The Company

by Robert Littell

  “Exchange Manny for whom?” Bill Colby inquired when the full task force met to consider the idea.

  Ebby glanced at Jack, then looked uncertainly at Bill Colby. “Spit it out, Elliott,” the Director ordered.

  “If I’m reading the tea leaves correctly,” Ebby finally said, “Kukushkin’s trial and execution…what I’m driving at is there appears to be no room left for doubt that AE/PINNACLE was a genuine defector, which means that his serials were true serials.”

  Jack said, “It’s not easy for me to say this but Jim got it right—Leo Kritzky is SASHA.”

  Angleton was following the conversation with heavy-lidded eyes. “Hang on,” he said. “I can see where this is headed. The answer is: Over my dead body.”

  Ebby turned on Angleton. “Let me ask you something, Jim—have you broken Leo? Has he admitted to being a Soviet agent?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Not yet,” Jack repeated, looking at Colby. “Jim’s had Leo on ice for more than three months, Director. I went to see him a while back and I can tell you he’s not in a luxury hotel. He’s drinking water out of a toilet bowl. If he hasn’t cracked by now chances are he’s not going to. He’ll rot to death in Jim’s private dungeon proclaiming his innocence.”

  “I can see you’ve never been fly fishing,” Angleton said lazily. “Doesn’t surprise me—you don’t have the patience. Count on it, Kritzky will break. In the end they all do. When he does I’ll tap into a counterintelligence gold seam—what he gave away during all these years, the identity of the controlling officer known as Starik, details of the operation known as KHOLSTOMER—“

  “What are you going to do if he doesn’t break?” Jack asked Angleton.

  Ebby said, “You don’t have many alternatives, Jim. You can bring him to trial—but without a confession and a guilty plea, this would involve calling witnesses and exposing Company secrets. Or you could keep him in prison for the rest of his life, something that would eventually present moral and legal problems. Imagine the stink if someone in Congress or the press broke the story: ‘CIA jails suspected Soviet mole for life without giving him his day in court.’ Talk about scandals, it would make Watergate look like a parking infraction.” Ebby turned to Colby. “The KGB, on the other hand, might jump at the chance to trade Manny for Kritzky—“

  Colby slowly shook his head. “I’m just thinking out loud,” he said, “but if we handed Kritzky over to the Soviets, what would prevent them from trotting him out in front of a pack of Western journalists for a propaganda triumph. He could still deny he worked for the Russians, he could tell them how he was illegally incarcerated in a CIA prison for three months under humiliating conditions. He would come across angry and bitter, which would explain why he’d decided to reveal the good secrets I’ve managed to keep out of the hands of Congress—the identity of our agents and descriptions of our ongoing operations, not to mention the operations he’s been party to for the past twenty-three years—Iran, Guatemala, Cuba for starters.” The Director saw the pain on Ebby’s face. “Let me be clear—in principle I’m not against the idea of trading one of theirs for one of ours. But trading Kritzky is a nonstarter.”

  Ebby got up and walked over to stare out a window. Colby started to collect his papers. Jack focused on Angleton across the table. “There’s more than one way to skin a cat,” he muttered.

  “You have another idea?” Colby inquired.

  “As a matter of fact, yeah. I know someone else we could trade for Manny.”

  A very thin, nattily dressed man in his late forties ducked into the men’s room off the lobby of the Hay-Adams Hotel on 16th Street. He urinated in one of the stalls, then rinsed his hands and dried them on a paper towel, which he threw into the bin. He removed his thick eyeglasses, cleaned them with a handkerchief and carefully hooked them back over his ears. Studying himself in the mirror, he adjusted his bow tie, then tried to pick food particles from between his teeth with a fingernail. The Puerto Rican janitor finished washing the floor and, gathering his mop and pail, departed, leaving the man alone in the lavatory. Opening the middle cubicle, he climbed onto the toilet seat, reached into the cistern and removed the package sheathed in a condom. On the way to the door, he discarded the condom in the bin filled with used paper towels and slipped the package into the pocket of his suit jacket. Stepping out into the lobby, he discovered half a dozen men in dark three-piece suits waiting for him. Off to one side a cameraman filmed the proceeding. One of the men stepped forward and, flipping open a small wallet containing a laminated card and a silver badge, identified himself as agent Sibley of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Another agent expertly snapped handcuffs on the man’s wrists. Behind them, in the lobby, guests and employees of the Hay-Adams stopped what they were doing to watch.

  “Raymond Shelton, we are arresting you for passing classified information to a foreign intelligence service with intent to harm the United States,” agent Sibley announced.

  Shelton, clearly terrified, sputtered, “This has to be a case of mistaken identity—“

  This seemed to amuse the FBI agent. “You are the Raymond W. Shelton employed by the National Security Agency?”

  “Yes, I am. But I don’t understand—“

  “You will in a moment.”

