The Company_ A Novel Of The CIA Part 9

Ebby murmured, "Did you know?"

"Did I know what?"

"Did you know about the Final Solution?"

The German rested a finger along the bridge of his nose. "Of course not."

Ebby said, "How could you not know? A little girl named Anne Frank hiding in an attic in Amsterdam wrote in her diary that the Jews were being packed off in cattle cars. How come she knew and you didn't?"

"I was not involved with the Jewish question. I did then what I do now-I fought Bolsheviks. I served on the intelligence staff of General Gehlen-three and one-half years on the Russian front. One thousand two hundred and seventy-seven days, thirty thousand six hundred hours in purgatory! Bolshevism is the common enemy, Herr Ebbitt. If we had had the good sense to join forces earlier your father and my father might still be alive, the Bolsheviks would not have swallowed up the nations of Eastern Europe as well as a large portion of Greater Germany-"

"You swallowed up the nations of Eastern Europe before the Bolsheviks-Poland, the Sudetenland, Yugoslavia."

Uppmann bridled. "We created a buffer between the Christian West and the atheistic Bolsheviks." He turned to stare out the window at the lighted streets of the Compound. "Hitler," he whispered, his hollow voice drifting back over a shoulder, "betrayed Germany. He confused the priorities-he was more concerned with eliminating the Jews than eliminating the Bolsheviks." Uppmann turned back abruptly to face his visitor and spoke with quiet emotion. "You make the mistake of judging us without knowing what really happened, Herr Ebbitt. My cla.s.s-the German military cla.s.s- despised the crude corporal but we agreed with his goals. After the Versailles Diktat we Germans were a Volk ohne Raum-a nation without s.p.a.ce to develop. I tell you frankly, German patriots were seduced by Hitler's denunciation of the odious Versailles Treaty, we were drawn to his promise of Lebensraum for the Third Reich, we shared his pa.s.sionate anti-Bolshevism. Our mistake was to see Hitler's chancellorship as a pa.s.sing phase in chaotic German politics. Do you know what Herr Hindenburg said after he met Hitler for the first time? I shall tell you what he said. 'Germany could, never be ruled by a Bohemian corporal! That is what he said." Uppmann threw back his head and gulped down the entire gla.s.s of cognac. Then he poured himself a refill. "I personally saw Hitler at the end in his bunker-Herr Gehlen sent me to deliver an appreciation of the Russian offensive against Berlin. You cannot imagine... a stooped figure with a swollen face, one eye inflamed, sat hunched in a chair. His hands trembled. He tried without success to conceal the twitching of his left arm. When he walked to the map room he dragged his left leg behind him. The one we called the Angel of Death, the Braun woman, was present also: pale, pretty, frightened to die and afraid not to. And what did Hitler have to offer the German people at this tragic hour? He issued an order, I myself heard him, to record the sound of tanks rolling over roads, cut gramophone records and distribute them to the front line with commands to play them over loudspeakers for the Russians. We were reduced to stopping the Bolsheviks with gramophone records, Herr Ebbitt. This will never-I repeat to you the word never-happen again."

Ebby covered his mouth with a palm to keep from speaking. Herr Doktor Uppmann took this as a sign of sympathy for the story he had told. "You maybe begin to see things in the new light."

"No!"Ebby closed the gap between him and the German. "It makes me want to throw up. You didn't wage war, Doktor Uppmann, you inflicted holocausts. Your solutions to Germany's problems were Final Solutions."

Uppmann appeared to address his words directly to a photograph of Gehlen hanging on the wall. "The Jews won the war and then wrote the history of the war. This number of six million-they picked it out of a hat and the victors swallowed it to diabolize Germany."

"The only thing left of your thousand-year Reich, Herr Doktor Uppmann, is the memory of the crimes you committed-and the memory will last a thousand years. It makes me sick to my stomach to be on the same side as you- to be in the same room with you. If you will conduct me to the main gate-"

The German stiffened. A muscle in his neck twitched. "The sooner you are gone from here the sooner we can get on with the struggle against Bolshevism, Herr Ebbitt." He downed the last of his cognac and flung the empty gla.s.s against a wall, shattering it into pieces. Crunching the shards under foot, he stalked from the room.

