The Company: A Novel of the CIA (29 page)

"Have you told Herr Professor about me?"

"He has never asked me and I have not raised the subject. What he does—the information he sends to you—it is out of an antique idealism. Herr Professor wears shirts with studs instead of buttons, and old-fashioned starched collars that he changes daily; he is clearly ill at ease with the latest fashions in clothing and political ideas. He gathers the information and writes it out meticulously on the silk in order to turn the clock back. He counts on me take care of the details of the delivery."

"We could become lovers," Jack breathed.

"In mysterious ways we are already lovers," Lili corrected him.

"I want you—"

"You have as much of me as I can give to you—"

"I want more. I want what any man wants. I want you in bed."

"I say it to you without ambiguity—this can never be."

"Because of Herr Professor?"

"He saved my life at the end of the war. In my dictionary gang-rape comes before grab forty winks. I was what you call gang-raped by drunken Russian soldiers. I filled the pockets of my overcoat with bricks in order to throw myself into the Spree, I could not wait for the dark waters to close over my head. Herr Professor prevented me... through the night he talked to me of another Germany... of Thomas Mann, of Heinrich Boll... at dawn he took me to the roof of the building to watch the sun rise. He convinced me that it was the first day of the rest of my life. I do not pretend, Jack, to be... indifferent to you. I only say that my first loyalty is to him. I say also that this loyalty takes the form of sexual fidelity..."

Lili stepped into a skirt and peeled off her dancing tights from under it. She folded them into her satchel and reached to turn out the lights in the rehearsal hall. "I must begin back, yes?"

Jack gripped her shoulder. "He lets you run risks."

Lili pulled away. "That is unfair—there is a hierarchy to the world I live in. Because he considers some things more important does not mean needs me less."

"I need you more."

"You do not need me as he needs me. Without me—" She looked away her face suddenly stony.

"Finish the sentence, damnation—without you what?"

"Without me he cannot remain alive. You can."

"You want to spell that out?"

"No."

"You owe it to yourself—"

"Whatever I owe to myself, I owe more to him. Please let me go now, Jack-o'-lantern."

Sorting through emotions that were not familiar to him, Jack nodded gloomily. "Will you come again Friday?"

"Friday, yes. Depart ahead of me, if you please. We should not be seen coming out of the theater together."

Jack put a hand on the back of her neck and drew her to him. She let her forehead rest for a moment against his shoulder. Then she stepped back and turned off the lights and opened the door and waited at the top of the staircase while he descended the steps.

He looked back once. Four floors above him Lili was lost in the shadows of the landing. "Lily of the valley?" he called. When she didn't respond he turned and, hurrying past Aristide dozing in his glass-enclosed cubbyhole, fled from the theater.

"Do me a favor, sport," the Sorcerer had said as casually as if he'd been asking Jack to break some ice cubes out of the office fridge. "Put a teardrop in SNIPER'S wall."

Bugging the Professor's house had turned out to be easier said than done. Jack had dispatched some German freelancers to scout the street behind the Gorky Theater. It was filled with war-gutted buildings and rubble and the single house standing in the middle of what had once been a garden. It took them ten days to work out when both RAINBOW and SNIPER were away from home. As a deputy prime minister, Lili's Herr Professor went to a government office weekday mornings and taught seminars in particle and plasma physics at Humbolt University in the afternoons. Two mornings a week Lili took the U-Bahn to Alexanderplatz, where she had classical dance classes at one of the last private schools in the Soviet Union. Three afternoons a week she spent in a windowless Gorky Theater rehearsal hall taking lessons from a crippled Russian woman who had danced with the Kirov before the war. Even when both RAINBOW and SNIPER were away, there was still a stumbling block to the planting of a microphone: Herr Professor had a caretaker living in two gloomy ground floor rooms of the house, an old woman who had once been his nanny and now, confined by arthritis to a wicker wheelchair, spent most of her waking hours staring through the windowpane at the deserted street.

Jack had brought the problem to the Sorcerer: how to get the caretaker out of the house long enough for a team to break into her rooms and install a bug in the ceiling?

