Lucky Bastard

by Charles McCarry

  Jack and Morgan waited.

  “You understand that it must be absolutely platonic.”

  Jack said, “Absolutely what?”

  “Free of sex. A sexual relationship would interfere with good judgment.”

  Jack glanced at Morgan. Her cheekbones were flushed. She stared into her dessert plate. She had known this all along. No wonder she had been screwing Jack cross-eyed for a week; it was her last chance. Jack gave her a long, slow, conspiratorial smile.

  He said, “When do we stop?”

  “Immediately,” Peter said. “Morgan is your handler, you see. Being your wife is just a cover, a way to explain her presence in your life.”

  “My handler?” Jack said. “What exactly is that supposed to mean?”

  “Let me answer that question in language that cannot possibly be misunderstood,” Peter said. “You will do as your wife says in every circumstance of your life. Morgan’s role is to act as the messenger between you and me. She is the link, the liaison, the go-between. For all intents and purposes, she is me. She speaks for me. She acts for me. She instructs for me. Money, advice, everything you need to succeed in your mission, will flow through Morgan.”

  Jack said, “Really? Then why do you need me?”

  “You know why,” Peter said. “You are the prime asset. Morgan’s role is to protect you. You must stay clean, never handle money, never get involved in the details of getting elected, and never, never have contact with anyone, including me, who might compromise you. All plans, all benefits, all advice, will come through Morgan.”

  “Including women?”

  “I’m glad you asked,” Peter said. “The answer is yes. As you know, we are aware how strong your sex drive is and what it can lead to. You can have as much variety as you want, with one proviso: We provide the women. No outsiders. Is that absolutely clear, Jack?”

  Jack said, “What do I do in case of emergency?”

  He was grinning and shaking his head in disbelief. Morgan would not meet the merry glances he was sending her way.

  Peter sighed. “Jack, I advise you to take this seriously.”

  Jack said, “I’m trying, Peter. But—”

  Peter’s urbanity vanished. “Enough. We have a long experience of professional marriages. They do not succeed if sex is involved. Their psychological consequences can never be anticipated or controlled. So it is forbidden between you. Absolutely, forever, and under all circumstances. You two are handler and agent. That is all.”

  “Fascinating,” Jack said. “But it’s hard to break a habit. What if we sleepwalk?”

  Peter said, “Have you ever heard of János Kádár?”

  “Yes. The Hungarian president.”

  “Prime minister, after the uprising in ’55. In Moscow you seemed to be interested in the KGB and its Oriental mentality. Let me answer your question by telling you a true story about this famous organization. After the Red Army put down the Hungarian Revolution, the Russians made Kádár premier. But he was a ladies’ man and he was inclined to question his instructions. So to make sure he concentrated on the job, and to make sure that he knew that they were serious, the KGB castrated him—completely. It was done by a surgeon, naturally, under anesthesia. When he woke up, he pissed through a plastic tube into a plastic bag for the rest of his life and never made any more difficulties. In fact, he seemed to love the people who had done this to him more than he ever loved his women. Do you understand what I am saying to you?”

  Eyes locked, the boy and the man were silent for a while. It was Jack who broke eye contact; he felt it was expected of him. He nodded, completing the surrender.

  Peter said, “Aloud, please.”

  “I understand.”

  Suddenly, Peter’s face lit up in a brilliant smile. “Ah, Hedi!” he cried with real pleasure. “What perfect timing!”

  In the glass wall, Jack saw the reflected figure of a tall, blond woman in a dramatic white dress. Light flashed from what seemed to be a diamond necklace. Jack rose to his feet and turned to look at this newcomer. She was young, voluptuous, perfumed. Morgan stared at her as if examining a cow that had wandered into the dining room. The woman ignored them both and floated toward Peter, arms outstretched.

  “Peter, darling,” she cried, kissing air.

  Peter introduced her. Hedi was a Dane, an actress, a dear friend. As if meeting the man of her dreams, she clung to Jack’s hand and gazed with swimming blue eyes into his face.

