The Company_ A Novel Of The CIA Part 17

Jack loosened his tie and let his sports jacket fall open as he sank back into the Sorcerer s chair. He had recently taken to wearing a shoulder holster in addition to the one in the small of his back. The mahogany grip of the Beretta projected from it. "A week shy of six months." He shook his head. "d.a.m.nation, time does have a way of flying here in Berlin. "

"Are there any... you know, distractions," the first recruit asked.

"There are some night clubs on the Kurfurstendamm but you want to watch your a.s.s-the place is crawling with Russians and East Germans."

Miss Sipp came in with the morning's transcripts from the sheets monitoring a.s.sorted microphones scattered around East Berlin from a call house near Checkpoint Charlie. "If you have questions, problems, whatever, my door is always open," Jack offered. As the two recruits departed he ran through the transcripts, looking for the take from the teardrop the plumbers had embedded in Herr Professor's floorboards. There had been some rambling SNIPER trap every morning since the microphone went into service twelve days before; of limited value from an intelligence point, the transcripts had come out of the Watchers' typewriters looking vaguely interestingly so far. This morning there was nothing from SNIPER. Jack sat up straight and went through the transcripts again.

"How come there's nothing from the SNIPER microphone?" he hollered out to Miss Sipp.

"I was curious t00, s0 I got one of the Watchers on the horn-he said that particular teardrop has dried up."

"Check again, huh?"

"Still no joy," Miss Sipp reported later in the morning. "They're telling me there are two possibilities. Possibility number one: Someone discovered it and removed it. P0ssibility number two: RAINBOW and/or SNIPER may be in the hands of the KGB."

"The sons of b.i.t.c.hes left out possibility number three," Jack blurted out, his words infused with seething irritability. "The microphone and/or one of the transmitters may be defective."

"They tested the material before they installed it," Miss Sipp said quietly. Ironing out the wrinkles in her skirt with a palm, she came around the desk and touched her finger tips to the back of Jack's wrist in a sisterly way. "Face the music Jack. You've become emotionally involved with your courier. This is definitely not a healthy situation."

Jack shook off her hand. "I never figured out why Harvey wanted me to bug them in the first place-he s getting everything SNIPER knows spelled out on pieces of silk. "

"Mr. Torriti is a very methodical person, Jack. Count on him to cover angles others dont know exist."

Tack turned up early at the rehearsal hall on Hardenbergstra.s.se for the pillar Friday night rendezvous with Lili, only to discover a hand-printed note taped to Aristide's cubbyhole. It announced that Lili's dance cla.s.ses had heen cancelled until further notice. At wit's end, Jack dispatched an all-points enquiry to Berlin Base's army of informers asking if anyone had gotten wind of an important arrest in the Soviet sector. The answers that came filtering back rea.s.sured him slightly: There had been no visible signs of any earthshaking arrests. The KGB officers at Karlshorst were preoccupied with a new Moscow Centre regulation requiring officers being rotated back to the Motherland to pay a stiff duty on furniture, clothing, automobiles, motor scooters and bicycles imported from the German Democratic Republic; there even had been some talk of circulating a pet.i.tion but the rezident. General Ilichev, had chewed out the ringleaders and nipped the proto-rebellion in the bud. Still not satisfied. Jack got hold of the Berlin Base listening-station logs recording radio traffic into and out of Karlshorst. Again, there was nothing out of the ordinary. He read through the last few days of reports from Watchers keeping an eye on Soviet airports. There were the usual nights, all scheduled. Jack even had the Fallen Angel check the private dance school on Alexanderplatz where Lili taught mornings; a note on the concierge's window said that, until further notice, Fraulein Mittag's cla.s.s would be taught by Frau Haeckler. On the way back to the American zone the Fallen Angel had dropped by the caretaker's flat under the Professor's apartment to see if her spanking new Czech radio was functioning properly; to see, also, if he could pry out of her news of the whereabouts of the couple who lived overhead. The radio, the Fallen Angel told Jack, had been tuned to the Radio Liberty wavelength in Munich. The arthritis medicine hadn't had much of an effect on the pain. The people who lived upstairs were away. Period.

