The Company

by Robert Littell

  And the measure of our torment is the measure of our youth, God help us, for we knew the worst too young!

  “For those of us who were around then and, like you, Jack, knew the worst too young, that about says it all. Except, perhaps, good luck and Godspeed.”

  The Company officers, a great many of whom hadn’t been born when Jack and Ebby were hanging out in Die Pfeffermühle, applauded enthusiastically; Jack was extremely popular with the rank and file and the truth was they were sorry to see him go. It was, as one section head put it, the end of an era. To everyone’s delight, Millie, sobbing openly, rushed up and planted a kiss on Jack’s Cossack mustache. Elizabet and Nellie and Manny crowded around him. Jack’s son, Anthony, and his daughter-in-law, Maria, hugged him affectionately.

  And then the liquor started flowing.

  “How did things go in Room SH219?” Jack asked when he managed to buttonhole Ebby in a corner.

  “For once they gave us grudging credit for anticipating the putsch and getting the President to warn Gorbachev, even if the warning fell on deaf ears,” Ebby recounted. “They asked about you, Jack. I told them you were starting a private security consultancy called the Enterprise. They wanted to know who was bankrolling you.” Ebby raised his half-empty whiskey glass and clinked it against Jack’s. “Who is bankrolling you, old buddy?”

  “Clients,” he said.

  “You sure are tight-lipped about the whole thing.”

  “A security consultancy needs to be tight-lipped if it wants to have credibility,” Jack retorted.

  “I suppose,” Ebby said. “Funny thing happened at today’s session—our congressional watchdogs went to great pains to remind me that political assassination is prohibited by a 1976 executive order. They kept coming back to that rash of accidents and suicides after the putsch—they asked me several times if I knew anything about them.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I told them the truth, Jack. I told them I’d read about the deaths in the newspapers. I told them that there was no way under the sun the Company would be involved in this sort of thing on my watch.” Ebby tilted his head and sized up his retiring DDCI. “You don’t happen to know anything about these deaths that you haven’t told me, do you, Jack?”

  “I’m clean as a whistle on this,” he replied.

  Jack had learned how to lie from a virtuoso. Every inch the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, he summoned up a perfectly guileless smile and, looking Ebby squarely in the eye, repeated what Harvey Torriti said when Jack had raised the subject of RAINBOW’s death in Berlin a dozen or so wars back. “Hey, pal, I swear it to you. On my mother’s grave.”

  POSTLUDE

  THE ANATOMY OF AN INFILTRATION

  “Tut, tut, child!” said the Duchess.

  “Everything’s got a moral, if only you can find it.”

  VIENNA, VIRGINIA, SUNDAY, AUGUST 6, 1995

  HIGH OVER THE CITY, A MARE’S TAIL DRIFTED ACROSS THE GREAT Bear so languorously it looked as if the motion picture had been slowed down. On a deserted street running along one side of Nottoway Park in Fairfax County, Virginia, a crow’s mile from the town of Vienna, a broad-shouldered fiftyish-something man known to his Russian handlers only by his code name, Ramon, surveyed the neighborhood through prism binoculars that could see in the dark. Sitting motionless in the back seat of his Isuzu Trooper, he’d been keeping an eye on the streets and paths since midnight. He’d watched several people impatiently walking dogs, a couple of homosexuals who stopped in their tracks every few seconds to bicker, an inebriated woman of uncertain age tottering on spiky heels that dispatched sharp echoes into the still summer night. Then absolute silence. Just after two in the morning he’d spotted the dark four-door Ford with two men in it cruising the area. It vanished down a side street and materialized ten minutes later from another direction. On its fourth pass around the area the car eased to a stop at the curb near the park’s main entrance on Old Courthouse Road. The headlights flickered out. For a long while the two men remained in the Ford. From time to time one of them would light a fresh cigarette from the glowing embers of the last one. At a quarter to three the men finally emerged from the car and made their way through the park to the wooden footbridge. The one smoking the cigarette turned his back on the bridge and stood guard. The other crouched quickly and tugged a green plastic trash bag from its hiding place under the end of the bridge, and wedged a paper shopping bag into the cranny in its place. On their way back to their automobile, the two men stripped off the white adhesive tape pasted vertically across a “pedestrian crossing” sign (indicating that Ramon was ready to receive the package) and replaced it with a horizontal length of tape (indicating that the dead drop had been serviced). With a last look around, they got back into their car and, accelerating cautiously, drove off.

  Ramon waited another twenty minutes before making his move. He had been spying for the Russians for ten years now, and long ago decided that this was the only really perilous moment in the game. His Russian handlers had no idea who he was. They would have figured out from the documents he supplied that he was deeply involved in Russian counterintelligence and just assumed he worked for the CIA; it would never have crossed their minds that he actually worked for the FBI. Which meant that even if the Americans got their hands on a mole or a highly placed Russian defector, they couldn’t discover Ramon’s identity from the Russians because the Russians didn’t know it. On his end, he was senior enough in his shop to have access to computer codes and files that would give him early warning if anybody raised the specter of an American mole working for the Russians.

