The Company_ A Novel Of The CIA Part 82

"I am having your address, lady."

Torriti set the phone back down on its hook, treated himself to a restorative shot of booze from his nearly empty flask and, pulling up the collar of a rumpled sports jacket that had been washed and worn to death, headed for the Arbat.

The Rabbi snared the intercom speaker with one of his canes and dragged the small wooden box closer so he wouldn't miss a word. He held his breath and listened, but all he heard was absolute silence. Then a primeval curdling whimper filled the room. It originated at the bottom of a deep pit of physical pain. Ben Ezra winced: he had to remind himself that ends did justify means; that the ends, continuing to get hundreds of thousands of Jews out of Russia, vindicated the torture of one man who was involved in a plot to prevent it. Gradually the whimper faded and one of the young men could be heard repeating the question.

What is the secret identification number that provides access to the account.

When the Devisenbeschaffer didn't immediately respond, the low buzz of what sounded like an electric razor came over the speaker. Then words detonated like Chinese firecrackers set off in series.

Nicht-das-schalte-es-aus-Ich-werde-es-Dir-sagen!

Enough, a voice ordered. Switch it off.

The buzzing stopped.

The numbers came across sandwiched between sobs and whimpers. Seven-eight-four-two, then the word Wolke, then nine-one-one.

The Rabbi scratched the numbers and the word on a pad. Seven-eight-four-two, then Wolke or cloud, then nine-one-one. He filled his lungs with air and looked up. It was a given in the world of espionage that everyone broke sooner or later. Ben Ezra knew of Jews on mission who had been instructed to hold out long enough to permit the others in their network to escape; sometimes they had, enduring torture for two, two-and-a-half days, sometimes they broke sooner. The Rabbi's own son had been caught in Syria in the mid-1970s and tortured for thirty-four hours before he cracked, at which point he had been sponged and dressed in white pajamas and hanged from a crude wooden gibbet. The German had absorbed more punishment than most; his rage at Jews had numbed him to a portion of the pain he was suffering. But he had broken.

What remained, now, was to test the numbers-and a.s.suming, as he did, that they were correct, to take control of the Devisenbeschaffer's deposits, divert the funds into various bank accounts in Switzerland and send the prearranged message to Jack McAuliffe informing him the dirty deed was done. At which point it would be up to the Sorcerer to fulfill his part of the pact. Ben Ezra had received the Sorcerer's message the previous evening: the putsch was set for 1 September. Using a scrambled telephone in a Mossad safe house, talking cryptically as an added precaution, the Rabbi had pa.s.sed this detail on to Jack McAuliffe in Washington. "Our mutual friend," Ben Ezra had said, "reminds us that we must get our applications in before the first of September if we hope to win any fellowships; any later will be too late."

"The first of September," Jack had noted on his end of the line, "doesn't leave us much time to get recommendations from the eight or ten key figures in Moscow; does our mutual friend think he can contact these people before the deadline?"

" He has started the ball rolling," the Rabbi had replied. "He expects to have the eight or ten recommendations in hand by the last week in August."

"That's cutting it pretty fine," Jack had shot back; "any possibility of speeding up the process?"

" Getting recommendations from eight or ten people at more or less the same time is a complicated process," Ben Ezra had cautioned Jack; "and we are obliged, for obvious reasons, to get it right the first time, there's no going back for a second try."

"Okay," Jack had said reluctantly, "I'll settle for the last week in August."

Now, sitting at a table in the upper floor office of the meatpacking factory, the Rabbi turned the intercom speaker around to unplug the cord. Peering through the thick lenses of his spectacles, his eyes glazed with the pain that was his constant companion, he saw, in the open back of the box, a tiny red-and-black spider dancing across tendrils that were so fine they were invisible to the naked eye. The spider, appearing suspended in s.p.a.ce, froze when Ben Ezra touched one of the strands with his thumbnail. It waited with endless patience, trying to determine if the vibrations it had picked up signaled danger. Finally it risked a tentative movement, then swiftly clawed across its invisible web and vanished into the cavernous safety of the intercom speaker.

Something resembling a scowl surfaced on Ben Ezra's bone-dry lips. His time was growing short. Soon he, too, would claw his way across an invisible web, his bad hip thrusting forward and around and back with each painful step, and vanish into the cavernous safety of the land that the Lord G.o.d had bequeathed to the descendants of the Patriarch Abraham.

