The Company: A Novel of the CIA (44 page)

"The bastards are lying through their teeth," Dulles told the men gathered in his spacious corner office. "If for some reason Ebbitt went to ground of his own accord, first thing he'd do would be to send us word— when he left Washington he committed to memory the whereabouts of Hungarian cutout equipped with a radio and ciphers. Christ, we even had emergency procedures to exfiltrate him out of Hungary if his cover was blown."

Half an hour into the meeting the DD/0, Frank Wisner, came on the squawk box from London, his first stopover on a tour of European stations, remind everyone that the Hungarian AVH were the step children of the Soviet KGB. "Bear in mind the relationship," he advised from across the Atlantic in his inimitable drawl. "If the KGB sneezes, it's the AVH that catches cold."

"The Wiz may be on to something," Bill Colby allowed when the squawk box went dead. "We won't get to first base with the AVH. On the other hand the KGB has a vested interest in preserving the unspoken modus vivendi between our intelligence services."

The department heads kicked around ideas for another twenty minutes. The State Department would be encouraged to file a formal complaint with the Hungarian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, though none of the people who had pulled up chairs around Dulles's desk held out hope that this would produce results. A channel would be opened, via the Hungarian cutout, to determine if Ebby had actually met with this Arpad Zeik fellow and other members of the Resistance Movement. A sometime-asset in the AVH would be contacted through his handler in Austria but this would take time; if the Hungarians had snagged Ebbitt, the asset might have gotten wind of it. Leo, still junior enough in the presence of the DCI and the various department heads to raise a finger when he wanted to say something, felt Dulles's hard gaze lock onto him when he came up with the idea of putting the Sorcerer on the case; he could meet in Berlin with his KGB counterpart and point out the disadvantages to both sides if they allowed their client services to take scalps, Leo suggested. One of the analysts wondered aloud whether an approach to the Russians on behalf of Ebbitt would undermine whatever chance he had of sticking to the cover story about being a New York attorney.

Leo shook his head thoughtfully. "If they've seized Ebbitt," he said, "it's because they've penetrated his cover story. The problem now is to extricate him alive and in one piece."

Behind a cloud of pipe smoke, Dulles nodded slowly. "I don't recall your name," he told Leo.

'Kritzky. I'm standing in for—" He named the head of the Soviet Russia Division.

"I like the idea ofTorriti explaining the facts of life to the Russian," Dulles announced, eyeing Leo over the top of his glasses. "Coming from Sorcerer, the menace of reciprocity would carry weight with the Russian. Torriti doesn't play games." Dulles hiked a cuff and glanced at his wrist watch. "It's early afternoon in Berlin. He might be able to get something off the ground today. Write that up, Kritzky. I'll sign off on it."

Torriti's corpulent body had slowed down over the years but not his brain. The deciphered version of Dulles's "Action Immediate" reached his sight when he was slumped over it, snoring off a hangover from a bottle of monastery-aged Irish whiskey he'd finally gotten around to cracking open. It had been a gift from the Rabbi to celebrate the Jewish New Year. ("May 5717 bring you fame, fortune and a defector from the Politburo," he had written on the tongue-in-cheek note that accompanied the bottle. "Barring that, may you at least live to see 5718.") Shaking himself out of a stupor, fitting on a pair of spectacles that he had begun to use to read printed matter, the Sorcerer digested Dulles's orders, then bawled through the half open door to Miss Sipp, "Get ahold of McAuliffe—tell him to get his butt down here pronto."

"From Washington, it probably looked like a cakewalk," Jack—now second-in-command at Berlin Base—remarked when he'd read through the Action Immediate. "One of our people's fallen into the hands of the AVH in Budapest. We're going to hold the KGB's feet to the flame if anything happens to him. So far, so good. But Jesus H. Christ, how does Dulles expect us to get in touch with the KGB rezident at Karlshorst on such short notice—I mean, it's not as if you could pick up the phone and dial his number and invite him over to West Berlin for tea and sympathy."

"Knew you'd come up with a creative idea," Torriti said. He dragged the telephone across the desk, then laced the fingers of both hands through his thinning hair to make himself presentable for the phone conversation he hoped to engage in. From the pocket of his rumpled trousers he produced a small key attached to the end of a long chain anchored to his belt. Squinting, he inserted the key in the lock of the upper right-hand desk drawer, tugged it open and rummaged among the boxes of ammunition until he found the small notebook German children used to keep track of class schedules, which he used as an address book. "Does Karlshorst begin with C or K?" he asked Jack.

