The Company_ A Novel Of The CIA Part 5

"It doesn't stand for anything. I only use it when I'm trying to impress people. My father wrote it in on the birth certificate because he thought it made you look important if you had a middle initial."

"I happen to be on the review board that examines the 201s-the personal files-of potential recruits. I remember yours, John J. McAuliffe. During your junior semester abroad you served as an intern in the American emba.s.sy in Moscow-"

"My father knew someone in the State Department-he pulled strings," Jack explained.

"The amba.s.sador sent you back to the states when it was discovered that you were using the diplomatic pouch to smuggle Finnish lobsters in from Helsinki."

"Your background checks are pretty thorough. I was afraid I'd wash out if that became known."

"I suppose there's no harm in telling you-your college record is fairly mediocre. You were taken because of the incident. The Company wants people who are not afraid to bend the rules."

"That being the case, what about the cup of Champagne?" Jack turned on the charm. "The way I see it, men and women are accomplices in the great game of s.e.x. You lean forward, the top of your blouse falls open, it's a gesture you've practiced in front of a mirror, there is a glimpse of a breast, a nipple-you'd think something was wrong with me if I don't notice."

Owen-Brack screwed up her lips. "You beautiful boys never get it right, and you won't get it right until you lose your beauty. It's not your beauty that seduces us but your voices, your words; we are seduced by your heads, not your hands." She glanced impatiently at a tiny watch on her wrist. "Look, you need to know that Owen is my maiden name," she informed him, "Brack is my married name."

'h.e.l.l, n.o.body's perfect-I won't hold your being married against you."

Owen-Brack didn't think Jack was funny. "My husband worked for the Company-he was killed in a border skirmish you never read about in the New York Times. Stop me if I'm wrong but the view from the sixty-sixth floor, the drink in my fist-that's not what you have in mind. You're asking if I'd be willing to sleep with you. The answer is: Yeah, I can see how I might enjoy that. If my husband were alive I'd be tempted to go ahead and cheat on him. h.e.l.l, he cheated enough on me. But his being dead changes the chemistry of the situation. I don't need a one-night stand, I need a love affair. And that rules you out-you're obviously not the love affair type. Byebye, John J. McAuliffe. And good luck to you. You're going to need it."

"Spies," the instructor was saying, his voice reduced to stifled gasps because his scarred vocal cords strained easily, "are perfectly sane human beings who become neurotically obsessed with trivia." Robert Andrews, as he was listed on the S.M. Craw roster in the lobby, had captured the attention of the management trainees the moment he shuffled into the cla.s.sroom eight weeks before. Only the bare bones of his ill.u.s.trious OSS career were known. He had been parachuted into Germany in 1944 to contact the Abwehr clique planning to a.s.sa.s.sinate Hitler, and what was left of him after months of Gestapo interrogation was miraculously liberated from Buchenwald by Patton's troops at the end of the war. Sometime between the two events the skin on the right side of his face had been branded with a series of small round welts and his left arm had been literally torn from its shoulder socket on some sort of medieval torture rack. Now the empty sleeve of his sports jacket, pinned neatly back, slapped gently against his rib cage as he paced in front of the trainees. "Spies," he went on, "file away the details that may one day save their lives. Such as which side of any given street will be in the shadows cast by a rising moon. Such as under what atmospheric conditions a pistol shot sounds like an automobile backfiring."

Enthralled by the whine of a police siren that reached his good ear through the windows, Mr. Andrews ambled over to the sill and stared through his reflection at the traffic on Route 95. The sound appeared to transport him to another time and another place and only with a visible effort was he able to snap himself out of a fearful reverie. "We have tried to drum into your heads what the people who employ us are pleased to call the basics of tradecraft," he said, turning back to his students. "Letter drops, cut-out agents, invisible writing techniques, microdots, miniature cameras, shaking a tail, planting bugs-you are all proficient in these matters. We have tried to teach you KGB tradecraft-how they send over handsome young men to seduce secretaries with access to secrets, how their handlers prefer to meet their agents in open areas as opposed to safe houses, how East Germans spies operating in the West employ the serial numbers on American ten-dollar bills to break out telephone numbers from lottery numbers broadcast over the local radio stations. But the truth is that these so-called basics will take you only so far. To go beyond, you have to invent yourself for each a.s.signment; you have to become the person the enemy would never suspect you of being, which involves doing things the enemy would never suspect an intelligence officer of doing. I know of an agent who limped when he was a.s.signed to follow someone-he calculated that n.o.body would suspect a lame man of working the street for an intelligence organization. I shall add that the agent was apprehended when the Abwehr man he was following noticed that he was favoring his right foot one day and his left the next. I was that agent. Which makes me uniquely qualified to pa.s.s on to you the ultimate message of tradecraft." Here Mr. Andrews turned back toward the window to stare at his own image in the gla.s.s.