The Sorcerer, sorting through barium meals and the people to whom they would be addressed, had grunted. His eyes were puffier than usual, and heavy-lidded; he looked as if had come out second best in a street brawl, which in itself defied logic. Jack couldn't imagine the Sorcerer coming out second best in anything.

"Kill her?" the Sorcerer had suggested.

For an instant Jack had actually taken him seriously. "We can't just up and kill her, Harvey—we're the good guys, remember?"

"Don't you know a joke when you hear one, sport? Lure her out of the house with a free ticket to a Communist Party shindig. Whatever."

"She's an old lady. And she's tied to a wheelchair."

The Sorcerer had shaken his head in despair. "I got problems of my own," he had grumbled, his double chins quivering. "Use your goddamn imagination for once."

It had taken Jack the better part of a week to figure out the answer, and three days to lay in the plumbing. One morning, soon after Herr Professor and Lili had left the apartment, an East German ambulance with two young men in white coats sitting on either side of a muzzled lap dog had eased up to the curb in front of the house. The men had knocked on the caretaker's door. When she opened it the width of the safety chain, they had explained that they had been sent by the Communist Party's Ministry of Public Health to transport her to a doctor s office off Strausberger Platz for a free medical examination. It was part of a new government social program to aid the elderly and the infirm. If she qualified—and judging from the wheelchair they suspected she might—she would be given the latest Western pills to alleviate her pain and a brand new Czech radio. The caretaker, her peasant eyes narrowing in suspicion, had wanted to know how much all this would cost. Silwan II had favored her with one of his angelic smiles and had assured her that the service was free of charge. Scratching the hair on her upper lip, the caretaker had thought about this for a long time. Finally she had removed the safety chain.

No sooner had Sweet Jesus and the Fallen Angel carted the caretaker to visit the doctor (hired for the occasion) than a small pickup truck with the logo of the East German Electrical Collective on its doors drew up in front of the house. Three of the Company's "plumbers," dressed in blue coveralls, carrying a wooden ladder and two wooden boxes filled with tools and electrical equipment, went up the walkway and let themselves into the caretaker's rooms; a fourth plumber waited in the drivers seat. The pickup's radio was tuned to the East German police frequency. A fist-sized radio transmitter on the seat buzzed into life. "We are operational," a voice speaking Hungarian said, "and starting the work."

The team inside used a silent drill—the sound of the bit working its way into the ceiling was muted by a tiny spray of water—in case the KGB had planted microphones in SNIPER'S apartment. Jack's people worked the bit up to within a centimeter of the surface of the floor, then switched drills to one that turned so slowly it could punch a pinhole in the floor without pushing any telltale sawdust up into the room. A tiny microphone the size of the tip of one of those new-fangled ballpoint pens was inserted into the pinhole and then wired up to the electric supply in the caretakers overhead lighting fixture. The small hole in the ceiling was filled with quick-drying plaster and repainted the same color as the rest of the ceiling with quick-drying paint. A miniature transmitter was fitted inside the fixture so that it was invisible from below, and hooked up to the house's electricity. The transmitter, programmed to be sound-activated, beamed signals to a more powerful transmitter buried in the crest of the rubble in the vacant lot next door. This second transmitter, which ran on a mercury dry-cell battery, broadcast in turn to an antenna on the roof of a building in the American sector of Berlin.

"Did you work something out, sport?" Torriti mumbled when he bumped into Jack in the Berlin-Dahlem PX.

"As a matter of fact I did, Harvey. I sent in your Hungarian plumbers—"

The Sorcerer held up a palm, cutting him off. "Don't give me the details, kid. That way I can't give your game away if I'm ever tortured by the Russians.

Torriti said it with such a straight face that Jack could only nod dumbly in agreement. Watching the Sorcerer lumber off with a bottle of whiskey under each arm, he began to suspect that the honcho of Berlin Base had been putting him on. On the other hand, knowing Torriti, he could have been serious.