"K, Harvey."

"Here it is. Karlshorst rezidentura." The Sorcerer fitted his trigger finger in the slots on the phone and dialed the number. Jack could hear the phone pealing on the other end. A woman babbling in Russian answered.

Torriti spoke into the phone cautiously, articulating every syllable. 'Get me some-one who speaks A-mer-i-can Eng-lish." He repeated the words "American English" several times. After a long while someone else came on the line. "Listen up, friend," Torriti said as patiently as he could. "I want you to go and tell Oskar Ugor-Zhilov that Harvey Torriti wants to speak to him." Pleats of skin formed on the Sorcerers brow as he spelled his name. "T-O-R-R-I-T-I." There was another long wait. Then: "So, Oskar, how the fuck are you? This is Harvey Torriti. Yeah, the Harvey Torriti. I think we need to talk. No, not on the phone. Face to face. Man to man. I got a message from my summit that I want you to deliver to your summit. The sooner, the better." Torriti held the phone away from his ear and grimaced. Jack could make out the tinny sound of someone with a thick Russian accent struggling to put a coherent sentence together in English. "You have to be making a joke," Torriti barked into the phone. "No way am I going to put a foot into East Berlin. I got another idea. Know the playground in the Spandau Forest in the British Sector? There's an open-air ice-skating rink that sits smack on the border. I'll meet you in the middle of the rink at midnight." The KGB rezident grunted something. Torriti said, "You can bring as many of your thugs as you like long as you come out onto the ice alone. Oh, yeah, and bring two glasses. I'll supply the whiskey," he added with a titter.

The Sorcerer dropped the phone back onto the receiver. Jack asked, "So how do you figure on playing it, Harvey?"

Torriti, cold sober and thinking fast, eyed Jack. "Not for laughs," he said

The full moon flitting between the clouds had transformed the ice on the skating rink into Argentine marble. At the stroke of midnight two phantoms emerged from the woods on either side and started across the ice in short, cautious flat-footed steps. Oskar Ugor-Zhilov, a wiry man in his middle fifties, wearing baggy trousers tucked into rubber galoshes and a fur shapka with the earflaps raised and jutting, carried two wine glasses in one hand and a bulky Russian walkie-talkie in the other. The Sorcerer, bareheaded, held his ankle-length green overcoat closed with both hands (two buttons were missing) and clutched a bottle of PX booze under an armpit. As the two men warily circled each other in the center of the rink, a giant US Air Force transport plane roared over the tree tops on its way to Tegel Airport in the Free Sector of Berlin.

"We're right under the air corridor," Torriti shouted to his Russia counterpart.

Ugor-Zhilov raised the walkie-talkie to his mouth and muttered something into it. There was an ear-splitting squeal by way of an answer. The Sorcerer waved the bottle. Nodding, the Russian held out the two glasses and Torriti filled them with whiskey. He grabbed one of the glasses by its stem and, saluting the KGB rezident, drank it off as if it were no more potent than apple juice. Not to be outdone by an American, Ugor-Zhilov threw back his head and gulped down the contents of his glass.

"You got a family?" Torriti inquired, skating from one side of the Russian to the other and back again on the balls of his shoes. He was mesmerized by the small tuft of curly hair growing under Ugor-Zhilov's lower lip.

Torriti's question amused the Russia. "You meet me at midnight in the middle of nowhere to find out if I have family?"

"I like to get to know the people I'm up against."

"I am married man," the Russian said. "I have two sons, both living in Moscow. One is senior engineer in the aeronautics industry, the other is journalist for Pravda. Or you, Gospodin Harvey Torriti—you have family?"

"Had a wife once," the Sorcerer said wistfully. "Don't have one any more. She didn't appreciate the line of work I was in. She didn't appreciate my drinking neither. Say, Oskar—you don't mind me calling you Oskar, right?—you wouldn't want to defect, would you?" When the Sorcerer spotted the scowl on the Russian's face, he laughed out loud. "Hold your water, sport, I was only pulling your leg. You know, kidding, teasing. Hey, you Russians need to loosen up. You need to be able to let your hair down. Take a joke." Suddenly Torriti turned serious. "The reason I ask about your family, Oskar, baby," he said, his head angled to one side as if he were sizing the Russian up for a coffin, "is..."

