Shadowplay

by Norman Hartley

  ‘It’s good news for Jennifer too. It makes her safer; there’s not much point in killing her now. Even dead, she’d be hard to frame as an agent. And for me,’ he went on, ‘it was also terrific news because it got the director off my back. I wasn’t kidding when I said that backing you dented my credibility a bit. Now I’ve scored some brownie points and I’ve got my freedom of action back.’

  ‘To do what?’ I said.

  ‘To follow up the one lead I’ve got that might take us to the real mole.’

  ‘You mean you have a suspect?’

  ‘No. That’s too strong. But I have suspicions, and I also have a place where I think I can check them out. That’s what the trip’s all about.’

  Ryder grinned.

  ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘if you had to name your own enemy, the guy who’s doing this to you, who would you want it to be?’

  I didn’t even hesitate.

  ‘Paul Sellinger.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To simplify life. As an ally, he’s so treacherous he’s already an enemy. If he was behind this, I’d only have one adversary to worry about.’

  Ryder grinned. ‘Pretty good rationalization for this time in the morning. Now tell me why you really want it to be Paul.’

  I smiled. ‘Because I hate the bastard more than I’ve ever hated any other human being, and if I could prove that he was a Soviet agent and a traitor I’d go to my grave happy.’

  ‘Better,’ Ryder said. ‘Much better. That’s much more like it.’

  He paused. ‘So you wouldn’t be too upset if I told you that in the past eighteen months, Paul Sellinger has made four ultra-secret trips to Prague and on three of them, he’s gone straight on to Moscow. As far as I can find out, the trips had nothing to do with World News and they were not known to anyone in the Sellinger Corporation.’

  It was an exquisite moment. I felt the shiver run all the way up from the small of my back.

  ‘Ooh,’ I said. ‘I like it, Bob. I like it. You’re quite sure.’

  ‘Yes. I got it from a man in Prague that I trained personally and put in place ten years ago. While you were in St. Tropez. He believes Sellinger is collaborating with the Soviets.’

  ‘I want to believe it,’ I said. ‘But why? What possible motive can he have?’

  ‘The word I have from inside the Sellinger Corporation is that the rift between Paul and Robert is much more serious than I’d realized. I have it from a source I trust that Robert is trying to freeze Paul out altogether. Jacob seems to be going along with that. If that’s true, I’m sure Paul is capable of using the Soviets to scuttle the Starburst program to destroy Robert.’

  ‘You think?’

  ‘John, I’ve watched the Sellingers for years,’ Ryder said. ‘Longer than you have. Long before the merger brought you nose to nose with Paul. They behave like gods. They really think they stride the earth like giants. Their passions, their emotions get out of balance too.’

  ‘One thing fits,’ I said.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘If it were Paul, he’d never do it without setting up a sacrificial mole. There’s no way Paul’s ever going to finish up in a grace-and-favor flat in Moscow with some dreary dacha for weekends.’

  ‘No,’ Ryder said, ‘that’s for damned sure.’

  ‘And you think you can get proof?’ I said.

  ‘Yes, there’s a good chance. Do you know who the ID people are?’

  ‘Yes, more or less.’

  ID stood for Intelligence Dissidents. The group operated out of Athens and seemed to consist mostly of ex-CIA employees who had quit the Company because they believed it had itself become subversive and unconstitutional. The name was also a play on words, since the ID people’s main activity was revealing the identity of CIA agents who were still active. Most journalists regarded it as a minor miracle that they hadn’t all long since met with serious accidents in the Athens traffic.

  ‘What you don’t know, I’ll fill in on the flight,’ Ryder said. ‘The important thing is that one of the ID people, a guy called Ray Truscott, wants to come back into the fold. He doesn’t like the world outside the Company. His price is information about a document he says the ID leader, Philip Ackerman, has come by. Truscott has never seen the contents but he claims it names the Starburst mole and tells the whole story. Now, thanks to your beloved Seagull, I have clearance to launch a little raid.’

