The Company: A Novel of the CIA (118 page)

"But won't the Russians spill the beans?" Tessa asked.

"We don't think so. We think Leo will oblige them to keep his defection under wraps to protect you guys and your mother. He told me as much—"

Vanessa interrupted. "How will Dad be able to oblige the KGB?"

"For one thing, he'll dose out what he knows over a period of years. They won't have any choice in the matter if they want him to cooperate."

Tessa had a sudden doubt. "Did Dad's going to Russia have any connection with the phone numbers we broke out of the Russian lottery numbers?"

"None whatsoever. The two aren't connected."

"Swear it, Jack," Tessa said.

Jack didn't hesitate. "I swear it." He could hear the Sorcerer, back at Berlin Base in the early '50s, swearing on his mother's grave that SNIPER and RAINBOW hadn't been one of the barium meals he'd used to unmask Philby...how effortlessly lies came to the lips of spies. "You have my word," he added now. "Honestly."

Tessa seemed relieved. "Thank goodness for that. It would have been hard to deal with."

Vanessa turned to her sister and announced, very calmly, "I think I hate him!"

"No, you don't," Tessa said. "You're angry with him. You're angry with yourself because you still love him and you think you shouldn't." A faraway look appeared in Tessa's eyes. "It's as if he died, Vanessa. We'll go into mourning. We'll rend our garments and grieve for what might have been but isn't."

Tears streamed down Vanessa's cheeks. "Nothing will ever be the same."

Jack was staring out a window. "It won't be the same for any of us," he muttered.

Reagan's professional instincts surfaced when he spotted the television cameras. Deftly steering Anthony and Maria Shaath across the Oval Office, he positioned himself and them so that the light from the silver reflectors washed out the shadows under their eyes. "Good lighting can take ten years off your age," he said to no one in particular. Squinting, he glanced around the room. "Can someone close the curtains," he called. "We're getting too much backlight." He turned to his visitors. "For the photo op," he told them, "you'll want to keep your eyes on me and, uh, smile a lot while we chat, and so forth." He turned to the cameras. "All right, boys, roll 'em."

And he grasped Maria's hand in both of his and exclaimed, in that utterly sincere and slightly breathless voice that the entire country loved, "Gosh, are we suckers for happy endings, especially where Americans are concerned."

"Can we have another take, please, Mr. President?" one of the television producers called from the bank of cameras.

"Sure thing. Tell me when you gents are ready."

"Do we have to have so many people in the room?" the line producer complained. "It's distracting to the principals."

The President's press secretary shooed several secretaries and one of the two Secret Service men out of the Oval Office.

"Okay, Mr. President. Here we go."

Reagan's eyes crinkled up and a pained smile illuminated his ruggedly handsome features. "Gosh, are we suckers for happy endings, especially where, uh, Americans are concerned."

"Great!"

"I got what I wanted," the producer told the press secretary.

"Thanks for coming around, fellows," Reagan told the television people as he escorted Anthony and Maria to the door.

Bill Casey caught up with the President in the small room off the Oval Office that Reagan retreated to after photo sessions. "Congratulations, Bill," Reagan said, swiveling toward his Director of Central Intelligence. "You people did a swell job on this raid thing. My pollster tells me that my, uh, positive job rating leaped six points."

"You're only getting your just desserts, Mr. President," Casey said. "It took moxie to sign off on the venture."

Reagan's long term-memory kicked in. "My father, rest his soul, loved the taste of Moxie—he drank a glassful when he got up in the morning, another before going to bed, swore the, uh, gentian root in it was a purgative." He noticed the bewildered glaze in the eyes of his aides. "I, uh, guess Moxie Nerve Food was before your time, boys."

"Bill's come over to brief you on this KHOLSTOMER business," the President's chief of staff, James Baker, reminded Reagan.

Bill Clark said, "KHOLSTOMER's the code designation of the Soviet plot to undermine the US currency and destabilize our economy."

Reagan raised a hand to Casey, inviting him to go on.

"As you know, Mr. President, the CIA worked up intelligence on KHOLSTOMER, so it didn't come as a surprise to us. On D-day, the Federal Reserve was ready and waiting to support the dollar the instant there were signs of a sell-off on the spot market. We knew that the Russians only had sixty-three billion available, and it wasn't difficult for the Fed to sponge it up. The danger was in the panic money that might come in behind the sixty-three billion if fund managers and central banks and foreign entities got the impression that the dollar was in free fall. Importantly, we flooded the media with inside stories of the Federal Reserve's resolve to support the dollar, and its almost unlimited ability to do so. The result was that the panic money the Russians were counting on never materialized."

