The Company: A Novel of the CIA (135 page)

The body of Gorbachev's military adviser, Marshal Akhromeyev, was found hanging from a noose attached to an overhead lighting fixture in his office. People in adjacent offices told police they had heard what sounded like furniture being moved and objects being thrown on the floor, but had not become suspicious because they knew that, in the aftermath of the aborted putsch, the Marshal had been retired from active duty and assumed he was simply moving out his personal affairs. The various noises were further explained away by Akhromeyev's typed suicide note, which said: "I am a poor master of preparing my own suicide. The first attempt didn't work— the cord broke. I will try with all my strength to do it again. My age and all I have done give me the right to leave this life."

The foreign ministry apparatchik Fyodor Lomov, one of the key putschists, fled Moscow to avoid arrest and was never heard from again. He left behind a cryptic note saying the only thing he regretted was that the coup against Gorbachev had failed. Clothing later identified as belonging to Lomov were discovered neatly folded on a bank of the Moscow River upstream from the capitol. The river was dragged but Lomov's body was never found; his disappearance was carried on the police books as a "swimming accident."

Newspapers reported other mysterious deaths: two in the city that used to be called Leningrad but had changed its name back to Saint Petersburg (the dead men, killed when their car went over a cliff, were KGB generals who had plotted to oust the elected mayor and take control of the city in the name of the State Committee for the State of Emergency); one in the Crimea (a senior KGB officer from the Ninth Chief Directorate who had commanded the unit keeping Gorbachev prisoner in Foros died in the explosion of a kitchen gas canister); one in the Urals Military District (an Army general who, at the height of the putsch, had ordered the local KGB to round up "cosmopolitans," a Stalinist code word for Jews, was knifed to death in a banal mugging).

Alerted by the rash of accidental deaths and suicides, the authorities decided to take extraordinary precautions with the putsch ringleaders already in custody, KGB Chairman Kryuchkov and Defense Minister Yazov being the most prominent among them. Visitors were required to communicate through a glass window; shoelaces, belts and sharp objects were removed from the cells and the accused were put on under round-the-clock surveillance.

With all eyes on Russia, few noticed the small item that appeared on a back page in the Dresden press: early-morning joggers had discovered the body of the Devisenbeschaffer hanging under a bridge across the Elbe. Sometime before dawn he had attached one end of a thick rope to a stanchion and tied the other end around his neck, and jumped to his death. He was wearing a neatly pressed conservative three-piece suit that showed no evidence of a struggle. A typed and signed note was found in his inside breast pocket; detectives eventually established that the typeface matched the deceased's computer printer. The note asked his wife and three children to forgive him for taking the easy way out, and went on to say that he had decided to kill himself because he had siphoned funds into Russia to finance the aborted putsch and was now sure he would be exposed and punished. The police report noted that the Devisenbeschaffer had failed to specify which accounts in Russia the money had been sent to, and they held little hope of ever finding out; for all intents and purposes the funds had vanished into thin air.

Turning their backs on the main drag crawling with narrow trolley cars and lined with banks, the Sorcerer and his Apprentice strolled across the footbridge at the end of Lake Geneva and went to ground in an open air cafe. Attractive young women wearing white aprons over gauze-thin blouses and peasant skirts waited on tables. Jack summoned one of them and inquired, "What do people order when they're celebrating?"

"Champagne cups," she said without hesitation.

"Oh, Jesus, not Champagne," Torriti whined. "The goddamn bubbles give me gas."

"Two Champagne cups," Jack told the waitress. When Torriti pulled a face, Jack said, "You've been drinking cheap booze so long you think it's an elixir. Besides which, we've got to launch the Enterprise in style."

Torriti nodded grudgingly. "It's not everybody who waltzes into a Swiss bank and finds out he's got $147 million and change stashed in a secret account. When you got up to leave I thought the clown in the three-piece suit was going to shine your shoes with his tongue."

"It's so much money I have trouble thinking of it as money," Jack told his friend.

"Actually, I thought this Devisenbeschaffer character had squirreled away a lot more in Dresden. You sure Ezra Ben Ezra isn't holding out on you?"

"The Rabbi took expenses off the top. To start with, there was your mafia chum in Moscow—"

"The inimitable Endel Rappaport, who's going to make Mother Russia pay through the nose for the fingers that got lopped off."

