The Prodigal Spy (24 page)

“So,” his father said, a blackboard pointer in his voice, “a new question. Who else did
she
know? Who recruited her?”

They were almost at the car now, and Nick turned to him, away from the guard. “Does it matter anymore?” he said gently. “So many years. Maybe he’s dead too.”

His father shook his head. “No, you don’t understand. It does matter. He’s still there.”

The guard, no longer shy, called over to them in rapid Czech, and Nick stepped aside when his father answered, jarred by the sudden volley of foreign words. Even the familiar voice seemed different, guttural and slurred. He looked at him, half expecting to see his face changed too, broad and Slavic.

“He wants to know what it can do on the highway, how fast,” his father said.

“I don’t know,” Nick said, his mind elsewhere. “What do you mean, he’s still there?”

“Later,” his father said quietly, then spoke in Czech again, affable now, sharing a foreign joke. Nick watched the guard widen his eyes, then shrug. “I told him ninety easy before it starts to rattle. He says his Tatra would fall apart.” The guard gave the car an admiring pat. “I think you’ve made a convert to the West.”

“Stop it,” Nick said, annoyed at his tone.

“Just smile and get in the car,” his father said, almost under his breath, and then spoke Czech to the guard again. Nick watched them chat for a minute, idle car talk outside the old camp walls, and felt again how surreal ordinary life was here. The past wasn’t forgotten, just ignored. Down the road, little girls had played in a pool.

“Never leave a bad impression,” his father said, getting in the car. “People remember.”

Nick put the car in gear and pulled away. “How do you know he’s still there?”

His father lit a cigarette. “Because I’ve been following him. Every agent has a pattern.”

“Following how?”

“Well, at first by accident,” he said, blowing smoke, easing into it. “We always acted alone in Washington. Burgess staying at Philby’s house–that kind of thing would have been impossible for us. We never knew each other. I had my contact, my control, at the Russian embassy, and that was it. No one else.”

“Then how do you know—”

“The code names. They liked to group us–it’s a convenience. Fish. Birds. Mythology. Whatever came to someone’s mind. I’ve often wondered who did that, who assigned the names. They’re supposed to be completely at random, but you know how it is, someone can’t help being clever. San Francisco was Babylon, Washington Carthage. Capitals of fallen empires. Some clerk’s idea of a joke.”

“What was yours?”

“Coal. I thought it was because of the union work, but it turned out we were all minerals. It had no significance at all. Schulman was Gold. Panning for gold? Maybe he was just first. Of course, I never had the cross-files, only the code names. But it became a kind of game to figure it out, to see whether I might have known any of them. I was pretty sure Iron was Carlson over in Commerce–the reports had his tone, just as dull as talking to him, and sure enough, when he died the reports stopped, so it must have been. Copper was someone at the
Post
, but I’m still not sure who. The others were mostly illegals, Soviets who were there without diplomatic immunity, so I wouldn’t have known them even if I had had the cross-files. Not that it mattered. It was just a game, to help pass the time.”

Nick stared ahead, amazed. A boys’ game for grownups, code names and passwords.

“Of course, this was all later,” his father continued. “After Josef, my embassy control, came home. At first I didn’t see anything. They had me reading newspapers. I was a sort of
Reader’s Digest
for Moscow Central. Then I got the traffic from the San Francisco residency.”

“They had an office in San Francisco? What for?”

“Originally to monitor the UN conference in ‘45,” his father said easily. “Afterward, well, some of the old GRU contacts were still there. It was useful to keep tabs on the Soviet merchant marine. Sailors had a bad habit of jumping ship once they were in Babylon. Defectors. That kept the office busy.”

“What happened to them, the sailors?”

“Does it matter?” his father said quietly.

“Yes.”

“They were found and shipped back home.”

Not a game. Hunted down, thrown into ships, sent back to prison camps.

“With your help,” Nick said.

His father was quiet, then sighed. “Yes, with my help. What do you want me to say, Nick? That I didn’t know?”

“No,” Nick said, absorbing it. “Go on.”

