The Sisters

by Robert Littell

  "I must be dreaming," the Deputy Director moaned from the couch. "I must be imagining things." He looked at G. Sprowls. "Tell me I am imagining things," he pleaded. "Tell me I will wake up at any moment and laugh at this whole business."

  Carroll shifted his gaze from the wall to the window. "You authorized the operation," he reminded the Director. "You admitted as much a few minutes ago. There are witnesses . . . the walls have ears."

  "My walls,' the Director announced in an icy voice, "do not have ears. I authorized nothing of the kind. It never occurred to me that anyone would interpret my comments as an invitation to launch an operation. You and your friend are certifiably insane. Stark raving mad. My God, do you realize what has happened? If anybody in Congress or the press gets so much as a whirl of this, the Company will be ruined forever."

  G. Sprowls came around behind the Director's desk and whispered for a moment in his ear. The Director appeared to calm down instantly. His eyes narrowed, and he began tapping the eraser end of his pencil thoughtfully against the blotter again. G. Sprowls looked at Carroll and asked in his slow drawl that suggested he knew the answer, "Who exactly knows about what you have done?"

  "I know. Francis knows. Now you three know."

  "If I can recapitulate," G. Sprowls said evenly. "You organized the detection from the Soviet Union of the Potter, who gave you the identity and awakening signal of a Soviet sleeper. You and Francis delivered the signal, activating the sleeper and dispatching him on a mission. Even as we speak, a Soviet agent-"

  The Director saw what G. Sprowls was driving at. "Born and raised in Communist Russia, recruited and trained by the KGB and presumably-who could prove otherwise?-still under its operational control . . ."

  The color had flooded back into the Deputy Director's face, and he leaned forward and finished G. Sprowls's line of reasoning. "A Soviet agent is travelling across the country to commit a crime."

  Carroll leapt out of his chair. "Don't you see the infinite possibilities, the absolute beauty of the operation? If our sleeper succeeds, we eliminate someone who has hurt the United States more than any single person in recent history; someone who has sucked up to the Communists and tied the hands of those of us who are willing and able to fight them. If the sleeper is caught in the act, his identity will eventually come out, and the whole Soviet intelligence apparatus-"

  "The whole idea that you can conduct business as usual with the Russians!" the Director interjected.

  "-will be discredited," Carroll plunged on. "If, by any chance, the sleeper is not caught, we will identify him and place the onus for the assassination on his masters in Moscow." Carroll sank back into his chair, drained. "It is like a diamond with many facets-it is the most perfect, the most beautiful operation that has ever existed in the annals of intelligence work," he continued in an undertone. "The worst that can happen is that the sleeper will fail and the Russians will be blamed for the assassination attempt. The best that can happen is that he will succeed-and the Russians will be blamed for the death."

  The Director regarded Carroll, then lowered his eyes to his blotter, then abruptly swivelled his chair around so that he could stare out the window. "I have to admit," he said after a moment, "it does have a certain-" He didn't finish the phrase.

  G. Sprowls and the Deputy Director exchanged knowing looks. "If the Soviets are blamed," the Deputy Director offered from the couch,

  "Congress and the public will begin to see the world as we see it; as it really is! The Company will be unleashed to take its place in the front line of battle. We won't have to go begging hat in hand up on the Hill every time we need a few hundred million dollars."

  The Director slowly swivelled back toward the room. It was apparent that he had come to a decision. "As far as I am concerned, gentlemen," he announced in a businesslike tone, "this meeting never took place."

  The Deputy Director's eyes widened in complicity. "What meeting," he asked innocently, "are you talking about?"

  There were loose ends, (There were always loose ends, the Potter would tell his students at the sleeper school, it was one of the few things people in their line of work could count on.) G. Sprowls was authorized to tie them up, a matter, he confided to the Director, of erasing footprints so that nobody could see who had passed this way.