11

FRANKFURT, MONDAY, APRIL 23, 1951

LOOKING LIKE WITNESSES AT A WAKE, EBBY, TONY SPINK AND HALF A dozen other officers from the Soviet/Eastern Europe Division crowded around the bulky reel-to-reel tape machine on Spink's desk. The technician, who had recorded the special radio program from Tirane earlier that afternoon, threaded the tape through the capstan and locked it into the pickup spool. Spink looked at the translator who had been sitting next to Ebby the night of the farewell dinner for the Albanian commandoes in the Heidelberg inn. "Ready?" he asked. She nodded once. He hit the "Play" button. At first there was a great deal of static. "We had trouble tuning in the station," the technician explained. "We had to orient our antenna. Here it comes."

Ebby could hear the high-pitched voice of a man speaking in Albanian. He seemed to be delivering a tirade. "So he is what we call the Procurator and you call the Prosecutor," announced the translator, a short, middle-aged woman with short-cropped hair. "He sums up the prosecution case against the accused terrorists. He says that they landed on the coast from two small, motorized rubber rafts immediately after midnight on April the twenty. He says a routine border patrol stumbled across them as they were deflating and burying the rafts in the sand." The translator cocked her head as another voice called out a question. "The chief judge asks the Procurator what the terrorists did when the border soldiers attempted to apprehend them. The Procurator says that the terrorists opened fire without warning, killing three border soldiers, wounding two additional border soldiers. In the change of gunfire four of the terrorists were killed and the three, on trial today, were apprehended." The translator wiped tears from her eyes with the back of her finger. "Now the judge asks if incriminating evidence was captured with the terrorists."

"They sound like they're reading from a goddamn script," Spink muttered angrily.

"The Procurator puts into evidence objects labelled with the letters the alphabet. The labels arrive at the letter V for Victor. Items A and B consist of two American manufacture rafts and seven American air force inflatable life jackets. In addition there are five British manufacture Lee-1 Enfield rifles, two American manufacture Winchester Model 74 rifles fitted with British manufacture Parker-Hale silencers and Enfield telescopic sights, three American manufacture Browning pistols fitted with primitive home-made silencers, one small leather valise containing a British manufacture Type A dash Mark Roman numeral two radio transmitter and receiver with Morse key and earphones, a map of Albania and another of Tirane printed on cotton and sewn into the lining of a jacket, seven cyanide vials in small brass containers that were attached by safety pins to the insides of lapels... Here the chief judge interrupts to ask if communications codes were discovered on the terrorists. The Procurator says the terrorists arrived to destruct the envelope containing the codes before they were captured. He goes on to explain that the envelopes were coated with a chemical that made them burn immediately a match was touched to the paper. He says also..."

The Procurators shrill voice, trailed by the muted voice of the translator, droned on. Spink pulled Ebby away from the tape recorder. "You mustn't blame yourself," he whispered. "Its a dirty game. These things happen all the time." He patted Ebby on the shoulder. Together they turned back to the tape and the translator.

"...asks if the terrorists have anything to say."

A growl of anger from the public attending the trial could be heard on the tape. Then someone breathed heavily into the microphone. A young man began to speak in a robot-like voice. "He says—" The translator sucked in her breath. She unconsciously brought a hand to her breast as she forced herself to continue. "He says his name is Adil Azizi. He says he is the leader of the commando group. He says he and his comrades were trained in the secret base near Heidelberg, Germany by agents of the American Central Intelligence Agency. Their mission was to land on the coast of the Albanian Democratic Republic, bury their rubber boats, work their way across country to the capitol of Tirane and, with the help of local terrorist cells, assassinate comrade Enver Hoxha, who holds the post of Premier and Foreign Minister. The chief judge asks the terrorist Azizi if there are mitigating circumstances to be taken into consideration before the court passes sentence. Azizi says there are none. Adil Azizi says that he and the two surviving terrorists deserve the supreme penalty for betraying the motherland... The sounds you hear in the background are from people in the courtroom demanding the death sentence."

The technician punched the fast-forward button and kept an eye on the counter. When it reached a number he had marked on a slip of paper, he started the tape again. "The radio station played twelve minutes of patriotic music while the judges deliberated," the translator explained. "Now is the sentence. The chief judge orders the three terrorists to stand. He says to them that they have been convicted of high treason and terrorism against the People's Republic of Albania and its supreme leader, Enver Hoxha. He says them that the court sentences the three terrorists to execution. Ah, I cannot continue—"

"Translate, damn it," Ebby snapped.