The official complaint was not long in working its way up the German chain of command and back down the American chain of command. Summoned to explain what had happened, Ebby appeared before a three-man board of inquiry. The Wiz came up from Vienna to sit in on the hearing. Ebby made no effort to water down what the officers in Frankfurt Station were calling "The Affair." It turned out that Ebby had punctured the abscess. Company officers across Germany heard the story on the grapevine and slipped him memos and Ebby boiled them down to an indictment, which he read aloud to the board of inquiry. "When General Gehlen was allowed to get back into the business of intelligence," he began, "he agreed in writing not to employ former Gesrapo officers or war criminals. Yet he has surrounded himself with ex-n.a.z.is, all of whom are listed on his masthead under false ident.i.ties."

"I a.s.sume you are prepared to name names," snapped the CIA officer presiding over the hearing.

"I can name names, yes. There are SS Obersturmfuhrers Franz Goring and Hans Sommer. Sommer's name will ring a bell-he got into trouble with his Gestapo superiors for organizing the 1941 burning of seven Paris synagogues. There is SS Sturmbannfuhrer Fritz Schmidt, who was involved in the executions of slave labor workers at the Friedrich Ott camp near Kiel in 1944. There is Franz Alfred Six, the SS Brigadefuhrer of Section VII of Himmler's RSHA, convicted at Nuremberg to twenty years imprisonment for having ordered executions of hundreds of Jews when he commanded a Jajdkommando in July and August 1941; he was released after four years and immediately employed by Gehlen's Org. There is Standartenfuhrer Emil Augsburg, who headed a section in Adolf Eichmann's department handling the so-called Jewish problem. My guide when I turned up at Gehlen's compound goes by the name of Doktor Uppmann. His real name is Gustav Pohl. He was a staff officer in Gehlen's Foreign Armies East but he wore a second hat-he was the German Foreign Office's liaison to the SS during the invasion of Russia. According to evidence presented at Nuremberg, Pohl partic.i.p.ated in the creation of the SS Einsatzgruppen mobile killing squads ant shot Jews, including women and children, as well as Commissars, into the graves that the condemned had been forced to dig."

At the side of the room Frank Wisner appeared to be dozing in a wooden chair tilted back against a wall. "Now I did warn you, Ebby," he called out, his eyes still closed. "You can't say I didn't. I warned you I'd kick a.s.s when things didn't work out the way I thought they ought to." The Wiz righted his chair and came ambling across the room. "I'm 'bout to kick a.s.s, Ebby. Let me fill you in on some facts of life-you know who the OSS officer was who negotiated with Gehlen to get hold of his G.o.dd.a.m.ned microfilms? It was me, Ebby. I negotiated with him. I swallowed my pride and I swallowed my bile and I swallowed whatever scruples the weak-kneed crowd came up with and I made a deal with one devil the better to fight another devil. Do you really believe we don't know that Gehlen employs ex-n.a.z.is? Come off it, Ebby-we pick up the tab over in Pullach. Jesus Christ Almighty, here you got a Joe 'bout to jump out of an aeroplane into Communist Russia and you suddenly have qualms about where you're getting the ID your Joe needs to avoid a firing squad. Myself, I'd crawl through dog s.h.i.t on all fours and kiss Hermann Goering's fat a.s.s if he could supply me with what my Joe needed to survive. In what ostrich hole have you been hiding your head, Ebby? In Berlin Station you got all hot under the collar because Harvey Torriti-who happens to be one of the most competent officers in the field-needs a ration of booze to get through the day. In Frankfurt Station you get all hot under the collar because of the company the Company keeps. Didn't your Daddy ever teach you that the enemy of your enemy is your friend? And while we're on the subject of your Daddy let me tell you something else. Before he parachuted into Bulgaria he was hanging out in Madrid doing deals with Spanish fascists to get the skinny on German raw material shipments. h.e.l.l, your Daddy was made of harder stuff than his son, that's for d.a.m.n sure. So which way you gonna jump, boy? You gonna go all out for your Joe or you gonna fill our ears with slop about the occasional ex-n.a.z.i in the woodpile?"

