His coworkers heard he was being investigated. His division head turned cold and vague. Special Agent Fiori from the Virginia FBI office, who with his own wife had become Mr. and Mrs. Schultz’s closest family friends, began to seem uncomfortable about maintaining the contact. The four of them still met for dinners and went together to Orioles games, but there was a new uncertainty in Fiori’s eyes. This look suggested not so much accusation as concern, and even pity. Petrosian didn’t like it. So he found excuses himself to gently but completely close down the friendship with the Fioris. Joette thought he was crazy. It affected their relationship also, though he had no reason to believe that Joette herself had heard the rumor, that she suspected him of reversing his loyalties back to Moscow. He couldn’t talk to her about any of this. And he may have wondered, paranoiacally, what his two daughters thought of him now, says Sparrow. The younger of the two was barely aware that her father had ever been a Russian. Furthermore his only other—
“I do feel bad for the man,” Kessler interrupts, “but could we roll this soap opera forward?” Evening traffic is in full scream again along Old Dominion, dusk lowering, yet Kessler still has so damn many unanswered questions. For instance: what does the Daniel Petrosian case have to do, if anything, with Viktor Tronko? “Could we jump ahead to the plane crash or the long vacation or whatever it was?”
“A kidnapping,” Sparrow says icily.
“A kidnapping?”
“Or possibly he was just murdered, right there in Vienna. But no corpse was ever found.”
“Petrosian.”
“Yes,” Sparrow says.
“He went on a trip to Vienna. All right, yes, I recall this part. He went to Vienna and disappeared.”
“His first trip outside U.S. territory since he had defected,” Sparrow says. “He had been very careful, until then.”
“I remember now. Sure. Then the Vienna trip, and bingo, he vanished. Presumed to have defected back to the Russians, because of professional disappointments.”
“That was just for the newspapers,” Sparrow says.
“But you say they jumped him. Murdered him.”
“No. I said that more probably he was kidnapped. Dragged back to Moscow for torture and interrogation,” Sparrow says. “They would have gotten him out of Austria as a comatose patient on a stretcher, if it was by plane, or else in the trunk of a car. Quite a coup, it was, for someone. Glory enough to go around. In Moscow, they might have marched him through a secret trial. Or possibly not. They might not have bothered with that. Then in a very lonely corner of the Lubyanka cellars, when they were finished with him, he’d have had a rubber ball shoved into his mouth, and then the bullet. Smallish caliber, one shot, in the back of the neck. The rubber ball catches the slug and spares mess. Or possibly, too, he might still be alive, somewhere. Although that isn’t likely.”
“Why the hell did he go to Vienna?”
“It was scripted. You say you want the concise version, Mr. Kessler? It was scripted.”
“There was supposed to be some sort of secret rendezvous?”
“Precisely. A meeting with Ivan. Face to face. Their first. Ivan had requested it.”
“Wasn’t that risky for Petrosian? Foolhardy, even?”
“ ‘Foolhardy’ implies Daniel Petrosian was given a free choice. But of course it was risky, yes. Yes indeed.”
“Did he see Ivan?”
“We don’t know. Petrosian left his hotel, went to the rendezvous. Never reappeared. But if there was an Ivan—then yes, very likely Petrosian saw him, eventually.”
Kessler pauses. He has gotten it all in the notebook. He sets the notebook down on the bench. He puts the ballpoint behind his frozen right ear. “Now I’m supposed to ask you: Who scripted this trip to Vienna? And then you tell me: Jed McAtee.”
Claude Sparrow holds his elbows pinned against his ribs, his shoulders hiked up around his neck, conserving warmth. “And then what do you say, Mr. Kessler?”
Sparrow is suddenly on his feet, not pacing, exactly, but executing a series of small restless cha-cha sidesteps back and forth in front of the bench. His hands have come out of the deep pockets, he is using his arms like a Signal Corpsman on semaphore duty, and if the temperature—which is falling fast, a much more serious and palpable cold filling the air now as twilight seeps away, filling their lungs too, visible as vapor with each breath and each exclamation—if the temperature bothers Claude Sparrow half so much as it bothers Kessler, that fact doesn’t show. Sparrow is very much preoccupied. He is reacting to Kessler’s latest statement.
