The Company_ A Novel Of The CIA Part 45

"f.u.c.k them all."

What I'm not saying, Harvey, is you've been around a long time. You've pulled your weight and then some."

"What you're not saying is I ought to call it a day, right?"

"All things considered, that would probably be the best thing to do, Harvey"

"I'm glad it was you they sent, Jack." The Sorcerer, suddenly sober, straightened in the chair. "Do they want me to hang in here until the new Chief of Station comes out?"

"I'm the new Chief of Station, Harvey."

Torriti nodded listlessly. "At your pleasure, sport."

The Sorcerer organized his own farewell bash in the ballroom of the Rome Hilton. For background music there were recordings of arias sung by Luciano Pavarotti, an Italian tenor who had made a scintillating debut earlier in the year. Liquor flowed. Speeches were delivered. The phrase "end of an era" came back like a refrain. Around midnight Jack finally managed to get a call through to Millie in Washington; she and Anthony would be flying over the following week, their furniture would be coming out on an MSTS freighter at the end of the month, she said. Had Jack found an apartment yet? Jack promised he'd start looking first thing Monday.

Returning to the ballroom, Jack discovered that the Hilton's night manager had turned off the air conditioning. The handful of people remaining drifted toward the exits. Two secretaries were fending off a very soused Torriti, who was trying to talk them into transporting the party, or what was left of it, to "a more reputable hotel than the Hilton." At two in the morning Jack and his old boss from Berlin Base stumbled out onto the sidewalk in front of the hotel. A stifling August heat wave struck them in the face. Jack gasped. "We need air conditioning."

"We need booze," Torriti agreed. Hanging on to each other's arms, the two stumbled down the street to the Excelsior on Via Veneto and managed to bribe the bartender into giving them one for the road.

Munching an olive, Torriti squinted at Jack. "So you loved her, didn't you, sport?"

"Who?"

"The German broad. The dancer. The one that went by the code name :RAINBOW. The one that filled her mouth with water and shot herself."

"You mean Lili. Yeah, Harvey. I did love her."

"I figured." Torriti threw back some more whiskey. "She wasn't one of my barium meals, Jack."

"That's what you said at the time. I never thought otherwise."

"There was a war on but there are lines I don't cross."

"I know that, Harvey."

"You believe me, don't you, kid?"

"Sure I do."

"Cause if you didn't, if you thought she'd been one of my G.o.dd.a.m.n barium meals, it would hurt real bad, you see what I mean?"

"I never blamed you."

The Sorcerer punched Jack in the shoulder. "That means a lot to me, sport." He signaled for a refill.

"Last one, please," implored the bartender as he refilled their gla.s.ses. "I have this second job, it starts at eight-thirty, which leaves me five and a half hours to sleep."

Torriti clinked gla.s.ses with Jack. "My barium meals paid off, sport. It was yours truly who smoked out Philby when f.u.c.king Jesus James you-know-who was buying him lunch at La Nicoise."

"The Company owes you, Harvey."

Torriti leaned so far toward Jack that he would have fallen off the barstool if he hadn't grabbed the bra.s.s rail. "There's another Russian mole in the Company," he murmured, the liquor breath stirring the air around his companions face. "The famous SASHA. And I know who it is."

"You know the ident.i.ty of SASHA?"

"f.u.c.king A. I'll let you in on a little secret, kid. SASHA is none other than Jesus James f.u.c.king Angleton himself." When Jack started to smile Torriti turned ornery. "I've given this a lot of thought, pal. Okay, the evidence is circ.u.mstantial, I'm the first to admit it. Look at it this way: If the KGB actually has a mole inside the Company he couldn't do more damage than Angleton."

"I'm not sure I follow you-"

"Angleton's been turning the CIA inside out for the last ten years looking for moles, right? Tell me something, sport-has he ever found one? The answer is negative. But he's crippled the Soviet Russia division with his suspicions. He's got everyone looking over everyone else's shoulder. I know guys who're afraid to bring in a defector for fear Angleton will think they're vouching for a KGB plant because they're a KGB plant. I made a head count once-Jesus James's ruined the careers of something like a hundred officers. He sits on the promotion board-"

"I didn't know that."

"Well, I know that. He's blackballed dozens of promotions, he's forced good people into early retirement. One Soviet Russia division officer on Angleton's s.h.i.t list went and pa.s.sed a lie defector, at which point he was rea.s.signed to Paris as Chief of Station. You know what Angleton did?"

"What did he do, Harvey?"

