The Company

by Robert Littell

  Angleton, pale as a corpse, sagged back into his seat, stunned. General Truscott whistled through his front teeth. “Burgess—a Soviet agent!” he said. “Son of a bitch! He obviously went back to England to warn Maclean we’d broken the HOMER serials. At the last second he lost his nerve and went with him.”

  Wisner pushed his chair off the wall. “How’d Burgess find out we’d broken into the HOMER serials?”

  “Burgess was living with Philby in Washington,” Torriti said pointedly.

  General Smith shook his head in disgust. “Burgess rented an Austin and drove to Maclean’s home in the suburb of Tatsfield,” he said, running his finger down the message from London station. “At 11:45 Friday night Burgess and Maclean boarded the cross-Channel boat Falaise bound for Saint-Malo. A sailor asked them what they planed to do with the Austin on the pier. ‘Back on Monday,’ Burgess called. On the French side, MI5 found a taxicab driver who remembered driving two men that he identified from photographs as Burgess and Maclean from Saint-Malo to Rennes, where they caught a train for Paris. The trail ends there.”

  “The trail ends in Moscow,” Wisner said.

  General Truscott frowned. “If Philby is a Soviet agent he may have run also.”

  Torriti turned on Angleton. “I warned you we should have taken god-damn precautions.”

  The Barons around the table studiously avoided Angleton’s eye.

  “Philby didn’t run for it,” Angleton said huskily, “because he is not a Soviet agent.”

  Truscott reached for the phone on a table behind him and pushed it across to Angleton. General Smith nodded. “Call him, Jim,” he ordered.

  Angleton produced a small black address book from the breast pocket of his suit jacket. He thumbed through to the P’s and dialed a number. He held the phone slightly away from his ear; everyone in the room could hear it ringing on the other end. After twelve or fourteen rings he gave up. “He’s not at his home,” he said. The two generals, Smith and Truscott, exchanged looks. Angleton dialed the MI6 offices in Washington. A woman answered on the first ring. She repeated the phone number, her voice rising to a question mark at the end. Angleton said, “Let me speak to Mr. Philby, please.”

  “Would you care to give a name?”

  “Hugh Ashmead.”

  “One moment, Mr. Ashmead.”

  Around the table the Barons hardly dared to breath.

  A jovial voice burst onto the line. “That you, Jimbo? Assume you’ve heard the not-so-glad tidings. Phone hasn’t stopped ringing over here. Christ, who would’ve thought it? Guy Burgess, of all people! He and I go way back.”

  “That may pose a problem,” Angleton said carefully.

  “Figured it would, old boy. Not to worry, I have a thick pelt against the slings and arrows—I won’t take it personally.”

  “Let’s meet for a drink,” Angleton suggested.

  Philby could be heard swallowing a laugh. “Sure you want to be seen with me? I may be contagious.”

  “Hay-Adams bar? One-thirty suit you?”

  “You’re calling the shots, Jimbo.”

  Preoccupied, Angleton set the phone back on its hook. Torriti remarked, “Give the fucker credit—he has moxie.”

  “If Philby were a Soviet mole,” Angleton said, thinking out loud, “the KGB would have brought him home along with Maclean and Burgess.” To the others in the room he sounded as if he were trying to convince himself.

  General Smith scraped back his chair and stood up. “Here’s the bottom line, Jim. Philby is contaminated. I want him barred from our buildings as of right now. I want him out of America within twenty-four hours. Let the cousins put him through the ringer and figure out whether he’s been spying for the Ruskies.” He looked down at Angleton. “Understood?”

  Angleton nodded once. “Understood, General.”

  “As for you, Torriti: you have to be the most unconventional officer on the Company payroll. Knowing what I know, I’m not sure I would have hired you but I’m certainly not going to be the one to fire you. Understood?”

  Torriti stifled a smile. “Understood, General.”

  In the executive lavatory down the hall from the DCI’s bailiwick, the Sorcerer flexed his knees and undid the zipper of his fly and, groaning with relief, peed into the urinal. “So what does it tell us about the human condition, that taking a leak turns out to be one of life’s great pleasures?” he asked the person at the next urinal.

