The Company: A Novel of the CIA (99 page)

"Oh, dear, Ardyn, what is going on?" a gray-haired woman whispered to the concierge standing behind the reception desk.

"Well, you're not going to believe this, Mrs. Williams, but I think the FBI's just captured a criminal."

"In the Hay-Adams! My goodness, how thrilling," the woman said. "Will I have something to tell my children when I get back to Memphis!"

When word of Manny's disappearance reached Langley, two of his closest friends in the Soviet Division stopped by Nellie's law office to break the news to her: Manny had gone into Moscow as a tourist and failed to show up for supper at the Hotel Metropole the previous evening. So far they had no idea what had happened to him. The embassy people were on the case, checking with the police and hospitals to see if he had been involved in an accident. Of course the Company would let Nellie know the instant there was any news.

Ebby phoned her soon after. She would have to understand that he couldn't tell her much over the phone. All they knew for sure was that Manny hadn't returned to the hotel. When Ebby told her they were still hoping the disappearance would have an innocent explanation, Nellie exploded: "You mean he might have been mugged and is lying unconscious in some alleyway, as opposed to arrested?" Then she got a grip on her emotions. She was terribly sorry; she understood this must be as hard for Ebby as it was for her. "It's hard on all of us," Ebby agreed, and she could tell from his voice that he was worried sick. Before he hung up he said, "Look, when you get off work, why don't you move back in with us until this blows over."

Ebby never made it home from Langley that night. Elizabet and Nellie sat up until after two, knocking down frozen daiquiris. The only light came from a late-night film, Five Easy Pieces, flickering on the television screen with the sound switched off. To break the long silences, Nellie got her mother onto the subject of Hungary. Elizabet, under the spell of the daiquiris, let down her guard and began to talk about Nellie s father, the poet Arpad Zeik. "I'm told that young people still recite his poems in the university," she said.

"How long were you together?" Nellie wanted to know.

Elizabet smiled in the flickering darkness. "We were never together, Arpad and I. Our paths crossed, sometimes several times during a day, more often than not in bed. He was what you might call an ardent despot, tyrannical in the pursuit of poetry and liberty for the masses. Individual freedom—my freedom—was not high on his agenda."

"And he was killed in the revolution."

"The revolution—the Russians—in a manner of speaking killed him. He and his poetry had helped suck the Hungarian people into a tragedy. When he realized this he did what had to be done—he shot himself."

Nellie whispered, "You told me he'd died but you never said he'd killed himself." She gulped down what was left in the glass, then chewed on some crushed ice. "Did you love him?" she asked.

Elizabet thought about that. "I don't remember," she said.

This annoyed Nellie. "How can you say that? How can you say you don't remember if you loved my father?"

"It's an honest answer. I must have thought I loved him—why else would I have been with him? But when I fell in love with Elliott it eradicated the several loves that went before."

"If something happens to Manny..." Nellie brought a fist up to her solar plexus. When the pain in her chest subsided she finished the sentence. "If something happens I will never forget how much I love him. Nothing... no one... no amount of time will eradicate the memory."

Elizabet held out her arms and Nellie came into them. Soundless sobs racked the girl's body and a torrent of tears spilled from her eyes.

The news that Manny had been arrested came as a relief to both women—at least it meant that he wasn't dying in an alleyway. Ebby showed up late one afternoon but he only stayed the time it took to shower and shave and change into fresh clothing, at which point he headed straight back to Langley to stay on top of the situation.

It was Jack who eventually phoned up with the good news. "I think it's going to work out," he told Nellie.

She covered the mouthpiece. "Jack thinks things will work out," she told her mother. Elizabet took the phone when Nellie chocked up with emotion. "Jack, are you sure?"

"We won't be sure until he's on our side of the Iron Curtain," he said. "But I think the fix is in."

Nellie grabbed the phone back. "How are you going to get him out?"

"Can't tell you that, Nellie. Bear with us. Pack a bag and be ready to leave at a moment's notice."

