The Company: A Novel of the CIA (78 page)

Nellie tucked her arm under Manny's elbow and pushed her breast lightly into his arm. "So like the Bible tells us, incest is best, Manny."

"Be serious, for once."

"Don't be misled by the smile—I'm always serious. Look, if God had been dead set against incest he would have started things off with two couples in two gardens. Which leads me to suspect he wasn't convinced incest was all that bad. So why don't we give it the old college try? Our one-night stand lasted one month. If we shoot for a one-month stand, who knows? It might last a year."

Squirming uncomfortably, Manny tried to pass the idea off as a joke. "It's out of the question, Nellie. I'm allergic to cigarettes. I don't see myself dating someone who smokes."

Nellie tightened her grip on his elbow. "If you loved me even a teensy bit you'd smoke, too. What do you say we take in the new Mel Brooks flick tonight. Young Frankenstein sounds like it ought to be required viewing for CIA spooks."

"I can't—I have the night watch from eight to eight."

"Want a rain check?"

"I don't understand you, Nellie. You walk into a room, men—hell, women, too—stop in mid-sentence to follow you with their eyes. Someone lights your cigarette, next thing you know he's head over heels in love with you. Why me?"

Nellie contemplated Manny for a moment. "Believe me, I ask myself the same question. Maybe it's because of the one-night stand that stretched into a month. There was something... different about it."

Manny raised his eyebrows in acknowledgement. "You scare the shit out of me, Nellie."

"If its any consolation I scare the shit out of me, too. So what about that rain check?"

"Sure. Why not?"

"Tuesday?"

"Tuesday."

In the narrow pantry next to the kitchen Jack's gangly fourteen-year-old son, Anthony, finally managed to buttonhole his godfather, Leo Kritzky. "Are you following the Judiciary Committee's hearings?" the boy asked.

"You'd have to be deaf, dumb and blind not to," Leo said.

"You think they'll actually impeach Nixon?"

"It's beginning to look like a possibility. Especially if the Supreme Court rules against the President on the tapes."

"Explain me something, Leo." Anthony shook a shock of flaming-red hair out of his eyes. "Why would Nixon be dumb enough to record all his conversations in the Oval Office, including the ones that show he was involved in the Watergate business?"

Leo shrugged a shoulder. "Has to do with his personality, I suppose. Nixon feels the Eastern establishment hates him. He tends to pull up the drawbridges and hunker down in the White House, agonizing about his enemies, real or imagined. The tapes may have been his way of agonizing for posterity."

"Have you actually met Nixon, Leo?"

"Several times. I was called in to brief him on specific Soviet Division areas of interest."

"Like what?"

Leo had to smile; he was extremely fond of his godson and had a sneaking admiration for his lively curiosity even when the questions were off-base. "You ought to know better than to ask me something like that, Anthony."

"I'm not a Russian spy, Chrissakes. You can trust me?"

"I don't think you're a Russian spy. But I'm still not going to tell you things that you don't need to know. That's how we operate in the Company."

"I've pretty much decided to join the Company when I finish college," the boy said. "With both my parents working there, I ought to breeze in."

"First finish high school, buddy. Then get your warm body int0 a good college. Then graduate. After which we'll see about your breezing into the Company."

Jack McAuliffe pushed through the kitchen door looking for more booze. He waved to Anthony in the pantry, grabbed two bottles of Beaujolais by their throats and headed back toward the rumpus room. Jack, who was Ebby's Chief of Operations, still sported his flamboyant Cossack mustache, but his dark hair had begun to thin out on the crown of his head and his once-lanky body had thickened noticeably around the middle. To the younger generation of Company officers he was something of a legend: the man who had defied orders and gone ashore at the Bay of Pigs— and escaped only when the Brigade commander threatened to shoot him if he remained.

"Where were we?" Jack asked as he spilled wine into outstretched tumblers.

"We were on the beaches of the Bay of Pigs," a newcomer to the Soviet Division reminded him.

"That's not anyplace you'd want to go for R and R," Jack quipped. The young officers scraping up chairs around him in the rumpus room laughed appreciatively.

"Would the invasion have succeeded if Kennedy hadn't cut back on the first air strike and called off the second?" an intense young woman inquired.

"Probably not," Jack said thoughtfully. "But Khrushchev might have thought twice about installing missiles in Cuba if he hadn't been convinced Kennedy was chicken-shit."

