The Sisters

by Robert Littell

  "You and Carroll contributed to the Potter's downfall when you ferreted out one of his sleepers, I remember."

  "So did you," Francis shot back. "We exposed him, you broke him."

  G. Sprowls ignored him. "Aside from the loss of the three sleepers, and the subsequent disgrace of the Potter, was there any other reason to think he might be ripe for defection?"

  Francis swallowed a yawn. "We knew in a very general way that he was married to a woman much younger than he was who was likely to put a great deal of pressure on him."

  "What kind of pressure?"

  "The money that had been available, the apartment overlooking the Moscow River, the chauffeured limousine, the access to Western products, all of these would disappear. If he wanted to keep the woman, and we suspected he did, he would have to come up with the equivalent."

  G. Sprowls glanced at the technician, who lifted his eyes to gaze through the upper part of his bifocals. "So far, so good," he said.

  "Let's talk about authorization for a moment," G. Sprowls suggested.

  "Let's Francis repeated amiably.

  "The effort to get the Potter to defect was authorized, according to my notes, by the Deputy Director for Operations. Is that your understanding?"

  "We proposed, he disposed."

  "When you proposed, as you put it, did you also tell the Deputy Director precisely what you expected to get from the Potter if he could be induced to defect?"

  "Absolutely," Francis replied.

  "His version is that you said you expected to get odds and ends."

  "Odds and ends are what we thought we would get," Francis agreed. A smile of transparent innocence spread across his features. "You are not thinking this through," he chastised G. Sprowls. "If we had been operating behind the Deputy Director's back, why would we have sent our man Friday to Vienna to skim off the cream? Surely one of us would have gone in his place."

  G. Sprowls leaned forward. It was precisely this point that baffled him.

  "The fact of the matter is that your man Friday did skim off the cream,"

  he went on. "The fact of the matter is that he was acting on your specific instructions. The fact of the matter is that you wound up with more than odds and ends."

  Francis shook his head in mild frustration. "The Potter trained sleepers. What could have been more logical than to ask him, at the moment he came across the frontier, if he would have the kindness to give us, as a token of his good faith, the names and addresses of any sleepers who might still be in circulation?"

  "You acknowledge that that was the cream that your man Friday was sent to skim off?"

  "We would have been idiots if we hadn't sent him to try," Francis insisted.

  G. Sprowls flipped to the next page in his loose-leaf book and studied it for a long moment. "Your man Friday," he said without looking up,

  "has told us that the Potter gave him the name and address and awakening signal of a Soviet sleeper living in Brooklyn Heights, and that he passed this information on to you. Is his version of events correct?"

  "Perfectly correct, yes."

  "Yet your Op Proposal updater filed with the Deputy Director, a photocopy of which I have before me, contained no mention of the fact that you had come into possession of this information," G. Sprowls drawled.

  It struck Francis that G. Sprowls tended to slip into a drawl when he thought he had a nibble and was starting to gently reel in the line. "No mention at all," he acknowledged cheerfully.

  "Of course you can account for this discrepancy," G. Sprowls said in his slow drawl.

  "Of course."

  G. Sprowls looked up from his loose-leaf notebook and issued a formal invitation. "Feel free to do so," he said.

  Francis actually sighed here. "We naturally attempted to verify the information when our man Friday- our former man Friday is probably more accurate- passed it on to us," he said. "There was a person by that name living at the address in Brooklyn Heights specified by the Potter-Except that he had decamped-Skedaddled. Flown the coop. A discreet phone call elicited the information that he was off somewhere on a business trip. Quite obviously, there were only two ways of confirming the Potter's information. We could have hooked the Potter up to one of these contraptions"- Francis cast a benign smile at the black box behind him-"over in Austria. Except the Potter had slipped through our man Friday's not very sticky fingers and was no longer available. Or we could wait for the alleged sleeper to return to his nest in Brooklyn Heights, then send him the awakening signal, along with an order or two-tell him to scratch his ass in front of the information booth at Grand Central station at high noon, for instance-and see if he responded. In any case, it would have been ridiculously premature for us to have put any of this into our Op Proposal updater-surely even you can understand that. People of our caliber only deal with confirmed information.

