Extraordinary Powers

by Joseph Finder

  “Certainly. He was a friend.”

  “Well, he’s in Munich now. Deputy station chief. He stuck his neck out to get these for me. The very least I could do is take the precaution of hiding them at home from prying burglars or what have you.”

  “So I take it the Company doesn’t know.”

  “I doubt they’ve even noticed,” he said, and pulled out a manila folder. “This is what Alex Truslow is up to. Do you know much about what your father-in-law was doing before his death?”

  * * *

  The rain was beginning to let up. Moore had spread out an array of files on a well-burnished oak library table near the French doors. They concerned the abolition of the KGB and the East Bloc intelligence services: the steady flow of secrets, and personnel, from Moscow and Berlin and everywhere else behind what was once called the Iron Curtain. There were extracts from debriefings of KGB officials who were attempting to sell their secrets for protection in the West, or who were offering bundles of files for sale to the CIA or to Western corporations. There were decoded cables reporting morsels of information seeping out of KGB stations around the world, which (I could tell at the briefest glance) had the potential for being explosive.

  “You see,” Moore said gently, “there’s quite a bit of information that we’d all just as soon had remained buried in the Lubyanka.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He sighed. “You know about the Wednesday Club, I’m sure.”

  I nodded. The Wednesday Club was a regular social gathering of former CIA muckamucks—former directors and deputy directors and so on who enjoyed each other’s company enough to eat lunch together at a French restaurant in Washington every Wednesday. The younger folks in the Agency called it the Fossils Club.

  “Well, there’s been quite a bit of talk in the last few months about just what we’re seeing coming out of what used to be the Soviet Union.”

  “Anything useful?”

  “Useful?” He looked at me intently, owlishly, over his glasses. “Would you consider it useful to receive irrefutable documentary proof that the Soviet Union engineered the assassination of John F. Kennedy?”

  I started for a second, then shook my head. “I don’t think it would make Oliver Stone very happy,” I said.

  He burst out laughing. “But for a second you believed me, didn’t you?”

  “I know your sense of humor quite well.”

  He laughed a few moments longer, then pushed his glasses up his nose. “We’ve had KGB and Stasi generals coming over and trying to sell us information on KGB assets around the world. Names of people who worked for them.”

  “I’d think that would be a great boon.”

  “Maybe, in some historical sense,” Moore said, and removed his glasses. He massaged the bridge of his nose. “But who really cares much now about some washed-up old Red who cooperated thirty years ago with a government that no longer exists?”

  “I’m sure some people do.”

  “No doubt. But that’s not what interests me. A few months ago at one of our Wednesday lunches I heard a story about Vladimir Orlov.”

  “The former chairman of the KGB?”

  “More precisely, the last chairman of the KGB, before Yeltsin’s people did away with it. Where do you imagine a fellow like that goes when his job is pulled out from under him?”

  “Paraguay or Brazil?”

  Moore chuckled. “Mr. Orlov knew better than to hang around in his dacha outside Moscow, waiting for the Russian government to decide to prosecute him for doing his job to the best of his ability. He went into exile.”

  “Where?”

  “That’s the problem.” He selected a stapled set of papers from the table and handed it to me. It was a photocopy of a cable from a CIA officer in Zurich station reporting the appearance of one Vladimir I. Orlov, former chairman of the Soviet KGB, in a café on Sihlstrasse.

  He was accompanied by Sheila McAdams, executive assistant to Director of Central Intelligence Harrison Sinclair. The cable was dated less than one month earlier.

  “I’m not sure I understand,” I said.

  “Three days before Hal Sinclair died, his executive assistant and—I trust I’m not revealing anything you don’t already know—mistress, Sheila McAdams, met in Zurich with the ex-chief of the KGB.”

  “So?”

  “The rendezvous was apparently cleared by Sinclair himself.”

  “Presumably they were transacting some sort of business.”