"Where am I going?"

"Stop asking dumb questions. Ebby wanted you both to know that we're working on something, that it's looking good. When Manny comes out we thought you'd like to be there."

"Goddamn it, I would. Like to be there. Thanks, Jack."

"Sure."

A film of fog blanketed the Havel River separating West Berlin from Potsdam in the Soviet Zone, deadening the hollow knell from a distant steeple on the eastern bank. Soon after midnight, seven Jeeps and a lorry with mud-splashed Red Army stars on its doors pulled up on the Potsdam side of the Glicnicbe Bridge. The lead Jeep flashed its lights twice. From the American end of the bridge came two answering flashes. Russian soldiers lowered the lorry's tailgate and a tall, slightly stooped man wearing a shapeless raincoat jumped down onto the road. The Russian colonel checked the luminous dial of his wristwatch, men nodded at two soldiers, who took up position on either side of the road in the raincoat. They accompanied him past the raised barrier onto the suspension bridge. A quarter of the way along it, the two Russian soldiers stopped in their tracks and the tall civilian kept walking. A figure could be seen heading toward him from the far end. He was wearing thick glasses that had turned fuliginous in the light from the bridge's wrought-iron lampposts. The two slowed as they approached each other in me middle of the bridge. Regarding each other warily, they stopped to exchange a few words.

"You speak Russian?" asked the younger man.

The second man, appearing disoriented, worked his bony fingers through his thinning hair. "No."

The younger man found himself smiling at a private joke. "Unfortunately for you, you'll have the rest of your life to learn."

As the bespectacled man approached the Soviet side the Russian colonel started forward to greet him. "Welcome to freedom," he called.

"I'm damned glad to be here."

On the American side, a man and a young woman were waiting impatiently in front of a line of Jeeps. The man was peering through binoculars. "It's him, all right," he said.

The woman darted forward to meet the young man approaching under the wrought-iron lampposts. "Are you all right?" she breathed as she flung herself into his arms.

The two clung to each other. "I'm fine," he said.

The man with the binoculars came up behind her. The two men shook hands emotionally. "I broke the eleventh commandment," said the young man.

"We don't think it was your fault," the other man replied. "The way they pulled out his wife and daughter on a moment's notice, then brought him home a day later—given how the game played out, it all begins to look very premeditated. They must have become suspicious of him in Washington and then just outplayed us. You were sent on a wild-goose chase."

"I lost my Joe, Dad. He's dead. Jim Angleton was right—I was too green. I must have gone wrong somewhere—"

The three started toward the Jeeps. "I know how you feel," remarked the man with binoculars. "I've been there a bunch of times. It's the downside of what we do for a living."

"Is there an upside?" the girl demanded.

"Yes, there is," he shot back. "We're doing a dirty job and we get it right most of the time. But there's no way you can get it right every time." The fog was rolling in off the river, imparting a pungent sharpness to the night air. What keeps us going, what keeps us sane," he added, talking to himself now, is the conviction that if something's worth doing, it's worth doing badly."

9

SANTA FE, SATURDAY, OCTOBER 12, 1974

JACK CAUGHT AN EARLY MORNING FLIGHT FROM DULLES TO ALBUQUERQUE, then rented a car at the airport and drove an hour up the interstate to Santa Fe. Following the Sorcerer's fuzzy directions as best he could, stopping twice at gas stations to ask directions, he finally found East of Eden Gardens east of the city, on the edge of a golf course. In a billboard planted halfway down the access road, East of Eden Gardens was advertised as a promoters' vision of what paradise must be like, though Jack had a sneaking suspicion the promoters didn't actually live there themselves. Smart folks. The sprawling condominium community, semi-attached bungalows made of fake adobe and set at weird angles to each other, was surrounded by a no-nonsense chain-link fence topped with coils of Army surplus concertina wire to keep the Hispanics from nearby Espanola out. For all Jack knew, there could have been a minefield under the belt of Astroturf inside the fence. His identity was controlled at the gatehouse by an armed and uniformed guard wearing Raybans. "Got a message for you from Mista Torriti," he said, checking Jack's name off the list on the clipboard. "If you was to get here after eleven and before four, you'll find him at the clubhouse." Following the guards instructions, Jack drove through an intestinal tangle of narrow streets named for dead movie stars, past a driving range, past a communal swimming pool shaped to look like the most fragile part of a promoter's body, the kidney.

