The Company: A Novel of the CIA (101 page)

"He and the others—they're all kind of awed by your attitude. You seem to have waived any claim to compensation."

"In any combat situation soldiers are wounded or killed by friendly fire all the time. I've never heard of any of them suing the government."

"There's no war on, Leo—"

"Dead wrong, Adelle. You were close enough to Lyndon Johnson to know there's a hell of a war raging out there. I was wounded by friendly fire. As soon as I'm well enough I plan to return to the battle."

Adelle shook her head incredulously. "After what you've been through— after what they put you through—after what I and the girls have been through!—you still refuse to quit the Company." She gazed out the window. After a while she said, "We honeymooned not far from here."

Leo nodded slowly. "We watched the sun rising over Chesapeake Bay..."

"Our life together began with two deaths—your dog and my cat. And then we turned our backs on death and went forward toward life." She started to choke up. "Everything happening at once... my father dying... you disappearing without a trace. I couldn't sleep, Leo... I stayed up nights wondering if you were alive, wondering if I'd ever see you again. All those nights, all those weeks, I felt that death was right behind me, looking over my shoulder. It can't go on like this, Leo. You have to choose—"

"Adelle, this conversation is a terrible mistake. You're too emotional. Give it time—"

"You can only have one of us, Leo—the Company or me."

"Please don't do this."

"I've made up my mind," she announced. "I tried to bring up the subject several times before you disappeared for four months. With you recovering in this clinic, I was only waiting for the right moment."

"There is no right moment for such conversations."

"That's true enough. So here we are, Leo. And I'm asking you the wrong question at the wrong moment. But I'm still asking. Which will it be?"

"I'll never quit the Company. It's what I do for a living, and what I do best—protecting America from its enemies."

"I loved you, Leo."

He noticed the past tense. "I still love you."

"You don't love me. Or if you do, you love other things more." She stood up. "You can keep the house—I'll move into Daddy's. If you have a change of heart..."

"My heart won't change—it's still with you, Adelle. With you and with the girls."

"But you've got this zealot's head on your shoulders and it overrules your heart—that's it, isn't it, Leo?" She collected her duffle coat from the foot of the bed and headed for the door. She looked back at the threshold to see if he would say something to stop her. They eyed each other across the chasm that separated them. Behind Leo, nature's riot whipped angrily at the panes of the storm window. Flicking tears away with a knuckle, Adelle turned on a heel and walked out of her twenty-three year marriage.

Nellie, looking radiant in a flaming-orange body-hugging knee-length dress with long sleeves and a high collar, clung to Manny's arm as the Justice of the Peace carefully moistened the official seal with his breath, and then stamped and signed the marriage certificate. "Reckon that 'bout does it," he announced. "Never could figure out at which point in the ceremony you're actually hitched but you sure as shootin' are now. You want to put the certificate into one of these leather frames, it'll run you ten dollars extra."

"Sure, we'll take the frame," Manny said.

Nellie turned to her mother and Ebby, who were standing behind them. "So the dirty deed is done," she told them with a giggle.

Jack, Millie, and their son, Anthony, came up to congratulate the newlyweds. Half a dozen of Manny's friends from the Soviet Division, along with their wives or girl friends, crowded around. Leo, on a day's furlough from the private sanatorium, waited his turn, then kissed the bride and shook Manny's hand. He nodded at them and it took a moment or two before he could find words. "I wish you both a long and happy life together," he said softly.

Elizabet called out, "Everyone's invited back to our place for Champagne and caviar."

"I'm going to get high on Champagne," Anthony announced.

"No, you're not, young man," Jack said.

Anthony, showing off for his godfather, persisted, "Don't tell me you never got drunk when you were a teenager."

"What I did when I was fourteen and what you do when you're fourteen are two different kettles of fish," Jack informed his son.

Elizabet handed out sachets of birdseed (on the instructions of Nellie, who had heard that rice swelled in the stomachs of birds and killed them), and the guests bombarded the newlyweds as they emerged from the front door. The wedding guests brought around their cars and, horns honking, followed Manny's Pontiac with the empty beer cans trailing from the rear bumper back toward Ebby's house. In the last car, Anthony eyed his godfather's white hair, which had grown back into a stubbly crew cut. "Dad says you've been through the ringer, Leo," the boy said. "How much can you tell me?"

