The Company_ A Novel Of The CIA Part 51

"Sorry to hit you over the head with business as you step off the plane, but something important has come up that needs your immediate attention. Would you come straight out to the campus-I'll fill you in when you get here."

"Sir," the young man said. "I have transportation waiting."

Leo studied the young man. "You know what's in the letter?"

"Sir, I only know what I'm told. What I'm told is to have a car and driver waiting to take you to the person who wrote the letter."

Adelle asked, "What's happening, Leo?"

"Bill Colby's asked me to come over to Langley," he said in a low voice. "Vanessa, you take your mother home. I'll make it back on my own steam. If I'm going to be delayed I'll call."

"Sir, if you'll follow me..."

Leo kissed his daughter on each cheek and smiled at Adelle, then fell into step alongside the young man in the raincoat. "Which Division do you work for?" he asked.

"The Office of Security, sir."

The young man pushed a door open for Leo and followed him through it. A gray four-door Ford sedan was waiting at the curb. The driver held the back door open for Leo, who ducked and settled onto the back seat. To his astonishment a burly man squeezed in next to him, pus.h.i.+ng him over to the middle of the seat. To his left, the door opened and another man with the bruised face of a prizefighter climbed in the other side.

"What's go-"

The two men grabbed Leo's arms. One of them deftly clamped handcuffs onto each wrist and snapped them closed. Outside the car, the young men in the Burberry could be seen talking into a walkie-talkie. Up front, the driver slid behind the wheel and, easing the car into gear, pulled out into traffic. "Lean forward, with your head between your knees," the burly guard instructed Leo. When he didn't immediately do as he was told the prize- fighter delivered a short, sharp punch to his stomach, knocking the wind out of his lungs. Leo doubled over and threw up on his shoes.

"Oh, s.h.i.+t," the burly man groaned as he pressed down on the back of Leo's neck to keep him hunched over. The Ford was obviously caught in traffic. Leo could hear horns blowing around them. His back began to ache from his cramped position but the hand pus.h.i.+ng down on his neck didn't ease up. Forty minutes or so later he felt the car turning off a thoroughfare and then slipping down a ramp. A garage door cranked open and must have closed behind them because they were suddenly enveloped in darkness. The burly man removed his hand from the back of Leo's neck. He straightened and saw that they were in a dimly lit underground garage. Cars were scattered around in the parking s.p.a.ces. The Ford drew up in front of a service elevator. The burly man got out and hauled Leo out after him. The prizefighter came up behind them. The elevator door opened and the three men entered the car. The prizefighter hit a b.u.t.ton. The motor hummed. Moments later the doors opened and Leo was pulled down a dark hallway and pushed into a room painted in a creamy white and lit by an overhead battery of surgical lights. Two middle-aged women dressed in long white medical smocks were waiting for him. The prizefighter produced a key and removed the handcuffs. As Leo ma.s.saged his wrists, the two men took up positions on either side of him.

"Do precisely as you are told," one of the women ordered. "When we tell you to, you will remove your clothing item by item, and very slowly. All right. Begin with your left shoe."

"What are you looking for?" Leo managed to ask. The burly man slapped him sharply across the face. "n.o.body said nothing about you talking, huh? The shoe, Mr. Kritzky."

His cheek stinging and tears br.i.m.m.i.n.g in his eyes, Leo stooped and removed his left shoe and handed it to the man who had struck him, who pa.s.sed it on to one of the women. She inspected it meticulously, turning it in her hands as if she had never seen this particular model before. Working with pliers she pried off the heel, then with a razor blade cut open the leather to inspect the inside of the sole and the underside of the tongue. Finding nothing, she cast Leo's left shoe aside and pointed to his right shoe. Item by item, the two women worked their way through every st.i.tch of clothing on Leo until he was standing stark-naked under the surgical-lights. One of the women fitted on a pair of surgeons latex gloves. "Spread your legs," she ordered. When Leo was slow to comply the prizefighter kicked his legs apart. The woman knelt on the floor in front of him and began feeling around between his toes and under his feet. She worked her way up the inside of his crotch to his t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es and his p.e.n.i.s, probing all the folds and creases of his groin. Leo chewed on his lip in humiliation as she inspected his arm pits and threaded her fingers through his hair. "Open wide," she ordered. She thrust a tongue depressor into his mouth and, tilting his head toward the surgical lights, inspected his teeth. "All rightie, lets take a gander at your a.n.u.s, Mr. Kritzky."

