The Company_ A Novel Of The CIA Part 8

According to your dental records," Serafima said, "the majority of your cavities were filled by American dentists in the United States. But you have two cavities that were filled in the Soviet Union, one before you first went to join your parents in New York after the war, the second when you were in Moscow during a summer vacation. These cavities will have to be redone by Centre dentists who are familiar with American dental techniques and have access to American materials."

"And the second problem?"

Starik suddenly appeared at the door carrying sandwiches and a bottle of kva.s.s. "There is no hurry about the second problem," he said. He was clearly annoyed at the sisters for having raised it now. "We will tell him at a later date."

Yevgeny telephoned Aza the first time he had a free evening and the two met (after Yevgeny, trying out his newfound tradecraft, ditched the man who was tailing him from across the street) in Gorky Park. They wandered along a path that ran parallel to the Moscow River, talking of American literature at first, then nibbling at the edge of matters that were more personal. No, she said, she was an orphan; both her mother, a writer of radio plays, and her father, an actor in the Yiddish theater, had disappeared in the late 1940s. No, she couldn't be more precise because the authorities who had notified her of their deaths had not been more precise. She had been befriended by Beria's daughter, Natasha, at a summer camp in the Urals. They had become pen pals, had written to each other for years. It seemed only natural, when her application to study history and languages at Lomonosov University was, against all odds, accepted, that she would move in with her friend. Yes, she had met Natasha's father on many occasions; he was a warm, friendly man who doted on his daughter but otherwise seemed preoccupied with important matters. He had three phones on his desk, one of them red, which sometimes rang day and night. Tiring of the quiz, Aza pulled typed sheets containing several of Anna Akhmatova's early love poems, along with the first rough draft of her attempts to translate the poems into English, from the pocket of her blouse. She absently plucked wild berries off bushes and popped them in her mouth as Yevgeny read aloud, first in Russian, then in English: What syrupy witches' brew was prepared On that bleak January day?

What concealed pa.s.sion drove us mad All night until dawn-who can say?

"I can identify the witches' brew," Yevgeny insisted. "It was l.u.s.t."

Aza turned her grave eyes on the young man. "l.u.s.t fuels the pa.s.sions of men, so I am told, but women are driven by other, more subtle desires that come from..."

"Come from?"

"...the uncertainty that can be seen in a man's regard, the hesitancy that can be felt in his touch, and most especially the tentativeness that can be heard in his voice, which after all are reflections of his innermost self." She added very seriously, "I am pleased with your voice, Yevgeny."

"I am pleased that you are pleased," he said, and he meant it.

The following Sunday Yevgeny, using a phone number reserved for high-ranking members of the Foreign Office, managed to reserve rare tickets to the Moscow Art Theater and took Aza to see the great Tarasova in the role of Anna Karenina. He reached for Aza's hand as the narrator's opening line echoed through the theater: "All happy families resemble one another but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Afterwards he invited her to dinner in a small restaurant off Trubnaya Square. When the bill came she insisted on paying according to the German principle. Yevgeny told her that the Americans called it the Dutch principle, or Dutch treat, and she jotted down the expression on her pad. After dinner they strolled arm in arm down Tsvetnoy Boulevard into the heart of Moscow. "Do you know Chekhov's essay, 'On Trubnaya Square'?" she asked him. "In it he describes the old Birds Market, which was not far from where we are standing now. My grandparents lived in a room over the market when they were first married. I offer you a question, Yevgeny Alexandrovich: Are all things, like the Birds Market, fleeting phenomena?"

Yevgeny's mind raced; he understood that she wanted to know if the feelings she had for him-and he appeared to have for her-would suffer the same fate as the Birds Market on Trubnaya Square. "I cannot say yet what is lasting in this world and what is not."

"You answer honestly. For that I thank you."

On an impulse he crossed to the center strip of the boulevard and bought Aza a bouquet of white carnations from one of the old peasant women in blue canvas jackets selling flowers there. Later, at the door other building on Nizhny Kizlovsky Lane, she buried her nose in the carnations and breathed in the fragrance. Then she flung her arms around Yevgeny's neck, kissed him with great pa.s.sion on the lips and darted off through the doors into the building before he could utter a word.

He telephoned her in the morning before he left for his rendezvous with the twin sisters. "It's me," he announced.

"I recognize the tentativeness of your voice," she replied. "I recognize even the ring of the telephone."

"Aza, each time I see you I leave a bit of me with you."

