Scanlon had been fighting a long list of vicious little wars against the Russians since 1945. To him, their capital city had a well-deserved reputation as a dark, brooding center of paranoia and evil that stretched back to Ivan the Terrible. By 1959, Josef Stalin was already six years in his grave, as was Lavrenti Beria, his sadistic head of the secret police. Nikita Khrushchev was now in firm control. Fat, jovial, and ever smiling, he was supposed to be an improvement, but Scanlon did not care. His hatred of Moscow and the Russians was as much personal as historic or professional. All that this trip would do was dredge up more unpleasant memories of treachery, mind-numbing pain, and a love lost forever.
World War II was long over, yet Ed Scanlon had been unable to sleep more than three or four hours a night since it ended. It was in the darkest early morning hours that the pain and the bad memories would rise out of their dark corners to nibble and gnaw on him again, made worse by the fact that he knew all too well they were all of his own making. Unfortunately, no sooner had that war ended with Hitler’s corpse lying half-burned in a pit outside the Führer Bunker in Berlin, than the inevitable frictions between the western Allies and the Russians began to heat up. They soon flared into a rash of dirty little undeclared wars fought in a dozen different ways on a dozen different battlefields over a dozen years. They could call it a cold war if they liked, but every war was hot to the people fighting it. These undeclared battles required hard men with a range of unique skills, which Ed Scanlon and a handful of others had acquired working undercover with the OSS inside Nazi Germany.
He had always been one of Allen Dulles’s favorites and any good director knew how to use smart, damaged men with ice water in their veins — men who could kill or order men killed without hesitation. In a kinder, gentler time and place, one might ask what had happened to create men like that; but they were the heart and soul of any nation’s intelligence operation. Without question, Ed Scanlon was the best of them. When Patton’s tank columns roared across Bavaria in April 1945, the young Captain thought his work was over. Dulles’s intention was to bring him back and find a spot on his fledgling OSS operations staff in Washington, where Scanlon would have the time to heal and decompress. Unfortunately, by the fall and winter of 1945-46, while the US Army sent its troops home and demobilized, the Russians did exactly the opposite. They used the crushing weight of the Red Army and the indigenous Communist networks they controlled to impose their will on Hungary, Poland, Rumania, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, the Baltic States, and Bulgaria, and have near misses in Greece, Austria, France, and Italy.
Winston Churchill put it best, “an iron curtain has descended across the continent,” and Ed Scanlon found himself with a new job. He became “station chief” in Berlin and eventually all of West Germany, running strings of agents into the eastern zone and ferreting out Russian spy networks in the west. As the OSS evolved into the CIA in 1947, the missions grew more varied. They included quietly running old German guns to the Israelis during the first two Arab-Israeli Wars, aiding the Greek right-wing militias in their civil war, and penetrating the East German Intelligence services during the Berlin crisis and airlift in 1948 and 1949. The list went on and on, into a dozen other hot spots throughout eastern and southern Europe.
Throughout those tense post-war years, Ed Scanlon exhibited an uncanny ability to communicate with and co-opt even the hardest-core German Socialist or Communist, while showing no mercy to any of the Nazi SD or Gestapo agents who tried to worm their way into his networks. Never one to pass the dirty work to others, it became known among those in select circles that he had personally eliminated at least four double agents with his own hands. They included one of his own assistants, one of several double agents whose bodies mysteriously appeared on the front steps of KGB headquarters in East Berlin, each with a hundred ruble note stuck in his mouth and a perfectly centered bullet hole in his forehead.
“I’d rather you didn’t tend to those things yourself,” came Dulles’s mild rebuke.
“It was a message I needed to deliver,” he replied.
Dulles knew he was right, even if he did not like it.
In 1953, after Dulles became director of the new CIA, he finally pulled Scanlon out of the field to become his head of operations in Washington. He still had a near-photographic memory and an uncanny ability to read people, and was now fluent in five languages. His once short, black hair was now fashionably longer with a growing touch of gray at the temples. Even though his days in the field were over, he had been places and done things that the old hands still only whispered about, and he had the scars to prove them — the ones that could be seen, and the ones that could not.
