Lucky Bastard

by Charles McCarry

  “Yes. But necessary. This operation must not fall into the wrong hands. They are changing in Moscow, accommodating themselves to defeat. We must not.”

  “Suppose they come to me?”

  “They may try. Anything is possible. Unless they speak the phrase I have just given you, they are not from Peter. If they are impostors, call the FBI.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “Far from it. What would the wife of any other candidate do if the KGB showed up on her doorstep? Believe me, if you put the feds on them they will go away and stay away.”

  We had finished our dinner. As was our invariable custom after one of these picnics, we put the garbage in order, separating it according to fingerprints—the flimsy Big Mac package for me, the more substantial french fries container for Morgan. No sleuth would ever know, by lifting prints from grease and ketchup, that we had shared a final meal before I vanished into the desert and she became first lady.

  At last I said—actually said—“This is goodbye.” I said it in Russian.

  In Russian, Morgan replied, “This is unbearable. Peter can’t ask this of us.”

  “He can ask anything and we must do it.”

  She seized me—the last thing I expected—and pulled me to her. She kissed me on the lips, a sweet, lingering, undaughterly kiss. I tasted the salt of her tears. Also the french fries, the flavor of childhood. She held me, convulsive with sorrow. I felt the heat of her body through her thin American clothes; she wasn’t dressed warmly enough. This worried me, as it had worried me in Boston.

  Sexually I felt nothing. How could I when she had been entrusted to me? But in my soul I realized—even though I already knew it—that I loved her. That she loved me. That if we had met as professor and student instead of handler and agent I would have divorced a wife as I could not divorce the mad and inescapable thing I was actually married to. Never before had I allowed myself such a thought. I was shaken by it now. At firsthand, at last, I felt what I had spent my life observing others feel: loss, regret, guilt, the misery of acts never completed. I felt jealousy of my successor. I was angry at him, the son of a bitch.

  Without another word, I got out of the car with my paper sack full of Russian fingerprints, walked across the snowy pavement, and deposited my trash in the can. Morgan’s headlights flashed twice. She stopped beside me and, for perhaps ten seconds, looked at me longingly—yes, that is the word—before driving away.

  In the blinking of an eye, her car vanished. I wept. Yes. Because I understood, and so did she. We were not saying goodbye to each other. We were, each in our own way, saying goodbye to Russia. Like a couple of old Bolsheviks who had outlived their passion, we had been erased from the official photograph.

  5 Driving down Interstate 91 through a snowstorm, I pondered the question of the twenty-seven million dollars. The amount staggered me. How could Peter—on the day before he was going to be disgraced, perhaps even tortured, almost certainly shot—disburse such an enormous sum to an asset? It was contrary to all procedures to do what he had done. This suggested two possibilities: (1), he had, improbably, forged the director’s signature, stolen twenty-seven million dollars in secret funds and somehow transferred the loot to Escobar’s tiny bank in remotest Amazonia; or (2), the sum in question was not the KGB’s money.

  If the answer was (2), whose money was it?

  The truth seemed obvious. I had always assumed, and Peter had encouraged me to assume, that funds for Jack came from his share of the drug trade. But I had also assumed that he ran this money through the KGB mill before distributing it to his operatives. This was only an assumption. Certainly Peter had never told me any such thing. Now it seemed possible that this was not the case, that he had simply deposited all those tainted millions in the most unlikely bank in the world and then spent it, raw and unlaundered, on operations that had not been approved by Moscow and therefore were not controlled by Moscow.

  It made the blood run cold. Why? Why would even Peter take such a chance, commit such a folly? If they came to suspect him, they would kill him. But not before he told them everything. And then they would kill me, and everyone else, too.

