The Company: A Novel of the CIA (92 page)

"What we need to do now," Ebby said, "is leave some disinformation lying around Shelton's shop that he can pass on to his handlers."

The ashes on Angleton's cigarette grew perilously long but he was too engrossed in the discussion to notice. Squinting down the table at his colleagues, he declared, "Which brings us back to the unfinished business— Æ/PINNACLE and SASHA."

Ebby glanced at Jack, then lowered his eyes.

Angleton said, "I take it that nobody in this room doubts that Kukushkin has proven, beyond a shadow of a doubt, his bona fides."

Everyone understood what that meant.

Jack said, "Director, I'd like to speak with Leo—"

"That's a nonstarter," Angleton snapped. "Kritzky has to be kept in total isolation, he has to be brought to the point of despair—"

Colby asked Jack, "What would you hope to accomplish?"

Jack considered the question. "Leo and I go back a long way. I can get him to face up to the reality of the situation he's in—"

Ebby saw possibilities in this approach. "We have to give Leo a way out short of life in prison. The problem isn't to break him—it's to double him back. If we handle Leo skillfully we could turn a disaster into an intelligence triumph—imagine what we can feed the KGB if Leo agrees to work for us."

Angleton, as he often did, began thinking out loud. "In order to double him you'd have to convince him that we have proof of his treason. Which means you'd have to tell him about the existence of Æ/PINNACLE. And that breaks every rule in the book—"

"That's why it'd work," Jack said with sudden vehemence. He talked directly to Angleton. "If you go by the book, Jim, this could drag on for God knows how long. It could be the Philby interrogation all over again. His interrogators were the best in the business. They went at him for months. They knew he was guilty but as long as he held out, as long as he insisted on his innocence, they couldn't bring the case into court because, in the end, without a confession, the evidence was circumstantial."

"It might be worth trying," Ebby told Colby.

"It would be coming at the problem from another angle," Jack pleaded.

Angleton puffed away on his cigarette. "Highly unusual," he grumbled. "Not something I'd feel comfortable with."

Colby looked from one to the other. "Let me think about it," he finally said.

At first Jack thought he'd been let into the wrong cell. The man sitting on the floor on an army blanket, his back to the padded wall, didn't seem familiar. He looked like one of those survivors of concentration camps seen in old photographs: thin, drawn, with a wild stubble of a beard and sunken cheeks that made his hollow eyes appear oversized and over-sad. His complexion had turned chalky. He was dressed in pajamas that were too large for him. His teeth gnawed away on his lower lip, which was raw and bleeding. The man brought a trembling hand up to shield his eyes from the three naked electric bulbs dangling from the high ceiling. Words seemed to froth up from his lips. "Slumming in Angleton's dungeons, Jack?"

Jack caught his breath. "Leo, is that you!"

The mask on Leo's face cracked into a lop-sided grimace. "It's me, or what's left of me." He started to push himself to his feet but sank back in exhaustion. "Can't offer you much by way of refreshments except water. You can have water, Jack, if you don't mind drinking from the toilet bowl."

Jack crossed the room and settled onto his haunches facing Leo. "God almighty, I didn't know..." He turned his head and stared at the tin cup on the floor next to the toilet. "None of us knew..."

"Should have found out, Jack," Leo said with stiff bitterness. "Shouldn't have left me in Angleton's clutches. I have diarrhea—I clean the inside of the toilet with my hand so I can drink out of it afterward."

Jack tried to concentrate on the reason for his being there. "Leo, you've got to listen up—this doesn't have to end with you rotting here, or in prison for the rest of your days."

"Why would I go to prison, Jack?"

"For treason. For betraying your country. For spying for the Russian we know as Starik."

"You believe that, Jack? You believe I'm SASHA?"

Jack nodded. "We know it, Leo. There's nothing left for you to do but come clean. If you won't think of yourself, think of Adelle. Think of the twins. It's not too late to redeem yourself—"

Mucus seeped from one of Leo's nostrils. Moving in lethargic slow motion, he raised the arm of his filthy pajamas and wiped the mucus away, then blotted the blood off his lips. "How do you know I'm SASHA?" he asked.

Jack settled back until he was sitting on the floor. He realized how cold the room was. "We have a Russian defector," he said. "We've given him the code name Æ/PINNACLE. Ebby's boy, Manny, had the night watch when the Russian made contact. Manny's been running him since."