"For the love of G.o.d," the reflection said, "don't make mistakes."

Several hours had been set aside after cla.s.ses let out for meetings with representatives of the various Company departments who had come down from c.o.c.kroach Alley on the Reflecting Pool to recruit for their divisions. As usual the deputy head of the elite Soviet Russia Division, Felix Etz, was allowed to skim off the cream of the crop. To n.o.body's surprise the first person he homed in on turned out to be Millicent Pearlstein, the lawyer from Cincinnati who had earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Chicago in Russian language and literature before she went on to law school. She had done extremely well in Flaps and Seals as well as Picks and Locks, and had scored high marks in the Essentials of Recruitment and Advanced Ciphers and Communist Theory and Practice. Jack had a so-so record in the course work but he had aced a field exercise; on a training run to Norfolk he had used a phony State of West Virginia Operators license and a bogus letter with a forged signature of the Chief of Naval Ordinance to talk his way onto the USS John R. Pierce and into the destroyer's Combat Information Center, and come away with top-secret training manuals for the s.h.i.+p's surface and air radars. His gung-ho att.i.tude, plus his knowledge of German and Spanish, caught Etz's eye and he was offered a plum berth. Ebby, with his operational experience in OSS and his excellent grades in the refresher courses, was high on Etz's list, too. When Leo's interview came he practically talked his way into the Soviet Russia Division. It wasn't his knowledge of Russian and Yiddish or his high grades that impressed Etz so much as his motivation; Leo had inherited the ardent and lucid anti-Communism of his parents, who had fled Russia one step ahead of the Bolsheviks after the 1917 revolution.

In the early evening the management trainees drifted over to an Italian restaurant in downtown Springfield to celebrate the end of the grueling twelve-week Craw curriculum. "Looks as if I'm going to Germany," Ebby was telling the others at his end of the long banquet table. He half-filled Millicent's wine gla.s.s, and then his own, with Chianti. "Say, you're not going to believe me when I tell you what attracted them to me."

"Fact that you're at home in German might have had something to do with it," Jack guessed.

"Not everyone who speaks German winds up in Germany," Ebby noted. "It was something else. When I was sixteen my grandfather died and my grandmother, who was a bit of an eccentric, decided to celebrate her newfound widowhood by taking me on a grand tour of Europe that included a night in a Parisian maison close and a week in King Zog's Albania. We made it out of the country in the nick of time when Mussolini's troops invaded- my grandmother used gold coins sewn into her girdle to get us two berths on a tramp steamer to Ma.r.s.eille. Turns out that some bright soul in the Company spotted Albania under the list of 'countries visited' on my personnel file and decided that that qualified me for Albanian ops, which are run out of Germany."

Across the room one of the locals from Springfield slipped a nickel into the jukebox and began dancing the crab walk with a teenage girl in crinolines.

"I'm headed for the Was.h.i.+ngton Campus," Leo confided. "Mr. Etz told me that Bill Colby could use someone with fluent Russian on his team."

"I'm being sent to an Army language school to brush up on my Italian," Millicent told the others, "after which I'm off to Rome to bat my eyelashes at Communist diplomats." Millicent looked across the table. "What about you, Jack?"

"It's the Soviet Russia division for me too, guys. They're sending me off to some hush-hush Marine base for three weeks of training in weaponry and demolition, after which they're offering me the choice of starting out in Madrid or working for someone nicknamed the Sorcerer in Berlin, which I suppose would make me the Sorcerer's Apprentice. I decided on Berlin because German girls are supposed to give good head."

"Oh, Jack, with you everything boils down to s.e.x," complained Millicent.