  As if Morgan’s kiss had infected me with her naïveté, I was stunned by the realization that I was now alone, utterly alone. Falling snow whirled hypnotically in the headlights of my rented Buick. Driving with the utmost caution, peering into the cone of fragmented light, I fell into something resembling a trance. Faces and figures from the distant past drifted across the bleak landscape of my memory, as across an endless expanse of snow. A dog I had known in childhood, which had somehow escaped being eaten, found me on this vast and empty steppe—just the two of us suspended in a prison of space, a black-and-tan dog with wagging tail, a boy of ten who was walking across Siberia, both with empty stomachs. Why did we walk together instead of one killing and eating the other? We must not have been in Russia after all.

  The dog and I entered a birch forest. The dog scented something and ran away. I came upon a man in white, sweeping a path in the snow. It was the man in ski trooper camouflage who had swept away Peter’s footprints. I remembered the broom—a big, efficient broom with a varnished wooden stick and wonderfully supple straw. It made the snow fly, it left the path as smooth as powder; it had a life, a purpose, of its own. Like the man who had made this broom, the man who wielded it respected it. This was no Soviet broom. It was an American broom.

  Peter! I woke with a spasm of nerves and muscles. My car swerved, nearly hitting another that had been passing me at God knows what speed; the other fellow must have been drunk to be going so fast in such weather. He wore hunter’s clothes—camouflage in bright red, how odd. He blew his horn, slammed on his brakes, and barely avoided death for both of us. He shook his fist at me and sped away.

  I stopped at the next rest area. Trembling, I closed my eyes and concentrated. The scene in the birch forest returned to me in all its shades of white and I realized who it was that Peter was meeting that day, and why the man was sweeping away Peter’s footprints, and why Peter had let me witness all this. Who but a CIA station chief, overdressed egomaniacs every one, would wear such a hat as the big man wore to a secret meeting in a forest? Peter was defecting. The men in white were not his captors. They were his liberators, and they were from the CIA. Peter had let me see this man, wanted me to know who and what he was. But why? Why? Peter would not defect merely to save his own life. He had a greater purpose. He wanted me to know this. But why did I need to know? What was the plan?

  In our last moment together he had said to me about Jack, “We have never had such an asset before, and we will never again have such an opportunity as this. This operation must at all costs be preserved.”

  Now I understood his meaning. It was an order to me not to interfere no matter how great the threat seemed. There was no threat, no KGB, no CIA. Only Peter. Nothing had changed. He, Peter, carried the next revolution, the true revolution, out of Russia with him. His plan was to tell the CIA every detail of everything he knew about KGB operations—with one exception. About Jack he would tell them nothing. Because Jack was the only thing that mattered. Madness? That is certainly one word for what Peter represented.

  By now Moscow knew that he was gone, and where to. Soon they would have more evidence of his treachery than they knew what to do with. Moles would confess, networks would cease to function, the whole worldwide apparatus would be infected with the virus that Peter had become. He was the ultimate defector; he knew so much and had learned it by such devious means over such a long period of time that no one could be sure what he knew and what he did not know. The KGB would never be able to trust anyone again. It would cease to function. The apparatchiks would have to start over, reinvent themselves.

  Peter was doing all this to preserve Jack Adams.

  The KGB would never know that Peter had kept one vital fragment of knowledge—the very existence of Jack—back from the CIA. Result? Jack and Morgan were untouchable from the KGB’s point of view. Mos
cow must assume that Jack Adams had been named by Peter with all the hundreds of other assets with which Soviet intelligence had salted the American body politic.

  But would the CIA report this fact, as a fact, to the White House? Think about this for a moment. How can they be sure that Peter is telling them the truth? And if he is, is it in their interest, is it in America’s interest, to bring the issue to a head in the middle of an election campaign? The moment they did, the outraged American president would phone the new Russian president and demand satisfaction—such as a public apology for the plot and the dismissal and disgrace of the entire top leadership of the KGB, or whatever it was calling itself by then. Jack’s opponents in his own party would join in the attack, along with the entire U.S. Congress and perhaps even the media. His enemies in the party were legion; few ever believed that he actually was a Democrat or a Republican or anything else that American politics could put a name to. Asses—famous asses, liberal asses, exquisitely tender asses—would be on the line all over America.