  Peter looked at his watch. “My goodness,” he said. “It’s late, and Morgan and I have an engagement.”

  Hedi pouted.

  “I’ll make it up to you,” Peter said. “I promise.”

  He put a fatherly hand on Jack’s forearm and squeezed, a paternal gesture. “Jack,” he said, “I wonder if I could ask you to see Hedi home. These sex-starved Spaniards do so annoy blond women who go out alone.”

  Hedi was smiling. Waves of scent rose from her hair, her skin. She was as perfect as a doll. Her ears, her nose, her every feature, were small and perfectly formed and impossibly smooth and white, as if her flawless maquillage had turned her face to porcelain.

  “Will you see me home, Jack?” Hedi asked, saucer-eyed. “I’m terrified to go out alone. Peter is so right!”

  Jack said, “My pleasure.”

  Morgan’s face was a mask.

  3 Villa la Nicha was, as you will have surmised, the very house in which the nymphet Greta had received her training as a Swallow. Morgan had been here before, too, but for more serious purposes. A couple of years before, she had cooled off in Majorca after killing a man in South America. This man, a psychopath whose idol was the Cambodian madman Pol Pot, opposed a certain plan of Peter’s on ideological grounds.

  This plan will play a certain role in the story of Jack Adams, so I will describe it here as briefly as possible. Ever since his days in Southeast Asia, Peter had seen drugs as a way to undermine, even destroy, the capitalists in America. He also saw it as a practically inexhaustible supply of funds for his more unconventional operations. The rise of the cocaine industry came at the same historical moment in which guerrilla movements—mostly inspired and financed by Peter through Fidel Castro’s intelligence service—were ceasing to be effective. In Peter’s fertile mind, this fork in the path of history presented a golden opportunity. At a remote location in Amazonia, he brought together the bosses of certain drug cartels and the leaders of certain guerrilla movements and proposed that they join forces. Peter’s logic was irresistible. The cartels were already paying “taxes” to the guerrillas who agreed in return not to attack them. But what if the guerrillas went a step further and actively protected the cartels from attack by the army and police? This would benefit both sides. The guerrillas would go on kidnapping, assassinating, bombing as before, but now the cartels could designate targets of interest to themselves. Instead of killing indiscriminately, the freedom fighters could kill selectively, eliminating each threat to the cartels’ business interests as it arose. The guerrillas, after all, did not care which enemies of the people they murdered, as long as they were enemies of the people.

  Seeing realities and opportunities that were invisible to others was Peter’s specialty. All present except one of the guerrilla leaders were in favor of Peter’s visionary plan. The drug dealers might be inadvertent enemies of the United States, he argued, but they were also capitalists like any other. He would not pollute his movement by going into business with them. His opposition discouraged others, who knew that it was impossible to know what he might do if his advice was ignored. To him, a Marxist-Leninist was a Social Democrat with a gun. He would kill them as readily as he would kill an American tourist or a policeman. He himself was so closely guarded by his fanatical followers that he was regarded as being invulnerable.

  In anticipation of this complication, Peter had arranged for the guerrilla chieftain to meet Morgan. His weakness, Peter knew, was turning left-wing American girls into sex slaves. In no time at all, Morgan won his confiden
ce with jargon and his besotted gratitude for the astonishing skills that later made such an impression on Jack. On Peter’s signal, Morgan removed this man from the picture, brusquely and permanently. After a tumult of passion, while he slept, she administered a certain poison in a most artistic way. This poison, made from castor beans and sulfuric acid, was then quite new to the secret pharmacopoeia. It produced death by inducing dozens of simultaneous ruptures in the vascular system, and was untraceable by any laboratory test then known to medicine. So imaginative was her method that there was not the slightest suspicion that the man’s death was anything but a heart attack. Nobody even tried to blame it on the CIA.