"He says them there is no appeal in capital crimes. He orders that the sentence is carried out immediately."

"When they say 'immediately,' they mean immediately," the technician warned. Several of the CIA officers drifted away from the table and casually lit cigarettes. Ebby noticed that the hands of one officer trembled.

"Now is the voice of the radio announcer," the translator went on very quietly. "He describes the three terrorist as shaking with fear when their wrists are bound behind their backs and they are led by soldiers from the courtroom. He describes—" The translator bit her lip. "He describes following them down two flights of steps to the rear door of the courthouse which opens onto the parking lot. He describes that there are no cars parked in the parking lot this day. He describes that a large crowd is assembled at the edge of the parking lot, that above his head all the windows are filled with people watching. He describes that the three terrorists are tied to iron rings projecting from the wall that were once used to attach horses when the building was constructed in the previous century. He describes a man in civilian clothing giving each terrorist a sip of peach brandy. He describes now the peloton of execution charging their rifles and one of the terrorists begging for mercy."

Unable to continue, sobbing into her sleeve, the translator stumbled away from the table.

From the tape machine came the crackle of rifle fire, then three sharp reports from smaller caliber weapons.

"Revolvers," Spink said professionally. "Twenty-two caliber, by sound."

"They were kids," Ebby said tightly. His right hand dipped into bit jacket pocket and closed over the wooden grip of the antique Webler revolver the young Albanians had given him in Heidelberg. "They never had time to liberate Albania, did they?"

Spink shrugged fatalistically. "To their everlasting credit at least they tried. God bless them for that."

"God bless them," Ebby agreed, and he came up with a sliver of a Byron poem that had once lodged in his brain at Yale:

Let there be light! said God, and there was light! Let there be blood! says man, and there's a sea!

12

FRANKFURT, WEDNESDAY, MAY 2, 1951

JACK HAD HITCHED A RIDE INTO FRANKFURT ON AN AIR FORCE film exchange run to hand-deliver the Sorcerer's "For Your Eyes Only" envelope into the fleshy hands of General Truscott, after which he was supposed to personally burn the contents in the Frankfurt Station incinerator and return to Berlin with Truscott's yes or no. The General, in one of his foul moods, could be heard chewing out someone through the shut door of his office as Jack cooled his heels outside. The two secretaries, one typing letters from a dictaphone belt, the other manicuring her fingernails, acted as if nothing out of the ordinary were happening. "And you have the gumption," Truscott could be heard bellowing, "to stand there and tell me you launched five hundred and sixteen balloons into Russian air space and only managed to retrieve forty?"

A muffled voice could be heard stumbling through an explanation. The General cut it off in mid-sentence. "I don't give a flying fart if the prevailing winds weren't prevailing. You were supposed to send reconnaissance balloons fitted with cameras and take photos of Soviet installations. Instead you seem to have spilled eight hundred thousand of the taxpayers' greenbacks down the proverbial drain. From where I'm sitting that looks suspiciously like unadulterated incompetence." The door opened and a drawn Company officer emerged from the General's office. Truscott's wrath trailed after him like a contrail. "Goddamn it, man, I don't want excuses, I want results. If you can't give 'em to me I'll send people who can. You out there, Miss Mitchel? Send in the Sorcerer's goddamn Apprentice."

The young woman working on her nails nodded toward the General's door. Jack rolled his eyes in mock fright. "Is the front office in friendly hands?" he asked.

The secretary bared her teeth in a nasty smile. "His bark is nothing compared to his bite," she remarked.

"Thanks for the encouragement," Jack said.

"Oh, you're very welcome, I'm sure."

"What's the Sorcerer cooking up that it needs to be hand-delivered?" Truscott demanded when he caught sight of Jack in the doorway.

"Sir, I am not familiar with the contents."