Torriti offered Ugor-Zhilov a refill but was waved off with an emphatic shake of the head. He refilled his own glass and carefully set the bottle down on the ice. "Suppose you were to kick the bucket, Oskar—that's American for cash in your chips, bite the dust, push up the daisies, buy the farm, die— would your family get a pension?"

"If you are threatening me, I inform you that two sharpshooters have your head in telescopic sights even as we talk."

Torriti's lips twisted into a lewd smirk. "If I don't make it off the ice, sport, you can bet you won't make it off the ice neither. Listen up, Oskar, I ain't threatening you. I was talking hypothetically. I'm concerned about what would happen to your family if we were to start killing each other off. We being the KGB and the CIA. I mean, we're not vulgar Mafia clans, right? We are civilized organizations on two sides of a divide who don't see eye to on things like what makes a free election free and due process due, stuff like that. But we are careful not to—"

The throaty growl of a small propeller plane passing low over Spandau drowned out the Sorcerer.

"Yeah, like I was saying, we are careful, you and me, your KGB and my CIA, not to start hurting each other's people."

Ugor-Zhilov looked puzzled. "As far as I know we are not hurting any CIA people."

"You don't know very far," the Sorcerer retorted icily. "Fact is, you have one of our people in custody—"

"I know of no—

"It's in Budapest, sport. The person in question disappeared from the radar screen twenty-four hours ago."

The Russian actually seemed relieved. "Ah, Hungary. That complicates the problem. The Hungarian AVH are completely autonomous—"

"Autonomous, my ass! Don't hand me that crap, Oskar. The KGB runs the AVH same as it runs every other intelligence service in East Europe. You take a crap, they flush the toilet." Over the Russian's shoulder, a flashlight came on near the edge of the woods and described a circle and then flicked off. Torriti skated closer to Ugor-Zhilov. "What would happen right now if I reached under my jacket and lugged out a handgun and stuck it into your gut?"

The Russian's eyes narrowed; he was clearly a man who didn't scare easily. "You would be doing a big mistake, Torriti," he said softly. "Such a gesture would be a form of suicide."

Nodding, the Sorcerer finished the whiskey in his wine glass and noisily licked his lips and set the glass down on the ice. Then, moving very deliberately, he slid his right hand inside his overcoat and came out with the pearl-handled revolver. The Russian froze. The long barrel glistened in the moonlight as Torriti raised the revolver over his head so that anybody watching from either side of the rink could see it. Ugor-Zhilov held his breath, waiting for the crack of the rifle to echo across the rink. Smiling sourly the Sorcerer thumbed back the hammer and jammed the business end of the barrel into the Russian's stomach. "Looks like the turkeys backing you up have gone to sleep on the job," he remarked. Then he pulled the trigger.

The hammer fell onto the firing pin with a hollow click. "Goddamn," Torriti said. "I must've forgotten to load the fucker." Cursing Torriti in a stream of guttural Russian, Ugor-Zhilov started backing toward his side of the rink.

"If anything happens to our guy in Budapest," Torriti called after him "I'll load the pistol and come after you. There won't be anyplace in Germany for you to hide. You reading me, Oskar? Like my friend the Rabbi says, our man loses a tooth, you lose a tooth. Our man goes blind, you go blind. Our man stops breathing, your wife starts collecting your KGB pension."

Torriti retrieved the wine glass and the bottle from the ice and poured himself a refill. Ambling in flat-footed steps back toward the woods, humming under his breath, he treated himself to a well-earned shot of booze.

"So how many of the fuckers were there?" the Sorcerer asked Jack. They were squeezed into the back seat of a station wagon filled with agents from Berlin Base. Sweet Jesus was driving. A second station wagon trailed behind them.

"Six. Two with sniper rifles, two with submachine guns, one with binoculars, one with a walkie-talkie."

"Did they put up much of a fight?"

Jack smirked. "They were all very reasonable types, you could see it in their eyes when they spotted our artillery," Jack said. He produced a small pair of Zeiss binoculars from the pocket of his duffle coat and offered them to the Sorcerer. "Thought you might like a trophy."

Torriti, suddenly weary, let his lids close over his eyes of their own accord. "You keep them, Jack. You earned them."

"I'll keep them, Harvey. But we both know who earned them."

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