  He grinned. ‘Much as I love you, John, that was why I woke up Momma Ross at three o’clock this morning. Now, do you still want to go and sit in your nice cozy World News Building?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I think I’d rather go a-hunting.’

  Ryder led me out onto the airfield and I saw Cox hurrying down by the side of the building, carrying a U.S. Air Force bag. I waved and Cox saw my smile but he didn’t return it. I took him quickly aside and said, ‘What’s the matter? Something wrong?’

  ‘Nope. I’m just worried, that’s all.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘It’s that cat-with-the-cream look on your face. I could tell at fifty yards that Ryder’s told you about Paul Sellinger.’

  ‘He’s already briefed you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So what do you think?’

  ‘Chief, when we were in St. Tropez,’ Cox said seriously, ‘you made me keeper of the royal objectivity. So I’m telling you: Don’t prejudge. You hate him too much. He’s the only enemy you want or need. Well, maybe it is him. But there’s nothing unusual about vodka-cola contacts. He could have been on a secret mission for the Sellinger Corporation. Shit, corporations are so fucking cynical, he could be looking for a site to build a Starburst plant.’

  ‘And what about the rift between Paul and Robert?’ I said.

  ‘Two brothers hate each other. So what else is new? Chief, just get on the plane and wait until you see the document-Okay?’

  ‘You’re right, of course,’ I said.

  ‘Natch. I’ve a genius for being right. That’s why execs like me end up feeding penguins in Reykjavik.’

  16

  ‘If the ID people operate out of Athens,’ I said, ‘what the hell are we doing in Rome? Are we refueling?’

  The question brought laughter from all around the cabin of the Grumman Firestream, but I noticed that the six men making up Ryder’s special assault squad waited a respectful split second for him to laugh first. It was obvious that I’d hit on some CIA in-house joke, but Bob wasn’t ready to enlighten me. ‘No, we’re not refueling,’ he said. ‘This is the end of the line. I’ll explain it when we’re at the base house.’

  It had taken me several minutes to work out where we were as the plane taxied down the tiny military airstrip. We could have been on the industrial outskirts of half a dozen European cities, but it certainly wasn’t Athens; the hill configurations around the field were all wrong for that. Eventually, I recognized Parioli, the eighth and least-known hill of Rome. From the airstrip we were seeing it from its unfamiliar side, as a nondescript hump at the edge of a plain given over to light industrial factories and warehouses, but I knew the district well and I spotted some apartment buildings on the crest which I knew formed part of the Anglo-American residential ghetto that covered most of the hilltop.

  It was almost six o’clock. The small Grumman had taken almost six hours to reach Rome, and on the flight Ryder had apologized, saying he wanted to use a very small strip and hadn’t wanted to change planes at any of the major airfields en route. I’d gathered that the mission was not only secret, it was also barely official within the Company itself. Ryder had what he called personal authorization from the director’s office, but I had the distinct feeling that if the raid went wrong the authorization papers might just mysteriously become missing. Ryder had brought six men from England but others would be joining the team from the CIA Rome station. Cox and I were to take no part; in fact, Cox was not going farther than what Ryder referred to as the base house. Cox was disappointed, but I wasn’t entirely unhappy; if so
mething did go wrong, the less direct World News involvement had, the better.

  The base house turned out to be a part of an anonymous, modern housing complex at the edge of the industrial area. It was detached, and cut off from the surrounding houses by a high walled yard. The houses were even less Italian-looking than the industrial area; they were in a hollow at the foot of a scrubby cliff and looked as though they had been assembled in factory-built kits. The hollow would be a sun trap in the morning, but now it was in shadow and the solitary umbrella pine gave nothing of the Mediterranean look of the usual Roman suburb. The rest of the trees, like the houses, could have been ‘Euro models’ and the little enclave might have been in Munich or Brussels or Amsterdam.