The siren atop the guard tower sounded high noon at the KGB complex in the village of Mashkino, a series of two-story, L-shaped brick satellites connected by covered pa.s.sageways to the nuclear headquarters building. In the small air-conditioned conference room on the second floor of this building, the KGB Chairman, Vladimir Kryuchkov, in the best of times a testy man who tended to see the cup half empty rather man half full, stared grimly out a window. Behind him the voice of Fyodor Lomov, the foreign ministry apparatchik, droned on as he read aloud from the file that had accompanied the photographs rushed over that morning by motorcycle courier.

It seemed that the Israeli desk of the Second Chief Directorate had a surveillance team watching a husband and wife of Jewish origin who sold Oriental carpets in a hole-in-the-wall shop on a side street off the Arbat. The couple was known to have provided safe house and communication services for the Israeli Mossad in the past. The surveillance team, working out of a vacant apartment diagonally across the street from the carpet store, systematically photographed everyone going in or out of the shop. These photographs were developed every night and delivered to the Second Chief Directorate's Israeli desk in the morning.

On this particular morning the photographs were still being sorted-the mug shots of visitors who could be identified were labeled and pasted into a sc.r.a.pbook, the others were stored in a wire basket marked unidentified-when Yuri Sukhanov, the cranky head of the Ninth Chief Directorate, one of the core group of plotters working closely with KGB Chairman Kryuchkov, stopped by with a disturbing photograph that the Dresden rezident had pouched to Moscow Centre. It showed a twisted old man struggling with the aid of two canes toward a limousine surrounded by bodyguards. Dresden had tentatively identified the old man as Ezra Ben Ezra, the infamous Rabbi who was winding up a seven year tour as head of the Israeli Mossad. Walking next to him was a corpulent figure that the Dresden rezidentura had not been able to identify- but Sukhanov, a veteran KGB officer who had begun an ill.u.s.trious career at the East Berlin Karlshorst rezidentura in the mid 1950s, recognized instantly: the man accompanying Ben Ezra was none other than the Rabbi's old friend from Berlin, the legendary one-time chief of the CIA's Berlin Base, H. Torriti, a.k.a. the Sorcerer. The question on everyone's lips, of course, was: why was the head of the Mossad meeting Harvey Torriti in Dresden? Was it possible that their presence had something to do with the sums of hard currency being transferred by the Devisenbeschaffer to the Dresden branch of the Greater Russian Bank of Commerce? Or worse still, something to do with the sudden disappearance of the Devisenbeschaffer himself?

The intriguing subject was being kicked around at an informal brainstorming session when Sukhanov noticed a pile of mug shots in the wire basket labelled unidentified. Absently leafing through them, he suddenly held one up to the light. "Where did you get this?" he demanded excitedly.

The desk officer explained that it had been taken the previous day by the team watching a Jewish couple that from time to time provided field services to the Israelis. "But this is the same man photographed with the Rabbi in Dresden! It's the American Torriti," the head of the Ninth Directorate said. Sukhanov took Torriti's presence first in Dresden, then in Moscow, as an ominous omen-it could only mean that the CIA, bypa.s.sing its Moscow station, had slipped an old professional into the Soviet capitol from the outside. And that, in turn, could only mean that the Americans suspected a putsch was in the works.

It was at this point that the photographs of Ben Ezra and Torriti in Dresden, and Torriti in Moscow, were hiked out to the KGB complex at Mashkino and Kryuchkov was alerted. The premonition of the head of the Ninth Directorate caused consternation among the putschists. A war council with the leading plotters was quickly convened. Lomov finished reading through the file. The Minister of Defense, Yazov, who along with the Interior Minister, Pugo, had originally pushed for a mid-August coup d'etat, argued for moving up the date from 1 September in light of this latest information. General Varennikov, the ground forces chief and the man responsible for mustering the troops that would seize control of Moscow, had previously been against the idea because military preparations couldn't be completed that early. Now, albeit reluctantly, he saw the logic of a mid-August date. The head of the Ninth Chief Directorate, whose agents would be responsible for quarantining Gorbachev during the first hours of the coup, reminded the others that the General Secretary was in his summer residence near the Crimean town of Foros until the twentieth. Which didn't leave much time.

Everyone looked at Kryuchkov, who was still staring out the window. He remarked that there was a brownish smog hovering over the fields surrounding the village of Mashkino. It had been there for the better part of a week. Superst.i.tious peasants, he noted, believed that evil spirits lurking in the smog could cause stillbirths in pregnant women who ventured out on days like this.

In short, it was not an auspicious moment to launch new projects. Happily, he, Kryuchkov, was not superst.i.tious. Turning to his colleagues, looking particularly somber, he announced that he, too, was now in favor of moving up the date of the uprising, even if it meant that all the preparations-including the importation of large amounts of foreign currency to Moscow in order to stock the stores immediately after the coup-could not be completed in time.