Reagan nodded solemnly. "So the panic money never, uh, materialized."

"On top of that, we worked up intelligence revealing that Soviet agents of influence close to the central banks of Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Malaysia, along with an economist close to West German chancellor Kohl, were set to press their central banks into a sell-off of dollar Treasury bond holdings."

Reagan, who tended to become ornery when he was deluged with details, said, "Sounds like one of Hitchcock's McGuffins. Cut to the chase, Bill."

"We managed to neutralize these agents of influence. One was arrested on charges of molesting a minor, the other four were encouraged to go off on vacation for a month or two. All five, I might add, will be job hunting. On D-day, we brought our own pressure to bear on the central banks in question to make sure there would be no panic sell-off. The bottom line, Mr. President, is that Andropov's scheme to destabilize our currency and our economy turned out to be a blind alley for him."

Reagan's eyes narrowed. "You think Andropov was personally behind this, uh, KHOLSTOMER business?"

"We take the view that the KGB would not have gone ahead with it in the absence of a specific order from the General Secretary," Casey said.

"Hmmmmm." Reagan was clearly peeved. "Makes me downright angry when I think that Andropov had the gumption to attack our currency."

Casey, always alert to the possibility of nudging Reagan into action, perked up. "It would be a dangerous precedent," he agreed, "to let him get away with it."

"Can't argue with Bill there," Reagan said.

Casey homed in on the President. "Andropov needs to be reminded that you don't attack the Reagan administration with impunity."

Reagan was still brooding. "My father always said, don't get angry, get, uh, even."

Casey recognized an opening when he saw one. "Getting even—that's the ticket, Mr. President. We could hit Andropov where he's most vulnerable—"

James Baker was on his feet. "Hold on, now. Bill."

"We don't want to do anything rash," Bill Clark chimed in.

But it was Casey who had Reagan's attention. "Where is Andropov vulnerable?" the President asked.

"In Afghanistan. If we supplied Ibrahim's freedom fighters with Stingers, Andropov would hurt."

"This Ibrahim fellow is certainly no Marxist," Reagan remembered. "And Andropov is."

"Ibrahim is dead," Bill Clark noted, but the remark went over the President's head.

"The beauty of it," Casey said, driving home the point, "is that we don't have to deliver Stingers to the freedom fighters. They have them already— fifty of them, to be precise. All we have to do is supply the firing mechanisms that we took out before the Stingers were delivered."

"You'll want to think about this very carefully, Mr. President," James Baker said uneasily.

"It would be a hell of a way to get even for what they did to us in Vietnam," Casey persisted. "We lost more than nine hundred planes there, many of them to Russian SAMs."

Reagan fitted the knuckles of his right hand against his cheek with the little finger extended under his nose as if it were a mustache. "Looking at the big picture," he said, nodding carefully, "I think Bill here may be on to something."

The President glanced at Baker and then at Clark. Each in turn averted his eyes. They had been outmaneuvered by Casey and they knew it.

"If that's what you want, Mr. President—" Clark said.

Casey, who had been trying to get Stingers into the hands of the mujaheddin for months, favored Baker and Clark with one of his famous deadpan stares. "You fellows can leave the details to me."

Before anyone could utter a word he had quit the room.

A nippy wind was sweeping the leaves across Pennsylvania Avenue outside the White House as Anthony, walking with a slight limp, and Maria headed for a French restaurant on 17th Street.

"So what was your impression of our President?" Anthony asked. Maria shook her head. "To the naked eye, he looks more like the stand-in for the President than the actual President. He goes through motions, he recites lines of dialogue that have been written for him. God only knows how decisions are made in there. What about you? What did you think?"

For answer, Anthony recited a poem:

Whether elected or appointed

He considers himself the Lord's anointed,

And indeed the ointment lingers on him

So thick you can't get your fingers on him.

"Where's that from?" Maria asked with a laugh.

"Ogden Nash."

She stepped in front of him, blocking his path. "Anthony McAuliffe, are you trying to impress me?"

"I guess you could make a case that I am. Is it having the desired effect?"

The smile evaporated from her face and her eyes turned very solemn. "I think so," she said.