Kessler has said: “What I say is, I get a strong feeling you want me to believe that Jed McAtee is the mole Dmitri.”
Sparrow hasn’t answered yes or no. Instead he seems to be changing the subject. He seems all at once to want Kessler to forget about the matter of Dmitri’s identity. More important issues may be involved, it would appear, and more complicated ones. How can that be? thinks Kessler. Haven’t you just devoted three long days to convincing me of exactly the opposite?
“There are two ways to be an agent,” Sparrow is saying, bland words spoken excitedly. “At least two. There are two ways of damaging the security of an intelligence service. You can do it wittingly. Or unwittingly. Sometimes the unwitting agent can be the more destructive.”
“Which kind was McAtee? Pardon me: is.”
Sparrow seems not to hear. He can’t even stand still.
“When Eames retired in 1972,” he is saying, “it was foreordained that I would be out. Soon. You oughtn’t be so naive as to imagine that Joe Delbanco had much to do with it—except as the unwitting agent of Jed, our new Director. McAtee used him rather adeptly. I know that you journalists prefer to believe in the myth of your own autonomy, your own faultless and inviolable sense of purpose functioning as final guarantor of the public welfare. But that’s a delusion, I assure you. We all have our own, and that’s yours. Anyway the Delbanco stories were only a convenient pretext for what McAtee himself already intended: Claude Sparrow simply had to be got rid of. I was causing certain problems. It was imperative that I be sacked. This was foreordained, I say. And not just from the moment of Eames’s departure. No, long before that. Years. There had been a concerted campaign, over years, to destroy my position. My influence. To negate me. It went straight back to the early phase of the Ivan operation.
“That disembodied voice, Ivan, had been murmuring against me. I’ve told you I was already being cut out of it by the spring of 1968. The same period of time when Roger Nye and the two others on Eames’s little panel were trying to reach a conclusion about Tronko. Everything was quite tense just then. We were working under great pressure. There was discord. Eames’s own energy had begun to wane badly, and that would pass soon into the waning of his health and his leadership. The entire Agency was in a state of roiling turmoil. Even more so than usual. After Lentzer’s try at debriefing Tronko, and sometime during the early stage of our effort, McAtee’s skepticism had finally succumbed and he became a convert: a convinced and dogmatic Tronkovian. He believed now, Jed did, that the man was a real defector with real stories to offer. He believed in Rybakov, he believed in the Tourist Department, he believed in Two Russians Contemplating the File of Oswald. He allowed himself to disbelieve select parts of Tronko’s testimony, the most implausible parts only, the proven falsehoods and the real hooters, excusing these away as innocent misstatements and fibs by a desperate drunk. On the subject of Dmitri (who of course did not exist, by Tronko’s account, except as a figment of our paranoia) McAtee took up a straddling position, which turned out to be just very damn opportune for his future needs. It turned out to be a brilliant stroke of prescience. On the subject of Dmitri, Jed reserved judgment. He held out that Dmitri might or might not exist, regardless of what Viktor Tronko was telling us. Regardless of what Tronko himself might believe. Jed’s stated view was that Dmitri could be real and among us,
yes—and that, nevertheless, a KGB officer of Tronko’s middling status might not have been cognizant. Might even have been actively misled, on that point, by the larger mullahs above him—that is, by Samoylov and Nechaev and his own dear paternal Rybakov. After all, said Jed, if you’ve got a deep penetration into the opposition’s service, a priceless but very perishable asset, you’re not going to blab the fact around to your own foot soldiers, are you? Tronko of course claimed to have been much more than a foot soldier, but never mind. Let that pass. The beauty of this position, for Jed, was that it allowed him to embrace both Viktor Tronko and Ivan. Both. Whereas I was at a distinct disadvantage. I had no pet Russians of my own to counter him with. Fedorenko by now was dead.
“So Jed made his swashbuckling trip to Berlin,” Sparrow is saying, “and then Ivan was suddenly there, our man on Dzerzhinsky Square. Giving away baubles, such as the agent in Ottawa who stole reactor technology, others in that vein. More importantly, he was offering an over-the-shoulder peek at current procedures and personnel within the First CD. And with the prospect of advancing himself still higher. Ivan, I can tell you, was the hottest new piece of action in many moons.
