The Company: A Novel of the CIA (34 page)

"All the pieces fit," Torriti insisted.

"All the pieces are circumstantial," Angleton said coolly; he was talking clown to Torriti again. "All the pieces could point to any one of two or three Brits." Sucking on his cigarette, he twisted in the bamboo chair until he was facing Torriti. "I know Adrian as well as I know anyone in the world," he announced with sudden vehemence. "I know what makes him tick, I know what he's going to say, the attitude he'll take in a given situation, before he opens his mouth and starts to stutter. I'd trust Adrian with my life. He couldn't be spying for the Russians! He represents everything I admire in the British." A haze of cigarette smoke obscured the expression on Angleton's face as he confessed, "Adrian is the person I would have liked to be."

Torriti produced a rumpled handkerchief and mopped the humidity off his palms. "Would you trust him with your Cattleya if it ever blooms?" Smirking at his own joke, he raised the matter of the agent drops into Poland and the Ukraine that had all ended in disaster. Philby, as MI6's liaison in Washington, had known about these drops.

"You parachute a bunch of courageous but amateur recruits into the lion's den and then you're surprised to discover they've been eaten alive."

Torriti wandered off and picked up a small jar with a tiny bud breaking through the earth in it.

"I'd appreciate it if you wouldn't handle the merchandise," Angleton called over. "They are extremely fragile."

The Sorcerer set the jar in its rack and ambled back. Pulling out his own notebook, wetting a thumb and leafing back the pages, he began to walk Angleton through his series of barium meals. He had sent one off to every single person on the Washington end who might have betrayed the Vishnevsky exfiltration. All of the barium messages had looked as if they were distributed widely but the distribution had been limited in each case to a single person or a single office. All of the operations he had exposed in the meals remained in place—all, that is, except the Albanian operation. The barium meal spelling out the Albanian caper had gone to the inter-agency Special Policy Committee, of which Philby was a member.

"There are sixteen members of the Special Policy Committee," Angleton noted, "not counting aides and secretaries who are cleared to read everything that passes through the committees hands."

"Know that," Torriti said. "That's why I narrowed the field down with a last barium meal. I had it sent to Philby himself. I let him know that I knew the identity of the Soviet mole in MI6. Two days later the Russians set me up for a kidnapping."

"Considering how you were occupied at the time—not surprising they'd try to get their hands on the head of Berlin Base." Suddenly a gleam appeared in Angleton's dark Mexican eyes. He snapped shut his notebook and stood up. "There was one more barium meal you haven't mentioned, Harvey. Unfortunately for you it punctures a gaping hole in your case against Adrian. What's your single best intelligence source in the Soviet zone of Berlin? SNIPER, by far. He is not only a theoretical physicist who has access to Soviet atomic secrets but a Deputy Prime Minister of the German Democratic Republic, someone extremely high up in the nomenklatura—someone who one day could conceivably become Prime Minister. Who services SNIPER? A courier code-named RAINBOW. You fed me this information in one of your so-called barium meals. I don't mind telling you I shared it with Adrian. If Adrian is your Soviet mole, how come SNIPER and RAINBOW weren't blown?"

The Sorcerer retrieved his holster and, dipping his left arm through the loop, buckled it across his barrel chest. "You never did say whether you passed on the Vishnevsky serial to your pal."

Angleton, tracing a series of petals in the film of humidity coating a pane of greenhouse glass, appeared to be in the middle of a conversation he was having with himself. "Adrian can't be a Soviet mole—all these years, all these operations. It is inconceivable."

15

GETTYSBURG, SATURDAY, MAY 26, 1951

EUGENE STOOD ON THE CREST OF CEMETERY HILL, GAZING ACROSS the killing ground that sloped down to Seminary Ridge. "They came from there," he said, pointing with the flat of his hand to the woods at the bottom of the fields. "Pickett's lunatic charge—the high water mark of the Confederacy. At midafternoon thirteen thousand Rebels started across the no-mans land, muskets leveled at their waists, bayonets fixed, battle flags flying, drums beating, dogs barking, half the men pissing in their trousers. If they had been Russian soldiers, they would have shouted: 'To the success of our hopeless task!' The objective was the Union line, stretched out along this ridge over to the Big Round Top. The Union gunners held their fire until they could hear the Rebels calling encouragement to each other. Then seventeen hundred muskets fired at once. A moan went up from the soldiers in the fields. Union grapeshot raked the Confederate ranks; the Yankee cannons became so hot their gunners burned their fingers firing and loading, firing and loading. When the cannons and the muskets fell silent, the battlefield was strewn with limbs and awash with blood. Only half of those who started out made it back to the woods. General Lee is supposed to have ridden up to Pickett and ordered him to rally his division against the counterattack that was sure to chase him back across the Potomac. Pickett is supposed to have told Lee that he no longer had a division to rally."