  Ramon, meticulous and experienced when it came to tradecraft, had examined the operation from every point of the compass. As far as he could see there was no way he could be caught—except in the act of picking up the payload in the dead drop. Which was why he went to such lengths to survey the park before retrieving what his Russian handlers had left for him.

  Back in the mid-1980s, when he’d delivered his first plastic trash bag filled with secrets, the motive had been money. The people around him—his college classmates, his neighbors, lawyers and stock brokers he ran into at cocktail parties—were pulling down enormous salaries and year-end bonuses and stock options worth a fortune. Ramon’s government payroll check permitted him and his family to live comfortably, but he didn’t see how he would pay for the college education of the three children he already had and the fourth that was on its way. He didn’t see how he could live with a measure of self-indulgence when the time came to retire. Unless…unless he came up with a scheme to augment his income. And the only scheme that seemed within the realm of possibility was peddling state secrets to the state’s principal adversary, Russia. He carefully studied the case histories of previous moles to make sure he didn’t fall into the same traps that eventually led to their downfall. He was careful not to change his lifestyle, something that was sure to attract the attention of the security mavins. He drove the same beat-up cars and lived in the same middle-class home in Virginia and vacationed at the same modest resorts on mainland America. Curiously, it was only after he’d delivered the first few packets to the Russians that he realized the money wasn’t the only reward. There was an enormous kick to be had from beating the system; the adrenalin flowed when he outsmarted the counterintelligence teams that had been created to prevent someone from doing what he was doing. The fact that he was a member of such a team only made the exploit sweeter. His drab life, which was filled with dreary routines and tedious paperwork and rigorous pecking orders, suddenly seemed a lot more glamorous.

  Ramon could feel the pulse pounding in his temple as he let himself out of the Isuzu. Walking soundless on rubber soles, he approached the footbridge and, squatting, worked the paper bag free from the cranny. He could make out the wads of bills, used twenties and fifties bound together with rubber bands, through the paper; his Russian handlers will have left him $50,000 in all, compensation for the payload he’d left the month before that included the
identities of two Russian diplomats serving in Washington who were spying for the CIA. Back in the car, he jammed the paper bag up under the dashboard behind the radio and started the motor. Threading his way through the empty streets in the direction of home, he felt the throb in his temple gradually returning to something approaching normal and experienced the liberating serenity familiar to the mountaineer coming down from an alp.

  The God-awful truth was he had become an adrenalin junkie; the double game had become the only game worth playing.

  Minutes before 5 A.M. an ambulance eased down the ramp of the Veterans Administration hospital on San Pedro Drive in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Hunched over the wheel of a rented car parked in an outdoor space reserved for doctors, Jack McAuliffe watched the automatic door rise and began ticking off the seconds. At three one-hundredth he was jogging down the ramp as the taillights of the ambulance disappeared into the vast basement garage. At nine one-hundredth he ducked under the overhead door as it started closing behind him. Threading his way between parked cars to a locked door, he worked a thin metal wedge down the jamb until the dead bolt clicked open. Picking the lock gave him a lot of satisfaction; he hadn’t done this sort of thing since S.M. Craw Management initiated him into the joys of tradecraft. Taking the stairs two at a time, he climbed to the fourth floor. Winded, he leaned on the banister to catch his breath; the body had aged more than the mind wanted to admit. Checking to make sure the coast was clear, he loped down the hospital corridor to the locker room, which was precisely where the nurse said it would be. He snatched a pair of white trousers and a knee-length white coat from the laundry bin, along with two white canvas shoe sheaths, and quickly pulled everything on. For good measure, he pinched a stethoscope from a peg on the wall and hung it around his neck. Moments later he made his way down to the third floor and pushed through the doors of the special ward the Company maintained for former officers and agents. There was an imperious red-lettered sign splashed across the inner doors that warned “Absolutely No Visitors.”

  Out of the corner of an eye Jack noticed a nurse at the far end of the unit glance in his direction as he approached the third cubicle. He made a show of studying the chart attached to the partition. Moving around to the side of the bed, he reached down to take the patient’s pulse. Harvey Torriti, wearing a sleeveless hospital gown and looking like a beached whale, opened one damp eye and then the other. He sniffed in pleasure as he recognized his visitor.

  “Goddamn, Harvey, how did you wind up here?” Jack whispered.

  “With all the painkillers I take, they’re worried about me babbling Company secrets,” Torriti said. “So they sentenced me to death in this sterile VA brig. Only immediate family are allowed to visit. As I have no family, immediate or otherwise, nobody gets in to see me.” The sight of his Apprentice had obviously cheered the Sorcerer. “How’d you get past the guards?” he demanded in a voice raw from disuse.

  “Exfiltrations, infiltrations, I learned it all at the foot of the master,” Jack said.