“At first McAtee kept Ivan’s little love notes all to himself,” Sparrow is saying, “and that seemed natural, or at least predictable, because the operation was only barely begun and Jed could be considered to have certain finder’s rights. Then a few months passed and Jed was having his whisper sessions with Eames but still none of the rest of us had been brought in on the Ivan product, and this seemed less natural. Even given Jed’s standing, by then, as favorite boy. In fact it seemed a glaring breach of good practice. If Ivan was supplying anything worth courier costs, then by God let’s share it around. Counterintelligence obviously had every reason to want to know what the KGB’s First Chief Directorate might be up to, and so did the top people in a few other divisions. But no. It didn’t happen. Jed remained stingy. Eames indulged him. And then a few more months passed, until one day I discovered with a great sickening jolt that the deputy director for Foreign Intelligence and the division chiefs of Western Hemisphere, Near East, and Special Operations had all been let into the know on Ivan. Everyone but me.
“I charged off to confront Jed, of course, got no satisfaction, and then went straight for Eames. Actually barged past the secretary and thumped my fist on his inner door. I was admitted. I refused to sit, I stated my piece. Eames merely looked pale and rolled his eyes back in his head before giving me, quietly, just the two of us in there alone, the following piece of breathtaking news: ‘Claude, you were excluded by stipulation of the source. It was a ground rule.’ Seems that, from the very beginning of contact, Ivan had specified that there must be no access to his material by anyone in the Counterintelligence section.
“My section. He had explicitly sealed us out. No access to the CI section, full stop. Any violation of that rule would put Ivan himself in unacceptable jeopardy (this is what Eames told me that Ivan had said) and would therefore be cause for termination of contact, completely and irreversibly. Of course it could only be taken one way. Ivan was pointing his finger.
“He never made a direct accusation,” Sparrow is saying. “Not to my knowledge, anyway. He never claimed outright that Dmitri was lurking somewhere in my shop. It wasn’t necessary. Probably he got much more attention, much more credence even, doing it just as he did. No access to Counterintelligence; I don’t trust them to know about me. Signed, Ivan. What better weapon could Jed and the rest of my enemies have received? It was clever, I must say so myself. Whose cleverness, I don’t know, but it was gracefully simple and it was clever. It was effective. We were quarantined off, I and my whole staff, from all reports by and deliberations concerning what was either the most important Soviet source that the Agency then had, or else the most harmful dezo agent then working against us. Among other consequences, this made it impossible for me to do my own job. I was powerless. I was grounded and blinded and featherless. It should have been manifest that I could never locate Dmitri if everyone else knew things from Ivan—from inside the opposition—of which I was to be kept ignorant. I wouldn’t have a prayer of succeeding. Unless I took exceptional measures. So of course this led to the wiretaps, of which you seem to derive such joy in reminding me, Mr. Kessler. Granted, they were technically illegal. Obviously it was a reckless step. But I was desperate.
“And then the Scott Wickes episode,” Sparrow says, pausing only for breath.
“What did he do?” says Kessler. “A tantrum, you said.”
“Wickes refused to sign that report. The one Eames had demanded, for a final resolution on Tronko. Instead he went back up and hid out with McAtee, oh, four months, five months. Nothing was heard from him. Evidently he was relieved of all line responsibility in the Soviet Bloc Division—or rather, those duties that had been shifted away while he worked on the panel were never afterward reassigned to him. He was left with a bare desk, Wickes was. At the time it was implied that this might be some form of bureaucratic punishment. Eames seems to have been under that impression. Late in the summer of 1968, Wickes resigned from the Agency. Abruptly, and with ill feeling, it was said. To his letter of resignation, which landed first on McAtee’s desk and then was passed along to Herbert Eames, he appended a fifty-page document. The subjects of this document were Viktor Tronko, Claude Sparrow, and Dmitri. Wickes claimed to believe that the last two were a single person. He had concocted quite an elaborate theory, really, during his five-month sabbatical.”
“He denounced you. As being Dmitri. Yourself,” says Kessler. “And then he quit.”
Sparrow nods once.