"Are you saying the Cuban missile crisis was Kennedy's fault?" another officer wanted to know.

Jack swivelled on his stool. "It was Khrushchev's fault for trying to upset the balance of power in the hemisphere by installing missiles in Cuba. It was Kennedy's fault for letting Khrushchev think he might be able to get away with it."

Ebby wandered down to join the impromptu bull session. One of the mid-level officers, a crateologist who specialized in analyzing packages from their shape, size, weight and markings, asked the DD/0 about the CIA's role in the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. Ebby, sitting on the edge of the pingpong table, explained how he had been sent into Budapest to talk the anti-communist Hungarians out of an uprising, at least until the groundwork for the revolution could be laid. Jack described the day when he and Millie had spotted Ebby coming across the Austrian border with a group of refugees. "Frank Wisner was the DD/0 at the time," he said. "He had tears in his eyes when he realized Ebby had made it out alive."

"What ever happened to Wisner?" someone asked. Jack and Ebby avoided each other's eye. "Hungary broke him," Ebby finally said. "He became moody. The moodiness turned into dark depressions. Eventually things got serious enough for him to check into a private psychiatric hospital near Baltimore, where he was diagnosed for psychotic mania—which is roughly a manic-depressive with dreams of grandeur. The doctors even thought his grand schemes—the idea of rolling back Communism in Eastern Europe—might have been early symptoms of the mania. The Wiz was given shock therapy, which brought an end to a given depression but couldn't prevent a new one. By the time he retired—"

"That was back in 1962," Jack said.

"—he wouldn't eat in the same restaurant twice for fear it had been staked out by the KGB. Then, nine years ago—"

Jack finished the story for Ebby. "In 1965 the Wiz was living on his farm in Maryland. The family had hidden his firearms... one day he found a shotgun"—Jack inhaled through his nostrils—"and he went and killed himself."

"It was the Wiz who recruited me," Ebby told the young officers. "It was the Wiz who gave me a boot in the backside when I lost sight of the goal posts. He was a passionate man with a great intellect and boundless energy. I'm proud to have known him—proud to have fought the Cold War alongside him."

"He's one of America's unsung heroes," Jack agreed. In the early evening the rain let up and the Soviet Division officers and their ladies wandered off to movie theaters. Manny headed back to Langley for the night watch in the Operations Center. Leo and Jack and Ebby broke out some whiskey for a last drink in Leo's den on the second floor of the house. Downstairs, their wives could be heard tidying up. Leo glanced at his two friends. "Who's going to be the first to raise the subject?" he asked.

Ebby said, "You mean Giancana, I suppose."

"Harvey Torriti phoned me up from Santa Fe when he saw the story in the paper," Jack said.

"What did he think?" Ebby asked.

"It sure looks like a mob hit—prying up the manhole to cut the alarm system, the clockwork precision of the break-in, subduing everyone in the house with an unidentified nerve gas, Giancana tied to the bed with a pillow covering his face and seven bullet holes in the pillow."

"I can hear the but coming," Leo said.

"There was a but," Jack said. "It's Rosselli's disappearance. The Sorcerer said it was too much of a coincidence to be a coincidence—the two Cosa Nostra dons who were trying to knock off Castro for us getting whacked at the same time."

"He's assuming Rosselli's dead," Ebby noted.

Jack snickered. "Jesus H. Christ, guys like Rosselli don't drop from sight like that. He left a woman's apartment at midnight. Miami police found his car abandoned in a parking lot near the docks in North Miami Beach. The doors were wide open, the key was in the ignition, a Saturday Night Special was in the glove compartment. The Sorcerer said the word on the street was Rosselli'd bought it, too."

"Could be Castro," Ebby remarked.

"Fidel knew the Company was trying to nail his hide to the wall," Leo said. "He knew who our middlemen were."

Ebby said, "If Castro is behind Giancana's murder and Rosselli's disappearance, it raises ominous possibilities—"

One of the two telephones on Leo's desk purred. Leo picked up the receiver. "Kritzky." He reached over and hit the button marked "Scramble," then listened for a moment. "Add it to the President's Book but flag it to say that HUMINT sources are involved so he won't think it came from a cipher breakout." He listened again. "We're flying out of Dulles tonight. Unless World War III starts I'll be out of the loop for two weeks... Thanks, I plan to." Leo rang off. "Vienna Station's got a Russian journalist claiming that India's going to test a ten kiloton atomic device before the month is out."

