The Proxy Assassin (7 page)

Byline, Julia Hammond. Five buck item my ass.

“Why would Wisner give a shit what I say?”

“Because he's
Cold Warrior Number One,” said Harvey. “And he's paying for your hotel room.”

Bill parked his rear end on the side of the bed and bit off half a sugar doughnut. When he was done chewing he said, “There are only two men in this town with hard power.”

I had to wait another half a doughnut to find out who they were.

“J. Edgar Hoover and Frank Wisner.”

“Not the President?”

Harvey snortled, which is somewhere between a chortle and a snort. “The President's naked to the world – photographers, stenographers, biographers. He tries to have you clipped and it comes back to bite him.”

“Clipped? Frank Wisner's going to have me
killed?”

“Unlikely. But the thing to remember about the Director of OPC is that, even more than Hoover, he's unsupervised. The higher-ups don't want to know. We've never had a government official that powerful in the history of the United States.”

True enough. I had done my due diligence in the back stacks of the Cleveland Library after I accepted Frank Wisner's invite to D.C. I read the charter of his new Office of Policy Co-ordination and remembered one chilling line in particular.

It said OPC operations must be conducted so that the President and the executive branch
could plausibly disclaim any responsibility
.

Harvey stood up and brushed powdered sugar off his front. “Lay low, don't answer the phone, don't call room service. I'll try to smooth out the wrinkles.”

“And what do I do for food and drink?”

“You got doughnuts and a water faucet.”

“Very funny,” I said, moving to block the door. “Fork it over, I know you're packin'.”

Harvey grumbled and reached inside his coat. He handed me a shiny silver flask.

“I am eternally in your debt,” I said, “but one last question. Why all this room service? What makes me so goddamn special?”

Harvey looked out the window. The dawn was pink and gray with fog. “Though it pains me to say so, Schroeder, you're my hero.”

“Good one Bill.”

“No, it's true,” said Harvey, nodding his great bovine head. “You made that sonofabitch Hoover look stupid two years ago and you have lived to tell the tale. So far.”

I
got hungry and bored hiding in my room at the Mayflower. It was 5 p.m. on a Tuesday, who was gonna know? I took the service elevator to the lobby. I saw no sign of newshounds, just a few well-fed gents bellied up to the Towne and Country Bar. Their name badges read ‘Iowa City Chamber of Commerce.'

I was pleasantly surprised to see Winston behind the bar. I ordered dinner and a beer. I didn't need any more hard stuff after nipping at Harvey's flask all afternoon.

With the slightest twitch of an eyebrow Winston indicated I had company. A large man wearing a floppy black hat took the barstool to my left. He wore an expensive pinstriped suit.

“You are Mr. Harold Schroeder?” lisped the man. He was about forty, with a flat pale face and a wide clownish mouth. He spoke with a Russian accent. “You are heem?”

“Yeah, yeah, I am heem.” I asked how he knew where to find me.

“Everyone says you are here.”

And here I was, parked on my barstool in the Towne and Country Lounge, the Harold Schroeder anti-Communist Command Center.

I leaned over and grabbed the Russian's wrist, hard, felt his pulse hammering. I suppose it was rude of me to be so rude but I have a checkered history with Russians in Savile Row suits.

“And who are you, comrade?”

He said his name was Nikolai Savayenko, that he was an attaché to the Russian Ambassador here in Washington.

I released his wrist. He slid a photograph my way – a little girl sitting on a woman's lap – as his eyes searched the mirror behind the bar.

“Who
is this?”

“My wife Maria and my daughter Tina. We want to defect to your country.”

This got my attention. “Why come to me, Mr. Savayenko? Why not go…”

“My wife is ill with heart condition, very rare. There is surgeon, at the Georgetown Hospital, who can help her.”

“Why not just check her in?”

“She is in Leningrad.”

Well it's never easy, is it? This was a lot to chew and digest on short notice. I didn't know who or what this guy was. With the Reds you never know where the real power lies. The Ambassador's chauffeur might outrank the Ambassador.

“I'm not a government official, Nikolai.”

“This is why I come! You are a man of action, not talk! The others I know, the diplomats, I cannot trust their indecision.”

