The Company

by Robert Littell

  Casey, always alert to the possibility of nudging Reagan into action, perked up. “It would be a dangerous precedent,” he agreed, “to let him get away with it.”

  “Can’t argue with Bill there,” Reagan said.

  Casey homed in on the President. “Andropov needs to be reminded that you don’t attack the Reagan administration with impunity.”

  Reagan was still brooding. “My father always said, don’t get angry, get, uh, even.”

  Casey recognized an opening when he saw one. “Getting even—that’s the ticket, Mr. President. We could hit Andropov where he’s most vulnerable—“

  James Baker was on his feet. “Hold on, now, Bill.”

  “We don’t want to do anything rash,” Bill Clark chimed in.

  But it was Casey who had Reagan’s attention. “Where is Andropov vulnerable?” the President asked.

  “In Afghanistan. If we supplied Ibrahim’s freedom fighters with Stingers, Andropov would hurt.”

  “This Ibrahim fellow is certainly no Marxist,” Reagan remembered. “And Andropov is.”

  “Ibrahim is dead,” Bill Clark noted, but the remark went over the President’s head.

  “The beauty of it,” Casey said, driving home the point, “is that we don’t have to deliver Stingers to the freedom fighters. They have them already—fifty of them, to be precise. All we have to do is supply the firing mechanisms that we took out before the Stingers were delivered.”

  “You’ll want to think about this very carefully, Mr. President,” James Baker said uneasily.

  “It would be a hell of a way to get even for what they did to us in Vietnam,” Casey persisted. “We lost more than nine hundred planes there, many of them to Russian SAMs.”

  Reagan fitted the knuckles of his right hand against his cheek with the little finger extended under his nose as if it were a mustache. “Looking at the big picture,” he said, nodding carefully, “I think Bill here may be on to something.”

  The President glanced at Baker and then at Clark. Each in turn averted his eyes. They had been outmaneuvered by Casey and they knew it.

  “If that’s what you want, Mr. President—” Clark said.

  Casey, who had been trying to get Stingers into the hands of the mujaheddin for months, favored Baker and Clark with one of his famous dead-pan stares. “You fellows can leave the details to me.”

  Before anyone could utter a word he had quit the room.

  A nippy wind was sweeping the leaves across Pennsylvania Avenue outside the White House as Anthony, walking with a slight limp, and Maria headed for a French restaurant on 17th Street.

  “So what was your impression of our President?” Anthony asked.

  Maria shook her head. “To the naked eye, he looks more like the stand-in for the President than the actual President. He goes through motions, he recites lines of dialogue that have been written for him. God only knows how decisions are made in there. What about you? What did you think?”

  For answer, Anthony recited a poem:

  Whether elected or appointed

  He considers himself the Lord’s anointed,

  And indeed the ointment lingers on him

  So thick you can’t get your fingers on him.

  “Where’s that from?” Maria asked with a laugh.

  “Ogden Nash.”

  She stepped in front of him, blocking his path. “Anthony McAuliffe, are you trying to impress me?”

  “I guess you could make a case that I am. Is it having the desired effect?”

  The smile evaporated from her face and her eyes turned very solemn. “I think so,” she said.

  Wearing a threadbare overcoat with its collar turned up and a moth-eaten cashmere scarf wrapped around his gaunt neck, James Jesus Angleton wheeled the chair back so that the sun wouldn’t be in his eyes. “Had to happen eventually,” he remarked in a feeble voice. “Too many packs of cigarettes a day for too many decades. Gave them up, along with alcohol, but it was too damn late. Death sentence. Cancer of the lungs, that’s what they’re telling me. They put me on painkilling drugs that seem to work a bit less each day.” He wheeled the chair closer to Ebby, who had taken off his overcoat and loosened his tie and pulled over a broken wicker stool. “Funny thing is you get used to pain. Don’t remember what it was like without it.” Angleton swung his wheelchair left, then right. “I spend a lot of time out here,” he went on. “The heat, the humidity, seem to help me forget.”

  “Forget what?” Ebby asked.