Philby raised a palm to shield his eyes from the bright sun and squinted across the Gettysburg countryside. "Where did a B-b-bolshevik like you learn about the American Civil War?"

Given the situation, Eugene didn't want to pass on personal information It, if divulged, could one day help the FBI identify him. After all, how many Russian exchange students had studied American history at Yale? " At Lomonosov State University in Moscow," he replied evenly.

Philby snickered. "There's a ropey story if I ever heard one. Forget I asked." A guide leading a group of visitors up the hill could be heard reciting Lincoln's Gettysburg address, '"...are engaged in a great Civil War, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure.'"

"Bloody pertinent question, you want my view." Philby, a paper grocery bag tucked under one arm, took Eugene's elbow and steered him away from the group. They strolled along the ridge, past children spooning ice cream out of Dixie Cups, past a family picnicking in the shade of a tree, until they were out of earshot. Eugene asked, "You're sure you weren't followed?"

"That's why I was late," Philby said. "I went round in bloody circles better p-p-part of an hour playing lost. Stopped to ask a gas station attendant directions to Antietam in Maryland, just in case. What you have to tell me must be bloody important to drag me away from my creature comforts on a Saturday, Eugene."

"The news isn't good," Eugene admitted.

Surveying the battlefield, Philby let this sink in. "Didn't think it would be," he muttered.

Tuning in the Moscow frequency on the Motorola the night before, Eugene had picked up one of his personal codes ("That's correct. 'But if I'm not the same, the next question is, Who in the world am I. Ah, that's the great puzzle!' is definitely from Alice in Wonderland") on the cultural quiz program. Using the lucky ten-dollar bill, he had transformed the winning lottery number into a Washington-area telephone number and called it at midnight from a public phone booth. He found himself talking to the woman with the thick Polish accent.

"Gene, is that you? A small packet has been attached to the back of the garbage bin in the parking lot," she said, all business. "In it is an envelope. Memorize the contents, burn the instructions and carry them out immediately." The woman cleared her throat. "Your mentor, the Old Man, wishes you to tell our mutual friend that he regrets things turned out this way. Say to him the Old Man wishes him a safe journey and looks forward eagerly to seeing him again. I would be pleased to talk more with you but I have been instructed not to." Then the line went dead.

Eugene dialed Bernice's number. "I had a fantastic day," she said breathlessly. "I got forty-four new signatures on my Rosenberg petition."

"I won't be coming over tonight," he told her.

"Oh?"

"Something important came up."

He could hear the disappointment in her voice. "Naturally I understand. Tomorrow, then."

"Tomorrow for sure."

Eugene went out behind the liquor store and felt around between the back of the garbage bin and the wall until he discovered the packet taped to the bin. Returning to the attic apartment, he tore open the envelope and extracted a sheet of paper crammed with four-number code groups. Working from a one-time pad hidden inside the cover of a matchbook, he deciphered the message, which had come from Starik himself. Eugene committed the contents to memory, repeating it several times to be sure he had it down pat, then burned the letter and the one-time pad in a saucepan and flushed the ashes down the toilet. Grabbing two bottles of Lagavulin Malt Whisky from a shelf in the liquor store, jumping into the station wagon parked in the alley, he headed along Canal Road to Arizona Avenue, then turned onto Nebraska and pulled up in front of the two-story brick house with the large bay window. Another automobile was parked behind Philby's car in the driveway. Eugene left the motor running and went up the walkway and rang the bell. After a moment the vestibule light came on and the front door opened. A disheveled Philby, wine stains on his shirt front, peered out at him, his eyes puny from alcohol and lack of sleep. For an instant he couldn't seem to place Eugene. When it dawned on him who his visitor was, he seemed startled. "I d-d-didn't order anything—" he mumbled, half-looking back over his shoulder.