In a large corner office in "L" building next to the Reflecting Pool, James Angleton leafed through the day's field reports clamped between the metal covers of the top-secret folder.

"Anything happening I need to write home ab-b-bout, Jimbo?" asked his friend Adrian, the MI6 liaison man in Washington.

Angleton plucked a sheet from the folder and slid it across the blotter. Stirring a whiskey and branch water with one of the wooden tongue depressors he'd swiped from a doctor's office, Kim Philby leaned over the report and sniffed at it. "Smells top secret," he said with a snicker. He read it quickly, then read it a second time more slowly. A whistle seeped through his front teeth. "You want a second opinion? We should have gotten round to this kind of shenanigans months ago. If there really is a Ukrainian resistance movement in the Carpathians we'd be b-b-b.l.o.o.d.y fools not to hook up with them."

"Do me a favor, Adrian, keep this under your hat until we hear our man's safely on the ground," Angleton said.

"Ayatollah Angleton's every wish is his servants command," Philby shot back, bowing obsequiously toward his friend. They both laughed and, clinking gla.s.ses, sat back to polish off their drinks.

SUMMERSAULT had to shout to be heard over the roar of the C-47's engines. "I thank you, I thank President Truman, I thank America for sending me back. If my father sees me now, for sure he turns over in his grave- his son Alyosha comes home in a plane where he is the only pa.s.senger."

Ebby had brought SUMMERSAULT to the secret air strip in the American zone of Germany at sunset to meet the two pilots, Czech airmen who had flown Spitfires during the Battle of Britain. The C-47 had been "sheep-dipped"-stripped of all its markings-and fitted with extra fuel tanks under the wings for the round trip to the Ukrainian Carpathians and back. An Air Force sergeant had personally folded the main parachute and the emergency chute into their packs and had shown the young Ukrainian how to tighten the straps over his shoulder blades. "The plane's going to descend to six hundred feet for the drop," he instructed Alyosha, who had seen training films but had never jumped himself. "When the yellow light comes on, you position yourself at the open door. When the green light comes on, you jump. Remember to count to five before you pull the rip cord. Count slow-like. One one-hundredth. Two one-hundredth. Like that, awright?"

"Awright," Alyosha had replied, imitating the sergeant's New York accent. Ebby had helped SUMMERSAULT lug his gear out to the plane- the heavy parachute pack, the small suitcase (containing worn Russian clothing, the shortwave radio and several dozen German wrist.w.a.tches that could be used to bribe people), a lunchbox with sandwiches and beer. Now, with the engines revving, Ebby carefully removed the poison capsule from a matchbox and forced it through the tiny rip in the fabric under SUMMERSAULT'S collar. He wrapped his arms around his Joe in a bear hug and yelled into his ear, "Good luck to you, Alyosha." He would have said more if he could have trusted himself to speak.

SUMMERSAULT grinned back. "Good luck to both of us and lousy luck to Joe Stalin!"

Moments later the plane climbed into the night sky and, banking as it gained alt.i.tude, disappeared into the east. Ebby used a base bicycle to peddle over to the Quonset hut that served as the flight center. If everything went according to plan the C-47 would be droning in for a landing in roughly six hours. The Czech pilots were under strict orders to maintain radio silence; the hope was that the Russians would take the flight for one of the aerial surveillance missions that regularly cut across the "denied areas" in a great rainbow arc. An Air Force duty officer brought Ebby a tray filled with warmed Spam and dehydrated mashed potatoes and offered him the use of a cot in a back room. He lay in the darkness, unable to cat-nap because of the disjointed thoughts tearing through his brain. Had he and Spink overlooked anything? The labels in Alyosha's clothing-they were all Russian. The soles on his shoes-Russian too. The wrist.w.a.tches-anyone who had served in a Russian unit in Germany (Alyosha's military status book bore the forged signature of an officer who was dead) could explain away a packet of stolen wrist.w.a.tches. The radio and the one-time pads and the Minox camera-they would be buried immediately after SUMMERSAULT sent word that he had landed safely. But what if he broke an ankle while landing? What if he was knocked unconscious and some peasants turned him in to the militia? Would the legend that Ebby had devised-that Alyosha had worked for two-and-a-half-years at a dam construction project in the northern Ukraine-stand up under scrutiny? The doubts crowded in, one behind the other, a long succession of them jostling each other to reach the head of the line.

