The Company

by Robert Littell

  Angleton began rummaging through the small mountain of paper on his desk for the Sorcerer’s overnight cable. He found it under another cable from the Mexico City CIA Station; signed by two Company officers, E. Howard Hunt and William F. Buckley, Jr., it provided the outline for what was euphemistically called a “tangential special project.”

  “Frankly, you’re the only Brit I’d trust with this,” Angleton said, flapping Torriti’s cable in the air to disperse the cigarette smoke.

  “Thanks for that, Jimbo.”

  “Which means you’ll have to give me your word you won’t spill the beans to London before I say so.”

  “Must be bloody important for you to take that line.”

  “It is.”

  “You have my word, old boy. My lips are sealed until you unseal them.”

  Angleton slipped the cable across the desk to his British friend, who fitted a pair of National Health spectacles over his nose and held the report under the Tiffany lamp. After a moment his eyes tightened. “Christ, no wonder you don’t want me to cable London. Handle with care, Jimbo—there’s always the chance the Russian bloke is a dangle and his serial is p-p-part of a scheme to set my shop and yours at each other’s throats. Remember when I scattered serials across Spain to convince the Germans we had a high-level mole chez-eux? The Abwehr spent half a year chasing their tails before they figured out the serials were phony.”

  “Everything Torriti pried out of him at their first meeting checked out.”

  “Including the microphone that went dry?”

  Behind the cloud of smoke Angleton nodded. “I’ve already assigned a team to walk back the cat on the microphone in the Soviet Ambassador’s chair in The Hague—the product was circulated narrowly but circulated all the same. You can count the people who knew where the product came from on the fingers of two hands.”

  Angleton’s Brit, an old hand at defections, was all business. “We’ll have to tread on eggshells, Jimbo. If there really is a mole in MI6, he’ll jump ship the instant he smells trouble. The KGB will have contingency p-p-plans for this sort of thing. The trick’ll be to keep the defection under wraps for as long as p-p-possible.”

  Angleton pulled another cigarette from the pack and lit it from the bitter end of the old one. “Torriti’s going to smuggle the Russian and his family into West Berlin and fly them straight back to the states out of Tempelhof,” he said. “I’ll put people on the plane so that we can start sorting through the serials before word of the defection leaks. With any luck we’ll be able to figure out the identity of the mole before KGB Karlshorst realizes the deputy to the chief of the First Chief Directorate has gone AWOL. Then the ball will be in MI6’s court—you’ll have to move fast on your end.”

  “Give me a name to go on,” the Brit insisted, “we’ll draw and quarter the son of a b-b-bitch.”

  Torriti had gone on the wagon for the exfiltration, which probably was a bad idea inasmuch as the lack of booze left him edgier than usual. He skulked through the small room of the safe house over the cinema the way a lion prowls a cage, plunging round and round so obsessively that Jack became giddy watching him. At the oriel window the Fallen Angel kept an eye on Sweet Jesus walking his muzzled lap dog in endless ovals in the street below. Every now and then he’d remove his watch cap and scratch at the bald spot on the top of his head, which meant he hadn’t seen hide nor hair of the Russian defector, hide nor hair of his wife or eleven year old son either. Silwan II’s radio, set on the floor against one wall, the antenna strung across the room like a laundry line, burst into life and the voice of the Watcher in the back row of the cinema could be heard whispering: “Der Film ist fertig… in eight minutes. Where is somebody?”

  “My nose is twitching to beat the band,” the Sorcerer growled as he pulled up short in front of the clock over the mantle. “Something’s not right. Russians, in my experience, always come late for meetings and early for defections.” The pounding pulse of the imperturbable cuckoo ticking off the seconds was suddenly more than Torriti could stomach. Snatching his pearl-handled revolver from the shoulder holster, he grasped it by the long barrel and slammed the grip into the clock, decapitating the cuckoo, shattering the mechanism. “At least it’s quiet enough to think straight,” he announced, preempting the question Jack would have posed if he had worked up the nerve.