  Torriti’s short, round-shouldered MI5 friend, Elihu Epstein, chortled under his breath. “Never thought of it quite like that,” he admitted. “Now that you mention it, I can see that it is one of the more Elysian moments in one’s day.” Epstein did up the buttons of his fly and went over to the line of sinks to wash his hands. “How did things go this morning?” he asked, eyeing the Sorcerer in the mirror.

  Torriti flexed his knees again and then joined Epstein at the sinks. “Are you wired, Elihu?”

  “Afraid so.”

  “Are you taping or broadcasting?”

  “I’m broadcasting. My pals on the other end are taping.”

  “What are you using for a microphone these days?”

  Epstein let his eyes drift to the discreet Victoria Cross rosette on his lapel.

  Grinning like a maniac, Torriti leaned toward Epstein and barked into the rosette: “Harold Adrian Russell Philby, known as Kim to his sidekicks in the rancid precincts of British intelligence, has been declared persona non grata. The fucker has twenty-four hours to get his ass out of our country, after which he’ll be all yours. Persuading him to help you with your inquiries is not going to be a cakewalk—you may have to twist his old school tie around his neck to get him to talk.”

  Torriti spun back to the mirror and splashed water on his face. He had been up most of the night rehearsing the case he would make against Philby. Now the tension and the fatigue were hitting him.

  Epstein held his hands under a hot air dryer and raised his voice to be heard over it. “By the by, how did your James Jesus Angleton take it?”

  “Hard. I don’t see him looking at the world the same way again.”

  “Hmmmm. Yes. Well. Not sure whether one ought to bless you or curse you, Harvey. Relations between our sister services will go from bad to nonexistent, won’t they? Still, I suppose it’s better to have loved and lost. Whatever.”

  “Whatever,” Torriti agreed. He desperately needed a drink.

  The lunch hour crowd was queuing up at the Hay-Adams, across Lafayette Park from the White House, when Angleton sank onto the stool next to Philby at the low end of the bar. The bartender had set out three double martinis in front of the Englishman. Philby had polished off the first two and, squinting along his nose, was trying to impale one of the olives in a saucer on a toothpick. “Did you spot the three-piece suits at the door, Jimbo?” he asked under his breath. “J. Edgar’s eunuchs. They haven’t let me out of their sight. There’s two cars full of ’em parked out front. Bloody FBI! You’d think I’d knocked over your Fort Knox.”

  “Some of my associates think you have,” Angleton said. He raised a finger to get the bartender’s eye, pointed at Philby’s martinis and held up two fingers. “They think you sent Burgess back to warn Maclean. They think that’s only the tip of the iceberg.”

  Philby came up with a bad imitation of a Texas accent. “That a fact, pardner?”

  “Did you, Adrian? Send Burgess back to warn Maclean?”

  Philby slowly turned his red-rimmed eyes on Angleton. “That cuts, Jim. Coming from you…” He shook his head. “‘There is a tide in the affairs of men’…My world is coming apart at the seams, isn’t it?”

  “Bedell Smith sent a stinging cable to your ‘C’ saying he wanted you out of the country. Your Five is going to rake you over the coals, Adrian.”

  “Don’t I know it.” He gripped the third martini and threw down most of it in one gulp. “I would have run for it if I was one of theirs,” he told the glass.

  “I remember one night back on Ry
der Street when the buzz bombs were exploding around us,” Angleton said. “We were talking theory, Adrian, and suddenly you said that theory was fine as far as it went. You quoted the founder of British Secret Service back in the sixteenth century—“

  “Francis Walsingham, old boy.”

  “I never could remember his name but I never forgot what you said he said.”

  Philby managed a smirk. “‘Espionage is an effort to find windows into men’s souls.’”

  “That’s it, Adrian. Windows into men’s souls.”

  The bartender set two double martinis down on the bar. Angleton started to stir the first one with a pretzel. “Haven’t found the window into your soul, Adrian. Who are you?”

  “I thought you knew.”

  “Thought I did, too. Not so sure now.”

  “I swear to you, Jimbo, I never betrayed my side—“

  “Which is your side, Adrian?”

  The question knocked the wind out of Philby. After a moment he said, with mock lightness, “Well, have to be toddling, don’t I? Sorry I can’t do lunch. Bags to pack, house to close, plane to catch, that sort of thing.” He more or less fell off his stool. Clutching the bar with one hand, he wedged a folded fiver under the saucer filled with olives, then held out his hand. Angleton shook it. Philby nodded, as if something he had just thought of had reinforced something he already knew. “Hang in there, Jimbo.”