  Besides, there was political reality to consider. Jack Adams was about to win his first primary. Who knew? He might after all become president. If that happened, no matter what the proofs of treason against him, Jack would be invulnerable. Who would dare to accuse him, the president of the United States, elected by the infallible will of the American people in the highest rite of democracy, of being the agent of a foreign intelligence service? The only possible accuser, the CIA, would destroy itself with such an allegation. Of all possible witnesses, it had the least chance of being believed by the media, the priesthood in charge of ritual executions in the United States. Besides, being a clandestine service, the CIA would prefer blackmail of the guilty president to exposure, would it not? Certainly that would be the KGB’s choice of options in such a delicious situation.

  So what now? It would take Peter at least four months to tell his CIA debriefers all that he knew—except, not to labor the point, the most important thing he knew. At the end of the debriefing, he would be fitted out by the CIA with a new identity, with a new face if he wanted one, with a house, a car, a generous stipend. A telephone number to call if he needed anything. And then the CIA would go away and leave him alone. Yes, incredible as it seems, that is what they would do. Why not? The whole world was having its memory edited. The USSR itself was vanishing. In a year it would be gone like God’s great rival Baal after his statues were overturned by the Israelites and his temple walls tumbled, his bloody altars demolished. No mystery, no god; no god, no future.

  Unless you believed in resurrection. Peter might fool the CIA, but not me, the last Soviet man.

  6 Methodical fellow that I am, I had taken certain precautions against the day when the revolution decided to eat me. Your lip curls, your eye rolls, you mutter, Preposterous! Let me brighten your day with some statistics. Forty-eight million people of all nations were killed in World War II, about half of those in the USSR. At least twenty million perished in the Soviet terror, and perhaps sixty million more in China, Cambodia, Vietnam, and other outposts of the faith. I was looking for two of the vanished, my mother and father, when I met the black-and-tan dog on the steppe. All this—the snow, the dog, my parents, the emptiness—was real, no vision. I learned a lesson. In my parents’ memory I had planned for the future. Remember, my cover in America was investor, rare-book dealer. I had been entrusted with large sums of money. In my suitcase, in the trunk of the car I was driving, I had just over one million dollars in cash. In investment accounts under two false identities, I had another couple of million. In warehouses in three different American cities I had stored valuable books and even more valuable manuscripts. Ah-ha!, you mutter. A thief as well as a slanderer. No, not one kopeck. All this wealth was interest earned on seed money provided by my masters. They got their original investment back; I kept what it had produced by breeding their cash with more vigorous American stock. Also in the suitcase, I had complete sets of documentation for two fallback identities—passports, driver’s licenses, Social Security cards, credit cards.

  I drove back to New York, arriving at four in the morning. I parked the Buick near the Port Authority Bus Terminal with thekeys in the ignition. Then I took the subway to Penn Station, a train to Baltimore, and finally a plane to Miami, changing in Winston-Salem, where I went into town and placed some things in a safe deposit box.

  In Miami Beach I rented a modest furnished apartment and moved in. Over the weeks that followed I watched the news for traces of Peter and had some minor plastic surgery done: a higher bridge for my Slavic nose, a few millimeters off my Asiatic cheekbones, an eye job to get rid of the epicanthic fold. While waiting for my face to heal, I went on the Ultra Slim Fast diet—if it worked for Tommy Lasorda, why not for a mujik like me?—and shed thirty pounds. In a new voice, with new facial expressions, I carried on imaginary conversations in front of a video camera and then studied my performance on-screen. Gradually I exchanged old mannerisms for new ones and adopted a new way of walking—a sauntering, hands-in-pockets American shamble with a touch of sea legs.