  With the ideologue out of the way, the rest of the freedom fighters agreed to Peter’s plan. Morgan’s deed had assured the financial future of his entire worldwide enterprise. Although she was only a beginner, Peter immediately promoted her to the rank of honorary captain in the KGB and bestowed a decoration on her.

  When Jack Adams came along, she was the obvious choice as handler, conscience, and protector. Morgan accepted the assignment without demur. It was she who suggested the methodology: the impersonation of an aging Movement chick, the ambush at Harvard. She had already been accepted by the Harvard Business School, and her purposes in attending were precisely as she described them to Jack: penetrate the Establishment, capture its guns from the rear, and turn them inward against the defenders. She was the Trojan horse, Peter was Odysseus.

  For all this I bear some responsibility. Morgan and I were old friends. She was one of the young Americans—like Arthur, like so many others—that I harvested out of the Venceremos brigade. From the beginning she showed promise. This was something of a surprise. Because the highly intelligent are usually also highly imaginative, a dizzying IQ is not regarded as a desirable quality in an agent destined for dangerous work. Someone like Jack, just bright enough, is the preferred material. Morgan was the exception. She was in every way an exception—that rarest of beings, an operative who was both imaginative and almost uncannily brave. She believed in her own intelligence and assumed that it would keep her alive in any situation. And unlike most brainy people, she took to discipline as a duck to water. We were exactly what she was looking for, and she already knew this when she came to us. In another time and context one would have said that she had the monastic temperament, and indeed she had certain saintly characteristics, including the psychotic impulse to repress, deny, and if possible kill her own powerful sexuality. Child of privilege and permissiveness that she was (her father was the head of a famous investment bank), she had been looking for certitude all her life. We provided it.

  Morgan was, in fact, such a perfect fulfillment of our notion of the perfect agent that some suspected for a time that she was a CIA plant. Not I; she was too unreal not to be real. I saw in her not only a talent for tradecraft that was as great as Jack’s talent for politics, but also that rarest of all qualities in Americans: seriousness and staying power and a belief that the benefits of discipline were in direct proportion to the incomprehensibility of its purposes. One example: In Cuba she had been permitted to take a lover, a Georgian who was an instructor of Swallows. She surprised him by her intensity, by her control. He could not break through to her. However, she broke through to him. After a few months, the Georgian told me that he feared that he was—he could barely speak the words—almost in love with her. This was a man who was irresistible to women, who had used them all his life, who had had no idea that any female could reach him sexually. Morgan showed him otherwise; like the good Communist he was, he reported this immediately. Abruptly, without explanation, they were separated. Morgan accepted this decision, which meant traveling in an hour from ecstasy to chastity, in exactly the way that a nun in hope of beatification might have accepted an order from her mother superior to give up all food except bread and water in the name of the Lord—obediently, humbly, happily.

  4 After the dinner with Peter and Jack, and after Jack and Hedi had left, I switched off the monitor on which I had been watching their encounter over closed-circuit television and came downstairs to greet Morgan in the great room of Villa la Nicha. We kissed cheeks three times, Russian style.

  I said, “Well, Morgan. What is your opinion of our Jack?”

  The image of Hedi still lingered in her memory, so perhaps she answered more candidly than she might otherwise have done in Peter’s presence. She said, “He’s a hollow fool. A liar. An egomaniac. A child at sex, a child at everything. Except talk and politics, at which he is a genius.”

  “How nice he has a good side.”

  “All sides of him are good, considering the purposes Peter wants him to serve,” she said. “He’s the most likeable person I have ever met. I like him. Even knowing all that I know, even knowing that he means nothing he says, I like him. When he throws an arm around you, you believe that he’s your friend. You love him. Afterward, but only afterward, you wonder why. But the feeling doesn’t go away. You keep wondering but you also keep liking him. Everyone reacts to him in the same way—anarchists, Republicans, men, women, rich, poor, smart and stupid, straight and homosexual. Men whose wives he’s seduced. Everyone likes him. It’s amazing.”

  Peter said, “I take it, Comrade Captain, that you think that this operation can succeed.”