  “Of course,” Moore said impatiently. “The following day, the name of Vladimir Orlov disappeared from most CIA data banks, at least those accessible to all but the top five or six officials. Then Orlov himself disappeared from Zurich. We don’t know where he went. It was as if Orlov had given Hal’s assistant some quid pro quo in exchange for removing him from our sonars, our sights. But we’ll never know. Two days later Sheila was killed in that alley in Georgetown. Next day Hal perished in that awful ‘accident.’”

  “So who would have murdered them?”

  “That, my dear Ben, is exactly what Alexander Truslow would like to know.” The fire was dying, and Moore poked at it idly. “There’s turmoil in the Agency. Terrible turmoil. A dreadful power struggle.”

  “Between—?”

  “Listen to me. Europe is in a frightful mess. Britain and France are in bad shape, and Germany’s virtually in a depression. The specter of feuding nationalist elements—”

  “Yes, but what does that have to do—”

  “The talk—it is only talk, I grant you, but it is from supremely well-connected Agency retirees—is that certain elements within the Agency have found a way to insinuate themselves into the chaos in Europe.”

  “Ed, that’s awfully vague—”

  “Yes,” he said, so sharply that it startled me. “Certain elements … and insinuate … and all the other muzzy little phrases we employ when all we know are wisps. But the point is, old men who should be playing golf and enjoying bone-dry martinis are frightened. Friends of mine who used to run the organization speak of enormous sums of money changing hands in Zurich—”

  “Meaning that we paid off Vladimir Orlov?” I interrupted. “Or that he paid us off for protection?”

  “Money isn’t the point!” His too-even teeth were an unnatural yellow.

  “Then what is?” I asked gently.

  “Let me just say that the skeletons haven’t yet begun to emerge from the closet. And when they do, the CIA may well join the KGB on the ash heap of history.”

  We sat for a long time in silence. I was about to remark And would that be so bad? when I glimpsed Moore’s expression. His face was now chalk-white.

  “What does Kent Atkins think?”

  He was silent for half a minute. “I don’t really know, Ben. Kent is scared to death. He was asking me what I thought was going on.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “That whatever these Agency renegades are trying to accomplish in Europe will not simply involve the Europeans. It will directly involve us as well. It will involve the world. And I shudder to think what sort of conflagration is in store for us all.”

  “Meaning what, specifically?”

  He ignored my question, gave a small, rueful smile, and shook his head. “My father died at the age of ninety-one, my mother at eighty-nine. Longevity runs in my family. But none of them fought in the Cold War.”

  “I don’t understand. What sort of conflagration, Ed?”

  “You know, in his last few months in office, your father-in-law was quite obsessed with saving Russia. He was convinced that unless CIA took serious action, forces of reaction would take over in Moscow. And then the Cold War would be a sweet memory. Maybe Hal was onto something.”

  He clenched his small liver-spotted fist, and pressed it against his pursed lips. “We take risks, all of us who work for Central Intelligence. The rate of suicide is quite high, you know.”

  I nodded.

  “And although it’s actually quite rar
e for any of us to be killed in the line of duty, it happens.” His voice softened somewhat. “You know that.”

  “You’re afraid you’re going to be killed?”

  Another smile, a shake of the head. “I’m approaching eighty. I don’t plan to live my remaining years with an armed guard beside my bed. Assuming they’d provide one. I see no reason to live in a cage.”

  “But have you received any threats?”

  “None at all. It’s just the patterns that have me worried.”

  “Patterns—?”

  “Tell me this. Who knew you were coming to see me?”

  “Just Molly.”

  “No one else?”

  “No.”

  “There’s always the telephone.”

  I peered at him closely, wondering whether the paranoia had closed in on him, as it had done on James Angleton in his last years. And as if he could read my thoughts, Moore said, “Don’t worry about me, Ben. I have all my marbles. And certainly my suspicions could be wrong. If and when anything happens to me, it will happen. It’s just that I’m allowed to be scared, aren’t I?”

  I had never known him to be hysterical, so his quiet fear unnerved me. All I could say was, “I think you’re probably overreacting.”

