The Company: A Novel of the CIA (129 page)

The Sorcerer changed trains several times, making sure he was the last person off and the last on as the doors closed. He eventually rode another escalator to the street, ducked into a toy store with nearly empty shelves and emerged through a back door into an alleyway that led to another street. There he flagged down a gypsy cab and made his way back to the fifth-floor room in the Hotel Ukraine. Locking himself in the bathroom, he tore out the upper right-hand quarter of page four and heated it over a naked light bulb. Within seconds writing in lemon juice began to emerge.

D-day is 1 Sept. General in charge of ground forces, Varennikov, working out of KGB complex in Mashkino, is drawing up plans to infiltrate KGB's Dzerzhinsky Division, units from the Kantemirov Division and the Taman Guards and paratroop elements from Ryazan Airborne Division into Moscow to control strategic points. Gorbachev to be isolated under house arrest while plotters declare state of emergency and take control of government organs. For God's sake, somebody do something before it's too late.

Torriti copied the pertinent details in a minuscule handwriting onto a slip of paper and hid it under the instep of his left shoe. He burned the quarter page of newspaper in an ashtray and flushed the cinders down the toilet. Moments later, at a public booth around the corner from the hotel, he fed a coin into the slot and dialed the number the Rabbi had given him if he needed to communicate with the Israelis in Dresden quickly.

A woman answered the phone. "Pazhalista?"

"I have been told you sell rare Persian carpets at rock bottom prices," Torriti said.

"Please, who said you this information?"

"A little birdie name of Ezra."

"Ezra, bless his heart! He is from time to time sending clients. Sure thing, you come by and we are showing you Persian carpets until your head spins dizzy. You are having my address?"

"I am having your address, lady."

Torriti set the phone back down on its hook, treated himself to a restorative shot of booze from his nearly empty flask and, pulling up the collar of a rumpled sports jacket that had been washed and worn to death, headed for the Arbat.

The Rabbi snared the intercom speaker with one of his canes and dragged the small wooden box closer so he wouldn't miss a word. He held his breath and listened, but all he heard was absolute silence. Then a primeval curdling whimper filled the room. It originated at the bottom of a deep pit of physical pain. Ben Ezra winced: he had to remind himself that ends did justify means; that the ends, continuing to get hundreds of thousands of Jews out of Russia, vindicated the torture of one man who was involved in a plot to prevent it. Gradually the whimper faded and one of the young men could be heard repeating the question.

What is the secret identification number that provides access to the account.

When the Devisenbeschaffer didn't immediately respond, the low buzz of what sounded like an electric razor came over the speaker. Then words detonated like Chinese firecrackers set off in series.

Nicht-das—schalte-es-aus—Ich-werde-es-Dir-sagen!

Enough, a voice ordered. Switch it off.

The buzzing stopped.

The numbers came across sandwiched between sobs and whimpers. Seven-eight-four-two, then the word Wolke, then nine-one-one.

The Rabbi scratched the numbers and the word on a pad. Seven-eight-four-two, then Wolke or cloud, then nine-one-one. He filled his lungs with air and looked up. It was a given in the world of espionage that everyone broke sooner or later. Ben Ezra knew of Jews on mission who had been instructed to hold out long enough to permit the others in their network to escape; sometimes they had, enduring torture for two, two-and-a-half days, sometimes they broke sooner. The Rabbi's own son had been caught in Syria in the mid-1970s and tortured for thirty-four hours before he cracked, at which point he had been sponged and dressed in white pajamas and hanged from a crude wooden gibbet. The German had absorbed more punishment than most; his rage at Jews had numbed him to a portion of the pain he was suffering. But he had broken.

What remained, now, was to test the numbers—and assuming, as he did, that they were correct, to take control of the Devisenbeschaffer's deposits, divert the funds into various bank accounts in Switzerland and send the prearranged message to Jack McAuliffe informing him the dirty deed was done. At which point it would be up to the Sorcerer to fulfill his part of the pact. Ben Ezra had received the Sorcerer's message the previous evening: the putsch was set for 1 September. Using a scrambled telephone in a Mossad safe house, talking cryptically as an added precaution, the Rabbi had passed this detail on to Jack McAuliffe in Washington. "Our mutual friend," Ben Ezra had said, "reminds us that we must get our applications in before the first of September if we hope to win any fellowships; any later will be too late."