  They had made their way into the Soviet Sector of East Berlin in the usual way: Torriti and Jack lying prone in the false compartment under the roof of a small Studebaker truck that had passed through a little-used checkpoint on one of its regular runs delivering sacks of bone meal fertilizer; Sweet Jesus and the Fallen Angel, dressed as German workers, mingling with the river of people returning through the Friedrichstrasse Station after a day of digging sewage trenches in the western part of the city. Sweet Jesus had had a close call when one of the smartly dressed East German Volkspolizei patrolling beyond the turnstiles demanded his workplace pass and then thumbed through its pages to make sure it bore the appropriate stamps. Sweet Jesus, who once worked as a cook for an SS unit in Rumania during the war and spoke flawless German, had mumbled the right answers to the Volkspolizei’s brittle questions and was sent on his way.

  Now the plumbing for the exfiltration was in place. The defector Vishnevsky and his wife would be smuggled out in the fertilizer truck, which was waiting for them in an unlighted alleyway around the corner from the cinema; the driver, a Polish national rumored to have a German wife in West Berlin and a Russian mistress in the eastern part of the city, had often returned from one of his fertilizer runs well after midnight, provoking ribald quips from the German frontier guards. An agent of the French Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionnage (SDECE), carrying a diplomatic passport identifying him as an assistant cultural attaché, was scheduled to pass close to the cinema at midnight on his way back from a dinner at the Soviet embassy. Allied diplomats refused to recognize the authority of the East German police and never stopped for passport controls. His Citroën, with diplomatic license plates and a small French flag flying from one of its teardrop fenders, would spirit the Sorcerer and Jack past the border guards back into West Berlin. The two Rumanians would go to ground in East Berlin and return to the west in the morning when the workers began to cross over for the day. Which left Vishnevsky’s eleven-year-old son: the Sorcerer had arranged for the boy to be smuggled across by a Dutch Egyptologist who had come into East Germany, accompanied by his wife, to date artifacts in an East Berlin museum. The Dutch couple would cross back into West Berlin on a forged family passport with a blurred photo taken when the boy was supposed to have been five years younger, and a visa for the Dutch father, his wife and 10-year-old boy stamped into its very frayed pages. The Sorcerer had been through this drill half a dozen times; the sleepy East German Volkspolizei manning the checkpoints had always waved the family through with a perfunctory glance at the passport photo. Once over the border, the three Russians would be whisked to the Tempelhof airport in West Berlin and flown in a US Air Force cargo plane to the defector reception center in Frankfurt, Germany, and from there on to Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland.

  But the success of the exfiltration hinged on Vishnevsky and his family shaking off their Watchers—there were KGB people at Karlshorst who did nothing but keep track of the other KGB people—and making their way to the safe house over the cinema. Torriti resumed his prowl, stopping once every orbit to peer over the Fallen Angel’s shoulder at the street.

  Another burst of static came from the radio on the floor. “Film ist zu Ende. All must leave. Gute Nacht to you. Please for God’s sake remember to deposit the Geld in my account.”

  In the street below figures bundled into long overcoats hurried away from the cinema. Sweet Jesus, stamping his feet under a vapor lamp, glanced up at the faint light in the oriel window under the eaves and hiked his shoulders in an apprehensive shrug. Jack pulled the antenna down and started packing it away in the radio’s carrying case. “How long do you figure o
n waiting, Harvey?” he asked.

  The Sorcerer, sweating from alcohol deprivation, turned on Jack. “We wait until I decide to stop waiting,” he snapped.

  The Irishman in Jack stood his ground. “He was supposed to get here before the film ended.” And he added quietly, “If he hasn’t shown up by now chances are he’s not going to show. If he hasn’t been blown we can reschedule the exfiltration for another night.”

  The Fallen Angel said anxiously, “If the Russian was blown, the safe house maybe was blown. Which leaves us up the creek filled with shit, chief.”

  Torriti screwed up his face until his eyes were reduced to slits. He knew they were right; not only was the Russian not going to turn up but it had become imprudent for them to hang in there. “Okay, we give him five minutes and we head for home,” he said.