Hoping against hope that there was an innocent explanation for RAINBOW'S dropping from sight, Jack went to the Tuesday night rendezvous. The sign posted on Aristide's cubbyhole cancelling dance lessons was gone. As suddenly as she had disappeared, Lili reappeared. Watching from the shadows of the doorway across from the stage entrance, Jack monitored her arrival. n.o.body seemed to be following her. Two hours later her students duck-walked off after the cla.s.s. Rushing into the narrow corridor that reeked of sweat and talc.u.m powder, taking the steps three at a time, Jack burst into the top floor rehearsal hall to discover Lili standing with her back arched and one long leg stretched out along the barre.

Gripping her wrist, he pried her away from the barre. "Where have you been?" he demanded harshly.

"Please, you are hurting me-"

"I was afraid you'd been-"

"I could not think of how to get word to you-"

"If you'd been arrested-

Jack let go of her wrist. They both took a deep breath. "Jack-in-the-box," Lili whispered. She placed the flat of her palm on his solar plexus and pushed him back and shook her head once and then, sighing like a child folded herself into his arms. "Herr Professor's brother died suddenly. We had to go to Dresden for the funeral. We stayed a few days in order to help his wife put things in order... there were bank accounts, there was an insurance policy. Oh, Jack, this is not possible. What are we to do?"

"Give me time," he said. "I'll think of something."

"What permits you to hope that time exist for us?" she murmured, breathing words into his ear that were as moist and as warm as a square of silk.

Jack crushed her to him. "Spend a night with me, Lili," he pleaded. "Only one."

"No," she said, clinging to him. "I must not..." Her voice trailed off weakly.

Lili twisted in the narrow wooden bed so that her back was toward Jack. Pressing into her, he buried his mouth in the nape of her neck and ran a calloused palm along the curve of her hip. Her voice, husky from hours of love-making, drifted back over a lean shoulder. "Did you ever notice how, when a train goes very quickly, everything close to the tracks becomes blurred? But if you blink your eyes rapidly you can stop the motion for an instant, you can freeze the images. You are going by me tonight with the speed of light, Jacklight. In the eye of my mind-"

"In your mind's eye-"

"Yes, in my mind's eye I blink to stop the motion and freeze the images of us copulating."

Jack could feel the sleekness and hardness of a dancer's muscles along her thigh. "Describe what you see."

"I have, of course, experienced physical love before... but it has been a long long while since..."

Jack thought of the Fallen Angel snapping open his small telescope and seeing Lili fall into the embrace of an older man with snow-white hair. "Start at the start," Jack said. "We'll relive tonight together."

Lili shuddered. "I consent, the last time we see each other in the rehearsal hall, to meet you at this small hotel for voyagers in the French Quarter. I tell Herr Professor I am spending the night with my childhood girlfriend in Potsdam; I am surprised not so much by the lie as the fact that it pa.s.ses effortlessly through my lips. I do as you instructed me-I walk the wrong way down single-direction streets to be positive I am not being followed. Then, my heart beating wildly, I walk directly here."

Jack laughed into her neck. "I also made sure you weren't being followed."

"The clerk at the desk smiles knowingly when she gives me the key but I do not feel embarra.s.sed. The opposite is true-I feel proud... proud that someone as beautiful as you, Jackstraw, has so much desire for me."

"Desire is a weak word, Lili."

"I wait in the room until I hear the sound of your steps on the landing. I have listened for them so many times in the theater that I recognize them immediately. I open the door. This is the precise point at which things began to move quickly... to blur."

"Blink. Describe the snapshots."

"Snap? Shots?"

"That's what cameras do-they freeze images. We call them snapshots."

"I will attempt it. I see me, unable to find words with which to greet you, reaching up to unfasten my earrings."

"The gesture took my breath away, Lili. It seemed to me that all life can offer in the way of intimacy begins with you taking off your earrings."