"How about the nineteenth?" Kryuchkov said.

"Nineteen August sounds fine to me," Defense Minister Yazov commented. The others in the room nodded in agreement.

"So it is decided," Kryuchkov said. "We will declare a state of emergency, isolate Gorbachev and take control of the government one week from today."

Trying to walk off a chronic angst, Leo Kritzky spent the afternoon exploring the narrow streets behind the Kremlin filled with small Orthodox churches. Over the years he had become so Russian-looking that the ever-present hustlers who waylaid foreigners with offers to buy dollars or sell caviar no longer gave him a second glance. He stopped for tea and a dry cupcake in a workers' canteen, then queued at a pharmacy for a bottle of Polish cough syrup and dropped it off at his lady friend's apartment; she'd been battling a chest cold with herbal infusions but it had only gotten worse. He lingered for half an hour looking at the sketches she'd done for a children's book on Siberian elves and fairies, then took the subway back to Frunzenskaya Embankment. Hanging on to an overhead strap, swaying from side to side as the train plunged through a tunnel, his eyes fell on what he took to be a relic of seventy years of Communism: a small metal plaque at the head of the subway car with the words "October Revolution" engraved on it. He wondered how many people noticed this reminder of things past; how many of those who noticed still believed in the promise of the October Revolution. There were days when he himself thought it might better to start over again; there were other days when he tried not to think about it at all.

Arriving at Frunzenskaya Embankment number 50, entrance 9, he climbed the steps to the third floor. The janitor still had not gotten around to replacing the light bulb at the end of the corridor near his apartment, number 373. As he crouched to insert the latch key in the lock an agitated voice called from the darkness. "Sorry, sorry, but I don't suppose you happen to understand English." When Leo didn't immediately respond, the person sighed. "I didn't think so-it would have been too good to be true."

Leo squinted into the shadows. "As a matter of fact-"

"Oh, thank goodness," the woman exclaimed in relief. She materialized out of the shadows and approached Leo. "Sorry again, but I don't suppose you'd know which of these apartments Leon Kritzky lives in?"

Leo's face turned numb as stone. "Who are you?" he demanded. He raised his fingertips to his cheek and felt only dead skin.

The woman drew closer and peered at Leo. He could hear her catch her breath. "Daddy?" she whispered in a child's anguished voice.

"Tessa? Is that you?"

"Oh, Daddy," she moaned. "It is me. It's me, it's me."

Leo felt time and place and regret and heartache fall away. He opened his arms and Tessa, quaking with sobs, collapsed into them.

It was a long while before either of them could utter a word. They stood there in the shadows clinging to each other until Tessa's tears had saturated the lapel of Leo's windbreaker. Later, neither could remember how they had gotten into the apartment or who had opened the bottle of Bulgarian wine or where the open sandwiches spread with roe had come from. They gazed at each other across the folding table. Every now and then Leo would reach over and touch his daughter and her eyes, riveted on his, would brim with tears.

Tessa had checked into a hotel off Red Square but there was no question of her going back to it; they would collect her valise and the package of books she had brought for Leo the next morning. They spread a sheet on the couch for her and propped up pillows on either end of it and talked in soft voices husky with emotion into the early hours of the morning. Tessa, a thin, handsome woman closing in on forty, had just ended another in a series of love affairs; she always seemed to fall for men who were already married or leery of committing themselves to permanent relationships. And as her sister constantly reminded her, the biological clock was ticking. Tessa was toying with the idea of getting pregnant by her next lover even if the affair never went anywhere; she'd at least wind up with a child, which is what she wanted more than anything.

Vanessa? Oh, she was fine. Yes, she was still married to the same fellow, an a.s.sistant professor of history at George Washington University; their son, who had been named Philip after his grandfather, was a strapping four-year-old who already knew how to work a computer. Why hadn't she warned Leo she was coming? She hadn't wanted to get his hopes up. Hers either. She was afraid she might chicken out at the last moment, afraid of what she would find-or what she wouldn't find. She hadn't even told Vanessa where she was going. "Oh, Daddy, if only..."

"If only?"

"If only you hadn't..."

He understood what she couldn't bring herself to say. "I had allegiances and loyalties that went back to before I joined the CIA," he told her. "I was true to these allegiances and loyalties."

"Do you have any regrets?"

The regrets that had fallen away in the corridor flooded back. "Your mother," he said; "I bitterly regret what I did to Adelle. Your sister; I regret that she can't bring herself to talk to me. You; I regret that I can't share your life and you can't share what's left of mine."

