CHAPTER 42 – Fallout
February 18
Gerry Hancock surveyed the carnage that had visited the small hotel room. Beside him stood Chief Inspector Hans Freibeck of the Bundespolizei, the Federal Police responsible for Vienna. Hancock knew that Freibeck actually belonged to the Stapo, or Staatespolizei, Austria’s counterintelligence service.
“Any first impressions, Mr. Hancock?”
Freibeck undoubtedly had his own ideas, but he was curious to learn the thoughts of the head of the FBI investigative team that had arrived in his city the day before. Freibeck did NOT know that ‘Hancock’ was not the American’s real name or that he and the two men with him were members of the CIA’s quick reaction “mop-up and retrieval” squad, stationed at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington. Hancock’s assignment was to investigate the Vienna events involving Harry Connolly, locate Connolly, and eliminate him.
“I’m wondering why someone with Connolly’s means would have been staying in a dump like this.”
The crime scene was a mess. A table and chair had been knocked over, a copy of the International Herald Tribune open to a half-finished crossword puzzle lay on the floor, and a lamp was broken, but the most salient features were the yellow outlines of two bodies drawn on the threadbare carpet. There was a lot of blood. Hancock’s nostrils filled with the coppery scent.
“That’s where the guy with the head shot fell?” Hancock pointed to one of the body outlines with massive blood stains around the head.
“Yes,” replied the Austrian policeman. “Most curious.”
“How so?”
“You saw the two bodies last night when we visited the morgue.”
Hancock recalled his revulsion at the sight of the destroyed face and head of one of the two bodies he had examined. “Yeah. It’s pretty obvious which one of them left those bloodstains.”
“I quite agree, but there is something you don’t know.”
Hancock concentrated on Freibeck’s face. “Please, go on.”
“Several days ago a nude male body was found not far from here. The head bore a wound remarkably similar to what we observed last night. We found several rounds drilled into the walls of neighboring buildings, very special sub-sonic bullets designed to produce maximum effect upon impact.”
“An assassin’s weapon.” Hancock wondered where the hell Connolly could have gotten his hands on it.
“Precisely. Even more interesting, the rounds we recovered from this crime scene are of the same type and caliber. The same gun could well have been used in both crimes.”
“So Connolly has been murdering people in Vienna for several days now?”
“So it would seem, but the bullets found at the other crime scene were too distorted get a perfect match. Also, there are other curiosities associated with this matter.”
Hancock was getting impatient with the way the Austrian was eking out information. If there was anything that would permit him to locate Connolly, he needed it NOW. He wished Freibeck would drop the Sherlock Holmes act and get to the point. He held his temper in check, however. It wouldn’t do to antagonize the Austrian.
“Please go on, Inspector. I’m all ears.”
Freibeck stepped into the room and gestured for Hancock to follow him. He pointed to some bullet holes in the far wall.
“A lot of shooting occurred in this room, Mr. Hancock – a LOT of shooting. Pistols were found near the bodies of both of the dead men. Also please take note of the fact that the door to the room is off its hinges and the frame is cracked. If I had to guess what happened here, I would deduce from the crime scene that the two dead men broke into the room and attacked Connolly, who killed them in self-defense. We also know for a fact that your man did NOT kill the desk clerk. It appears that the man with the destroyed face killed him. The bullet was a match for the pistol found near his body. And then there is the curious matter of the nationality of the two deceased gentlemen.”
He shot Hancock a sly look. “What do you make of that, Mr. Hancock?”
Hancock caught the implication. It wouldn’t be the first time that a US clandestine operation had spilled over into Austrian civil society.
“So far as we know, Inspector, Connolly had no official business in Austria. You mentioned another body that was found on the street. What can you tell me about it?”
“Just as I said: the body was discovered on a back street not far from this hotel, at least within reasonable walking distance. The slugs we dug out of the wall are the same type as the ones found in this room, apparently fired by your Mr. Connolly. The body we found still has not been identified.”
“So you think Connolly killed at least three people, including the unidentified victim?”
“All the evidence is circumstantial, of course, but it is certainly possible.”
“What can you tell me about where Connolly might have gone?”
“Nichts, nothing. We know he fought a running gun battle in the hallway out there and escaped down the fire escape into the alley that runs alongside this building. We found no traces of blood along his escape route, so I think we can safely assume that he was not wounded. There was a reported sighting of a tall man without a coat, possibly a foreigner, on the subway that matched the description of Connolly. He was last seen at the Nestroy Platz station. After that, nichts.”
This was definitely not good news for Hancock. If necessary he was prepared to seize Connolly from the Austrian authorities or kill him from a distance, but the renegade still eluded capture. Hancock wondered whether his target might have had some outside assistance, the Russians, maybe. But if that were so, then how to explain the two dead Russians in Connolly’s hotel room? What the hell was going on here?
“I have another question for you, Mr. Hancock.” Freibeck’s voice brought Hancock back to the present.
“Yes?”
“On that table over there the investigating officers found an old leather valise. It was filled mostly with dirty clothes – all Russian or Eastern European, by the way – but there was also an envelope.”
“What sort of envelope?”