I took a closer look at the photo, my eyes drawn to little Tina, a bright-eyed cutie with ringlets shooting off in all directions. I could act as an intermediary with Wisner I suppose. But…

“We still use the barter system over her, Nikolai. You give me something of value, I give you something back.”

“I will give you a complete lisstt of Soviet agents operating in USA,” said Nikolai, leaning in, spraying saliva.

“Legals?” I said. “Or illegals?”

The CIA knew who the legal Soviet agents were. Anyone who worked for the Soviet Embassy. Illegal agents posing as everyday citizens did the real damage – the clerk in the State Department mail room, the typist in the DoD secretarial pool, the lab tech at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

“The illegals,” said Nikolai, just like that.

Good God, the motherload! We studied the mirror behind the bar. No one was paying us the least attention.

I gave Winston the nod. He stepped forward to take Nikolai's order. Shot of Smirnoff. And again.

The preferred
method of exfiltration of foreign assets was submarine. Not possible in the northern Baltic this time of year. Nikolai's wife and daughter couldn't escape overland through a thousand miles of Soviet checkpoints and we wouldn't violate Soviet airspace to snatch them. There was a slim chance Wisner could engineer a swap, but first things first.

“We need to get you out of here, Nikolai. Too public. Let's go up to my room and…”

He shook his head. “I need first to speak to your Mr. Vizner.”

“Fine. We'll go up to my room and call him.”

But Nikolai was eyeing the mirror again. I followed his look. A familiar face, wearing a rumpled suit, straggled up to the other end of the bar as if climbing a steep hill. Damned if it wasn't Guy Burgess.

Nikolai turned his face away. He had recognized Kim Philby's friend.

I caught Winston's eye and inclined my head.

A good bartender is a rare and glorious thing. Winston quick stepped down the bar and greeted the disheveled Brit like a long lost friend, giving me a moment to issue instructions.

“Tomorrow, Lincoln Memorial, nine a.m.”

Nikolai Savayenko squeezed my hand before he turned and hurried off, the brim of his floppy black hat pulled low.

Abe
Lincoln drew the short straw in the monument derby if you ask me. The Washington Monument soars high above the D.C. skyline. A bronze Jefferson towers above the visitors to his memorial dome. Only the rawboned rail-splitter sits on his marble keester, deep in shadow.

I gaped up at him. He looked depressed.

Honest Abe had drawn a fair crowd of visitors for a Tuesday morning in October, mostly school kids on a bus tour. I looked around for Nikolai.

Ah, there he was, his back to me, about ten yards away. There was no mistaking that dumb floppy hat.

Only he had shrunk a few inches. And dropped fifty pounds.

I felt a clutch of dread in my gut as I approached the hat wearer. He was a boy about fourteen. His teacher reached him before I did.

“Donald, what in the world?”

“It was just sittin' there, Miss Hazelton, on the bench!”

“Well you put it back where you found it.”

Young Donald galumphed over to the marble bench by the front entrance and threw down the hat.

He needn't have bothered. By my reckoning Nikolai Savayenko wouldn't need it anytime soon. The message from the NKVD was clear. The greatest potential catch in the history of American intelligence was now deceased.

I felt cold eyes watching as I ankled out the entryway. A thick line of trees bordered the reflecting pool straight ahead, convenient cover for watchers.

I didn't give the Blue Caps the satisfaction they sought, didn't run down the steps in a panic. I took my time, then turned at the bottom of the stairway to stare up at the pillared
edifice in which the proudest son of the heartland sat parked on his duff.

As a fellow Midwestern bumpkin I couldn't help feeling I had let the great man down.

I strode the length of the National Mall on a windswept day that couldn't make up its mind – cloudy one minute, sunny the next. I was angry with myself. I shouldn't have let Nikolai walk even if it meant putting him in a hammerlock and marching him upstairs.

The NKVD knew that Nikolai was ripe for ‘imperialist conversion' because of his wife's illness. That his family didn't accompany him to his foreign posting indicated his superiors didn't fully trust him. He would have been under surveillance. His unauthorized visit to a decadent D.C. watering hole was all they would need to know.