"That'll put nuclear proliferation on the front burner," Ebby guessed. "We'll get the usual flurry of 'drop whatever you're doing' queries from Kissinger's shop in the White House basement."

"Let's get back to your ominous possibilities," Jack said quietly.

'Remember what Castro is supposed to have said after the Bay of Pigs?" Ebby asked. "Something along the lines of United States leaders should bear in mind that if they were sending terrorists to eliminate Cuban leaders, they themselves would not be safe."

"I can feel the sand shift under my feet every time we get onto this subject," Leo admitted.

"It's a mystery we'll never get to the bottom of," Jack said.

"Maybe it's better that way," Ebby said. "There's something to be said for letting sleeping dogs lie."

Adelle once repeated something Lyndon Johnson told her days after Kennedy was shot in Dallas," Leo said. He stirred the ice cubes in his drink with the blade of a letter opener. "'Kennedy was trying to kill Castro but Castro got him first.'"

"If Johnson had a shred of hard evidence, it would have come out when the Warren Commission investigated the assassination," Ebby said. "I think he was going on gut feelings."

"Warren Commission was a joke," Jack said. "Remember when Harvey Torriti testified at a closed session? He never breathed a word about the Company's Cosa Nostra connections and the various attempts to knock off Castro. He never told them that Oswald had been spotted visiting the Soviet embassy in Mexico City before he killed Kennedy; or that Oswald saw a KGB 13th Department wetwork specialist named Valery Kostikov, who had connections to people close to Castro." Jack had to laugh. "I once asked Harvey how come he never told Warren's people about that stuff. You know what he said? He said he didn't tell them because they didn't ask."

Ebby shook his head uncomfortably. "Assuming Castro got to Giancana and Rosselli, the question is: Did he get to John Kennedy, too?"

"Maybe Fidel'll write his memoirs some day," Leo said. "Maybe he'll tell us the answer then."

Ebby looked at Leo. "Where are you and Adelle going?"

"Changing the subject," Jack accused Ebby.

"We're off to the Loire Valley," Leo said. "We're biking from one chateau to another. You get to eat these fantastic French meals, then you pedal all day to work them off."

"When's the last time you took a holiday?" Ebby asked.

"We spent ten days hiking through Nova Scotia the September before last," Leo said. "What's that? Twenty months ago."

"You've earned a break," Ebby said.

"Tessa and Vanessa going with you?" Jack asked.

"The twins' idea of a vacation is holding the fort while the parents are away," Leo said.

Ebby climbed to his feet and stretched. "I guess we'd better assign a team to the Giancana-Rosselli thing," he told Jack. "Just in case Castro left some fingerprints lying around."

"The absence of fingerprints is a fingerprint," Leo noted.

"You're supposed to be on vacation," Jack said.

Manny settled into the catbird seat in the pit of the spacious Operations Center, kicked off his loafers and hiked his stockinged feet up on a desk crammed with sterile telephones. The night watch, which came his way once every twenty-one days, was not his idea of a sexy way to spend an evening. He would have preferred to take in Young Frankenstein with Nellie. Catching up on operational reports made the first hour or two pass quickly enough but then tedium inevitably set in; to get through the night the dozen or so hands on deck would resort to reading very tattered copies of Cold War spy novels that were stacked in a bookcase near the water cooler.

Tonight looked as if it would be no exception to the rule. First, Manny leafed through the blue-bordered National Intelligence Daily, hot off the basement press and due to be circulated (to a very restricted audience) the following morning. Behind him, technicians from the Office of Security, dressed in pristine white overalls, were inspecting the devices that vibrated the glass panes in the windows to prevent the KGB from eavesdropping on conversations with laser beams. Television sets lined up on a shelf were tuned to the major networks to monitor breaking news stories. Junior officers from various directorates sat around an enormous oval table keeping track of overnight cables pouring in from stations around the world, sorting them according to security classification and dropping the more urgent ones into the duty officer's in-box. Manny glanced at the wall clock—he still had ten and a half hours to go on the twelve-hour shift—and, swallowing a yawn, attacked the pile in the in-box to see if anybody on the seventh floor of Langley needed to be rousted out of bed.