"He's just trying to get a rise out of you," Ebby told her.

"I'm not trying to get a rise out of her," Jack insisted. "I'm trying to get her to pay attention to the rise out of me."

"Fat chance of you succeeding," she groaned.

'"Mad, bad and dangerous to know'-that's what they put under Jack's senior photo in the Yale yearbook," Leo informed the others. "It was in quotation marks because the original described Lord Byron, which deep down is how Jack sees himself. Isn't that a fact, Jack?"

Slightly drunk by now, Jack threw his head back and declaimed some lines from Byron. "When Love's delirium haunts the glowing mind, Limping Decorum lingers far behind."

"That's what your code name ought to be, Jack-Limping Decorum," quipped Millicent.

By eleven most of the trainees had left to catch a late-night showing of Sunset Boulevard in a nearby cinema. Ebby, Jack, Leo, and Millicent stuck around to polish off the Chianti and gossip about their division a.s.signments. Since this was to be their last meal in the restaurant, the proprietor offered a round of grappa on the house. As they filed past the cash register on their way out he said, "You're the third trainee group to come through here since Christmas. What exactly do you Craw Management folks do?"

"Why, we manage," Millicent said with a grin.

"We don't actually work for S.M. Craw," Leo said, coming up with the cover story. "We work for Sears, Roebuck. Sears sent us to attend the Craw management course."

"Management could be just the ticket for my restaurant," the owner said. "Where the heck do you manage when you leave Springfield?"

"All over," Millicent told him. "Some of us have been a.s.signed to the head office in Chicago, others will go to branches around the country."

"Well, good luck to you young people in your endeavors."

"Auguri," Millicent said with a smile.

An evening drizzle had turned the gutter outside the restaurant into a glistening mirror. The mewl of a cat in heat reverberated through the narrow street as the group started back toward the Hilton Inn. Ebby stopped under a street light to reread the letter from his lawyer announcing that the divorce finally had come through. Folding it away, he caught up with the others, who were arguing about Truman's decision a few days before to have the Army seize the railroads to avoid a general strike. "That Harry Truman," Jack was saying, "is one tough article."

He's one tough strikebreaker," Millicent declared.

"A President worth his salt can't knuckle under to strikers while the country's fighting in Korea," Ebby said.

Engrossed in conversation, the four took no notice of the small newspaper delivery van parked in front of the fire hydrant just ahead. As they drew abreast of it, the van's back doors flew open and four men armed with handguns spilled onto the sidewalk behind them. Other dark figures appeared out of an alleyway and blocked their path. Leo managed a startled "What the h.e.l.l is go-" as a burlap sack came down over his head. His hands were jerked behind his back and bound with a length of electrical wire. Leo heard a fist punch the air out of a rib cage and Jack's m.u.f.fled gasp. Strong hands bundled the four recruits into the van and shoved them roughly onto stacks of newspapers scattered on the floor. The doors slammed closed, the motor kicked into life and the van veered sharply away from the curb, throwing the prisoners hard against one wall. Leo started to ask if the others were all right but shut up when he felt something metallic pressing against an ear. He heard Jack's angry "case of mistaken iden-" cut off by another gasp.

The van swerved sharply left and then left again, then with its motor revving it picked up speed on a straightaway. There were several stops, probably for red lights, and more turns. At first Leo tried to memorize them in the hope of eventually reconstructing the route, but he soon got confused and lost track. After what seemed like forty or fifty minutes but could easily have been twice that the van eased to a stop. The hollow bleating of what Leo took to be foghorns reached his ears through the burlap. He heard the sharp snap of a cigarette lighter and had to fight back the panic that rose like bile to the back of his throat-were his captors about to set fire to the newspapers in the van and burn them alive? Only when Leo got a whiff of tobacco smoke did he begin to dominate the terror. He told himself that this was certainly an exercise, a mock kidnapping-it had to be that; anything else was unthinkable-organized by the Soviet Russia people to test the mettle of their new recruits. But a seed of doubt planted itself in his brain. Mr. Andrews remark about becoming obsessed with trivia came back to him. Suddenly his antenna was tuned to details. Why were his captors being so silent? Was it because they didn't speak English, or spoke it with an accent? Or spoke it without an accent, which could have been the case if they had been kidnapped by CIA agents? But if they had been kidnapped by CIA agents, how come the odor of tobacco that reached his nostrils reminded him of the rough-cut Herzegovina Flor that his father had smoked until the day he shot himself? Weighing possibilities in the hope that one of them would lead to a probability, Leo's thoughts began to drift-only afterward did it occur to him that he had actually dozed-and he found himself sorting through a sc.r.a.pbook of faded images: his father's coffin being lowered into the ground in a windwashed Jewish cemetery on Long Island; the rain drumming on the black umbrellas; the car backfire that sounded like the crack of a pistol; the pigeons that beat in panic into the air from the dry branches of dead trees; the drone of his father's brother blundering through a transliterated text of the Kaddish; the anguished whimper of his mother repeating over and over, "What will become of us? What will become of us?"

