The Sisters

by Robert Littell

  "For God's sake," Svetochka cried, "for Svetochka's sake, tell him what he wants to know."

  Thursday fought down an urge to giggle; his face contorted as if he were suppressing a yawn. He spread his hands awkwardly, palms up, as if to say: It is up to you, friend.

  Carroll's cheek muscle had gone on another rampage. Francis felt giddy, as if he had flown too high without oxygen, or drunk too much champagne.

  Carroll read what Francis had written on his yellow legal pad: "He is living under the assumed name of Peter Raven."

  Francis reached for the pad and added, "The Potter would know the name because he was the one who worked out the legend with the sleeper."

  Carroll brought a damp palm to his cheek to pacify the twitching muscle.

  "The awakening signal," he scribbled on his pad, "is a line from Walt Whitman: The hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly softly wash again, and ever again, this soil'd world.' The i in 'Night' is to be dotted with a microdot containing the location of a dead-letter drop.

  The dead-letter drop will have in it an innocent-looking advertisement containing numbered microdots that give the details of the mission he is assigned."

  Francis wrinkled up his face as if he had swallowed something bitter.

  "Thursday says the Potter selected as an awakening signal a line of poetry that both he and his sleeper admired," he wrote. Out loud he added, "Shows he had bad taste. Personally I never liked Whitman. All those unbuttoned shirts! All that hair on his chest! He was a poser. It follows that his poetry is a pose.

  Carroll looked at the deciphered cable again. "The sleeper is living in a brownstone at number I45 Love Apple Lane in Brooklyn Heights," he wrote.

  "Do we know exactly how the Potter knew that?" Francis asked.

  Carroll carefully wrote out, "Thursday says the Potter received a picture postcard in the mail one day, with a photograph of the house on it, from his sleeper. Walt Whitman once lived in the brownstone. There's a bronze plaque next to the door. 'Here lived-' That sort of thing. The sleeper couldn't resist telling the Potter he was living in Whitman's house. So he sent him a picture postcard with some banal message on it."

  Francis snickered. "Having a great time. Wish you were here,' he said out loud.

  Carroll did something he rarely did-he looked directly at the person he was speaking to. "We have gotten our hands on a perfect criminal," he said.

  "I suppose we have," Francis agreed in a voice that held more than a trace of awe in it.

  Carroll was ignoring forests and lingering over trees: what form the awakening signal would take; how it would be delivered; where the first dead-letter drop would be (Francis was partial to country drops, which is to say places rarely frequented, while Carroll, who saw safety in numbers, favored city drops); how much money should initially be given to the sleeper (Carroll and Francis planned to finance the venture on a fifty-fifty basis); making arrangements at the inn in Pennsylvania (they had already procured the rifle; one of them would have to drive out and plant it there before the sleeper arrived). Nuts and bolts. Details. The kind of thing that bored Francis to death, but gave Carroll an orgasm.

  As it was a Tuesday, Francis had stopped by his apartment long enough to change into more casual clothing, then had driven downtown to his favorite delicatessen for a hot roast-beef sandwich on rye with half sour pickles on the side. Later he walked over to the movie theater two blocks farther east and bought a ticket to see Elizabeth Taylor and Laurence Harvey in Butterfield 8. He had missed the film when it first came around, and was delighted to have a chance to see it. He got there early and had no trouble finding a good seat in the smoking section. The house filled up, the lights went out, the film flashed on. Not surprisingly. Francis had difficulty concentrating on the movie. Too many thoughts competed for attention in his head. Normal intelligence activities involved, at best, small triumphs- "taste treats" is what Carroll, thinking no doubt of his candies, called them-which gave the illusion of having some impact on current events. But only one in ten thousand-a Sorge, for instance, whose information from Tokyo permitted Stalin to thin out his defenses against the Japanese and concentrate on the Germans-really affected the course of history. Well, Francis too was going to affect history.