"He got a share of the money. Another chunk wound up in the pocket of a shadowy individual who may be sponoring the career of a little known KGB lieutenant colonel named Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. The individual in question worked with Putin in Dresden and knew his way around well enough to siphon off some of the Devisenbeschaffer loot before the Rabbi could get to it."

"Funny thing, there was a Russian named Vladimir with Rappaport the last time our paths crossed."

"The Rabbi said this Putin quit the KGB the day after the coup against Gorbachev began, then turned up in something called the Federal Security Service, which is the successor to the KGB."

"Nimble footwork," Torriti commented. "Putin." He shook his head. "Name doesn't ring a bell."

"It will," Jack said. "With roughly a hundred fifty million to spread around, he's bound to surface eventually."

The waitress set the Champagne cups on the table and tucked the bill under the ashtray. "Here's to Swiss banks," Torriti said, and wincing in apprehension, he warily tested his cocktail.

"Here's to the Enterprise," Jack said. He drank off half the Champagne as if it were seltzer water. "You want to know something, Harvey. I feel like Mr. Rockefeller must have felt when he set up his foundation. My big problem now is to figure out how to give away the seven or so million the account generates a year."

"Read the newspapers and send out money orders to deserving causes."

"How would you define deserving causes?"

Torriti said with utter seriousness, "That's not complicated—deserving causes knock off deserving people."

Sniffing the air, Torriti smiled at a thought. Jack asked, "What is it?"

"Funny thing, Kritzky cashing in his chips like that. You want a second opinion, he got what was coming to him."

Jack gazed at the lake without seeing it. He could make out Leo's voice in his ear.
I'm still sorry, Jack. About our friendship. But not about what I did.
"He set out to fix the world," Jack said. "He didn't realize it wasn't broken."

Torriti could see that his Apprentice needed cheering up. "Well, don't let it go to your head, sport, but the fact is I'm proud of you. No kidding aside, I am. You're the best thing since sliced bread."

"I had a great teacher."

Torriti hiked his glass. "To you and me, sport, the last of the Cold War Mohicans."

"The last of the Cold War Mohicans," Jack agreed.

The Company pulled out all the stops for Jack's official going away bash in the seventh-floor dining room at Langley. A banner bearing the McAuliffe family mantra ("Once down is no battle") had been strung over the double doors. The Time magazine photo of Jack being rescued from a half-inflated rubber raft off the Bay of Pigs had been blown up larger than life and taped to one wall. Much to Jack's embarrassment and Millie's delight, the secret citations that accompanied his many "jockstrap" medals ("... for courage above and beyond the call of duty... highest tradition of the clandestine service... honor on the country and on the Company") had been printed up poster-size and tacked to the remaining walls. The speeches—beginning with Manny's tribute and ending with Ebby's—had been interminable. "All Central Intelligence officers have the right to retire when they're pushing sixty-five," the DCI told the several hundred men and women crowded into the executive dining room, "especially after forty years of dedicated service to the flame of liberty. But with Jack's departure, we're losing more than a warm body who happens to be the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence. We're losing the heart and the soul and the brain and the expertise and the instincts of a warrior who has fought all the battles, from the rooftops of East Berlin to Cuba to the recent attempt at a putsch in Russia. In the process, he survived the bloodletting and earned the kudos and taught us all that once down is no battle. Forty years ago I sat with Jack in a cabaret in Berlin called Die Pfeffermuhie and we drank more than our share of beer and wound up singing the Whiffenpoof song. And there's a stanza in it—correct me if I screw this up, Jack—that says: And the measure of our torment is the measure of our youth, God help us, for we knew the worst too young!

"For those of us who were around then and, like you, Jack, knew the worst too young, that about says it all. Except, perhaps, good luck and Godspeed."

The Company officers, a great many of whom hadn't been born when Jack and Ebby were hanging out in Die Pfeffermuhie, applauded enthusiastically; Jack was extremely popular with the rank and file and the truth was they were sorry to see him go. It was, as one section head put it, the end of an era. To everyone's delight, Millie, sobbing openly, rushed up and planted a kiss on Jack's Cossack mustache. Elizabet and Nellie and Manny crowded around him. Jack's son, Anthony, and his daughter-in-law, Maria, hugged him affectionately.