  Morgan said, “I believe that we can make this man president. But that he will be difficult to control.”

  “And you, Comrade Major,” he said to me. “What are your expectations?”

  Peter already knew my answer to his question, but I stepped up to my mark just the same and delivered my line: “Comrade General, with some reservations I accept the assessment of the comrade captain.”

  “State your reservations.”

  “I agree there is a very great danger, Comrade General, that this asset will prove to be uncontrollable. No matter who is handler.”

  “Why?”

  “Because of his unstable character. And because of the historical precedents. He thinks it is his destiny to rule. If he becomes what you think he can become, he will thank his destiny, not us.”

  “An interesting thesis, Comrade Major.” Peter turned to Morgan. “Your comments?”

  “A question, Comrade General?”

  Peter nodded benevolently.

  She said, “Is there a fallback plan? Have you a lesser objective in mind as an acceptable final result—such as the Senate?”

  Spacing his words, Peter said, “Understand me well, Comrade: Absolutely not.”

  “Good,” Morgan said. “Because with what he has to hide and what he has to fear, he wouldn’t last for a year in the fishbowl of Washington. Except for one place. The only place Jack can operate with impunity is in the best hideout in America—the White House.” She paused. “May I speak frankly?”

  Peter nodded.

  “I just hope,” Morgan said, “that your reference to the fate of Kádár will be enough to keep him in his own bed.”

  Peter did not smile. This was no joking matter. He said, “If you awake to find him in your bed, Comrade Captain, you will remove him. Then you will punish him. Your function is to provide the things that are lacking in Jack’s character: judgment and conscience. You must be his superior. This will not be the case if you open your legs to him. Such a lapse of discipline would be unforgivable.”

  “I understand.”

  “Then be a wife,” Peter said. “Keep an eye on him. Regard him like any other American husband, a creature that exists and labors and succeeds for the benefit of the wife who spends his money, manipulates his appetites, and controls his every action, word, and thought.”

  Morgan did not reward Peter with the laugh he had expected. Instead, just for a moment, she looked stricken to the soul. I thought I knew why, and I still think so even though she has denied it. What Peter was describing to her as her duty to the Party was exactly what she had joined the Party to escape: a bourgeois American life in which nothing was real, in which there was no passion, a life built on ru
thless promotion of self-interest and the pretense of love and respect. In the name of all she believed to be holy, Peter had sentenced her to be what she was born to be and had sworn she never would be.

  The Cover Mechanism

  One

  1 During the years Jack Adams was completing his education and Morgan was passing through the various tests of piety and stages of betrothal that ended in her becoming a bride of Lenin and then the sister-wife of Jack, I kept busy providing for their future. Like most young couples with a well-defined goal in life, they required two extra advantages: money and influence.

  Peter had promised money; it was my job to deliver it. This was no simple matter. Funding is the Achilles’ heel of covert operations. There is good reason why Follow the money and find the traitor is an adage of counterintelligence. As Jack kept reminding Peter, the making of an American president requires huge amounts of cash. It is one thing to hand Jack Adams, the obscure student, five thousand dollars in fifties in a safe house in Moscow and have him sign for the cash with a thumbprint. It is another matter altogether to explain where Jack Adams the presidential candidate got the mountain of gold required to be elected to an office that pays $200,000 a year in salary in return for an investment in campaign costs of at least $150 million. This cost-to-earnings ratio helps explain why politicians in the world’s greatest democracy have been reluctant to pass laws that require close scrutiny of the sources of one another’s pocket money. But there are rules. For example, you must be able to present a balance sheet that does not arouse undue suspicion. I worried about this from the start. People take money seriously at the grass roots. The lower the office, the greater the scrutiny. Jack’s career was far more likely to be destroyed at an early stage, when questions were asked about the $100,000 he would need to run for mayor or the $ 1 million that a gubernatorial campaign costs, than later on, when one could suppose that legitimate donations would be large enough to mask clandestine funds.