The Company: A Novel of the CIA (131 page)

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Authors: Robert Littell

Tags: #Literary, #International Relations, #Intelligence officers, #Fiction, #United States, #Spy stories, #Espionage

BOOK: The Company: A Novel of the CIA
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"If I had a car," the soldier remarked, "wouldn't bother me none being caught in traffic. I'd listen to American rock 'n roll music on the radio."

Parking around the side of the ill-proportioned wood-and-brick dacha, Aza made her way to the back door inside the screened-in porch. In the woods around the house, the birds had still not started to chirp. She took the skeleton key from its hiding place under a pot of geraniums and let herself into the kitchen. Climbing the wooden steps with the painted balusters, she went down the hallway and knocked softly on the door at the end of it. When there was no response she rapped more insistently. A gruff voice called from inside, "What the devil is going on?"

"Boris Nikolayevich, it's me, Azalia Isanova. I absolutely must speak to you."

Down the hall, several doors opened and Yeltsin's daughters, Lena and Tanya, quite frightened to be awakened at this hour, stuck their heads out. "What is happening?" asked Tariya, the younger of the two.

Yeltsin, wearing trousers with the suspenders dangling and a nightshirt, carrying a large-bored pistol in one hand, pulled open the door of the room. "Go back to bed," he called over Aza's head to his daughters. "Come in," Yeltsin told Aza. He knew that it wasn't good news that had brought her out from Moscow at dawn. He set the pistol down on the night table next to a nearly empty bottle of cognac. Pointing to a chair, pulling another over to it, he sat down facing her. "So you've had word from your informant?" he demanded.

Aza nodded. "He came to see me around one-thirty," she said, and she repeated what Yevgeny had told her: the putsch was underway, Gorbachev had refused to cooperate and was being held prisoner in the Crimea, Army and paratroop units had been ordered to take up positions in the capitol. She had seen one of them, a long line of giant tanks, heading into Moscow with her own eyes.

Yeltsin threaded the three thick fingers of his left hand through a shock of graying hair and stared at the floor, brooding. Then he shook his head several times, as if he were arguing with himself. "How did you get out here?" he asked.

"I borrowed a Lada from a neighbor."

He looked away, a preoccupied frown pasted on his face; Aza knew him well enough to realize that he was sorting through scenarios. "It is essential for me to return to the White House," he finally said, thinking out loud. "I'm sure to be on the KGB's list of those to be arrested. By now they'll have set up roadblocks around Moscow. If I go back in my limousine, surrounded by bodyguards, they are bound to recognize me and that will be the end of it. I have a better chance of getting through the checkpoints if I drive back with you. It could be dangerous—are you willing to take the risk?"

"I am, Boris Nikolayevich."

"You are a spunky woman, Azalia Isanova."

Yeltsin jumped to his feet and switched on a small radio tuned to an all-night Moscow station. It was playing a recording of Swan Lake, which was a sinister sign; Soviet stations always switched to Swan Lake in times of trouble. Then an announcer, his voice quivering with nervousness, interrupted the music to read a news bulletin: "Mikhail Gorbachev has stepped down for reasons of health. At this grave and critical hour, the State Committee for the State of Emergency has assumed power to deal with the mortal danger that looms over our great Motherland." Hearing the commotion, Lena and Tanya came flying into their father's bedroom. Yeltsin waved for them to be quiet. "The policy of reforms, launched at Mikhail Gorbachev's initiative and designed to insure the country's dynamic development," the voice on the radio was saying, "has entered into a blind alley. The country is sinking into the quagmire of violence and lawlessness. Millions of people are demanding measures against the octopus of crime and glaring immorality."

Yeltsin snapped off the radio. "Millions of people are demanding democratization, not a new dictatorship of the proletariat," he declared. Peeling the nightshirt off over his head, he began to strap on a bullet-proof vest. He put on a white shirt and adjusted the suspenders, slipped into a brown suit jacket and dropped the pistol into a pocket. Turning to his daughters, he instructed them to phone their mother in the family's apartment in the city. "The line is certain to be tapped," he told them. "Say only that I heard the radio and left immediately by car for Sverdlovsk. Nothing more."

Outside, a particularly large shooting star etched a fiery path through Ursa Major. "Make a wish," Yeltsin ordered his daughters. He himself was not a religious man but he did believe in destiny; clearly the moment was at hand to fulfill his. Gazing up at the cloudless August sky he made a wish, then settled into the passenger's seat ofAza's Lada.

