Read The Company: A Novel of the CIA Online

Authors: Robert Littell

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

The Company: A Novel of the CIA (6 page)

BOOK: The Company: A Novel of the CIA
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Another burst of static came from the radio on the floor. "Film ist zu Ende. All must leave. Gute Nacht to you. Please for God's sake remember to deposit the Geld in my account."

In the street below figures bundled into long overcoats hurried away from the cinema. Sweet Jesus, stamping his feet under a vapor lamp, glanced up at the faint light in the oriel window under the eaves and hiked his shoulders in an apprehensive shrug. Jack pulled the antenna down and started packing it away in the radio's carrying case. "How long do you figure on waiting, Harvey?" he asked.

The Sorcerer, sweating from alcohol deprivation, turned on Jack. "We wait until I decide to stop waiting," he snapped.

The Irishman in Jack stood his ground. "He was supposed to get here before the film ended." And he added quietly, "If he hasn't shown up by now chances are he's not going to show. If he hasn't been blown we can reschedule the exfiltration for another night."

The Fallen Angel said anxiously, "If the Russian was blown, the safe house maybe was blown. Which leaves us up the creek filled with shit, chief."

Torriti screwed up his face until his eyes were reduced to slits. He knew they were right; not only was the Russian not going to turn up but it had become imprudent for them to hang in there. "Okay, we give him five minutes and we head for home," he said.

Time passed with excruciating slowness, or so it seemed to Jack as he kept his eyes fixed on the second hand of his Bulova. At the window, Silwan II, rolling his head from side to side, humming an ancient Rumanian liturgical chant under his breath, surveyed the street. Suddenly he pressed his forehead against the pane and grabbed his stomach. "Holy Mother of God," he rasped, "Sweet Jesus went and picked up the dog."

"Damnation," cried Jack, who knew what the signal meant.

The Sorcerer, freezing in mid-prowl, decided he badly needed a swig of medicinal whiskey to clear the cobwebs from his head. "Into every life a little rain must fall," he groaned.

The Fallen Angel called, "Oh, yeah, here they come—one, two, oh shit, seven, wait, eight Volkspolizei wagons have turned into the street. Sweet Jesus is disappearing himself around the corner."

"Time for us to disappear ourselves around a corner, too," Torriti announced. He grabbed his rumpled overcoat off the back of a chair. Jack crammed the radio into its satchel and the three of them, with Jack in the lead and the Sorcerer puffing along behind him, ducked through the door and started up the narrow stairs. It was the route they would have taken if the Russian defectors had turned up. From three floors below came the clamor of rifle butts pounding on the heavy double doors of the cinema, then muffled shouts in German as the Volkspolizei—accompanied by a handful of KGB agents—spread out through the building.

At the top of the stairs Jack unbolted the steel door and pushed it open with his shoulder. A gust of wintry night air slammed into his face, bringing tears to his eyes. Overhead a half moon filled the rooftop with shadows. Below, in the toilet off the cinema, heavy boots kicked in the false door at the back of the broom closet and started lumbering up the narrow stairs. Once Jack and Torriti were on the roof, the Fallen Angel eased the door closed and quietly slid home the two bolts on it. The Sorcerer, breathing heavily from the exertion, managed to spit out, "That'll slow the fuckers down." The three made their way diagonally across the slippery shingles. Silwan II helped the Sorcerer over a low wall and led the way across the next roof to a line of brick chimneys, then swung a leg over the side of a wall and scrambled down the wooden ladder he had planted there when the Sorcerer had laid in the plumbing for the exfiltration. When his turn came Jack started down the ladder, then jumped the rest of the way to the roof below. The Sorcerer, gingerly stabbing the air with his foot to locate the next rung, climbed down after them.

The three of them squatted for a moment, listening to the icy wind whistling over the rooftops. With the adrenalin flowing and a pulse pounding in his ear, Jack asked himself if he was frightened; he was quite pleased to discover mat he wasn't. From somewhere below came guttural explicatives in German. Then a door leading to the roof was flung open and two silvery silhouettes appeared. The beams from two flashlights swept across the chimneys and illuminated the wooden ladder. One of the silhouettes grunted something in Russian. From a pocket the Fallen Angel produced an old 9 mm Beretta he had once stripped from the body of an Italian fascist whose throat he'd slit near Patras in Greece. A subsonic handgun suited to in-fighting, the Beretta was fitted with a stubby silencer on the end of the barrel. Torriti scratched Silwan II on the back of the neck and, pressing his lips to his ear, whispered, "Only shoot the one in uniform."