  Time passed with excruciating slowness, or so it seemed to Jack as he kept his eyes fixed on the second hand of his Bulova. At the window, Silwan II, rolling his head from side to side, humming an ancient Rumanian liturgical chant under his breath, surveyed the street. Suddenly he pressed his forehead against the pane and grabbed his stomach. “Holy Mother of God,” he rasped, “Sweet Jesus went and picked up the dog.”

  “Damnation,” cried Jack, who knew what the signal meant.

  The Sorcerer, freezing in mid-prowl, decided he badly needed a swig of medicinal whiskey to clear the cobwebs from his head. “Into every life a little rain must fall,” he groaned.

  The Fallen Angel called, “Oh, yeah, here they come—one, two, oh shit, seven, wait, eight Volkspolizei wagons have turned into the street. Sweet Jesus is disappearing himself around the corner.”

  “Time for us to disappear ourselves around a corner, too,” Torriti announced. He grabbed his rumpled overcoat off the back of a chair, Jack crammed the radio into its satchel and the three of them, with Jack in the lead and the Sorcerer puffing along behind him, ducked through the door and started up the narrow stairs. It was the route they would have taken if the Russian defectors had turned up. From three floors below came the clamor of rifle butts pounding on the heavy double doors of the cinema, then muffled shouts in German as the Volkspolizei—accompanied by a handful of KGB agents—spread out through the building.

  At the top of the stairs Jack unbolted the steel door and pushed it open with his shoulder. A gust of wintry night air slammed into his face, bringing tears to his eyes. Overhead a half moon filled the rooftop with shadows. Below, in the toilet off the cinema, heavy boots kicked in the false door at the back of the broom closet and started lumbering up the narrow stairs. Once Jack and Torriti were on the roof, the Fallen Angel eased the door closed and quietly slid home the two bolts on it. The Sorcerer, breathing heavily from the exertion, managed to spit out, “That’ll slow the fuckers down.” The three made their way diagonally across the slippery shingles. Silwan II helped the Sorcerer over a low wall and led the way across the next roof to a line of brick chimneys, then swung a leg over the side of a wall and scrambled down the wooden ladder he had planted there when the Sorcerer had laid in the plumbing for the exfiltration. When his turn came Jack started down the ladder, then jumped the rest of the way to the roof below. The Sorcerer, gingerly stabbing the air with his foot to locate the next rung, climbed down after them.

  The three of them squatted for a moment, listening to the icy wind whistling over the rooftops. With the adrenalin flowing and a pulse pounding in his ear, Jack asked himself if he was frightened; he was quite pleased to discover that he wasn’t. From somewhere below came guttural explicatives in German. Then a door leading to the roof was flung open and two silvery silhouettes appeared. The beams from two flashlights swept across the chimneys and illuminated the wooden ladder. One of the silhouettes grunted something in Russian. From a pocket the Fallen Angel produced an old 9 mm Beretta he had once stripped from the body of an Italian fascist whose throat he’d slit near Patras in Greece. A subsonic handgun suited to in-fighting, the Beretta was fitted with a stubby silencer on the end of the barrel. Torriti scratched Silwan II on the back of the neck and, pressing his lips to his ear, whispered, “Only shoot the one in uniform.”

  Bracing his right wrist in his left hand, the Fallen Angel drew a bead on the taller of the two figures and pulled back on the hairpin trigger. Jack heard a quick hiss, as if air had been let out of a tire. One of the two flashlights clattered to the roof. The figure who had been holding it seemed to melt into the shadow of the ground. Breathing heavily, the other man thrust his two arms, one holding the flashlight, the other a pistol, high over his head. “I know it is you, Torriti,” he called in a husky voice. “Not to shoot. I am KGB.”

  Jack’s blood was up. “Jesus H. Christ, shoot the fucker!”

  The Sorcerer pressed Silwan II’s gun arm down. “Germans are fair game but KGB is another story. We don’t shoot them, they don’t shoot us.” To the Russian he called, “Drop your weapon.”

  The Russian, a burly figure wearing a civilian overcoat and a fedora, must have known what was coming because he turned around and carefully set his flashlight and handgun on the ground. Straightening, he removed his fedora and waited.

