The Company: A Novel of the CIA (122 page)

Some of the DO people began to titter—they had heard the story before.

"The census taker counts heads but finds only twenty-one. Turns out that Little Luke is missing. Then someone shouts from the outhouse—Little Luke has fallen through the privy hole. Everyone runs over to take a look. The father shrugs and wanders off. The census taker can't believe his eyes. Aren't you going to pull him out?' he shouts. 'Shucks no,' the father calls back. 'It'll be easier to have another than clean him up.'"

Half the DO staffers burst into laughter. Others raised their eyebrows. Manny gazed at the floor. The officer who told the joke turned his head and looked across the room directly at the DCI.

"Jesus H. Christ," Jack moaned angrily. He would have strode over to have it out with the retiring officer then and there if Ebby hadn't put a hand on his arm.

"These guys were hotshots when they started, but they're burnt out," Ebby said in a low voice.

"That doesn't give him the right—"

"Getting rid of the deadwood is a painful experience for everyone concerned. Grin and bear it, Jack."

Later, in the DCI's seventh-floor Holy of Holies, Jack flopped into a seat across the desk from Ebby. "What he said back there—there may be some truth to it," he moaned. "There are people in Congress who'd prefer to start from scratch rather man give us a chance to clean up the mess Casey left behind him."

"Ran into several of them when I testified this morning," Ebby said.

Jack leaned forward. "I've given this a lot of thought, Ebby. Fighting Columbian drug lords or Islamic terrorists or Russian arms merchants is too much of a sideshow to justify the twenty-eight billion spent on intelligence every year. Look at it another way: How are we going to recruit the best and the brightest if our archenemy is Cuba?"

"You have another idea of what we should be doing?"

"As a matter of fact, I do." Jack got up and strolled over to the door, which was ajar, and kicked it closed. He came around behind Ebby and settled onto on a windowsill.

Ebby swiveled around to face him. "Spit it out, Jack."

"I nibbled around the edges of the subject with you when Anthony was kidnapped by the fundamentalists in Afghanistan. We were in a no-win situation then, we're in a no-win situation now. Congress ties our hands with oversight and budget restrictions and strict limitations on Presidential Findings—my God, Ebby, it's actually against the law for us to target a foreign leader, it doesn't matter that he may be targeting us."

"I remember that conversation—at the time I told you that the CIA was an endangered species and couldn't afford to get involved in what you had in mind."

"At the time," Jack retorted in annoyance, "I told you that we wouldn't have to get involved. We could get others to do the dirty work for us—"

"It would be a violation of our charter—"

"Take this Gorbachev thing—even if we knew what was going on we'd be helpless to do anything about it."

"I'm not sure I want to have this conversation—"

"You're having the conversation—"

"What do you mean by doing something about it?"

"You know what I mean? We could get Torriti to put a toe in the water. Ezra ben Ezra still runs the Mossad—he could be counted on to contribute resources to an enterprise that keeps Gorbachev in power and Jewish emigration from Russia going."

Ebby turned sarcastic. "Contribute to an enterprise—you make it sound so congenial. You make it sound almost legal."

"Those dollars being stashed in Germany by the Russians—If we could get our hands on some of them, the enterprise could become a self-financing entity operating outside of Congressional appropriations and oversight."

"Casey tried to pull that off by selling arms to the Iranians and using the money to support the contra rebels in Nicaragua. I don't need to remind you that it blew up in his face."

"We're supposed to be a shadowy organization, Ebby. I'm only suggesting that we start to operate in the shadows."

Ebby sighed. "Look, Jack, we've fought the same wars, we bear the same scars. But you're wide of the mark now. Because the enemy doesn't have scruples is no excuse for the Company not having scruples. If we fight the wars their way, even if we win, we lose. Don't you see that?"

"What I see is that ends justify means—"

"That's a meaningless catch phrase unless you weigh each case on its merits. Which ends? Which means? And what are the chances of a particular mean achieving a particular end?"

"If we don't score, and soon, they'll break up the Company," Jack said.

"So be it," Ebby said. "If you want to continue working for me," he added, "you'll do so on my terms. There will be no enterprise as long as I'm running the show. I'm the custodian of the CIA. I take that responsibility very seriously. You read me, Jack?"