"Papa, only keep calm," Lena said as she closed the car door. "Remember that everything depends on you."

At first the ringing seemed far away and Jack McAuliffe integrated it into his dream; through a haze of memory, he could see himself handcuffing Leo Kritzky to a radiator as a bicycle bell reverberated through a dilapidated wooden hulk of a building to remind everyone that coffee and doughnuts were available in the hallway. Surfacing with infinite languidness from the depths of the dream, Jack realized where he was and what was ringing. In the darkness he groped for the telephone on the nightstand. Millie got to it first.

"Yes?"... "Who did you say you were?"... Out of long habit she murmured, "I'll see if he's here."

She smothered the mouthpiece in the pillow and whispered to Jack, "Its the Langley night duty officer, Jack. Are you here?"

Jack, breaking the surface, grumbled, "Where else would I be in the middle of the night except in bed with my wife." He found Millie's shoulder, then followed the arm to her hand and the telephone. Taking it from her, he growled, "McAuliffe speaking."

Wide awake now, Jack sat up in bed and shifted the phone to his other ear. "Jesus H. Christ, when did this come in?".. ."Okay, dispatch an Action Immediate to Moscow Station ordering all hands off the streets until the situation stabilizes. We don't want any of our people killed in crossfires. Sign my name to it. Next, track down Director Ebbitt—he's on a sailboat named
Gentleman Rankers
somewhere off Nantucket."... "Alert the Coast Guard if you can't raise him on the radio. Also notify the DD/0, Manny Ebbitt. Tell him to come straight in to the situation room. I'll be there in three quarters of an hour. I'll decide then whether we wake the President immediately or hold it for a morning briefing."

Jack felt around in the dark until he found the light switch. The sudden brightness blinded him and he covered his eyes with a forearm as he hung up the phone. "Balloon's gone up in Russia," he told Millie. "Leo got it wrong. Goddamn plotters launched their putsch twelve days ahead of schedule. Russian Army's occupying strategic positions in Moscow. Gorbachev's either dead or under arrest in the Crimea."

"Maybe I ought to go in with you, Jack, to get the public relations angle sorted out—Washington TV'll be breaking down our door in the morning to know why we didn't give the President some advance warning of a coup.

"As usual we can't tell them we did." He glanced at Millie—she looked every bit as appetizing as the day he first laid eyes on her in the Cloud Club. "Anyone ever told you you're one hell of a beautiful broad?" he asked.

"You have, Jack." She reached over and smoothed his disheveled mustache with the tips of her fingers. "Tell me one more time, I might begin to believe it."

"Believe it," he said. "It's gospel truth." Frowning in preoccupation, he pushed himself out of the bed. "Fucking Russians," he groaned. "If this coup succeeds it'll put them right back into the Bolshevik ice age."

Curled up on the couch in the living room, Tessa slept through the sound of Leo's alarm and the flushing of the toilet and the water cascading through the pipes in the wall. She finally opened an eye when the odor of percolating coffee reached her nostrils.

"Rise and shine, baby," Leo called from the kitchenette. "We want to get on the road at a decent hour if we're going to go to Zagorsk."

"I can handle the rise part," Tessa moaned. "Shine is beyond my diminished capacities."

The two of them had been covering Moscow like a blanket (as Tessa liked to say), visiting every nook and cranny of the Kremlin, St. Basils Cathedral, the labyrinthian halls of GUM, the Novodievitchi Monastery and cemetery (where Manny Ebbitt had been nabbed seventeen years ago this month), the Pushkin Museum. In the waning light of the late afternoons, they had explored lengths of the Moscow River embankment and segments of the Sadovaya Ring. Leo, at sixty-four, seemed to have a bottomless well of energy to draw on; it was Tessa, at thirty-seven, who ultimately cried uncle and asked if they couldn't put off seeing the rest of Moscow until tomorrow.

"Three more days," Leo said now, buttering a toasted bun (he did all his shopping at a special KGB store whose shelves were filled to overflowing) and handing it across to his daughter.

"I'll be back, Daddy"

"Will you?"

"You know I will. Maybe next time I can convince Vanessa... " She let the sentence trail off.