"Oh, I hope this is not true," she said softly. "For if you see me too often there will be nothing left of you." She was silent for a moment; he could hear her breathing into the mouthpiece. Finally she said in a firm voice: "Next Sunday Natasha is voyaging to the Crimea with her father. I will bring you back here with me. We will together explore whether your l.u.s.t and my desire are harmonious in bed." She said something else that was lost in a burst of static. Then the connection was cut.

Gradually Yevgeny became the legends that the sisters had devised-brus.h.i.+ng his hair forward into his eyes; speaking in a rapid-fire fas.h.i.+on in sentences he often didn't bother to finish; striding around the room in loud, sure steps as he spoke; rattling off the details of his life from the cradle to the present. Starik, who was sitting in on the sessions, would occasionally interrupt with a question. "Precisely where was the drugstore in which you worked?"

"On Kingston Avenue just off Eastern Parkway. I sold comic books- Captain Marvel, Superman, Batman-and made egg creams for the kids for a nickel."

The sisters were pleased with their pupil. "I suppose there is nothing left for us to do now except destroy all the loose-leaf books," Agrippina said.

"There is still the matter of the second problem," Serafima said. They looked at Starik, who nodded in agreement. The sisters exchanged embarra.s.sed looks. "You must tell him," Serafima informed her sister. "You are the one who stumbled across it."

Agrippina cleared her throat. "Both of your legends are built around young men who were born in the United States of America, which means that like the overwhelming majority of Americans they will have been circ.u.mcised at birth. We have examined your birth records at"-here she named a small and exclusive Kremlin clinic that was used by ranking Party people. "They make no mention of a circ.u.mcision. I apologize for posing such a personal question but are we correct in a.s.suming you were not circ.u.mcised?"

Yevgeny pulled a face. "I see where this is leading."

Starik said, "We once lost an agent who was pa.s.sing himself off as a Canadian businessman. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police found the businessman's medical records and discovered he had been circ.u.mcised. Our agent was not." He pulled a slip of paper from a s.h.i.+rt pocket and read it. "The operation, which will be performed in a private Centre clinic in a Moscow suburb, is scheduled for nine tomorrow morning." The sisters stood up. Starik signaled for Yevgeny to remain. The two women bid goodbye to their student and left the room.

"There is one more matter that needs to be cleared up," Starik said. "I am talking about the girl, Azalia Isanova. You shook the man who was tailing you from across the street, but you did not lose the one who was a.s.signed to follow you from in front. Your street craft needs work. Your faculty of discretion, too. We have been monitoring your telephone calls. We know that you slept with the girl-"

Yevgeny blurted out, "She can be trusted-she shares an apartment with the daughter of Comrade Beria-"

Starik, his face contorted, his eyes bulging, blurted out, "But don't you see it? She is too old for you!"

Yevgeny was startled. "She is two years older than me, it is true, but what does that amount to? The question of age must be seen as-"

Starik, hissing now, cut him off. "There is something else. Her surname is Lebowitz. Her patronymic is a version of Isaiah. She is a zhid."

The word struck Yevgeny like a slap across the face. "But Comrade Beria must have known about her when he took her in..."

Starik eyes narrowed dangerously. "Of course Beria knows. A great many in the superstructure are careful to include one or two Jews in their entourage to counter Western propaganda about anti-Semitism. Molotov went too far-he actually married one of them. Stalin decided it was an impossible situation-the Foreign Minister married to a Jewess-and had her s.h.i.+pped off to a detention camp." Starik s bony fingers gripped Yevgeny's wrist. "For someone in your position any liaison with a girl would pose delicate problems. A liaison with a zhid is out of the realm of possibility."

"Surely I have a say-"

For Starik there was no middle ground. "You have no say," he declared, switching to the formal "vui" and spitting it into the conversation. "You must choose between the girl and a brilliant career-you must choose between her and me." He shot to his feet and dropped a card with the address of the clinic on the table in front of Yevgeny. "If you do not turn up for the operation our paths will never cross again."