Leo's eyes burned fiercely into Jack's; it dawned on him that Jack's visit was highly irregular; he was astonished Angleton would sit still for it. "This Æ/PINNACLE identified me by name? He said Leo Kritzky is SASHA?"

"He said SASHA's last name began with K. He said he was fluent in Russian."

"How did he know these things?"

"The defector worked for Directorate S of the First Chief Directorate in Moscow Centre, the department that runs illegals—"

"Damn it, I know what Directorate S is."

"He reported directly to this Starik character. In September of '72, he laid in the plumbing for a trip Starik took to Nova Scotia to meet an agent."

"He said Starik was going to meet an agent."

"No. We surmised that part. We surmised that the only thing that would lure Starik out of Russia was a face-to-face meeting with his agent SASHA."

"And I was on a bicycle trip to Nova Scotia in September of'72."

"Yes, you were, Leo."

"There has to be more to it. What else do you have?"

"Æ/PINNACLE learned from the KGB rezident that SASHA was away from Washington for the two weeks ending on Sunday, twenty-six May."

"Which just happens to be when I was in France." What started out as a laugh gurgled up from Leo's throat. "That it?"

"Jesus H. Christ, isn't that enough?"

"Didn't occur to you guys that Starik was feeding you a phony defector with phony serials to frame the wrong person."

"Why would Starik want to frame you, Leo?"

"To distract you from the right person?"

Jack shook his head. "Angleton's worked up a profile on you that is very persuasive—"

Leo managed a sneer. "Every operation that succeeded was designed to advance my career. Every one that failed, failed because I gave it away."

"There's too much overlap for it to be coincidental. Besides which, you flunked Jim's polygraph test. In spades."

"Did anyone flutter this Æ/PINNACLE character of yours?"

"Come off it, Leo. You know as well as I do we don't flutter defectors in a safe-house environment. He'll be too uptight, too edgy to get an accurate reading. We'll flutter him when we bring him over for good."

"You can't flutter a defector in a safe house. But Angleton can flutter a prisoner in a padded cell who drinks water out of the toilet and still get good results?" Leo teetered forward. "Pay attention, Jack, I'm going to tell you something you need to remember: Æ/PINNACLE will never be fluttered. He'll be run over by a car or mugged in an alleyway or whisked back to Mother Russia for some cockamamie reason that will sound plausible enough. But he won't be fluttered because he won't be brought in. He won't be brought in because he's a dispatched defector sent to convince Angleton I'm SASHA."

Jack shook his head in despair. "If you're not SASHA, Leo, it means that SASHA is still out there somewhere. If that's so, how do you explain the fact that Æ/PINNACLE hasn't been put on ice by his embassy's SK people?"

"Jack, Jack, he hasn't been put on ice because your Æ/PINNACLE is a dispatched agent and SASHA, if he exists, knows it."

"Look, I didn't come here to argue with you, Leo. I came here to offer you a way out."

Leo whispered hoarsely, "The way out of here is through that padded door, Jack. I'm innocent. I'm not SASHA. I'm Leo Kritzky. I've been fighting the good fight for twenty-four years. And look at the thanks I get." Suddenly Leo began trembling. He jammed his thumb and third finger into the corners of his eyes and breathed hard through his mouth. "It's so unfair Jack. So fucking unfair. There has to be someone who believes me—who believes this defector is a dispatched agent, sent to frame me—"

Jack struggled to find the right words. "Leo, I can't tell you how but Æ/PINNACLE has proven his bona fides beyond any doubt. There is absolutely no possibility of his being a dispatched agent. Which means his serials concerning SASHA are genuine. And they all point to you. Admit you're SASHA, Leo. Tell us what you've given them over the years so we can run a damage assessment analysis. And then come over to our side. We'll double you, we'll run you back against the KGB. No one here will forgive you, no one here will shake your hand again. But it can keep you out of prison, Leo. Adelle, the twins won't find out you betrayed your country unless you tell them. When it's all over, you can go off somewhere where people won't know you and live out what's left of your life."