  Moving on the balls of his feet, the Fallen Angel crossed the roof and stepped up behind the Russian and brought the butt of the Beretta sharply down across his skull over an ear—hard enough to give him splitting headaches for the rest of his life but not hard enough to kill him. The Rumanian deftly caught the Russian under the armpits and lowered him to the roof.

  Moments later the three of them were clambering down the dimly lit staircase of the apartment building, then darting through a corridor reeking of urine and out a back door to an alley filled with garbage cans piled one on top of another. Hidden behind the garbage cans was the fertilizer truck. Without a word the Fallen Angel vanished down the alley into the darkness. Torriti and Jack climbed up into the compartment under the false roof of the vehicle and pulled the trap-ladder closed after them. The engine coughed softly into life and the truck, running on parking lights, eased out of the alley and headed through the silent back streets of East Berlin toward a Pankow crossing point and the French sector of the divided city beyond it.

  Even the old hands at Berlin Base had never seen the Sorcerer so worked up. “I don’t fucking believe it,” he railed, his hoarse cries echoing through the underground corridors, “the KGB fucker on the roof even knew my name.” Torriti slopped some whiskey into a glass, tossed it into the back of his throat and gargled before swallowing. The sting of the booze calmed him down. “Okay,” he instructed his Night Owl, “walk me through it real slow-like.”

  Miss Sipp, sitting on the couch, crossed her legs and began citing chapter and verse from the raw operations log clipped to the message board. She had to raise her voice to make herself heard over Tito Gobbi’s 78-rpm interpretation of Scarpia. It was an indication of Torriti’s mental state that he didn’t seem to catch a glimpse of the erotic frontier where the top of her stocking fastened to the strap of a garter belt.

  “Item number one,” began Miss Sipp, her voice vibrating with suppressed musicality. (She had actually signed on as Torriti’s Night Owl in order to pay for singing lessons at the Berlin Opera, which ended when her teacher informed her that she had almost as much talent as his rooster.) “The listening post at Berlin Base noticed an increase in radio traffic between Moscow and Karlshorst, and vice versa, eighty-five minutes before the defector and his family were due to show up at the safe house.”

  “Bastards were getting their marching orders from Uncle Joe,” the Sorcerer snarled.

  “Item number two: The sister of the cleaning woman who works at the hotel near Karlshorst called her contact in West Berlin, who called us to say the Russians were running around like chickens without a head, i.e., something was up.”

  “What time was that?” Jack, leaning against a wall, wanted to know.

  “D-hour minus sixty minutes, give or take.”

  “The fuckers knew there was going to be a defection,�
� figured the Sorcerer, talking more to himself than to the eight people who had crowded into his office for the wake-like postmortem. “But they didn’t get ahold of that information until late in the game.”

  “Maybe Vishnevsky lost his nerve,” Jack suggested. “Maybe he was perspiring so much he drew attention to himself.”

  The Sorcerer batted the possibility away with the back of his hand. “He was a tough cookie, sport. He didn’t come that far to fink out at the last moment.”

  “Maybe he told his wife and she lost her nerve.”

  Torriti’s brow wrinkled in concentration. Then he shook his head once. “He’d thought it all through. Remember when he asked me if I had a microphone running? He was testing me. He would have tested his wife before he brought her in on the defection. If he thought she’d lose her nerve he would have skipped without her. As for the kid, all he had to know was that they were going to see a late movie.”

  “There’s another angle,” Jack said. “The wife may or may not have gone to bed with the rezident—either way she was probably afraid of him, not to mention ashamed of the trouble she’d brought down on her husband after he confronted the rezident. All of which could have given her enough motivation to defect with Vishnevsky.”

  “There’s smoke coming out your ears, sport,” Torriti said, but it was easy to see he was pleased with his Apprentice. The Sorcerer closed his eyes and raised his nose in the direction of Miss Sipp. She glanced down at the log sheet balanced on her knees.

  “Oh dear, where was I? Ah. Item number three: The Rabbi reported in from the German-Jewish Cultural Center to say that East Germany’s Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung troops were mustering next to vehicles parked in the courtyard behind the school in the Pankow district. That was D-hour minus thirty-five minutes.”