That night Yevgeny climbed to the roof of his building and gazed for hours at the red-hazed glow hovering over the Kremlin. He knew he was walking a tightrope; he understood he could jump off one side as easily as the other. If he had been asked to give up Aza for operational reasons he would have understood; to give her up because she was a Jewess was a bitter pill to swallow. For all his talk about the genius and generosity of the human spirit, Starik-Yevgeny's Tolstoy-had turned out to be a rabid anti-Semite. Yevgeny could hear the word zhid festering in his brain. And then it dawned on him that the voice he heard wasn't Starik's; it was a thinner voice, quivering with rage and pessimism and panic, seeping from the back of the throat of someone who feared growing old, who welcomed death but dreaded dying. The word zhid resounding in Yevgeny's ear came from the great Tolstoy himself; scratch the lofty idealist of the spirit and underneath you discovered an anti-Semite who believed, so Tolstoy had affirmed, that the flaw of Christianity, the tragedy of mankind, came from the racial incompatibility between Christ, who was not a Jew, and Paul, who was a Jew.

Yevgeny laughed under his breath. Then he laughed out loud. And then he opened his mouth and bellowed into the night: "Za uspiekh nashevo beznadiozhnovo diela! To the success of our hopeless task!"

The circ.u.mcision, performed under a local anesthetic, was over in minutes. Yevgeny was given pills to ease the pain and an antiseptic cream to guard against infection. He retreated to his apartment and buried himself in the Prikhodko lectures, making lists of neighborhoods and parks and department stores in various East Coast American cities that could be used for meetings with agents. The telephone rang seven times on Sat.u.r.day, four times on Sunday and twice on Monday. Once or twice the maid plucked the receiver off its hook. Hearing a female voice on the other end of the line she muttered a curse in Tajik and slammed down the phone. After a few days the burning sensation in Yevgeny's p.e.n.i.s dulled to an ache and gradually disappeared. One morning a motorcycle messenger brought Yevgeny a sealed envelope. Inside was a second sealed envelope containing a pa.s.sport in the name of Gregory Ozolin and a plane ticket to Oslo. There, Ozolin would disappear from the face of the earth and a young American named Eugene Dodgson, who had been backpacking in Scandinavia, would buy pa.s.sage on a Norwegian freighter bound for Halifax, Canada, the staging area for Soviet illegals bound for a.s.signments in the United States.

On the evening before Yevgeny's departure, Starik, smiling thinly, turned up with a tin of imported herring and a cold bottle of Polish vodka. The two talked about everything under the sun late into the night; everything except the girl. After Starik had departed Yevgeny found himself staring at the telephone, half-hoping it would ring; half-hoping there would be a musical voice on the other end saying "I dislike summer so very much."

When, just before six in the morning, it finally did ring, Yevgeny leapt from the bed and stood staring at the receiver. With the phone's discordant peal still echoing through the apartment, his eye fell on the packed valise near the door. He could feel a magnetic force pulling him toward his quest on the American continent. Accepting his destiny with a grudging smile, he sat down on the valise in preparation for a long, long voyage.

Part 8

3.

FRANKFURT, WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 7, 1951.

THE OVERHEAD LIGHTS DIMMED AND THE TWO CHICKEN COLONELS attached to the Joint Chiefs materialized in the spotlight. Endless rows of campaign ribbons s.h.i.+mmered over the breast pockets of their starched uniforms. Company scuttleb.u.t.t had it that they'd pa.s.sed the time on the flight out from Was.h.i.+ngton spit-s.h.i.+ning their shoes until they resembled mirrors. "Gentlemen," the colonel with the cropped mustache began.

"Seems as how he's giving us the benefit of the doubt," Frank Wisner, his s.h.i.+rtsleeves rolled up, muttered in his inimitable southern drawl, and the officers within earshot, Ebby among them, laughed under their breaths.

They had gathered in Frankfurt Station's sloping auditorium on the second floor of the huge, drearily modern I.G. Farben complex in the Frankfurt suburb of Hochst to hear the Pentagons latest Ca.s.sandra-like forebodings. For Wisner, Allen Dulles's deputy in the Dirty Tricks Department who was pa.s.sing through Germany on a whirlwind tour of the CIA's European stations, the briefing was another installment in the "p.i.s.sing contest" between the Joint Chiefs and the Company over Cold War priorities. The chicken colonels who had turned up in Frankfurt before had agonized over the Soviet order of battle as if it were the entrails of a slaughtered ram, counting and recounting the armored divisions that could punch on six hours' notice through the cordon sanitaire the Allies had strung like a laundry line across Europe. In the great tradition of military mindset, they had made the delicate leap from capabilities to intentions; from could to would. Like Delphic oracles predicting the end of the world, they had even identified D-day (in a top-secret "Eyes Only" memo with extremely limited distribution; the last thing they wanted was for this kind of information to fall into the hands of the Russians). World War III would break out on Tuesday, 1 July 1952.