"No," Leo said. The word emerged as a sob. "I demand to see-"

"Your a.s.shole, a.s.shole," the prizefighter said. He punched Leo hard in the stomach and folded him over with a deft judo lock on one arm. The woman stabbed a gloved finger into a jar of Vaseline and, kneeling behind him, probed his a.n.u.s.

When he was permitted to straighten up, Leo gasped, "Water." The burly man looked at the woman wearing the surgical gloves. When she shrugged, he went out and came back with a paper cup filled with water. Leo drained it, then, panting, asked, "Am I still in America?"

The prizefighter actually laughed. "This is like the Vatican, pal-its extraterritorial. Habeas corpus don't exist."

One of the women dropped a pair of white pajamas and two scuffs onto the floor at Leo's feet. "You want to go and put them on," she said in a bored voice.

Leo pulled on the pajama bottoms; there was no elastic band and he had to hold them up. One by one, he slipped his arms into the top. His hands were trembling so much he had trouble b.u.t.toning the b.u.t.tons with his free hand. Finally the prizefighter did it for him. Then, clutching the waist of the pajamas and shuffling along in the backless slippers, Leo followed the burly man through a door and down a long dark corridor to another door at the far end. The man rapped his knuckles on it twice, then produced a key, unlocked the door and stepped back. Breathing in nervous gasps, Leo made his way past him.

The room in which he now found himself was large and windowless. All the walls, and the inside of the door, were padded with foam rubber. Three naked electric bulbs dangled at the ends of electric cords from a very high ceiling. A brown army blanket was folded neatly on the floor next to the door. A lidless toilet was fixed to one wall and a tin cup sat on the floor next to it. In the middle of the room stood two chairs and a small table with a tape recorder on it; the table and both chairs were bolted to the floor. James Jesus Angleton sat in one of the chairs, his head bent over the loose-leaf book open before him. A cigarette dangled from his lips; an ashtray on the table overflowed with b.u.t.ts. Without looking up, he waved Leo toward the seat opposite him and hit the "record" b.u.t.ton on the tape machine.

"You're Yale, cla.s.s of fifty, if I'm not mistaken," Angleton remarked.

Leo sank onto the seat, mentally exhausted. "Yale. Fifty. Yes."

"What college?"

"I was in Timothy Dwight for two years, then I lived off campus."

"I was Silliman, but that was before your time," Angleton said. He turned to another page in the loose-leaf book to check something, then flipped back to the original page. "How about if we begin with your father."

Leo leaned forward. "Jim, it's me, Leo. Leo Kritzky. These goons abducted me from the airport. They roughed me up. I was strip-searched. What's going on?"

"Start with your father."

"Jim, for G.o.d's sake..." Leo glanced at the whirring reels of the tape recorder, then, shuddering, took a deep breath. "My father's name was Abraham. Abraham Kritzky. He was born in Vilnus, in the Jewish Pale, on the twenty-eighth of November 1896. He emigrated to America during the 1910 pogroms. He got a job in the Triangle s.h.i.+rtwaist factory sewing bands inside hats-he was there when the famous fire broke out in 1911, killing almost a hundred and fifty seamstresses. My father got out with his sewing machine strapped to his back when firemen hacked open a locked fire door leading to an alleyway."

"Did the experience make him bitter?"

"Of course it made him bitter."

"Did it turn him against capitalism?"

"What are you looking for, Jim? I went over all this when I was recruited. There are no secrets hidden here. My father was a Socialist. He wors.h.i.+pped Eugene Debs. He joined Debs's Socialist Party when it was formed in 1918. He picketed when Debs was jailed, I think it was around 1920. He read the Jewish Daily Forward. His bible was the 'Bintel Brief' letters-to-editor column, where people poured out their troubles; he used to read the letters aloud to us in Yiddish. My father was a bleeding heart, which wasn't a federal offense until the House Un-American Activities Committee came along."