"Jesus H. Christ, Harvey, I didn't know you'd taken up golf," Jack exclaimed when he found the Sorcerer nursing a Scotch on the rocks at the empty bar.

"Haven't taken up golf," Torriti said, squeezing his Apprentice's hand with his soft fingers, punching him playfully in the shoulder. "Taken up drinking in golf clubs. Everyone who owns a condo is a member. Members get happy-hour prices all day long. All night, too."

The Sorcerer bought Jack a double Scotch and another double for himself, and the two carried their drinks and a bowl of olives to a booth at the back of the deserted clubhouse.

"Where's everybody?" Jack asked.

"Out golfin'," Torriti said with a smirk. "I'm the only one here who doesn't own clubs." He waved toward the adobe condominiums on the far side of the kidney-shaped pool. "It's a retirement home, Jack. You get free maid service, you can order in from the club kitchen, faucet drips and you got a handyman knocking at your door by the time you hang up the phone. Halfa dozen ex-Langley types live out here; we got an all-Company dealer's choice game going Monday nights."

"Aside from drinking and poker, how do you make time pass in the middle of nowhere?"

"You won't believe me if I tell you."

"Try me."

"I read spy stories. I finished one yesterday called
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
by someone name of le Carre."

"And?"

"He gets the mood right—he understands that Berlin was a killing field. He understands that those of us who lived through it were never the same again. People could learn more about the Cold War reading le Carre than they can from newspapers. But he loses me when he says spies are people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives. What a load of bullshit! How about you, sport? Hows tricks?"

"Can't complain," Jack said.

"So what brings you to Santa Fe? Don't tell me you were just passing through and wanted to chew the fat. Won't swallow that."

Jack laughed. "I wanted to see how retirement was treating the honcho of Berlin Base, Harvey."

Torriti's red-rimmed eyes danced merrily, as if he had heard a good joke. "I'll bet. What else?"

"You read the newspapers?"

"Don't need to. Anything concerning my ex-employer turns up in the news, one of my poker pals fills me in." The Sorcerer plucked an ice cube from the glass and massaged his lids with it. "I heard about the joker from NSA you traded for one of ours, if that's what you want to know. Newspapers said he was a low-level paper pusher, but I wasn't born yesterday."

Jack leaned forward and lowered his voice. "He was a mid-level analysist working on Russian intercepts—"

"Which means the Ruskies knew what we were intercepting, which means they were filling it with shit."

Jack took a sip of Scotch. He wondered if the Sorcerer broke down and ordered solids at lunchtime. "But they didn't know we knew. Now they do."

"How'd you trip to him?"

"We got a walk-in at the Russian embassy. He wanted to defect but we talked him into spying in place until his tour was up. He gave us two important things, Harvey—the NSA mole and a series of serials that led Jim Angleton to SASHA."

The Sorcerer rolled his head from side to side, impressed. "Where's the problem?"

"What makes you think there's a problem?"

"You wouldn't be here if there wasn't."

"Something's bothering me, Harvey. I thought, if your twitching nose was still functioning, you might help me sort through it."

"Try me."

"Like I was saying, based on the walk-in's serials, Angleton identified SASHA. He told us he'd been closing in on him, that it was only a matter of time before he narrowed it down to two or three. The walk-ins serials speeded up the inevitable, that's what Mother said."

"You want to go whole-hog."

Jack was whispering now. "It's Kritzky. Leo Kritzky."

A whistle seeped through Torriti's lips. "The Soviet Division chief! Jesus, it's Kim Philby redux, only this time it's in our shop."