An hour or so before dawn Ebby, braving the icy air outside the Quonset hut, thought he heard the distant drone of engines. He climbed on the bicycle and pedaled across the field to the giant hangar, arriving just as two wing lights snapped on and the C-47 touched down at the end of the strip. The plane taxied up to the hangar. Spotting Ebby, one of the Czech pilots slid back a c.o.c.kpit window and gave him the thumbs-up sign. Ebby, exhilarated, sliced the air with his palm in response. All that remained now was to pick up the first cipher message announcing that the landing had gone off without a hitch.

Back at Frankfurt Station later that morning, Ebby was catnapping on an office cot when Tony Spink shook him awake. Ebby sat straight up. "Did he check in?" he demanded.

"Yeah. The kid said he'd landed, no bones broken. He said he was going to bury the radio and head for the hills to find his friends. He said he was happy to be home. He said he'd get in touch again in a few days. He said... he said 'I love you guys.'"

Ebby searched Spink's face. "What's wrong, Tony? The fist was Alyoshas, wasn't it?"

"The fist was right. My man who taught him Morse swears it was Alyosha sending. But the kid inserted the danger signal in the message-he signed it Alyosha instead of SUMMERSAULT."

Ebby clutched at a straw. "Maybe he forgot-"

"No way, Ebby He's being played back. We'll act as if we don't suspect anything for as long as they want to play him. But the kid is a dead man walking."

4.

BERLIN, FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 23, 1951.

JACK'S AFTER-HOURS HAUNT, DIE PFEFFERMUHLE, WAS FILLED WITH what the Vichy police chief in Mr. Humphrey Bogart's motion picture Casablanca would have called "the usual suspects." Freddie Leigh-Asker, the MI6 Chief of Station, sidled up to the bar to chase down a refill. "Two doubles, no rocks," he hollered to the harried bartender. "Heard the latest?" he asked Jack, who was nursing a double with rocks before meandering toward the small dance theater for his semi-weekly session with the agent known as RAINBOW. It was Jack's third double of the afternoon; he was beginning to understand what pushed the Sorcerer to drown his angst in alcohol. Freddie's hot breath defrosted Jack's eardrum. "The psych warfare crazies have come up with a p.i.s.ser-they want us to bombard Russia with zillions of extra-large condoms."

On the small stage an all-female jazz band dressed in tight lederhosen was belting out number three on the American top ten, "Kisses Sweeter Than Wine." "Not sure I follow you," Jack called over what in other circ.u.mstances would have pa.s.sed for music.

"The condoms will all be stamped 'medium' in English'" Freddie explained. "Do I need to draw you a diagram, old boy? It'll demoralize every Russian female of the species who hasn't reached menopause. Never look at their blokes again without wondering what they've been missing out on. Absolutely wizard scheme, what?"

Groping in an inside pocket of his blazer for some loose marks, Freddie flung them on the bar, grabbed his drinks and drifted off into a smog of cigarette smoke. Jack was glad to be rid of him. He knew the Sorcerer couldn't stand the sight of Leigh-Asker; Torriti claimed to be leery of people with hyphenated names but his Night Owl, Miss Sipp, had come up with a better take on the situation.

"It's not the silly little hyphen, oh, dear, no," she had confided in Jack late one night. "Poor Freddie Leigh-Asker had what the Brits call a good fairy. He parachuted into the burning fiery furnace and wasn't even singed. He's absolutely positive that if he hasn't bought it by now he's home free to die of old age. It's said of him that he doesn't know what the word fear means. Mr. Torriti prefers to work with people who are afraid-he feels they have a better chance of staying one jump ahead of the opposition. He likes you, Jack, because he reckons that behind your bravado-behind your 'Once down is no battle' mantra-there's a healthy trepidation."

A lean, muscular man in his mid twenties with short-cropped hair climbed onto the stool next to Jack and lifted a finger to get the attention of the bartender. "Draft beer," he called. He caught sight of Jack's face in the mirror behind the bar. "McAuliffe!" he cried. "Jacko McAuliffe!"