"You were born on the twenty-ninth of October 1929-"

Leo laughed bitterly. "The day the stock market crashed. Are you going t0 read something into that?"

'Your father had a small business by then." Angleton turned to another page in his loose-leaf book. "He manufactured and repaired hats at an address on Grand Street in Manhattan. The crash wiped him out."

"The banks called in his loans-he'd bought the brownstone on Q Street. We lived upstairs. His business was on the ground floor. He lost everything."

"And then what happened?"

"Can I have some water?"

Angleton nodded toward the tin cup on the floor next to the toilet. "There's water in the bowl."

Leo shook his head in dismay. "You're out of your G.o.dd.a.m.n mind, Jim. You're crazy if you think I'm going to drink out of a toilet."

"When you're thirsty enough, you will. What happened after the stock market crash?"

When Leo didn't respond, Angleton said, "Let's understand each other. You're going to stay in this room until you've answered all my questions, and many times. We're going to go over and over your life before and after you joined the Company. If it takes weeks, if it takes months, it's no skin off my nose. I'm not in any particular hurry. You want to go on now or do you prefer that I come back tomorrow?"

Leo whispered, "Son of a b.i.t.c.h."

Angleton started to close the loose-leaf book.

"Okay. Okay. I'll answer your d.a.m.n questions. What happened after the stock market crash was that my father killed himself."

"How?"

"You know how."

"Tell me anyway.

"He jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge. They found his body was.h.i.+ng around under the docks under Brooklyn Heights the next morning."

"What was the date?"

"March 1936."

Angleton said, "Seven March, to be exact. Between the stock market crash and his suicide, did your father become a Communist, or was he one already when he came over from Russia?"

Leo laughed under his breath. "My father was a Jew who believed, like the Prophet Amos-writing eight centuries before Jesus Christ-that you were a thief if you had more than you needed, because what you owned was stolen from those who didn't have enough. Luckily for Amos there was no Joe McCarthy around in those days." Leo looked away In his mind's eye he could see his father reading from a worn Torah, and he quoted the pa.s.sage from memory. '"For they know not to do right, saith the Lord, who store up violence and robbery in their palaces.' That's Amos 3:10, if I remember correctly, Jim."

"You seem fixated on Joe McCarthy."

"He was a s.h.i.+t."

"Did you agree with Amos and with your father? Did you think that what you own is stolen from those who don't have enough?"

"In an ideal world such a sentiment might have a shred of validity. But I long ago moved on into the imperfect world."

"Did capitalism kill your father?"

"My father killed himself. Capitalism, as it was practiced in America in the twenties and thirties, created conditions that caused a great many people to kill themselves, including the capitalists who threw themselves out of Wall Street windows in 1929."

Angleton lit a fresh cigarette. There was a fragment of a smile clinging limply to one corner of his mouth and volcanic ash in the pupils of his eyes. Leo remembered that Angleton was a devoted angler; the word was that he would spend endless hours working the Brule in the upper watershed of northern Wisconsin, casting with a flick of his wrist a nymph fly he had tied with his own fingers and letting it drift back downstream, waiting with infinite patience to snare the mythical brown trout that was rumored to hide in the currents of the river. It hit Leo that the counterintelligence chief was working another river now; casting hand-made flies in front of Leo in the hope that he would snap at the hook, fudge a truth, lie about a detail, after which he would carefully reel in the line.

Flipping through the pages of his loose-leaf, Angleton ticked off an item here, underlined a phrase there, scratched out a word and wrote a new one above it. He wanted to know how Leo felt about Soviet Russia during the Second World War. He was only a kid then, Leo said; he didn't remember thinking about Soviet Russia one way or the other. "You joined Ethical Culture after the war," Angleton noted. He'd never actually joined Ethical Culture, Leo replied; he'd gone to evening meetings in Brooklyn, mostly to play chess. "What kind of people did you meet there?" Leo had to laugh. He'd met chess players, he said. "You met a girl there, didn't you?" Angleton asked. "Named"-he moistened a finger and skipped ahead several pages- named Stella." Yes, Leo agreed. He remembered Stella. She had the infuriating habit of taking a move back after she took her hand off the piece; eventually he'd been the only one who would play with her. Angleton asked, "Do you recall her family name?" Leo thought a moment. No, he said, he didn't. The fragment of a smile turned up again on Angleton's face. "Could it have been Bledsoe?" he wanted to know. That rings a bell, Leo agreed. Bledsoe sounds familiar.

