The Berlin Conspiracy (20 page)

“Kovinski claims it’s a fake,” Powell interjected.

“And what does that tell you?” I shot back.

“I’m afraid you’re the one who’s answering the questions,” he simpered.

“What should it tell us, Jack?” Sam demanded.

“That somebody went to a fair amount of trouble to make Kovinski into a crazed Commie killer.”

“Kovinski thinks the Russians are setting him up,” Powell piped in again.

“You think the KGB faked the picture in order to implicate themselves?”

“Kovinski says—”

“Kovinski will say whatever he thinks you want to hear,” I interrupted, losing patience. I looked to Sam for help, but Powell had taken over. Sam stepped back, leaned against the wall, smoked his cigar, and listened.

“Why would the KGB set Kovinski up?” I persisted.

“Because they found out he works for us.”

“Then why go to the trouble of making him look like one of their own, with the flag and the rifle? It’s stupid.” Powell’s expression tightened. He was about to erupt when Sam answered the question.

“Maybe they plan to expose the photo as a fake after the fact. To show we were behind it.”

“Come on, Sam,” I said. “If the KGB wanted to assassinate the president—”

“Sam’s not talking about the president,” Powell interrupted. “You’re the only one who buys into that fairy tale.”

I turned to Sam. “What are you talking about, then?”

“Kovinski says the KGB are planning to hit a West German official and he’s being set up to take the rap.”

I drew a breath and laughed.

“That’s funny?” Sam said.

“Forget the West German official.” I shook my head. “Nobody’s going after a West German official. I fed that to Kovinski and he spit it back at you. Anyway, I told him
you
were planning to whack the guy, not the Russians.”

Sam looked to Powell, who lost the smirk.

“Why would we want to knock off a West German official?”

“As far as I know, you wouldn’t,” I answered.

“Then why would you tell Kovinski that?” he chafed.

“Because I didn’t want to tell him the truth.”

“The truth being that the Soviets are planning it.”

I looked at him, incredulous. “I just told you—I made it up!”

“I’m afraid your word doesn’t go very far around here at the moment.” Powell smiled and leaned back in his chair, case closed as far as he was concerned.

“You fucked up, Jack,” Sam shrugged. “But there’s one angle I’m not totally clear on.” He turned to Powell. “What do the Russkies get out of it?”

Powell hesitated, put on his professor’s voice. “Look at it from their perspective. What would the Soviets most love to accomplish?”

“World domination?” Sam said with a sly smile. Powell ignored him and continued his lecture.

“To drive a wedge between us and NATO, that’s what. Imagine the reaction in Western Europe if the Soviets could pin the murder of a European leader on us. What do you think de Gaulle would say about it? And what about the West Germans themselves? NATO’s crippled, maybe forever, and they’re toasting each other in Moscow.”

“Good scenario,” Sam admitted. “What about the Kennedy stuff?”

“The only source we have on that is Teller.”

Sam nodded his head sagely, turned to me. “Jack?”

“It’s a wonderful theory,” I said. “The only problem is that no one is planning to hit a West German official. … /
made the fucking thing up!”

“What else have you made up?” Powell grinned.

“Fuck you,” I answered.

“What about Sasha?”

“What … ?”

He smiled. “You know the name Sasha, don’t you?”

“In what context?” I said, feeling the noose tighten.

“You told Kovinski that you work for a KGB agent named Sasha,” he purred. “Is that right?”

“Are you kidding me?”

“You can be sure I’m not kidding you. Did you or did you not say that you worked for a KGB agent named Sasha?”

I looked to Sam again.

“Answer the question, Jack,” he said. I could see that he was getting no joy from this. He’d told me that I was on my own and I was finding out how much he meant it.

“Yes,” I said. “I told Kovinski I worked for Sasha, but it was bullshit. I’ve never met the guy.”

“How did you know Sasha was Kovinski’s KGB controller?”

“The Colonel told me.”

“A STASI colonel gave you information about a KGB control agent?”

“That’s right,” I said.

“That’s Colonel Josef Becher, who you’ve been having unauthorized contact with?”

“Yeah, the one that you guys brought me all this way to see.”