Jack raised his eyes to the mirror. He recognized the young man sitting next to him and wagged a finger at his reflection, trying to dredge up the name that went with the familiar face. The young man helped him. "The European championship? Munich? Forty-eight? I was rowing stroke in the Russian c.o.xed four? You and me we fell crazy in love with Australian peacenik twins but broke off romance when the sun came up?"

Jack slapped his forehead in recognition. "Borisov!" he said. He glanced sideways, genuinely delighted to stumble across an old bar-hopping pal from Munich. "Vanka Borisov! d.a.m.nation! What the h.e.l.l are you doing here?"

The bartender shaved the head off the beer with the back of his forefinger and set the mug down in front of Borisov. The two young men clinked gla.s.ses. "I am working for the Soviet import-export commission," the Russian said. "We conduct trade negotiations with the German Democratic Republic. What about yourself, Jacko?"

"I landed a soft job with the State Department information bureau- I am the guy in charge of what we call boilerplate. I write up news releases describing how well our Germans are making out under capitalism and how badly your Germans are faring under Communism."

"The last time I saw you you had a bad case of blood blisters under your calluses."

Jack showed the Russian his palms, which were covered with thick calluses. "When we beat Harvard last Spring I was pulling so hard I thought the bone I cracked in Munich would crack again. The pain was something else."

'What ever happened to your c.o.x? Leon something-or-other?"

A faint current buzzed in Jack's brain. "Leo Kritzky. I lost track of him," he said, a grin plastered on his face. He wondered if the Russian really worked in import-export. "We had a falling out over a girl."

"You always had an eye for the ladies," the Russian said with a broad smile. The two young men talked rowing for a while. The Russians, it seemed, had developed a new slide that ran on self-lubricating ball bearings. Borisov had been one of the first to test it during trial runs on the Moscow River the mechanism worked so smoothly, he told Jack, it allowed the rower to reduce the exaggerated body work and concentrate on blade work. The result, Borisov guessed, was worth one or two strokes every hundred meters. Still smiling, the Russian looked sideways at Jack. "I have never been to the States," he said nonchalantly. "Tell me something, Jacko-what is a lot of money in America?"

The buzzing in Jack's head grew stronger. It depended, he replied evenly, on a great many things-whether you lived in the city or the countryside, whether you drove a Studebaker or a Cadillac, whether you bought readymade suits or had them custom-tailored.

"Give me an approximate idea," Borisov insisted. "Twenty-five thousand dollars? Fifty? A hundred thousand?"

Jack began to think the question might be innocent after all-everybody in Europe was curious about how Americans lived. He allowed as how $25,000 was an awful lot of bucks; $50,000, a fortune. Borisov let that sink in for a moment. When he turned back to Jack the smile had faded from his face. "Tell me something else, Jacko-how much do you earn a year producing boilerplate stories for the State Department?"

"Somewhere in the neighborhood of six thousand dollars."

The Russian jutted out his lower lip in thought. "What if somebody was to come up to you-right now, right here-and offer you a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in cash?"

The buzzing in Jack's head was so strong now it almost drowned out the conversation. He heard himself ask, "In return for what?"

"In return for the odd piece of information about a Mr. Harvey Torriti."

"What makes you think I know anyone named Harvey Torriti?"

Borisov gulped down the last of the beer and carefully blotted his lips on the back of a wrist. "If a hundred fifty thousand is not enough, name a figure."

Jack wondered how Vanka had gotten involved with the KGB; probably much the same way he'd gotten involved with the CIA-a talent scout, an interview, several months of intensive training and whoops, there you were, baiting a hook and casting it into the pitchy waters of Die Pfeffermuhle.

"You tell me something," Jack said. "How much is a lot of money in the Soviet Union?" Vanka squirmed uncomfortably on his stool. "Would a Russian with five thousand United States of America dollars stashed in a numbered Swiss bank account be considered rich? No? How about twenty-five thousand? Still no? Okay, let's say somebody walked up to you-right here, right now- and wrote down the number of a secret Swiss bank account in which a hundred and fifty thousand US dollars had been deposited in your name."

The Russian let out an uncomfortable laugh. "In exchange for what?"