Despite his many Cold-War accomplishments, in the power corridors of Washington, it was common knowledge that Ed Scanlon’s most important contribution, the one that cemented his relationship with Allen Dulles, came in the spring of 1945. Like a reluctant Pied Piper, he was sent into Germany and came back out, battered and bruised, with several of Nazi Germany’s top jet airplane engineers and a truck-full of blueprints for their new ME-262 jet fighter. Lockheed, Northrop, and Grumman would never admit it, but those engineers and drawings gave the US a five-year head start on the Russians in post-war jet aircraft development. Like Werner Von Braun and the other German rocket scientists, the optical engineers from Zeiss, the chemists from Bayer, metallurgists from Krupp and Thyssen, weapons designers from Walther and Mauserwerke, physicists from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, and many, many others, they were snatched up and quickly surrendered to the west. It was called “Operation Paperclip” and it drastically altered the post-war balance of power, the outcome of the Korean War, and the lingering Cold War for decades to come.
Both in the field and out, Ed Scanlon developed the reputation as Dulles’s smart, loyal, and utterly ruthless hatchet man, who invariably was handed the agency’s dirtiest jobs. That made him a most valuable commodity in Washington in 1959. He always had the director’s ear for a word or a quick whisper, causing CIA insiders to refer to him as “the black priest,” “the confessor,” or “Dulles’s Jesuit,” but only when both men were well out of earshot. Dressed in an impeccably tailored pinstripe suit and carrying a thin, hand-tooled Italian leather briefcase, he could easily be mistaken for a big-ticket corporate CEO, a bank president, or a Capitol Hill lawyer but not if you looked into his eyes. They were ice-cold and analytical, reminding some of a butcher in his meat locker appraising a fresh side of beef. There was also that business about his left hand, which rarely left his pants or jacket pocket. What could one expect from a man who had survived for months inside the belly of the Nazi beast? Few men in the world could understand that experience, much less live through it. As he often quipped, that was how the best steel is made — in a hot fire and beaten on by a large hammer.
Unfortunately for Ed Scanlon, it was now less than four weeks until Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev’s big visit to the United States, the first time a Soviet or Russian head of state had ever visited. The KGB, the Russian Embassy, the US Secret Service, the FBI, and even the D.C. Capital Police were now arguing and tripping over each other’s security plans, and there were details remaining that could only be hammered out “at the very top,” as they say. For President Eisenhower, that meant Allen Dulles. For Dulles that meant Ed Scanlon, his trusted right arm. For Ed Scanlon, that meant going to Moscow.
“Look, Eddie, I know you don’t want to,” Dulles commiserated, softly and persuasively as always, not that he had to. “Khrushchev’s trip next month is important, or I wouldn’t ask.” As director, both men knew he could simply order Scanlon to go anywhere he wanted, but that was not his style.
“I’ll be useless there,” Scanlon said. “You need a diplomat, not me.”
“The KGB won’t listen to a diplomat. You, they’ll listen to.” Scanlon rolled his eyes, completely unconvinced, but Dulles continued. “They know you’re speaking for me, and that I’m speaking for the President. And believe me, Eddie, they know all ab
out you.”
“I’m sure they do, and I know all about them. That’s why I don’t want to go anywhere near the place.”
Dulles leaned across the desk, reaching out to the younger man. “We both know the problem isn’t Khrushchev, or the KGB, or Moscow. It’s the Steiner woman, isn’t it?”
Scanlon’s eyes flashed at the mention of her name. “You say that with such a nice, clinical detachment, Allen, like she was an experiment gone wrong, or a missing pet.”
Dulles didn’t react. His expression remained kind and conciliatory, which hurt Scanlon even worse. “I’m sorry about what happened back there and how it turned out, but that was a long time ago, a very long time ago. The truth is you don’t know if she even made it out of Germany, much less to Moscow, do you?”
“I know she did, Allen.”
“No, you think you know. In this business, that is a big mistake.”
Scanlon could not look at him. Think? At 3:00 a.m., lying alone in his Georgetown apartment staring at the ceiling over and over again, his memories of Hanni were all he had, as were the many, many ways he knew he lost her.
“You know we turned over every rock looking for her, but we couldn’t find a thing, not even a whisper about what happened,” Dulles commiserated.
“I know.”
“And it’s been a lot of years now, too many.”
“I know that, too, Allen.”