  The music built to a crescendo. The image on the screen began to fade out. Francis extracted a cigarette from a pack and reached into his jacket pocket for a book of matches. He had given up smoking years before on medical advice, and only treated himself to a cigarette at the end of his regular Tuesday-night film. As always on these occasions, there was a single match left in the book. Francis used it to light his cigarette, inhaled, tossed the empty matchbook under his seat, and smiling as if he had nothing more weighty on his conscience than the death of a rodent, headed for the entrance and the warm, moist September air.

  The first people to arrive for the ad-hoc Damage Control Board meeting at the retired general's house were the Center's handymen. Wielding odd-looking devices that they plugged in and maneuvered like vacuum cleaners, they proceeded to "clean" house. What they were looking for were magnetic fields, the kind given off by hidden microphones. What they found was one earring, lost by the general's wife months before, and several coins that had slipped behind the cushions of a couch.

  The general's study, on the second floor of a private house on Lenin Hills, had a splendid view of the city, and the guests who had never been up to the room before made appropriate noises of appreciation. A soccer match was in progress in the Lenin Stadium, across the river, and every once in a while a roar, not unlike the sound of surf pounding against a shore, wafted up.

  "Does anyone happen to know the score?" the GRU man asked.

  "One-zero in favor of Dynamo," announced the Central Committee representative, "but that was as of fifteen minutes ago."

  "Did you catch the move the Bulgarian wingback put on the Dynamo goalie last week?" asked the lieutenant colonel representing the Party Control Commission. "His hips went one way and his body the other."

  The KGB's Second Chief Directorate man offered around his pack of Chesterfields. "Will someone please tell me why is it we have a defection every time Spartacus has a home game? I'd like to know if there is a connection between the two.

  "It's an American plot," quipped the GRU man, "to drive us crazy."

  There was the sound of a thin baton tapping along the wooden floor. The people at the window exchanged glances. Department 13 of the First Chief Directorate usually sent someone over to these postmortem sessions in case of a decision to eliminate the defector. But for one of the Cousins to show up meant that they were dealing with no ordinary defection.

  "This could turn out to be more interesting than the soccer game," the representative from the Politburo whispered to the others.

  The blind man found a seat at the long table with his baton and settled into it. The others in the room followed suit. The general, wearing well-tailored civilian clothes with an Order of Lenin conspicuous on his breast, limped into the room and took his place at the head of the table. "The score is one-one, he announced in a gruff voice. "Zhilov scored with a bullet from thirty meters. Anyone wants mineral water, help yourselves. Don't stint. I don't pay. The state does. What's on our plate today?"

  The KGB's Second Chief Directorate man, the specialist on defectors, pulled a dossier trom a plastic portfolio. "Turov," he read, "Feliks Arkantevich."

  The general's eyebrows arched up. "The old novator from the sleeper school?"

  "The same' acknowledged the KGB man. "He and his wife were booked onto a flight to the Crimea two days ago. Instead they wound up on a scheduled flight to Vienna. It all looks as if it was very well organized. It may have been the Israelis; Turov is a jew. It may have been one of the emigre groups working on a German leash. Whoever it was supplied him with false papers, reservations, even two people to take their places on the Crimea flight."

  "I assume you are looking into how he got out," the general interrupted.


  "The special area of interest of this board is what he took with him."

  The KGB man shrugged. "Turov's been out of circulation for six months."

  The lieutenant colonel from the Party Control Commission said, "He can tell them almost everything there is to know about our sleeper school-how we recruit candidates, how we train them, how we inject them into America-"

  "It is unlikely he can tell them anything they don't already know,"

  insisted the KGB man. "About twelve months ago one of Turov's sleepers went over to the Americans when he received his awakening signal. You chaired a damage-control session on him. General."

  "If Turov has nothing of value to offer, why did someone go to all that trouble to get him out?" the blind man, sitting on the right hand of the general, inquired quietly.

  "A pertinent question," acknowledged the general.