“So Josef came back–this would be after they finally got rid of Beria, lots of changes then–and we got together. He liked a drink. I’m a political analyst, I said. Isn’t it time I had something to analyze? I’m wasting my time here. No one is going to waste time now, he says. We’re going to clean house. You’ll see. Very important. As if it were up to him. It’s the drink talking, I thought. But no, reports did start coming. They threw out half the section, Beria’s goons, and Josef had everything his way for a while. He liked me, I don’t know why. I never liked him much, but we don’t pick our commissars, do we? I finally had some real work to do.

“Then, one day, a funny thing. Josef used to assign the reports, but he was out, so his secretary brought them straight over from cryptology. She was the type who knew everything–she came with the place. No one could ever get rid of her, not even Josef. I think maybe she had a protector. Anyway, she handed me a report and said, ‘So Silver’s back. Now we’ll really have something,’ as if I knew all about it. ”Good,“ I said. ‘It’s about time.’ Conspirators, you see. And she was right–we did have something. Committee minutes. House appropriations. Much better than the other stuff I was seeing. So where did this come from? I wondered. Not Carlson. Not an illegal–the access was too good. The next day I said to Josef, ‘Who’s Silver?’ Not that he would tell me–that wasn’t allowed. But I thought he might say something, a hint. For the old network. It only took a second, that look of surprise. He shouldn’t have hesitated —we live for seconds like that.”

Nick thought of the guard, of his father’s seamless affability, not even a second’s pause.

“‘There is no Silver,’ he said. ‘What are you talking about?’ But I knew. It was that second. I showed him the report. ‘Oh, this,’ he said. ‘That idiot in cryptology —he keeps getting the names wrong. There is no Silver.’ So I went along with it–what else could I do? I waited for the next one. Of course it never came. So one day I took a report back to the secretary and said, casually, you know, ‘This one’s no Silver. When’s he going to deliver again?’ and the old cow smiled that little superior smile of hers. ‘Oh, Josef Ivanovich reads those himself.’ So there it was. But what? Why not let me see them? I was reading everything else. We used to cross-check the reports, to verify information when we could. Evidently these didn’t need verification. Josef never said a word. I would get him drunk, talk about the old days, but never a word. The others, yes. How Carlson used to bungle the meetings. Lots of stories.

“Then one night he said something interesting. We were talking about the Cochrane woman. ‘That was wrong,’ he said, ‘which surprised me. I thought he was talking about her being killed. Josef wasn’t the squeamish type. His hands were never— Then he said, ’You can’t run things that way. The postman shouldn’t know anyone.‘ ’She knew me,‘ I said, thinking I’d catch him, but he just shrugged it off. ’From the newspapers.‘ He wagged his finger at me, I remember. ’I always said, stay out of the newspapers.‘ Scolding me, a joke. So we laughed. But all I could think was, she knew somebody else.”

“Silver,” Nick said.

“Yes. It had to be. No one else was that important. Maybe Schulman–he was a talent spotter, he would have known names, but he had a different contact. Not in Washington. She never knew him. It had to be Silver. No one in the old network was worth protecting. Not that way–killing somebody. Josef wouldn’t talk about him. They were still protecting him, even from me.”

“What made him so important?”

“His information. They were right–it didn’t need verification. No guesswork, no mistakes.”

Nick glanced over. “You got this from one report?”

“No, I saw others. I told you, I followed him. Nothing lasts forever in the service. Including Josef. He was a good man, too, as far as that went. His problem was, he was from the old days, all the way back to the Comintern, when people believed in things. He didn’t grasp what it had all become. Just smoke and mirrors. And perks, if you knew how to work them. Which he didn’t.”

“What happened to him?”

“I don’t know. We never asked.”

“You never asked?”

“Does that seem strange to you? You see how long I’ve been here. You have to live through the terror to understand. You’d hear the cars. The next morning no one would say a thing, even the neighbors. It happened in my building once. Like a plague–no one wanted to touch the sick. You went to work. You went about your business. After Stalin died it was different, but who knew for how long? It was always better not to ask. So we didn’t. People just–went away.” He paused and lit another cigarette, coughing slightly. “Once a whole hockey team, the WS, national heroes. That was Vasily’s pet project–Stalin’s son, a drunk. Vasya ordered them to fly to Kazan in a storm, on a Politburo plane, no less. It went down. But there were no disasters in the Soviet Union, not even natural ones. So no publicity. They just disappeared, the whole team. No one said a word.” He drew on the cigarette. “Vasya,” he said scornfully. “His father was always cleaning up one mess or another. He tortured people, I heard. For the practice. But what could they expect, given the father? They had to wait until Stalin died before they could send him away. Then he disappeared too.”