  Jack could make out the shrapnel wound that had decapitated the naked lady tattooed on Torriti’s arm; he remembered Miss Sipp fainting dead away when the Sorcerer peeled off his shirt to show it to her. He leaned closer until his face was hovering above Torriti’s. “So how are you doing, Harvey?”

  “What can I say, kid? I’m not doing so good. I’m dog-tired when I go to sleep, I’m bushed when I wake up. Let’s face it, I’m on my last legs. I think this is where I get to buy the farm.”

  “These days the doctors can pull off miracles—“

  Torriti waved away the idea with a limp hand. “Don’t fuck with me, pal. We’ve come too far together for you to fling bullshit on a dying man.” He turned his head on the pillow to make sure the nurse was still at the far end of the ward. “You wouldn’t by any chance have a pick-me-up on you to help a buddy over the Great Divide?”

  “Funny you should mention it—“

  Jack produced the hip flask filled with cheap whiskey. Torriti brightened as his Apprentice lifted his head and tilted the flask to his lips. The alcohol burned. There was a rattle in the back of his throat as he sucked in air to douse the fire. “Just what the doctor ordered,” he murmured as he sank back onto the pillow. “Suppose you read about those two Russian diplomats who were caught spying for the CIA and shot.”

  “What about them, Harvey?”

  “You need to be dumb and blind not to see it, kid. Anybody could stumble across one mole, but two at a time—it set my nose to twitching. Want an educated guess, means the Russians have got themselves a mole of their own somewhere, probably in counterintelligence, since he knew about the two diplomats we’d turned.”

  “The Cold War may be over but the great game goes on,” Jack said.

  “Nature of the beast,” Torriti grunted. “Long as the Homo politicus is addicted to adrenalin highs, spies will keep on spying.” The Sorcerer, in pain, opened his mouth wide and breathed deeply. When the pain had subsided, he said, “Read about Endel Rappaport in the papers from time to time.”

  “I never saw Rappaport’s name—“

  “They don’t mention him by name. They just talk about the home-grown Russian mafia taking over this or that banking syndicate or oil cartel.”

  Jack started to say something but Torriti plunged on, “I’ve been following that Vladimir Putin fellow, too. In case you haven’t noticed, which I doubt, he’s the deputy mayor of St. Petersburg. Folks who keep track of these things say he’s close to Yeltsin and conspicuously upwardly mobile and has a filthy rich patron, so they say.” The Sorcerer’s eyes widened playfully. “I read about you, too, Jacko.”

  “You read about me!”

  “I wasn’t born yesterday, kiddo. Every now and then the good guys score and I figure your Enterprise could be behind it. The assassination of that drug tsar in Colombia, the disappearance of that Communist journalist in Egypt, the bomb that went off under the car of that neo-Nazi in Austria. You still got all that money stashed in Switzerland?”

  “Loose lips sink ships, Harvey.”

  Torriti’s eyes focused on the past. “I remember the day you showed up in Berlin Base, I remember the night we met that poor son of a bitch Vishnevsky in the safe house over the movie theater—you were one hell of a circus act, Jack, with those splotches of green behind the ears and a cannon of a pistol tucked into the small of your back. No harm telling you now, I wasn’t positive you’d survive.”

  “Thanks to you, Harvey, I survived. Thanks to you, we made a difference.”

  “You think so, Jack? I tell myself we made a difference. Nowadays people have short memories—they forget the goddamn Goths were at the goddamn gate. You and me, kid—we put our warm bodies on the firing line and turned them back. Fuck, something like the Cold War has to have a moral. Otherwise what was it all about?”

  “It was about the good guys beating the bad guys,” Jack said softly.

  The Sorcerer snorted. “We sure screwed up an awful lot in the process.”

  “We screwed up less than they did. That’s why we won.”

  “Never could figure out how the frigging Soviets lasted as long as they did.”

  “Russia wasn’t a country,” Jack said. “It was a metaphor for an idea that may have looked good on the drawing boards but in practice was deeply flawed. And flawed metaphors are harder to slay than flawed countries. But we clobbered them in the end.”

  Torriti’s inflamed lids drifted over his eyes. Jack burst out, “Jesus H. Christ, Harvey, I hope you’re not planning to die on me. The least you could do is wait until I’m gone.”

  The remark drew a feeble grin from the Sorcerer. With an effort he forced his eyes open and said, “All these years I been wondering what the hell that H in Jesus H. Christ stands for.”

  “Hey, it’s like a lot of middle initials,” Jack explained. “They don’t stand for anything. They’re tacked on to dress up the name. The H in Jesus H. Christ. The J in Jack J. McAuliffe. The S in Harry S. Truman.”r />
  Torriti coughed up a crabby snicker. “I read what you’re saying, sport. It’s like the I in CIA—that doesn’t mean nothing neither.”

  Jack had a last laugh; he didn’t see himself laughing again, ever. “You may be on to something, Harv.”