of me as I can give to you-"

"I want more. I want what any man wants. I want you in bed."

"I say it to you without ambiguity-this can never be."

"Because of Herr Professor?"

"He saved my life at the end of the war. In my dictionary gang-rape comes before grab forty winks. I was what you call gang-raped by drunken Russian soldiers. I filled the pockets of my overcoat with bricks in order to throw myself into the Spree, I could not wait for the dark waters to close over my head. Herr Professor prevented me... through the night he talked to me of another Germany... of Thomas Mann, of Heinrich Boll... at dawn he took me to the roof of the building to watch the sun rise. He convinced me that it was the first day of the rest of my life. I do not pretend, Jack, to be... indifferent to you. I only say that my first loyalty is to him. I say also that this loyalty takes the form of s.e.xual fidelity..."

Lili stepped into a skirt and peeled off her dancing tights from under it. She folded them into her satchel and reached to turn out the lights in the rehearsal hall. "I must begin back, yes?"

Jack gripped her shoulder. "He lets you run risks."

Lili pulled away. "That is unfair-there is a hierarchy to the world I live in. Because he considers some things more important does not mean needs me less."

"I need you more."

"You do not need me as he needs me. Without me-" She looked away her face suddenly stony.

"Finish the sentence, d.a.m.nation-without you what?"

"Without me he cannot remain alive. You can."

"You want to spell that out?"

"No."

"You owe it to yourself-"

"Whatever I owe to myself, I owe more to him. Please let me go now, Jack-o'-lantern."

Sorting through emotions that were not familiar to him, Jack nodded gloomily. "Will you come again Friday?"

"Friday, yes. Depart ahead of me, if you please. We should not be seen coming out of the theater together."

Jack put a hand on the back of her neck and drew her to him. She let her forehead rest for a moment against his shoulder. Then she stepped back and turned off the lights and opened the door and waited at the top of the staircase while he descended the steps.

He looked back once. Four floors above him Lili was lost in the shadows of the landing. "Lily of the valley?" he called. When she didn't respond he turned and, hurrying past Aristide dozing in his gla.s.s-enclosed cubbyhole, fled from the theater.

"Do me a favor, sport," the Sorcerer had said as casually as if he'd been asking Jack to break some ice cubes out of the office fridge. "Put a teardrop in SNIPER'S wall."

Bugging the Professor's house had turned out to be easier said than done. Jack had dispatched some German freelancers to scout the street behind the Gorky Theater. It was filled with war-gutted buildings and rubble and the single house standing in the middle of what had once been a garden. It took them ten days to work out when both RAINBOW and SNIPER were away from home. As a deputy prime minister, Lili's Herr Professor went to a government office weekday mornings and taught seminars in particle and plasma physics at Humbolt University in the afternoons. Two mornings a week Lili took the U-Bahn to Alexanderplatz, where she had cla.s.sical dance cla.s.ses at one of the last private schools in the Soviet Union. Three afternoons a week she spent in a windowless Gorky Theater rehearsal hall taking lessons from a crippled Russian woman who had danced with the Kirov before the war. Even when both RAINBOW and SNIPER were away, there was still a stumbling block to the planting of a microphone: Herr Professor had a caretaker living in two gloomy ground floor rooms of the house, an old woman who had once been his nanny and now, confined by arthritis to a wicker wheelchair, spent most of her waking hours staring through the windowpane at the deserted street.

Jack had brought the problem to the Sorcerer: how to get the caretaker out of the house long enough for a team to break into her rooms and install a bug in the ceiling?

The Sorcerer, sorting through barium meals and the people to whom they would be addressed, had grunted. His eyes were puffier than usual, and heavy-lidded; he looked as if had come out second best in a street brawl, which in itself defied logic. Jack couldn't imagine the Sorcerer coming out second best in anything.

"Kill her?" the Sorcerer had suggested.

For an instant Jack had actually taken him seriously. "We can't just up and kill her, Harvey-we're the good guys, remember?"

"Don't you know a joke when you hear one, sport? Lure her out of the house with a free ticket to a Communist Party shindig. Whatever."

"She's an old lady. And she's tied to a wheelchair."

The Sorcerer had shaken his head in despair. "I got problems of my own," he had grumbled, his double chins quivering. "Use your G.o.dd.a.m.n imagination for once."