"I'd like that," Leo said quietly. "I'd like it a lot."

The telephone in the living room rang and Leo got up to answer it. Tessa could hear him talking to someone in urgent tones when a low throaty rumble rose from the street. She went over to the open window and parted the curtains and looked out to see the most startling sight of her life: a long column of monstrously large tanks lumbering down Frunzenskaya Embankment.

Behind her Leo was almost shouting into the phone. "What happened to the first of September, for God's sake? Twelve days ahead of schedule will throw any plans Torriti may have made into the garbage heap."

On the avenue, the tanks were splitting up into smaller formations and wheeling off in different directions. Two of the tanks remained behind at an intersection, the barrels of their cannons twitching as if they were searching for something to shoot at.

Leo could be heard saying, "How do they know Yeltsin fled to Sverdlovsk?" Then: "Without Yeltsin the democratic forces will have no one to lead them." Coming back into the kitchen, he heard the coughing of diesel motors on the Embankment and joined Tessa at the window.

"What's going on, Daddy?" she asked anxiously.

Shaking his head in disgust, he took in the scene. "The putsch has begun," he said.

It wasn't lost on Tessa that her father seemed to be extremely well informed. "Who's rebelling against whom?" she asked.

"The KGB, the military-industrial interests, the Army want to get rid of Gorbachev and set the clock back."

Tessa retrieved the 35-mm Nikon from her canvas carryall, fitted on a telescopic lens and took several shots of the two tanks at the intersection. People heading for work had gathered around them and seemed to be arguing with the commanders who stood in the turrets. "Hey, let's go down there," Tessa said, throwing some rolls of film and her camera in the carryall.

"The smartest thing would be for us to stay put."

"Daddy, I work for an American news magazine. I'm not about to hide in a closet if there's a real live coup d'etat going on."

Leo looked out the window again; he, too, was curious to see what was happening. "Well, as long as nobody's shooting, I suppose we could take a look."

Muscovites were streaming into the streets when Leo and Tessa emerged from Number 50 into the brilliant August sunlight. Knots of people had gathered at corners to exchange information. A large group swarmed around the two tanks at the intersection. Students bending under the weight of backpacks filled with textbooks kicked at the treads. "Make a U-turn and go back to your barracks," one of them cried.

"We have been given orders and we are obliged to follow them," the young officer in the turret tried to explain, but he was shouted down.

"How can you carry out orders to shoot at your own people?" pleaded a young woman balancing an infant on her hip.

"Answer if you can," an old woman challenged.

"Yes, Yes, answer!" others cried in chorus.

An old man shook his cane at the tanks. "Shame on you, shame on the parents who raised you," he called hoarsely.

"Pozor! Pozor!" the crowd chanted.

"Shame! Shame on anyone who shoots Russian bullets at Russian citizens," someone else shrieked.

"We are shooting at no one," declared the officer, visibly shaken.

Tessa circled the crowd, snapping pictures of the officer in the turret and the students shaking their fists at the tank. She reloaded her camera and, tugging at her father's elbow, headed in the direction of the Kremlin walls. At another intersection soldiers had formed a circle around two trucks and a Jeep, their Kalashnikovs slung under their arms. Three young girls wearing short summer skirts that swirled around their bare thighs spiked the stems of roses into the barrels of the rifles, to the cheers of the bystanders. At the Kremlin tower, a soldier could be seen hauling down the Russian tricolor from a flagpole and raising the red hammer-and-sickle standard in its place. A bearded man in a wheelchair watched with tears streaming down his cheeks. "We thought we'd seen the last of the Communists," he complained to everyone within earshot. A teenage boy on roller skates balanced a portable radio on a fire hydrant and turned up the volume. People clustered around. The distinctive voice of Boris Yeltsin's filled the air. "...soldiers and officers of the army, the KGB, and the troops of the Interior Ministry! At this difficult hour of decision remember that you have taken an oath to your people, and your weapons cannot be turned against them. The days of the conspirators are numbered. The elected government is alive and well and functioning in the White House. Our long-suffering masses will find freedom once again, and for good. Soldiers, I believe at this tragic hour you will make the right decision. The honor of Russian arms will not be covered with the blood of the people."

Leo pulled his daughter to one side and said breathlessly, "Yeltsin didn't run away to Sverdlovsk! He's broadcasting from the White House. There still may be a shred of hope."

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