“After he insisted that he would see only you … Colonel Becher must have a great deal of trust in you to reveal sensitive information like the name of a KGB controller.”

An answer to that question seemed a bit pointless, so I didn’t bother.

“Where did you get the Kovinski photo?” Powell was in high gear now, playing to the microphone and enjoying every minute.

“The Colonel gave it to me.”

“Did he tell you where he got it?”

I said no, but they both picked up my hesitation. Powell replaced the photo in the envelope and stood up.

“To sum up,” he said, “you obtained a falsified photograph showing Aleks Kovinski, a CIA asset, holding a Soviet weapon in front of a Soviet flag. This photograph was given to you by a colonel in the East German security service with whom you’ve had several unauthorized contacts. When you showed Kovinski the photograph you indicated that you were working for a KGB agent whose code name is Sasha and there was a plan to assassinate an official of the West German government. You told Kovinski that the
photograph would be given to the newspapers in order to implicate him in the assassination. We believe it would then be revealed as a fake and other evidence would surface to implicate Central Intelligence in the assassination. You instructed Kovinski to arrange a meeting with his CIA contact in order to obtain certain information, which he was to pass back to you in a meeting you arranged for later today. Presumably you would then forward that information to Sasha through Colonel Becher and it would be used as part of the evidence to connect Kovinski to the agency. … Other than empty denials, is there anything you’d like to offer now that can refute the preceding facts?”

It didn’t matter what I answered because I knew the transcript, which would be in the next Washington dispatch, would conclude with the words
SUBJECT OFFERED NO RESPONSE/END INTERVIEW.

For the record, my response was: “Shall I applaud now or should I just throw peanuts?”

The pain in my head was subsiding, leaving just the steady drumbeat of my throbbing brain to deal with. I lay back on the bed, eyes shut, and considered my situation. I probably should’ve been more worried about Powell’s indictment, but I couldn’t believe anyone would take it seriously. Anyway, it was more important at the moment to figure a way out of there.

I came up empty.

It was disappointing about Powell. When I’d seen that Johnson was Kovinski’s contact, I was sure that it meant the station chief was involved, too, but his thickheaded need to avenge the bathroom incident had more or less proved his innocence. He was a jackass, all right, but he wasn’t stupid enough to go on tape the day before the president was hit
and call the plot a “fairy tale” if he knew anything. On reflection, he wasn’t the type, anyway. Powell was a political animal, working his way up the Company ladder, doing what was necessary to get ahead. Oh, he’d approve the assassination of his grandmother if it helped his career, but he was too calculating to lay it all on the line unless it was a sure thing. If they got the president, he’d happily join the club and submit his resume. At that point, the high priests of Langley would gather around and make all the awkward tapes and documents magically disappear, including today’s laughable interrogation. They’d vanish into the agency’s black files, never to be seen again. And so would I, which was an excellent reason to get back to the question of how I was gonna get the hell out of there.

I drew a blank again.

My mind turned to Andy Johnson. What about Baby Bear? Kovinski’s contact, there was no doubt that he was involved. But he was naval intelligence out of special ops, a former Green Beret. Those guys have a religious devotion to the chain of command. They specialize in taking orders. So if Powell wasn’t running him, who was? I wondered how long he had been assigned to Berlin and who had put him there.

I heard Sam’s voice in the next room, talking in hushed tones. Where did my old friend fit in? He seemed strangely disengaged, unlike I’d ever seen him. Powell had been running the debriefing, if you could call it that, but Sam was going along. Why? He couldn’t buy any of that crap about me working for Sasha or a hit on a West German official. So why was he letting me twist in the wind? Sure, the stakes were high, but up until now Sam had always come through for me.

The door opened and he walked in, alone this time. He looked preoccupied, unusually restrained.

“Come to get your knife out of my back?” I said, folding my hands behind my head, trying to look relaxed.

“I love you like a son, Jack, but I’m not about to put my ass on the line for you.” He shoved his hands into his pockets and frowned. “For Christ’s sake, you set
yourself
up! Didn’t you know Kovinski would fuck you over?”

“I thought he’d be too scared,” I shrugged.