  From across the river, a hollow roar drifted up from Lenin Stadium. A young aide in uniform dashed into the study and whispered something in the general's ear. "Two-one, Dynamo, on a penalty shot by Misha Tsipin,"

  the general announced gleefully. He turned to the KGB man. "Why did they go to all that trouble to get him out?" he asked with exaggerated politeness. He had developed a theory when he received his first star that politeness, out of context, was appropriately menacing. "Surely he had something of value to offer them."

  The KGB man turned a page in his dossier. "There is still one sleeper on the active list who was trained by Turov while he was novator. He is planted in America, awaiting the signal that will activate him."

  "Does Turov know the identity under which the sleeper operates?" the General asked.

  The KGB man nodded gloomily. "In the sleeper's dossier, the legend was typed. But the awakening signal was written in ink. We have ascertained that the handwriting is Turov's."

  "To sum up, ' said the general, shifting uncomfortably in his chair because of his gout, "we must assume that the defector Turov is familiar with the identity under which the sleeper is operating, as well as the coded signal that will convince him he is being activated to perform a mission for Moscow Center."

  There was dead silence around the table. The Central Committee representative poured a glass of mineral water and sipped it thoughtfully. The KGB man pulled his Chesterfields from his pocket.

  "Does the General object if I smoke?" he asked in a subdued voice.

  "I most emphatically do," snapped the general. "Cigarette smoke stimulates bile, which poisons the blood and leads to attacks of gout.

  Ten minutes in a room with cigarette smoke and no amount of acupuncture can alleviate the pain."

  The pack of cigarettes disappeared back into the KGB man's pocket.

  The Party Control Commission representative remarked, "What good would all this information do Turov, or the Americans, assuming, as we must, that he conveys it to them, unless he knew where to find the sleeper?

  Before I was posted to the Party Control Commission, I was assigned to the KGB's Second Chief Directorate. I remember how these things worked.

  Once the sleeper passed out of the novator's hands-once he graduated from the school to fieldwork-his dossier was taken over by the particular Merchant at Moscow Center who would run him. The sleeper's location in America would be known to the Merchant, but not to the novator--especially not to a novator who had been put out to pasture and no longer had access to dossiers of his graduates."

  The KGB man nodded. "Our comrade from the Party Control Commission is quite correct. There is no way that Turov could be familiar with the sleeper's location in America. He could be anywhere, for all he knows."

  The blind man tapped his baton against the leg of his chair. "Turov knows where the sleeper is." he stated flatly.

  "That is simply not possible," the KGB man insisted in a nervous voice.

  "There is no way he could have had access to that piece of information."

  The blind man reached into his breast pocket, extracted a brown envelope and offered it to the general. From beyond the window there was another roar, but nobody paid attention to it. The general pulled two pieces of paper from the envelope. "Photocopies," he said.

  "Two sides of an American picture postcard," the blind man acknowledged.

  "These were picked up as part of a regular intercept program on foreign-source mail passing through the Central Post Office. The picture postcard in question was sent to Turov from Brooklyn, New York, several months after the sleeper was inserted into America. The awakening phrase in the sleeper's dossier, the one in Turov's own handwriting, happens to be a line taken from the works of the revisionist American poet Whitman."

  "And the picture on the postcard," announced the general, examining it closely, "shows the facade of a house in Brooklyn Heights that Whitman once lived in."

  "The message on the picture postcard," continued the blind man, "is not important. But the handwriting is-it's definitely that of the sleeper.

  He was informing his novator, despite express rules which forbid this kind of communication, that he had rented rooms in a building once occupied by Whitman."

  "If Turov knows where the sleeper is in America," said the Party Control Commission representative, "this is very bad news indeed."

  "It opens the possibility," said the blind man, staring sightlessly in the general's direction, "that the novator will convey to the American Central Intelligence Agency information that will permit its operatives to activate and control a Soviet agent in place. Once awakened by the proper coded signal, the sleeper will assume he is being run by his superiors in Moscow, and carry out his orders. Which means that the Americans have the potential of committing a crime-any crime-and then arranging for the blame to fall on us."