  Oskar, who happened to be recruiting for his network in East Berlin at the time, received a coded message summoning him West for an urgent meeting. Using one of his many aliases, he crossed through Checkpoint Charlie, took a taxi to a business district, and continued on foot to his safe house in West Berlin. He buzzed twice, sensed someone looking at him through the peephole, then heard the locks on the door being opened. He wasn't so much alarmed as annoyed when he didn't recognize the man who held the door for him; the fewer people he was exposed to, the safer he felt. But he became upset when the second man, waiting for him in the living room, turned out to be a stranger also. "So," Oskar said in German, sensing that something out of the ordinary was happening. "You must have a very important message for me, yes?"

  The man Oskar spoke to was leaning against the wall next to a phony fireplace. He was wearing an overcoat and carrying a bouquet of plastic roses. The other man, the one who had let him into the apartment, came into the living room behind him and closed the door. "We are delivery men," the man next to the phoney fireplace told Oskar. He spoke German with a distinct Bavarian accent.

  Oskar didn't like the look of him. "So what is it you are delivering?"

  he asked.

  "Your body," the Bavarian replied just as the other man stepped forward and plunged a long, thin kitchen knife up to its hilt into Oskar's back.

  "Why?" Oskar managed to gasp, as if it would be easier to deal with death if he understood the motives of his killers; as if his own fate, as long as it was logical, would be acceptable.

  The Bavarian only shrugged. "They only told us who, not why," he informed Oskar.

  The man behind Oskar caught him under the armpits and lowered him gently, solicitously even, to the floor. Oskar attempted to turn his face and get his mouth off the dirty carpet. But he couldn't move. He could feel the strength ebbing from his body. Someone was feeling for his pulse. He tried to open his eyes, to work his lips, to tell them to be sure not to bury him until they were positive he was dead, yes?

  Because he had a lifelong horror of waking up in a sealed coffin. But he was too dizzy to function. The carpet under his face was suddenly spinning; a whirlpool was sucking him into its center. Why? he thought to himself as he plunged head first toward it. At the last instant of consciousness, an acceptable answer occurred to him: Why not!

  Within an hour of Oskar's rendezvous in the safe house, two middle-level West German intelligence operatives-the senior of the two habitually pinned a black homburg to his head with the curved handle of an umbrella, the junior trudged around in galoshes at the slightest hint of rain-were driving along an autobahn toward Berlin in response to a verbal summons from an American contact. They chatted about pay scales, and the political situation in West Germany, and whether they would live to witness the reunification of the two halves of their country.

  Galoshes told Homburg he was curious to know what had become of the dwarflike Russian defector and his floozy of a wife whom they had been assigned to welcome to Vienna several months before. Homburg shook his head. Curiosity, he informed his younger colleague, was what killed the cat. Galoshes took the hint and didn't pursue the subject.

  Hounding a curve thirty miles from their destination, the Mercedes veered out of control. The steering pinion had snapped-at least that was what an in-house postmortem attributed the accident to. The car skidded off the highway, down an embankment into a ravine, where it burst into flame and exploded, killing the two men instantly.

  The afternoon of Oskar's disappearance, Svetochka's body was discovered at the bottom of an elevator shaft in a downtown Vienna office building.

  There was a suicide note, written in her own hand, in the pocke
t of the used fur coat she had bought the previous week with the money she had wormed out of one of the Austrians in return for services rendered.

  "Excuse Svetochka," it read in English, "for the trouble she has caused.

  She is not wanting to stay here and she is not willing to go back, so she is going to put herself to sleep."

  The Viennese detective who investigated the death was mildly curious how a woman could have pried open the doors to the elevator shaft. One of the uniformed policemen accompanying him managed to do it, but he was an amateur wrestler. The chief of detectives who read the preliminary report asked the detective to retype it leaving out his doubts about whether Svetochka had the strength to pry open the doors, or the ability to write a suicide note in English when she couldn't speak it. Quite obviously, the Viennese police were happy to accept the note, and the suicide of a recent immigrant from the Soviet Union, at face value. Why muddy the water? the superintendent in charge of homicides said when he closed the case.

