The Company: A Novel of the CIA (115 page)

"It means that Fet and the KGB decided that Ibrahim was worth cultivating. It means they fingered Manny and my godson, Anthony. It means they urged Ibrahim to kidnap them—Maria Shaath happened to be in the car, so she was a wild card—and hold them against the delivery of the Stingers that will boost Ibrahim's chances of winding up at the head of the fundamentalist pack."

"But the Stingers will shoot down Russian aircraft," Jack said.

"According to Fet, that's the short term price and the KGB is willing to pay it. Stingers in the hands of fundamentalists, so Fet's superiors told him, will convince the Soviet brass that the war can't be won. The sooner the war ends, the sooner the fundamentalists, with the KGB pulling the strings behind the scenes, can turn their attention to the Saudi oil fields."

Jack polished off his whiskey and went over to the bar to help himself to more. He held the bottle up but Leo waved away a refill. "You're the DD/O's Chief of Operations, pal," Jack said. "Do you swallow this story?"

Leo said carefully, "There was a detail in the Shaath interview that seems to give Fet's story plausibility. Remember where she asks Ibrahim how come, with Soviet planes and helicopters crisscrossing the countryside, his mountaintop fortress hasn't been attacked, at least since she's been there?"

"Yeah, I do remember. His answer was kind of feeble."

"He said they had too many anti-aircraft guns around and the Russians knew it," Leo said. "But you and I know that anti-aircraft guns are almost useless against modern jets or helicopters hugging the ground and coming in fast."

"Which is why they want Stingers," Jack said.

"Which is why," Leo agreed.

"Which could mean," Jack said, "that the KGB—which has a hand in drawing up the target lists, same as we do—has put Ibrahim's real estate off limits."

"That's what Fet says," Leo confirmed.

They concentrated on their drinks for a while, each following his own train of thoughts. Eventually Leo glanced up at his old friend. "When are you going to get around to what really brought you over at this time of night?" he asked.

Jack shook his head in distress. "There's a photo I want you to take a look at."

"What kind of photo?"

"I'm glad you're sitting down," Jack said. He pulled the photograph from the inside breast pocket of his sports jacket and held it out. Leo rocked forward and took it. Fitting on a pair of reading glasses, he held the photograph up to the light.

Jack saw his friend catch his breath.

"So it is Yevgeny," Jack whispered.

"Where did you get this?" Leo demanded.

"We have your girls to thank for it," Jack said, and he explained how Tessa and Vanessa had come up with the Washington phone number of the old Polish woman who was acting as a circuit breaker for a KGB cutout, who went by the name of Gene Lutwidge. "I've always wondered what became of our Russian roommate," Jack said. "Now we know."

Breathing irregularly, Leo rocked back in his chair. The photo of Yevgeny had obviously shaken him.

"I couldn't believe it either, at first," Jack said. "The FBI's assigned a fifty-man task force to Yevgeny. If we're patient enough he'll lead us to SASHA. If we grow impatient we'll pick him up and wring it out of him." Jack leaned forward. "You should be very proud of Tessa and Vanessa... Hey, Leo, you all right?"

Leo managed to nod. "Vanessa told me they had scored a breakthrough but she didn't give me details. I should have guessed it concerned Yevgeny..."

Jack, puzzled, asked, "How could you have guessed that?"

Leo pushed himself to his feet and, dropping the photo onto the rocking chair, made his way to the bar. Crouching behind it, he hunted for something in a cupboard. Then, standing, he splashed some whiskey into a new tumbler and carried it back across the room. This time he settled onto the couch across from Jack.

Leo's anxious eyes were fixed on his oldest friend. He had come to a decision: From here on there would be no turning back. "This is what the bullfighters and the fiction-writers call the moment of truth," he said. His voice was too soft; the softness conveyed menace. "Yevgeny doesn't have to lead you to SASHA," he went on. "You're looking at him."

Jack started to come out of his seat when the automatic materialized in Leo's hand. For an instant, Jack's vision blurred and his brain was incapable of putting the riot of thoughts into words. He sank back onto the cushions in confusion. "Damnation, you wouldn't shoot to kill," was all he could think to say.

"Don't misread me," Leo warned. "I'd shoot to wound. I don't plan to spend the rest of my life in a federal penitentiary."

