The Language of Cannibals

by George C. Chesbro

  When Acton finished, we were all silent for some time. The KGB operative studied us, looking from one face to another, apparently waiting for some response. I was the one who finally broke the silence.

  “You’ve talked a lot, Acton, but you still haven’t answered my question. Did you kill Michael Burana and Harry Peal—your father?”

  “No,” Acton replied in a flat voice. “I never laid eyes on Michael Burana, and I never knew that he’d discovered my secret. And I didn’t kill my father.”

  I looked at Garth, who nodded to me. “He could be telling the truth about that, Mongo. He cried when I told him who his father was and what had happened.” He paused, shifted his gaze to Acton. “Then again, he wouldn’t have known who Harry Peal was when he killed him.”

  “I knew who he was,” Acton said quietly. “I didn’t know that he was my father, but Harry Peal was always one of my idols.”

  “Why are you being so hard on him?” Mary asked, looking back and forth between Garth and me. “If it hadn’t been for Jay, the three of us wouldn’t be alive now.”

  “The question becomes one of why he saved our lives,” Garth replied evenly, gazing steadily at Acton. “If you didn’t kill Burana and your father, then who did?”

  “I have to assume it was the same man who tried to kill me—a KGB assassin.”

  “Why would the KGB want you dead?” I asked. “You have to be one of their most important assets.”

  “I would no longer be of any value at all if I was exposed as a KGB operative. Also, they may have feared that I’d become unreliable; that was always the fear with people like me and the reason we were never given high rank. And in my case, they feared me being caught and telling American intelligence what I’m telling you.”

  “How did this attack take place?”

  “A poison gas grenade was lobbed through my bedroom window at around the same time Garth was driving up from New York to see you in the hospital. If I’d been in bed asleep, I would have died almost instantly, and all an autopsy would have shown was that I died of a heart attack; the grenade itself would have been retrieved. As it happened, I was in the bathroom, with the door closed. I heard the window break and the grenade hitting the floor, and I immediately knew what was happening. I managed to escape through the bathroom window before the gas got to me. I had a spare set of keys taped under my car’s bumper. I drove here, got into these clothes. The machine I used to monitor all Culhane’s calls is in my home, but there’s an electronic hookup to my telephone that I can activate by remote control. I played back the tapes of his most recent conversations, heard what he’d said to Gregory Trex, and realized what had happened. Then I went to the Community of Conciliation mansion to try and head off the death squad.”

  “If you’re not in the business of killing people, why would the KGB give you all the weapons you have up here?”

  “The KGB never provided me with anything but communications and wiretapping equipment. I got my weapons from the same places Culhane got his—various arms dealers in the western states and Florida. I trained myself to use them. He supplied the death squad with their weapons.”

  Garth grunted, said, “What exactly do you want from us, Acton?”

  “I want the two of you to walk me in, to get all of us in the hands of people you trust, and who can guarantee our safety. Supposedly you have powerful friends in Washington and elsewhere; Culhane claimed you have a personal relationship with the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Is that true?”

  “It might be,” Garth replied evenly.

  “Do you have other friends in the intelligence community, people you trust completely?”

  “Maybe.”

  “We have all the communications equipment we need up here. I would like you to contact whoever can get us safely off this mountain and to Washington, where I’ll talk to your counterintelligence people. They’ll have to guarantee our safety for an indefinite period of time. Thousands—maybe tens of thousands—of people in federal and state governments, and in conservative political organizations, are going to have to be vetted; and others are going to have to vet the vetters. It won’t be as formidable a task as it might sound to flush out the other KGB people like me, because the legends constructed for us aren’t as complex as they’d be if we were engaged in ordinary espionage. It was never anticipated that anyone would delve too deeply into our birth records or other background. But it must be done. Only when my story has been accepted by your people, and me process of rooting out the other KGB plants has begun, will the four of us be safe from assassination; the KGB is more likely to leave us alone if there’s nothing to be gained by killing us and if our murders could be logically blamed on them. I need the three of you to back up my story and then support me.”

  Garth and I exchanged glances, and I could see in his eyes that we were thinking the same things. We both looked back at Acton, waited.

  “You don’t seem too taken with my proposal, gentlemen,” Acton continued at last in a slightly wry tone, turning to look at Mary. “Maybe you don’t realize how much danger we’re all in. This is the most important and productive operation the KGB has ever mounted. You can be sure that a crack assassin—or maybe even a team of assassins—is searching for us right now. And if we’re caught by the police, we die; the people who are after us would be perfectly willing to blow up a police station, or even the town of Cairn, to keep this operation secret and the KGB plants in place. I’m not sure you understand—”

  “Okay, you’ve already played the tune for us, Acton,” I interrupted, “and it’s a real spooky one. We’re all properly impressed with your story. What my brother and I are wondering is if it’s true. You’ve had such success bullshitting Culhane and his friends, maybe you think you can bullshit us and our friends. Maybe there is no KGB assassin, no assassination team; maybe the story about the right wing and the government being infiltrated by a load of carbon-copy Americans manufactured by the KGB is just a fairy tale. Maybe there’s just you. Maybe it was you, after all, who murdered Michael and Harry.”