Angleton's voice was reduced to a purr now as he worked the rod, letting the fly skid across the surface of the water. "There was a Bledsoe, Stella, named by Whittaker Chambers as a fellow traveler whom he'd met at Communist Party meetings after the war." When Leo didn't say anything, Angleton looked up from his notes. "Was Stella Bledsoe a Communist?"

Leo snickered. "She was a social worker, and a lot of social workers were Socialists so she might have been, too. If she was a Communist when I first met her in the forties I never knew it."

Sucking away on his cigarette, Angleton said, "She espoused the party line-unilateral nuclear disarmament, abandoning Berlin to the Russians-which makes her a Communist, wouldn't you agree?"

"Does it matter if I agree?"

"It doesn't, Leo. But it would make things easier."

"For whom?"

"For yourself. For me. For the Company."

Pus.h.i.+ng himself to his feet, clutching the waistband on the pajama bottoms, Leo shuffled over to the toilet and stared down at the water in the bowl. He swallowed hard to relieve his parched throat and returned to the chair. "Where are we here?" he asked, waving toward the padded walls. He thought he knew; there was a former Naval Hospital on 23rd Street, a group of yellow buildings across from the State Department, which the CIA used for secret research. Because the place was so secure the Company occasionally debriefed defectors there.

Angleton looked up at Leo. "As far as you're concerned we could be on another planet," he said. There was no malice in his voice, only cold information.

"My wife will start asking questions when I don't turn up at home."

Angleton glanced at his wrist.w.a.tch. "By now," he said, "the Director will have phoned up Adelle and apologized profusely for packing you off to Asia on such short notice. 'Something has come up,' he will have told her. 'You'll understand if he didn't provide details.' Your wife will have taken the news bravely; will have surely inquired when she might expect you to return home. The Director would have been vague. 'It could take time,' he would have said. 'He has no clothing,' your wife will have remarked. 'Can you pack a bag and I'll send a car around to pick it up,' the Director will have said. 'Will he call me?' Adelle might have asked. 'I've instructed him to maintain radio silence,' the Director would have answered. 'But rest a.s.sured I'll personally call you when I have more to tell you.' 'Will he be in any kind or danger?' Adelle would want to know. 'None whatsoever,' the Director would tell her. 'You have my personal word for that.'"

Leo felt as if the wind had been knocked out of him again. "I never really understood until now what a b.a.s.t.a.r.d you are," he murmured.

Unperturbed, Angleton turned back to the first page in the loose-leaf book and stared at the single word printed on it. Leo concentrated on the capital letters, trying to read them upside down. The letters swam into focus. The word was: SASHA.

Angleton closed the loose-leaf book and stopped the tape recorder. He put them and the ash tray into a brown paper shopping bag and, without a word, went to the door. He rapped twice against it with his free hand. The prizefighter opened the door and let him out and closed it again. Leo found himself regretting that Angleton had gone. At least he was someone to talk to. He spread the blanket and doubled it and tried to doze. The three naked bulbs were brighter than before-Leo realized that they worked on a rheostat and had been turned up to deprive him of sleep. Lying there on the blanket, curled up in a fetal position, he lost track of time. At one point the door opened and someone slid a tin plate inside, then the door slammed closed again. Clutching his waistband, Leo shuffled over to the door and stuffed bits of cold cooked cabbage into his mouth with his fingertips. Tears came to his eyes when he realized that the cabbage had been salted. For a long time he stood staring at the toilet. Finally he went over to it and dipped the tin cup into the water and sipped it. He gagged and crouched, jamming his head between his legs and breathing deeply to keep from vomiting. When he felt better he stood up and urinated into the toilet and flushed it, and stretched out again on the blanket, his eyes wide open, thinking. SASHA.