"In exchange for the odd bit of information from Karlshorst-import-export data, the names of the Russians who are doing the importing and exporting."

Borisov slid off his stool. "It has been a pleasure seeing you again, Jacko. Good luck to you at your State Department information bureau."

"Nice b.u.mping into you, too, Vanka. Good luck with your import-export commission. Hey, stay in touch."

Lurking in the shadows of a doorway across Hardenbergstra.s.se, Jack kept an eye on the stage door of the ugly little modern dance theater. He had spent an hour and a half roaming the labyrinthian limbs of the S-Bahn, jumping into and out of trains a moment before the doors closed, lingering until everyone had pa.s.sed and then doubling back on his route, finally emerging at the Zoo Station and meandering against traffic through a tangle of side streets until he was absolutely sure he wasn't being followed. Mr. Andrews, he thought, would be proud of his tradecraft. At 8 P.M. the street filled with people, their heads angled into the cold air, hurrying home from work, many carrying sacks of coal they had picked up at an Allied distribution center in the Tiergarten; something about the way they walked suggested to Jack that they weren't dying to get where they were going. At 9:10 the first students began coming out of the theater, scrawny teenagers striding off in the distinctive duck-walk of ballet dancers, great clouds of breath billowing from their mouths as they giggled excitedly. Jack waited another ten minutes, then crossed the street and let himself into the narrow hallway that smelled of perspiration and talc.u.m powder. The watchman, an old Pomeranian named Aristide, was sitting in the shabby chair in his gla.s.ssnclosed cubbyhole, one ear glued to a small radio; von Karajan, who had played for the Fuhrer and once arranged for audience seating in the form of a swastika, was conducting Beethoven's Fifth live from Vienna. Aristide, his eyes shaded by a visor, never looked up as Jack pushed two packs of American cigarettes through the window. With the wooden planks creaking under his weight, he climbed the staircase at the back of the hallway to the top floor rehearsal hall and listened for a moment. Hearing no other sound in the building, he opened the door.

As she always did after her Tuesday and Friday cla.s.ses, RAINBOW had lingered behind to work out at the barre after her students had gone. Barefoot wearing purple tights and a loose-fitting washed-out sweat shirt, she leaned forward and folded her body in half to plant her palms flat on the floor, then straightened and arched her back and easily stretched one long leg flat along the barre and then leaned over it, all the while studying herself in the mirror. Her dark hair, which seemed to have trapped some of the last rays of the previous night's setting sun, was pulled back and plaited with strands of wool into a long braid that plunged to the small hollow of her back-the spot where Jack wore his Walther PPK. This was the fifth time Jack had met with her and the sheer physical beauty of her body in motion still managed to take his breath away. At some point in her life her nose had been broken and badly set, but what would have disfigured another woman on her served as an enigmatic ornament.

"What do you see when you watch yourself dance in the mirror?" Jack asked from the door.

Startled, she grabbed a towel from the barre and flung it around her neck, and with her feet barely touching the ground-so it appeared to Jack-came across the room. She dried her long delicate fingers on the towel and formally offered a hand. He shook it. She led him to the pile of clothing neatly folded on one of the wooden chairs lining the wall. "What I see are my faults-the mirror reflects only faults."

"Something tells me you're being too hard on yourself."

She smiled in disagreement. "When I was eighteen I aspired to be a great dancer, yes? Now I am twenty-eight and I aspire only to dance."

The Sorcerer had purchased RAINBOW from a Polish freelancer, a dapper man in a black undertakers suit who pasted the last strands of hair across his scalp with an ointment designed to stimulate defolliculus. Like dozens of others who worked the hypogean world of Berlin, he made a handsome living selling the odd sc.r.a.p of information or the occasional source who was said to have access to secrets. Warning Jack to be leery of a KGB dangle operation, Torriti-brooding full time over the aborted defection of Vishnevsky-had handed RAINBOW over to his Apprentice with instructions to f.u.c.k her if he could and tape record what she whispered in his ear. Tickled to be running his first full-fledged agent, Jack had set up a rendezvous.