"Angleton's been giving Leo the third degree for four months and then some, but he hasn't cracked. Leo claims he's innocent and Angleton hasn't been able to make him admit otherwise."

"Seems open and shut, sport—everything depends on the walk-in inside the Russian embassy. Flutter him. If he's telling the truth"—Torriti's shoulders heaved inside a very loud sports jacket—"eliminate SASHA."

"Can't polygraph the walk-in," Jack said. He explained how Kukushkin's wife and daughter had suddenly flown home to be with her dying father; how Kukushkin had followed them back to Moscow the next day.

"Did the father die?"

"As far as we can tell, yes. There was a funeral. There was an obituary."

Torriti waved these tidbits away.

"That's what we thought, too, Harv. So we sent Kukushkin's controlling officer to Moscow to speak to him."

"Without diplomatic cover."

"Without diplomatic cover," Jack conceded.

"And he was picked up. And then he confessed to being CIA. And then you traded the NSA mole to get him back."

Jack concentrated on his drink.

"Who was the controlling officer?"

"Elliott Ebbitt's boy, Manny."

Torriti pulled a face. "Never did like that Ebbitt fellow but that's neither here nor there. What did Manny have to say when he came in?"

"He was at Kukushkin's trial. He heard him confess. He heard the verdict. Kukushkin turned up in his cell to ask him to acknowledge being CIA in order to save his family. That's what Manny's so-called confession was all about—it was in return for an amnesty for the wife and kid. That night he heard the firing squad execute Kukushkin—"

"How did he know it was Kukushkin being executed?"

"He cried out right before. Manny recognized his voice."

The Sorcerer munched on an olive, spit the pit into a palm and deposited it in an ashtray. "So what's bothering you, kid?"

"My stomach. I'm hungry."

Torriti called over to the Hispanic woman sitting on a stool behind the cash register. "DOS BIT'S sobre tostado, honey," he called. "DOS cervezas tambien."

Jack said, "I didn't know you spoke Spanish, Harvey."

"I don't. You want to go and tell me what's really bothering you?"

Jack toyed with a salt cellar, turning it in his fingers. "Leo Kritzky and I go back a long way, Harv. We roomed together at Yale. He's my son's godfather, for Christ's sake. To make a long story shorter, I visited him in Angleton's black hole. Mother has him drinking water out of the toilet bowl."

The Sorcerer didn't see anything particularly wrong with this. "So?"

"Number one: He hasn't broken. I offered him a way out that didn't involve spending the rest of his life in prison. He told me to fuck off."

"Considering the time and money you spent to come here, there's got to be a number two."

"Number two: Leo said something that's been haunting me. He was absolutely certain our walk-in would never be fluttered." Jack stared out the window as he quoted Leo word for word. "He said Kukushkin would be run over by a car or mugged in an alleyway or whisked back to Mother Russia for some cockamamie reason that would sound plausible enough. But he wouldn't be fluttered because we would never get to bring him over. And he wouldn't be brought over because he was a dispatched defector sent to convince Angleton that Kritzky was SASHA and take the heat off the real SASHA. And it played out just the way Leo said it would."

"Your walk-in wasn't polygraphed because he rushed back to Moscow for a funeral. After which he was arrested and tried and executed."

"What do you think, Harvey?"

"What do I think?" Torriti considered the question. Then he tweaked the tip of his nose with a forefinger. "I think it stinks."

"That's what I think, too."

"Sure that's what you think. You wouldn't be here otherwise."

"What can I do now? How do I get a handle on this?"

The Hispanic woman backed through a swinging door from the kitchen carrying a tray. She set the sandwiches and the beers down on the table. When she'd gone, Torriti treated himself to a swig of beer. "Drinking a lot is the best revenge," he said, blotting his lips on a sleeve. "About your little problem—you want to do what I did when I ran up against a stone wall in my hunt for Philby."

"Which is?"

"Which is get ahold of the Rabbi and tell him your troubles."

"I didn't know Ezra Ben Ezra was still among the living."