Leo came back to his senses with a start when the back doors were jerked open and a fresh sea breeze swept through the stuffy van. Strong hands pulled him and the others from their bed of newspapers and guided them across a gangplank into the cabin of a small boat. There they were obliged to lie down on a wooden deck that reeked of fish, and they were covered with a heavy tarpaulin saturated with motor oil. The deck vibrated beneath them as the boat, its bow pitching into the swells, headed to sea. The engines droned monotonously for a quarter of an hour, then slowed to an idle as the boat b.u.mped repeatedly against something solid. With the boat rising and falling under his feet, Leo felt himself being pulled onto a wooden landing and pushed up a long flight of narrow steps and onto the deck of a s.h.i.+p, then led down two flights of steps. He tripped going through a hatch and thought he heard one of the captors swear under his breath in Polish. As he descended into the bowels of the s.h.i.+p the stale air that reached Leo's nose through the burlap smelted of flour. Someone forced Leo through another hatch into a sweltering compartment. He felt rough hands drag the shoes off his feet and then strip him to his skivvies. His wrists, aching from the wire biting into them, were cut free and he was shoved onto a chair and tied to it, his wrists behind the back of the chair, with rope that was pa.s.sed several times across his chest and behind the chair. Then the burlap hood was pulled off his head.

Blinking hard to keep the spotlights on the bulkheads from stinging his eyes, Leo looked around. The others, also stripped to their socks and underwear, were angling their heads away from the bright light. Millicent, in a lace bra.s.siere and underpants, appeared pale and disoriented. Three sailors in stained dungarees and turtleneck sweaters were removing wallets and papers from the pockets of the garments and throwing the clothing into a heap in a corner. An emaciated man in an ill-fitting suit studied them from the door through eyes that were bulging out of a skull so narrow it looked deformed. A trace of a smile appeared on his thin lips. "h.e.l.lo to you," he said, speaking English in what sounded to Leo's ear like an Eastern European-perhaps Latvian, perhaps Polish-accent. "So: I am saying to myself, the sooner you are talking to me in the things I want to knowledge, the sooner this unhappy episode is being located behind us. Please to talk now between yourself. Myself, I am hungry. After a time I am coming back and we will be talking together to see if you are coming out of this thing maybe alive, maybe dead, who knows?"

The civilian ducked through the hatch, followed by the sailors. Then the door clanged shut. The bolts that locked it could be seen turning in the bulkhead.

"Oh, my G.o.d," Millicent breathed, her voice quivering, spittle dribbling from a corner of lips swollen from biting on them, "this isn't happening."

Ebby gestured toward the bulkhead with his chin. "They'll have microphones," he whispered. "They'll be listening to everything we say."

Jack was absolutely positive this was another Company training drill but he played the game, hoping to make a good impression on the Company spooks who monitored the exercise. "Why would thugs want to kidnap Craw trainees?" he asked, sticking to the cover legend they had worked out in the first week of the course.

Ebby took his cue from Jack. "It's a case of mistaken ident.i.ty-there's no other explanation."

"Maybe someone has a grudge against Craw," Jack offered.

"Or Sears, Roebuck, for that matter," Leo said.

Millicent was in a world of her own. "It's a training exercise," she said, talking to herself. "They want to see how we behave under fire." Squinting because of the spotlights, it suddenly dawned on her that she was practically naked and she began to moan softly. "I don't mind admitting it, I'm frightened out of my skin."