"I see you pulling your shirt over your head. I see you removing an ugly object from your belt and sliding it under the pillow. I watch you unb.u.t.toning my dress. I fold my garments as you take them off and place them carefully on a chair, which amuses you-I can suppose, in the style of Americans, you would prefer to have me throw them on the floor. I feel the back of your hand brush against the skin of my breast. Oh, I see the melting together of our clothes-less bodies, I see your eyes wide open as you press your mouth against my mouth-"

"Your eyes must have been open to notice."

"I did not want to miss any part of the ballet."

"Give me more images, Lili."

'More snapshots, yes. I possess images for a lifetime of remembering. You carry me to this bed, you loom over me in the faint light coming from the left-open door of the closet, you caress my unused body with your enormous hands and your famished mouth." Lili sighed into the pillow. "You enter slowly into me, you manipulate me this way and that, now you are facing me, now you are behind me, now I am on top of you or alongside you. You are very good at this business of love-making."

"It is the woman who makes the man good at the business of love-making, " Jack said, discovering a truth when he heard himself say it. "We are good lovers with a very few, unremarkable lovers with most and lousy lovers with some. It is not something to be taken for granted, being a good lover. It is never for sure "

"We do not have a long time together," Lili warned him.

"Whatever time we have is enough to persuade me that your images are more powerful than my fantasies."

They dozed for a while, then came awake as the first sounds of traffic reached their ears and the first gray streaks of dawn reached their eyes. Jack started to make love to her again but she murmured that she was sore and he was hurting her and he stopped. Lili got out of bed and washed at the bidet behind the screen in the corner of the room and dressed. They had breakfast, stale rolls and margarine and jelly and hot chocolate made with powdered milk, in the small room behind the concierge's office.

Out on the sidewalk, Lili's face darkened. "And how shall we say goodbye?"

"We won't," Jack said. "When I was a kid my mother used to take me to Atlantic City every Thanksgiving. I remember standing on the beach at the edge of the ocean, my knickerbockers pulled up above my knees, watching as the tide washed the sand out from under my bare feet each time it receded. It left me feeling dizzy, lightheaded. Your going, like the tide's, gives me the same feeling."

"I am the sand under your bare feet." Lili turned away to look at men with blackened faces, who were carting sacks of coal from a truck into the bas.e.m.e.nt of an apartment building. "Life is an acc.u.mulation of small mistakes," she said suddenly.

"Why do you speak of mistakes?" Jack asked in annoyance. "To tell me that our night together was a mistake?"

"That is not at all what I meant. It is my way of telling you in one or two sentences the story of my life," she explained. "I have concluded that the problem is not so much the acc.u.mulation of small mistakes but the big ones we make trying to correct them."

Later that night the teardrop planted in SNIPER'S floorboards detected the sound of voices, activating the transmitter hidden in the lighting fixture below. In the morning a transcript arrived on Jack's desk. It was filled with half-garbled fragments of sentences from people walking into and out of the room, rumors of a famous marriage on the rocks, a hurried declaration of undying devotion from an older man to a younger woman, the punch line an anti-Soviet joke, a flowery tribute to someone's cooking. It was pretty much what the microphone had been picking up from the start: the inconsequential prattle of a couple in the privacy of their own apartment, as apposed to intelligence secrets, which SNIPER collected at the university or his government offices. After a while there was a long silence, followed by a quiet and intense conversation between what sounded like a German (obviously SNIPER) and a Pole talking in the only language they had in common, which was English.

