The Company: A Novel of the CIA (65 page)

Its disappearance was not noticed by the two FBI agents monitoring the school outing from a distance.

When the Russians returned to their bus outside, dusk was settling over Washington. Eugene, coming through the reptile house from the other direction, stopped to use the toilet. A moment later he retraced his steps, going out the other door and heading in the opposite direction from the Russians visiting the zoo.

He was carrying an American Airlines flight bag. Back in the tiny apartment he had rented over the garage of a private house in the Washington suburb of Tysons Corner, he unpacked its contents. There was a small General Electric clock radio and instructions on how to transform it into a shortwave receiver; an external antenna coiled and hidden in a cavity inside the back cover; a microdot viewer concealed as the middle section of a working fountain pen; a deck of playing cards with ciphers and new dead drop locations, along with their code designations, hidden between the faces and the backs of the cards; a chessboard that could be opened with a paperclip to reveal a spare microdot camera and a supply of film; a can of Gillette shaving cream, hollowed out to cache the rolls of developed film that would be retrieved from SASHA; and $12,000 in small-denomination bills bunched into $1,000 packets and secured with rubber bands.

That night Eugene tuned into Radio Moscow's 11 P.M. shortwave English language quiz program. He heard a contestant identify the phrase "Whiffling through the tulgey wood" as a line in Lewis Carroll's
Through the Looking Glass
. "Whiffling through the tulgey wood" was one of Gene Lutwidge's personal code phrases. At the end of the program Eugene copied down winning lottery number, then took his lucky ten-dollar bill from his wallet, subtracted the serial number from the lottery number, which left him with a Washington phone number. At midnight, he dialed it from a phone booth.

"Gene, is that you?" the woman asked. To Eugene s ear, she sounded half a world and half a century away, a delicate bird whose wings had been clipped by age. She spoke English with a heavy Eastern European accent. "I placed an advertisement in the Washington Post offering for sale a 1923 Model A Duesenberg, the color of silver, in mint condition, one of only one hundred and forty sold that year."

"I understand," Eugene said. Starik was notifying SASHA that Eugene Dodgson had dropped from sight and Gene Lutwidge had taken his place. the cryptic advertisement would automatically activate an entirely different set of dead drops, as well as the code names identifying them.

"I received nine responses," the woman continued. "One of the nine inquired whether I would be interested in trading the Duesenberg for a black 1913 four-door Packard in need of restoration."

"What did you say?"

The woman on the other end of the phone line sighed. "I said I would think about it. The caller said he would phone again in two days' time to see if I agreed to the trade. The appointed hour passed at seven this evening but he never called."

Eugene said, "I hope you find a customer for your Duesenberg." Then he added, "Goodbye and good luck to you."

The woman said, "Oh, it is for me to wish you good luck, dear child," and hung up.

Back in his apartment, Eugene consulted his new list of dead drops. A black 1913 four-door Packard in need of restoration—that was the code phrase indicating that SASHA would be leaving four rolls of microfilm, fifty exposures to a roll, in a hollowed-out brick hidden in the bushes behind the James Buchanan statue in Meridian Hill Park.

Bone-tired, Eugene set the clock radio's alarm for six and stretched out on the bunk bed. He wanted to be at the park by first light and gone by the time people started walking their dogs. He switched off the light and lay there for a long time, concentrating on the silence, staring into the darkness. Curiously, the specter of his mother, a ghostly figure seen through a haze of memory, appeared. She was speaking, as she always did, in a soft and musical voice, and using their secret language, English; she was talking about the genius and generosity of the human spirit. "These things exist as surely as greed and ruthlessness exist," she was saying. "It is for Lenin's heirs, the soldiers of genius and generosity, to vanquish Lenin's enemies."

The battle was, once again, joined. Eugene Dodgson had disappeared from the face of the earth. Gene Lutwidge, a Brooklyn College graduate who had been raised in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn and was struggling to make a living writing short stories, had taken his place and was now operational.

