The Company: A Novel of the CIA (46 page)

Jumping to his feet, Arpad gestured for the woman to attend to Elizabet. Only too glad to be spared the fate of the other AVH people in the build, she dropped to her knees and began to feel for a pulse. Arpad pulled a pistol from his waistband and motioned for Matyas to bring the prisoner to them. The AVH officer stared at Ebby and said, in English, "For the love of God, stop him." A gold tooth in his lower jaw glistened with saliva. "I have information that could be of great value to your Central Intelligence Agency."

Ebby recognized the voice—it was the one that had emerged from the darkness of the interrogation chamber to ask him, 'Be so kind as to state your full name."

"His name is Szablako," Arpad informed Ebby, the pupils of his eyes reduced to pinpricks of hate. "He is the commandant of this prison, and well-known to those of us who have been arrested by the AVH."

Ebby stepped closer to the AVH colonel general. "How did you know I was CIA? How did you know I work for Wisner? How did you know I worked in Frankfurt?"

Szablako clutched at the straw that could save his life. "Take me into your custody. Save me from them and I will tell you everything."

Ebby turned to Arpad. "Let me have him—his information can be of great importance to us."

Arpad, wavering, looked from Elizabet on the floor to Szablako, and then at Matyas, who was angrily shaking his head no. "Give him to me," Ebby whispered, but the muscles around the poet's eyes slowly contorted, disfiguring his face, transforming it into a mask of loathing. Suddenly Arpad jerked his head in the direction of the refrigerator room. Matyas understood instantly. Ebby tried to step in front of the colonel general but Arpad, rabid, roughly shoved him to one side. Szablako, seeing what was in store for him, began to tremble violently. "It was the Centre that told us," he cried as Arpad and Matyas dragged him into the cold room. A shriek of terror resounded through the basement corridor, followed by the mournful whimpering a coyote would make if one of its paws had been caught in the steel teeth of a bear trap. The whimpering continued until Arpad and Matyas emerged from the refrigerator room and swung the heavy door shut. They spun the chrome wheel, driving home the spikes on the lockset.

Once outside the room, Arpad cast a quick look at Elizabet, stretched out on the floor. For a fleeting moment he seemed to be torn between staying with her and dashing off to lead the revolution. The revolution won; grabbing his rifle, Arpad strode away with Matyas. The prison doctor busied herself disinfecting Elizabet's wounds and, with Ebby's help, dressed her in a man's flannel shirt and trousers that were tugged up high and tied around her waist with a length of cord. Elizabet's eyes flicked open and stared dumbly into Ebby's face, unable at first to place him. Her tone measured the gap in a chipped front tooth. Then her right hand clutched her left breast through the fabric of the shirt and her stiff lips pronounced his name.

"Elliott?"

"Welcome back to the world, Elizabet," Ebby whispered.

"They hurt me..."

Ebby could only nod.

"The room was so cold—"

"You're safe now."

"I think I told them who you were—"

"It doesn't matter." Ebby noticed a filthy sink with a single faucet at the far end of the hall way. He tore off a square of cloth from the tail of his shirt and wet it and sponged her lips, which were caked with dried blood.

"What has happened?" she asked weakly.

"The insurrection is underway," Ebby said.

"Where is Arpad?"

Ebby managed a bone-weary grin. "He's trying to catch up with the revolution so he can lead it."

As streaks of gray tinted the sky in the east, rumors spread through the city that Russian tanks from the 2nd and the 17th Mechanized Divisions had already reached the outskirts of the capitol. Ebby spotted the first T-34 tank, with the number 527 painted in white on its turret, lumbering into position at an intersection when he and Elizabet were being taken in a bread delivery van to the Corvin Cinema on the corner of Ulloi and Jozsef Avenues. A skinny girl named Margit, with veins of rust bleached into her long blonde hair, was behind the wheel of the van. Ebby sat next to her, Elizabet lay curled up on a mat in the back. On Kalvin Square, five tanks with Russian markings stenciled on the turrets had formed a circle with their guns pointing outward and their commanders surveying the surrounding streets through binoculars from their hatches. Ebby noticed that three of the tanks had small Hungarian flags attached to their whip antennas; the Russians clearly weren't looking for a clash with the students, many of whom were armed with Molotov cocktails.