Now they had come back with details of the Soviet a.s.sault. Tapping a large map of Europe with a pointer, the chicken colonel with the mustache reeled off the names and effective strengths of the Soviet divisions in East Germany and Poland, and a.s.serted that the Kremlin had ma.s.sed three times as many troops as it needed for occupation duties. A slim, crewcut sergeant major who walked as if he had a ramrod up his b.u.t.t changed maps, and the colonel briefed the audience on the route the two-p.r.o.nged Soviet armored blitzkrieg would follow across the northern plain; in a Pentagon war game simulation, the colonel said, the Soviet attack had reached the English Channel in a matter of weeks. Still a third map was thumbtacked to the easel, this one showing Soviet airfields in Poland and East Germany and the western Bohemian area of Czechoslovakia that would provide close air support for the a.s.sault. Signaling for the houselights, the colonel strode to the edge of the stage and looked out at Wisner, who was slouched in the third row next to General Lucian Truscott IV, the Company's Chief of Station in Germany. "What the Joint Chiefs want," the colonel announced, his jaw elevated a notch, his eyes steely, "is for you to plant an agent at every one of these airfields before July first, 1952 in order to sabotage them when the balloon goes up and the fun starts."

Wisner pulled at an earlobe. "Well now, Lucian, we d.a.m.n well ought to be able to handle that," he remarked. There was no hint in his tone or expression that he was being anything but serious. "How many airfields did you say there were, colonel?"

The chicken colonel had the figure at the tip of his tongue. "Two thousand, give or take half a hundred. Some of them have got tarmac runways, some dirt." He grinned at his colleague; he was sure they would be returning to Was.h.i.+ngton with upbeat news.

Wisner nodded thoughtfully. "Two thousand, some tarmac, some dirt," he repeated. He twisted in his seat to speak to his deputy, d.i.c.k Helms, sitting directly behind him. "I'll bite, d.i.c.k-how does an agent on the ground go about sabotaging a runway?"

Helms looked blank. "Beats me, Frank."

Wisner looked around at his troops. "Anyone here have an inkling how you put a runway out of action?" When n.o.body spoke up Wisner turned back to the colonel. "Maybe you can enlighten us, colonel. How do you sabotage a runway?"

The two colonels exchanged looks. "We'll have to get back to you with an answer," one of them said.

When the chicken colonels had wrapped up the briefing and beat a tactical retreat, Wisner settled onto the back of the seat in front of him and joked with his people. "I'll be G.o.dd.a.m.ned surprised if we ever hear from them again," he said with a belly laugh. "Carpet bombing can put an airfield out of action in two hours, three tops. What a single agent on the ground could do is beyond me. To turn to more serious matters than planting two thousand agents at two thousand airfields-"

There were guffaws around the auditorium.

"Back in the insulated offices of the District of Columbia, the Pentagon is trying to figure out how to blunt a Soviet attack across Europe that is highly unlikely, given our superiority in atomic weaponry and delivery capacity, not to mention that some divisions in the satellite armies are more likely to attack the Russians than the Americans if war breaks out. The Was.h.i.+ngton civilians, led by our erstwhile specialist on all things Soviet, George Kennan, are rambling on about containment, though n.o.body has made the case why the Russians would want to add another dozen satellites to their fragile empire. And make no mistake about it-the Soviet empire is a house of cards. One good puff in the right place at the right time and the whole thing will come cras.h.i.+ng down. I am not presiding over the clandestine service in order to sabotage airfields or contain Communism. Our mission is to roll back Communism and liberate the captive nations of East Europe. Am I getting through to you, gentlemen? Our mission is to destroy Communism, as opposed to dirt runways on airfields."

Ebby had been deeply involved in Wisner s roll-back campaign from the day he reported for duty in Germany the previous November. His first a.s.signment, at Berlin Base, had ended abruptly when Ebby's gripe about a "pathological dipsomaniac" being in charge of a Company base reached the Sorcerer's ear and he had whipped off one of his notorious "It's him or me" cables to the DD/0. Bowing to the inevitable, Ebby had put in for a transfer to Frankfurt Station, where he wound up working as an a.s.sistant case officer in the Internal Operations Groups of the SE (Soviet/Eastern Europe) Division, cutting his teeth on a new and risky campaign: agent drops into the Russian Carpathians.

