The Sorcerer exploded. “He knew I knew the identity of the Soviet mole who had compromised the Vishnevsky defection because I sent him a barium meal to that effect. Next thing you know some jokers lure me to a church and try to take me out of circulation. What does that add up to?”
Angleton dragged on his cigarette. “Philby knew that your hottest source in East Germany—“
General Smith ran his thumb down the numbered paragraphs in Angleton’s rebuttal. “Here it is—number three—you’re talking about SNIPER.”
“Philby was privy to the SNIPER material from day one,” Angleton said. “Backtracking from what was passed on to us, the KGB could have easily figured out the identity of SNIPER. When Harvey discovered that SNIPER was a theoretical physicist and a deputy prime minister in the East German Government, this information was passed on as a matter of routine to the MI6 liaison man in Washington, Philby.” He turned toward the Sorcerer. “SNIPER is still delivering, isn’t he, Harvey?”
“Yeah, he is, Jim.”
Angleton almost smiled, as if to say: I rest my case.
Torriti said, very quietly, “He’s delivering because he’s a Soviet disinformation operation.”
The Barons around the table exchanged glances. Truscott leaned back in his chair and eyed the Sorcerer through the haze of pipe and cigarette smoke. “I suppose you’re prepared to elaborate on that.”
“I suppose I am,” Torriti agreed. He tugged two crumpled message blanks from the breast pocket of his sports jacket, ironed them open on the table with the flat of his hand and began reading from the first one. “This is a ‘Flash—Eyes Only’ that reached me here Saturday morning. ‘From: The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. To: The Sorcerer. Subject: AESNIPER. One: Something fishy’s going on here, Harvey.’”
General Smith leaned forward. “It starts off with ‘Something fishy’s going on here, Harvey?’”
“That’s what it says, General.”
“Is that a cryptogram?”
“No, sir. It’s plain English.”
The DCI nodded dubiously. “I see. And precisely what is the something fishy that was going on?”
Torriti smiled for the first time that morning. “It’s like this,” he began. “A while back, acting on my instructions, my Apprentice, name of John McAullife, planted a teardrop microphone in the floorboards of SNIPER’s apartment. McAullife is the officer who’s been running SNIPER’s courier, code-named RAINBOW…”
At their Friday night meeting in the rehearsal hall, Jack had dipped two fingers into Lili’s brassiere and pressed the backs of them against her flesh as he kissed her. When his fingers came out, the square of silk filled with minuscule writing was between them. Later, at Berlin-Dahlem, Jack slipped the silk between two pieces of glass, adjusted the desk lamp and, leaning over a magnifying glass, slowly worked his way through the latest “get” from SNIPER. Not surprisingly, he found details of bacteriological warfare testing on the Baltic island of Rügen, uranium production in the Joachimstal area of the Harz Mountains, the most recent Soviet nuclear fission experiments in Central Asia. That was followed by a long quotation from a letter from Walter Ulbricht to the Soviet ambassador complaining about comments supposedly made about his, Ulbricht’s, commitment to Communism by his Party rival, Wilhelm Zaisser. After that came a long list of Soviet Army units that, according to an internal Soviet study, were quietly being rotated through a training program designed to prepare combat troops for bacteriological warfare. The Friday “get” from SNIPER ended with the names of middle-level West German government and private enterprise functionaries who were hiding compromising Nazi-party pasts and were thus vulnerable to blackmail.
Bone tired after a long day, Jack switched off the desk lamp and rubbed his eyes. Then, suddenly, he found himself staring into the darkness, thinking hard. Something fishy was going on! He snapped on the desk lamp and, dialing the combination of a small safe, retrieved the most recent transcript of the conversations recorded by the teardrop microphone in SNIPER’s floorboards. Leaning over the desk, he compared the microphone’s “get” with the latest material from SNIPER. Slowly, his mouth gaped open. The details of bacteriological warfare testing on Rügen, of uranium production in the Harz Mountains, of the recent Soviet nuclear fission experiments in Central Asia had all been subtly altered. The teardrop and the silk were delivering two different versions of the same information. Even more crucial, the silk made no mention at all of the MI6 watch list in the hands of the Polish intelligence service, UB, or the presumption that there might be an important Soviet spy in British intelligence who had provided it.