Ebby scribbled down an address on Prater Street that he had memorized back in Washington—it was the apartment of the Hungarian cutout with a radio and ciphers—and Margit managed to make it there by only side streets and alleyways, avoiding the intersections controlled by Russian tanks. The cutout turned out to be a happy-go-lucky young man named Zoltan with sickle-shaped sideburns that slashed across his pox-scarred cheeks and two steel teeth that flashed when he smiled. Ebby had no difficulty convincing Zoltan to come along with him; the Gypsy didn't have anything against Communism but he was aching to get into a fight with the Russians who occupied his country. He brought along backpack with a transceiver in it, a long curved knife that his father's father had used in skirmishes against the Turks and a violin in a homemade canvas case.

"I understand about the radio and the knife," Ebby told him as they squeezed into the front seat of the van. "But why the violin?"

"Not possible to make war without a violin," Zoltan explained seriously. "Gypsy violinists led Magyars into battle against goddamn Mongols, okay, so it damn good thing if gypsy violinist, yours truly, leads Hungarians into battle against goddamn Russians." He crossed himself and repeated the same thing to Margit in Hungarian, which made her laugh so hard it brought tears to her eyes.

On Rakoczi Street the van was suddenly surrounded by students who had thrown up a roadblock of overturned yellow trolley cars placed in such a way that an automobile had to zigzag through the gaps between them. Overhead, electric cables dangled from their poles. The students wore armbands with the Hungarian colors and brandished large naval pistols, antiquated World War I German rifles and, in one case, a cavalry sword. They must have recognized Margit because they waved the van through. From the sidewalk, an old woman raised her cane in salute. "Eljen!" she cried. "Long life!" On the next corner, more students were carrying out armloads of suits from a big clothing emporium and piling them on the sidewalk. A young woman wearing the gray uniform of a tram conductor, her leather ticket pouch bulging with hand grenades, shouted to a group of passing students that anyone joining them would be given a suit and five Molotov cocktails. Half a dozen students took her up on the offer.

The Corvin Cinema, a round blockhouse-like structure set back from the wide avenue, had been transformed into a fortress and command post for the five hastily organized companies of the so-called Corvin Battalion. A poster in the lobby advertised a film entitled Irene, Please Go Home; someone had crossed out "Irene" and substituted "Russki." In the basement girls manufactured Molotov cocktails by the hundreds, using petrol from a nearby gas station. The movie theater itself, on the ground floor of a four story block of flats, had been turned into a freewheeling assembly line patterned after the popular "Soviets" that had sprung up in Petrograd during the Bolshevik Revolution. Delegates from schools and factories and Hungarian Army units came and went, and raised their hands to vote while they were there. At any given moment a speaker could be heard arguing passionately that the object of the uprising was to put an end to the Soviet occupation of Hungary and rid the country of Communism; merely reforming the existing Communist government and system would not satisfy the people who flocked to Corvin.

Students wearing Red Cross armbands carried Elizabet off on a stretcher to a makeshift infirmary on the third floor. Ebby and his gypsy radioman set up shop in an office on the top floor of an adjoining apartment house that was connected to the Corvin Cinema by a jury-rigged passage through the walls of the buildings. "If goddamn Russian tanks start shooting, this is safest place to be," Zoltan explained with an ear-to-ear grin. "Because those cannons on the goddamn T-34's, they can't aim so high in narrow streets, right." Zoltan shinnied up a stovepipe on the roof to string the shortwave antenna, then set about enciphering Ebby's first bulletin to the Company listening post in Vienna. It reported briefly on his arrest and the arrival of a KGB officer who tried to spirit him away from the AVH station, only to wind up in front of an impromptu firing squad as the insurrectionists raided secret police buildings. Ebby described sighting the first Russian tanks and the telling detail that many of them displayed Hungarian flags. He also pointed out that the Russian armor that had taken up positions in Budapest was not accompanied, as far as he could see, by ground troops, which meant that the Russians were incapable of putting down the revolution without the assistance of the Hungarian army and regular 40,000 strong uniformed police force. And as of dawn on this second day or the insurrection, he said, the Hungarian army and the regular Budapest police had either gone over to what Ebby called the freedom fighters (a phrase that would be picked up by the press) or had declared neutrality.