Leo, concentrating on the road, said, "Jack's already told you more than I would have."

"I don't have a need to know, right?"

"You're making progress, Anthony."

"Yeah, well, as I plan to make the CIA my life's work I've got to learn the ropes early." He watched Leo drive for a while, then said, "There are four or five of us at my school who have parents working at Langley. Sometimes we get together after school and trade information. Naturally, we make sure nobody can overhear us—"

With a straight face, Leo asked, "Do you sweep the room for microphones?"

Anthony was taken aback. "You think we ought to?"

"I wouldn't put it past the KGB—bug the kids in order to find out what the parents are up to."

"Do you guys do that in Moscow with the kids of KGB people?" Anthony waved a hand. "Hey, sorry. I don't have a need to know. So I take back the question."

"What did you find out at these bull sessions of yours?"

"We read about Manny being traded for the low-level Russian spy in the papers, so we kicked that around for a while. One kid whose dad forges signatures said he'd overheard his father telling his mother that the Russian spy was much more important than the CIA let on. A girl whose mother works as a secretary on the seventh floor told her husband that a task force had been set up to deal with something that was so secret they stamped all their paperwork NODIS, which means no distribution whatsoever except to the Director Central Intelligence and a designated list of deputies."

Leo said, "I know what NODIS means, Anthony." When he returned to Langley he would have to circulate a toughly worded all-hands memorandum warning Soviet Division officers not to talk shop at home. "What else did your group discuss?"

"What else? A girl I know's father who is a lie defector specialist said that someone code-named Mother had called him in to polygraph a high-ranking CIA officer who was being held in a secret—"

Suddenly Anthony's mouth opened and his face flushed with embarrassment.

"Held in a secret what?"

Anthony went on in an undertone. "In a secret cell somewhere in Washington."

"And?"

"And the person's hair had become white as snow and started to fall out in clumps—"

A stoplight on the avenue ahead turned red. The car in front ran it but Leo pulled up. He looked at his godson. "Welcome to the frontier that separates childhood from adulthood. If you really plan on joining the CIA some day, this is the moment to cross that frontier. Right here, right now. The problem with secrets is that they're hard to keep. People let them slip out so that others will be impressed by how much they know. Learn to keep the secrets, Anthony, and you might actually have a shot at a CIA job. We're not playing games at Langley. What you've figured out—nobody has a need to know."

Anthony nodded solemnly. "My lips are sealed, Leo. Nobody will hear it from me. I swear it."

"Good."

Ebby and Elizabet were handing out long-stemmed glasses filled with Champagne when Leo and Anthony finally arrived. Leo helped himself to a glass and handed a second one to Anthony. Jack said, "Hey, Leo, he's only a kid—he shouldn't be drinking."

"He was a kid when he started out this afternoon," Leo replied. "On the way here he crossed the line into manhood."

"To the bride and groom," Ebby said, raising his glass. "To the bride and groom," everyone repeated in chorus. Leo clicked glasses with Anthony. The boy nodded and the two of them sipped Champagne.

Later, as Manny was struggling to open another bottle, Ebby came back downstairs from his den. He was carrying a small package wrapped in plain brown paper, which he handed to his son. "This is my wedding present to you," he told him. With everyone looking on, Manny tore the paper off the package to reveal a beautifully crafted mahogany box that Ebby had had made to order years before. Manny opened the box. Fitted into the red felt was a British Webley Mark VI revolver with "1915" engraved in the polished wood of the grip. Manny knew the story of the weapon—it was the revolver that the young Albanians had presented to Ebby before they set off on their fatal mission to Tirane. He hefted the weapon, then looked up at his father. Watching from the side, Elisabet brought the back of a fist to her mouth. "Consider this a sort of passing of the torch," Ebby said.

Manny said, "Thanks, Dad. I know what this gun means to you. I will never forget where you got it. And I will always be true to it."

