The Company: A Novel of the CIA (33 page)

"I am the sand under your bare feet." Lili turned away to look at men with blackened faces, who were carting sacks of coal from a truck into the basement of an apartment building. "Life is an accumulation of small mistakes," she said suddenly.

"Why do you speak of mistakes?" Jack asked in annoyance. "To tell me that our night together was a mistake?"

"That is not at all what I meant. It is my way of telling you in one or two sentences the story of my life," she explained. "I have concluded that the problem is not so much the accumulation of small mistakes but the big ones we make trying to correct them."

Later that night the teardrop planted in SNIPER'S floorboards detected the sound of voices, activating the transmitter hidden in the lighting fixture below. In the morning a transcript arrived on Jack's desk. It was filled with half-garbled fragments of sentences from people walking into and out of the room, rumors of a famous marriage on the rocks, a hurried declaration of undying devotion from an older man to a younger woman, the punch line an anti-Soviet joke, a flowery tribute to someone's cooking. It was pretty much what the microphone had been picking up from the start: the inconsequential prattle of a couple in the privacy of their own apartment, as apposed to intelligence secrets, which SNIPER collected at the university or his government offices. After a while there was a long silence, followed by a quiet and intense conversation between what sounded like a German (obviously SNIPER) and a Pole talking in the only language they had in common, which was English.

It was the transcription of this conversation that intrigued Jack. The text contained details of bacteriological warfare testing on the Baltic island of Rüeen, uranium production in the Joachimstal area of the Harz Mountains and the latest Soviet nuclear fission experiments in Central Asia. Then the two men chatted about friends they had in common and what had happened to them over the years; one had died of colon cancer, another had left his wife for a younger woman, still another had defected to the French and now lived in Paris. Suddenly the Pole mentioned that he supposed the Russians had an important spy in British intelligence. How could he know such a thing, asked the older man, obviously surprised. The conversation broke off when a woman's footsteps came back into the room. There was some murmured thanks for the brandy, the clink of glass against glass. The microphone picked up the woman's cat-like footfalls as she quit the room. The older man repeated his question: how could his guest possibly know the Russians had a spy in British intelligence. Because the Polish intelligence service, the UB, was in possession of a highly classified British intelligence document, the Pole said. He had seen the document with his own eyes. It was a copy of the British MI6's "watch list" for Poland. What is a watch list? the older man inquired. It was a list of Polish nationals that MI6's Warsaw Station considered potential assets and worth cultivating. The list could have been stolen from British intelligence agents in Warsaw, the older man suggested. No, no, the Pole maintained. The copy he had seen bore internal routing marks and initials indicating it had been circulated to a limited number ofMI6 intelligence officers, none of whom was serving in Warsaw.

The conversation moved on to other things—news of friction between the Polish Communists and the Russians, the suppression of a Warsaw magazine for publishing an article about the massacre of thousands of Polish officers in Katyn Forest near Smolensk in 1943, a spirited discussion of whether the Germans or the Russians had killed the Poles (both men agreed it had been the Russians), a promise to keep in touch, a warning that letters were likely to be opened. Then RAINBOW'S voice could be heard saying goodbye to the Pole. There were heavy footsteps on the stair case, followed by the sound of glasses being cleared away and a door closing.

Looking up from the transcript, Jack produced a new series of snapshots: he could see SNIPER removing his old-fashioned starched collar and the studs from his shirt; he could see RAINBOW reaching up to take off her earrings, he could see the smile on her lips as she remembered the effect the small gesture had had on Jack; he could see her coming back from the toilet in a shapeless cotton nightdress; he could see her turning down the cover of the four poster bed and slipping under the sheets next to the man to whom she owed so much.

Shaking off the images. Jack reread the passages concerning the Soviet spy in MI6. If the Sorcerer wasn't already on his way to Washington to flaunt his barium meals in Mother's face and unmask the Soviet mole, he would have delivered this new serial to him right away. No matter. The gist of the conversation would turn up in SNIPER'S distinctive handwriting on the warm silk that Jack would extract with his own fingers from Lili's brassiere.