"f.u.c.king Jesus James flew to Paris and personally warned the French counterintelligence people that the CIA station chief was a Soviet mole. Th f.u.c.king frogs immediately cut off all contact with the station. Holy s.h.i.t. Angleton's going around telling anyone in Congress who'll listen that the Sino-Soviet split is KGB disinformation designed to lull the West into letting down its guard. Ditto for t.i.to in Yugoslavia."

The bartender finished rinsing gla.s.ses. "Gentlemen, have a heart. I need I to close now. "

The Sorcerer slid off the seat and hiked his baggy trousers high up on his vast waist. "Remember where you heard it first, sport," he said. "Jesus James f.u.c.king Angleton is SASHA."

"I wont forget, Harvey."

"f.u.c.ker thought he'd buy me off with a holster but I'm one jump ahead of him. s.h.i.t, I may go around in vicious circles but I go around one jump ahead of everyone."

Outside the Excelsior, Torriti looked up and down the deserted avenue, trying to figure out which way to go and what to do with the rest of his life. With Jack trailing behind, he staggered off in the direction of the American emba.s.sy, a block away. As he drew abreast of the gate, the young Marine on duty in the gla.s.s booth recognized him.

"Morning to you, Mr. Torriti, sir."

"No f.u.c.king way," the Sorcerer called over his shoulder to Jack as he waddled past the Marine down the walkway toward the main entrance. "RAINBOW wasn't one of my barium meals." He reached the wall and unzipped his fly and flexed his knees and began to urinate against the side of the emba.s.sy. "I'd remember if she was, sport. Something like that'd lodge in your skull like a G.o.dd.a.m.n tumor."

Jack caught up with the Sorcerer. "I can see how it would, Harvey." He conjured up a vision of Roberto and Orlando and the other Cubans jammed into one of Castro's dark dungeons. Blinking hard to stifle the image, he opened his fly and began to relieve himself against the emba.s.sy, too.

Torriti didn't appear to notice the puddle of urine forming around his scuffed shoes. "You're still the Sorcerers Apprentice, right, sport?"

"I am, Harvey. The Sorcerers Apprentice. And proud to be."

PART FOUR.

SLEEPING DOGS.

She tried to fancy what the flame of a candle looks like after the candle is blown out.

Snapshot: a black-and-white photograph, taken in the dead of night with ASA 2,000 film using available light from wrought iron lampposts, shows two figures pa.s.sing each other in the middle of a deserted bridge. They appear to have stopped for a moment to exchange words. The older of the two, a haggard man with thick eyegla.s.ses that have turned fuliginous in the overhead light, is threading long bony fingers through his thinning hair. The gesture conveys anxiety. The other man, younger and taller than the first and wearing a shapeless raincoat, seems to be smiling at a private joke. The photograph was snapped by a journalist from Der Spiegel who had staked out the bridge after being tipped off by the Gehlen Organization in Pullach. Before Der Spiegel could go to press with the photo, the CIA got wind of its existence and arranged for the negative and prints to be seized by a German state prosecutor. The negative and all existing copies of the photograph were turned over to the chief of Berlin Base, who shredded everything but the single copy that was filed away in the station's archives. Stamped diagonally across the photograph are the words "Top Secret" and "Archives Only.

1.

CHERYOMUSKI, MOSCOW DISTRICT, WEDNESDAY, MAY 1, 1974.

ON TELEVISION, WORKERS FROM THE RED STAR CHEMICAL FERTILIZER Plant Number Four in Nizhnevartovsk on the Ob River could be seen streaming into Red Square carrying a giant papier-mache head of Leonid Brezhnev, the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR. As Brezhnev's head, bobbing above a sea of people, came abreast of the reviewing stand atop Lenin's Tomb, a slip of a girl wearing gold lame tights and a silver tank top detached herself from the marchers to skip up the stairs at the side of the tomb and present the First Secretary, his face thick with makeup for the television cameras, with a bouquet of red and pink carnations. "Oh, she is awfully cute, don't you think?" exclaimed one of the girls glued to the TV screen, a twelve-year-old Chechen with guileless eyes. "If Uncle were watching he would certainly pick up the telephone and ask her name."

Uncle was watching-he'd been invited by the First Secretary to join the head of the Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti and several senior Directorate chiefs in his private suite in the Kremlin, where they could observe the May Day parade on a giant television screen while sipping Champagne and snacking on zakuski. In Uncle's apartment in the Apatov Mansion near Cheryomuski, the nieces-they were reduced to five now; the sixth, a Uighur from the Xinjiang Uigur region of Central Asia, had been sent home when it was, discovered, during bath hour, that she had started menstruating-grew bored with the parade, which still had four hours to go, and decided to play hide-and-seek. Crouching behind Uncle's bathrobes in a closet in the bedroom, the Cuban girl, Revolucion, discovered a toy revolver loaded with toy bullets in a s...o...b..x. "Girls, girls," she yelled, emerging from her hiding place, "come see what I've found."