It was the transcription of this conversation that intrigued Jack. The text contained details of bacteriological warfare testing on the Baltic island of Rueen, uranium production in the Joachimstal area of the Harz Mountains and the latest Soviet nuclear fission experiments in Central Asia. Then the two men chatted about friends they had in common and what had happened to them over the years; one had died of colon cancer, another had left his wife for a younger woman, still another had defected to the French and now lived in Paris. Suddenly the Pole mentioned that he supposed the Russians had an important spy in British intelligence. How could he know such a thing, asked the older man, obviously surprised. The conversation broke off when a woman's footsteps came back into the room. There was some murmured thanks for the brandy, the clink of gla.s.s against gla.s.s. The microphone picked up the woman's cat-like footfalls as she quit the room. The older man repeated his question: how could his guest possibly know the Russians had a spy in British intelligence. Because the Polish intelligence service, the UB, was in possession of a highly cla.s.sified British intelligence doc.u.ment, the Pole said. He had seen the doc.u.ment with his own eyes. It was a copy of the British MI6's "watch list" for Poland. What is a watch list? the older man inquired. It was a list of Polish nationals that MI6's Warsaw Station considered potential a.s.sets and worth cultivating. The list could have been stolen from British intelligence agents in Warsaw, the older man suggested. No, no, the Pole maintained. The copy he had seen bore internal routing marks and initials indicating it had been circulated to a limited number ofMI6 intelligence officers, none of whom was serving in Warsaw.

The conversation moved on to other things-news of friction between the Polish Communists and the Russians, the suppression of a Warsaw magazine for publishing an article about the ma.s.sacre of thousands of Polish officers in Katyn Forest near Smolensk in 1943, a spirited discussion of whether the Germans or the Russians had killed the Poles (both men agreed it had been the Russians), a promise to keep in touch, a warning that letters were likely to be opened. Then RAINBOW'S voice could be heard saying goodbye to the Pole. There were heavy footsteps on the stair case, followed by the sound of gla.s.ses being cleared away and a door closing.

Looking up from the transcript, Jack produced a new series of snapshots: he could see SNIPER removing his old-fashioned starched collar and the studs from his shirt; he could see RAINBOW reaching up to take off her earrings, he could see the smile on her lips as she remembered the effect the small gesture had had on Jack; he could see her coming back from the toilet in a shapeless cotton nightdress; he could see her turning down the cover of the four poster bed and slipping under the sheets next to the man to whom she owed so much.

Shaking off the images. Jack reread the pa.s.sages concerning the Soviet spy in MI6. If the Sorcerer wasn't already on his way to Washington to flaunt his barium meals in Mother's face and unmask the Soviet mole, he would have delivered this new serial to him right away. No matter. The gist of the conversation would turn up in SNIPER'S distinctive handwriting on the warm silk that Jack would extract with his own fingers from Lili's bra.s.siere.

14.

ARLINGTON, SUNDAY, MAY 20, 1951.

WEARING A SOILED GARDENER'S Ap.r.o.n OVER AN OLD SHIRT AND washed-out chinos, James Jesus Angleton was sweeping the aisles of the greenhouse he had recently installed in the back yard of his suburban Arlington house, across the Potomac from the District of Columbia and the Pickle Factory on the Reflecting Pool. "What I'm doing," he said, a soggy cigarette glued to his lower lip, a hacking cough scratching at the back of his throat, a dormant migraine lurking under his eyelids, "is breeding a hybrid orchid known as a 'Cattleya cross.' Cattleya is a big corsage orchid that comes in a rainbow of colors. If I succeed in crossings new Cattleya, I plan to call it the Cicely Angleton after my wife."

The Sorcerer loosened the knot of his tie and slung his sports jacket over the back of a bamboo chair. He shrugged out of his shoulder holster, and hung it and the pearl-handled revolver from the k.n.o.b of a ventilation window. "I'm a G.o.dd.a.m.n Neanderthal when it comes to flowers, Jim. So I'll bite-how does someone cross an orchid?"

"For G.o.d's sake, don't sit on it," Angleton cried when he saw Torriti starting to back his bulky body into the chair. "The bamboo won't hold your weight."

" Sorry. Sorry."

"It's all right."

"I am sorry."

Angleton went back to his sweeping. Out of the corner of his eye he kept track of Torriti, who began meandering aimlessly around the aisles, running his finger tips over clay pots and small jars and gardening t00ls set out on a bamboo table. "Crossing orchids is a very long and very tedious process," Angleton called across the greenhouse, "not unlike the business ofcounterespionage."

"You don't say."

Angleton abruptly stopped sweeping. "I do say. Trying to come up with a hybrid involves taking the pollen from one flower and inseminating it into another. Ever read any of Rex Stout's mystery novels? He's got a detective named Nero Wolfe who breeds orchids in his spare time. Terrific writer, Rex Stout. You ought to get hold of him."