  In the mirror I still looked very much the same, but in matters of disguise, major changes are not necessary. A loss in weight and the mere act of exchanging suit and tie for shorts, sandals, and a Florida shirt would have been enough to render me unrecognizable to all but the keenest of eyes. Just the same, a little extra never hurts. I did not imagine that I could deceive Peter’s eyes if ever they fell on me again. I merely wanted to pass unnoticed through the circle of disciples that would certainly surround him.

  7 Jack won the New Hampshire primary, then Iowa. Three of the six original candidates withdrew from the race, including the one the party leaders had favored. All threw their support to the candidate who was Jack’s closest competitor in the polls. No matter. The media, in their deep affinity for the unlikely and the implausible and in their historic affection for the right kind of scoundrel, had chosen Jack as the winner. His face was on every front page, every television screen. The camera, famous for capturing the great and holding them hostage, surrendered like a smitten trollop to Jack and made the world see him as more lovable, wiser, and more human than he actually was.

  But that was what Jack was all about. He made liars of us all by recruiting us to defend a faith worth lying for.

  By some bizarre alchemy that no one except Jack himself pretended to understand, film and videotape concealed his true character rather than driving the real Jack out of hiding for all to see. When I say that Jack alone understood this phenomenon, I mean that he believed that he had inherited his strange power over the lens from his real father, JFK, that it was in his blood, or was perhaps part of some pact the Kennedys had made with whatever invisible power controls such matters. Had he been Nixon’s love child his image would have seemed to squirm and sweat no matter how much the human being that embodies it stood tall and smiled. Danny called this the Dorian Gray factor. In his sound bites, Jack was modesty itself, a man who was as mystified by the workings of the Lord as the next most humble citizen in the land. Actually he knew in his bones that he was under the protection of quite a different supernatural power. Jack smiled and spoke softly to turn away wrath; he hoped that he was worthy of the trust that was being invested in his ideas, his vision. He stood up for his ideas without really having any ideas. He defended grand concepts and proposed trivial solutions to meaningless problems. He was hailed by pundits as a thinker. Naturally he made enemies.

  On the day before the next important primary after Iowa—who can remember them all?—a leading tabloid ran the full, delicious story of the girl bodyguard: smoking pistol, outraged wife, and all. She posed in a bikini, wearing her trooper Stetson and pistol harness. The story was a one-week sensation. Holding hands with Morgan and the twins—they were on their way to church—Jack told a television crew that he honestly could not remember this unfortunate young woman. His advisers told him she had indeed served on his staff of bodyguards for less than two weeks, and had been dismissed for los
ing her weapon and other items of equipment. With a smile of Christian forgiveness, Jack told the world he hoped with all his heart that this deluded young person would get the help she needed. He made his statement to the cameras while standing in front of a tumbledown little AME Zion chapel, Bible in hand. No one who saw Morgan’s upturned face, beaming at Jack as he spoke, could doubt that she believed every word her husband said.

  Jack won the primary, though more narrowly than forecast. His desperate opponents were encouraged by this faint evidence that he might be vulnerable on the character issue. Soon they had more reason to hope that the public was getting wise to this man they could not defeat. Half a dozen women who claimed to have performed sexual services for Jack, willingly and otherwise, come forward with their stories. Jack denied nothing. He merely repeated, in every case, what he had said in the first case: He honestly didn’t remember the lady. His puzzlement gave way at length to anger—suppressed but all too evident to his friend the minicam—that his family should be put through this tawdry exercise in dirty politics. Finally, on a syndicated confession program watched by millions of women all over the world, Jack’s beautiful and obviously loyal and adoring wife, flanked by their darling twin sons, broke the dignified silence with which she had previously treated these allegations.

  “Morgan,” asked the host, the most influential woman in America, “how do you feel in your inner self when you hear these stories?”

  A blush, a sigh. A search for words while staring straight into America’s eyes. “To be honest, I just feel sorry for these women,” Morgan replied. “All they have is their fantasies. I have Jack Adams, and I’m the luckiest woman in the world.”

  “Morgan, when you hear these terrible stories that you can’t believe, do you ever ask yourself Why?”