  Consider this: perhaps the Potter was not a defector, but someone planted on us in order to make us swallow false information. Perhaps he was a genuine defector who, once across, decided to give us bubbles that burst when you tried to get a grip on them. Perhaps our former man Friday was inventing the whole thing."

  G. Sprowis looked Francis in the eye. "And you are willing to state categorically that neither you nor Carroll awakened the alleged sleeper and sent him on his merry way?

  "Categorically, yes."

  The technician shrugged uncertainly. "Could he make a positive declaration? 'I state categorically that neither I nor to my knowledge Carroll'-that sort of thing-"

  G. Sprowls focused his half-smile on Francis.

  Francis exhaled sharply through his nostrils and nodded. "I state categorically that neither I nor to my knowledge Carroll awakened the alleged sleeper residing in Brooklyn Heights and dispatched him on a mission. Does that do the trick?"

  On the spur of the moment (the question was not in his loose-leaf book!

  G. Sprowls asked, "Have you had any contact with agents or representatives of another country?"

  Francis face glistened with innocence as he replied, "I have not had any contact with agents or representatives of another country."

  G. Sprowls glanced at the technician, who bent over the styluses scratching away in the black box. Finally the technician looked up.

  "He's telling the truth," he concluded.

  "All of it and nothing but," Francis added cheerfully, "so help me God."

  And he added mischievously, "You are barking up the wrong tree."

  Carroll didn't fare as well as Francis when G. Sprowls put him through his paces that very same afternoon. "He's lying," the technician announced evenly, staring at the telltale traces through the bottom half of his bifocals.

  G. Sprowls cleared his throat. Curiously, he seemed embarrassed for Carroll, almost as if he had stripped him of his clothing. "So you are up to something after all," he said.

  A muscle twitched in Carroll's cheek. "We are not up to anything we should not be up to," he declared.

  "Whatever you're doing," G. Sprowls filled in the gap, "you have authorization to do it?"

  "We are good soldiers," Carroll insisted, his eyes staring vacantly at some point on the far wall. "We are patriots-the word is not used lightly. We serve the best interests of our country in ways that our superiors indicate to us." Unable to control himself any longer, Carroll burst out, "The first war I fought in was the wrong war. The next one will be the right war. We must at all costs be prepared for it."

  "I see," G. Sprowls said, although he didn't see at all what Carroll was getting at. He decided to let the business of wrong wars and right wars go for the moment, and concentrate on the question of authorization. If he could discover who Carroll thought had given him authorization, perhaps he could uncover what Carroll felt authorized to do.

  "It is fairly simple," Carroll replied in answer to another question. He seemed eager to justify himself, "Things were said by highly placed people in public places-at in-house pours, at a reception for a British colleague, at a medal-pi
nning ceremony honoring the fellow down the corridor from us who was retiring."

  G. Sprowls appeared to sympathize completely with Carroll. "You read between the lines," he suggested in a slow drawl.

  "The Director was obviously in no position to give an explicit order,"

  Carroll said. "So he did the next best thing. It is out of the realm of possibility that he would have said what he did if he hadn't expected someone to take his words to heart; and if he hadn't expected someone to act on them." He arched his neck to relieve the pressure from his starched collar. "We are, Francis and I, old hands. We were, as Francis likes to say, pointed in the right direction. Where is the crime if we marched?"

  "When you marched," G. Sprowls drawled softly, his half-smile inviting confession, offering absolution, "you mean that you organized the defection of the Potter in order to get access to the identity and awakening signal of a Soviet sleeper; that you then used this signal to awaken him and send him off on an assignment that you knew your superiors would approve of."