Wearing a threadbare overcoat with its collar turned up and a moth-eaten cashmere scarf wrapped around his gaunt neck, James Jesus Angleton wheeled the chair back so that the sun wouldn't be in his eyes. "Had to happen eventually," he remarked in a feeble voice. "Too many packs of cigarettes a day for too many decades. Gave them up, along with alcohol, but it was too damn late. Death sentence. Cancer of the lungs, that's what they're telling me. They put me on painkilling drugs that seem to work a bit less each day." He wheeled the chair closer to Ebby, who had taken off his overcoat and loosened his tie and pulled over a broken wicker stool. "Funny thing is you get used to pain. Don't remember what it was like without it." Angleton swung his wheelchair left, then right. "I spend a lot of time out here," he went on. "The heat, the humidity, seem to help me forget."

"Forget what?" Ebby asked.

"The pain. How much I miss cigarettes and alcohol and Adrian Philby. The great mole hunt. The Æ/PINNACLE serials that pointed to SASHA. All the mistakes I made, and I made my share, as you no doubt know."

Ebby let his eyes wander around the greenhouse, set in the back yard of Angleton's Arlington home. Clay pots, small jars, gardening tools, bamboo work tables, and wicker furniture had been piled helter-skelter in a corner. Several panes in the roof had been shattered by hailstones the previous winter and left unrepaired. The sun, high overhead, had scorched the half dozen or so orchids still in pots scattered around the floor. The earth in the pots looked bone dry. Obviously nobody was watering them.

"Nice of you to come by," Angleton mumbled. "Don't see many Company people these days. Come to think of it, don't see any. Doubt if the new generation even knows who Mother is."

"I thought someone from Langley ought to come out and brief you," Ebby said.

"Brief me on what?"

"You were right all along, Jim. The KGB did have a mole inside the Company. You identified him but nobody believed you. When Æ/PINNACLE turned out to be alive after his supposed execution, your suspect went free."

Angleton made eye contact with his visitor for the first time. "Kritzky!"

Ebby nodded.

"You've incarcerated him?"

"Like Philby, like Burgess and Maclean, he fled the country before we could get our hands on him."

"Gone home to Soviet Russia, no doubt."

Ebby shrugged. "We don't expect him to surface—the days when the KGB trots out its spies for the press are long gone. Everyone's better off keeping the lid on this kind of thing."

Angleton's lower lip trembled. "Knew it was Kritzky—told him so to his face. You have to hand it to him, he had a lot of balls, bluffing it out until you all swallowed his line. Playing the innocent. A lot of balls."

"You were right about something else, too, Jim. There was a Soviet master plan to undermine our currency and ruin the economy. They called it KHOLSTOMER."

"KHOLSTOMER," Angleton groaned. He brought a hand up to his migraine-scarred forehead. "Warned you about that, too. One of my biggest mistakes—squandered my credibility warning about too many people. When I got it right nobody was listening."

Ebby said, "Well, I thought you ought to know. I thought we owed it to you."

Both men were at a loss for conversation. Finally Ebby said, "Where do you go from here, Jim? Isn't there something you can do about your...?"

"No place to go from here. This is the last stop, the terminus, the ultima Thule. I'm going to go into the woods on my own and deal with the end of my life, like an Apache." Drawing the overcoat around his wasted body, Angleton shut his eyes and began intoning what sounded like an Indian death chant.

He didn't appear to notice when Ebby retrieved his overcoat and got up to leave.

PART SIX

DEAD RECKONING

There would be no harm, she thought, in asking if the game was over. "Please, would you tell me—" she began, looking timidly at the Red Queen.

Snapshot: a glossy Polaroid color print of Jack McAuliffe and Leo Kritzky strolling along the sun-saturated bank of the Rhone River in Basel, Switzerland. Jack, his Cossack mustache and thinning hair ruffled by the breeze blowing off the river, is wearing prescription sunglasses, a khaki safari jacket and khaki chinos. Leo, his face thin and drawn, is dressed in a light Russian windbreaker and a peaked worker's cap. Both men are so absorbed in their conversation they don't appear to notice the street photographer who stepped into their path and snapped the picture. Leo reacted violently. Jack calmed him down and quickly purchased the photograph for twenty Swiss francs, which was twice the normal price. Leo wanted to destroy it but Jack had another idea. Uncapping a pen, he scrawled across the face of the picture, "Jack and Leo before The Race but after The Fall," and gave it to Leo as a memento of what was to be their last encounter.