"You're SASHA!" It began to dawn on Jack that this wasn't a joke or a dream. "Jim Angleton was right all along!"

"Do us both a favor, keep your hands where I can see them," Leo ordered. He tossed a pair of handcuffs onto the couch next to Jack. "Attach one end to your right wrist. Don't make any sudden moves—now sit on the floor with your back against the radiator. Okay, lock the other end of the cuffs onto the pipe at the side of the radiator. Good." Leo came across and sat down where Jack had been sitting. "Now we'll talk, Jack."

"How did you do it—how did you get past all the lie defector tests?"

"Tranquilizers. I was so relaxed I could have told them I was female and it wouldn't have stirred the stylus. The only lie defector test I failed was the one Angleton gave me in his dungeon—and I was able to explain it away because I'd been locked up for so long."

Leo's treachery was starting to sink in. "You bastard! You prick! You betrayed everyone, your country, your wife, your girls, the Company. You betrayed me, Leo—when you drank that water from Angleton's toilet bowl, Jesus H. Christ, I fell for it. I thought you could actually be innocent. It was your old buddy Jack who didn't let the matter drop when Kukushkin was supposed to have been executed. It was me who set the wheels turning to see if he might still be alive."

"I was manning the ramparts of the Cold War, Jack, but on the other side. Remember when I came off the elevator and you were all waiting there to welcome me back after my incarceration? I said something about how I was serving the country whose system of governance seemed to offer the best hope to the world. I wasn't lying. That country, that system of governance, is the Soviet Union."

The air in the room was suddenly charged with emotion. It was almost as if two longtime lovers were breaking up. "So when did you start to betray your country, Leo?"

"I never betrayed my country, I fought for a better world, a better planet. My allegiance to the Soviet Union goes all the way back to Yale. Yevgeny wasn't a KGB agent when he roomed with us but, like all Russians abroad, he was an unofficial spotter. He told his father, who was a KGB agent, about me: about how my family had been ruined by the depression and my father had jumped to his death from the Brooklyn Bridge; about how I had inherited from my father the Old Testament belief that what you own was stolen from those who don't have enough."

"Then what?"

"Yevgeny's father alerted the New York resident, who sent an American Communist named Stella Bledsoe to recruit me."

"Your girlfriend Stella!" Jack gazed across the room at the framed black-and-white photograph hanging on the wall, the one taken after the 1950 Harvard-Yale boat race. He couldn't make out the caption but since he'd written it, he recollected it: "Jack & Leo & Stella after The Race but before The Fall". Now he said with a sneer, "I remember Stella slipping into my room that night—"

"She snuck into your room and screwed you so I would have a plausible explanation for breaking off with her. Moscow Centre wanted to put some distance between Stella and me in case the FBI discovered her connection with the American Communist Party, which is what happened when Whittaker Chambers identified her as a fellow traveler he'd met at Party meetings after the war."

Jack tugged angrily on the handcuff and the metal bit into the skin on his wrist. "What a sap I was to trust you."

"It was Stella who instructed me to go out for Crew when they learned that Coach Waltz was a talent scout for the new Central Intelligence Agency. The idea was for me to get close to him. The rest of the story you know, Jack. You were there when he made his pitch to us."

Jack looked up suddenly. "What about Adelle? Was she planned, too?"

Leo turned away. "Adelle's not the part of the story I'm the most comfortable with," he admitted. "The Centre wanted me to marry into the Washington establishment, both to further my career and to give me other sources of intelligence. The rezidentura more or less picked Adelle out because she worked for Lyndon Johnson, also because her father was rich and powerful and had access to the White House. They arranged for our paths to cross."

"But you met by chance at a veterinarian," Jack remembered.

Leo nodded grimly. "When Adelle was away at work, they broke into her apartment and dropped her cat out a fourth-floor window. I picked up an old dog at the pound and fed him enough rat poison to make him sick. I took him to her vet knowing Adelle would show up with her cat. If that hadn't worked out we would have figured another way to make our paths cross.

Jack, stunned, sat there shaking his head. "I almost feel sorry for you, Leo."