  G. Sprowls received reports of Oskur's disappearance and the deaths of the two Germans and Svetochka in the overnight pouch,shredded the only copies in existence, then dispatched Thursday's orders, in triplicate, through the interoffice routing system. The Sisters' former man Friday was cooling his heels in a basement cubbyhole, wading through piles of transcripts of obituaries from provincial Soviet newspapers and matching up the names with those of former members of the Politburo and Central Committee. The fact that he could discern no rhyme or reason in what he was doing didn't make the chore any easier, so that when the orders arrived sending him overseas, he barely glanced at the fine print to see where exactly he was off to. Anything, he decided, would be better than reading Russian obituaries in a stuffy basement cubbyhole. It was only after he had countersigned the orders, and returned the pink copy to the originating desk, that he bothered to identify his new post. "You will proceed, on a priority-one voucher via a military-air-transport flight out of Edwards Air Force Base, to Bangkok," the orders read, "where you will report to the adjutant station chief, Bangkok, for further assignment to listening post Echo-Charlie-Hotel, situated on the Cambodian-South Vietnamese frontier, I.7 kilometers from the Ho Chi Minh trail. On arrival you will relieve the acting post chief, and file a full KIA report on the circumstances surrounding the death of your predecessor, as well as carry out to the best of your abilities the mission of the listening post as set forth in the listening-post operating-procedure annex to these orders."

  Thursday's case officer, an older woman with a cigarette dangling from her lips and ashes dropping on the papers that passed across her desk, supplied him with a voucher for per diem funds to cover his travel expenses until his arrival in Bangkok. She also asked him to till out and sign a standard next-of-kin form, and identify his beneficiaries in the event anything happened to him in the field. Thursday protested that he had never given the matter of beneficiaries much thought. The case officer brushed ashes off the appropriate form with the back of her hand and suggested that the time had come to do so. You are not going to a tea party, she informed him in a voice that was anything but motherly.

  The last two people we sent out to Echo-Charlie-Hotel came back in pine boxes.

  In pine boxes, Thursday repeated, and he astonished the case officer studying him through a haze of cigarette smoke by giggling uncontrollably.

  G. Sprowls's damp half-smile evaporated when the case officer phoned him to confirm that Thursday was off and running. He produced an index card with the words "Loose Ends" typed at the top, and carefully erased Thursday's name. Four other names had already been erased. All of them had "died of measles," Company argot for killing someone and making the death look natural. Which left three names on the card. The Potter, Feliks Aricantevich Turov, was the next on the list. G. Sprowls had put out discreet feelers. It was only a matter of time before his sources would locate the Potter. Then he would erase his name from the card too, and concentrate on the last two loose ends.

  G. Sprowls looked up suddenly from the index card. A chilling thought had appeared on the horizon of his consciousness. He had caught sight of it while it was still a vague menace, too distant to define. He watched it draw closer. And then a shudder threaded its way down his spinal column as he identified it. If Francis could lie to the black box about his name, he could also have been lying when he claimed that he had not had any contact with agents or representatives of another country.

  The sign in the window of the Chinese health-food restaurant announced, in ridiculous lettering with Chinese curlicues, that it was under new management. "We should at least give it a try," Carroll insisted, and he led the way past the new owner, smiling uncertainly from his seat behind the cigarette counter, to their usual booth in the far corner.

  They spent a long time studying the menu, made sure the waiter understood that they didn't want any monosodium glutamate sprinkled on their dishes, and then ordered, Carroll with undisguised enthusiasm, Francis with undisguised suspicion. Waiting for the food to come, they discussed the weather, the film Francis had seen the previous Tuesday, Carroll's sister's recent menopausal outburst when she discovered that he was throwing out socks instead of giving them to her to darn; in short, they discussed everything but. Until Carroll, midway through his plate of wild rice and steamed shrimp, slammed his chopsticks down on the table so loudly that the owner, watching them out of the corner of his eye for some sign that they were enjoying the food, looked over with an anguished expression on his face. Francis smiled innocently in his direction, and nodded encouragingly, and the owner, appeased, turned back to his abacus and toyed with it as if it were strung with worry beads.