The weather had turned unseasonably warm but n.o.body had thought to turn off the mansion's central heating. Uncle's bedroom was like a sauna The five girls stripped to their cotton underpants and undershirts and settled in a circle on Uncle's great bed, and Revolucion taught them a new game she had heard about in Havana. First she removed the make-believe bullets until only one was left in the revolver. Looking up, she recited from memory a pa.s.sage from Uncle's favorite book. '"I'll be judge, I'll be jury' said cunning old Fury. 'I'll try the whole cause, and condemn you to death."' Then she spun the cylinder and, closing her eyes, inserted the tip of the long barrel between her thin lips. Holding the revolver with both hands she pushed against the trigger with her thumb. There was an audible click as the hammer came down on an empty chamber. Smiling innocently, she pa.s.sed the handgun to the Kazakh niece on her right. When the girl seemed uncertain about what exactly she was expected to do, Revolucion guided her-she spun the cylinder and inserted the barrel in the girl's mouth and showed her how to trip the trigger with her thumb. Once again there was a loud click.

The Chechen, who was next in the circle, shook her head. "Oh, dear, I really don't wish to play this game," she announced.

"But you must," Revolucion insisted. "Once a game's begun there can be no turning back. It's like Alice and her friends, don't you see? Everybody shall win and all shall have prizes."

"I don't know," the Chechen said uncertainly.

"Play, play," pleaded the others in chorus. The Chechen girl picked up the gun reluctantly. She spun the cylinder and, pouting to better suck on the barrel, inserted the tip ever so slightly into her mouth.

"Do go ahead and play, for it's only a game," Revolucion said impatiently. "Play, play," the others taunted when she still hesitated. s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g up her eyes, the Chechen sighed and tripped the trigger with a jerk of her thumb.

There was a deafening report as the back of her skull exploded, spattering the girls and the wall behind the bed with blood and flecks of bone and brain.

Uncle found the body of the Chechen when he returned from Moscow that evening. He was distressed for the longest time, and calmed down only after men in white coveralls enshrouded the dead girl in the blood-drenched sheets and took her away. The nieces, beside themselves with fright, were all made to bathe while Uncle himself sponged the wall behind the bed clean of blood and brain tissue. Revolucion was given a scolding about the perils of playing with firearms and sent off without supper, and was not permitted to partic.i.p.ate in the hugging and fondling that always followed the nightly reading from the worn pages of Uncle's now blood-speckled bedside book.

The next afternoon a new child appeared at the doorway of Uncle's suite at Apatov Mansion. Her name turned out to be Axinya. She came from the city of Nizhnevartovska on the Ob River, and was wearing gold lame tights and a silver tank top.

Moving like phantoms through the pre-dawn stillness, the seven members of the hit team, dressed in identical black trousers and turtleneck sweaters and sneakers, a.s.saulted the house in Oak Park near Chicago. Three of the attackers cut the telephone lines and the electricity cables, then came over the high brick wall with shards of gla.s.s cemented into the top, dropped lightly down onto the gra.s.s and broke into the gatehouse. Using aerosol cans filled with an experimental Soviet nerve gas, they subdued the three bodyguards sleeping on Army cots before they could raise an alarm. Two other attackers cut the gla.s.s out of a bas.e.m.e.nt window and, slipping through the frame, landed in what had once been the coal bin before the house was switched over to oil. Making their way to the small service apartment at the back of the bas.e.m.e.nt, they bound and gagged the Korean couple in their beds. The leader of the hit team and another attacker scrambled up a trellis to a second-floor terrace, jimmied open French doors with a short crowbar that had been ground down to a thin wedge at the end, then padded through a room filled with round tables and wicker chairs to the hallway. The bodyguard on night duty had nodded off in an easy chair. He was neutralized with nerve gas and lowered soundlessly to the parquet floor. Gripping their Czech 7.65 pistols fitted with silencers, the two invaders pushed through a door into a large bedroom that reeked from the cigar b.u.t.ts heaped in a gla.s.s ashtray on a night table. Startled out of a sound sleep, a short, balding man wearing striped pajamas sat upright in bed to find himself pinned in the beams of two flashlights.

"What duh f.u.c.k-"

A young woman with long dyed hair and heavy b.r.e.a.s.t.s slid naked from the sheets and cowered in a corner, shielding her body with the hem of the window curtain. One of the invaders nodded toward the bathroom door. The woman, only too glad to escape, darted across the room and locked herself in the bathroom.