Bracing his right wrist in his left hand, the Fallen Angel drew a bead on the taller of the two figures and pulled back on the hairpin trigger. Jack heard a quick hiss, as if air had been let out of a tire. One of the two flashlights clattered to the roof. The figure who had been holding it seemed to melt into the shadow of the ground. Breathing heavily, the other man thrust his two arms, one holding the flashlight, the other a pistol, high over his head. "I know it is you, Torriti," he called in a husky voice. "Not to shoot. I am KGB."

Jack's blood was up. "Jesus H. Christ, shoot the fucker!"

The Sorcerer pressed Silwan II s gun arm down. "Germans are fair game but KGB is another story. We don't shoot them, they don't shoot us." To the Russian he called, "Drop your weapon."

The Russian, a burly figure wearing a civilian overcoat and a fedora, must have known what was coming because he turned around and carefully set his flashlight and handgun on the ground. Straightening, he removed his fedora and waited.

Moving on the balls of his feet, the Fallen Angel crossed the roof and stepped up behind the Russian and brought the butt of the Beretta sharply down across his skull over an ear—hard enough to give him splitting headaches for the rest of his life but not hard enough to kill him. The Rumanian deftly caught the Russian under the armpits and lowered him to the roof.

Moments later the three of them were clambering down the dimly lit staircase of the apartment building, then darting through a corridor reeking of urine and out a back door to an alley filled with garbage cans piled one on top of another. Hidden behind the garbage cans was the fertilizer truck. Without a word the Fallen Angel vanished down the alley into the darkness. Torriti and Jack climbed up into the compartment under the false roof of the vehicle and pulled the trap-ladder closed after them. The engine coughed softly into life and the truck, running on parking lights, eased out of the alley and headed through the silent back streets of East Berlin toward a Pankow crossing point and the French sector of the divided city beyond it.

Even the old hands at Berlin Base had never seen the Sorcerer so worked up. "I don't fucking believe it," he railed, his hoarse cries echoing through the underground corridors, "the KGB fucker on the roof even knew my name" Torriti slopped some whiskey into a glass, tossed it into the back of his throat and gargled before swallowing. The sting of the booze calmed him down. "Okay," he instructed his Night Owl, "walk me through it real slow-like."

Miss Sipp, sitting on the couch, crossed her legs and began citing chapter and verse from the raw operations log clipped to the message board. She had to raise her voice to make herself heard over Tito Gobbi's 78-rpm interpretation of Scarpia. It was an indication of Torriti's mental state that he didn't seem to catch a glimpse of the erotic frontier where the top of her stocking fastened to the strap of a garter belt.

"Item number one," began Miss Sipp, her voice vibrating with suppressed musicality. (She had actually signed on as Torriti's Night Owl in order to pay for singing lessons at the Berlin Opera, which ended when her teacher informed her that she had almost as much talent as his rooster.) "The listening post at Berlin Base noticed an increase in radio traffic between Moscow and Karlshorst, and vice versa, eighty-five minutes before the defector and his family were due to show up at the safe house."

"Bastards were getting their marching orders from Uncle Joe," the Sorcerer snarled.

"Item number two: The sister of the cleaning woman who works at the hotel near Karlshorst called her contact in West Berlin, who called us to say the Russians were running around like chickens without a head, i.e., something was up."

"What time was that?" Jack, leaning against a wall, wanted to know.

"D-hour minus sixty minutes, give or take."

"The fuckers knew there was going to be a defection," figured the Sorcerer, talking more to himself than to the eight people who had crowded into his office for the wake-like postmortem. "But they didn't get ahold of that information until late in the game."

"Maybe Vishnevsky lost his nerve," Jack suggested. "Maybe he was perspiring so much he drew attention to himself."

The Sorcerer batted the possibility away with the back of his hand. "He was a tough cookie, sport. He didn't come that far to fink out at the last moment."

"Maybe he told his wife and she lost her nerve."

Torriti's brow wrinkled in concentration. Then he shook his head once. "He'd thought it all through. Remember when he asked me if I had a microphone running? He was testing me. He would have tested his wife before he brought her in on the defection. If he thought she'd lose her nerve he would have skipped without her. As for the kid, all he had to know was that they were going to see a late movie."