Maybe. But it was thin gruel. Even the Blue Caps needed more than a visit to the T&C Lounge to justify a wet job in a foreign capital. Someone must have informed the NKVD that Nikolai was headed to the Mayflower in an attempt to establish contact with yours truly.

Nikolai was dead when he walked in the door. Or, more precisely, when I let him walk out.

I was Nikolai's proxy assassin. He was snuffed for the crime of speaking to me. But his real executioner was the person who sent him my way.

My question to Nikolai had been right on the money.

Why come to me?

Nikolai was steered, that's why. Sidled up to at a diplomatic reception by someone who knew he was frustrated and ripe to cross over, someone saying, ‘I can't help you personally but may I make a suggestion? Take your case to Hal Schroeder, he has the ear of Frank Wisner, he's easy to get to. And, by the way, it would be better if Mr. Schroeder thought this was your idea, not mine.'

A twofer. Eliminate
Nikolai and reduce my reputation to a smoking hole. Guy Burgess appeared just in time to flush Nikolai from the plush confines of the Harold Schroeder anti-Communist Command Center.

Burgess wanted the Russian neutralized because he feared Nikolai would expose him. Burgess wanted me discredited because I knew he was an intimate of Col. Norwood, who fled Berlin after I caught him working both sides.

Of course the person who sidled up to Nikolai couldn't be on Nick's list of known Soviet agents, as Burgess likely was. Burgess would have needed a front man.

Hard to see how it could be anyone but his roomie, MI6 legend Kim Philby. Philby was beyond reproach. If Philby was dirty Nikolai wouldn't have known. If Philby was dirty only Lavrenty Beria and Josef Stalin would know.

Guilt by association, assassination by proxy.

Well, two can play at that game. The apartment on Nebraska Avenue would be watched. Beria, in his dark and devious heart, had to suspect that this decadent British aristocrat was playing him, that Burgess was that rarest of birds, a triple agent. Reporting to Burgess' apartment immediately after my big meet went bust would confirm that suspicion.

Yes, this was a wonderful plan, the new way of the world. Don't get your hair mussed or your hands dirty, young fella, become a proxy assassin. Enlist today!

I stopped at a newstand. It was possible I had gotten ahead of myself. Nikolai had been found out but it didn't necessarily mean he was dead.

The story on the front page of the
Washington Times-Herald
quoted the Soviet Ambassador. Embassy attaché Nikolai Savayenko had thrown himself into the Potomac river upon learning of the death of his wife in Leningrad. She had died of heart failure.

Sure she had.

This
is what we were up against. An enemy willing to kill an invalid to justify the murder of her husband.

I muttered dark curses and swore bloody vengeance. And not for the Soviet diplomat who had been bundled into a car by NKVD goons and dumped off a pier in the dead of night.

Anyone who's tasted combat enjoys poking fun at the blue-sky cookie-pushers in the State Department. There are, however, no blue-sky cookie-pushers in the Soviet diplomatic service. There aren't even any diplomats, not really. They're all members of the
Cheka
, an acronym for Committee to Combat Counter-revolution or somesuch. Imagine the FBI, CIA and State Department all rolled into one tight-knuckled fist.

So I didn't swear vengeance for Nikolai Sayavenko. I was angry for the bright-eyed girl in the photograph, little Tina, now consigned to some dreary Soviet orphanage to be fed a diet of cold porridge and correct thinking.

I dumped the paper in a trash can and continued walking east. Guy Burgess figured to be sleeping it off at half past nine in the morning. Could be he'd slam the door in my face. I
had
dumped him on his backside at the Conklin's party.

Then again I had maintained decorum by not shoving his mug into the tureen of sheep testicles.

It's been my experience that scumbags generally keep a strict ledger of these things.

-----

4001 Nebraska Avenue NW was a leg-stretcher and then some. I stood on the sidewalk and stretched my back when I arrived, stood there long enough for the NKVD to get a few snaps from whatever apartment window they were holed up in.

I climbed brick steps and knocked on the door of the apartment I had seen Philby and Burgess enter two nights ago. First floor, on the right.

I knocked
again. No answer. Burgess was probably zzz'ed out with a pillow over his head. I crowded closer to quick pick the cheesy lock while pretending to wait for the door to open.