From the bed the man croaked, "Who duh f.u.c.k sent you?"

The hit team leader produced lengths of nylon cord and began tying up the man's wrists and ankles to the four bedposts. The second attacker kept flashlight and pistol trained on the man's face.

"Holy s.h.i.t, you're makin' uh big f.u.c.kin' mistake. You know who I am? f.u.c.k, dis can't be happenin' to me." The last length of nylon was slipped over his left ankle and pulled tight against a bedpost. The man in pajamas, spread-eagled on the bed, began to panic.

"Wait, wait, listen up, whatever, whoever's payin' you pays you, I'll pay you double. I swear to Christ. Double! Triple, even. Sure, triple." He twisted his head toward the door. "Charlie, where duh f.u.c.k are you?" He turned back to his captors. "Why not triple? Do not laugh uh gift horse in duh mouth. You need to be smart, dis is uh opportunity to make big bucks. Jesus Christ, don't just stand there lookin' at me like dat, say something."

The hit team leader removed a pillow from the bed. "Hubiese sido mejor para ustedes de no haber nacido nunca, " he murmured.

"Oh, Jesus, I don't know Spanish. Why duh f.u.c.k are you talkin' Spanish?"

"I'm talking Cuban," the leader told the man spread-eagled on the bed. "I am telling you: It will be good for you if you had not been born."

"Holy Mother of G.o.d, I'm ain't goin' to croak. I won't do it. I refuse." The hit team leader slowly lowered the pillow over the victim's face. Wrenching his head from side to side, pulling on the bindings until the nylon cord bit into his wrists, the short balding man spit out half-stifled phrases, "...please don't... beggin' you... love of G.o.d... please, oh, please... mercy on... I'm on my f.u.c.kin' knees... I'm pleadin' with you..."

The other attacker pressed the tip of the silencer attached to his Czech pistol deep into the pillow and shot seven bullets through it into the man's face.

The self-propelled garbage scow that normally serviced ships anch.o.r.ed off North Miami Beach cut across Dumfoundling Bay after midnight. The sea was flat, the offsh.o.r.e breeze barely able to stir the worn company pennant flying from a halyard on the mast. Astern of the scow headlights flickered playfully along the low Florida coastline. Overhead, a gibbous moon burned through the haze, churning up flecks of silver in the vessel's wake. In the well of the scow, a tall, silver-haired man with a mournful face stood ankle-deep in garbage, his legs spread for balance. Four men wearing black trousers, turtleneck sweaters and rubber boots kept Czech pistols trained on him. The silver-haired man took off his blazer and, folding it inside out, set it down on the garbage. Then he undid his tie and removed a pair of silver cufflinks and set them on the blazer. Gripping the side of the scow, he kicked off one alligator loafer and then the other, then pulled off his socks and the garters that kept them up on his calves. He undid the silver buckle on his belt and the b.u.t.tons on his fly, dropped his trousers to his ankles and gingerly stepped out of them, trying to avoid placing his bare feet in the more revolting garbage. He unb.u.t.toned his shirt and added it to the pile of clothing. He removed the watch on his wrist and the diamond ring on his pinkie and tossed them overboard. Then he looked up at the leader of the hit team, who was watching from the open pilot house.

The leader gestured with a finger toward the man's white skivvy shorts. Without a word the silver-haired man slipped them off and folded them onto the pile. He straightened and stood there, stark naked and hugging his hairy chest because of the chill.

"Awright, just tell me who wants me whacked," the naked man called up to the pilot house.

"Hubiese sido mejor para ustedes de no haber nacido nunca, " the hit team leader shouted back.

The naked man, who spoke Spanish, shook his head in disgust. "Whoever, you tell him for me to go f.u.c.k himself," he said.

The other men moved in to attach his wrists and ankles with telephone line, which they tightened with pliers until the wire cut into the skin, drawing blood. The naked man didn't utter a word as he was lifted into an empty oil drum and forced down until he was seated in it with his knees jammed up against his chin. The top of the barrel was screwed on and locked in place with several blows from a sledgehammer. The four men in turtleneck sweaters wrestled the barrel up onto the shelf that ran from stem to stern above the garbage well. A length of heavy anchor chain was wrapped around the barrel and secured with thick wire. The team leader nodded. The four men rolled the barrel to the edge of the scow. Just before it was pushed overboard a hollow voice could be heard crying out, "The f.u.c.ker should go f.u.c.k himself."

The barrel, with the anchor chain around it, hit the water and floated for a moment before it began to sink with excruciating slowness into the sea.