  He smiled, a slow, sad smile. “Maybe so. Maybe not.” He reached for a large manila envelope and slid it across the table toward me. “A friend … or, rather, a friend of a friend … sent this to me.”

  I opened the envelope and removed an eight-by-ten glossy color photograph.

  It took me a few seconds to recognize the face, but the instant I did, I felt sick to my stomach.

  “Jesus Christ,” I said. I was transfixed with horror.

  “I’m sorry, Ben. But you had to know. It rather settles any doubts as to whether Hal Sinclair was murdered.”

  I stared, my head reeling.

  “Alex Truslow,” he went on, “may be the last, best chance the Company has. He’s been valiantly trying to rid CIA of this—for want of a better word, cancer—that afflicts it.”

  “Are things really that bad?”

  Moore gazed at the reflection of the room in the dark panes of the French doors. His eyes got a far-off look. “You know, years ago, when Alex and I were junior analysts at Langley, we had a supervisor who we knew was fudging an assessment—grossly exaggerating the threat posed by an Italian extreme-left splinter group, just so that he could double the size of his operating budget. And Alex faced him down. Called him on it. Even then the guy had brass balls. He had a kind of integrity that seemed out of place, almost bizarre, in such a cynical outfit like the Agency. As I recall, his grandfather was a Presbyterian minister in Connecticut, from whom Alex probably inherited that kind of ethical stubbornness. And you know something? People came to respect him for it.”

  Moore took off his glasses, closed his eyes, and massaged them. “Only problem is, I’m not sure there are any others left like him. And if they get to him the way they got to Hal Sinclair … well, who knows what might happen?”

  FOUR

  I didn’t get to bed until well after midnight. It was too late to catch the last shuttle back to Logan, and Moore wouldn’t hear of my staying in a hotel, what with the various empty rooms in his house now that his children had all left. So I spent the night in his comfortable guest bedroom on the third floor and set the digital alarm clock for six A.M. so I could get to the office at a decent hour.

  About an hour later I suddenly sat up in bed, my heart pounding, and switched on the bedside lamp. The photograph was still there. Molly must never see this, I told myself. I got up from the bed, and, in the bright yellow lamplight, slipped the photograph into the manila envelope and zipped it into a side compartment in my briefcase.

  I switched off the light, tossed and turned for a few moments, until I surrendered and put the light back on. I could not sleep. As a rule I avoid sedatives, in part because of my Agency training (one must always be ready to bound out of bed on an instant’s notice), and in part because, as an intellectual-property attorney, the last thing I need during the day is the hangover from anything sleep-inducing.

  So I put on the television and looked for something suitably soporific. C-SPAN usually does it for me. On CNN, as it turned out, was a news-talk program, Germany in Crisis. Three journalists were discussing the German situation, the German stock market crash, and the resulting neo-Nazi demonstrations. They appeared to be in rather heated agreement that Germany was in imminent peril of succumbing to another dictatorship, which would present the world with a terrifying prospect. And, being journalists, they seemed quite certain about it.

  One of them I recognized immediately.

  He was Miles Preston, a British newspaper correspondent. Ruddy-cheeked, a sparkling wit, and (unlike most Brits I know) a fitness fanatic, I had known him since my early Agency days. He was a bright, extremely well-informed, impressively well-connected fellow, and I listened closely to what he had to say.

  “Let’s call a spade a spade, shall we,” he was saying from CNN’s Washington studio. “The so-called neo-Nazis who are behind all this violence are just plain old Nazis. I think they’ve been waiting for this historical moment. Look, the Germans finally, after all these years, establish one unified stock market, the Deutsche Börse, and look what happens—it teeters and then collapses, right?”

  I had met him during my assignment in Leipzig, having just graduated my training at the Farm. I was lonely: Laura was back home in Reston, Virginia, trying to sell our house so she could join me. I was sitting alone in the Thüringer Hof on Burgstrasse, a pleasant, bustling little beer cellar in the Altstadt, and I was probably looking bent out of shape, nursing a large mug of beer.