14

ARLINGTON, SUNDAY, MAY 20, 1951

WEARING A SOILED GARDENER'S APRON OVER AN OLD SHIRT AND washed-out chinos, James Jesus Angleton was sweeping the aisles of the greenhouse he had recently installed in the back yard of his suburban Arlington house, across the Potomac from the District of Columbia and the Pickle Factory on the Reflecting Pool. "What I'm doing," he said, a soggy cigarette glued to his lower lip, a hacking cough scratching at the back of his throat, a dormant migraine lurking under his eyelids, "is breeding a hybrid orchid known as a 'Cattleya cross.' Cattleya is a big corsage orchid that comes in a rainbow of colors. If I succeed in crossings new Cattleya, I plan to call it the Cicely Angleton after my wife."

The Sorcerer loosened the knot of his tie and slung his sports jacket over the back of a bamboo chair. He shrugged out of his shoulder holster, and hung it and the pearl-handled revolver from the knob of a ventilation window. "I'm a goddamn Neanderthal when it comes to flowers, Jim. So I'll bite—how does someone cross an orchid?"

"For God's sake, don't sit on it," Angleton cried when he saw Torriti starting to back his bulky body into the chair. "The bamboo won't hold your weight."

" Sorry. Sorry."

"It's all right."

"I am sorry."

Angleton went back to his sweeping. Out of the corner of his eye he kept track of Torriti, who began meandering aimlessly around the aisles, running his finger tips over clay pots and small jars and gardening t00ls set out on a bamboo table. "Crossing orchids is a very long and very tedious process," Angleton called across the greenhouse, "not unlike the business ofcounterespionage."

"You don't say."

Angleton abruptly stopped sweeping. "I do say. Trying to come up with a hybrid involves taking the pollen from one flower and inseminating it into another. Ever read any of Rex Stout's mystery novels? He's got a detective named Nero Wolfe who breeds orchids in his spare time. Terrific writer, Rex Stout. You ought to get hold of him."

"I'm too busy solving goddamn mysteries to read goddamn mystery novels," Torriti remarked. "So what makes crossing orchids like counterespionage?"

Leaning on the broom handle, Angleton bent his head and lit a fresh cigarette from the embers of the one in his mouth. Then he flicked the butt into a porcelain spittoon overflowing with cigarette stubs. "It can take twelve months for the seedpod to develop," he explained, "at which point you plant the seed in one of those small jars there. Please don't knock any of them over, Harvey. It takes another twelve months for the seed to grow an inch or two. The eventual flowering, if there is a flowering, could take another five years. Counterespionage is like that—you nurture seeds in small jars for years, you keep the temperature moist and hot, you hope the seeds will flower one day but there's no guarantee. You need the patience of a saint, which is what you don't have, Harvey. Orchid breeding and counterintelligence are not your cup of tea."

Torriti came around an aisle to confront Angleton. "Why do you say that, Jim?"

"I remember you back in Italy right after the war. You were guilty of the capital crime of impatience." Angleton's rasping voice, the phrases he used, suddenly had a whetted edge to them. "You were obsessed about getting even with anybody who was perceived to have crossed you—your friends in the Mafia, the Russians, me."

"And people say
I
have the memory of an elephant!"

"Remember Rome, Harvey? Summer, nineteen forty-six? You lost an agent, he turned up in a garbage dump with his fingers and head missing. You identified him from an old bullet wound that the doctors who performed the autopsy mistook for an appendicitis scar. You were quite wild, you took it personally, as if someone had spit in your face. You didn't sleep for weeks while you walked back the cat on the affair. You narrowed the suspects down to eight, then four, then two, then one. You decided it had been the mistress of the dead man. Funny thing is you may have been right. We never got a chance to question her, to find out whom she worked for, to play her back. She drowned under what the cambinieri described as mysterious circumstances—she apparently stripped to the skin and went swimming off a boat at midnight. Curious part was she didn't own a boat and couldn't swim."

"She couldn't swim because there was a goddamn chunk of scrap iron tied to her goddamn ankle," Torriti said. He laughed under his alcoholic breath. "I was young and impetuous in those days. Now that I've grown up I'd use her. When she'd been used up, that's when I'd tie the goddamn iron her goddamn ankle and throw her overboard."

Torriti hiked up his baggy users, which tapered and came to a point at the ankles; Angleton caught glimpse of another holster strapped to one ankle.