  “The pain. How much I miss cigarettes and alcohol and Adrian Philby. The great mole hunt. The AE/PINNACLE serials that pointed to SASHA. All the mistakes I made, and I made my share, as you no doubt know.”

  Ebby let his eyes wander around the greenhouse, set in the back yard of Angleton’s Arlington home. Clay pots, small jars, gardening tools, bamboo work tables, and wicker furniture had been piled helter-skelter in a corner. Several panes in the roof had been shattered by hailstones the previous winter and left unrepaired. The sun, high overhead, had scorched the half dozen or so orchids still in pots scattered around the floor. The earth in the pots looked bone dry. Obviously nobody was watering them.

  “Nice of you to come by,” Angleton mumbled. “Don’t see many Company people these days. Come to think of it, don’t see any. Doubt if the new generation even knows who Mother is.”

  “I thought someone from Langley ought to come out and brief you,” Ebby said.

  “Brief me on what?”

  “You were right all along, Jim. The KGB did have a mole inside the Company. You identified him but nobody believed you. When AE/PINNACLE turned out to be alive after his supposed execution, your suspect went free.”

  Angleton made eye contact with his visitor for the first time. “Kritzky!”

  Ebby nodded.

  “You’ve incarcerated him?”

  “Like Philby, like Burgess and Maclean, he fled the country before we could get our hands on him.”

  “Gone home to Soviet Russia, no doubt.”

  Ebby shrugged. “We don’t expect him to surface—the days when the KGB trots out its spies for the press are long gone. Everyone’s better off keeping the lid on this kind of thing.”

  Angleton’s lower lip trembled. “Knew it was Kritzky—told him so to his face. You have to hand it to him, he had a lot of balls, bluffing it out until you all swallowed his line. Playing the innocent. A lot of balls.”

  “You were right about something else, too, Jim. There was a Soviet master plan to undermine our currency and ruin the economy. They called it KHOLSTOMER.”

  “KHOLSTOMER,” Angleton groaned. He brought a hand up to his migraine-scarred forehead. “Warned you about that, too. One of my biggest mistakes—squandered my credibility warning about too many people. When I got it right nobody was listening.”

  Ebby said, “Well, I thought you ought to know. I thought we owed it to you.”

  Both men were at a loss for conversation. Finally Ebby said, “Where do you go from here, Jim? Isn’t there something you can do about your…?”

  “No place to go from here. This is the last stop, the terminus, the ultima Thule. I’m going to go into the woods on my own and deal with the end of my life, like an Apache.” Drawing the overcoat around his wasted body, Angleton shut his eyes and began intoning what sounded like an Indian death chant.

  He didn’t appear to notice when Ebby retrieved his overcoat and got up to leave.

  PART SIX

  DEAD RECKONING

  … there would be no harm, she thought, in asking

  if the game was over. “Please, would you tell me—“

  she began, looking timidly at the Red Queen.

  Snapshot: a glossy Polaroid color print of Jack McAuliffe and Leo Kritzky strolling along the sun-saturated bank of the Rhone River in Basel, Switzerland. Jack, his Cossack mustache and thinning hair ruffled by the breeze blowing off the river, is wearing prescription sunglasses, a khaki safari jacket and khaki chinos. Leo, his face thin and draw
n, is dressed in a light Russian wind-breaker and a peaked worker’s cap. Both men are so absorbed in their conversation they don’t appear to notice the street photographer who stepped into their path and snapped the picture. Leo reacted violently. Jack calmed him down and quickly purchased the photograph for twenty Swiss francs, which was twice the normal price. Leo wanted to destroy it but Jack had another idea. Uncapping a pen, he scrawled across the face of the picture, “Jack and Leo before The Race but after The Fall,” and gave it to Leo as a memento of what was to be their last encounter.