Anthony whispered to Leo, "Where did he get the gun, Leo?" He spotted the knowing smile on his godfather lips and smiled back. "Hey, forget I asked, huh?"

Leo drove down Dolly Madison Boulevard in McLean, Virginia, past the "CIA Next Right" sign that was swiped so often by souvenir hunters the Company ordered replacements by the dozen, and turned off at the next intersection. Braking to a stop at the gatehouse, he rolled down the window and showed the laminated card identifying him as a CIA officer to one of the armed guards. (Leo's appearance had altered so drastically that Jack had taken the precaution of providing him with new ID bearing a more recent photograph.) Driving slowly down the access road, he saw the statue of Nathan Hale (put there on the initiative of Director Colby) outside the front entrance as he pulled around to the ramp leading to the basement garage reserved for division heads and higher. Leo reached for his laminated card but the guard manning the control booth waved to indicate he recognized the Soviet Division chief. "Glad to see you back, Mr. Kritzky," he called over the loudspeaker. "The Director asked for you to come straight on up to his office when you got in."

Waiting for the Director's private elevator to descend, Leo could hear the secret printing press humming in a room at the back of the garage; at the height of the Cold War it had worked twenty hours a day turning out birth certificates, foreign passports and driver's licenses, along with bogus copies of newspapers and propaganda handbills. When the doors opened, Leo stepped in and hit the only button on the stainless steel panel, starting the elevator up toward the Director's seventh floor suite of offices. His head was bowed in thought as the elevator slowed. He was a bit nervous about what he'd find on this first day back on the job. Jack had filled him in on the storm brewing over Angleton's HT/LINGUAL mail opening operation; a New York
Times
reporter named Seymour Hersh had gotten wind of the illegal project, which had been running for twenty years before Colby finally closed it down in 1973, and was going to break the story any day now. Everyone topside was bracing for the explosion and the inevitable fallout.

The elevator doors slid open. Leo heard a ripple of applause and raised his eyes and realized that he had walked into a surprise party. Colby, Ebby and Jack stood in front of half a hundred or so staffers, including many from Leo's own Soviet Division. Jack's wife and Manny were off to one side, applauding with the others and smiling. Few of those present knew where Leo had been, but they only had to catch a glimpse of the reed of a man coming off the elevator to realize that he had returned from a hell on earth. He had lost so much weight that his shirt and suit were swimming on him. Shaken, Leo looked around in bewilderment. He spotted dozens of familiar faces—but Jim Angleton's was not among them. Leo's personal secretary and several of the women from the Soviet Division had tears in their eyes. The Director stepped forward and pumped his hand. The applause died away.

"On behalf of my colleagues, I want to take this opportunity to welcome back one of our own," Colby said. "Leo Kritzky's devotion to duty, his loyalty to the Company, his grace under fire, have set a high standard for us and for future generations of CIA officers. It is in the nature of things that only a handful here are aware of the details of your ordeal. But all of us"—the Director waved an arm to take in the crowd—"owe you a debt of gratitude."

There was another ripple of applause. When the crowd had quieted down Leo spoke into the silence. His voice was husky and low and people had to strain to hear him. "When I came aboard what we used to call Cockroach Alley, some twenty-four years ago, it was with the intention of serving the country whose system of governance seemed to offer the best hope to the world. As a young man I imagined that this service would take the form of initiating or becoming involved in dramatic feats of espionage or counterespionage. I have since come to understand that there are other ways of serving, no less important than reporting to the trenches of the espionage war. As the poet John Milton said, 'They also serve who only stand and wait.' Director, I appreciate the welcome. Now I think I'd like to get back to my division and my desk, and get on with the tedious day-to-day business of winning the Cold War."

There was more applause. The Director nodded. People drifted away. Finally only Jack and Ebby remained. Ebby stood there shaking his head in admiration. Jack opened his mouth to say something, thought better of it and raised a finger in salute. He and Ebby headed back toward the DD/O's shop on the seventh floor.

Leo took a deep breath. He was home again, and relieved to be.