  “I expect to.”

  Angleton watched Philby stumble through the swinging door. Hoover’s three-piece suits fell in behind him. Turning back to his drink, he took a long swallow and pulled a face; too much vermouth but what the hell. Finishing off the martini, he started to reflect on the almost infinite number of interpretations that could be put on any set of facts, the ambiguities waiting to be discovered in patterns of behavior. Say, for argument’s sake, that Adrian had been spying for the Russians. Someone that important would have been handled by the senior controller; by the one known as Starik. Angleton had started a dossier on Starik the first time he came across a reference to him in the serial provided by the Russian defector Krivitsky. The file was pretty thin but there was enough to convince him that the mysterious Starik was a cunning and meticulous planner, someone who prided himself on staying one jump ahead of the enemy. Which meant that the real question was not what Philby had given away—let the MI5 interrogators wrestle with that one—but who was taking his place. It was inconceivable that Starik would let the pipeline run dry, inconceivable that Soviet penetration operations would come to a grinding halt on 28 May 1951.

  Torriti’s accusations against Philby had initially unnerved Angleton but now he felt a surge of energy; now more than ever he had his work cut out for him. Attacking the second martini, he felt himself slip across a fault into a stygian mindscape where subtleties proliferated, where variations on a theme roared in the ear like an infernal chorus. Grimacing, Angleton made a silent vow: He would never trust another mortal the way he had trusted Philby. No one. Not ever. In the end, anyone could be a Soviet mole.

  Or everyone.

  17

  BERLIN, SATURDAY, JUNE 2, 1951

  THE SORCERER SCRATCHED HIS KNUCKLES ACROSS JACK’S OPEN DOOR. “Can I, eh, come in?” he asked, the balls of his feet on the threshold, his oversized body curling forward deferentially.

  The question astonished Jack. “Be my guest,” he said from behind the small desk that had been liberated from a Wehrmacht post office at the end of the war. He pointed to the only other place to sit in his cubicle of an office, a metal barber’s stool on castors. Jack pulled a bottle of whiskey from a carton at his feet, set out two glasses and half-filled them, careful to be sure they both held the same amount. Distributing his weight carefully on the stool, Torriti wheeled closer to the desk and wrapped his fingers around one glass. “You wouldn’t happen to have ice?” he asked.

  “Fridge in the hall is on the fritz.”

  “No ice, no tinkle. No tinkle, schlecht!”

  “That what you said the night we were waiting for Vishnevsky to show up,” Jack remembered. “No tinkle, schlecht!”

  The Sorcerer scraped dandruff out of an eyebrow with a fingernail. “Lot of water’s passed under the bridge in five months.”

  “An awful lot, yeah.”

  “You played heads-up ball on the SNIPER business,” the Sorcerer said. “To you.”

  They downed their whiskeys.

  “First time I’ve been up to the top floor,” the Sorcerer said. He took in Jack’s cubicle. “Nice place.”

  “Small.”

  “Small but nice. Least you have a window. What does it look out on when the shade’s up?”

  “Brick wall of the building across the alley.”

  Torriti snickered. “Well, you didn’t come to Germany for the view.”

  “Where are they with Philby?”

  “MI5’s Torquemadas are stretching him on the rack. So far he’s pleading coincidence.”

  “Will they break him?”

  “My pal in Five, Elihu Epstein, is sitting in on it. He says Philby’s going to be a tough nut to crack.”

  For a moment neither of them could think of anything to say. Then Jack remarked, “She missed two meetings, Harvey.”

  Torriti nodded uncomfortably.

  “The teardrop in SNIPER’s floorboard’s gone dry. The silence is deafening.”

  The Sorcerer looked around the small room as if he were trying to find a way out. “Jack, I have some unpleasant news for you.”

  “About RAINBOW?”

  “About RAINBOW. About SNIPER.”

  “Un-huh.”

  “Remember that tap we have on the phone of Ulbricht’s wife in her Central Committee office?”

  “Yeah. As a matter of fact, I do.”

  Torriti pushed the glass across the desk for a refill. His Apprentice obliged. The Sorcerer downed the second whiskey, then patted his pockets in search of a folded sheet of paper. He found it hidden in a shirt pocket under his shoulder holster. “This is a transcript of a conversation—took place two days ago—between Ulbricht and his wife, Lotte.”