Breathing carefully through his nostrils to calm himself, Leo tried to distinguish the thread of logic buried somewhere in the riot of thoughts. In the end there were really only two possibilities. The most likely was that it was a very realistic training exercise; a rite of pa.s.sage for those who had signed on to work for the elite Soviet Russia Division. The second possibility-that the four of them had really been kidnapped by Soviet agents who wanted information about CIA recruiting and training-struck him as ludicrous. But was Leo dismissing it out of wishful thinking? What if it were true? What if the Russians had discovered that Craw Management was a Company front and were trawling for trainees? What if the luck of the draw had deposited the four stragglers from the Italian restaurant in their net?

Leo tried to remember what they'd been taught in the seminar on interrogation techniques. Bits and pieces came back to him. All interrogators tried to convince their prisoners that they knew more than they actually did; that any information you provided was only confirming what they already knew. You were supposed to stick to your cover story even in the face of evidence that the interrogators were familiar with details of your work for the CIA. Mr. Andrews had turned up unexpectedly at the last session on interrogation techniques; in his mind's eye Leo could see the infinitely sad smile creeping over his instructor's face as he wrapped up the course but, for the life of him, he couldn't remember what Mr. Andrews had said.

After what seemed like an eternity Leo became aware of a grinding noise. He noticed the hatch-bolts turning in the bulkhead. The door swung open on greased hinges. The emaciated man, his eyes hidden behind oval sunela.s.ses, stepped into the room. He had changed clothing and was wearing a white jumpsuit with washed-out orange stains on it. One of the sailors came in behind him carrying a wooden bucket half filled with water. The sailor set it in a corner, filled a wooden ladle with brackish water from the bucket, and spilled some down the throat of each of the parched prisoners. The emaciated man sc.r.a.ped over a chair, turned it so that the back was to the prisoners and straddled the seat facing them. He extracted a cigarette from a steel case, tapped down the tobacco and held the flame of a lighter to the tip; Leo got another whiff of the Russian tobacco. Sucking on the cigarette, the emaciated man seemed lost in thought. "Call me Oskar," he announced abruptly. "Admit it," he went on, "you are hoping this is a CIA training exercise but you are not sure." A taunting cackle emerged from the back of his throat. "It falls to me to pa.s.s on to you displeasant news-you are on the Latvian freighter Liepaja anch.o.r.ed in your Chesapeake Bay while we wait for clearance to put to sea with a cargo of flour, destination Riga. The s.h.i.+p has already been searched by your Coastal Guard. They usually keep us waiting many hours to torment us, but we play cards and listen to Negro jazz on the radio and sometime question CIA agents who have fallen into our hands." He pulled a small spiral notebook from a pocket, moistened a thumb on his tongue and started leafing through the pages. "So," he said when he found what he was looking for. "Which one of you is Ebbitt?"

Ebby cleared his throat. "I'm Ebbitt." His voice sounded unnaturally hoa.r.s.e.

"I see that you have a divorce decree signed by a judge in the city of Las Vegas." Oskar looked up. "You carry a laminated card identifying you as an employee of Sears, Roebuck and a second card admitting you to the S.M. Craw Management course in Springfield, Virginia."

"That's right."

"What exactly is your work at Sears, Roebuck?"

"I am a lawyer. I write contracts."

"So: I ask you this question, Mr. Ebbitt-why would an employee of Sears, Roebuck tell his friends"-Oskar looked down at the notebook- "They will have microphones. They will be listening to everything we say.'"

Ebby raised his chin and squinted into the spotlights as if he were sunning himself. "I read too many spy novels."

"My colleagues and I, we know that S.M. Craw Management is a spy school run by your Central Intelligence Agency. We know that the four of you are conscripted into the CIA's curiously named Soviet Russia Division-curious because Russia is only one of fifteen republics in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Before your famous espionage agency can learn secrets it should study a Rand McNally atlas."

Leo asked, "What do you want from us?"

Oskar sized up Leo. "For beginning, I want you to abandon the legend of working for the Sears, Roebuck. For next, I want you to abandon the fiction that S.M. Craw teaches management techniques. When you have primed the pump with these admittances many other things will spill from the spigot- the names of your instructors and the details of their instruction, the names and descriptions of your cla.s.smates, the details of the cipher systems you learned at the spy school, the names and descriptions of the espionage agents who recruited you or you have met in the course of your training."

