The Company: A Novel of the CIA (94 page)

"You were careful to make sure the orders and the checks were in your wife's maiden name so that nobody would stumble across the link between you and Kahns delivery boy, who turned out to be a cutout for the KGB."

With his peripheral vision, Leo saw the moth alight on the padding of the wall above the toilet bowl. He couldn't wait for Angleton to leave so he could formally welcome his visitor. "It's another assumption of yours that fits in with what you want to believe," Leo said impatiently. "The only problem is that your assumptions don't add up. Your case is circumstantial and you know it."

"My circumstantial case, as you put it, rests on incontrovertible evidence from an irrefutable witness. There's only one way out of all this for you— admit you're SASHA, then cooperate with us in undoing the damage you've done to the Company." Angleton patted his jacket pocket in search of cigarettes as he turned his back on Leo and left the room. A guard bolted the door behind him.

For several minutes Leo continued sitting on the folded blanket with his back against a wall. He suspected that Angleton would be watching him through the pinhole in the door and he didn't want to put the moth in jeopardy. After a long while he decided the coast was clear and let his eyes drift up to the moth, clinging with spread-eagled wings to the padding of the wall behind the toilet. It was by far the most beautiful creature Leo had ever set eyes on in his life. There was a elegant symmetry to the intricate purple and brown pattern on the back of the wings; a graceful sensuality to the elongated hairy undercarriage and the feathery antennas that probed, like a blind man tapping a cane, the microcosm immediately in front of its head. Leo remembered having a high school chum who collected moths. The prize in his collection, grotesquely (so it had seemed to Leo) pinned to cork under glass, had been a rare species of moth called the Sphinx of Siberia. Leo decided that his moth was every bit as exotic and could qualify as a Sphinx, too. His spirits soared—he took it as an omen, a sign that someone beyond this secret prison and outside of Angleton's immediate circle knew of his predicament and would soon slip into the cell to succor him. He raised a hand in salute to convey to his comrade that they shared not only the same cell, but the same fate.

In the hours and days that followed Leo would make his way to one side of the room or another to visit his fellow prisoner clinging with endless patience to the padded wall. He took to murmuring words of encouragement to it and listened to the message of its body language; with patience, with fortitude, it seemed to be saying, they would both escape from this confinement that could no longer be described as solitary. And as if to drive home the point, from time to time the Sphinx would quit its perch and circle one of the light bulbs for minutes on end, delighting his cellmate by casting large flickering shadows onto the walls.

Angleton noticed the change in his prisoner immediately. Kritzky managed a conspiratorial smile now and then, almost as if he were concealing a delicious secret, and appeared eager to engage Angleton in verbal sparring. He even tittered out loud when the counterintelligence chief raised the possibility that Leo would die of old age in this cell if he didn't cooperate. Suspecting that one of the jailers might have befriended the prisoner, Angleton had all of the guards changed. Still, Leo's morale seemed to grow stronger by the day. "Sure, operations I had a hand in went bad," he admitted to Angleton during one morning session. "For heaven's sake, Jim, operations you had a hand in went bad, too, but nobody's accusing you of being a Soviet mole." Leo cast a glance in the direction of the Sphinx of Siberia and then suddenly started to laugh. Soon he was laughing so hard tears trickled from his eyes. "Maybe someone-" Laughter racked his body, laughter hurt his gut. "Maybe someone should, Jim. I mean, what a Joke it would be if James Jesus Angleton... turned out to be SASHA. Maybe you're going through the motions... oh. God, it's hilarious... going through the motions of hunting for SASHA to divert attention from yourself. Doubled over, Leo clutched his stomach and gasped for air between spasms of laughter. "Don't you see the humor of it, Jim? The joke would be on the Company, wouldn't it? Oh, Christ, the joke would be on me."

7

EN ROUTE TO THE SOVIET UNION, SATURDAY, AUGUST 10, 1974

THE REGULAR FRIDAY ÆROFLOT FLIGHT TO MOSCOW WAS RUNNING three quarters of an hour late. The plane had been delayed at the gate to repair a leak in a hydraulic system, then held up on the runway by the heavy traffic in and out of JFK. The fifty or so passengers aboard—two dozen wore blue-and-white lapel pins identifying them as clients on Trailblazer Travel's one-week tour of Moscow—were sound asleep, stretched across the vacant seats of the half-empty Tupolev 144. Manny, who had been leafing through Fodor's guide to Russia when he wasn't catnapping, wandered back down the aisle to where the stewards had set up a sandwich bar and helped himself to a ham on black bread and a plastic cup filled with kvass. He opened the sandwich and spread some mustard on the bread.