"There's another angle," Jack said. "The wife may or may not have gone to bed with the rezident—either way she was probably afraid of him, not to mention ashamed of the trouble she'd brought down on her husband after he confronted the rezident. All of which could have given her enough motivation to defect with Vishnevsky."

"There's smoke coming out your ears, sport," Torriti said, but it was easy to see he was pleased with his Apprentice. The Sorcerer closed his eyes and raised his nose in the direction of Miss Sipp. She glanced down at the log sheet balanced on her knees.

"Oh dear, where was I? Ah. Item number three: The Rabbi reported in from the German-Jewish Cultural Center to say that East Germany's Hauptverwaltung Aufklarung troops were mustering next to vehicles parked in the courtyard behind the school in the Pankow district. That was D-hour minus thirty-five minutes."

"The time frame would seem to suggest that the Russians were the ones who were tipped off, as opposed to the Germans."

All heads turned toward the speaker, a relative newcomer to Berlin Base, E. Winstrom Ebbitt II. A big, broad-shouldered New York attorney who had seen action with the OSS during the last months of the war, Ebby, as his friends called him, had recently signed on with the Company and had been posted to Berlin to run emigré agents into the "denied areas" of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. He had spent the entire night in the base's radio shack, waiting for two of his "Joes" who had parachuted into Poland to come on the air. Curious to hear about the aborted defection, he'd drifted into the Sorcerer's office when he learned there would be an early morning wake. "My guess is the Russians probably brought their Germans in at the last moment," Ebby added, "because they don't trust them any more than we trust our Germans."

The Sorcerer fixed a malevolent eye on the young man with long wavy hair and fancy wide suspenders sitting atop one of the office safes and toying with a red thermite canister. "Elementary deduction, my dear Watson," Torriti said mockingly. "Careful that doohickey doesn't blow up in your puss. By the way, did you get ahold of the lambs you sent to the slaughter?"

"Afraid I haven't, Harvey. They missed the time slot. There's another one tomorrow night."

"Like I said, it's the goddamn Goths who are winning the goddamn war." Torriti turned his attention back to Miss Sipp.

"Item number four: Gehlen's night duty officer at Pullach rang us on the red phone to say that one of their agents in the Soviet zone who is good at 'Augenerkundung'—the Night Owl raised her eyes and translated for the benefit of those in the room who didn't speak German—"that means 'eye spying'; the Augenerkundung had just spotted wagons filled with Volkspolizei throwing up roadblocks across the approaches to the Soviet air base at Eberswalde. Minutes later—just about the time the defector was supposed to present his warm body at your safe house, Mr. Torriti—the Augenerkundung spotted a convoy ofTatra limousines pulling on to the runway from a little used entrance in the chainlink fence. Sandwiched in the middle of the convoy was a brown military ambulance. Dozens of civilians—KGB heavies, judging by the cut of their trousers, so said the Watcher—spilled out of the Tatras. Two stretchers with bodies strapped onto them were taken out of the ambulance and carried up a ramp into the plane parked, with its engines revving, at the end of the runway." Miss Sipp looked up and said with a bright smile, "That means Vishnevsky and his wife were still alive at this point. I mean"—her smile faded, her voice faltered—"if they were deceased they wouldn't have needed to strap them onto stretchers, would they have?"

"That still leaves the kid unaccounted for," noted Jack.

"If you'd let me finish," the Night Owl said huffily, "I'll give you the kid, too." She turned back toward the Sorcerer and recrossed her legs; this time the gesture provoked a flicker of interest from his restless eyes. "A boy—the Watcher estimated he was somewhere between ten and fifteen years of age; he said it was difficult to tell because of all the clothing the child was wearing—was pulled from one of the Tatras and, accompanied by two heavies, one holding him under each armpit, led up the ramp onto the plane. The boy was sobbing and crying out 'papa' in Russian, which led Gehlen's duty officer to conclude that the two people strapped onto the stretchers must have been Russians."

The Sorcerer palm came down on his desk in admiration. "Fucking Gehlen gives good value for the bucks we provide. Just think of it, he had a Watcher close enough to hear the boy call out for his papa. Probably has one of the fucking Hauptverwaltung Aufklarung storm troopers on his payroll. We fucking pay through the nose, how come we don't get Watchers of this quality?"

BOOK: The Company: A Novel of the CIA
6Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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