It was the first of these drops that almost broke Ebby's heart-and led to an incident that came within a hairsbreadth of cutting short his Company career.

He was unpacking his valise in an upstairs bedroom of a private house in the "Compound," an entire residential neighborhood commandeered by the Army a mile down the road from the I.G. Farben building, when his immediate superior, a grizzly, curly-haired Russian-speaking former OSS officer named Anthony Spink, came around to collect him. They were off, he explained, gunning the engine of a motor pool Ford as he sped west out of Frankfurt, to meet an agent code-named SUMMERSAULT, a Ukrainian agent trained at a secret Army base for infiltration into the denied areas behind the Iron Curtain. Jockeying in and out of heavy truck traffic, Spink briefed Ebby on the agent: he was a twenty-three-year-old from the westcentral Ukrainian city of Lutsk who had fought for the Germans under the turncoat Russian General Vlasov during the war. Vlasov himself, along with hundreds of his officers, had been hanged by the Russians after V-E Day. SUMMERSAULT, whose real name was Alyosha Kulakov, had been one of the lucky few who had been able to flee west with the retreating Germans and eventually wound up in one of the Displaced Persons camps teeming with refugees from the Soviet Union and the satellite countries. There he had been spotted by a Company recruiter and interviewed by Spink. SUMMERSAULT had maintained that there were thousands of armed Ukrainian nationalists still battling the Russians in the Carpathian Mountains, a claim supported by a deciphered intercept from the Communist boss of the Ukraine, a little known apparatchik named Nikita Khrushchev, who had cabled Moscow: "From behind every bush, from behind every tree, at every turn of the road, a government official is in danger of a terrorist attack." The Company decided to train SUMMERSAULT in radio and ciphers, and to drop him into the Carpathians to establish a link between the CIA and the resistance movement.

On paper the operation looked propitious.

Spink drove the Ford along a winding unpaved road through endless fields planted with winter wheat to an isolated dairy farm. Pulling up in front of a stone barn, they could see a young man with a baby face and blond hair drawing water from a well. He greeted Spink with a broad smile, pounding him on the back. "When you sending me home to my Carpathians?" he asked eagerly.

"Pretty soon now," Spink promised.

Spink explained that he had come out to introduce Ebby (for security reasons, he used a pseudonym), who was going to be working with SUMMERSAULT in devising a legend and fabricating the official Soviet doc.u.ments to go with it. "I got a birthday present for you, son," he added. With Alyosha dancing behind him excitedly, he opened the Ford's trunk and gave SUMMERSAULT a Minox camera disguised as a cigarette lighter, and a book-size battery-powered shortwave radio with a built-in Morse key and an external antenna that could be strung between trees; the transmitter, German war surplus, had a range of eight hundred kilometers.

When Spink headed back to Frankfurt, Ebby and SUMMERSAULT circled each other cautiously. As a prelude to creating a workable legend, Ebby began to walk Alyosha through his biography; when they constructed a legend they wanted as much of it as possible to be true. At first, the young Ukrainian seemed reluctant to tell his story and Ebby had to worm details out of him: his childhood on the banks of the Styr River in Lutsk with his father deeply involved in a clandestine circle of Ukrainian nationalists; an adolescence filled with terror and suffering when his father and he wound up fighting against the Russians ("because they are Russians, not because they are Communists") in Vlasov's Army of Liberation. When Alyosha finally came to talk about his father's execution by the Russians, his eyes brimmed with tears and he had difficulty finis.h.i.+ng his sentences. Ebby's eyes misted over, too, and he found himself telling Alyosha about the death of his father, a legendary OSS officer who had parachuted into Bulgaria at the end of the war to pry that country out of the Axis alliance. Winstrom Ebbitt had been betrayed by a supposed partisan and tortured by the Germans until he had agreed to radio back false information; he had included in the report a prearranged signal to indicate he was being "played back" by German intelligence. After a while the Germans realized that the OSS hadn't taken the bait. On the day the Red Army crossed the Danube into Bulgaria, Ebbitt had been hauled out on a stretcher-because both of his ankles had been broken-to a soccer field on the edge of Sofia, lashed to a goal post and bayonetted to death by a German firing squad that was short of ammunition. One of the executioners, on trial for war crimes after the end of hostilities, remembered a curious detail: the American OSS officer had died with a smile on his lips.