"What's going to happen now that Nixon has resigned?" the male steward inquired from the pantry. "Will there be a coup d'etat?"

Manny had to laugh. "I doubt it," he said. "Gerald Ford's already been sworn into the White House. In America, the transition is spelled out in the constitution." He bit into the sandwich, then talked with his mouth full. "What would happen in Russia if Brezhnev resigned tomorrow?"

"Why would Comrade Brezhnev want to resign?"

"Say he did something illegal like Nixon—say he had his people break into the opposition's headquarters. Say the burglars were caught and Mr. Brezhnev ordered the police not to investigate the case. Say he tried to bribe the burglars into keeping quiet when that didn't work."

Now it was the stewards turn to laugh. "What you are describing couldn't happen in a proletarian democracy," he said earnestly. He tossed his fine blond hair away from his eyes with a snap of his head. "Our Communist Party represents all points of view in the Socialist spectrum, which means there is no political opposition and no headquarters to break into. I can see you are not familiar with the Soviet Union—is this your first visit?"

Manny was vaguely aware that the steward had initiated the conversation and steered it around to this question. "Yeah, as a matter of fact, it is."

"Where are you from?"

"New York. Manhattan, actually. Upper West Side, if you really want to pin me down."

The Company, in fact, had provided Manny with a cover identity and backstopped it so he could pass any but the most exhaustive vetting. Armed with a driver's license, an Upper West Side neighborhood grocery fidelity card, a Yale alumni card, a voter registration card, American Express Travelers Cheques and a very worn three-year-old passport filled with entry and exit stamps to England and Spain and Mexico, he was traveling under the name of Immanuel Bridges. If someone took the trouble to check, he would find an Immanuel Bridges listed in the Manhattan telephone directory on Broadway and Eighty-Second Street. (Anyone who dialed the number would reach an answering machine with Manny's recorded voice saying, "Hi, I can't come to the phone. Now you say something.") Manny, who had once taken a course in business administration, would be passing himself off as a merger consultant; he had been assigned an office in a firm on 44 Wall Street, as well as a parking space two blocks away. (A secretary at the firm would answer all calls coming in on Manny's line with, "I'm sorry, Mr. Bridges is away on vacation. Would you care to leave a message?") A check with the admissions office at Yale would reveal that someone named Bridges, Immanuel, had graduated in 1968 with a degree in business administration. Even the gym card in Manny's wallet had been backstopped; someone phoning up the gym on upper Broadway would hear a gruff voice muttering, "Hang on—I'll see if he's here." A moment later the voice would come back on the line. "No, he ain't here— a guy who works out with Mr. Bridges says he's out of town for the week."

It was twenty-five minutes after high noon, local time, when the Tupolov finally began its descent through dense clouds toward Sheremetyevo Airport northwest of Moscow. As they came out under the clouds, Manny spotted a blue-gray tear in the overcast sky off to the right through which sunlight streamed, illuminating what seemed to be a carpet of white birches. It was his first glimpse of Mother Russia. Moments later a tongue of tarmac materialized below the fuselage and the Tupolov dropped down onto it. Many of the passengers, relieved to be alive, applauded.

Inside the terminal, Manny joined the mob queuing at the passport control lines. Waiting his turn, he thought again of the remarkable conversation he'd had with Ebby the previous afternoon. Ebby had insisted on driving him to the airport. It was Manny who raised a subject that they had nibbled at dozens of times over the years.

The subject was fear.

Whenever Manny had worked up the nerve to ask his father about Budapest '56, Ebby had somehow managed to reply without telling his son anything he didn't already know. Driving Manny to JFK, Ebby had started to reply to his son's perennial question with the usual half answers. Manny, exasperated, had interrupted him. "Dad, we're coming down to the wire here. The Company has supplied me with a cover ID but it hasn't outfitted me mentally. What I want to know—what you need to tell me—is: Were you afraid in Budapest?"

And for the first time Ebby had addressed the subject directly. "Yeah, I was afraid, Manny. I was frightened going into Budapest. I was terrified when they snatched me off the street and started to question me in one of their torture chambers. I was paralyzed with fear when I realized they knew my name and rank and details of my service record."