"I'm too busy solving G.o.dd.a.m.n mysteries to read G.o.dd.a.m.n mystery novels," Torriti remarked. "So what makes crossing orchids like counterespionage?"

Leaning on the broom handle, Angleton bent his head and lit a fresh cigarette from the embers of the one in his mouth. Then he flicked the b.u.t.t into a porcelain spittoon overflowing with cigarette stubs. "It can take twelve months for the seedpod to develop," he explained, "at which point you plant the seed in one of those small jars there. Please don't knock any of them over, Harvey. It takes another twelve months for the seed to grow an inch or two. The eventual flowering, if there is a flowering, could take another five years. Counterespionage is like that-you nurture seeds in small jars for years, you keep the temperature moist and hot, you hope the seeds will flower one day but there's no guarantee. You need the patience of a saint, which is what you don't have, Harvey. Orchid breeding and counterintelligence are not your cup of tea."

Torriti came around an aisle to confront Angleton. "Why do you say that, Jim?"

"I remember you back in Italy right after the war. You were guilty of the capital crime of impatience." Angleton's rasping voice, the phrases he used, suddenly had a whetted edge to them. "You were obsessed about getting even with anybody who was perceived to have crossed you-your friends in the Mafia, the Russians, me."

"And people say I I have the memory of an elephant!" have the memory of an elephant!"

"Remember Rome, Harvey? Summer, nineteen forty-six? You lost an agent, he turned up in a garbage dump with his fingers and head missing. You identified him from an old bullet wound that the doctors who performed the autopsy mistook for an appendicitis scar. You were quite wild, you took it personally, as if someone had spit in your face. You didn't sleep for weeks while you walked back the cat on the affair. You narrowed the suspects down to eight, then four, then two, then one. You decided it had been the mistress of the dead man. Funny thing is you may have been right. We never got a chance to question her, to find out whom she worked for, to play her back. She drowned under what the cambinieri described as mysterious circ.u.mstances-she apparently stripped to the skin and went swimming off a boat at midnight. Curious part was she didn't own a boat and couldn't swim."

"She couldn't swim because there was a G.o.dd.a.m.n chunk of sc.r.a.p iron tied to her G.o.dd.a.m.n ankle," Torriti said. He laughed under his alcoholic breath. "I was young and impetuous in those days. Now that I've grown up I'd use her. When she'd been used up, that's when I'd tie the G.o.dd.a.m.n iron her G.o.dd.a.m.n ankle and throw her overboard."

Torriti hiked up his baggy users, which tapered and came to a point at the ankles; Angleton caught glimpse of another holster strapped to one ankle.

"There's a bond between agent and his handler, an umbilical cord, the kind of thing that exists between a father and a son," Torriti was saying. "You're too a.n.a.lytical to get a handle on it, Jim. You've got dazzling theories into which you fit everything. I don't have theories. What I know I pick up the hard way-I get my hands and knees dirty working in the G.o.dd.a.m.n field."

"You operate on the surface of things. I dig deeper." Angleton wearied of the sparring. "What did you have to tell me that couldn't wait until Monday morning?"

"I'm in the process of writing a memorandum to the Director laying out the case that your pal Philby is a Soviet spy. Has been since the early thirties. As you're the Company's counterintelligence honcho, I thought it was only fair to give you some advance warning. On top of that, I thought we ought to take precautions to make sure Philby doesn't blow the coop."

"You'll only make a fool of yourself, Harvey."

"I have the son-of-a-b.i.t.c.h by the b.a.l.l.s, Jim."

"You want to lay out the case for me."

"That's what brought me across the G.o.dd.a.m.n Potomac on a drizzly Sunday afternoon when I could be drinking in my G.o.dd.a.m.n hotel room."

Angleton leaned the broom against the side of the greenhouse and produced a small pad from his hip pocket. "Mind if I make notes?"

"No skin off my G.o.dd.a.m.n nose."