The telling of the story broke the ice between the two young men and, for the better part of two weeks, they became inseparable companions. During sessions that went on into the early hours of the morning, on long walks through the fields of waist-high winter wheat, Alyosha related the details of his life to the person he came to call "my American brother." Using the main lines of the Ukrainian's biography, filling in the gaps with plausible fictions (Alyosha had to account for the years in Vlasov's army and the post-war years in Western DP camps), Ebby painstakingly constructed a persona that could pa.s.s all but the most careful examination by trained KGB investigators. Seeing that Alyosha was chafing at the bit, he took him for a night on the town in Frankfurt that included a visit to a local brothel (paid for with a pair of nylon stockings from the station's PX) and a meal in a black-market restaurant, where a dinner and a bottle of Rhine wine could be had in exchange for several packs of American cigarettes.

Back at the farm Alyosha polished his Morse "fist," memorized the silhouettes of Soviet planes from flash cards and plowed through thick briefing books to bring himself up to date on life in the Soviet Union-trolley fares, the price of a loaf of black bread, the latest regulations on changing jobs or traveling between cities, the most recent Russian slang expressions. Ebby, meanwhile, began the last phase of the legend-building: creating the Soviet doc.u.ments that would support the legend. Which is how he came in contact with the shadowy West German intelligence "Org" run by Reinhard Gehlen.

Over lunch in the "Casino," a dollar-a-day mess in one of the enormous I.G. Farben buildings. Tony Spink told Ebby more about the man whose unofficial Company code name was "Strange Bedfellow." General Gehlen, it seemed, had been the commander of Fremde Heere Ost, a World War II German intelligence unit that had targeted the Soviet Union. With the war winding down, Gehlen had microfilmed his archives (including invaluable profiles of Soviet political and military leaders), destroyed the originals and buried fifty-two cases of files near an alpine hut in the Bavarian mountains. "The microfilmed files were Gehlen's life insurance policy," Spink explained. "He put out feelers to Western intelligence and offered to give his files to the Americans."

"In exchange for?"

One of the Casino waiters, recruited from a nearby Displaced Persons camp, cleared off the empty plates and carefully emptied the b.u.t.ts in the ashtray into an envelope, which he put in the pocket of his white jacket. Spink made sure the waiter was out of earshot before he answered the question.

"Gehlen wanted to set up a West German intelligence ent.i.ty, with him as its Fuhrer, and he expected the CIA to fund it. There was a lot of soul searching. Putting a German general back in business-especially one who had remained loyal to Der Fuhrer to the bitter end-rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. Sure, we wanted his files and his a.s.sets, but Gehlen came with the package. Take it or leave it, that was his att.i.tude. To make a long story shorter, the Cold War was starting to heat up and Gehlen's microfilms contained a gold mine of information on the enemy. Besides which Gehlen had stay-behind teams along the railway line from Vologda to Moscow, he claimed to be in contact with survivors of Vlasov's army scattered across the Oriol Mountains, he could identify antiSoviet Ukrainian units around Kiev and Lvov, he even had a.s.sets in the part of Germany occupied by Soviet armies." Spink shrugged philosophically. "Without Gehlen and his microfilm we would have been up s.h.i.+t's creek as far as the Ruskies were concerned." He pulled two cigarettes from a pack and left them on the table as a tip. "I know how your old man bought it, Ebby. So here's some unsolicited advice: grit your teeth and get the job done."

The next afternoon Ebby checked out a car from the motor pool and drove the two hundred miles down to the village of Pullach, some eight miles from downtown Munich. Arriving at dark, he found Heilmannstra.s.se, with a ten-foot-high gray concrete wall running along one side, then turned and followed the narrow road that ran parallel to the thick hedges with the electrified fence behind it until he came to the small guardhouse manned by sentries wearing green Bavarian gameskeepers' uniforms. A naked electric bulb illuminated a sign in four languages that read: "SUD-DEUTSCHE INDUSTRIE-VERWERTUNGS GmbH-Switch off your headlights and switch on your inside lights." Only when Ebby had complied did one of the guards approach the car. Ebby cracked the window and pa.s.sed him his American pa.s.sport and Company ID card. The guard took them back to the house, dialed a number and read the doc.u.ments to someone on the other end. Moments later a jeep roared up to the gate and a lean, balding man with a distinctive military bearing pushed through a turnstile and let himself into the pa.s.sengers seat of Ebby's car. "I am Doktor Uppmann of the Records Department," he announced. He never offered his hand. "You may switch on the headlights now."

