He could accept a plane ticket to Vienna or one to Los Angeles.
If he chose Vienna, his original Soviet passport would be returned to him, and his other papers, in addition to which he would be given one hundred dollars in cash and a new suit. He would hit the street cold, in Vienna, and be on his own. Free to do as he wished—or at least, as he could. The four years in America would vanish as though they had been just a long somnolent blink; and here he would be, back where he started. No one would receive advance information of his arrival. He could walk into the Soviet Embassy, declare his identity, and announce that the mission had failed. Or he could bypass the embassy and take his chances otherwise—disappear, get as far away as he was able on that hundred dollars and that new suit. No one from this Agency, or this country, would bother him further. No one on this side of the ocean would come looking for him or care where he went.
Tronko’s eyes hung out of their sockets as Eames described this option, says Sparrow. Tronko knew, as we all did, says Sparrow, that he wouldn’t be good for twenty-four hours in Vienna, whatever the truth might have been about his mission. The Soviets would kill him just to show us we had been wrong—even if we had been right. Or he would find himself on a fast flight back to the cells of the Lubyanka. It was only Eames who didn’t seem to grasp these realities anymore. Tronko grasped them perfectly.
Or there was Los Angeles.
If he chose the L.A. ticket, he would receive also a new identity, supported by an authentic American passport showing his own photograph and the new name, as well as a cashier’s check for $86,443, and a letter of reference from a mythical employer stating that the man in question had served for four years as a reliable and satisfactory employee in whatever capacity Tronko cared to specify. The particular dollar amount represented back salary for the four years plus a few weeks that Tronko by then had spent in American custody, at a rate of just over $21,000 per year, which would have been his CIA pay in a position roughly equivalent to deputy chief of the Tourist Department. He would in this case too get a new suit. He would receive no physical protection from the Agency, and by the same token there would be no surveillance.
“I choose that. I choose Los Angeles,” Viktor Tronko said quickly, according to Sparrow. Eames had not even finished explaining the arrangement whereby the letter of reference would be verifiable through a telephone number that rang at Langley.
“Are you quite sure?” said Eames.
Tronko nodded emphatically, by Sparrow’s account. He was sure.
Less than a week later Viktor Tronko was drinking his way across Beverly Hills, says Sparrow. By June he was in Fresno, with a job as custodian at a set of apartment buildings and a solid alibi for the night Robert Kennedy was shot (which was very lucky for him, and also for Herbert Eames, says Sparrow). The part about no surveillance had been untrue, Eames’s sole concession to trickery or, as Sparrow prefers viewing it, to normal sensible sound practice. The cashier’s check was good. After a year Tronko moved back down to Santa Barbara, having managed somehow to land a part-time instructorship in the Russian department at UCSB. He supplemented that trickle of income with work for a dry-cleaning chain, though there was still also the large nest egg. After another six months we stopped watching. Sparrow is reciting these facts, now, in a weary droning voice. He has slumped still lower on the bench beside Kessler, so low that his neck rests on the back edge and his toes, pointed, touch the ground. He stares toward the elms.
It’s ending, thinks Kessler. The last day of my three, and we’re going to finish early.
And damn, I still haven’t learned anything.
I’ve got nothing but a whole lot of tangled and useless information. I don’t know the big Who, and I don’t know the big Why. I have been snowed upon—Christ, I’ve been avalanched at—by an expert. God damn. For a moment Kessler feels the nervous despair of having botched a precious opportunity.
Sparrow goes silent. But it doesn’t seem he has come quite to the end. He has caught himself in mid-sentence.