“She was a professional, like you, and one of their best. I hate to say it, but she knew exactly what she was getting herself into. She knew the risks.”
Yes, Hanni knew exactly what she was doing; but when she left him on that beautiful April afternoon, she left a shell of a man behind. She was heading east toward the open arms of the Red Army. Like a fool, he just stood there and watched her go, not that he ever could have stopped her. Moscow! That was why he hated the place, sight unseen.
Moscow’s new Sheremetyevo airport was located eighteen miles north-west of the Kremlin. While it did not officially open until the next month, it had been the preferred terminus for “unofficial” government flights for almost a year now. The embassy sent a shiny black Cadillac out to pick him up. The driver and the head of embassy security shared the front seat, leaving Scanlon alone in the rear for the ride into town. That gave him an opportunity to lean back and relax. Nice car, he thought as he ran his good hand across the leather. It was big and solid, like that bastard Otto Dietrich’s old Maybach. That car was long gone now, probably a quaint rusting hulk sitting in the weeds on some Russian collective farm. Hanni was long gone, too, probably buried along with millions of other nameless, faceless inmates in one of Stalin’s Gulag work camps. That sure knowledge left Scanlon feeling like the lead character in Boris Pasternak’s recently published novel, Doctor Zhivago. He was doomed to chase the ghost of a lost love until it killed him. Silently, he cursed that big bastard Otto Dietrich once again. Somehow, the Chief Inspector managed to cast Scanlon and Hanni for their parts whether they wanted them or not.
The Cadillac’s driver was Jim Grimes, a large, powerfully built black man in dark sunglasses with the shoulders and neck of the offensive tackle he had once been at Ohio State. Sitting next to him in the passenger seat was Art Jensen, head of embassy security.
“Are the babysitters really necessary, Art?” Scanlon asked.
“Probably not,” Jensen answered as his head continued to pivot slowly and his eyes swept the road around them, “but with Ivan you never know.”
It was 2:00 p.m. on a hot, hazy, late-summer afternoon. Other than a few Soviet VIP limousines, several Red Army trucks, and the ever-present KGB trail car behind them, there was not much traffic on the highway. There never was, Art said, because there were not many cars in the USSR and even fewer authorized to go anywhere near an airport, new or old. Still, he found it a nice drive. The sanitized views of the rustic Russian countryside along the new, showpiece highway were lovely and the asphalt perfect, but they were a sham. The rest of the country still used horse-drawn carts on rutted, dirt farm roads, but a showpiece was important. In Soviet Russia, appearance is everything.
The temperature outside was hovering around 105 degrees Fahrenheit and the Cadillac’s rudimentary air-conditioning was not working worth a damn, so Scanlon shed his suit jacket. “Sorry about the air,” Art Jensen told him. “Repair parts are all but impossible to get here, and GM doesn’t make house calls.” Both Jensen and the driver wore heavy suit coats and the sweat was pouring off them.
“Hey, you guys can take off the jackets,” Scanlon offered. “You don’t have to stand on formality on my account.”
“Can’t,” Jensen answered. “We’re both packing, in shoulder holsters, and the Russians don’t like to be publicly shown up.”
“That’s interesting. What do you think they’d do if they caught you?”
“Again, it’s hard to say. Sometimes, Ivan isn’t the easiest to figure out,” Jensen said with a fatalistic shrug. “He’d probably ignore it; but then again, he could have some reason we don’t know about, much less understand, to make a big stink and send us home. Then, we’d send some of theirs home, and they’ll send more of ours home, and it will go back and forth like that until everybody had made whatever point it was that they were trying to make. Like I said, it all depends on what Ivan’s thinking, and nobody knows that but Ivan.”
“Then why carry? What’s the point?”
“To remind Ivan that we do have them and don’t give a shit about their rules,” Jensen answered, well aware of Scanlon’s reputation and the “notches” on his own gun. “They love watching old John Wayne movies in the Kremlin. They think we’re all a bunch of gun-crazy American cowboys anyway, so it tells them not to push us too far. That’s fine with me, and a point we need to make every now and then,” Jensen said as he raised his leg and patted the top of a shiny, pointy-toed, snakeskin cowboy boot. “Hell, I’m from Detroit, not Texas,” he laughed, “but if these things keep Ivan guessing, then my feet can get used to anything.”