"What about my ID?" Ebby asked.

"They will be returned to you when you leave. I will accompany you until then."

The gate in the electrified fence swung open and Ebby followed Herr Uppmann's directions through the Compound. "This is your first visit here, yes?" Uppmann commented.

"Yes," Ebby said. He could feel a tingling at the back of his neck.

"We are, be a.s.sured, eager to be of service to our American friends," his guide said, gesturing with an open palm toward a lighted road to the right.

Ebby turned into the road. "Does anyone fall for the South German Industries Utilization Company sign back at the gate?" he inquired.

The German managed a thin smile. "Doktor Schneider"-Gehlen's cover name-"has a hypothesis: If you want to keep a big secret, disguise it as a boring and inconsequential secret rather then try to convince people it is not a secret at all. You would be astonished how many Germans think we steal industrial secrets from the Americans or the French."

Following his guide's hand signals, Ebby pulled up on the side of a long one-story building. Doktor Uppmann produced a metal ring with half a dozen keys attached to it. With one he turned off the alarm system, with another he opened the two locks on a heavy metal door. Ebby followed him down a lighted corridor. "How long have you been here?" he asked, waving toward the Compound.

"We moved in soon after the end of hostilities. Except for some underground vaults that were added, the compound existed much as you see it today. It was originally built for SS officers and their families and by good fortune survived your bombers." Uppmann let himself into a lighted office and locked the door behind them. Looking around, Ebby took in the st.u.r.dy furniture and the gray walls encrusted with squashed insects. He noticed an American poster taped to the back of the door. It read: "Watched from a safe distance an atomic explosion is one of the most beautiful sights ever seen by man."

"Do you really believe that?" Ebby asked his guide.

Doktor Uppmann looked fl.u.s.tered. "It is merely a joke."

"I have heard it said a German joke is no laughing matter," Ebby muttered.

"I beg your pardon?"

"Nothing."

Uppmann crouched in front of a large safe and fiddled with the dial until the door clicked open. From a shelf in the safe he withdrew a manila folder. He swung the safe's door closed and spun the dial to make sure it was locked, then, straightening, emptied the contents of the manila folder onto a table. "All of these were fabricated by the Abwehr in the last months of the great struggle against Bolshevism," Uppmann informed his visitor. "They are first-cla.s.s forgeries, in some ways superior to the doc.u.ments we fabricated earlier in the war. Many of the agents we dropped behind Bolshevik lines were executed because we made the error of using our own stainless steel staples and not the Russian staples which rust after a very short period of time. You Americans have a saying we Germans appreciate-live and learn. Take a close look at the stamps-they are small masterpieces. Only a Russian trained in credentials could distinguish them from the real thing." He slid the doc.u.ments across the table, one by one. "An internal pa.s.sport for the Ukrainian Republic, a labor book, a military status book, an officers ident.i.ty book, a Ukrainian ration book. When filling in the doc.u.ments you must bear in mind certain Russian idiosyncracies. Whereas the internal pa.s.sport, the military status and officer's ident.i.ty books would normally be filled in by secretaries with a more or less elaborate bureaucratic penmans.h.i.+p, the labor book would be signed by the factory managers who, if they rose from the ranks, might be quite illiterate and would scratch their initials in place of a readable signature. There is also the matter of which inks are used in Russia. But I am confident your experts in Frankfurt are familiar with these details, Herr Ebbitt."

Herr Doktor Uppmann led Ebby to a lounge at the end of the corridor. Waving him toward an easy chair, he fetched a bottle of three-star French cognac and two small gla.s.ses from a painted Bavarian cabinet. He filled them to the brim and handed one to Ebby. "Prosit," he said, smiling, carefillly clicking gla.s.ses. "To the next war-this time we get them together."

Ebby, trembling with anger, rose to his feet and set the gla.s.s down on a table without drinking. "I must tell you, Herr Doktor Uppmann-" He took a deep breath to control his temper.

Uppmann c.o.c.ked his head. "You must tell me what, Herr Ebbitt? That your father was killed in the war? I see you are surprised to discover I am familiar with your pedigree. As a matter of absolute routine we perform background checks on all visitors to the compound. My father, too, was a casualty of the war-he was taken captive at Stalingrad and did not survive the long march through the snow to the prison camp. My younger brother, Ludwig, stepped on a land mine and returned from the war with both of his legs amputated above the knees. My mother cares for him at our family estate in the Black Forest."