"The truth is I grew to love her," Leo said. "I adore my girls..." Then he blurred out, "I never accepted a penny, Jack. I risked my neck for peace, for a better world. I didn't betray a country—I have a higher loyalty... an international conception of things."

"Just for the record, explain the Æ/PINNACLE caper, Leo. Kukushkin was a dispatched defector—but weren't they taking a big risk accusing you of being SASHA? We might have believed it."

"It's not very complicated," Leo said. "Angleton was slowly narrowing down the list of suspects through a careful analysis of failed and successful operations, and who was associated with them. My name was on all the overlaps. Moscow Centre—or more precisely, my controlling officer— decided Angleton was getting uncomfortably close, so he organized Æ/PINNACLE to lure Angleton into accusing me. Kukushkin would have been unmasked as a dispatched agent even if you hadn't brought the Israelis in. Once Kukushkin was discredited, the case against me would fall apart. And Angleton would be ruined. We killed two birds with one stone."

"Where do you go from here, Leo? Yevgeny is being watched twenty-four hours a day. You'll never get away."

"I'll get away and so will Yevgeny. We have contingency plans for situations like this. All we need is a head start, which is what those handcuffs will buy me. Tomorrow morning I'll phone Elizabet and tell her where you are."

"So this is how it all ends," Jack said bitterly.

"Not quite. There's one more piece of business, Jack. I want to pass some secrets on to you." Leo couldn't restrain a grim smile when he spotted the incredulity in Jack's eyes. "The Soviet Union is coming apart at the seams. If it weren't for oil exports and the worldwide energy crisis, the economy would probably have collapsed years ago. The Cold War's winding down. But there are people on my side who want it to wind down with a bang. Which brings me to the subject of KHOLSTOMER—"

"There is a KHOLSTOMER! Angleton was right again."

"I'll let you in on another secret, Jack. I've had qualms about KHOLSTOMER all along, but I wasn't sure what to do about it until I talked with Fet today. When I learned about the KGB plotting to put Stingers in the hands of people who would shoot them at Russian pilots, not to mention their role in my godson's kidnapping—" Leo, his face contorted, whispered, "For me, it's as if the KGB amputated Anthony's toe. Jack. That was the last straw. Enough is enough. Listen up."

Jack's sense of irony was returning. "Consider me your captive audience," he remarked dryly.

"Andropov is dying. Jack. From what I hear—both from Company sources and from Starik—the General Secretary is not always lucid—"

"You mean he's off his rocker."

"He has periods of lucidity. He has other periods where his imagination takes hold and the world he sees is cockeyed. Right now he's in one of his cockeyed phases. Andropov is convinced that Reagan and the Pentagon are planning to launch a preemptive nuclear strike against the Soviet Union—"

"That's preposterous and you know it," Jack burst out.

"I've sent back word that it's not true. But I have reason to believe my reports have been doctored to feed into Andropov's paranoia."

"How could you know that from Washington?"

"I surmise it from the queries I get from Moscow Centre—they're focused on ABLE ARCHER 83, they want to know if the Pentagon could be keeping the CIA in the dark about plans for a preemptive strike. I've told them it's out of the realm of possibility but they keep coming back with the same questions. They say I must be missing something, they instruct me to look again."

"Where does KHOLSTOMER fit in?" Jack asked.

"KHOLSTOMER is Moscow's response to ABLE ARCHER 83. Believing the US is going to launch a preemptive war on December first, Andropov has authorized Starik to implement KHOLSTOMER—they plan to flood the spot market with dollars and cause the American currency, and ultimately the American economy, to crash."

"I'm not an economist," Jack said, "but they'd need an awful lot of greenbacks to make a dent in the market."

"They have an awful lot of dollars," Leo said. "Starik has been siphoning off hard currency for decades. He has slightly more than sixty billion dollars sitting in off-shore banks around the world. On top of that, he has agents of influence in four key countries ready to push the central banks into selling off US bonds once the dollar starts to nosedive. On D-day I'm supposed to monitor the Federal Reserve's reaction and the movement in the bond market. The thing could spiral out of control—the more the dollar goes down, the more people will panic and sell off dollars and US bonds to protect their positions. At least that's what Starik is counting on."

"Can you identify the agents of influence?"

"No. But I know which countries they're supposed to be operating in. Our stations—"