  I noticed someone standing over me, clearly a Westerner. “You look bored,” the man said in a British accent.

  “Not at all,” I said. “Drink enough of this stuff, and everybody seems interesting.”

  “In that case,” Miles Preston said, “may I join you?”

  I shrugged. He sat at my table and asked, “American? A diplomat, or something?”

  “State Department,” I answered. My cover was as a commercial attaché.

  “I’m with the Economist. Been here long?”

  “About a month,” I said.

  “And you can’t wait to leave.”

  “I’m getting a little tired of Germans.”

  “No matter how much beer you drink,” he added. “How much longer are you here?”

  “A couple of weeks. Then Paris. Which I much look forward to. I’ve always liked the French.”

  “Oh,” he said, “The French are just Germans with good food.”

  We hit it off, and saw each other, for drinks or dinner, a number of times before I was transferred to Paris. He seemed to believe my State Department cover, or at least didn’t question it. He may have suspected I was with the Agency, I don’t know. On one or two occasions when I was dining with Agency friends at the Auerbachs Keller, one of the city’s few decent restaurants and popular with foreigners, he walked in, saw me, but didn’t approach, perhaps sensing that I didn’t want to introduce him. This was something I liked about him: journalist or not, he never tried to pry for information or ask intrusive questions about what I was really doing in Leipzig. He could be blunt-spoken to the point of crassness—a source of much humor between the two of us—but at the same time he was capable of extraordinary tact. We were both in the same line of work, which may have been what drew me toward him. Each of us was hunting and gathering information; the only difference was that I was doing it on the shady side of the street.

  Now I picked up the bedside phone. It was after one-thirty in the morning, but someone answered at CNN’s Washington office, no doubt a young intern, who gave me the information I needed.

  * * *

  We met for a very early breakfast at the Mayflower. Miles Preston was as hearty and charming as I remembered him.

  “Did you ever remarry?” he asked over his second cup of c
offee. “What happened to Laura in Paris, my God, I don’t know how you ever survived it—”

  “Yes,” I interrupted. “I’m married to a woman named Martha Sinclair. A pediatrician.”

  “A doctor, eh? Could be trouble, Ben. A wife must be just clever enough to understand her husband’s cleverness, and just stupid enough to admire it.”

  “She may be a little too bright for my own good. How about you, Miles? As I recall, you had a rather steady stream of women.”

  “Never did the dirty deed. Ah, well, if only you could fall into the arms of a woman without falling into her clutches, hmm?” He chortled quietly and signaled the waiter for a third cup of coffee. “Sinclair,” he murmured. “Sinclair … You didn’t marry the scion of the proprietor of the Company Store, did you? Not Harrison Sinclair’s daughter?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “Then please accept my condolences. Was he … murdered, Ben?”

  “Subtle as always, Miles. Why do you ask?”

  “I’m sorry. Forgive me. But in my business, I can’t ignore rumors.”

  “Well, I was hoping you might be able to enlighten me on that,” I said. “Whether he was or not, I have no idea. But you’re not the first to suggest as much to me. And it doesn’t make any sense to me—my father-in-law just didn’t have personal enemies, so far as I know.”

  “But you mustn’t think in terms of personalities. Think instead in terms of politics.”

  “How so?”

  “Harrison Sinclair was known to be a vociferous supporter of helping out Russia.”

  “So?”

  “A lot of people don’t want that.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Plenty of Americans oppose throwing money at the Russians—good money after bad, and all that. Especially in a time of global financial difficulty.”

  “That’s not what I mean. There are people—no, let’s call them forces, Ben—who want Russia to collapse altogether.”

  “What sort of forces?”

  “Consider this: Eastern Europe is a total disaster. It’s full of valuable natural resources, and it’s roiling with dissent. Many Eastern Europeans have forgotten Stalinism already, and they long for dictatorship again. So it’s ripe for the picking. Wasn’t it Voltaire who said, ‘The world is a vast temple dedicated to Discord’?”