  With the camera zooming in, agent Sibley reached into Shelton’s pocket and took out the package he had recovered from the cistern. He opened it on camera and spilled the contents onto a table. There was a wad of five-hundred-dollar bills, four tiny microfilm canisters and a blank piece of paper which the agent handled gingerly so as not to eradicate the secret writing believed to be on it. There were also two matchbooks with one-time code grids hand-drawn under the matches. Another agent pulled an index card from his breast pocket and began to read from it. “I advise you that you have the right to remain silent. Anything you say may be used against you in subsequent legal proceedings. You have the right to legal counsel. If you can’t afford legal counsel, one will be appointed by a court of law…”

  “Oh, dear, Ardyn, what is going on?” a gray-haired woman whispered to the concierge standing behind the reception desk.

  “Well, you’re not going to believe this, Mrs. Williams, but I think the FBI’s just captured a criminal.”

  “In the Hay-Adams! My goodness, how thrilling,” the woman said. “Will I have something to tell my children when I get back to Memphis!”

  When word of Manny’s disappearance reached Langley, two of his closest friends in the Soviet Division stopped by Nellie’s law office to break the news to her: Manny had gone into Moscow as a tourist and failed to show up for supper at the Hotel Metropole the previous evening. So far they had no idea what had happened to him. The embassy people were on the case, checking with the police and hospitals to see if he had been involved in an accident. Of course the Company would let Nellie know the instant there was any news.

  Ebby phoned her soon after. She would have to understand that he couldn’t tell her much over the phone. All they knew for sure was that Manny hadn’t returned to the hotel. When Ebby told her they were still hoping the disappearance would have an innocent explanation, Nellie exploded: You mean he might have been mugged and is lying unconscious in some alleyway, as opposed to arrested? Then she got a grip on her emotions. She was terribly sorry; she understood this must be as hard for Ebby as it was for her. It’s hard on all of us, Ebby agreed, and she could tell from his voice that he was worried sick. Before he hung up he said, Look, when you get off work, why don’t you move back in with us until this blows over.

  Ebby never made it home from Langley that night. Elizabet and Nellie sat up until after two, knocking down frozen daiquiris. The only light came from a late-night film, Five Easy Pieces, flickering on the television screen with the sound switched off. To break the long silences, Nellie got her mother onto the subject of Hungary. Elizabet, under the spell of the daiquiris, let down her guard and began to talk about Nellie’s father, the poet Arpád Zelk. “I’m told that
young people still recite his poems in the university,” she said.

  “How long were you together?” Nellie wanted to know.

  Elizabet smiled in the flickering darkness. “We were never together, Arpád and I. Our paths crossed, sometimes several times during a day, more often than not in bed. He was what you might call an ardent despot, tyrannical in the pursuit of poetry and liberty for the masses. Individual freedom—my freedom—was not high on his agenda.”

  “And he was killed in the revolution.”

  “The revolution—the Russians—in a manner of speaking killed him. He and his poetry had helped suck the Hungarian people into a tragedy. When he realized this he did what had to be done—he shot himself.”

  Nellie whispered, “You told me he’d died but you never said he’d killed himself.” She gulped down what was left in the glass, then chewed on some crushed ice. “Did you love him?” she asked.

  Elizabet thought about that. “I don’t remember,” she said.

  This annoyed Nellie. “How can you say that? How can you say you don’t remember if you loved my father?”

  “It’s an honest answer. I must have thought I loved him—why else would I have been with him? But when I fell in love with Elliott it eradicated the several loves that went before.”

  “If something happens to Manny…” Nellie brought a fist up to her solar plexus. When the pain in her chest subsided she finished the sentence. “If something happens I will never forget how much I love him. Nothing…no one…no amount of time will eradicate the memory.”

  Elizabet held out her arms and Nellie came into them. Soundless sobs racked the girl’s body and a torrent of tears spilled from her eyes.

  The news that Manny had been arrested came as a relief to both women—at least it meant that he wasn’t dying in an alleyway. Ebby showed up late one afternoon but he only stayed the time it took to shower and shave and change into fresh clothing, at which point he headed straight back to Langley to stay on top of the situation.

  It was Jack who eventually phoned up with the good news. “I think it’s going to work out,” he told Nellie.

  She covered the mouthpiece. “Jack thinks things will work out,” she told her mother. Elizabet took the phone when Nellie chocked up with emotion. “Jack, are you sure?”

  “We won’t be sure until he’s on our side of the Iron Curtain,” he said. “But I think the fix is in.”

  Nellie grabbed the phone back. “How are you going to get him out?”

  “Can’t tell you that, Nellie. Bear with us. Pack a bag and be ready to leave at a moment’s notice.”

  “Where am I going?”

  “Stop asking dumb questions. Ebby wanted you both to know that we’re working on something, that it’s looking good. When Manny comes out we thought you’d like to be there.”

  “Goddamn it, I would. Like to be there. Thanks, Jack.”

  “Sure.”