It had taken Jack the better part of a week to figure out the answer, and three days to lay in the plumbing. One morning, soon after Herr Professor and Lili had left the apartment, an East German ambulance with two young men in white coats sitting on either side of a muzzled lap dog had eased up to the curb in front of the house. The men had knocked on the caretaker's door. When she opened it the width of the safety chain, they had explained that they had been sent by the Communist Party's Ministry of Public Health to transport her to a doctor s office off Strausberger Platz for a free medical examination. It was part of a new government social program to aid the elderly and the infirm. If she qualified-and judging from the wheelchair they suspected she might-she would be given the latest Western pills to alleviate her pain and a brand new Czech radio. The caretaker, her peasant eyes narrowing in suspicion, had wanted to know how much all this would cost. Silwan II had favored her with one of his angelic smiles and had a.s.sured her that the service was free of charge. Scratching the hair on her upper lip, the caretaker had thought about this for a long time. Finally she had removed the safety chain.

No sooner had Sweet Jesus and the Fallen Angel carted the caretaker to visit the doctor (hired for the occasion) than a small pickup truck with the logo of the East German Electrical Collective on its doors drew up in front of the house. Three of the Company's "plumbers," dressed in blue coveralls, carrying a wooden ladder and two wooden boxes filled with tools and electrical equipment, went up the walkway and let themselves into the caretaker's rooms; a fourth plumber waited in the drivers seat. The pickup's radio was tuned to the East German police frequency. A fist-sized radio transmitter on the seat buzzed into life. "We are operational," a voice speaking Hungarian said, "and starting the work."

The team inside used a silent drill-the sound of the bit working its way into the ceiling was muted by a tiny spray of water-in case the KGB had planted microphones in SNIPER'S apartment. Jack's people worked the bit up to within a centimeter of the surface of the floor, then switched drills to one that turned so slowly it could punch a pinhole in the floor without pushing any telltale sawdust up into the room. A tiny microphone the size of the tip of one of those new-fangled ballpoint pens was inserted into the pinhole and then wired up to the electric supply in the caretakers overhead lighting fixture. The small hole in the ceiling was filled with quick-drying plaster and repainted the same color as the rest of the ceiling with quick-drying paint. A miniature transmitter was fitted inside the fixture so that it was invisible from below, and hooked up to the house's electricity. The transmitter, programmed to be sound-activated, beamed signals to a more powerful transmitter buried in the crest of the rubble in the vacant lot next door. This second transmitter, which ran on a mercury dry-cell battery, broadcast in turn to an antenna on the roof of a building in the American sector of Berlin.

"Did you work something out, sport?" Torriti mumbled when he b.u.mped into Jack in the Berlin-Dahlem PX.

"As a matter of fact I did, Harvey. I sent in your Hungarian plumbers-"

The Sorcerer held up a palm, cutting him off. "Don't give me the details, kid. That way I can't give your game away if I'm ever tortured by the Russians.

Torriti said it with such a straight face that Jack could only nod dumbly in agreement. Watching the Sorcerer lumber off with a bottle of whiskey under each arm, he began to suspect that the honcho of Berlin Base had been putting him on. On the other hand, knowing Torriti, he could have been serious.

11.

FRANKFURT, MONDAY, APRIL 23, 1951.

LOOKING LIKE WITNESSES AT A WAKE, EBBY, TONY SPINK AND HALF A dozen other officers from the Soviet/Eastern Europe Division crowded around the bulky reel-to-reel tape machine on Spink's desk. The technician, who had recorded the special radio program from Tirane earlier that afternoon, threaded the tape through the capstan and locked it into the pickup spool. Spink looked at the translator who had been sitting next to Ebby the night of the farewell dinner for the Albanian commandoes in the Heidelberg inn. "Ready?" he asked. She nodded once. He hit the "Play" b.u.t.ton. At first there was a great deal of static. "We had trouble tuning in the station," the technician explained. "We had to orient our antenna. Here it comes."

Ebby could hear the high-pitched voice of a man speaking in Albanian. He seemed to be delivering a tirade. "So he is what we call the Procurator and you call the Prosecutor," announced the translator, a short, middle-aged woman with short-cropped hair. "He sums up the prosecution case against the accused terrorists. He says that they landed on the coast from two small, motorized rubber rafts immediately after midnight on April the twenty. He says a routine border patrol stumbled across them as they were deflating and burying the rafts in the sand." The translator c.o.c.ked her head as another voice called out a question. "The chief judge asks the Procurator what the terrorists did when the border soldiers attempted to apprehend them. The Procurator says that the terrorists opened fire without warning, killing three border soldiers, wounding two additional border soldiers. In the change of gunfire four of the terrorists were killed and the three, on trial today, were apprehended." The translator wiped tears from her eyes with the back of her finger. "Now the judge asks if incriminating evidence was captured with the terrorists."