RAINBOW turned out to be an East German cla.s.sical dancer who crossed into West Berlin twice a week to give ballet cla.s.ses at a small out-of-the-way theater. At their first meeting Jack had started to question her in German but she had cut him off, saying she preferred to conduct the meetings in English in order to perfect her grammar and vocabulary; it was her dream, she had confessed, to one day see Margot Fonteyn dance at London's Royal Ballet. RAINBOW had identified herself only as Lili and had warned Jack that if he attempted to follow her when she returned to the eastern zone of the city she would break off all contact. She had turned her back to Jack and had extracted from her bra.s.siere a small square of silk covered with minuscule handwriting. When Jack took it from her he had discovered the silk was still warm from her breast. He had offered to pay for the information she brought but she had flatly refused. "I am hateful of the Communists, yes?" she had said, her bruised eyes staring unblinkingly into his. "My mother was a Spanish Communist-she was killed in the struggle against the fascist Franco; because of this detail I am trusted by the East German authorities," she had explained at that first meeting. "I loathe the Russian soldiers because of what they did to me when they captured Berlin. I loathe the Communists because of what they are doing to my Germany. We live in a country where phones are allotted on the basis of how often they want to call you; where you think one thing, say another and do a third. Someone must make a stand against this, yes?"

Lili had claimed to be a courier for an important figure in the East German hierarchy whom she referred to as "Herr Professor," but otherwise refused to identify. Back at Berlin Base, Jack had arranged for the patch of silk to be photographed and translated. When he showed the "get" from Lili's Herr Professor (now code-named SNIPER) to the Sorcerer, Torriti had opened a bottle of Champagne to celebrate tapping into the mother lode. For Lili had provided them with a synopsis of the minutes of an East German cabinet meeting, plain-text copies of several messages that had been exchanged between the East German government and the local Soviet military leaders (Berlin Station already had enciphered versions of the same messages, which meant the Americans could work backwards and break the codes that had been used for encryption), along with a partial list of the KGB officers working out of Karlshorst. For the past six months Torriti had been running an East German agent, code-named MELODY, who worked in the Soviet office that handled freight shipments between Moscow and Berlin. Using the shipping registry, MELODY (debriefed personally by Torriti when the agent managed to visit the Sorcerer's wh.o.r.ehouse above a nightclub on the Grunewaldstra.s.se in Berlin-Schoneberg) had been able to identify many of the officers and personnel posted to Karlshorst by their real names. Comparing the names supplied by Lili with those supplied by MELODY provided confirmation that Lili's Herr Professor was genuine.

"Who the f.u.c.k is she, sport?" Torriti had demanded after Jack returned from the second rendezvous with another square of silk filled with tiny handwriting. "More important, who the f.u.c.k is her G.o.dd.a.m.n professor chum?"

"She says if I try to find out the well will go dry," Jack had reminded Torriti. "From the way she talks about him I get the feeling he's some sort of scientist. When I asked her where exactly the Communists were going wrong in East Germany, she answered by quoting the professor quoting Albert Einstein-something about our age being characterized by a perfection of means and a confusion of goals. Also, she speaks of him with great formality, more or less the way someone speaks about a much older person. I get the feeling he could be her father or an uncle. Whoever it is, he's someone close to the summit."

"More likely to be her lover," Torriti had muttered. "More often than not s.e.x and espionage are birds of a feather." The Sorcerer had dropped an empty whiskey bottle into a government-issue wire wastebasket filled with cigarette b.u.t.ts and had reached into an open safe behind him for another bottle. He had poured himself a stiff drink, had splashed in a thimbleful of water, had stirred the contents with his middle finger, then had carefully licked the finger before downing half the drink in one long swallow. "Listen up, sport, there's an old Russian proverb that says you're supposed to wash the bear without getting its fur wet. That's what I want you to do with RAINBOW."

In order to wash the bear without getting its fur wet, Jack had to organize a tedious surveillance operation designed to track RAINBOW back into East Berlin and discover where she lived and who she was. Once they discovered her ident.i.ty, it would be a matter of time before they found out who SNIPER was. If the Professor turned out to be a senior Communist with access to East German and Soviet secrets, some serious consideration would be given to using him in a more creative way; he could be obliged (under threat of exposure; under threat of having his courier exposed) to plant disinformation in places where it could do the most harm, or steer policy discussions in a direction that did the most good for Western interests. If he really was a member of the ruling elite over in the Soviet zone, the few people above him could be discredited or eliminated and SNIPER might even wind up running the show.