Oskar, it turned out, was the first in a series of interrogators who took turns questioning the prisoners without a break. With the spotlights burning into their eyes, the captives quickly lost track of time. At one point Millicent pleaded for permission to go to the toilet. A fat interrogator with a monocle stuck in one eye jerked aside her bra.s.siere and pinched a nipple and then, laughing, motioned for one of the sailors to untie her and lead her to a filthy toilet in the pa.s.sageway; this turned out to be particularly humiliating for Millicent because the sailor insisted on keeping the door wide open to watch her. If any of the four nodded off during the interrogation, a sailor would jar the sleeper awake with a sharp kick to an ankle. Working from handwritten notes scribbled across the pages of their notebooks, the interrogators walked the captives through the cover stories that had been worked up, sticking wherever possible to actual biographies, during the first week at Craw.

"You claim you worked for the law firm of Donovan, Leisure, Newton, Lumbard and Irvine," Oskar told Ebby at one point.

"How many times are you going to cover the same ground? Working for Donovan, Leisure, Newton, Lumbard and Irvine isn't the same thing as working for a government agency, d.a.m.n it."

The cigarette Oskar held between his thumb and middle finger was burning dangerously close to both. When he felt the heat on his skin he flicked it across the room. "Your Mr. Donovan is the same William Donovan who was the chief of the American Office of Strategic Services during the Great Patriotic War?"

"One and the same," Ebby said wearily.

"Mr. Donovan is also the William Donovan who eagerly pushed your President Truman to construct a central intelligence agency after the war."

"I read the same newspapers you do," Ebby shot back.

"As you are a former member of Mr. Donovan's OSS, it would have been logical for him to recommend you to the people who run this new central intelligence agency."

"He would not have recommended me without first asking me if I wanted to return to government service. Why in the world would I give up a thirty-seven-thousand-dollar-a-year job in a prestigious law firm for a six-thousand-four-hundred-dollar job with an intelligence agency? It doesn't make sense."

Ebby realized he had made a mistake the instant the numbers pa.s.sed his lips. He knew what Oskar's next question would be before he asked it.

"So: Please, how do you know that an agent for the Central Intelligence Agency earns six-thousand-four-hundred-dollars a year?"

Ebby's shoulders lifted in an irritated shrug. "I must have read it in a newspaper."

"And the precise figure of six-thousand-four-hundred lodged in your memory?"

"I suppose it did, yes."

"Why did you give up the thirty-seven-thousand-dollar job to join Sears, Roebuck?"

"Because Mr. Donovan wasn't holding out the prospect of a partners.h.i.+p. Because the Sears people were pleased with the contracts I drew up for them when I was working at Donovan. Because they were paying an arm and a leg for legal work and figured they could come out ahead even if they paid me more than Mr. Donovan paid me."

"Who do you work for at Sears?"

Ebby named names and Oskar copied them into his notebook. He was about to ask another question when one of the sailors came into the room and whispered in his ear. Oskar said, "So: Your Coastal Guard has at last given us permission to get underway." Beneath the feet of the prisoners the deck plates began'to vibrate, faintly at first, then with a distinct throb. "It can be hoped none of you suffer from sea sickness," Oskar said. He switched to Russian and barked an order to one of the sailors. Leo understood what he was saying-Oskar wanted buckets brought around in case anyone should throw up-but he kept his eyes empty of expression.

Slumped in her chair, Millicent held up better than the others had expected; she seemed to take strength from the tenacity with which they stuck to their legends. Again and again the interrogator returned to the Craw Management course; he even described the cla.s.s in tradecraft given by a one-armed instructor named Andrews, but Millicent only shook her head. She couldn't say what the others had been doing at Craw, she could only speak for herself; she had been studying techniques of management. Yes, she vaguely remembered seeing a one-armed man in the room where mail was sorted but she had never taken a course with him. No, there had never been a field trip to Norfolk to try and steal secrets from military bases. Why on earth would someone studying management want to steal military secrets? What would they do with them after they had stolen them?