  “Then why would I save your lives?”

  “Because your cute game with Culhane and his lunatic friends and followers was over, no matter what happened to us. You’d listened to Culhane’s telephone conversations, so you knew I’d already told Culhane about you, and I’d contacted the head of the FBI’s counterintelligence unit, as well as Dan Mosely. While it’s true that those people might have done nothing more than conspire to make you disappear back to Russia, that’s probably the last thing you wanted, and want. Having lived most of your life in the United States, you didn’t find the idea of a Kim Philby existence in Mother Russia all that appealing. You weren’t ready to retire, and the only way you could stay on the job would be to find a new way to make yourself useful to your KGB masters. Not only could you cause massive disruption, erosion of morale, and loss of confidence in the government if you had FBI counterintelligence vetting everyone from congressmen to secretaries, but you’d top it off by graciously accepting a job with the CIA. The KGB would flip; they would not only have caused divisiveness and disruption in the United States government, but they’d have a new mole. You might have just a bit of difficulty getting anyone to believe you on your own, so you want Garth and me to help you, to vouch for you. Garth and I just aren’t all that anxious to become KGB accomplices—without pay, no less.”

  Garth abruptly snatched the Uzi from where it lay beside Acton’s thigh, then straightened up. “Mongo and I will be happy to walk you in, Acton,” he said evenly, “and our friends will guarantee your safety. But we have only your word for all this other business, and we’re not about to vouch for you on the basis of that. Quite the contrary; it should be clear to you by now that Mongo is serious about having the murderer of his friend brought to justice, along with Elysius Culhane for making it all possible and for trying to obstruct justice.”

  “You got that right,” I said.

  Acton stared impassively at the Uzi
in my brother’s hand for a few moments, then glanced up into his face. “Your brother is right in some of the things he said,” he said quietly and evenly to Garth. “Yes, I want to stay here; I’ve spent most of my life here, and Russia is an alien culture to me.” He paused, looked at me. “But you’re wrong when you suggest that I want to penetrate the CIA; I want nothing to do with the CIA. Indeed, I need you and your friends to protect me from the CIA. They don’t have a good track record when it comes to dealing with defectors. Before they would even consider using me, I’d be endlessly interrogated, drugged, and probably locked away for a good long time while they tried to turn my brain inside out. I don’t want to switch sides in the sense that you think of switching sides; I don’t want to spy any longer, but I want to be an American—as my father was. I did what I did for ideology. I’m a communist, and probably will be until the day I die. But the Russians themselves have killed the dream of communism as a global system. They can’t even take care of themselves. Glasnost and perestroika came too late. Gorbachev never realized that you can’t instill spirit and initiative into the souls of people who were gutted first by the terror of Stalin and then the stagnation under Brezhnev. This country is where the action is, and where it will be as long as the fascists can be kept at bay. Ever since the Depression, this country has been adopting precisely those social attitudes and programs that communists like me believe in; the difference is that this country made them work, while Russia never has. Russia and China have had to adopt capitalist attitudes and programs in order to survive. The world that I want may not be all that different from the world Robert and Garth Frederickson and Mary Tree want.” He paused, smiled. “Who knows? Maybe I’ll write a book. Maybe I’ll become a politician. If a former grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan can win office by appealing to one segment of Americans, maybe an ex-KGB operative can win office by appealing to another segment. My ideology is certainly closer to the things this country supposedly stands for than a klansman’s.”

  “Don’t count on my vote, Acton,” I said.

  Mary cleared her throat, peered at me over the tops of her bifocals. “I’m glad you’re only speaking for yourself, Mongo.”

  Acton’s smile faded. “But first I have to make sure that we all stay alive.”

  It was easy enough to see that Acton had won over Mary, had her support and sympathy. I glanced at Garth, who merely shrugged noncommittally.

  I said, “It still sounds to me like switching sides, and doing it free of charge.”

  “It’s not free of charge, Frederickson. I’m bringing to you information that can decimate one of the greatest spy operations ever mounted in any country. But then, you still don’t believe me when I tell you that the right-wing infrastructure in this country, in and out of government, is riddled with KGB operatives.”

  “You gave us a nice speech—but it may be the same kind of language you found so effective with Elysius Culhane. You still haven’t said anything, or offered any proof, to convince us that you’re not the only one.”

  Acton’s response was to sigh, straighten up and stretch, then walk to the edge of the plateau and gaze out over the river. He remained there, his back to us, for nearly five minutes. Finally he turned back, spoke to me.

  “You’re a tough audience, Frederickson.”

  “Even if your aim isn’t to penetrate our intelligence apparatus, you would still be in a position to feed our government disinformation, and to disrupt.”