  When we were inside, I asked again why we were in Rome. Ryder grinned and I noticed a slight touch of gentle malice in his voice as he said, ‘You’re about to learn one of the best-kept secrets in the intelligence business. The IDs’ Athens HQ is strictly for the benefit of the media. The ID people appear to operate out of Athens, but they actually live in Rome.’

  When he explained it to me, I couldn’t help being a bit irritated. The CIA, it seemed, fostered the myth that the office in the Athens suburb where the ID people gave their monthly press briefings was also their base, because they wanted to carry on their own dealings with the dissidents, free of the prying eyes of the media. I didn’t like the idea of the press being fooled that easily, but I admit I was fascinated by the curious symbiotic relationship that apparently existed between the CIA and the dissidents.

  Bob described the ID organization as a way station for waverers who were disillusioned with intelligence work but couldn’t cope with life out in the cold. Such people gravitated naturally to places where other ex-intelligence people gathered, looking for somewhere to reattach their umbilical cords. Many had regrets and tried to buy their way back in to the Company with information picked up in this fringe network of disaffected agents.

  There were, he said, several such organizations, but the ID people were the most valuable to the CIA, ironically, because ID’s anti-CIA successes had given it real credibility and had drawn to it the disaffected of other, hostile intelligence agencies. Its leftist inclinations also plugged it into Europe’s urban guerrilla and terrorist networks and it had become a clearinghouse for information from a whole web of subversion throughout Europe. By subtle manipulation of the waverers, the CIA was also plugged in, but the price it had paid was the inability to head off the exposure of its own agents.

  When I asked Bob what would happen to the IDs after the raid, I gathered he had not personally favored the Company’s tolerance of the organization. He said abruptly, ‘We lost one too many good buddies because of that bastard Ackerman. Some people in the Company got greedy; they were getting too much good material. There were people in the Director’s office who wanted to gamble that Ackerman would run out of names.’

  The leader, Philip Ackerman, was not, in anyone’s book, a waverer. According to Ryder, he had been pushed out of the CIA with a dishonorable discharge after a mission failure which had cost the lives of four of his men, and he had inverted his guilt into a passionate need to blame the CIA for all the sins of the U.S. government and the Western world at large.

  ‘It sure as hell isn’t the way the media sees the ID people,’ I said, when he’d finished. Ryder shrugged. ‘This is a private war. Company versus the IDs. Private wars need private battlegrounds.’

  ‘I don’t like private wars much,’ I said.

  ‘A lot more about my trade is private than you realize,’ Ryder said, unapologetically. ‘It’s the nature of the beast. There’s a public mythology about spying and there’s spying. They’re not the same. Sorry, old buddy.’

  I still didn’t like it, but I had even more of a shock when Ryder took a reconnaissance trip to check on the preparations for the operation and I discovered that the building where the ID people had their headquarters was not much more than a block from the apartment of the World News chief Rome correspondent.

  As chief of correspondents, I’d been there often when Ray Swallow had been bureau chief, and from the balcony where I’d listened to Ray’s good-humored griping about the Rome allowances, I could have thrown a stone onto the ID people’s rooftop.

  After a quick circuit of the hill we parked at the edge of a small ornamental garden, where we might have been admiring the view over the eastern slopes of Parioli, and watched the entrance to the ID headquarters.

  ‘The tricky part of the raid is getting in,’ Bob said. ‘Being ex-agents, the ID people have some pretty bright security ideas.’

  He gave me a quick summary of their defenses. There was no front or back door to the ID building; the windows had been sealed and barred and the windowsills removed to make it harder to climb the yellow brickwork of the outside walls. From the street, the main entrance and the side door appeared quite normal, but the glass lobbies led nowhere, except to blank, bricked-up walls. No one ever entered the building on foot, which explained why successive WN chief correspondents had managed to live practically on the same street without recognizing a face as well-known as Philip Ackerman’s.

  The only entrance was through the garage which was below road level, down a steep ramp. According to Ryder’s surveillance reports, cars entered the ramp, went through an electronic security screen when they were halfway down, then the garage doors opened very fast and closed again equally fast once the car was through. When I asked Bob how he planned to get in, he said enigmatically, ‘We’re going to ride in on Mr. Ackerman’s coattails.’

