The Company: A Novel of the CIA (77 page)

1

CHERYOMUSKI, MOSCOW DISTRICT, WEDNESDAY, MAY 1, 1974

ON TELEVISION, WORKERS FROM THE RED STAR CHEMICAL FERTILIZER Plant Number Four in Nizhnevartovsk on the Ob River could be seen streaming into Red Square carrying a giant papier-mache head of Leonid Brezhnev, the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR. As Brezhnev's head, bobbing above a sea of people, came abreast of the reviewing stand atop Lenin's Tomb, a slip of a girl wearing gold lame tights and a silver tank top detached herself from the marchers to skip up the stairs at the side of the tomb and present the First Secretary, his face thick with makeup for the television cameras, with a bouquet of red and pink carnations. "Oh, she is awfully cute, don't you think?" exclaimed one of the girls glued to the TV screen, a twelve-year-old Chechen with guileless eyes. "If Uncle were watching he would certainly pick up the telephone and ask her name."

Uncle was watching—he'd been invited by the First Secretary to join the head of the Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti and several senior Directorate chiefs in his private suite in the Kremlin, where they could observe the May Day parade on a giant television screen while sipping Champagne and snacking on zakuski. In Uncle's apartment in the Apatov Mansion near Cheryomuski, the nieces—they were reduced to five now; the sixth, a Uighur from the Xinjiang Uigur region of Central Asia, had been sent home when it was, discovered, during bath hour, that she had started menstruating—grew bored with the parade, which still had four hours to go, and decided to play hide-and-seek. Crouching behind Uncle's bathrobes in a closet in the bedroom, the Cuban girl, Revolucion, discovered a toy revolver loaded with toy bullets in a shoebox. "Girls, girls," she yelled, emerging from her hiding place, "come see what I've found."

The weather had turned unseasonably warm but nobody had thought to turn off the mansion's central heating. Uncle's bedroom was like a sauna The five girls stripped to their cotton underpants and undershirts and settled in a circle on Uncle's great bed, and Revolucion taught them a new game she had heard about in Havana. First she removed the make-believe bullets until only one was left in the revolver. Looking up, she recited from memory a passage from Uncle's favorite book. '"I'll be judge, I'll be jury' said cunning old Fury. 'I'll try the whole cause, and condemn you to death."' Then she spun the cylinder and, closing her eyes, inserted the tip of the long barrel between her thin lips. Holding the revolver with both hands she pushed against the trigger with her thumb. There was an audible click as the hammer came down on an empty chamber. Smiling innocently, she passed the handgun to the Kazakh niece on her right. When the girl seemed uncertain about what exactly she was expected to do, Revolucion guided her—she spun the cylinder and inserted the barrel in the girl's mouth and showed her how to trip the trigger with her thumb. Once again there was a loud click.

The Chechen, who was next in the circle, shook her head. "Oh, dear, I really don't wish to play this game," she announced.

"But you must," Revolucion insisted. "Once a game's begun there can be no turning back. It's like Alice and her friends, don't you see? Everybody shall win and all shall have prizes."

"I don't know," the Chechen said uncertainly.

"Play, play," pleaded the others in chorus. The Chechen girl picked up the gun reluctantly. She spun the cylinder and, pouting to better suck on the barrel, inserted the tip ever so slightly into her mouth.

"Do go ahead and play, for it's only a game," Revolucion said impatiently. "Play, play," the others taunted when she still hesitated. Screwing up her eyes, the Chechen sighed and tripped the trigger with a jerk of her thumb.

There was a deafening report as the back of her skull exploded, spattering the girls and the wall behind the bed with blood and flecks of bone and brain.

Uncle found the body of the Chechen when he returned from Moscow that evening. He was distressed for the longest time, and calmed down only after men in white coveralls enshrouded the dead girl in the blood-drenched sheets and took her away. The nieces, beside themselves with fright, were all made to bathe while Uncle himself sponged the wall behind the bed clean of blood and brain tissue. Revolucion was given a scolding about the perils of playing with firearms and sent off without supper, and was not permitted to participate in the hugging and fondling that always followed the nightly reading from the worn pages of Uncle's now blood-speckled bedside book.

The next afternoon a new child appeared at the doorway of Uncle's suite at Apatov Mansion. Her name turned out to be Axinya. She came from the city of Nizhnevartovska on the Ob River, and was wearing gold lame tights and a silver tank top.