6

VIENNA, MONDAY, OCTOBER 29, 1956

AS REBELLION ROCKED HUNGARY, CIA REINFORCEMENTS POURED INTO Vienna from Company stations across Europe. Jack McAuliffe, on detached duty from Berlin, reported to the dingy six-story hotel that the Company had leased on the edge of the Danube Canal in the blue collar suburb of Landstrasse. Directing a task force working out of a warren of rooms on the fourth floor, Jack began to set up an infrastructure for screening the refugees starting to trickle across the Austro-Hungarian frontier; if the situation deteriorated, that trickle was expected to turn into a flood and the Company had to be ready to deal with it. The Austrian Red Cross had opened reception centers in villages near the frontier. Jack's brief was to make sure that middle or high level Communists, as well as ranking military and police officers, were weeded out and interrogated; to make sure, also, that the Company kept an eye peeled for refugees who might be recruited as agents and sent back into Hungary. Late in the afternoon of the 29th, Jack received word that his refugee screening net had pulled in its first big fish: a regular army colonel who had been attached to the Hungarian general staff as liaison with the Soviet 2nd Mechanized Division had come across the frontier with his family during the ^ght and had exhibited a readiness to trade information for the promise of political asylum in America. Jack was signing off on an in-house memo on the 5110-001 when one of his junior officers, fresh out of the S.M. Crew Management course in Alexandria, Virginia, stuck his head in the door. There was going t0 be a briefing on the latest developments in Hungary in twenty minutes.

Jack was settling into one of the folding metal chairs at the back of the banquet hall on the hotels top floor when a young woman pushed through the swinging doors from the kitchen. The officer sitting next to him whistled under his breath. "Now that's someone I wouldn't kick out of rack," he said.

"If she's the new briefing officer," a meteorologist quipped, "we better rent another truckload of seats for the hall."

Jack pushed up his tinted aviators sunglasses with a forefinger and peered under them to get a closer look at her. The young woman seemed vaguely familiar. She was wearing a soft blue skirt that fell to the tops of her ankle boots, a white shirt with a ruffled front and a riding jacket that flared at the waist. Her mouth was painted with raspberry-pink lipstick. She strode across the room to the podium, propped up her briefing folder and scratched a very long and very painted fingernail across the microphone to see if it was turned on. Then she stared out at the ninety or so Company officers crowded into the banquet hall. "My name," she announced, her take-charge voice cutting through the background noise of unfinished conversations, "is Mildred Owen-Brack."

Of course! Owen-Brack! A lifetime ago, back at the posh Cloud Club in the Chrysler building in Manhattan, Jack had been dumb enough to make a pass at her but she hadn't been in the market for a one-night stand. Bye-bye, John J. McAuliffe, and good luck to you, she'd said, batting eyelashes that were so long he'd imagined they were trying to cool his lust.

At the podium Owen-Brack was providing a rundown on the latest news's from Hungary. The Stalinist old guard in Budapest had been booted out and Imre Nagy, the former Hungarian premier who had once been imprisoned as a "deviationist," had emerged as the new head of government. Nagy, who favored a system that Communist intellectuals dubbed Marxism with a human face, had informed the Russians that he couldn't be held responsible for what happened in Hungary unless Soviet troops were pulled out of Budapest. Within hours the Soviet tanks guarding the major intersections had kicked over their engines and started to re-deploy. A long line of ammunition carriers pulling field kitchens, some with smoke still corkscrewing up from their stovepipes, had been spotted heading east through the suburbs. The population, convinced that the revolution had triumphed, had spilled into the streets to celebrate. Nagy, under pressure from militant anti-Communists, appeared willing to test the limits of Russian patience; one of the uncensored newspapers quoted Nagy as saying privately that he would abolish the one-parry system and organize free elections. The political counselor at the American embassy guessed that, in a genuinely free election, the Communists would be lucky to poll ten percent of the vote, which would spell the end of Socialism in Hungary. This same counselor had heard rumors that Nagy was toying with the idea of pulling Hungary out of the Soviet-dominated Warsaw Military Pact.

The $64,000 question, Owen-Brack suggested, was: Would the Soviets sit on their hands while Nagy eased Hungary out of the Soviet orbit? Were the Russians pulling the 2nd and 17th Mechanized Divisions out of Budapest in order to buy time—time for Soviet reinforcements, known to be stationed in the Ukraine, to cross the pontoon bridges over the Tisza and reoccupy the entire country