Did this mean what he thought it meant?
Jack grabbed a message blank and began scrawling a “Flash—Eyes Only” for the Sorcerer in Washington. “Something fishy’s going on here, Harvey,” he began.
Dressed in the cobalt blue coveralls of an East German state electrical worker, Jack leaned against the kiosk on the south side of Alexanderplatz, eating a sandwich made with ersatz Swiss cheese and skimming the editorial page of Saturday’s Communist Party newspaper, Neues Deutschland. Surveilling the far side of Alexanderplatz over the top of his newspaper, he repeated from memory the Sorcerer’s answer to his overnight “Something fishy” bulletin. “Hit RAINBOW over the head with it,” Torriti had ordered. “Today. I want her answer in my hands when I go into the lion’s den Monday at nine.”
Jack saw Lili emerge from the private dance school minutes after the noon siren had sounded. She stood for a moment as the lunch hour crowd flowed around her, angling her face toward the sun, relishing its warmth. Then she slung her net catchall over a shoulder and set off down Mühlendammstrasse. She queued to buy beets from an open farm truck, then ducked into a pharmacy before continuing on her way. Jack waved to the Fallen Angel, who seemed to be dozing behind the wheel of the small Studebaker truck that transported bone meal fertilizer into the Soviet zone. He spotted Lili and started the motor. Cutting diagonally across Alexanderplatz, Jack came abreast of her as she waited for the light to change.
“Guten Morgen, Helga,” Jack said tensely, slipping his arm through hers. “Wie geht es Dir?”
Lili turned her head. A look of pure animal dread filled what Jack had always thought of as her bruised eyes. She glanced around frantically, as if she would take flight, then looked back at him. “You know my real name?” she whispered.
“I know more than that,” he said under his breath. He raised his voice and asked, “Wie geht es Herr Löffler?”
Lili pulled free from his grip. “How do you know these things?”
Jack snapped his head in the direction of a workers’ café across the street. It was evident from his manner that he was very agitated. “I invite you for coffee and cake mit Schlagsahne.”
Feeling giddy, afraid her knees would give way if she couldn’t sit down, Lili let Jack lead her through traffic to the café, a spacious high-ceilinged neighborhood canteen with one Bauhaus stained-glass window that had miraculously survived the war. Neon lights suspended from long electrical cords illuminated tables covered in Formica. Middle-aged waiters in black trousers and white shirts and black vests, balancing trays brimming with coffee and cakes on palms raised high over their heads, plied the room. Jack steered Lili up the steps to a table at the back of the almost deserted mezzanine and slid onto the bench catty-corner to hers, his back to a tarnished mirror. He signalled the waiter for two coffees and two cakes and then reached across the table to touch her knuckles.
She jerked her hand away as if it had been scorched. “Why do you risk coming here in daylight?”
“What I have to say couldn’t wait. All hell is going to break loose. I don’t want you to be in the Soviet zone when it does.”
“How long have you known our real names, Herr Professor and me?”
“That’s not important,” Jack said.
“What is important?”
“It is about your Professor Löffler, Lili—I stumbled across the truth. He has betrayed you. He
works for the Soviet KGB, he is what we call a disinformation agent.”
Lili’s chin sank onto her chest and she began to breathe through her mouth. The waiter, thinking they were having a marital spat, set the coffee and cakes between them. “Some clouds have silver linings, some do not,” he intoned as he slipped the check under a saucer.
Lili looked up, her eyes blinking rapidly as if she were trying to freeze an image. “Jack, I am not able to understand what you say?”
“Yes, you do, Lili,” he said fiercely. “I can see it on your face, I can read it in your eyes. You understand very well. The silk I pulled from your breast Friday night—“
“It was filled with information. I read some of it before I gave it to you, yes?”