  1

  MOSCOW, THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 28, 1991

  LEO KRITZKY COULD NEVER QUITE GET USED TO THE RUSSIAN WINTER. It had taken him seven years and eight winters to figure out why. It wasn’t so much the arctic temperatures or the drifts of dirty snow piled against dirty buildings or the permanent film of black ice on the sidewalks or the enormous stripped chimneys spewing chalk-white smoke into the eternal twilight or the fume of humidity trapped between the double windows of his apartment, making you feel as if you were marooned in a pollution-filled cloud chamber. No, it was more the unrelenting bleakness of everybody in sight—the grim expressions frozen onto the faces of pensioners peddling razor blades on street corners to buy a handful of tea, the emptiness in the eyes of the prostitutes selling themselves in metro stations to feed their children, the resignation in the voices of the gypsy cabbies who weren’t sure they could make enough working a fifteen-hour shift to repair their battered cars.

  In winter every bit of bad news or bad luck or bad temper seemed to take on tragic proportions. Come spring, so went the saw to which all sensible Muscovites (including Leo) subscribed, life had to get better because there was no way it could get worse.

  Thirty-two days to go until All Fools’ Day, Leo told himself as he made his way across Taganskaya Square in the flatfooted shuffle that veterans of the Russian winter employed to keep from slipping on the ice. He saw the Commercial Club up ahead on Bolshaya Kommunisticheskaya—the posh watering hole for the nouveau riche (unofficial motto: better nouveau than never) would have been difficult to miss. Pulled up on the curb in brazen illegality were two dozen or so of the latest model BMWs or Mercedes-Benzes or Jeep Cherokees, their motors running to keep the broad-shouldered bodyguards (almost all of them Afghan veterans) warm as they catnapped in the front seats. Once inside the club, Leo checked his wool-lined duffle coat (a birthday present from Tessa) in the cloakroom and walked across the lobby to the visitors desk, where he was politely but firmly invited to produce an identity card, after which his name was checked against a list on a computer screen. “Gospodin Tsipin is waiting for you in the private baths, door number three,” a white-jacketed flunkey said as he led Leo down a freshly painted corridor and, using one of the passkeys attached to a large ring, let him into the bath.

  Yevgeny, a soggy sheet wrapped around the lower half of his body, was sitting on a wooden bench, flaying his back with a birch branch. “What kept you?” he cried when he caught sight of Leo.

  “The Vyhino-Krasnopresneskaja line was down for half an hour,” Leo told him. “People said that a man fell in front of a train.”

  Yevgeny snorted. “This is Gorbachev’s Russia,” he said. “Which means there’s a good chance he was pushed.”

  “You used to be a stubborn optimist,” Leo said. “Has Russia transformed you into an incorrigible cynic?”

  “I spent thirty years fighting for Communism,” Yevgeny said, “before I returned home to a Mother Russia run by the vorovskoi mir. What’s that in English, Leo? The thieves’ world.” The smile on Yevgeny’s lips only served to emphasize his disenchantment. “It’s good to see you again after all this time.”

  “I’m pleased to see you, too, Yevgeny.”

  The moment turned awkward. “If I’d known you were coming by metro,” Yevgeny said, “I would have sent one of my cars around to fetch you.”

  “Cars, plural?” Leo asked. Feeling self-conscious, he turned his back on Yevgeny and peeled off his clothes, handing them to the attendant who gave him a white sheet, which he quickly wrapped around his waist. “How many cars do you have?”

  Yevgeny, who had put on weight during his seven years in Moscow, filled two small glasses with iced vodka. “Nazdorovie,” he said, and he threw his back in one brisk gulp. “Personally, I don’t own anything more than the shirt on my back. On the other hand, my organization has several BMWs, a Volvo or two and a Ferrari, not to mention the Apatov mansion near the village of Cheryomuski. Beria kept an apartment there until his execution in 1953, Starik used it as a home and office before his illness; it was in the wood-paneled library on the second floor that he first recruited me into the service. I bought the mansion from the state for one million rubles; with inflation being what it is, it turned out to be a steal.” Yevgeny pursed his lips. “So where have you been hiding, Leo? I heard you’d settled in Gorky after we came back, but by the time I persuaded someone to give me your address you’d moved. Two years ago a friend told me you were living on a houseboat without a telephone at the end of the metro line at Rechnoi Vokzal—I sent one of my drivers around half a dozen times but the boat was always deserted. I figured you were out of the city, or out of the country. Finally I got an old KGB colleague at Lubyanka to tell me where your pension check was being sent. Which is how I found the address on Frunzenskaya Embankment—number fifty, entrance nine, apartment three seventy-three.”