"The first of September," Jack had noted on his end of the line, "doesn't leave us much time to get recommendations from the eight or ten key figures in Moscow; does our mutual friend think he can contact these people before the deadline?"

" He has started the ball rolling," the Rabbi had replied. "He expects to have the eight or ten recommendations in hand by the last week in August."

"That's cutting it pretty fine," Jack had shot back; "any possibility of speeding up the process?"

" Getting recommendations from eight or ten people at more or less the same time is a complicated process," Ben Ezra had cautioned Jack; "and we are obliged, for obvious reasons, to get it right the first time, there's no going back for a second try."

"Okay," Jack had said reluctantly, "I'll settle for the last week in August."

Now, sitting at a table in the upper floor office of the meatpacking factory, the Rabbi turned the intercom speaker around to unplug the cord. Peering through the thick lenses of his spectacles, his eyes glazed with the pain that was his constant companion, he saw, in the open back of the box, a tiny red-and-black spider dancing across tendrils that were so fine they were invisible to the naked eye. The spider, appearing suspended in space, froze when Ben Ezra touched one of the strands with his thumbnail. It waited with endless patience, trying to determine if the vibrations it had picked up signaled danger. Finally it risked a tentative movement, then swiftly clawed across its invisible web and vanished into the cavernous safety of the intercom speaker.

Something resembling a scowl surfaced on Ben Ezra's bone-dry lips. His time was growing short. Soon he, too, would claw his way across an invisible web, his bad hip thrusting forward and around and back with each painful step, and vanish into the cavernous safety of the land that the Lord God had bequeathed to the descendants of the Patriarch Abraham.

The siren atop the guard tower sounded high noon at the KGB complex in the village of Mashkino, a series of two-story, L-shaped brick satellites connected by covered passageways to the nuclear headquarters building. In the small air-conditioned conference room on the second floor of this building, the KGB Chairman, Vladimir Kryuchkov, in the best of times a testy man who tended to see the cup half empty rather man half full, stared grimly out a window. Behind him the voice of Fyodor Lomov, the foreign ministry apparatchik, droned on as he read aloud from the file that had accompanied the photographs rushed over that morning by motorcycle courier.

It seemed that the Israeli desk of the Second Chief Directorate had a surveillance team watching a husband and wife of Jewish origin who sold Oriental carpets in a hole-in-the-wall shop on a side street off the Arbat. The couple was known to have provided safe house and communication services for the Israeli Mossad in the past. The surveillance team, working out of a vacant apartment diagonally across the street from the carpet store, systematically photographed everyone going in or out of the shop. These photographs were developed every night and delivered to the Second Chief Directorate's Israeli desk in the morning.

On this particular morning the photographs were still being sorted—the mug shots of visitors who could be identified were labeled and pasted into a scrapbook, the others were stored in a wire basket marked unidentified—when Yuri Sukhanov, the cranky head of the Ninth Chief Directorate, one of the core group of plotters working closely with KGB Chairman Kryuchkov, stopped by with a disturbing photograph that the Dresden rezident had pouched to Moscow Centre. It showed a twisted old man struggling with the aid of two canes toward a limousine surrounded by bodyguards. Dresden had tentatively identified the old man as Ezra Ben Ezra, the infamous Rabbi who was winding up a seven year tour as head of the Israeli Mossad. Walking next to him was a corpulent figure that the Dresden rezidentura had not been able to identify— but Sukhanov, a veteran KGB officer who had begun an illustrious career at the East Berlin Karlshorst rezidentura in the mid 1950s, recognized instantly: the man accompanying Ben Ezra was none other than the Rabbi's old friend from Berlin, the legendary one-time chief of the CIA's Berlin Base, H. Torriti, a.k.a. the Sorcerer. The question on everyone's lips, of course, was: why was the head of the Mossad meeting Harvey Torriti in Dresden? Was it possible that their presence had something to do with the sums of hard currency being transferred by the Devisenbeschaffer to the Dresden branch of the Greater Russian Bank of Commerce? Or worse still, something to do with the sudden disappearance of the Devisenbeschaffer himself?