  "The way I see it," Carroll said quietly, staring off into space, "is that what we had before was a brilliant operation for which we could never get credit. Now our masters are bound to see our talents in a new light."

  Francis gestured with the back of his hand. "Raises, promotions, don't interest me anymore. I am too old to appreciate that sort of thing."

  "I’m not talking about raises or promotions," Car-roll hissed. "I'm talking about the plots we can hatch now that we have credit in the bank. The next time we come up with a scheme, the doors in the Athenaeum will open to us of their own accord. Listen to me, Francis. Between us, you and I can stop the hemorrhage that is sucking the lifeblood out of this country. America can return to being America the beautiful.

  Francis toyed with his Chinese cabbage, which he found overcooked and underspiced. "What made you tell them?" he wanted to know.

  "Pure instinct," Carroll replied without a trace of modesty. Modesty, in his book, was for people who had something to he modest about. "I knew the Director would have to be on our side." He leaned toward Francis. "I remember when you first noticed there was a pattern to his off-the-cuff'

  remarks. That thing he said about it being two minutes to midnight, for instance. Or about the need for unleashing the Company. And how what the Director was really saying with the business about Churchill and the Dardanelles was that we desperately needed leaders who were not soft on Communism." In an unusual gesture that Francis found almost touching, Carroll shifted his eyes and actually focused on him across the table.

  "I have to hand it to you, Francis. You were the one who ignited the fuse. Without you, there would have been no scheme in the first place."

  "You were the one who came up with the idea of using a Soviet sleeper,'

  Francis said graciously. He had never been one to hog credit, and he wasn't about to start now.

  "But you thought of getting the Potter to give us a sleeper," Carroll reminded him. He shifted his gaze back to some undefined spot on the wall. "We are a perfect couple," he concluded. "We complement each other. Where you see forest, I see trees,"

  Francis nodded in agreement- "What we are," he said with a touch of pride, "is the sisters Death and Night."

  Carroll leaned back in his seat and breathed in and out with evident emotion. "That's us," he said quietly. "The siste
rs Death and Night."

  "That is certainly us," Francis agreed with an innocent smile.

  It was not the First time in his professional life that Francis was moved to reflect on the role that luck played in any operation. With good luck things could go right instead of wrong. With incredible luck they might go very right indeed. And a stroke of incredible hick, in the form of Carroll's "pure instinct that the Director would go along with them, had just come Francis' way. He looked up from his yellow legal pad and tried to recall the exact words Carroll had used to describe the meeting in the Athenaeum, then bent his head and continued writing. Not typing: he knew the day would come when handwriting experts would be called in to verify that Francis himself was the author of the notes in question. Carroll, he wrote, had delivered his report on the operation to the Director himself, in the presence of the Deputy Director and the Company’s erstwhile utility infielder, G. Sprowls. Let them wriggle out of that when they Were hooked up to the little black box, Francis thought. Carroll had reminded the Director that he had personally authorized the operation. "If I authorized an operation, I won t hack away from it now," the Director had said. And the meeting had ended on a suitably conspiratorial note. "As far as I am concerned, gentlemen, the Director had announced, "this meeting never took place." "What meeting," the Deputy Director had asked innocently, "are you talking about?

  Francis felt a wave of exhilaration pass through his chest. For a moment he thought he might have trouble breathing, the sensation was so strong.

  The Athenaeum was locked into the conspiracy by a stroke of incredible luck. Now they would be trapped by the truth, as revealed by the scratching styluses of a lie-detector machine.

  Francis dated the sheet of yellow paper, scribbled across the top,

  "Notes on conversation with Carroll in Chinese restaurant then folded it in half and added it to the pile of office papers that he was supposed to have shredded. They were all stuffed into the false bottom of the kitchen garbage pail. The time was fast approaching, Francis realized, when he and his friends would have to organize his own death, along with a trail of evidence that led investigators to the treasure trove of incriminating notes in the bottom of the pail.