"I read you, pal. Like the man says, you're right from your point of view. But your point of view needs work."

2

PERKHUSHOVO, FRIDAY, APRIL 19, 1991

"I HAVE IRREFUTABLE EVIDENCE," ASSERTED THE KGB CHAIRMAN, Vladimir Kryuchkov, "that the American CIA has succeeded in infiltrating its agents into Gorbachev's inner circle."

At the end of the table, the Minister of Defense, Marshal Dmitri Yazov, a dull, plodding old soldier with a broad chunky face, demanded, "Name names."

Kryuchkov, happy to comply, identified five figures known to be intimate with the General Secretary. "Any idiot can see that Gorbachev is being manipulated by the CIA—it is part of an American plot to sabotage first the Soviet administration, and after that the economy and scientific research. The ultimate goal is the destruction of the Communist Party and the Union, the crushing of Socialism and the elimination of the Soviet Union as a world power capable of holding American arrogance in check."

The eighteen men and one women seated around the long outdoor picnic table listened in consternation. Yevgeny, taking in the scene from a place half way down the table, decided that the last time he had seen so many VIPs in one place was when the television cameras panned to the reviewing stand atop Lenin's Tomb during Red Square May Day parades. At midmorning, the limousines had started arriving at the stately wooden dacha on the edge of the village of Perkhushovo off the Mozhaysk Highway. The guests had sipped punch and had chatted amiably in a large room overheated by a tiled stove as they waited for the latecomers to turn up. One ranking member of the Politburo secretariat had complained about the cost of sending a daughter to a Swiss boarding school and the people listening had nodded in empathy. Eventually everyone had pulled on overcoats—the last snow of the winter had melted but the air was still chilly—and trooped outside to thwart any microphones that might have been installed inside the dacha. Vladimir Kryuchkov's guests hunted for their nametags and took the places assigned to them around the long picnic table set up under a stand of Siberian spruce. Beyond the trees, the lawn sloped down to a large lake on which several dozen teenagers were racing small sailboats. From time to time shrieks of exaltation drifted up hill as the helmsmen wheeled around the buoys marking the course. To the left, through the trees, armed guards could be seen patrolling the electrified fence that surrounded the property.

Mathilde, sitting directly opposite Yevgeny, dispatched a smile of complicity across the table, then turned to whisper in the ear of her husband, Pavel Uritzky. An austere man who made no secret of his deep aversion for Jews, he nodded in agreement and addressed Kryuchkov, presiding from the head of the table. "Vladimir Alexandrovich, the story of CIA spies within Gorbachev's inner circle may be the drop that causes the bucket to overflow. It is one thing to disagree with Gorbachev, as we all do; to reproach him for abandoning the fraternal Socialist states of Eastern Europe, to criticize him for spitting on our Bolshevik history, to fault him for plunging headlong into economic reforms without having the wildest idea of where he was taking the country. It is quite another to accuse him of being manipulated into doing the dirty work of the American CIA. Have you exposed your charges directly to the General Secretary?"

"I attempted to warn him during our regular briefings," Kryuchkov replied. "I can tell you that he invariably cuts me short and changes the subject. He obviously does not want to hear me out; the few times I have managed to get a word in, he has waved a hand in the air as if to say that he does not believe my information."

"Knowingly or unknowingly, Gorbachev is selling the Soviet Union to the devil," Mathilde declared with great passion.

"The country is facing famine," claimed the Soviet prime minister, Valentin Pavlov, from the other end of the table. "The economy has been reduced to total chaos. Nobody wants to carry out orders. Factories have cut production because they lack raw materials. The harvest is disorganized. Tractors sit idle because there are no spare parts."

"Our beloved country is going to the dogs," agreed Valentin Varennikov, the general in charge of all Soviet ground forces. "Tax rates are so prohibitive no one can pay and remain in business. Retired workers who have devoted their lives to Communism are reduced to brewing carrot peelings because they can no longer afford tea on their miserable pensions."

Mathilde's husband slapped the table with the palm of his hand. "It's the fault of the Jews," he insisted. "They bear collective responsibility for the genocide of the Russian people."