  For an endless moment the styluses scraped noisily away in the black box. Again a muscle twitched in Carroll's cheek. "That's roughly it," he acknowledged wearily.

  On a hunch, G. Sprowls slipped in a question. "Have you had any contact with agents or representatives of another country?"

  Carroll closed his eyes in frustration. "You don't understand anything I've told you, in the end," he said.

  "Would you like me to repeat the question?" G. Sprowls asked.

  "No contact with agents or representatives of another country," Carroll said in a dull voice.

  The technician looked up at G. Sprowls and nodded. Carroll was telling the truth.

  "And Francis is involved in this with you?" G. Sprowls wanted to know.

  "Francis speaks for Francis," Carroll snapped. "I speak for myself."

  "About the assignment you gave to the Soviet sleeper," G. Sprowls said casually.

  "When he carries it out," Carroll replied carefully, self-justification unfurling across his face like a flag, "you will know it instantly.

  Everyone will know it instantly. People we don't even know will stop us in the corridor and shake our hands."

  The technician tried to catch G. Sprowls's attention; to indicate to him, with a roll of his eyes, that Carroll was stark raving mad. But G.

  Sprowls was concentrating on making Carroll think he sympathized with him. Exaggerating his drawl, he started to pose another question.

  Carroll cut him off. "I can't tell you any more than I've already told you," he said curtly. And he closed his mouth in a way that indicated he had no intention of opening it again in the immediate future.

  G. Sprowls ate cold sandwiches in his office that evening, and worked late into the night. Seeing the light through his transom, the night security officer knocked on the door to make sure he had authorization.

  G. Sprowls, irritated at the interruption, showed him a chit signed by none other than the Director himself.

  The thing that was baffling G. Sprowls as he pored over the printouts, notched with numbers to indicate what question was being asked at any given moment, was how Francis and Carroll, who worked together, could be telling completely different stories, with no trace that either one was lying. Had Carroll gone off on a tangent of his own? The routine tape recordings of their office chitchat made this seem unlikely. Whatever they were doing, they were obviously doing together. Yet Carroll had admitted they were up to something. And Francis had denied it.

  And they were both telling the truth.

  G. Sprowls removed his eyeglasses and massaged his eyes with a thumb and forefinger. His lids felt inflamed, his eyes more comfortable closed than open. He was tempted to lean his head on the desk, to doze off, dreaming, no doubt, of styluses scratching away on paper and a dwarflike figure pinned, like a gypsy moth, to a piece of cork in a collector's case. As usual, G. Sprowls resisted. With a determined gesture he fitted his eyeglasses back over his rather oversized ears and started where lie always started when he couldn't put his finger on something he suspected was there: at the beginning. "We'll begin with some control questions, if you don't mind, the transcript read. "Would you be so kind as to state your full name as it appears on your birth certificate."

  G. S prowls glanced across at the stylus traces that corresponded to the answer. There wasn't a waver in them. "Francis Augustus," Francis had replied, adding his family name.

  His name!

  C. Sprowls's brow furrowed thoughtfully. A conversation in the lunchroom some four or five years before came hack to him. Several middle-echelon ex-field hands responsible for tunneling money to friendly trade-union people in Latin America had been talking about a wild scheme that had circulated in the form of a lemon-colored Op Proposal, only to be shot out of the sky by a prudent department head. The scheme called for bribing the captain of a supertanker to run his ship onto some rocks of?

  Cuba, causing an enormous oil spill that would pollute the coastline, ruin Cuba's fishing and tourist industry, and in general divert economic resources away from Castro's military and industrial buildup. "Sounds like something the Sisters might have thought up," one of the ex-field hands had said, and when C. S prowls, just back from an overseas tour and new to Washington, had asked who the Sisters were, he had gotten the full description. There was Carroll with his three-piece suits and red welts around his neck from the starched collars which, so it was said, he wore to atone for unspecified sins; and there was Francis, who sported outrageous bow ties, an expression on his face midway between curious and reluctant and a Cheshire cat s innocent smile-so innocent, in fact, that he regularly lied about his name during the annual lie-detector tests and managed to fool the black box.