  "The ideal solution to the problem," the general mused-he appeared to be talking to himself-"would be to eliminate the sleeper before the possibility you raise becomes a reality."

  The blind man scraped his chair back from the table and crossed his legs. "We have two Canadians on tap in Toronto for an eventuality such as this. But the chances of their getting to the sleeper before the Central Intelligence Agency activates him are almost nonexistent. The CIA has had Turov for two days already. They will recognize the obvious advantage, the necessity even, of moving rapidly."

  "Which leaves us with a potentially explosive problem on our hands," the general noted. His voice had turned polite again; he was extremely irritated.

  "We are not without potential solutions," suggested the blind man.

  The Politburo representative leaned forward. He was a classic case of someone whose importance derived from the fact that he reported back to important people. "Would the director of Department 13 care to be more specific?" he asked in a way that left the blind man little choice.

  In his eagerness to know the answer, the general reiterated the question. "What are the potential solutions?"

  "Like any good lawyer," explained the blind man, "we must construct our case proving that the CIA is responsible for the crime, always assuming one will be committed. To begin with, we have the defection of the novator of the sleeper school, the awakening signal, the legend, the copy of the picture postcard, all of which tend to support our story that the control of the sleeper was exercised by the CIA, and not Moscow Center."

  "We will have a hard time convincing the world of that," the Politburo man said dryly.

  "When the time comes to convince the world," the blind man said matter-of-factly, "we will arrange for someone inside the American intelligence community to testify on our behalf."

  "This is within the realm of possibility?" the general asked, making no effort to mask his astonishment.

  "It is within the realm of certainty," announced the blind man.

  Later, while various participants were waiting in the foyer for their limousines to be summoned, the general hobbled over to the blind man and the KGB's Second Chief Directorate man. "I neglected to ask you whether there were any ongoing operations that were likely to be
jeopardized by the defection of the novator. It is something I should include in my post-mortem report."

  The KGB man shook his head. "We have no problems," he said.

  The general directed his voice at the blind man. "How about Department 13?"

  "Actually, we have one operation under way in America," he said. "We are running an agent, via a Cuban cutout. His principal mission is to neutralize some of the more outspoken anti-Castro people in the country,"

  "Wetwork?" asked the general, an eyebrow dancing up in interest.

  "Wetwork," acknowledged the blind man, using the professional term for assassinations. "The agent is listed in your current operations portfolio under the code name Khanda, which is Hindu for 'double-edged sword.' As far as I can tell, the defection of the novator will have no effect on Khanda."

  Another roar drifted up from Lenin Stadium across the Moscow River. The general's young aide came trotting into the foyer. "Dynamo scored again in the final seconds," he cried. "It's all over, with Dynamo on top three-one."

  The general's face relaxed into one of those famous sour smiles he was noted for using when he appeared on television. "Let us hope," he remarked, "that all of our games end on a similar note."

  Outside it was night, inside too-a "Ninth-month midnight," in the words of Whitman.

  Mesmerized by the headlights, Svetochka had stared for the better part of an hour at the traffic on the Ringstrasse, the boulevard that circled the inner city. Suddenly she had drawn the thick curtains across the bay window with an angry jerk, cutting of the noise of traffic so abruptly it seemed as if a needle had been lifted off a phonograph record.

  She had been pleased at first with the small hotel on the quiet side street off the Ringstrasse; with the subtle click of the desk clerk's heels; with the three-room top-floor suite; with the four-poster bed; with the cream-colored sheets and the enormous fluffy square pillows in lace cases. She had stripped to the skin in the white-tiled bathroom and soaked in the high tub for the better part of an hour, and then phoned down for tea and little cakes the size of fingernails. But when they arrived, lined up in rows on an oval silver tray, she discovered she was unable to swallow. Her throat had constricted, her stomach had knotted up.