Mathilde said, "I wholeheartedly agree with my husband—I hold the view that Jews must be forbidden to emigrate, and most especially to the Zionist entity of Israel, until a tribunal of the Russian people has had a chance to weigh their fate. After all, these Jews were born and educated here at state expense—it is only fitting that the state be compensated."

One of the foreign ministry apparatchiki, Fyodor Lomov, the great-grandson of a famous old Bolshevik who served as the first Peoples Commissar of Justice after the 1917 revolution, spoke up. "It is well known that Jewish architects designed Pushkin Square so that the great Pushkin had his back turned to the motion picture theater, the Rossiya. The symbolism escaped no one." Lomov, a bloated figure of a man with yellowish liquor stains in his snow-white goatee, added, "The zhids and Zionists are responsible for rock music, drug addiction, AIDS, food shortages, inflation, the decline in the value of the ruble, pornography on television, even the breakdown of the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl."

As the meeting went on, the plotters (as Yevgeny began to think of them) exposed their resentments and fears. Emotions ran high; there were moments when several people were talking at once and Kryuchkov, like a teacher managing an unruly classroom, had to point to someone so the others would give way to him.

"Gorbachev deceived us into thinking he intended to tinker with the Party structure. He never let on that he intended to destroy it."

"Malicious mockery of all the institutions of the state is commonplace."

"I speak from experience—authority on all levels has lost the confidence of the population."

"The state's coffers are empty—the government is regularly late in paying military salaries and pensions."

"The Soviet Union has, in effect, become ungovernable."

"Soviet armies were humiliated by Gorbachev's decision to retreat from Afghanistan."

"The drastic cuts in the military budget, and the inability to come up with the sums that are budgeted, have left us badly positioned to deal with the Americans after their hundred-hour triumph in the Gulf War."

Kryuchkov searched the faces around the table and said, very solemnly, "The only hope is to declare a state of emergency."

"Gorbachev will never consent to a state of emergency," Paval Uritzky observed.

"In that case," Kryuchkov said, "we will have to consent to a state of emergency for him. I ask those who agree with this analysis to raise a hand." Around the table nineteen hands went up.

From the lake far below came the howling of a teenager whose boat had capsized. The other boats closed in on the boy from all directions and dragged him out of the water. One of the young girls watching from the shoreline shouted uphill, "They've got him—he's all right."

"When it comes time to launch our project," remarked Uritzky, "we must not be squeamish about people falling overboard." He arched his brows knowingly. Many around the table chuckled.

Later, when the meeting broke up and the guests began drifting toward the limousines, Kryuchkov took Yevgeny aside. "We have a mutual friend who speaks highly of you," the KGB Chairman said. "Your work in the Centre is known to me, your devotion to our cause is legendary within a closed circle of colleagues."

Yevgeny said, "I did my duty. Comrade Chairman, nothing more." Kryuchkov permitted a humorless smile onto his face. "There are fewer and fewer who use the term Comrade since Gorbachev took power." He steered Yevgeny into the bathroom and turned on the two faucets full blast. "One amongst us—a senior official responsible for the Central Committee finances—has managed over the years to move important sums of foreign currency into Germany and convert them, with the complicity of what the Germans call the Devisenbeschaffer—the currency acquirer—into dollars and gold. If we are to sideline Gorbachev and declare a state of emergency, we will need large amounts of cash to finance our movement. Once we are successful, it will be of paramount importance to immediately stock the shelves of the food and liquor stores in the major cities to demonstrate our capacity to bring order out of Gorbachev's chaos—we'll reduce the prices of staples, and most especially of vodka. We'll also send out back pension checks to retired people who haven't been paid in months. To accomplish this will require an immediate infusion of capital."

Yevgeny nodded. "I am beginning to understand why I was invited—"

"Your Greater Russian Bank of Commerce has a branch in Germany, I am told."

"Two, in fact. One in Berlin, one in Dresden."

"I ask you bluntly—can we count on your help, Comrade?"

Yevgeny nodded vigorously. "I have not fought for Communism my entire life to see it humiliated by a reformer who is manipulated by the Principal Adversary."