The tall, rangy Russian with a scraggy pewter beard ducked through the door of the Ilyushin-14 and, blinded by the brilliant Cuban sunlight, hesitated on the top step of the portable stairs. The thin metal dispatch case in his left hand was attached to his left wrist by a stainless steel wire. Descending the steps, the Russian caught sight of a familiar figure leaning against the door of the gleaming black Chrysler idling near the tail of the plane. As the other passengers headed in the direction of the customs terminal, the Russian broke ranks and started toward the Chrysler. Two Cuban policemen in blue uniforms ran over to intercept him but the man at the car barked something in Spanish and they shrank back. The Cuban stepped forward from the Chrysler and embraced the Russian awkwardly. Tucking an arm behind his visitor's elbow, he steered him into the back seat of the car. A bodyguard muttered a code phrase into a walkie-talkie and climbed into the front seat alongside the driver. The Cuban translator and a middle-aged secretary settled onto jump seats facing the Russian and his Cuban host. The driver threw the Chrysler into gear and sped across the tarmac and the fields beyond toward an airport gate guarded by a squad of soldiers. Seeing the Chrysler approaching they hauled the gate open. A lieutenant snapped off a smart salute as the Chrysler whipped past. The car jounced up an embankment onto an access road and roared off in the direction of the Havana suburb of Nuevo Vedado. Its destination: the tree-shaded villa two houses down the street from Point One, Castro's military nerve center.

Speeding along a broad boulevard lined with flame trees and bougainvillea, Manuel Piñeiro, the chief of Castro's state security apparatus, instructed the translator to tell their guest how pleased the Cubans were to welcome Pavel "emyonovich Zhilov on his first visit to Communist Cuba. Starik caught sight of a group of elderly men and women doing calisthenics in a lush park and nodded his approval; this was the Cuba he recognized from dozens of Soviet newsreels. Turning back to Piñeiro, he offered an appropriate response: it went without saying that he was delighted to be here and eager to be of service to the Cuban revolution. The two men filled the quarter-hour ride to Nuevo Vedado with small talk, chatting—through the interpreter, a diffident young man hunched forward on his seat and nodding at every word—about what they'd been up to since they'd last met in Moscow. They brought each other up to date on common acquaintances: the German spy chief Marcus Wolf who had achieved considerable success infiltrating Reinhard Gehlen's West German intelligence organization; a former Soviet ambassador to Cuba, who had fallen afoul of Khrushchev and been sent off to manage a shoe factory in Kirghizstan; a gorgeous Cuban singer, who was rumored to be having a lesbian affair with the wife of a member of the Soviet Central Committee. Piñeiro, an early and ardent Fidelista who had been educated at New York's Columbia University before joining Castro and his guerrillas in the Sierra Maestras, wanted to know if the stories in the American press about Leonid Brezhnev, currently chairman of the presidium of the Supreme Soviet, were accurate. Had Brezhnev set his sights on succeeding Khrushchev as First Secretary of the Party? Did he have supporters in the Politburo? How would the tug-of-war between the two factions affect Soviet policy toward Cuba?

It was only when the two men and the young translator were alone in the "secure" room-within-a-room on the top floor of Piñeiro's villa that they got down to the serious business that had brought Starik to Cuba.

"I have come to alert you to the critical danger that confronts the Cuban revolution," Starik announced. Producing a small key, he unlocked the stainless steel bracelet, opened the dispatch case and took out four manila folders with security notations marked on the covers in Cyrillic. He opened the first folder, then, eyeing the translator, frowned uncertainly. Piñeiro laughed and said something in Spanish. The young translator said in Russian, "He tells you that I am the son of his sister, and his godson."

Piñeiro said, in English, "The boy is my nephew. It is okay to speak in front of him."

Starik sized up the translator, nodded and turned back to Piñeiro. "The information we have developed is too important, and too secret, to risk sending it through the usual channels for fear the Americans may have broken our ciphers, or yours. For reasons that will be apparent to you we do not want them to know that we know. The American Central Intelligence Agency"—Starik remembered Yevgeny teaching him the English words for glavni protivnik, and used them now—"the principal adversary..." He reverted to Russian, "...is arming and training a force of Cuban exiles, recruited in Miami, for the eventual invasion of Cuba. This force includes a brigade of ground troops and several dozen pilots of B-26s expropriated from a fleet or mothballed bombers near the city of Tucson in the state of Arizona. The CIA's B-26 bombers differ from your Cuban air force B-26s in as much as they are fitted with metal nose cones where yours have plastic nose cones."