"Living and kicking. He works out of a Mossad safe house in a suburb of Tel Aviv. Saw him eight months ago when he was passing through Washington—we met in Albuquerque and he picked my brain, or what was left of it." The Sorcerer took a bite out of his sandwich, then produced a ballpoint pen and scratched an address and an unlisted phone number on the inside of an East of Eden Gardens matchbook. "A word to the wise—it's not polite to go empty-handed."

"What should I bring?"

"Information. Don't forget to say shalom from the Sorcerer when you see him."

"I'll do that, Harvey."

The midday Levantine sun burned into the back of Jack's neck as he picked his way through the vegetable stalls in the Nevei Tsedek district north of Jaffa, a neighborhood of dilapidated buildings that dated back to the turn of the century when the first Jewish homesteaders settled on the dunes of what would become Tel Aviv. The sleeves of his damp shirt were rolled up to the elbows, his sports jacket hung limply from a forefinger over his right shoulder. He double-checked the address that the Sorcerer had scribbled inside the matchbook, then looked again to see if he could make out house numbers on the shops or doorways. "You don't speak English?" he asked a bearded man peddling falafel from a pushcart.

"If I don't speak English," the man shot back, "why do you ask your question in English? English I speak. Also Russian. Also Turkish, Greek and enough Rumanian to pass for someone from Transylvania in Bulgaria, which is what saved my life during the war. German, too, I know but I invite Hashem, blessed be He, to strike me dead if a word of it passes my lips. Yiddish, Hebrew go without saying."

"I'm looking for seventeen Shabazi Street but I don't see any numbers on the houses."

"I wish I had such eyes," remarked the falafel man. "To be able to see there are no numbers! And at this distance, too." He indicated a house with his nose. "Number seventeen is the poured-concrete Bauhaus blockhouse with the second-hand bookstore on the ground floor, right there, next to the tailor shop."

"Thanks."

"Thanks to you, too, Mister. Appreciate Israel."

The stunning dark-haired young woman behind the desk raised her imperturbable eyes when Jack pushed through the door into the bookstore. "I need help," he told the young woman.

"Everybody does," she retorted. "Not many come right out and admit it."

Jack looked fleetingly at the old man who was browsing through the English language books in the back, then turned to the woman. "I was led to believe I could find Ezra Ben Ezra at this address."

"Who told you that?"

"Ezra Ben Ezra, when I called him from the United States of America. You've heard of the United States of America, I suppose."

"You must be the Sorcerer's Apprentice."

"That's me."

The woman seemed to find this amusing. "At your age you should have become a full-fledged Sorcerer already. Remaining an apprentice your whole life must be humiliating. The Rabbi is expecting you." She hit a button under the desk. A segment of wall between two stands of shelves clicked open and Jack ducked through it. He climbed at long flight of narrow concrete steps that bypassed the first floor and took him directly to the top floor of the building. There he came across a crew cut young man in a dirty sweat suit strip cleaning an Uzi. The young man raised a wrist to his mourfti and muttered something into it, then listened to the tinny reply coming through the small device planted in one of his ears. Behind him, still another door clicked open and Jack found himself in a large room with poured concrete walls and long narrow slits for windows. The Rabbi, looking a decade older than his sixty-one years, hobbled across the room with the help of a cane to greet Jack.

"Our paths crossed in Berlin," the Rabbi announced.

"I'm flattered you remember me," Jack said.

Ben Ezra pointed with his cane toward a leather-and-steel sofa and, with an effort, settled onto a straight-backed steel chair facing his visitor. "To tell you the terrible truth, I am not so great at faces any more but I never forget a favor I did for someone. You were running an East German code-named SNIPER, who turned out to be a professor of theoretical physics named Loffler. Ha, I can see by the expression on your face I hit the hammer on the head. Or should that be nail? Loffler finished badly, if my memory serves, which it does intermittently. His cutout, RAINBOW, too." He shook his head in despair. "Young people today forget that Berlin was a battleground."