"When I first saw you in the hallway, Daddy, I had the terrible feeling that you weren't glad to see me."

"No, it's not true-"

"I saw it in your eyes."

"Seeing you here is the most wonderful thing that's happened to me in seven and a half years. It's only-"

"Only what?"

"This isn't the best time to be in Moscow, Tessa."

"With Gorbachev in power, I thought it'd be a fascinating time to be in Moscow."

"That's just it. Gorbachev may not be in power long."

"Is there going to be a coup d'etat? Gosh, that would be fun-to be in the middle of a real revolution." Suddenly Tessa looked hard at her father. "Do you know something, Daddy, or are you only repeating rumors?"

"A coup is a real possibility."

"Excuse me for asking but do you still work for the KGB?"

He tried to smile. "I'm retired. I draw a pension. I get what information I have from the newspapers."

Tessa seemed relieved. "Predicting coups is like predicting the weather," she said. "Everybody knows the newspapers get it wrong most of the time. So if they say there's going to be a coup d'etat, chances are things will be quiet as h.e.l.l. Too bad for me. I could have used some excitement in my life."

5.

NEAR FOROS ON THE CRIMEAN PENINSULA, MONDAY, AUGUST 19, 1991.

FLYING INTO THE WHITEWASHED BULL'S-EYE HELIPAD IN A GIANT bug-like Army helicopter, Yevgeny saw the onion-domed Church of Foros clinging to the granite cliffs and the surf breaking against the jagged sh.o.r.eline far below it. Moments later Mikhail Gorbachev's compound on the southern Crimean cliffs overlooking the Black Sea came into view. There was a three-story main house, a small hotel for staff and security guards, a separate guest house, an indoor swimming pool and movie theater, even a long escalator to the private beach under the compound.

As soon as the helicopter had touched down, the delegation from Moscow-Yuri Sukhanov representing the KGB, General Varennikov representing the Army, Oleg Baklanov representing the military-industrial complex, Oleg Shenin from the Politburo, Gorbachev's personal a.s.sistant and chief of staff Valery Boldin, Yevgeny Tsipin representing the powerful banking sector-was rushed over to the main house in open Jeeps. As the group made its way through the marble and gilt central hall, the head of the compound's security detachment whispered to Sukhanov that he had cut off Gorbachev's eight telephone and fax lines at four thirty, as instructed. "When I informed him that he had unexpected visitors, he picked up the phone to see what it was all about," recounted the officer. "That's when he discovered the lines were dead. He even tried the direct phone to the commander in chief-the one that's kept in a box. He must have understood immediately what was happening because he turned deathly pale and summoned his family-his wife, Raisa Maksimovna, his daughter, his son-in-law. They are all with him now in the living room. Raisa was particularly shaken-I heard her say something to her husband about the Bolsheviks murdering the Romanov family after the October revolution."

Pushing through double doors, the delegation found Gorbachev and his family standing shoulder to shoulder in the middle of the grand living room. There was a breathtaking view of the cliffs and the sea through the picture window behind them. The General Secretary, barely able to control his rage, stared at his chief of staff, Boldin. "Et tu. Brute?" he said with a sneer. Gorbachev eyed the others. "Who sent you?" he asked with icy disdain.

"The committee appointed in connection with the emergency," Sukhanov told him.

"I didn't appoint such a committee," Gorbachev shot back. "Who is on it?"

Yevgeny went up to Gorbachev and handed him a sheet of onionskin on which the names of the members of the State Committee for the State of Emergency had been typed. The Secretary General fitted on a pair of eyegla.s.ses and looked at the list. "Kryuchkov! Yazov-my G.o.d, I plucked him out of nowhere to be Minister of Defense! Pugo! Varennikov! Uritzky!" Gorbachev's head rocked from side to side in disgust. "Do you really think the people are so tired that they will follow any dictator?"

General Varennikov stepped forward. "You don't have much choice in the matter, Mikhail Sergeyevich. You must go along with us and sign the emergency decree. Either that or resign."

Gorbachev glanced at Raisa and saw that she was shivering with fear. He rested a hand on her shoulder, then told the delegation, "Never-I refuse to legalize such a decree with my signature."

In a barely audible voice Raisa asked her husband, "Yeltsin-is his name on the list?"

Sukhanov said, "Yeltsin will be arrested."

Gorbachev and his wife stared into each other's eyes. Their daughter moved closer to her mother and took her hand. Gorbachev smiled grimly at both of them; they all understood that there was a strong possibility of ending up in front of a firing squad. He turned back to the delegation. "You are adventurers and traitors," he said in an even voice. "You will destroy the country. Only those who are blind to history could now suggest a return to a totalitarian regime. You are pushing Russia to civil war."