Moving like phantoms through the pre-dawn stillness, the seven members of the hit team, dressed in identical black trousers and turtleneck sweaters and sneakers, assaulted the house in Oak Park near Chicago. Three of the attackers cut the telephone lines and the electricity cables, then came over the high brick wall with shards of glass cemented into the top, dropped lightly down onto the grass and broke into the gatehouse. Using aerosol cans filled with an experimental Soviet nerve gas, they subdued the three bodyguards sleeping on Army cots before they could raise an alarm. Two other attackers cut the glass out of a basement window and, slipping through the frame, landed in what had once been the coal bin before the house was switched over to oil. Making their way to the small service apartment at the back of the basement, they bound and gagged the Korean couple in their beds. The leader of the hit team and another attacker scrambled up a trellis to a second-floor terrace, jimmied open French doors with a short crowbar that had been ground down to a thin wedge at the end, then padded through a room filled with round tables and wicker chairs to the hallway. The bodyguard on night duty had nodded off in an easy chair. He was neutralized with nerve gas and lowered soundlessly to the parquet floor. Gripping their Czech 7.65 pistols fitted with silencers, the two invaders pushed through a door into a large bedroom that reeked from the cigar butts heaped in a glass ashtray on a night table. Startled out of a sound sleep, a short, balding man wearing striped pajamas sat upright in bed to find himself pinned in the beams of two flashlights.

"What duh fuck—"

A young woman with long dyed hair and heavy breasts slid naked from the sheets and cowered in a corner, shielding her body with the hem of the window curtain. One of the invaders nodded toward the bathroom door. The woman, only too glad to escape, darted across the room and locked herself in the bathroom.

From the bed the man croaked, "Who duh fuck sent you?"

The hit team leader produced lengths of nylon cord and began tying up the man's wrists and ankles to the four bedposts. The second attacker kept flashlight and pistol trained on the man's face.

"Holy shit, you're makin' uh big fuckin' mistake. You know who I am? Fuck, dis can't be happenin' to me." The last length of nylon was slipped over his left ankle and pulled tight against a bedpost. The man in pajamas, spread-eagled on the bed, began to panic.

"Wait, wait, listen up, whatever, whoever's payin' you pays you, I'll pay you double. I swear to Christ. Double! Triple, even. Sure, triple." He twisted his head toward the door. "Charlie, where duh fuck are you?" He turned back to his captors. "Why not triple? Do not laugh uh gift horse in duh mouth. You need to be smart, dis is uh opportunity to make big bucks. Jesus Christ, don't just stand there lookin' at me like dat, say something."

The hit team leader removed a pillow from the bed. "Hubiese sido mejor para ustedes de no haber nacido nunca, " he murmured.

"Oh, Jesus, I don't know Spanish. Why duh fuck are you talkin' Spanish?"

"I'm talking Cuban," the leader told the man spread-eagled on the bed. "I am telling you: It will be good for you if you had not been born."

"Holy Mother of God, I'm ain't goin' to croak. I won't do it. I refuse." The hit team leader slowly lowered the pillow over the victim's face. Wrenching his head from side to side, pulling on the bindings until the nylon cord bit into his wrists, the short balding man spit out half-stifled phrases, "...please don't... beggin' you... love of God... please, oh, please... mercy on... I'm on my fuckin' knees... I'm pleadin' with you..."

The other attacker pressed the tip of the silencer attached to his Czech pistol deep into the pillow and shot seven bullets through it into the man's face.

The self-propelled garbage scow that normally serviced ships anchored off North Miami Beach cut across Dumfoundling Bay after midnight. The sea was flat, the offshore breeze barely able to stir the worn company pennant flying from a halyard on the mast. Astern of the scow headlights flickered playfully along the low Florida coastline. Overhead, a gibbous moon burned through the haze, churning up flecks of silver in the vessel's wake. In the well of the scow, a tall, silver-haired man with a mournful face stood ankle-deep in garbage, his legs spread for balance. Four men wearing black trousers, turtleneck sweaters and rubber boots kept Czech pistols trained on him. The silver-haired man took off his blazer and, folding it inside out, set it down on the garbage. Then he undid his tie and removed a pair of silver cufflinks and set them on the blazer. Gripping the side of the scow, he kicked off one alligator loafer and then the other, then pulled off his socks and the garters that kept them up on his calves. He undid the silver buckle on his belt and the buttons on his fly, dropped his trousers to his ankles and gingerly stepped out of them, trying to avoid placing his bare feet in the more revolting garbage. He unbuttoned his shirt and added it to the pile of clothing. He removed the watch on his wrist and the diamond ring on his pinkie and tossed them overboard. Then he looked up at the leader of the hit team, who was watching from the open pilot house.