"How did you deal with the fear?"

"What I'm going to say may sound strange to you—I had an epiphany. It hit me like a bolt of lightening. I wasn't afraid of the pain, I wasn't afraid of the dying. For reasons that had to do with my father and the way he'd died, I was afraid of being afraid, which is another way of saying I was afraid of not living up to my father. And this insight liberated me. It was as if I'd suddenly been sucked into the eye of a hurricane. Everything slowed down—my racing pulse, the thoughts tearing through my skull, the rotation of the earth on its axis. Everything."

As the car was emerging from the Midtown Tunnel, sunlight had turned the window opaque for an instant. Ebby had leaned forward and squinted anxiously and, when he could see again, had followed the signs to the Long Island Expressway. After a while Manny had said, very quietly, "I have a father, too."

Ebby had looked quickly at his son. "You have nothing to prove to me, Manny. You're everything a man could want in a son. When the Judgment Day comes you are the evidence, defense exhibit number one."

"Maybe I have things to prove to myself."

Ebby had considered this for a moment. "When I joined the Company we had an instructor by the name of Andrews. He was OSS and had been to hell and back in the war. He drummed into us that the only sure way to avoid being broken—he called it the eleventh commandment of intelligence work—was to never get caught."

"You broke the eleventh commandment," Manny had remarked.

"I did, didn't I? Concentrate on your tradecraft and make goddamn sure you don't."

Manny had smiled. Ebby had grinned back but his son could see the worry lines distorting the forced smile. And it struck him how courageous his father had been to let him volunteer for this mission. "Thanks, Dad," he said.

Ebby understood that they were communicating between the lines. "Sure. You're welcome."

In the crowded airport hall at Sheremetyevo, one of the Trailblazer tourists was prodding Manny. "You're next," he whispered. Snapping out of his reverie, Manny walked up to the booth and slid his passport under the glass partition. A woman with badly bleached hair piled on her head and a completely expressionless face, wearing the gray uniform and shoulder boards of the KGB's elite frontier guards, rifled through it page by page before turning back to the photograph and looking up straight into his eyes to see if he matched the picture. Her gaze flicked over Manny's right shoulder to the mirror planted above and behind him at a forty-five degree angle to give her a view of his feet; in the mirror she could see if he were trying to make himself shorter or taller. She checked his height in the passport and then looked again at him through the partition. Manny knew that there were calibrations etched into her side of the glass so she could tell his exact height at a glance. She flipped through an enormous loose-leaf binder to make sure his name wasn't in it, then stamped the passport and the currency form he'd filled out in the plane and, looking to her right, nodded for the next person.

Manny scarcely let himself breathe—he had passed the very stringent Soviet border control and was inside the belly of the whale. A pulse throbbed in his temple; the rotation of the earth on its axis seemed to have speeded up.

For the rest of Saturday and the two days that followed, Manny found himself being whisked by the Trailblazer chaperons from one tourist site to another. Accompanied by Intourist guides who regurgitated the official Soviet version of history, they visited the Kremlin churches, the onion-domed St. Basils Cathedral on Red Square and the Lenin Museum on one side of the square, then were taken to the head of the long queue to file past the Wax-like corpse of Lenin in the nearby mausoleum. Across from the mausoleum, the side of GUM, a vast show-case department store that they were scheduled to visit Tuesday morning, was draped with giant portraits of the Soviet leaders: there was Vladimir Ilyich Lenin with a vaguely Kazakh slant to his eyes, Karl Marx hiding behind his unkempt Walt Whitman-like beard, Leonid Brezhnev beaming down like a benevolent alcoholic. The American tourists spent one entire morning at the VDNKh, the Exhibit of the Economic Achievements of the Nationalities (the highlights: Yuri Gagarin's rocket monument and the colossal 'Worker and Kolokhoznik' statue), and an afternoon at a church in Zagorsk that reeked of incense and candle wax. That evening they were taken to the Bolshoi Theater, a stone's throw from the Metropole, to attend a dazzling performance of Giselle. At mealtimes the tourists were bussed back to the Hotel Metropole and seated under the stained-glass dome at tables with small American flags on them; the first course (served by waiters who tried to peddle black market caviar on the side) was invariably half a hard-boiled egg covered with wrinkled peas and mayonnaise that had petrified because the food had been prepared hours in advance.