The Sorcerer had given Jack the services of the two Silwans, the Fallen Angel and Sweet Jesus, and half a dozen other Watchers. Each time Jack met with RAINBOW, one of the Silwans would take up position where Lili had last been seen when she headed back toward East Berlin. No single Watcher would follow her for more than a hundred meters. Using walkie-talkies, members of the surveillance team would position themselves ahead of Lili and blending in with the tens of thousands of East Berliners returning home to the Soviet Sector after working in West Berlin, keep her in sight for a few minutes before pa.s.sing her on to the next Watcher. When the team ran out of agents the operation would be called off for the night. Each time Jack met RAINBOW the radius of the operation would be extended.

On the first night of the operation, Jack's third meeting with RAINBOW, the Fallen Angel had watched Lili buy some sheer stockings in one of the luxury stores on the Kurfurstendamm and tracked her to the gutted Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church at the top of West Berlin's six-lane main drag; Sweet Jesus, walking his muzzled lap dog, had kept her in sight until she disappeared in the crowd at Potsdamer Platz, where the four Allied sectors converged. She was last seen crossing into the eastern sector near the enormous electric sign, like the one in Times Square, that beamed news into the Communist-controlled half of the city. The second night of the operation one of the Silwans picked her up in front of the Handelorganization, a giant state store on the Soviet side of Potsdamer Platz, and handed her on to the second Watcher as she pa.s.sed the battle-scarred Reichstag and the gra.s.sy mound over the underground bunker where Hitler and Eva Braun committed suicide. Two uniformed policemen from the Communist Bereitschaftspolizisten stopped her near the gra.s.sy mound to check her ident.i.ty booklet. Lili, glancing nervously over her shoulder every now and then to make sure she wasn't being followed, turned down a side street filled with four-story buildings gutted in the war; the few apartments where Germans still lived had their windows boarded over and stovepipes jutting through the walls. The Watcher peeled off and the next Watcher, alerted by radio, picked her up when she emerged onto Unter den Linden. He lost her moments later when a formation of Freie Deutsche Jugund, Communist boy scouts wearing blue shirts and blue bandannas and short pants even in winter, came between them; drums beating, the scouts were marching down the center of the Unter den Linden carrying large photographs of Stalin and East German leader Otto Grotewohl and a banner that read: "Forward with Stalin."

On the night of Jack's sixth rendezvous with RAINBOW on the top floor of the ugly little theater, Lili delivered the still-warm square of silk ruled with writing and then offered her hand. "You have never said me your name, yes?" she remarked.

I am called Jack," he said, gripping her hand in his.

"That sounds very American to my ears. Jackknife. Jack-in-the-box. Jack-of-all-trades. "

"That's me," Jack agreed with a laugh. "Jack-of-all-trades and master of none." He was still holding her hand. She looked down at it with a cheerless smile and gently slid her fingers free. "Look," Jack said quickly, "I just happen to have two tickets to a Bartok ballet being performed at the Munic.i.p.al Opera House in British Sector-Melissa Hayden is dancing in something called The Miraculous Mandarin." He pulled the tickets from his overcoat pocket and offered her one of them. "The curtain goes up tomorrow at six-they begin early so the East Germans can get home before midnight." She started to shake her head. "Hey," Jack said, "no strings attached-we'll watch the ballet, afterwards I'll buy you a beer at the bar and then you'll duck like a spider back into your crack in the wall." When she still didn't take the ticket he reached over and dropped it into her handbag.

"I am tempted," she admitted. "I have heard it said that Melissa Hayden is not restricted by gravity. I do not know..."

The next evening the Watchers, spread strategically through the streets surrounding Humbolt University at the end of the Unter den Linden, picked RAINBOW up coming from the direction of the Gorky Theater, behind the university. Queuing with a crowd of relatively well-dressed Berliners waiting for the Opera House doors to open, Jack was handed a note that read: "We are almost there-tonight should do it."