The intriguing subject was being kicked around at an informal brainstorming session when Sukhanov noticed a pile of mug shots in the wire basket labelled unidentified. Absently leafing through them, he suddenly held one up to the light. "Where did you get this?" he demanded excitedly.

The desk officer explained that it had been taken the previous day by the team watching a Jewish couple that from time to time provided field services to the Israelis. "But this is the same man photographed with the Rabbi in Dresden! It's the American Torriti," the head of the Ninth Directorate said. Sukhanov took Torriti's presence first in Dresden, then in Moscow, as an ominous omen—it could only mean that the CIA, bypassing its Moscow station, had slipped an old professional into the Soviet capitol from the outside. And that, in turn, could only mean that the Americans suspected a putsch was in the works.

It was at this point that the photographs of Ben Ezra and Torriti in Dresden, and Torriti in Moscow, were hiked out to the KGB complex at Mashkino and Kryuchkov was alerted. The premonition of the head of the Ninth Directorate caused consternation among the putschists. A war council with the leading plotters was quickly convened. Lomov finished reading through the file. The Minister of Defense, Yazov, who along with the Interior Minister, Pugo, had originally pushed for a mid-August coup d'etat, argued for moving up the date from 1 September in light of this latest information. General Varennikov, the ground forces chief and the man responsible for mustering the troops that would seize control of Moscow, had previously been against the idea because military preparations couldn't be completed that early. Now, albeit reluctantly, he saw the logic of a mid-August date. The head of the Ninth Chief Directorate, whose agents would be responsible for quarantining Gorbachev during the first hours of the coup, reminded the others that the General Secretary was in his summer residence near the Crimean town of Foros until the twentieth. Which didn't leave much time.

Everyone looked at Kryuchkov, who was still staring out the window. He remarked that there was a brownish smog hovering over the fields surrounding the village of Mashkino. It had been there for the better part of a week. Superstitious peasants, he noted, believed that evil spirits lurking in the smog could cause stillbirths in pregnant women who ventured out on days like this.

In short, it was not an auspicious moment to launch new projects. Happily, he, Kryuchkov, was not superstitious. Turning to his colleagues, looking particularly somber, he announced that he, too, was now in favor of moving up the date of the uprising, even if it meant that all the preparations—including the importation of large amounts of foreign currency to Moscow in order to stock the stores immediately after the coup—could not be completed in time.

"How about the nineteenth?" Kryuchkov said.

"Nineteen August sounds fine to me," Defense Minister Yazov commented. The others in the room nodded in agreement.

"So it is decided," Kryuchkov said. "We will declare a state of emergency, isolate Gorbachev and take control of the government one week from today."

Trying to walk off a chronic angst, Leo Kritzky spent the afternoon exploring the narrow streets behind the Kremlin filled with small Orthodox churches. Over the years he had become so Russian-looking that the ever-present hustlers who waylaid foreigners with offers to buy dollars or sell caviar no longer gave him a second glance. He stopped for tea and a dry cupcake in a workers' canteen, then queued at a pharmacy for a bottle of Polish cough syrup and dropped it off at his lady friend's apartment; she'd been battling a chest cold with herbal infusions but it had only gotten worse. He lingered for half an hour looking at the sketches she'd done for a children's book on Siberian elves and fairies, then took the subway back to Frunzenskaya Embankment. Hanging on to an overhead strap, swaying from side to side as the train plunged through a tunnel, his eyes fell on what he took to be a relic of seventy years of Communism: a small metal plaque at the head of the subway car with the words "October Revolution" engraved on it. He wondered how many people noticed this reminder of things past; how many of those who noticed still believed in the promise of the October Revolution. There were days when he himself thought it might better to start over again; there were other days when he tried not to think about it at all.

Arriving at Frunzenskaya Embankment number 50, entrance 9, he climbed the steps to the third floor. The janitor still had not gotten around to replacing the light bulb at the end of the corridor near his apartment, number 373. As he crouched to insert the latch key in the lock an agitated voice called from the darkness. "Sorry, sorry, but I don't suppose you happen to understand English." When Leo didn't immediately respond, the person sighed. "I didn't think so—it would have been too good to be true."