The Company

by Robert Littell

  Jack turned to Manny. “You set up emergency procedures for contacting him in Moscow?”

  Manny nodded. “We agreed on a primary and a secondary meeting place for the second and fourth Tuesday of every month.”

  Colby said, “That gives us fourteen days.”

  Jack said, “We won’t really know what the situation is until someone’s talked to Kukushkin.”

  “I suppose we ought to alert one of our people in Moscow,” Colby said.

  Angleton came awake again. “At AE/PINNACLE’s last debriefing, he warned us that the KGB had started coating the shoes of American diplomats with a scent that trained dogs can follow. Which means that our people are tracked when they service dead drops. We’d be running the risk of blowing Kukushkin if we sent one of our embassy-based officers to the rendezvous.”

  Jack agreed. “Whoever contacts Kukushkin ought to come in from the outside. It should be a one-shot deal. He should come in and meet him and go out again.”

  Manny and his father exchanged looks. Ebby smiled and nodded; his son had matured into a seasoned CIA officer during the three months that he had been handling the Kukushkin defection. Watching Manny across the table, Ebby was extremely proud of him. And he knew what Manny was going to suggest before he opened his mouth.

  “It has to be me,” Manny declared, and he quoted something Director Colby had said at the task force’s first meeting: “A friendly face is worth its weight in gold.”

  “I don’t like it,” Jack said. “The man who goes in to contact him could wind up in one of the KGB’s Lubyanka dungeons.”

  Manny said eagerly, “My going to meet Kukushkin makes sense. Either he’ll agree to work for us in Moscow or, alternatively, he may let us bring him out—either way we’ll be ahead of the game.”

  Fidgeting uneasily, Colby glanced at Ebby. “He’d be taking one hell of a risk.”

  Ebby said, “He’s a consenting adult, Director, and a damn good Soviet Division officer who happens to be fluent in Russian.”

  “Two weeks wouldn’t give us time to work up diplomatic cover and immunity,” Colby noted. “He’d have to go in naked.”

  Ebby said, “If we opt for sending a man in from the outside, there’s a lot to be said for using someone Kukushkin knows personally, and trusts.”

  Colby gathered up his notes. “I’ll sleep on it,” he announced.

  “Back up one sentence,” Nellie said, her eyes squinting into the duststorm she was about to kick up. “You’re going somewhere, right?”

  “It’s just for a week—“

  “You’re going somewhere for a week, but you can’t take me with you and you won’t tell me where you’re going?”

  Manny shifted his weight from one foot to the other.

  “You won’t tell me where you’re going because it’s a secret?”

  “That’s right.”

  “How do I know you’re not running off with another female of the species?”

  “Damn it, Nellie. You’re the only woman in my life.”

  “Is it dangerous? At least tell me that much.”

  Manny took her hand. “Look, Nellie, if you’re going to marry into the Company there are certain thing you need to—“

  “Who said anything about marrying into the Company?”

  “Well, I sort of assumed, what with us more or less living together, what with incest being best, that marriage would be on the agenda.”

  “Marriage? To each other?”

  “That’s how it’s usually done. I marry you and you marry me.”

  “You’re ready to give up your apartment?”

  Manny considered the question, raised his eyebrows and nodded.

  Cocking her very pretty head, Nellie said, “Manny, are you proposing to me?”

  Manny seemed as surprised as Nellie by the turn the conversation had taken. “I suppose you could make a case that I am.”

  Nellie brought the flat of a hand up to her solar plexus and collapsed onto the couch. “Well, that sort of changes things,” she murmured.

  Manny sat down next to her. “I sure hope marriage doesn’t change things,” he said.

  “I’m talking about your trip. I’ve got this theory, Manny. You need to be possessive of the things you don’t possess. But once you possess them you can afford not to be possessive any more.”

  “I’m not positive I follow you.”

  Nellie leaned over and kissed Manny hard on the lips. “I accept,” she announced in a throaty whisper. “I’ve wanted to fuck you as far back as I can remember. From puberty onward I wanted to marry you. I never changed my mind, not even when you used to beat me up.”