  G. S prowls reached into a drawer and took out Francis service file. He thumbed through the sheets in it until he came to the one he was looking for-a photocopy of Francis' birth certificate. The name listed on it was Francis Algernon. Not Francis Augustus.

  So he had lied, while hooked up to the black box, about his name.

  G. Sprowls gazed up from Francis' service file, the hall-smile warped into a grimace of satisfaction. He had heard about people who could beat the black box, but he had never come across one before. The box registered stress that someone would feel when he didn't tell the truth-moisture on the palms, a slight change in pulse rate or respiration. But Francis was obviously one of those extremely rare individuals who didn't feel stress of any kind when he lied. And if Francis was able to lie about his name, he would have been able to lie about the Potter and the Sleeper.

  Almost everything the Sleeper knew about tradecraft he had learned from the Potter. During the first months at the Moscow sleeper school, the Potter had concentrated on sharpening his student's powers of observation. Piotr Borisovich would be dispatched to spend an afternoon in the lobby of a large tourist hotel, with instructions to note everything that happened and report back to the Potter. "You omitted the arrival of the fat American woman carrying a shopping bag from a Paris department store,' the Potter would say after debriefing the Sleeper.

  "Also the Intourist woman who had a dispute with someone on the phone and burst into tears when she hung up. Also the man in the wheelchair who asked you for a match. The man in the wheelchair, in case you are curious, works for me. He was there to watch you."

  So it went. One day Piotr Borisovich would be assigned to follow a junior diplomat from a junior country-but always from in front, since people seldom suspected anyone in front of following them. Another time the Sleeper would be sent across the city and back, and then asked if anyone had been following him. At the beginning, there might be no one, but his imagination would get the best of him and he would think there had been someone. On still another occasion there might be someone, but the Sleeper would not spot him and would report back that his wake had been

  clean. Slowly, however, he began to get the hang of it. He had a natural instinct for the streets, a good memory for faces, sharp eyes and
a knack for improvisation, which in the end is the hallmark of a good agent. As the Potter drummed into his head: there were no rules. He himself, he explained by way of giving an example, had once hobbled after an Israeli agent in New York for the better part of an afternoon, on the theory that the agent would never suspect a crippled man of following him.

  In time the Sleeper's tradecraft became as good as the Potter's. He too learned how to take advantage of the reflecting surfaces in the street to keep track of everything that was going on around him; not just store windows, but doors of cars, windows of buses, distant mirrors on the walls of department stores. It was a rare event when he couldn't pick out of a crowd the man or woman, and once, a teenager on roller skates, whom the Potter had put on his tail. (One tip the Sleeper never forgot: if you spot someone following you and don't want him to know he's been spotted, pick your nose.) It became a standing joke between them that once the Sleeper had identified the tail, he bought him a vodka if he was a man, and seduced her if it turned out to be a woman.

  Now, whiling away two and a half days between buses in a small town in Ohio, the Sleeper, without consciously thinking about it, found himself scanning the rush-hour crowd for that telltale jerk of a head that turned away when he looked at it; for the glimpse of someone who didn't move through the streets tit the rhythm of the crowd around him, but seemed to linger at store windows studying objects that, judging from appearances, he seemed unlikely to buy. The last thing the Sleeper expected was to spot anyone-which is why he felt shaken when he spotted two shadows. The first one, in his middle forties, balding, bloated, effeminate, was in a telephone booth, dialling as if his life depended on it. What gave him away was that the Sleeper remembered seeing him twice before earlier in the afternoon, both times in telephone booths dialling like mad. The second man, rail-thin, with wavy hair and lips that seemed to be pursed and producing sounds, the Sleeper noticed because every time he saw him he was gazing up at street signs as if he were lost.