Piñeiro extracted some deciphered cables from a thick envelope and ran his thumb nail along lines of text. "What you say does not come as news to us, my dear Pasha," he said. "We have, as you can imagine, made an enormous effort to develop assets in Miami; several of them actually work for the CIA's Miami Station, located on the campus of the University of Miami. According to one of my informants the Cuban mercenaries, known as Brigade 2506, are being trained by the Americans at Retalhuleu in the Sierra Madre Mountains of Guatemala and now numbers four thousand."

Starik, an austere man who, in a previous incarnation, might have been a monk, permitted a weak smile onto his lips; the expression was so rare for him that it somehow looked thoroughly out of place. "The number of four thousand is inaccurate," he told Piñeiro. "This is because they began numbering the exiles starting with twenty-five hundred to mislead you. The mercenary bearing the number twenty-five-oh-six was killed in a fall from a cliff and the brigade adopted his number as its official name."

"There are only fifteen hundred, then? Fidel will be happy to learn of this detail."

"The invasion is scheduled for early in the month of April," Starik said. "Current plans call for three civilian freighters to ferry half the brigade of mercenaries, some seven hundred and fifty men, to Cuba, though it is not excluded that this number could increase to fifteen hundred if more ships are brought into the operation."

Piñeiro pulled another of the deciphered cables from the pile. "We have an agent among the longshoremen loading one of the freighters, the Rio Escondido, at its anchorage on the Mississippi River. The ship is carrying a communications van, large stores of ammunition and a quantity of aviation gasoline."

"A portion of the aviation gasoline is in tanks below deck, the rest in two hundred fifty-five-gallon drums lashed to the deck's topside," Starik told the Cuban. "With all this gasoline on the main deck, the Rio Escondido will be a juicy target for your planes. Note, too, that the brigade's B-26 bombers will strike three times before the landings, once on D-day minus two, a second time on D-day minus one, a third on the morning of the landings. The principal targets of the first two raids will be the airplanes parked at your air bases, and the air base facilities themselves. The third raid will attack any or your planes that survived the first two raids, plus your command-and-control centers, your communications facilities and any armor or artillery spotted by the U-2 overflights near the invasion site."

"We know that the Americans plan to send the Cuban counterrevolutionists ashore at Trinidad," Piñeiro said. He was anxious to impress his guest with the work of the Cuban intelligence community. "They selected Trinidad because of its proximity to the Escambray Mountains. They reasoned that if the landing failed to spark a general uprising or an Army' mutiny and the invaders then failed to break out of the beachhead, they could slip away into the mountains and form guerrilla bands that, sustained by air drops, could prove to be a thorn in the side of the revolution."

Starik consulted a second folder. "It is true that the CIA originally targeted Trinidad but, at the insistence of the new President, they recently moved the landings to a more remote area. Even Roberto Escalona, the leader of the brigade, has not yet been informed of the change. The plan now calls for the establishment of a bridgehead on two beaches in a place called the Bay of Pigs."

Piñeiro had assumed that the KGB had excellent sources of information in America but he had never quite realized how excellent until this moment. Though he was too discreet to raise the subject, it was clear to him that Starik must be running an agent in the upper echelons of the CIA, perhaps someone with access to the White House itself.

"The Zapata swamps, the Bay of Pigs," he told Pasha excitedly, "is an area well known to Fidel—he goes down there often to skin-dive." He pulled a detailed map of southern Cuba from a drawer and flattened it on the table. "The Bay of Pigs—it is difficult for me to believe they could be so foolish. There are only three roads in or out—causeways that can be easily blocked."

"You must be careful to move your tanks and artillery down there in ones and twos, and at night, and camouflage them during the day, so that the CIA does not spot them and realize you have anticipated their plans."

"Fidel is a master at this sort of thing," Piñeiro said. "The mercenaries will be trapped on the beach and destroyed by artillery and tank fire."

"If the American Navy does not intervene."

"Do you have information that it will?"