Freibeck smiled thinly. “An envelope of American manufacture, actually. It contained a considerable amount of American currency.”
Hancock had no idea what this might mean. What he did know was that his investigation was getting nowhere fast. Langley would not be pleased.
“And what do you deduce from this, Inspector?”
“I was hoping you might be able to shed some light on it, Mr. Hancock.”
*****
The retrieval team Barney Morley had sent to Vienna returned with a plethora of confusing and contradictory information about what had happened, but there was absolutely no trace of the fugitive.
Three days had passed since the news of Harry Connolly’s bloody appearance in Vienna became public, and Morley was facing Armageddon with the Seventh Floor brass. He now stood sweating in the elevator as it whisked him towards a meeting he wished he did not have to attend.
Entering the suite of rooms leading to the Director’s office he caught sight of his direct boss, the
Director of Operations Freddy Walsop, and the Agency’s General Counsel sitting side by side on a sofa awaiting their summons. The attendance of the General Counsel did not bode well.
Finally admitted into the Director’s spacious office, the three sat like naughty schoolboys in chairs ranged in front of Director Russell Stanford’s desk. Stanford, himself a respected, high-powered “K” Street attorney had been appointed DCI a year ago by the new President. A capable, intelligent man, he had been disappointed by what he found at Langley and even more disappointed to learn that the President of the United States had discontinued personal meetings with the Director of Central Intelligence. Stanford didn’t plan to stay here much longer. He was a dollar a year man, and he certainly didn’t plan to leave under a cloud. To say that he was unhappy with this Connolly situation was a vast understatement.
The DCI’s p
rosecutorial stare drilled into Barney. “What the hell is going on, Morley? This is your bailiwick. What is all this crap in the press? Who is leaking this stuff?”
Morley tried his best tack. “But you see, sir, it’s NOT really my bailiwick. I kicked Connolly out of Russia Section a long time ago.”
“Yes, I know,” said Stanford, his voice even. “Let me see. Connolly was a twenty-plus year veteran of Russian operations with a stellar record,” the Director lifted a file folder from his desktop, and Morley saw that it was Connolly’s personnel file.
“In fact,” continued Stanford, “he was one of the most highly qualified Russian operations officers in the Agency.” He paused to glare at Morley. “And you fired him.”
The accusatory tone was unmistakable. “He wasn’t a team player, Director,” persisted Morley, “he was a relic of the past, with old ideas. He just didn’t fit in. At any rate, I got rid of him.”
Morley glanced in the DDO’s direction in search of support, but Walsop refused to meet his eyes. Morley knew at that moment that he was finished.
Stanford resumed his rant.
“And since then you’ve lost every Russian agent. A mole has destroyed your Section, Morley, and according to the press, THE PRESS, mind you, that mole is Harry Connolly. After the callous, idiotic way you handled this man, is there any wonder he turned against us? And now you’ve put us all in the soup!”
CHAPTER 43 – Persona Non Grata
I spent the night in a sparsely furnished guest room at the Israeli Embassy. Sasha had made another foray through the shops of Vienna returning with a complete wardrobe for me, as well as a suitcase and toiletries. Whatever plans the Israelis had, they must include travel.
Eitan Ronan spent much of the time on the secure line to Tel-Aviv, and the contents of Stankov’s computer disk were transmitted electronically to the same place. From what I could gather from the few times I’d spoken with Ronan during the course of the day, he was conjuring a strategy with his superiors that involved the data from the disk.
It listed nearly a hundred hidey holes for the Russian funds in places like Liechtenstein and the Cayman Islands. Getting at the accounts would be a difficult and far flung affair. And much of the money was held in trusts or invested in private companies and impossible to retrieve.
Tuesday morning the big Israeli had more depressing news.
“I’ve heard from our Cosmos representative in Washington.”
Cosmos is the code name for Mossad liaison with the American services.
“There is a burn notice out on you, my friend. CIA liaison told our representative that you are in all likelihood a Russian mole and should be treated as a hostile. Informally, CIA told us they don’t care if you are captured or killed, and frankly they would prefer the latter.”
What Ronan said next was even worse.
“The 'Washington Post’ somehow got hold of the story. They’ve taken the information provided by the Austrian press and added that they’ve learned from a confidential source that you are a mole and on the run. They’ve named you publicly as a suspected Russian spy and murderer. The ‘Post’ also reports turmoil at the CIA, and the Head of the Russia Section is being held accountable.
“You are persona non grata everywhere, my friend.”
I had never thought I could feel sympathy for a preening bureaucrat like Barney Morley, but he too had been set up. And the same person had done both jobs.
No matter how many times I thought it over, I always arrived at the same dismaying conclusion. Jake Liebowitz was the only common thread that ran through all that had happened. Jake the snake. Jake the mole!
Concealed beneath an unprepossessing exterior Jake Liebowitz was gifted with a razor sharp intellect that was admirably attuned to the art of espionage. Somewhere along the way the art had overwhelmed the cause it was intended to serve.