“It was filled with leftovers from a lousy supper. It was filled with things we already knew or weren’t true. The good stuff had been edited out.”
Now she really did look puzzled. “How could you know what was edited out?”
“We have a microphone in Löffler’s apartment. It records everything that’s said in the dining room. Six days ago it picked up his hurried declaration of love to you. You haven’t forgotten what he told you, have you?”
Lili, unable to speak, shook her head miserably.
“You had a visitor that night, a man speaking English with a Polish accent. You do remember the evening, don’t you, Lili? The three of you had supper together. Then you went out to clean up and let them talk. The microphone recorded a conversation in English between Herr Professor and his Polish friend. You came back with brandy and then left again. What they talked about when you were out of the room was incredibly interesting to us. The trouble was that it had been left off the piece of silk you delivered. The heart of the conversation in the room that night—the secrets, Lili—were missing. It is not something Herr Professor would have omitted if he was really working for us. Which means he is working for the Communists. Either he or the person who handles him laundered the text before the Professor wrote out his report on the silk.”
Lili dipped her middle finger into her coffee and carefully ran it over her lips as if she were applying lipstick. Jack said, “Lili, this is bad news for the people I work for—but good news for us. For you and me.”
“How is it possible to see this as good news for us?” she managed to ask.
“The debt you owe Herr Professor is cancelled. He has betrayed you.” Jack leaned toward her and touched her knuckles again. This time she didn’t pull away. “Come across to the American sector, Lili. Come across to me. Right now. Come across and don’t look back. I have a small truck waiting on a side street—we will squeeze into its secret compartment and cross the frontier at a little-used check-point.”
“I must think—“
“You will start life over. I’ll take you to London to see the Royal Ballet. You can try out your English in America. You can use it to tell the justice of the peace that you agree to take me for your wedded husband.”
Lili’s mask of a face was disfigured by a bitter smile. “Dear Jack-in-thebox, it has slipped from your mind that I am the sand under your bare feet. I make you lightheaded, yes? If only the thing was as simple as you say. You understand nothing. Nothing.”
Lili’s fingertips passed across her eyelids. Then she sighed and looked Jack in the eye. “It is not the Professor who is a Soviet agent,” she told him. “It is me, the Soviet agent. It is me who, in a certain sense, betrayed him.”
Jack felt spasms shoot through his rib cage as sharp as any he had felt while rowing. It occurred to him that he might be having a heart attack; curiously, it seemed like a solution to his problems. He took a sip of coffee and forced himself to swallow. Then he heard himself say, “Okay, tell me what happened” even though he wasn’t sure he wanted to hear it.
“What happened? I ask myself, again and again, what happened.” She stared off into space for a moment. “Ernst is a German patriot. After much contemplation he came to the conclusion that the Communists—the Russian Communists and their German puppets—were crippling Germany. He decided to work for reunification of the two Germanies by passing information to the West that would discredit the Communists. He thought it through very carefully—he was too well known, both at the University and as a deputy prime minister, to move about freely. I, on the other hand, crossed to the American sector twice each week to give my dance class. So we decided together—the decision was also mine, Jack—that he would collect the information and write it out on silk and I would act as the mail deliverer…”
Jack leaned toward her. “Go on,” he whispered.
Lili shuddered. “The KGB found out about it. To this day I do not know how. Perhaps they, too, have microphones buried in the apartments of deputy prime ministers. Perhaps they overheard our conversations in bed late in the night. When I left for my first meeting with you—oh, it seems to me a lifetime ago, Jack—I was stopped a block from our apartment, I was forced into the back of a limousine and blindfolded and taken to a building and up an elevator and pushed into a room that smelled of insect repellent. Five men…” She caught her breath. “Five men stood around me—one spoke in Russian, four spoke in German. The Russian was clearly in charge. He was short with fat ankles and the eyes of an insect, and it crossed my brain that the repellent was there to keep him away but hadn’t worked. He spoke German like a German. He ordered me to take off all my clothing. When I hesitated he said they would do it for me if I refused. In that room, before the eyes of men I did not know, I became naked. They discovered the square of silk—they seemed to know it would be in my brassiere. They said that Ernst would be tried for high treason and shot. They said I would certainly go to prison for many years. They said I would never dance again because they would see to it that my knees…my knees—“
“Lili!”