“Sounds like a fun assignment, Art.”
“Fun? No, I wouldn’t call it fun,” he shook his head. “It’s all a game, Mister Scanlon, a big goddamned game that Ivan started playing with the Brits over a century ago. Ivan is the undefeated grand master now, and he is always trying some new move on us. You might keep that in mind while you’re here, and don’t forget who told you.”
“Don’t worry,” Scanlon reassured Jensen with a thin, wry smile. “I’m just a tourist passing on through town. A couple of meetings and I’m the hell out of here, but it doesn’t sound like things have changed much under the new regime.”
“Changed?” Jensen chuckled as his eyes continued to search the road behind them. “Joe Stalin’s laid out in Red Square next to Lenin like two pheasants under glass, but that don’t make a damned bit of difference. It’s Stalin’s system, and that’ll never change.”
Scanlon’s eyes narrowed to thin, dark slits; but he kept quiet.
“In the 1930s and 1940s, right up until the old bastard died, tens of thousands of people disappeared right off these very streets,” Jensen went on, unaware. “Tens of thousands. You get one of the old comrades drunk enough, he’ll tell you what it was like here ten or twenty years ago. He’ll also tell you it can all come back just as quick as it went away. See, Ivan’s got a long memory, and an even longer past. To him, it was like yesterday.”
Tens of thousands, Scanlon thought, and he did not need to be reminded.
“Nicky Khrushchev may look like a dumb, shit-kickin’, country hick, which he is; but he didn’t get where he is by being no Boy Scout. He was the party hatchet man in the Ukraine in the mid to late 1920s. They called it ‘the Great Terror’ back then, when they liquidated all the kulaks, the small farmers, and forced everyone onto collective farms. Later, they say he’s the one who put the bullet into the back of Beria’s head in the basement of the Lubyanka when the Politburo had him arrested after Stalin died. The truth is, it was kill or be killed for him
and all the rest of them. They’ve got basements under the basements in that place, and not a whole lot of people ever came out alive.”
Basement torture cells? Did the Russians learn that art from the Nazis or was it the other way around, Scanlon wondered. As for Beria, he was Stalin’s enforcer and Hanni’s boss, and he got what he deserved.
“No, Mister Scanlon. The KGB hasn’t changed one damned bit. You can call it the GRU, the NKVD, or the KGB; but it is still the same old creeps doing the same old jobs, and Moscow is still Moscow. So, don’t go wandering off by yourself on any late-night walks, because they love to set up the new guy. If you need to go anywhere, you give me or Grimes here a call,” he nodded to the muscular black driver. “Grimes is the best wheel man in Moscow and I’m the best shot. Together, we’ll get you where you want to go. More importantly, we’ll make sure you get back.”
The new guy? My ass, Scanlon thought. Still, he had been in and out of airplanes and airports for the better part of thirty-six hours, and he was too brain-dead to argue. He desperately wanted to sleep, but he faced the torture of an evening diplomatic reception at the embassy with a bunch of fat, sweating Russians instead. Wonderful, he thought, as the Cadillac finally passed through the embassy gates. This trip to Moscow was going to be one more of those big pieces of cake, wasn’t it, he asked himself.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
It was 8:30 p.m. when Ed Scanlon found himself in a hot, poorly ventilated embassy ballroom sipping tepid champagne and trying to act friendly. As usual, whenever he was in a crowd of strangers he kept his left hand tucked safely inside his pants pocket where the badly scarred fingertips remained out of sight and occasionally out of mind. After fifteen years, the hand no longer embarrassed him, but he had long grown tired of the curious looks and dumb questions, which invariably followed.
Between the soggy canapés and strained conversations, he was introduced to a succession of Russian bureaucrats with bad teeth and terminal cases of bad breath. They all seemed to wear the same cheap, ill-fitting brown suit, a wide necktie from a 1930s American gangster movie, and rows upon rows of shiny medals from “the Great Patriotic War,” which dangled down their barrel-shaped chests. Amazing, he thought — so many men and so little taste. They looked like a bunch of farmers who came up to the big city to buy a used tractor. Then again, it might not be healthy to appear better-dressed or more intelligent than Comrade Khrushchev.
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