Kessler turns. He traces the vector of Claude Sparrow’s frozen attention. From out of the bare woods along the far perimeter of the park, near the paved path but not on it, a figure has emerged. Kessler squints toward the figure, trying to make sense of some blurry, confusing details. It is a man in camouflage fatigues. Or a boy. No, it’s a man, but a small man, and he moves as though feeble or very old. The man is bent over a long tool of some sort, holding himself hump-shouldered, head low, his own attention directed at the ground. He could be raking leaves. But he is not. Kessler and Sparrow together watch the man come, as he inches his way across the browned grass, seemingly oblivious to the fact that he might be observed, that he could possibly bring any conversation to a dead stop. Now Kessler can see him well enough: an old man dressed in camo fatigues, yes, a fragile pensioner, probably at least in his early eighties, mincing along with an electronic metal detector. Combing the park for lost silver and keys and interesting trinkets. He wears a baseball cap, and over it a pair of earphones. The dish of his instrument hovers back and forth above a narrow swath along the far edge of the path, putting Kessler in mind of some sort of psychic vacuum cleaner by which stray ideas might be sucked up, carried in through the earphones. Or maybe memories. The old man is looking for something, and apparently it doesn’t much matter what. He will settle for whatever he finds. The search itself gives him purpose, no doubt. Kessler can’t quite read the insignia on his cap.
“There’s that asshole again,” Sparrow whispers.
The old man takes an excruciatingly long time to angle past them across the park. He is thorough at his task. Kessler finds himself dreading that the man may turn, reverse, and work his way back up, along the near side of the path. But the old man seems to have gotten interested in the redwood chips under a jungle gym.
It’s ending, thinks Kessler. He has started again to feel abused by the cold. “Before you finish, tell me about Scott Wickes.”
“The hell with Wickes,” Sparrow grumbles.
Kessler’s mood sinks further. This fugue of gloom into which Sparrow has fallen seems to be contagious. Then, as though hauled back from some distant distraction, Sparrow brings his face around toward Kessler.
“Finish?’ says Sparrow. “No no, not yet. Certainly not before we have done McAtee and Ivan.”
“Ivan?”
“Ivan. See how appallingly little you know? Ivan was McAtee’s greatest and worst folly.”
The emphasis is so clearly on McAtee, the name, that Kessler is forced to wonder: as opposed to whose? Herbert Eames’s greatest and worst folly, as just described? Or is Sparrow perhaps thinking about himself?
“Open your notebook, Mr. Kessler, and I’ll give you a story to write.”
Ivan began in 1967, during the middle stages of Tronko’s term in the Vault. Sparrow himself was so absorbed with the debriefing, with the transcripts he was getting and the verbal reports from Pokorny, that he barely—
“Ivan began what?” Kessler interrupts.
“Began to happen.”
“Was Ivan a person?”
“Ivan was a voice. A putative voice. A source. Whether it was a real person or not, we never knew. And never will know.”
“A goblin,” says Kessler.
“Yes.”
“Much like Dmitri.”
Sparrow scowls. “No. Take my word, Dmitri was indisputably real. That we do know. Ivan was something quite different.”
Ivan, from the start, was McAtee’s very own. Ivan grew from a seed that McAtee had planted and watered back in the middle 1950s, while Jed was still just a lowly case officer in Berlin. At least so goes the story, says Sparrow. It was only one seed among many, tossed out on untilled ground, and McAtee himself admitted to having had no special intuition that this one in particular would germinate, take root, grow into something. He had merely been operating on instinct and sou
nd principles, playing percentages, trying to maximize possibilities. Any runner of agents, any field man worth his pay, functions just the same way, devoting some time and attention to long-range, low-likelihood prospects, each of whom might someday turn into a valuable asset but probably will not. In this case one did: and behold they named him Ivan. Or so goes the story, says Sparrow. McAtee had known this person originally during his own time in Berlin back before the Wall, but whether Ivan had been attached to the KGB already then, or perhaps to the GRU, whether under diplomatic cover or some other sort, whether in fact Ivan had been stationed in East Berlin or had only come passing through, were questions that Jed wouldn’t answer. Or would answer only to Herbert Eames, in private session; and Eames wasn’t sharing the answers with Claude Sparrow. Whether McAtee himself had ever so much as met Ivan, in a face-to-face contact, was even a matter of uncertainty. It was merely known that they had somehow connected, McAtee and the voice called Ivan. McAtee did a few well-calculated favors for Ivan during the earlier years, toward consolidating that connection and reinforcing Ivan’s ambivalent lean toward the West, and then for more than a decade the connection lapsed to silence. McAtee forgot all about him. Ivan was still undecided as to his own loyalties, or more likely as to his level of daring, or else he was simply not in position where it was feasible for him to act. Finally that changed. Suddenly one day Jed heard from him. He heard in the form of a long-ago-prearranged signal requesting contact. Presto, Ivan was ready. He had fetched up as a desk officer at the Lubyanka, conditions had altered, inhibitions were less, and he was now ready to place his career and his life within the disposition of Jed McAtee. At least so goes the story, says Sparrow.