“I was standing before them completely naked, you see. If I could have crawled under a table and died I would have. Then the Russian told me to put my clothes back on. And he said…he said there was a way out for Ernst, for me. I would deliver Ernst’s piece of silk to them and they would substitute another piece, rewritten, edited, things taken out, other things added, and I would deliver the second square to the American spy who would come to meet me Tuesday and Friday after my class. They promised that my service to the cause of Communism would be taken into consideration. Ernst would not be harmed as long as I cooperated—“
Jack’s heart sank—he remembered Lili’s saying, “Without me he cannot remain alive.” At the time it had seemed a phrase with a simple meaning—the description of a lover who could not support the departure of the person he loved. Now Jack understood that she had meant it literally; she could not defect to the West because Ernst Ludwig Löffler would be arrested and tried and shot.
“After each meeting,” she was saying, her voice thick with anger, “I wrote a report—I had to tell them who I met, and where, and what was said. They know your identity, Jack.”
“Did you tell them about—“
“Not a word. They know nothing about us…”
Jack racked his brain for things he could say to convince her to come with him to the West. “The Professor—Herr Löffler—is condemned, Lili. You must see that. This game couldn’t go on forever. And when it came to an end they would punish him, if only as an example to others who might be tempted to follow in his footsteps. You can still be saved. Come with me now—we will live happily ever after.”
“There is no such thing as happily ever after. It is a child’s tale. If I would leave, my going would kill him before they came to kill him.”
So Lili’s “Without me he cannot remain alive” had two meanings after all.
Jack knew he was running out of arguments. “Take him where there are no microphones and tell him what you’ve told me—tell him the KGB has been using him. Tell him I can get the both of you out.”
“You do not understand Ernst. He will never leave his University, his work, his friends, the Germany he was born in
and his parents are buried in. Not even to save his life.” Her eyes clouded over. “He always said if it came to that, he had a small caliber handgun. He would joke about how the bullet was so small, the only way you could kill yourself was to fill your mouth with water and insert the pistol and explode your head…”
“He loves you—he’ll want you to save yourself.”
Lili nodded dumbly. “I will ask his advice…”
“Which explains why SNIPER wasn’t closed down when Philby passed word of it on to his handlers,” Torriti was telling the ad hoc war council. “The KGB already knew about SNIPER—the whole thing was a KGB disinformation operation.”
There was a restless silence in the conference room when the Sorcerer came to the end of his story. The point of Truscott’s pencil could be heard doodling on a yellow pad. Dulles aimed a flame from a Zippo lighter into the bowl of his pipe and sucked it back into life. Wisner drummed his fingers on the metal band of his wristwatch.
Angleton reached up and massaged his forehead, which was throbbing with a full-blown migraine. “There are two, five, seven ways of looking at any given set of facts,” he said. “I will need time to tease the real meaning out of this, to—“
There was a sharp knock on the door. General Smith called out gruffly, “Come.”
A secretary poked her head in. “I have a ‘Flash—Eyes Only’ for you, General. It’s from the station chief, London.”
Helms took the message board and passed it along the table to the Director. Smith fitted on a pair of reading glasses, opened the metal cover and scanned the message. Looking up, he waved the secretary out of the room. “Well, gentlemen, the shit has hit the fan,” he announced. “On Friday the British Foreign Office authorized MI5 to begin interrogating Maclean regarding the HOMER serials first thing Monday. The interrogators turned up at dawn this morning and they discovered he’d jumped ship. I’m afraid that’s not all. Guy Burgess seems to have disappeared with him.”
The Company Page 31