And then the liquor started flowing.

"How did things go in Room SH219?" Jack asked when he managed to buttonhole Ebby in a corner.

"For once they gave us grudging credit for anticipating the putsch and getting the President to warn Gorbachev, even if the warning fell on deaf ears," Ebby recounted. "They asked about you, Jack. I told them you were starting a private security consultancy called the Enterprise. They wanted to know who was bankrolling you." Ebby raised his half-empty whiskey glass and clinked it against Jack's. "Who is bankrolling you, old buddy?"

"Clients," he said.

"You sure are tight-lipped about the whole thing."

"A security consultancy needs to be tight-lipped if it wants to have credibility," Jack retorted.

"I suppose," Ebby said. "Funny thing happened at today's session—our congressional watchdogs went to great pains to remind me that political assassination is prohibited by a 1976 executive order. They kept coming back to that rash of accidents and suicides after the putsch—they asked me several times if I knew anything about them."

"What did you say?"

"I told them the truth, Jack. I told them I'd read about the deaths in the newspapers. I told them that there was no way under the sun the Company would be involved in this sort of thing on my watch." Ebby tilted his head and sized up his retiring DDCI. "You don't happen to know anything about these deaths that you haven't told me, do you, Jack?"

"I'm clean as a whistle on this," he replied.

Jack had learned how to lie from a virtuoso. Every inch the Sorcerer's Apprentice, he summoned up a perfectly guileless smile and, looking Ebby squarely in the eye, repeated what Harvey Torriti said when Jack had raised the subject of RAINBOW'S death in Berlin a dozen or so wars back. "Hey, pal, I swear it to you. On my mother's grave."

POSTLUDE

"Tut, tut, child!"said the Duchess. "Everything's got a moral, if only you can find it.

VIENNA, VIRGINIA, SUNDAY, AUGUST 6, 1995

HIGH OVER THE CITY, A MARE'S TAIL DRIFTED ACROSS THE GREAT Bear so languorously it looked as if the motion picture had been slowed down. On a deserted street running along one side of Nottoway Park in Fairfax County, Virginia, a crow's mile from the town of Vienna, a broad-shouldered fiftyish-something man known to his Russian handlers only by his code name, Ramon, surveyed the neighborhood through prism binoculars that could see in the dark. Sitting motionless in the back seat of his Isuzu Trooper, he'd been keeping an eye on the streets and paths since midnight. He'd watched several people impatiently walking dogs, a couple of homosexuals who stopped in their tracks every few seconds to bicker, an inebriated woman of uncertain age tottering on spiky heels that dispatched sharp echoes into the still summer night. Then absolute silence. Just after two in the morning he'd spotted the dark four-door Ford with two men in it cruising the area. It vanished down a side street and materialized ten minutes later from another direction. On its fourth pass around the area the car eased to a stop at the curb near the park's main entrance on Old Courthouse Road. The headlights flickered out. For a long while the two men remained in the Ford. From time to time one of them would light a fresh cigarette from the glowing embers of the last one. At a quarter to three the men finally emerged from the car and made their way through the park to the wooden footbridge. The one smoking the cigarette turned his back on the bridge and stood guard. The other crouched quickly and tugged a green plastic trash bag from its hiding place under the end of the bridge, and wedged a paper shopping bag into the cranny in its place. On their way back to their automobile, the two men stripped off the white adhesive tape pasted vertically across a "pedestrian crossing" sign (indicating that Ramon was ready to receive the package) and replaced it with a horizontal length of tape (indicating that the dead drop had been serviced). With a last look around, they got back into their car and, accelerating cautiously, drove off.

Ramon waited another twenty minutes before making his move. He had been spying for the Russians for ten years now, and long ago decided that this was the only really perilous moment in the game. His Russian handlers had no idea who he was. They would have figured out from the documents he supplied that he was deeply involved in Russian counterintelligence and just assumed he worked for the CIA; it would never have crossed their minds that he actually worked for the FBI. Which meant that even if the Americans got their hands on a mole or a highly placed Russian defector, they couldn't discover Ramon's identity from the Russians because the Russians didn't know it. On his end, he was senior enough in his shop to have access to computer codes and files that would give him early warning if anybody raised the specter of an American mole working for the Russians.