With an effort Leo struggled to his feet and, clutching the waistband of his pajamas, shuffled in short, cautious steps across the room to the toilet. He sank to his knees in front of it and filled the tin cup from the bowl and moistened his lips with the water. He looked over at Jack. Then, with his eyes fixed on him, Leo slowly drank off the rest of the cup. When he finished he set the cup down on the ground and whispered through his raw lips, "Go fuck yourself, Jack."

6
WASHINGTON, DC, TUESDAY, JULY 30, 1974

AND THEN Æ/PINNACLE DISAPPEARED FROM THE RADAR SCREEN. "What do you mean, disappeared?" Jack demanded when Manny called in on a secure line from the Watcher's flat down the hall from Agatha Ept's apartment.

"He seems to have vanished, Jack. That's all I can say for the moment."

"Did their SK people somehow tag on to him?"

"Don't know."

Jack was clearly irritated. "What do you know?"

"Æ/PINNACLE phoned Ept Friday before she left for work to say he'd come by Monday evening. I just listened to the tape of the conversation. He said he'd appreciate it if she could get her hands on more of the candy that she swiped from the Patent Office from time to time. Which means that, as of Friday morning, he was operational."

"How did he sound?"

"He didn't sound as if he was talking with a gun to his head, if that's what you mean. He was tense—who wouldn't be in his shoes—but he wasn't particularly agitated or anything.

"When did you see him last?"

"A week ago today. We cut the session short because his daughter was running a fever and he was anxious to get back to the embassy."

"He seem normal?"

"Yeah, Jack, he did. Although for Æ/PINNACLE, 'normal' was preoccupied—anxious to unload the material he'd collected, worried about what the future held for him and his family. We chatted for a moment waiting for the elevator—he told me the latest Brezhnev joke, then he said he'd call Ept and let her know when he would be able to come again."

Jack asked "Did you have any trace of him between Tuesday and Friday, when he phoned Ept?"

"The FBI caught him on their surveillance cameras going in and out of the embassy, once on Wednesday afternoon, once on Thursday morning. Both times he was with the chief of the consular section, Borisov, who is the KGB rezident—they were chatting away as if neither of them had a care in the world. Then we have him on tape Friday morning telling Ept he'd come by on Monday. Then—he dropped from sight."

"I don't like the sound of it, Manny," Jack said. "With all the cameras and Watchers, how does a Russian diplomat drop from sight?"

"It turns out the Russians recently bought several cars with tinted windows—we film them coming into and out of the underground parking but we have no idea who's inside. It's possible Æ/PINNACLE could have been in one of these cars."

"Any sign of the wife or daughter?"

"No. And his wife missed a Monday afternoon appointment with the heart man we set up two floors above the Bulgarian dentist. She was supposed to come in for another electrocardiogram. And she never phoned the dentist's office to cancel."

Jack said, "Okay, if Æ/PINNACLE and his wife left town, chances are it was by plane, so we ought to have them on surveillance cameras. I'll put the Office of Security onto the problem. You come on in and look over their shoulder when they go through the footage—if anybody can spot Kukushkin or his wife it'll be you."

Manny spent the rest of the morning and all of the afternoon in a Company screening room, studying the clips that the security people projected for him. He started with the footage from Friday afternoon—reel after reel of people boarding international carriers. Several times Manny spotted heavy-shouldered men with light-colored hair. But when the clip was run again in slow motion he could see that none of them was Sergei Kukushkin. Sandwiches and coffee were brought in and he started going through the Saturday morning reels.

At one point, Manny ducked out to phone Nellie and tell her not to count on him that night; they were more or less living together in Nellie's apartment, though Manny hadn't given up his old flat, which was a sore point with Nellie. It's not the two rents that bugs me, she'd told him when the subject came up at breakfast one morning, it's the symbolism; you're afraid to burn your bridges. Incest takes getting used to, he'd explained. At which point they'd laughingly repeated in chorus what had become their credo: No doubt about it, incest is definitely best!

"Hey, are you watching the tube?" Nellie asked now.

"I am otherwise engaged," Manny said dryly.

"Well, you're missing out on history in the making: The House Judiciary Committee just voted the third article of impeachment."

"Nixon will worm out of it," Manny said. "He always does."

"Not this time," Nellie said. "Here's what I think: It has nothing to do with the Watergate break in, it has nothing to do with the Supreme Court ordering Nixon to turn over those sixty-four incriminating tapes to the special prosecutor."