  A film of fog blanketed the Havel River separating West Berlin from Potsdam in the Soviet Zone, deadening the hollow knell from a distant steeple on the eastern bank. Soon after midnight, seven Jeeps and a lorry with mud-splashed Red Army stars on its doors pulled up on the Potsdam side of the Glienicke Bridge. The lead Jeep flashed its lights twice. From the American end of the bridge came two answering flashes. Russian soldiers lowered the lorry’s tailgate and a tall, slightly stooped man wearing a shapeless raincoat jumped down onto the road. The Russian colonel checked the luminous dial of his wristwatch, then nodded at two soldiers, who took up position on either side of the man in the raincoat. They accompanied him past the raised barrier onto the suspension bridge. A quarter of the way along it, the two Russian soldiers stopped in their tracks and the tall civilian kept walking. A figure could be seen heading toward him from the far end. He was wearing thick glasses that had turned fuliginous in the light from the bridge’s wrought-iron lampposts. The two men slowed as they approached each other in the middle of the bridge. Regarding each other warily, they stopped to exchange a few words.

  “You speak Russian?” asked the younger man.

  The second man, appearing disoriented, worked his bony fingers through his thinning hair. “No.”

  The younger man found himself smiling at a private joke. “Unfortunately for you, you’ll have the rest of your life to learn.”

  As the bespectacled man approached the Soviet side the Russian colonel started forward to greet him. “Welcome to freedom,” he called.

  “I’m damned glad to be here.”

  On the American side, a man and a young woman were waiting impatiently in front of a line of Jeeps. The man was peering through binoculars. “It’s him, all right,” he said.

  The woman darted forward to meet the young man approaching under the wrought-iron lampposts. “Are you all right?” she breathed as she flung herself into his arms.

  The two clung to each other. “I’m fine,” he said.

  The man with the binoculars came up behind her. The two men shook hands emotionally. “I broke the eleventh commandment,” said the young man.

  “We don’t think it was your fault,” the other man replied. “The way they pulled out his wife and daughter on a moment’s notice, then brought him home a day later—given how the game played out it all begins to look very premeditated. They must have become suspicious of him in Washington and then just outplayed us. You were sent on a wild-goose chase.”

  “I lost my Joe, Dad. He’s dead. Jim Angleton was right—I was too green. I must have gone wrong somewhere—“

  The three started toward the Jeeps. “I know how you feel,” remarked the man with binoculars. “I’ve been there a bunch of times. It’s the downside of what we do for a living.”

  “Is there an upside?” the girl demanded.

  “Yes, there is,” he shot back. “We’re doing a dirty job and we get it right most of the time. But there’s no way you can get it right every time.” The fog was rolling in off the river, imparting a pungent sharpness to the night air. “What keeps us going, what keeps us sane,” he added, talking to himself now, “is the conviction that if something’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly.”

  9

  SANTA FE, SATURDAY, OCTOBER 12, 1974

  JACK CAUGHT AN EARLY MORNING FLIGHT FROM DULLES TO ALBUQUERQUE, then rented a car at the airport and drove an hour up the interstate to Santa Fe. Following the Sorcerer’s fuzzy directions as best he could, stopping twice at gas stations to ask directions, he finally found East of Eden Gardens east of the city, on the edge of a golf course. In a billboard planted halfway down the access road, East of Eden Gardens was advertised as a promoters’ vision of what paradise must be like, though Jack had a sneaking suspicion the promoters didn’t actually live there themselves. Smart folks. The sprawling condominium community, semi-attached bungalows made of fake adobe and set at weird angles to each other, was surrounded by a no-nonsense chain-link fence topped with coils of Army surplus concertina wire to keep the Hispanics from nearby Española out. For all Jack knew, there could have been a minefield under the belt of Astroturf inside the fence. His identity was controlled at the gatehouse by an armed and uniformed guard wearing Raybans. “Got a message for you from Mista Torriti,” he said, checking Jack’s name off the list on the clipboard. “If you was to get here after eleven and before four, you’ll find him at the clubhouse.” Following the guard’s instructions, Jack drove through an intestinal tangle of narrow streets named for dead movie stars, past a driving range, past a communal swimming pool shaped to look like the most fragile part of a promoter’s body, the kidney.

  “Jesus H. Christ, Harvey, I didn’t know you’d taken up golf,” Jack exclaimed when he found the Sorcerer nursing a Scotch on the rocks at the empty bar.

  “Haven’t taken up golf,” Torriti said, squeezing his Apprentice’s hand with his soft fingers, punching him playfully in the shoulder. “Taken up drinking in golf clubs. Everyone who owns a condo is a member. Members get happy-hour prices all day long. All night, too.�
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  The Sorcerer bought Jack a double Scotch and another double for himself, and the two carried their drinks and a bowl of olives to a booth at the back of the deserted clubhouse.

  “Where’s everybody?” Jack asked.

  “Out golfin’,” Torriti said with a smirk. “I’m the only one here who doesn’t own clubs.” He waved toward the adobe condominiums on the far side of the kidney-shaped pool. “It’s a retirement home, Jack. You get free maid service, you can order in from the club kitchen, faucet drips and you got a handyman knocking at your door by the time you hang up the phone. Half a dozen ex-Langley types live out here; we got an all-Company dealer’s-choice game going Monday nights.”

  “Aside from drinking and poker, how do you make time pass in the middle of nowhere?”