Agatha Ept was categoric: Today was not the moment for a Capricorn and a Virgo to undertake new projects. "I'd be thrilled to explain why," she said," backing toward the bedroom. "To begin with, Pluto is squaring Mars- okay, okay, I can take a hint." And she disappeared through the door.

"She is a crazy American lady," Sergei Kukushkin told Manny when they were alone, "if she is seriously thinking that stars decide our fate."

Manny had come to like Kukushkin. His open features, the worry lines that creased his brow whenever they talked about his wife or daughter, even fhe anxiety betrayed by the metronome-like clicking of his fingernails-they appeared to support the notion that ae/PINNACLE was a genuine defector bearing genuine information. Manny wished it were otherwise; wished that Sergei wouldn't look him straight in the eye when he talked, wished that he could detect in his handshake a holding back, a hesitation hint of something other than forthrightness. Because if Kukushkin was genuine and Jim Angleton was right, Leo Kritzky was SASHA.

"Did Elena Antonova pick up the pills this morning?" he asked Kukushkin now.

A smile lurked in the Russian's eyes. "She took the first two immediately she returned to the emba.s.sy," he said. "Elena said me that she felt relief in minutes." Kukushkin's fingernails fell silent, a sign that a particularly important question was on his tongue. "And SASHA? What has happened with SASHA?"

With an effort Manny kept his eyes on Kukushkin. "Mr. Angleton claims he has discovered his ident.i.ty."

The Russian asked in a whisper, "And has SASHA been taken into custody?" Manny nodded. "You do not look happy about this."

"Arranging meetings with you, establis.h.i.+ng codes and signals that you can use if the circ.u.mstances change, relaying questions and bringing back your answers, this is my job. What happens with the serials you give me is in the hands of others."

"And do you honestly think, Manny, that the SASHA in custody is the real SASHA?"

"It's Thursday," Manny said. "According to your information SASHA has been back at his desk at Langley since Monday. It is true that only a handful of our people know your ident.i.ty. But a number of people from various departments are involved in this-monitoring phone lines, disguising pills for your wife, watchers and handlers keeping track of you and your wife, that kind of thing. Word that there is a high-level defection in the works is bound to seep out. If you are right about SASHA-if he is someone important-he would have heard about it by now. Did you notice your SK people taking any particular precautions?"

Kukushkin shook his head.

"Did your wife think she was followed when she went to the dentist this morning?"

"If she was followed I am not sure she would see it."

"We would see it, Sergei. She was clean when she came out of the subway at Dupont Circle. She was clean when she went back into the subway. Have you noticed anything out of the ordinary at the emba.s.sy? Anyone paying particular attention to you?"

"The rezident called me in and opened a bottle of Scotch whiskey and offered me a drink."

"He's pleased with the patent reports you bring back?"

Kukushkin thought about this. "I would say he is satisfied, yes. He was in trouble with Moscow Centre last December. A KGB officer at the emba.s.sy was recalled to Moscow for claiming he ran an American defector who gave him radar secrets-it developed that this same information was available in aviation magazines. A month later a KGB colonel, working under diplomatic cover, wrote a ten-page report on a conversation he had with your Secretary of Defense Schlesinger when he only shook his hand in a receiving line." The Russian raised his palms. "We are all under great pressure to produce secrets."

Manny judged the time had come to pose the question he had been instructed to ask. "How about it, Sergei? Will you risk it? Will you stay in place now that SASHA is no longer a menace to you?"

"And if I agree..."

Manny understood that the Russian wanted to hear the terms again. "We'll bring you all over at Christmas when you and your family go down to visit Disney World in Florida. There will be a lump sum payment of two hundred fifty thousand dollars sitting in a bank account, and a monthly consultant's stipend of fifteen hundred for a minimum of ten years. There will be a completely new ident.i.ty and American citizens.h.i.+p, and a two-story house in a residential area of Florida to be decided on by you. There will be a four-door Oldsmobile parked in the driveway."