  Torriti started to set the sheet down on the desk but Jack said, “What’s it say, Harvey?”

  The Sorcerer nodded. “Ulbricht tells her the jokers from Karlshorst tracked Ernst Ludwig Löffler to his brother’s house in Dresden. They went around to arrest him for high treason, they broke down the door when nobody opened it, they found Löffler’s sister-in-law cowering in a closet, they found Löffler hanging from a curtain rod. He’d climbed a stepladder and tied a bunch of neckties around his neck and kicked the ladder away. He’d been dead for two days.”

  “Un-huh.”

  “Lotte asks Ulbricht about Helga Agnes.”

  “Un-huh.”

  “He tells her she’d locked herself in the john. The boys from Karlshorst ordered her to come out. They heard a shot.” Torriti cleared his throat. “There are details in the transcript you don’t want to know.…You listening, sport?”

  Jack ran his finger around the rim of his glass. “She went into it never once considering how the hell she was going to get out again.”

  “So I guess you kind of fell for her.”

  “We couldn’t spend time. Neither of us had any to spare.”

  The Sorcerer pushed himself to his feet. “What can I say?”

  “Win some, lose some.”

  “That’s the spirit, Jack. Wasn’t your fault. You offered her a ticket out. Her problem she didn’t take it.”

  “Her problem,” Jack agreed. “Solved it with a mouth full of water and a small-caliber pistol.”

  The Sorcerer eyed his Apprentice. “How’d you know about the mouth full of water? How’d you know the pistol was small-caliber?”

  “Shot in the dark.”

  Torriti started for the door. Jack said, “Tell me something, Harvey.”

  The Sorcerer turned back. “Sure, kid. What do you want to know?”

  “Were SNIPER and RAINBOW one of your bariu
m meals? Because if they were, Harvey, if they were, I’m not sure I can go on—“

  Torriti spread his hands wide. “SNIPER was Berlin Base’s crown jewel, sport. I was ready to give a lot of crap away. I was ready to give Lotte’s phone tap away. But not SNIPER.” He shook his head for emphasis. “No way I’d put him on the line.” He raised his right hand. “Hey, I swear it to you, kid. On my mother’s grave.”

  “That makes me feel better, Harvey.”

  “Onward and upward, sport.”

  “Yeah. Onward. Whichever.”

  18

  CHERYOMUSKI, MOSCOW DISTRICT, MONDAY, JUNE 4, 1951

  STARIK HAD CLAMBERED UP THE SPIRAL IRON STAIRCASE TO THE FLAT roof of the three-story mansion to get a respite from the telephones that never stopped ringing. Was it true, Beria wanted to know, that the two Englishmen who had been spying for the Soviet Union had already arrived in Moscow? At what point, Pravda’s editor asked, would the two be available for interviews by Western journalists in order to prove to the world that they had defected of their own free will? The Politburo needed to know, Nikita Khrushchev insisted, whether the rumors circulating in the Kremlin about there being a third English defector were based on fact or wishful thinking.

  Grinding a Bulgarian cigarette out under his foot, Starik made his way across the roof to the southeast corner and hiked himself onto the balustrade. From beyond the forest of white birches came the pungent aroma of the dung that had been scattered from horse-drawn carts in the fields that the Cheryomuski collective would sow with feed corn if the weather held. Pasha Zhilov, a.k.a. Starik, had been born and raised in the Caucuses. His father, an acolyte who fasted on the Sabbath and read to his six children from the Book of Revelations before bedtime every night, died in a typhus epidemic when Starik was sixteen, and he had been sent to live with his father’s brother in the Ukraine. Before the collectivization campaign of the early thirties, he used to accompany his uncle, a minor Bolshevik official charged with ensuring that private farms delivered the correct quotas to the state, on his trips through the countryside. The thing that Starik remembered most about these expeditions was the pure odors that reached his nostrils from the piles of manure steaming after a sudden summer cloudburst. Because Starik’s uncle was extremely unpopular with the Ukrainian peasants—there were occasions when the tires of his car had been slit or sand had been thrown into its petrol tank—he was accompanied by a second automobile filled with armed militiamen who sometimes let the young Starik fire their Nagant rifles at beer bottles set out on a fence.