  “I never beat you up—“

  “What about the time you came back from graduate school and shoved me into a snowdrift?”

  “You were throwing snowballs at me—“

  “So when’s the wedding?”

  “I’m leaving Friday afternoon. What’s that?”

  “The ninth.”

  “Friday, nine August. Which means I’ll be back on Friday the sixteenth. We could find a justice of the peace and do the dirty deed that weekend.”

  Nellie, suddenly short of breath, said, “You really know how to sweep a girl off her feet.” She thought a moment. “So if we’re getting married a week from this weekend, that makes us engaged, right?”

  “I guess it does.”

  “If we’re actually engaged, nothing would be more natural than for you to tell your bride-to-be where you’re going on this trip of yours.” When she saw the expression on his face, she started laughing. “Don’t tell me, let me guess: Company wives…”

  “…don’t ask…”

  “…dumb questions.”

  Leo Kritzky experienced a surge of exaltation: He was not alone in his padded cell!

  His companion was the moth that had slipped in from the bleak corridor when Jim Angleton, turning back on the threshold as he was about to leave, thought of a last question. “You have no recollection of liquor being delivered to your door from Kahn’s Wine and Beverage on M Street?”

  “You keep coming back to Kahn’s Wine and Beverage—” Leo saw the flutter of tiny wings as the moth, possibly attracted to the bulbs suspended from the ceiling, flew past Angleton’s knee. For a harrowing moment he was sure Angleton would notice; noticing, he would summon the guards to hunt down the moth and squash it against the padded wall before Leo could savor the pleasure of its company. Determined not to follow the moth with his eyes lest he betray its presence, he concentrated on Angleton. “Adelle was the one who did all the ordering-in—pizza, groceries, liquor, whatever. I didn’t even know where she got the liquor and I never asked. I had too many other things to worry about. And I don’t remember making out any checks to Kahn’s Wine and Beverage.”

  “You were careful to make sure the orders and the checks were in your wife’s maiden name so that nobody would stumble across the link between you and Kahn’s delivery boy, who turned out to be a cutout for the KGB.”

  With his peripheral vision, Leo saw the moth alight on the padding of the wall above the toilet bowl. He couldn’t wait for Angleton to leave so he could formally welcome his visitor. “It’s another assumption of yours that fits in with what you want to believe,” Leo said impatiently. “The only problem is that your assumptions don’t add up. Your case is circumstantial and you know it.”

  “My circumstantial case, as you put it, rests on incontrovertible evidence from an irrefutable witness. There’s only one way out of all this for you—admit you’re SASHA, then cooperate with us in undoing the damage you’ve done to the Company.” Angleton patted his jacket pocket in search of cigarettes as he turned his back on Leo and left the room. A guard bolted the door behind him.

  For several minutes Leo continued sitting on the folded blanket with his back against a wall. He suspected that Angleton would be watching him through the pinhole in the door and he didn’t want to put the moth in jeopardy. After a long while he decided the coast w
as clear and let his eyes drift up to the moth, clinging with spread-eagled wings to the padding of the wall behind the toilet. It was by far the most beautiful creature Leo had ever set eyes on in his life. There was a elegant symmetry to the intricate purple and brown pattern on the back of the wings; a graceful sensuality to the elongated hairy undercarriage and the feathery antennas that probed, like a blind man tapping a cane, the microcosm immediately in front of its head. Leo remembered having a high school chum who collected moths. The prize in his collection, grotesquely (so it had seemed to Leo) pinned to cork under glass, had been a rare species of moth called the Sphinx of Siberia. Leo decided that his moth was every bit as exotic and could qualify as a Sphinx, too. His spirits soared—he took it as an omen, a sign that someone beyond this secret prison and outside of Angleton’s immediate circle knew of his predicament and would soon slip into the cell to succor him. He raised a hand in salute to convey to his comrade that they shared not only the same cell, but the same fate.