"Yes, you did," Eugene insisted.

"Who is it, Adrian?" someone called from inside the house.

"Liquor delivery, Jimbo. D-d-didn't want the river to run dry on us, did I?"

Through the open door Eugene caught a glimpse of a gaunt, stoop-shouldered figure pulling a book from a shelf and leafing through it. "There's a time, a place, some instructions written in plain text on the inside cover of one of the cartons," Eugene whispered. "Don't forget to burn it." He handed Philby an invoice. Philby disappeared into the house and returned counting out bills from a woman's snap purse. "Keep the change, old boy," he said in, a voice loud enough to be overheard.

"In a hundred years you'd never guess who was visiting me when you d-d-dropped by so unexpectedly last night." Philby was saying now. They had reached the commemorative stone marking the furthest Confederate soldiers had reached during Pickett's charge on July 3, 1863. "It was the illustrious Jim Angleton himself, Mr. Counterintelligence in the flesh, come to conimisserate with me—seems like one of the Company underlings, a rum chap from Berlin with an Italian-sounding name, has d-d-decided I'm the rotter who've been giving away CIA secrets to the ghastly KGB."

"Angleton told you that?"

"Jimbo and I go back to the Creation," Philby explained. "He knows I couldn't be a Soviet mole." He had a good chuckle at this, though it was easy to see his heart wasn't in it.

"I'm afraid it's not a laughing matter," Eugene remarked. "Did you bring all your paraphernalia with you."

"Stuff's here in the bag," Philby said morosely.

"You didn't leave anything behind? Sorry, but I was told to ask you."

Philby shook his head. Eugene took the paper bag filled with the objects that would doom Philby if the Americans discovered them—one-time pads, miniature cameras, film canisters, microdot readers, a volume of poems by William Blake with instructions for emergency dead drops rolled up in a hollow in the binding.

"I'll get rid of this—I'll go home on back roads and bury it somewhere."

"Why all the alarums? Just b-b-because one cheeky bugger comes out of the woodwork and wags a finger at me is no reason to p-p-push the bloody p-p-p-p"—Philby, clearly unnerved, had trouble spitting out the words. "Panic button." Annoyed with himself, he took a deep breath. "Dodgy business, living on the cutting edge," he muttered. "Hard on the nerves. Time to let the bloody cat out of the bloody bag, hey? What's up? Didn't Burgess warn Maclean in time? Didn't Maclean get off ahead of the coppers?"

"Maclean left England last night. He's on his way to Moscow via East Germany."

"Wizard. Wheres the bloody p-p-problem?"

"Burgess lost his nerve and went with him."

"Burgess buggered off!" Philby looked away quickly. Breathing in little gasps, he scrubbed his lips with the back of his hand. "The bloody little bastard! That is hard cheese."

"The British will discover Maclean is missing when they turn up Monday morning to question him about the HOMER business. Won't take them long to figure out Burgess has skipped with him. At which point the alarm bells will go off in London and Washington."

"And all those beady eyes will focus on yours truly," Philby said gloomily "Burgess got you into this business."

Eugene agreed. "Until he headed hack to England to warn Maclean, he was boarding with you in Washington. On top of that there are half a dozen serials that point in your direction. You knew from Angleton that the Americans had deciphered bits of text that identified Maclean as the Soviet agent HOMER. You knew the British were going to take him into custody and begin questioning him Monday morning. Then there are the emigre operations that ended in disaster. There is the business of the Vishnevsky defection." Eugene thought he had made his case. "The rezident figures you have thirty-six hours to get out of the country. You brought your backup passport with you, I hope."

"So Starik wants me to run for it, then?"

"He doesn't think you have a choice." Eugene pulled the small package from his jacket. "There's hair dye, a mustache, eyeglasses, forty-eight hundred dollars in ten and twenty-dollar bills. I have an old raincoat for you in the station wagon. We'll remove your license plates and leave your car here—it'll take the local police a couple of days to trace it to you, by which time you'll be far away. I'll drop you at the Greyhound terminal in Harrisburg. The route is written out in the package—Harrisburg to Buffalo to Niagara Falls, where you cross to the Canadian side. A car will be waiting to take you to a safe house in Halifax. Starik's people will put you on a freighter bound for Poland."