  “Tell me how your friend was killed.”

  It was Garth who replied. “I’ve already told you; he was drowned.”

  Acton shook his head impatiently, and his dark eyes flashed. “Give me the details; tell me everything you know about Michael Burana’s activities on the day he was killed.”

  “He’d gone to see your father to pay his respects,” I said, watching Acton’s face carefully. I’d already decided that if he was an actor, he was a good one—but then, that was precisely what he had been so thoroughly trained to do. “They hit it off. They got to drinking, and Harry Peal told him about a certain advisor to the right wing who had the Peal family birthmark on his back and shoulder. Then Michael must have come back and confronted you.”

  Now Acton slowly walked back toward us, stopped when he was standing between Garth and me. Garth switched the Uzi to his other hand, away from Acton, but the KGB operative didn’t even look at the weapon. “Would that be standard procedure, Frederickson? Would an FBI agent who’d just learned about a KGB spy in this country confront that spy before reporting the fact to someone and asking for direction and backup?”

  I averted my gaze, somewhat grudgingly shook my head. “No, that wouldn’t be standard procedure. But Michael was in a very strange place in his head.”

  “Oh, really?” The faintest trace of a smile had appeared on the other man’s lips, but there was no trace of humor in his eyes or voice. “Does that mean that he’d suddenly gone stupid?”

  “Look, Acton, I don’t know what—”

  “Mongo, I’m telling you that Michael Burana never contacted me. I’d never heard of Burana until you came to town and started asking questions of Mosely, Culhane, and Mary. Just for the sake of argument, assume I’m telling the truth. If he didn’t contact me after learning that I was KGB, then who did he contact to report about me?”

  He’d found the one weak link in my scenario of what Michael had done, and what had happened to him, on the day he was killed, and hammered it. Attention had to be paid, thought given. If Acton was telling the truth, then the KGB was indeed all over the place—elected officials, advisors to powerful figures, government officials.…

  “Damn,” I said.

  Garth stepped around Acton and laid a hand on my shoulder. “Mongo?”

  “That fucking Hendricks,” I said hoarsely. “Edward J. Hendricks.”

  Mary was staring at me, her impossibly blue eyes very wide. “Michael’s boss?”

  “Michael’s boss. The head of the FBI’s counterintelligence unit. Mary, you said that Michael went into town twice after he came back from talking to Harry Peal, right?”

  She nodded.

  “Did he say why?”

  She shook her head.

  “Well, I think I may know why. He went into town to use a pay phone there, because he was afraid the Community’s phones might be tapped—as they were. He called Hendricks—the first time to report what he’d found out and probably to ask for an immediate warrant and backup to go and arrest his man here. Then he went back to the mansion to wait for help to arrive. When it didn’t, he got impatient and went back into town a second time to ask Hendricks what was happening. What was happening was that Hendricks was sending an assassin after him.”

  “I really hope this FBI agent isn’t one of those powerful friends of yours, Frederickson,” Acton said in a flat voice.

  “Hardly, Acton. Listen, you said that the people who were doing what you were doing were insulated from one another. If Hendricks is one of you, how would he have been able to call in an assassin?”

  Acton shook his head, shrugged. “I don’t know. I told you what I was told. It’s possible this man is more trusted than I was, or of a higher rank. He may be a control.”

  “It could be, Mongo,” Garth said quietly. “It just could be this man is telling the truth.”

  “Maybe,” I said, looking at my brother. Suddenly my stomach muscles were tight, and I felt slightly short of breath. “There could be a way to find out.”

  “Not a good idea,” Acton said quickly, tersely. “If you call Hendricks and report all this to him, and if Hendricks is what we suspect him to be, then it’s true that you’ll undoubtedly get the assassin who killed your friend and my father after us. It doesn’t mean that we’ll survive the encounter. He or she or they will be very good.”

  “But we’ve got the drop on him or her or them.”

  “If it’s a team, there’ll be three. The KGB hit teams usually work in threes.”

  “I know.” />
  “How are you feeling, Mongo?” Garth asked.

  “I feel like nailing Michael and Harry’s killer. It may be the only chance we’ll get. Agreed, brother?”

  Garth held up his hand, raised two fingers. “How many fingers?”

  “Six. Let’s do it.”

  “I’d like my weapon back,” Acton said to Garth.

  Garth shook his head. “You spectate until we see what goes down here.” He turned to Mary, who was pale and trembling slightly. “It’s going to be all right,” he continued, touching the woman’s arm. “Do you remember the number, code words, and name I wrote down for you?”

  “Yes,” Mary replied in a small voice.

  “Find a way to get up to the top of the mountain—and be careful climbing. If you hear shooting, you get off the mountain and to a phone just as fast as you can. Get hold of that person we mentioned and tell him what’s happening. He’ll give you instructions. He’ll also make sure that you’re safe.”

  Mary shook her head. Despite her paleness and slight tremor, her voice was firm. “No. I want to stay here with you.”