"There's a bond between agent and his handler, an umbilical cord, the kind of thing that exists between a father and a son," Torriti was saying. "You're too analytical to get a handle on it, Jim. You've got dazzling theories into which you fit everything. I don't have theories. What I know I pick up the hard way—I get my hands and knees dirty working in the goddamn field."

"You operate on the surface of things. I dig deeper." Angleton wearied of the sparring. "What did you have to tell me that couldn't wait until Monday morning?"

"I'm in the process of writing a memorandum to the Director laying out the case that your pal Philby is a Soviet spy. Has been since the early thirties. As you're the Company's counterintelligence honcho, I thought it was only fair to give you some advance warning. On top of that, I thought we ought to take precautions to make sure Philby doesn't blow the coop."

"You'll only make a fool of yourself, Harvey."

"I have the son-of-a-bitch by the balls, Jim."

"You want to lay out the case for me."

"That's what brought me across the goddamn Potomac on a drizzly Sunday afternoon when I could be drinking in my goddamn hotel room."

Angleton leaned the broom against the side of the greenhouse and produced a small pad from his hip pocket. "Mind if I make notes?"

"No skin off my goddamn nose."

Pulling the bamboo chair up to the bamboo table, pushing aside his gardening tools to make room for the pad, Angleton fingered the pencil he used for filling in his gardening log and looked up, the barest trace of a condescending smile on his lips.

The Sorcerer, patrolling behind him, began with the story of Philby's membership in the Cambridge Socialist Society in the early thirties, his pilgrimage to riot-torn Vienna, his marriage to a rabid Red (Angleton's Israeli friend, Teddy Koliek, had known about the wedding), his efforts after he returned to England to paper over his left-wing leanings by turning up at German embassy parties and nursing a reputation for being pro-German. Then came the Times assignment to cover Franco's side during the Spanish Civil War.

Angleton glanced up. "Adrian has been vetted a dozen times over the years—none of this breaks new ground."

Torriti rambled on, raising the Krivitsky serial which, according to Elihu Epstein, the Brits had never shared with their American cousins.

"Krivitsky was debriefed when he reached this side of the Atlantic," Angleton remembered. He closed his eyes and quoted the serial from memory. "There is a Soviet mole, code named PARSIFAL and handled by a master spy known by the nickname Starik, working in British intelligence. The mole worked for a time as a journalist in Spain during the Civil War." Opening his eyes, Angleton snickered. "Krivitsky was telling us there was a needle in the haystack in the hope we'd take him seriously."

"Somebody took him seriously—he was murdered in Washington in 1941."

"The official police report listed his death as a suicide." Torriti turned in a complete circle, as if he were winding himself up, then asked if Angleton was aware that Philby had signed out MI6 Source Books on the Soviet Union long before he became involved in Soviet counterespionage.

"No, I didn't know that but, knowing Adrian, knowing how thorough he is, I would have been surprised if he hadn't signed out those Source Books."

"Which brings us to Vishnevsky," the Sorcerer said, "the would-be defector who told us he could finger a Soviet mole in MI6."

"Which brings us to Vishnevsky," Angleton agreed.

"The night of the aborted exfiltration," Torriti plunged on, KGB Karlshorst sent Moscow Centre an Urgent Immediate—the Sorcerer happened to have a copy of the clear text—thanking Moscow for the early warning that prevented the defection of Lieutenant Colonel Volkov/Vishnevsky, his wife and his son. "Once Vishnevsky claimed he could identify a Soviet mole in MI6," Torriti said, "I was careful not to include any Brits on the Vishnevsky distribution list. So tell me something, Jim. I'm told you hang out with Philby at La Nicoise, not to mention that he drops by your office whenever he shows up at the Pickle Factory. Did you mention Vishnevsky to your British pal? Spill the beans, Jim. Did you tell him we had someone claiming he could identify a Soviet mole in MI6?"

Angleton set down his pencil. He appeared to be talking to himself. "To begin with, there is no hard evidence that there is a Soviet mole in MI6—"

"Vishnevsky claimed there was—"

"Vishnevsky wouldn't have been the first defector to make himself appear valuable by claiming to have a gold ingot."