  In the hours and days that followed Leo would make his way to one side of the room or another to visit his fellow prisoner clinging with endless patience to the padded wall. He took to murmuring words of encouragement to it and listened to the message of its body language: with patience, with fortitude, it seemed to be saying, they would both escape from this confinement that could no longer be described as solitary. And as if to drive home the point, from time to time the Sphinx would quit its perch and circle one of the light bulbs for minutes on end, delighting his cellmate by casting large flickering shadows onto the walls.

  Angleton noticed the change in his prisoner immediately. Kritzky managed a conspiratorial smile now and then, almost as if he were concealing a delicious secret, and appeared eager to engage Angleton in verbal sparring. He even tittered out loud when the counterintelligence chief raised the possibility that Leo would die of old age in this cell if he didn’t cooperate. Suspecting that one of the jailers might have befriended the prisoner, Angleton had all of the guards changed. Still, Leo’s morale seemed to grow stronger by the day. “Sure, operations I had a hand in went bad,” he admitted to Angleton during one morning session. “For heaven’s sake, Jim, operations you had a hand in went bad, too, but nobody’s accusing you of being a Soviet mole.” Leo cast a glance in the direction of the Sphinx of Siberia and then suddenly started to laugh. Soon he was laughing so hard tears trickled from his eyes. “Maybe someone—” Laughter racked his body, laughter hurt his gut. “Maybe someone should, Jim. I mean, what a joke it would be if James Jesus Angleton…turned out to be SASHA. Maybe you’re going through the motions…oh, God, it’s hilarious…going through the motions of hunting for SASHA…to divert attention from yourself.” Doubled over, Leo clutched his stomach and gasped for air between spasms of laughter. “Don’t you see the humor of it, Jim? The joke would be on the Company, wouldn’t it? Oh, Christ, the joke would be on me.”

  7

  EN ROUTE TO THE SOVIET UNION, SATURDAY, AUGUST 10, 1974

  THE REGULAR FRIDAY AEROFLOT FLIGHT TO MOSCOW WAS RUNNING three quarters of an hour late. The plane had been delayed at the gate to repair a leak in a hydraulic system, then held up on the runway by the heavy traffic in and out of JFK. The fifty or so passengers aboard—two dozen wore blue-and-white lapel pins identifying them as clients on Trailblazer Travel’s one-week tour of Moscow—were sound asleep, stretched across the vacant seats of the half-empty Tupolev 144. Manny, who had been leafing through Fodor’s guide to Russia when he wasn’t catnapping, wandered back down the aisle to where the stewards had set up a sandwich bar and helped himself to a ham on black bread and a plastic cup filled with kvass. He opened the sandwich and spread some mustard on the bread.

  “What’s going to happen now that Nixon has resigned?” the male steward inquired from the pantry. “Will there be a coup d’état?”

  Manny had to laugh. “I doubt it,” he said. “Gerald Ford’s already been sworn into the White House. In America, the transition is spelled out in the constitution.” He bit into the sandwich, then talked with his mouth full. “What would happen in Russia if Brezhnev resigned tomorrow?”

  “Why would Comrade Brezhnev want to resign?”

  “Say he did something illegal like Nixon—say he had his people break into the opposition’s headquarters. Say the burglars were caught and Mr. Brezhnev ordered the police not to investigate the case. Say he tried to bribe the burglars into keeping quiet when that didn’t work.”

  Now it was the steward’s turn to laugh. “What you are describing couldn’t happen in a proletarian democracy,” he said earnestly. He tossed his fine blond hair away from his eyes with a snap of his head. “Our Communist Party represents all points of view in the Socialist spectrum, which means there is no political opposition and no headquarters to break into. I can see you are not familiar with the Soviet Union—is this your first visit?”

  Manny was vaguely aware that the steward had initiated the conversation and steered it around to this question. “Yeah, as a matter of fact, it is.”

  “Where are you from?”

  “New York. Manhattan, actually. Upper West Side, if you really want to pin me down.”