“Yeah, he’s so damned scared he never wants to see you again. The son of a bitch is demanding political asylum.”

“Since when do guys like Kovinski get to make demands?”

“Personally, I don’t give a shit.”

“That your new motto?”

He looked at me, stung. I felt bad at first, but got over it. “A lot’s changed in eighteen months, Jack,” he said. “McCone doesn’t have a clue and everyone’s running around saying the sky’s gonna fall after the election.”

John McCone had been appointed DCI—Director of Central Intelligence—by Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs went pear-shaped and Allen Dulles, the quintessential Company man, was removed, along with several of his top lieutenants. But McCone was an outsider, a civilian, and if JFK thought he could get a handle on the agency that way, he was whistling Dixie. Everyone saw McCone as a caretaker, put in to hold the fort until Kennedy could “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds,” like he’d promised in ‘61. The word was that once he got the second term under his belt, he’d fold the agency into Justice, where Bobby could run things.

“Where’s Kovinski now?” I asked Sam.

“How in God’s name could the whereabouts of that pissant be the most important thing on your mind right now?”

“You’re pretty good at history, aren’t you, Sam?” He
shrugged, but I knew he was. “You know the name Gavrilo Princip?”

“The guy who shot the Archduke Ferdinand,” he answered without hesitation. “What’s he got to do with the price of eggs in China?”

“He was the pissant that got the First World War under way.”

Sam pulled on his earlobe and made a face. “Do you really believe all this crap, Jack? You think there are guys in the agency who’d go that far?”

“Ever hear of the Black Hand?”

“Should I have?”

“No, the whole point is that you shouldn’t have. The Black Hand was a secret society made up of Serbian army and intelligence officers. They planned and executed the assassination of Ferdinand because he was on a peace mission and they thought peace was another word for surrender. They wanted war and victory, so they arranged for the pissant named Gavrilo Princip to pull the trigger on the duke. It’s just possible that if he never got the chance to take the shot that day, the Great War wouldn’t have happened. So that’s why I’m interested in where Kovinski is.”

“I don’t know where he is.” Sam shook his head. “But there are plenty of pissants around. If you stop this one, there’ll be another one in his place next week.”

“So we have to get the Black Hand,” I said. Sam gave me a long look and sighed. “Or maybe I should just go home and throw a beach party.”

“Christ, Jack.”

“What?”

“You’re under arrest for treason.”

I tried not to look concerned. “So unarrest me, Sam.”

“No can do,” he said. “Powell telexed a transcript of our
chat to Langley and they want you detained in a military cell over at Clayallee. I’m sorry.”

“You gonna go along with this?”

“I just arranged the transport,” he shrugged. At least he looked me in the eye when he said it.

Johnson put me in cuffs and walked me down to the street, where Chase, decked out in his trademark black turtleneck and leather jacket, was waiting in the Chrysler. The safe house stood on a tree-lined avenue of unexceptional homes whose unexceptional residents could be counted on to mind their own unexceptional business. No one was around to watch Johnson guide me into the front seat then slide into the back, positioning himself directly behind me. Like the mob does when they take you for a ride.

Chase put the car in gear and we moved off.

I thought about various options, but they all ended in disaster. My only hope, a small one, was to catch them off guard. I was still a bit disoriented, unsure how long I’d been unconscious, so I asked the boys what the time was.

“Quarter to twelve,” Johnson replied.

“Tuesday?” I said, just to be sure.

“Tuesday,” Johnson confirmed.

“I want you guys to know that I don’t hold this against you,” I said. “I realize that you’re just doing your job.”

Chase allowed himself a little chuckle. “That’s a real load off my mind, Teller.”

I rattled my chains: “Well, Alcatraz here I come.”

“They closed it,” Johnson said. I twisted around, ostensibly to make eye contact, but actually I wanted to see exactly where he was sitting.

“Closed the Rock?” I said, incredulous. In fact, I’d read
about it in the
Miami Herald.
It was too old and too expensive to run, or so the board of governors said anyway.

“Couple of months ago.”

“Is nothing sacred?” I said, facing front again. If I went for Chase, you could count in milliseconds how long it would take Johnson to have me dead or unconscious. And there was no doubting his credentials.