He gave the sealed envelope to the General, who slit it open with the flick of a finger and pulled out the single sheet of yellow legal paper. He flattened the page on the blotter with his palms, put on a pair of spectacles and frowning, began to read the message, which had been handwritten by Torriti. Glancing around the vast office, Jack took in the framed photographs showing Truscott with various presidents and prime ministers and field marshals. He thought he heard Truscott mutter under his breath as he jotted something on the blotter; it sounded like "Thirty, twelve, forty-five."

Truscott looked up. "Here's what you tell him: The answer to his barely legible bulletin from Berlin is affirmative."

"Affirmative," Jack repeated.

"While you're at it, remind him I'd take it as a personal favor if he'd learn to typewrite."

"You would like him to typewrite future messages," Jack repeated.

"Make tracks," Truscott snapped. He brayed through the open door, "Goddamn it, Miss Mitchel, haven't they deciphered the overnight from the Joint Chiefs yet?"

"They said it'd be another twenty minutes," the secretary called back.

"What are they doing down in the communications shack," the General groaned, "taking a coffee break between each sentence?"

Jack retrieved the Sorcerer's message from Truscott's desk and made his way down a staircase to the second-level sub-basement incinerator room. The walls and doors had been freshly painted in battleship gray, and smelled it. In the corridor outside the "Central Intelligence Agency Only" door, curiosity got the best of Jack and he sneaked a look at Torriti's note. "General," it said, "I've decided to send out one last barium meal to my prime suspect saying Torriti knows the identity of the Soviet mole who betrayed the Visnei exfiltration. At which point, if I've hit the nail on the head, my suspect willl get word to his KGB handlers and the Russians will try to kidnap or kill me. If they succeed you'll find a letter addressed to you in the small safe in the corner of my office. The combination is: thirty, then left past thirty to tvelve, then right to forty-five. Copy the numbers on your blotter, please. The letter will identify the mole and spell out the evidence, including my last bariu meal. If the attempt to murder or kidnap me fails I'll fly to Washington and drive home the spike myself. Okay? Torriti."

Jack folded the Sorcerer's letter back into the envelope and went into the burn room. An Army staff sergeant with sixteen years worth of hash marks on the sleeve of his field jacket hanging on the back of the door glanced at the laminated ID card Jack held up, then pointed to a metal trash bin. "Throw it in—I'll take care of it."

"I've been ordered to burn it personally," Jack told him.

"Suit yourself, chum."

Jack crumbled the envelope, opened the grate of the furnace and dropped it in. "Talk about balls," he said as the envelope went up in flames.

"Beg pardon?"

"No, nothing. I was just thinking out loud."

With an hour and a quarter to kill before he could catch a ride back to Berlin on the film-exchange plane, Jack wandered up to the fifth floor cubbyhole occupied by Ebby. Finding the door ajar, he rapped on it with his knuckles and pushed through to discover Ebby sitting with his feet propped up on the sill. He was staring gloomily out over the roofs of Frankfurt as he absently spun the cylinder of what looked like an antique revolver. Ebby's occasional office mate, a young CIA case officer named William Sloane Coffin, assigned at the time to a leaflet distribution project, was on his way out. "Maybe you can cheer him up," Coffin told Jack as they brushed past each other.

Ebby waved Jack into Bill Coffin's chair. "Hey, what brings you down to Frankfurt?"

Jack noticed that the lines around Ebby's eyes had deepened, making him look not only grimmer but older. "Needed to ferry some 'Eyes-Only' stuff to your general." Jack scraped Coffin's vacated seat over to Ebby's desk. You look like death warmed over," he said. "Want to talk about it?"

Ebby gnawed on a lip. "I was the case officer for a team going into Albania," he finally said. He shook his head disconsolately. "My Albanians, all seven of them, bought it—four were gunned down on the beach, the other three were hauled in front of judge and treated to a mock trial, then put up against a wall and shot."

Im sorry to hear that, Ebby. Look, I don't mean to soft-pedal your sense of loss—"

"—of failure. Use the right word."

"What I want to say is that we all take hits," Jack said softly. He was thinking of the would-be Russian defector Vishnevsky and his wife strapped onto stretchers. He was thinking of Vishnevsky s boy being pulled up the ramp onto a plane sobbing and crying out "papa." "It comes with the territory."