  The Company, in fact, had provided Manny with a cover identity and backstopped it so he could pass any but the most exhaustive vetting. Armed with a driver’s license, an Upper West Side neighborhood grocery fidelity card, a Yale alumni card, a voter registration card, American Express Travelers Cheques and a very worn three-year-old passport filled with entry and exit stamps to England and Spain and Mexico, he was traveling under the name of Immanuel Bridges. If someone took the trouble to check, he would find an Immanuel Bridges listed in the Manhattan telephone directory on Broadway and Eighty-Second Street. (Anyone who dialed the number would reach an answering machine with Manny’s recorded voice saying, “Hi, I can’t come to the phone. Now you say something.”) Manny, who had once taken a course in business administration, would be passing himself off as a merger consultant; he had been assigned an office in a firm on 44 Wall Street, as well as a parking space two blocks away. (A secretary at the firm would answer all calls coming in on Manny’s line with, “I’m sorry, Mr. Bridges is away on vacation. Would you care to leave a message?”) A check with the admissions office at Yale would reveal that someone named Bridges, Immanuel, had graduated in 1968 with a degree in business administration. Even the gym card in Manny’s wallet had been backstopped; someone phoning up the gym on upper Broadway would hear a gruff voice muttering, “Hang on—I’ll see if he’s here.” A moment later the voice would come back on the line. “No, he ain’t here—a guy who works out with Mr. Bridges says he’s out of town for the week.”

  It was twenty-five minutes after high noon, local time, when the Tupolov finally began its descent through dense clouds toward Sheremetyevo Airport northwest of Moscow. As they came out under the clouds, Manny spotted a blue-gray tear in the overcast sky off to the right through which sunlight streamed, illuminating what seemed to be a carpet of white birches. It was his first glimpse of Mother Russia. Moments later a tongue of tarmac materialized below the fuselage and the Tupolov dropped down onto it. Many of the passengers, relieved to be alive, applauded.

  Inside the terminal, Manny joined the mob queuing at the passport control lines. Waiting his turn, he thought again of the remarkable conversation he’d had with Ebby the previous afternoon. Ebby had insisted on driving him to the airport. It was Manny who raised a subject that they had nibbled at dozens of times over the years.

  The subject was fear.

  Whenever Manny had worked up the nerve to ask his father about Budapest ’56, Ebby had somehow managed to reply without telling his son anything he didn’t already know. Driving Manny to JFK, Ebby had started to reply to his son’s perennial question with the usual half answers. Manny, exasperated, had interrupted him. “Dad, we’re coming down to the wire here. The Company has supplied me with a cover ID but it hasn’t outfitted me mentally. What I want to know—what you need to tell
me—is: Were you afraid in Budapest?”

  And for the first time Ebby had addressed the subject directly. “Yeah, I was afraid, Manny. I was frightened going into Budapest. I was terrified when they snatched me off the street and started to question me in one of their torture chambers. I was paralyzed with fear when I realized they knew my name and rank and details of my service record.”

  “How did you deal with the fear?”

  “What I’m going to say may sound strange to you—I had an epiphany. It hit me like a bolt of lightening. I wasn’t afraid of the pain, I wasn’t afraid of the dying. For reasons that had to do with my father and the way he’d died, I was afraid of being afraid, which is another way of saying I was afraid of not living up to my father. And this insight liberated me. It was as if I’d suddenly been sucked into the eye of a hurricane. Everything slowed down—my racing pulse, the thoughts tearing through my skull, the rotation of the earth on its axis. Everything.”

  As the car was emerging from the Midtown Tunnel, sunlight had turned the window opaque for an instant. Ebby had leaned forward and squinted anxiously and, when he could see again, had followed the signs to the Long Island Expressway. After a while Manny had said, very quietly, “I have a father, too.”

  Ebby had looked quickly at his son. “You have nothing to prove to me, Manny. You’re everything a man could want in a son. When the Judgment Day comes you are the evidence, defense exhibit number one.”

  “Maybe I have things to prove to myself.”

  Ebby had considered this for a moment. “When I joined the Company we had an instructor by the name of Andrews. He was OSS and had been to hell and back in the war. He drummed into us that the only sure way to avoid being broken—he called it the eleventh commandment of intelligence work—was to never get caught.”