  I caught a smile on the face of the young Texan driver and once again I had the feeling that I was not going to be made part of the in group, despite my friendship with Bob. ‘Don’t try to do anything,’ Bob had said. ‘Just accept that you’re an observer, with the correspondent’s ringside seat, only this time you’re getting a bit closer up than usual.’

  Since we’d left the base house Bob had, in fact, been treating me quite distantly. He wasn’t cold exactly, but he had withdrawn into a shell which included the rest of the assault team and excluded me, and I suspected that he might just be bothered by some residual memories of the West African business. It seemed important to him to emphasize the difference the years had made. When I had saved his life he had been a vulnerable kid without too many physical skills, on a first assignment that no one had wanted him to have. Now he was one of the CIA’s folk heroes and I didn’t blame him for being a bit reserved with me; it’s always difficult to be a myth figure when you’re with someone who’s seen the other side of your face.

  I noticed too that he had the extra responsibilities that came with hero worship. The members of the assault team were all very young. I suspected that for most, this was their first operation and they were drawing a lot of reassurance from Ryder’s reputation. If Ryder had told them, on a whim, to swim through the sewers to Trastevere, they would only have paused long enough to ask where to draw their wet suits, but it was obvious there were going to be no whims. The raid had been meticulously planned, long before Seagull’s innocence had allowed it to go ahead.

  On the tour of the hilltop, Ryder had indicated two vans. One had the markings of the City of Rome urban maintenance department, the other appeared to be an ambulance belonging to the emergency services. There were two men in each cab and presumably more inside, and the ones who were visible looked far more Italian in appearance than the team from London. ‘They’re the Rome station people,’ Bob said. ‘With a bit of luck we won’t need them,’ he added, but without explaining.

  I gathered that we were waiting for the arrival of Truscott, the ex-agent who had given Ryder the original tip. ‘He won’t be coming on the raid,’ Bob said. ‘He’s going to point out Ackerman’s car. It’s better if he doesn’t go along after that.’

  Again he didn’t explain, and again I caught a little smile on the driver’s face.

  Then a few minutes later, Truscott arrived and I understood: he looked as
though he were barely holding himself back from a nervous breakdown. I may have been projecting onto him everything Ryder had been telling me about the schizophrenia of the ex-agents in organizations like ID, but it seemed as though Truscott’s personality had not just split but had fragmented into a dozen facets, and he seemed to jump about from one to the other. One minute he was being deferential to Ryder, talking about old times and hinting with almost palpable yearning about good times to come when he was ‘back in the Company.’ The next minute, he was attacking the policies of the administration with a venom that made his hands tremble.

  His appearance didn’t help either. I doubt if he was much over thirty, but he had a sallow face and drawn eyes. His hair was carrot-colored and he had a beard made up of reddish whiskers of two different shades, neither of them exactly matching the hair, which added to the wild and unstable look. No personnel manager would have hired him as an elevator operator, but Ryder chatted calmly with him as though he were only days away from being reinstated into the very highest echelons in Langley, and I sat quietly praying that he hadn’t hallucinated the document naming the Starburst mole.

  From the talk, I didn’t learn much more about the operation, but I did build up a picture of the inside of ID headquarters. It had once been a three-story apartment building set into the hillside, with the top floor at the level of the steep road that wound down Parioli hill. The ID people had apparently gutted it and turned it into a mini-fortress, joining all the apartments together. It was run like an officers’ mess, with a bar and lounge and a number of bedrooms that ID people could use for short or long stays. In the back of the first level were Ackerman’s own quarters: an office where the safe was located, with an annex which he used for conferences, and a bedroom and bathroom which formed his private quarters. The building had been under surveillance for some time and I gathered Ackerman usually came into the building in midevening. He varied the time and the car he used and though the surveillance team thought they had most of the vehicles pinpointed, it had been decided to use Truscott to make the final verification.