Yevgeny, conscious of having a role to play, remarked, "You are the one pushing Russia to civil war. We are trying to avoid bloodshed."

Sukhanov said, "Mikhail Sergeyevich, in the end we ask nothing from you. You will remain in Foros under house arrest. We will take care of the dirty work for you."

"Dirty work is what you will be doing," Gorbachev agreed bitterly.

"There is nothing more we can accomplish here," Sukhanov told the other members of the delegation. He approached Gorbachev and thrust out his hand; the General Secretary and the head of the KGB's Ninth Chief Directorate had been on close terms for years. Gorbachev looked down at the hand, then with a contemptuous sneer turned his back on him. Shrugging off the insult, Sukhanov led the way out of the room.

Heading back in the helicopter to Belbek airport, where a Tupolev-154 was waiting to fly them to Moscow, Sukhanov issued instructions over the radiophone to the head of the security detachment at Foros; the General Secretary and the members of his family were to be cut off from the world. No person and no news was to be allowed in or out. Understood?

The words "Your orders will be carried out" crackled over the radio.

Baklanov produced a bottle of cognac from a leather satchel and, filling small plastic cups to the brim, handed them around. Everyone started to drink. "You have to hand it to him," General Varennikov shouted over the whine of the rotors. "Anyone else in his shoes would have signed the f.u.c.king decree."

Sukhanov leaned his head back against the helicopter's bulkhead and shut his eyes. "Everything now depends on isolating Boris Yeltsin," he shouted. "Without Gorbachev, without Yeltsin, the opposition will have n.o.body to rally around."

Yevgeny agreed. "Yeltsin," he said, his thoughts far away, "is definitely the key."

Returning to Moscow well after midnight, Yevgeny rang Aza's apartment from a public phone in the airport parking lot. Using a prearranged code phrase, he summoned her to a quick meeting in a garage across the alleyway from the back door of her building. He found her waiting in the shadows when he got there and they fell into each others arms. After a moment Yevgeny pushed her away and, in short disjointed sentences, explained what had happened: the putschists had unexpectedly moved up the date of the uprising; he and some others had flown down to Foros to try to browbeat Gorbachev into signing the decree establishing the State Committee for the State of Emergency; Gorbachev had flatly refused and was being held prisoner in the Foros compound. Even as they spoke, Marshal Yazov was promulgating Coded Telegram 8825 putting all military units on red alert. Within hours detachments of tanks and half-tracks loaded with combat troops would occupy strategic positions in Moscow, at which point the public would be informed that Gorbachev had suffered a stroke and resigned, and all governmental power was now in the hands of the State Committee for the State of Emergency.

Aza took the news calmly. The events were not unexpected, she noted, only the timing came as a surprise. She would borrow a car from a neighbor and drive out to warn Boris Nikolayevich immediately, she said. Yeltsin would undoubtedly barricade himself inside the ma.s.sive Russian parliament building on the Moscow River known as the White House and try to rally the democratic forces to resist. If the White House phones were not cut off, Yevgeny might be able to reach her at the unlisted number in Yeltsin's suite of offices that she had given him. In the darkness she caressed the back of his neck with her hand. "Take care of yourself, Yevgeny Alexandrovich," she said, and she whispered a coda from their fleeting romance so many, many years before: "Each time I see you I seem to leave a bit of me with you."

The line, which Yevgeny instantly recognized, left him aching with regret at what might have been; aching with hope at what still could be.

Aza threaded the small Lada through the deserted streets of the capitol. She turned onto Kutuzovsky Prospekt and headed out of Moscow in the direction ofUsovo, the village where Boris Yeltsin had his dacha. She had stopped for a red light-the last thing she wanted was to be pulled over by the police for a traffic violation-when she realized that the ground was shaking under the wheels of the car. It felt like the foreshock of an earthquake. She heard the rumbling at the same moment she saw what was causing it. To her stupefaction, a long column of enormous tanks heading toward downtown Moscow hove into view on the avenue. A soldier wearing a leather helmet and goggles stood in the open turret of each tank. Suddenly the trembling of the earth matched the rhythm of Aza's heart; until this instant the putsch had been a more or less abstract concept, but the sight of the tank treads grinding along the cobblestones into Moscow made it painfully real. The tankers didn't stop for the red light, which struck Aza as outrageous. Who did they think they were! And then it hit her; it was preposterous to think that tanks heading for a putsch would obey traffic regulations. One soldier must have noticed there was a woman behind the wheel of the Lada because he made a gallant gesture as he rolled past, doffing an imaginary top hat in her direction.