The resumption of contact was itself an elaborate little drama, if one is willing to credit Jed’s later account of that part, says Sparrow. He received the signal by way of a case officer from the Berlin base, a man who had worked under Jed while he was station chief in Bonn and whom he still trusted completely; this younger man had concocted a tale of family emergency in order to get three days’ leave back in the States, and then delivered Ivan’s signal personally in an evening meeting at McAtee’s home. The younger man knew nothing of what the signal entailed except that it came from the opposite side, that it seemed to be potentially important, and that it was intended for Jedediah McAtee alone. McAtee flew out of Washington a day and a half later. The long-ago-prearranged rendezvous point was in West Berlin, fortunate for McAtee but possibly a problem for Ivan, now that the Wall was in place. The time of day was also prearranged; the date was specified in the signal he had received. McAtee checked in with the current chief of the Berlin base, explaining with dire emphasis that he was there on old business and that he wanted to be given a long tether. No tether at all, actually. He wanted to be left alone. The base chief could clear it by cable with Langley, if he so wished. But that cable should go straight to the Director’s office, no intermediate quacking to Bonn station, no consultation with anyone else—otherwise McAtee and the poor base chief would be at war. This was so like Jed, you see, that it makes me inclined to believe in the whole little episode, says Sparrow. He was such a melodramatic fool, such a cowboy in a silk neckerchief, whenever he got into the field. He loved it so. Well, the base chief said just about what I would have said, Sparrow tells Kessler: Be my guest, Jed, go out and get yourself kidnapped. McAtee went off in his Burberry to an appropriately seedy hotel. He made the rendezvous point just on time, but no one showed up. No sign of any Ivan.
He made the fallback two hours later, and still there was no one. Returned to his hotel and waited a day. Showed up again at the rendezvous point exactly twenty-four hours after the first try, again no sign of Ivan, but this time a young German frau with a child in a pram intercepted him as he was leaving. She asked him for directions to the Zoological Gardens—clearly just a pretext for an impromptu brush contact, Jed explained later, because by her accent she was a Berliner herself whereas he was unmistakably, by his clothes, an American. So he improvised with her through a few lines of amiable street-corner chat, to see what might develop. Did he like children? the woman asked. Yes, he lied. My little boy is a very bright baby, she bragged, very handsome, quite intelligent and communicative for his age. Jed took the hint. He bent himself over the pram as though to admire her child; he tickled the kid, he smiled, he even spoke a bit of baby talk. And he discreetly removed the piece of folded, sucked-upon paper that it was holding in its fat little paw. Then he excused himself to the woman and went on his way. The scrap of paper informed him of a new time and a new place: Luther Bridge, where the Paulstrasse crosses the Spree; nine-thirty the following evening.
Nine-thirty the following evening, at the Luther Bridge, Ivan once more failed to appear. By now Jed was getting concerned that something had gone seriously wrong. Perhaps Ivan, after all those years of cautious delay, had been discovered and squashed just on the very verge of his first useful act as an agent. This possibility also implied a greater jeopardy for McAtee himself. Maybe he would be kidnapped, and that base chief would get the last laugh. Nevertheless Jed skulked back out to the Luther Bridge at 3 A.M. the next morning. You appreciate the motif of modest but intrepid professionalism, I trust, says Sparrow. Here was our Jed now in dungarees and a dark sweater, armed with a flashlight—a pavement artist again, in his middle age. He searched the undergirders and pilings of the bridge. It took him two hours, counting interruptions to wait out the passage of hookers and police patrols. He was obliged to do some rather athletic climbing; he might have fallen into the Spree and drowned, or at least caught hepatitis. But he found the magnetized box in which had been left the first of the Ivan messages.
This message consisted of a tantalizing sample of product from inside the Lubyanka, says Sparrow, as well as ground rules by which all further traffic would be conducted. McAtee arrived back at Langley wearing the smile of a baleen whale. Ivan had begun.
