The Company: A Novel of the CIA (11 page)

"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 assigned 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 hell 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 muffled 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 scrapbook 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 bumped 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 ship, 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 ship 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 passed 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 brassiere 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. "Hello 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 God," 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 identity—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 passage 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 sunelasses, 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 scraped 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 pass on to you displeasant news—you are on the Latvian freighter Liepaja anchored in your Chesapeake Bay while we wait for clearance to put to sea with a cargo of flour, destination Riga. The ship 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 hoarse.

"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 classmates, 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 brassiere 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 passageway; 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.