“And that was the campaign to destroy Claude Sparrow,” says Kessler.
“Not only me. My section. It was the end of Counterintelligence.”
“Right. Counterintelligence had to be purged. Razed and rebuilt.”
“Or just razed.”
“Sounds pretty nefarious,” says Kessler. “Also, as you say, pretty clever.”
Again Sparrow nods, minutely.
“But aren’t you telling me it was Jed McAtee’s work?”
Now Sparrow pins his lips tightly together and shakes his head. He appears very agitated. Then he says: “Partly.”
“And Wickes’s own, of course.”
“A lackey’s role.”
“Who else? Who else was there?”
“Ivan.”
“Ivan, again. But he was McAtee’s agent.”
Sparrow can barely restrain himself, though he seems to be trying hard. He looks almost lightheaded from the effort. Kessler doesn’t think it’s a performance.
“Or vice versa,” Sparrow says.
He turns and begins walking quickly away up the paved path toward the trees. Five yards off he stops, and turns back. Kessler opens his own mouth but nothing comes out.
“Good luck to you, Mr. Kessler,” Sparrow says.
20
THIS IS INSANE, Kessler thinks.
He has found a pay phone in the foyer of the restaurant across from the park, but there is still no answer at Barry’s house and the switchboard at Georgetown Law School has closed. He calls the Tabard for messages and recognizes the voice of the woman in black mohair, assuring him that he has gotten none. No, no unmarked parcels either. By now she may be sizing Kessler up as a remittance man whose check is late. The hell with her, she has already run a print of his credit card, she’s got nothing to worry about. No calls, no couriers, no visitors resembling lizards or any other form of wildlife—no, huh-uh, zero. Guess they don’t love you anymore, she jokes. How long have you been there? he presses her. Maybe Barry’s call came in right after I left to meet Sparrow, he thinks.
“Twelve wonderful years, honey,” she says and then asks Kessler if he can hold but doesn’t wait for an answer.
Sure I can, he says to the dead air. He hangs up. This is insane.
For another full minu
te Kessler stands there beside the phone, his mind almost empty of everything but fatigue. The foyer is at least warm. His toes and his ears begin to hurt, a good sign that those appendages may survive. His sinuses hurt. Now he has a headache also. That might mean he is sliding down into the far trough of his hangover following an afternoon of healthy diversion, the letdown effect, or else to the contrary Claude Sparrow is directly responsible. It’s out of character, Kessler is thinking, for Barry Koontz to be careless about an appointment or a promise.
Somewhere a piece of linkage must be down.
Kessler decides to drive straight to Rockville and find Barry at home, or at least leave a note. The direct approach. Just go, just show up. Barry should have arrived back by the time Kessler gets there. Possibly. If Kessler’s luck happens to be running good, Barry has perhaps even left the law school early to swing by his bank and retrieve that other item from his deposit box. That other bit of relevant material. Item, document, some such—what exactly did Barry call it? What did he tell Kessler about this other thing, before Kessler realized how interested he might be? Duh. Blank. The whiskey is making you stupid, Michael.
“Is that what’s doing it,” Kessler answers himself aloud. Two teenage girls halfway in the door glance at this man by the telephone, conducting his conversation with the receiver cradled.
He stops at a Wendy’s for a bag of fish sandwiches and a Coke the size of a beach bucket which he drinks for its restorative value as he drives. First thing he sees along the Beltway, of course, are the signs for Langley. A reminder, an omen. Amid this foul traffic somewhere is Jedediah McAtee himself, perhaps, riding homeward in his bulletproof limousine. Undoing the bow tie, slipping off the pumps, after a hard and vigilant day’s work. But work for whom? Kessler thinks about the Nye Report on Viktor Tronko. He thinks about the fifty-page appendix to Scott Wickes’s resignation letter. If it isn’t one of those two that Barry has squirreled away, Kessler will be very surprised. But which one? And which document was it that Mel stashed at Grand Central? The Nye Report, or Wickes’s J’accuse? Dmitri and Ivan, Sparrow and McAtee, was it the lady or was it the tiger, which one which one. The thought of tigers brings a new wave of depression down over Kessler, and in a moment he understands why.
The Soul of Viktor Tronko (Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries) Page 34