And then suddenly there was a commotion in the pa.s.sageway. The door was ajar and men in uniform could be seen lumbering past. The two interrogators in the room at that moment exchanged puzzled looks. Oskar gestured with his head. They both stepped outside and had a hushed conversation in Russian with a heavy-set man wearing the gold braid of a naval officer on his sleeves. Leo thought he heard "cipher machine" and "leadweighted bag," and he was sure he heard "overboard if the Americans try to intercept us."

"What are they saying?" Jack growled. He was beginning to wonder if they had been caught up in a Company exercise after all.

"They talking about putting their cipher machine in a weighted bag and throwing it into the sea if the Americans try to intercept the s.h.i.+p," Leo whispered.

"Jesus," Ebby said. "The last order that reached the j.a.panese emba.s.sy in Was.h.i.+ngton on December sixth, 1941 was to destroy the ciphers, along with their cipher machines."

"d.a.m.nation, the Russians must be going to war," Jack said.

Millicent's chin sank forward onto her chest and she began to tremble.

Oskar, still in the pa.s.sageway, could be heard talking about "the four Americans," but what he said was lost in the wail of a siren. The naval officer snapped angrily, "Nyet, nyet" The officer raised his voice and Leo distinctly heard him say, "I am the one who decides... the Liepaja is under my... in half an... sunrise... by radio... cement and throw them over..."

Ebby and Jack turned to Leo for a translation. They could tell from the wild look in his eyes that the news was calamitous. "They're saying something about cement," Leo whispered. "They're talking about throwing us into the sea if we don't talk."

"It's part of the exercise," Ebby declared, forgetting about the microphones in the bulkhead. "They're trying to terrorize us."

His face ashen, his brow furrowed, Oskar returned to the room alone. "Very unsatisfactory news," he announced. "There has been a confrontation in Berlin. Shots were fired. Soldiers on both sides were killed. Our Politburo has given your President Truman an ultimatum: Withdraw your troops from Berlin in twelve hours or we will consider ourselves to be in a state of war."

Half a dozen sailors barged into the room. Some were carrying sacks of cement, others empty twenty-five-gallon paint cans. Another sailor ran a length of hose into the room, then darted out to hook it up to a faucet in the toilet. Oskar shook his head in despair. "Please believe me-it was never my intention that it should come to this," he said in a hollow voice. He unhooked his sungla.s.ses from his ears; his bulging eyes were moist with emotion. "The ones we kidnapped before, we frightened them but we always let them go in the end."

Tears ran from Millicent s eyes and she started to s.h.i.+ver uncontrollably despite the stifling heat in the room. Ebby actually stopped breathing for a long moment and then panicked when, for a terrifying instant, he couldn't immediately remember how to start again. Leo desperately tried to think of something he could tell Oskar-he remembered Mr. Andrews's saying you had to become the person the enemy would never suspect you of being. Who could he become? Suddenly he had a wild idea-he would tell them he was a Soviet agent under instructions to infiltrate the CIA? Would Oskar fall for it? Would he even take the time to check it out with his superiors in Moscow?

Water began to trickle from the end of the hose and the sailors gashed open the paper sacks and started filling the four paint cans with cement. Oskar said, "I ask you, I beg you, give me what I need to save your lives. If you are CIA recruits I can countermand the orders, I can insist that we take you back to Latvia so our experts can interrogate you." Rolling his head from side to side in misery, Oskar pleaded, "Only help me and I will do everything in my power to save you."

Millicent blurted out, "I will-"

Oskar stabbed the air with a finger and one of the sailors untied the rope that bound her to the chair. Shaking convulsively, she slumped forward onto her knees. Between sobs, words welled up from the back of her throat. "Yes, yes, it's true... all of us... I was recruited out of law school... because of my looks, because I spoke Italian... Craw to take courses..." She darted to gag on words, then sucked in a great gulp of air and began fitting out names and dates and places. When Oskar tried to interrupt her she clamped her palms over her ears and plunged on, describing down to the last detail the pep talk the Wiz had delivered at the Cloud Club, describing Owen-Brack's threat to terminate anyone who gave away Company secrets. Sc.r.a.ping the back of her mind, she came up with details of the courses she had taken at Craw. "The man who taught tradecraft, he's a great hero at the Pickle Factory-"

"Pickle Factory?"