“And this was in 1967,” says Kessler, putting it straight in his own mind. “While you were preoccupied with trying to crack Tronko.”
“Spring of ’67. Alas, yes. Evidently I was preoccupied. Jed had been feeding Eames full of Ivan material for almost six months before I became aware of it.”
“Was that unusual? That you wouldn’t have heard about the new source?”
“Highly unusual.”
“McAtee was intentionally keeping you ignorant?”
“He was keeping all of us ignorant. With the indulgence of Herbert Eames. Eames allowed Jed to play Ivan as his own personal fish. I suppose that much might be explicable in petty human terms. It was still early, and Jed was excited and greedy; it appeared that he had pulled off a nice piece of work, with the trip to Berlin. So Eames indulged his possessiveness. But later there came a different slant to this possessiveness. Later, as you will see, there was a particular animus against me.”
“How many times would Ivan have communicated, during that space of six months?”
“Two or three times at most. Not many. But each of those messages caused its own stir. Each one was taking us onto new ground.” Sparrow wrinkles his face into a rodential sneer. “Putatively.”
“You saw them, then. Those messages.”
“Retroactively, I saw them. The early messages.”
“What sort of new ground was it?”
“Inside the Lubyanka. Faces, names, résumés. Organizational structure. We had so seldom ever gotten a peek inside there.”
“And when you had, it was thanks to Bogdan Kirilovich Fedorenko?”
“Chiefly him, yes. Certainly we were learning nothing from Viktor Tronko. Then again, even Bogdan Kirilovich’s information was already a little stale by the time we got it. Whereas Ivan was broadcasting live.”
“Putatively,” Kessler adds, to save Sparrow the trouble.
“Right.”
“What was the form of these messages? Radio?”
“No. You can’t hope to u
se radio in downtown Moscow. It was all by dead-drops. Written matter, one-time pads. McAtee was permitted to choose a case officer from his own folk and place him in Moscow, specially for servicing Ivan. The messages came back to Langley by diplomatic pouch. Directly to Jed. None of it went over the air.”
“Again like Dmitri,” says Kessler, scribbling fast. Having taken Sparrow at his word, he is now making thorough notes. “Maybe they studied at the same school.”
“Maybe they did, Mr. Kessler.”
Mel Pokorny coined a nickname for Ivan, says Sparrow. The name “Ivan” itself was only a code name, of course, a marker, an arbitrary designation that Jed had given to this source. Pokorny nevertheless, in his unmistakable style, came up with another. His name for Ivan—snide and yet quite apt, says Sparrow—was “The Shadow.” Who knows what evil lurks, et cetera. You follow, Mr. Kessler? Are you old enough to—
“Yes, I get it,” Kessler says.
Pokorny had a knack for light mockery. Within a few months, “The Shadow” was general usage among everyone but Eames and the Soviet Bloc staff.
“That’s very interesting,” Kessler says.
McAtee didn’t let it bother him. He remained all flushed and hearty, like a young man in love, from the thrill of working this new source. He moved through the corridors briskly, always too busy to linger, always on his way to Eames’s office or back from there to an urgent closed session with his own people on the subject of Ivan’s latest billet-doux. Always carrying an accordion folder or some other prop, the pretentious ass. Always cheerful, says Sparrow, and always a little bit coy. Ivan had just delivered again, say, and so Jed would be in a twitter, but he controlled himself. “Another packet of wonders, yes, you’ll see some of it Monday at the section chief’s meeting, Claude, I think you’ll be interested.” Interested, Sparrow repeats. You’ll see some of it. He was riding high at that point, Jed was. He went about in shirt sleeves, with the cuffs of his oxford-cloth shirts folded up to the elbow, carefully. Not rolled but folded. He began seeing a fancier barber. He was a busy man and could afford for the present to forget about Viktor Tronko, the search for Dmitri, and all that dreary old tired business. Because he now had a voice whispering to him from ground zero at Dzerzhinsky Square, Jed did. Many times that autumn, says Sparrow, I wished him death in a falling elevator. And Ivan was still on best behavior. Ivan was sending his blasts of insider’s material and asking for nothing more, so far, than the appreciative attention of the Archangel Jedediah.
The Soul of Viktor Tronko (Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries) Page 31