The leader gestured with a finger toward the man's white skivvy shorts. Without a word the silver-haired man slipped them off and folded them onto the pile. He straightened and stood there, stark naked and hugging his hairy chest because of the chill.

"Awright, just tell me who wants me whacked," the naked man called up to the pilot house.

"Hubiese sido mejor para ustedes de no haber nacido nunca, " the hit team leader shouted back.

The naked man, who spoke Spanish, shook his head in disgust. "Whoever, you tell him for me to go fuck himself," he said.

The other men moved in to attach his wrists and ankles with telephone line, which they tightened with pliers until the wire cut into the skin, drawing blood. The naked man didn't utter a word as he was lifted into an empty oil drum and forced down until he was seated in it with his knees jammed up against his chin. The top of the barrel was screwed on and locked in place with several blows from a sledgehammer. The four men in turtleneck sweaters wrestled the barrel up onto the shelf that ran from stem to stern above the garbage well. A length of heavy anchor chain was wrapped around the barrel and secured with thick wire. The team leader nodded. The four men rolled the barrel to the edge of the scow. Just before it was pushed overboard a hollow voice could be heard crying out, "The fucker should go fuck himself."

The barrel, with the anchor chain around it, hit the water and floated for a moment before it began to sink with excruciating slowness into the sea.

2

WASHINGTON, DC, SUNDAY, MAY 12, 1974

THE ANNUAL SOVIET DIVISION (THE ANACHRONISTIC APPELLATION "Russia" finally had been dropped from the nomenclature) BYOB barbecue on the back lawn of Leo Kritzky's newly purchased Georgetown house had been called on account of rain and the party had moved indoors, sprawling across the kitchen and dining room into the living room, finally spilling down into the basement rumpus room when a handful of the younger officers showed up with their wives or girlfriends. Leo, the current division chief, and his wife, Adelle, meandered through the rooms distributing hot dogs to the troops. Ebby, in his second year as DD/0, was pushing through knots of people to hand out fresh bottles of Beaujolais when he noticed his son, Manny, arguing in a corner with Elizabet's daughter, Nellie.

The two hadn't seen each other in nineteen months. Fresh out of Harvard Law, Nellie, now a bewitching twenty-three-year-old with a willowy figure and her mother's dark impatient eyes dancing under a mop of dirty-blonde hair, had gone to work for an insurance firm in Hong Kong and only just come back for job interviews in Washington. Manny, a reserved, slightly stooped young man with a solemn mien, had been recruited into the Company soon after he was graduated from Yale with honors in Central Asian studies; he was fluent in Russian, could converse with an Afghan in Pashto and haggle in pidgin Tajik in a souk.

"Vietnam is the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time," Manny, now twenty-eight and a junior officer in Leo's Soviet Division, was saying.

"You're forgetting about the goddamn dominoes," Nellie shot back. She popped a cigarette into her mouth and, knowing Manny didn't smoke, grabbed the elbow of a passing young man. "Do you have fire?" He was only too happy to produce a lighter. She rested a hand lightly on his wrist and pulled the flame to the tip of the cigarette. "So, thanks," she said, dismissing him and turning back to Manny. "If Vietnam falls, believe me, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand won't be far behind. Hellfire, all of Southeast Asia will go Communist, leaving Japan out on a limb, leaving American interests in Asia in a limbo. It doesn't take much political savvy to understand that we need to draw the line somewhere."

"You sound like Joe Alsop," Manny remarked. "You miss the same point he misses—the war in Vietnam is a political problem that requires a political solution, not a military solution."

Nellie decided to tack toward the port she hoped to dock in. "I may sound like Joe Alsop but I don't look like Joe Alsop," she observed sweetly.

Manny flashed a tight grin; somehow Nellie always managed to get under his skin. "Nellie, what happened between us..." Manny looked around nervously, then lowered his voice. "What I'm trying to say is that we're practically brother and sister."