  Leo said quietly, “I had a lot of ghosts to exorcise. I’ve more or less become a hermit—a hermit lost in a city filled with hermits.”

  Yevgeny peeled off the sheet and pulled Leo into the steam room. The thermometer on the wall read eighty-five centigrade. The heat scalded Leo’s throat when he tried to breath. “I’m not used to this—don’t know how long I can stand it.”

  Yevgeny, his face growing beet-red, splashed a ladle full of cold water onto the hot coals. A haze of vapor sizzled into the moist air. “You become used to it,” he whispered. “The trick is to store up enough heat in your body to see you through the winter months.”

  Leo abandoned the steam room when the sand ran out of the glass. Yevgeny came out behind him and the two dipped in a tiled pool. The water was so icy it took Leo’s breath away. Later, wrapped in dry sheets, they settled onto the bench and the attendant wheeled over a cart loaded with zakuski—herring, caviar, salmon, along with a bottle of iced vodka.

  “I’m not sure I can afford this on my KGB pension,” Leo remarked. “The ruble doesn’t go as far as it used to.”

  “You are my guest,” Yevgeny reminded him.

  “How did you get so rich?” Leo asked.

  Yevgeny looked up at his friend. “You really want to know?”

  “Yeah. I see all these characters in their foreign cars and leather coats with bleached blondes clinging to their arms. I’m curious how they do it.”

  “It’s not a state secret,” Yevgeny said. “After I returned to Moscow the Centre gave me a job in the USA section of the First Chief Directorate, but I could see I was going nowhere fast. When Gorbachev came on the scene in 1985, I decided to strike out on my own. All those years I spent in the Mecca of free enterprise must have rubbed off on me. I rented a dilapidated indoor pool and gymnasium for a song—ha! my English is still pretty good—and transformed it into a sports center for the new Russian rich. With the profit I organized a financial information center for foreign investors. With the profit from that I bought a Communist Party printing press and started a financial newspaper. Then I branched out. I started buying and selling raw materials in Siberia and trading them for finished products—Japanese VCRs, Hong Kong computers, American blue jeans—which I imported. Tell me if this is boring you.”

  “On the contrary.”

  “I sold the VCRs and computers and blue jeans in Russia for a huge profit. All the while I was working out of the back seat of a car and renting a relatively small apartment behind the Kremlin from an opera singer for a thousand US dollars a month—she’d fired
the housekeeper and moved into her attic room. I needed a larger apartment and a corporate center, which is why I bought the Apatov mansion. It solved all my problems. Now people come to me with ideas and I give them seed money in return for a fifty percent interest in the bizness. And I’m in the process of setting up my own private bank. I’m calling it the Greater Russian Bank of Commerce. We are opening our doors this week, with branch offices in Leningrad and Kiev and Smolensk, as well as Berlin and Dresden to plug into the international banking scene.” Yevgeny helped himself to some herring on a dry biscuit and washed it down with vodka. “Tell me what you’ve been doing, Leo.”

  Leo sniggered in derision. “There’s not much to tell. The Centre kept me on ice for several years when I came in. The address in Gorky was a decoy—it was supposed to throw off the CIA if they came looking for me, which of course they didn’t. I went through endless debriefings. Case officers would bring me questions, area specialists would seek my opinion on this or that senator or congressman, they’d ask me to read between the lines of the latest Presidential speech. When my conclusions reinforced the views held in the superstructure they were passed on. When they didn’t they were shelved.”

  Yevgeny said, “It’s an old story—an intelligence organization functioning in a country that doesn’t tolerate dissent has a tendency to ignore dissenting information.”

  Leo shrugged listlessly. “The middle-level analysts seemed to think I had a magic key that could unlock American mysteries and kept coming back for more. In the last few years, as Gorbachev opened things up and information began to circulate more freely, they finally began to lose interest in my opinions—“

  “And the CIA never acknowledged that you’d been a mole?”