I did not presume to understand Jake’s motives. What it is that turns a person into a traitor? Are defectors, after all, only defective people? Or is it that, as LeCarré put it, betrayal is a form of worship? There was no Rosetta Stone to provide the answer. Most tradecraft practitioners identify the classic motivations with the acronym MICE – money, ideology, compromise, and ego.
Sometimes opportunity becomes motivation, but the motives for betraying the trust of one’s country fall into six major categories: money, sex, conviction, revenge, fear or coercion, and just plain love of risk-taking. And each of these has multiple sub-categories. Motivation can be negative or positive. Probably a majority of professionals would aver that money is the primary motivator, but the mechanisms that create spies and make them tick are usually too complex to narrow down to a single type.
There are true spies -- those intrepid individuals who assume the guise of a foreign nationality or surreptitiously enter foreign territory to spy upon the enemy. Such were the men and women of the Allied intelligence services who parachuted from black planes into occupied France, for example, or Soviet “Illegals” like Rudolph Abel. These people are true patriots, not traitors or defectors, and so cannot be described as inherently “defective.”
Some recognize evil in the regime under which they live and it is conscience that dictates betrayal. Such are the best human sources, though they can be notoriously difficult to handle because their righteous zeal often leads them to take risks that lead to their own destruction. Such people are seldom “recruited” in the classic sense. They volunteer themselves for the suicide mission when the opportunity arises and entrust their lives into the hands of spymasters.
Spymasters target the motivations and weaknesses that can be exploited for recruitment. Fear or money, or both are powerful incentives to commit treason. However, the quality of information from weak or blackmailed sources is notoriously unreliable.
Finally there are those amoral characters that yearn for the intellectual challenge and thrill of danger that espionage offers, people to whom betrayal offers a sense of power.
What had driven Jake to the Russians? I would probably never know, but if I had to guess I’d say it was ego, a quality he had in abundance. From the moment he had called me just a little over a week earlier, he had played the master manipulator. He had used everything he had learned throughout our long friendship, pushed every button and yanked every string to put me on the spot in Vienna, to use me to bait the trap for Stankov - and to get me killed in the process.
All my precautions, the third-party communications system via Maurice in Paris, everything I had done to stay below the radar had been for naught because from the beginning, even before I left Washington, Jake knew the precise spot, the treffpunkt on Kaerntner Strasse, where Stankov would be lured to his death.
The Russians had reacted fast to the unexpected situation created by Stankov’s appearance in Vienna and his call for a meeting via the accommodation address in Oslo. They had not been fast enough to get him the first time, but they had killed Thackery and retrieved one of the disks - poor clueless Thackery. If only he had returned directly to Washington to report after his meeting with Stankov, he might still be alive.
Instead the rookie had chosen to discount everything Stankov told him or was so keen to have his skiing holiday that he convinced himself that the disk was low grade ore.
There was no “Eyes Only” memo in Jake’s safe that would exonerate me. Jake had designed my departure from Washington to look hasty, with no official sanction. I was on my own, and there was no one in Washington who could or would help. At this very moment Jake might well be hammering away at the nails in my coffin.
My chubby buddy must have been shocked when I turned up alive. Nevertheless, “Jake the Snake” had recovered quickly and set me up for the kill a second time.
It was brilliant. Not only had he arranged for my death, but he also had succeeded in casting me as the traitorous mole and hung the blame for Thackery’s murder around my neck. Well done!
Had pinning the mole rap on me been foremost in Jake’s mind from the start? T
he information Stankov carried was clearly important to the Russians, but setting up a scapegoat to divert attention from himself would have been of equal or greater importance to Jake, and he had played his hand brilliantly, manipulating the actions of both the Russians and the Americans.
Barney Morley had been blindsided and left to take the blame. He would be out within days.
A CIA team must be on its way to join the manhunt, along with the Austrians, Interpol, and assorted Russian death squads. Jake had to be feeling pretty cocky that I was alone with no place to hide and that one or the other of these pursuers in the end would bring me to ground.
But none of them knew I had linked up with the Israelis. On the negative side, the Israelis could do anything with me they liked, including shooting me and handing my still bleeding corpse over the CIA. Everything depended upon whether Eitan Ronan was a man of honor.
CHAPTER 44 – "A bris is out of the question."
Ronan interpreted my thoughts correctly.
“Don’t worry, my friend. I think we need to work together. Do you agree?”
“Of course.”
What choice did I have? But conviction was lacking.
“You are a versatile and capable man, Connolly. And you have proven that you are a survivor. Frankly, you surprised me. Who knows? When this is all over the CIA may welcome you back as a hero!”
I was unable to discern whether this was in earnest or deadpan humor. The Israeli was unreadable.
“What was it that Spartan mothers told their sons when they went off to war? ‘Return carrying your shield or carried upon it?’ Believe me; the CIA would much prefer that I just disappear. Too much china has been broken already.”
“Well, we'll see. You have a lot of work to do today with our technicians. We’ve developed an alias persona for you that you should have no trouble pulling off.” His shark’s teeth glinted in a grin that I assumed he intended to be reassuring. “You will undoubtedly be pleased to learn that I am making you an Israeli citizen, at least temporarily. First we must do something about your appearance.”
Harry's Rules Page 15