His voice had begun to drift, an old man’s ramble, away from Nick, and Nick saw now that he would never know his father’s other life. Even the palace gossip was as chilling and remote as whispers from outer space.

“We were talking about your boss,” he said.

“Yes. Josef. Another victim. But in this case also an opportunity. Now we had Alexei, somebody’s nephew, a kid. He didn’t even know where the files were. Josef’s secretary ran things, when he let her. He was suspicious of everybody —well, he was right to be suspicious–but he trusted me. An American defector. I’d be the one person who’d never have his job. So I helped him. Among other things, I told him that the Silver reports were supposed to come to me, no one else. Of course, it was his department now, and if he felt it would be better to change the procedures— He didn’t. He brought me the first one himself, like a puppy. So I followed Silver.”

“Who was he?”

His father shook his head.

“You never figured it out?”

“Neither did Hoover. But I knew where. Hoover showed me where.”

“Hoover?”

“Strange, isn’t it, to end up on the same side. We were both looking for him. And he helped me.” A small smile, a twist of history. “You see, I thought it had to be somebody I knew. The mind plays these funny tricks when you don’t know where to look. You turn things over and over–you suspect everybody. Everybody. Your best friend. Why not? He took my wife. Or your housekeeper.” He nodded. “Even Nora. Imagine. The best one was Welles himself. Just the kind of elaborate bluff the comrades would like.”

He stopped and shook his head. “So much time wasted. Then Hoover showed me. I got some of Silver’s early reports, the ones Josef had kept to himself, and that’s when everything began to fall into place. After I left Hoover went on another witch-hunt, this time internal. Right through the Bureau. Now that was interesting. He had never done this before, at least that we knew. So how did we know now? I studied those reports over and over. You see, we’d never been able to crack the Bureau. And now here it was, details, how he was turning the place inside out, what he was thinking. Not low-level information–someone close to him. And everything else began to make sense. The access everywhere, not just one department. The personal information–who else had files like that? Why he had to be protected–Dzerzhinsky would have done anything to keep someone close to Hoover. A prize. And that hunt, for Hoover to go after his own–I know what that’s like. It’s always the worst fear in the service, a renegade agent, someone who
knows
. Now it made sense why it was so hard for me to track him. The others, they’d reveal themselves one way or the other. You can’t imagine the mistakes. They don’t follow their own rules. Sometimes, by accident, even their own names, or their colleagues‘. But Silver was different. He was a professional, careful. Nothing to indicate where he was. But when Hoover knew, then I knew too. He was there. Our man in the Bureau. If it hadn’t been for Hoover, I never would have known where to look.”

“But you said there’s always a pattern.”

“To the reports, yes. A certain style. But never
how
he knew. The others, they made regular reports, even when they had nothing to report. But with Silver, months would go by. No unnecessary risks. Then, when he had something, there’d be several in a row, all complete. Then nothing again. You had to wait. When he stopped, I didn’t know it for months. I kept waiting. But he was gone.”

“What do you mean, he stopped?”

“No reports. No documents. It got to be a year. That’s a long time. I thought he was dead, or Hoover had finally got him and covered it up. What else? The others were all gone, one way or another. He had a long run, longer than most. People get caught, or die. Schulman. Carlson. Now Silver. It was the logical thing. You don’t retire, you know.”

“You did,” Nick said.

“I wasn’t in the field,” his father said smoothly. “Just an office worker. With a pension. In the field it’s different. You keep going until something happens. But he was never caught. We would have heard that. He had to be dead.”

“But he wasn’t.”

“No. I didn’t know for years. Of course, I wasn’t in a position to know. They reorganized the department again. I had other things to do. But I could still hear the gossip, and I never heard anything.”

“Then how do you know he’s still there?”