The Company
Page 72
Angleton produced a lighter and brought the flame to the tip of the cigarette. He inhaled deeply and let the smoke stream from his nostrils. “You don’t want to do that, Jack. You’d lose it.”
Colby scratched at the stubble on his cheek, deep in thought. “How can you be sure that the Swett who ordered liquor at Kahn’s wasn’t Adelle’s father, Philip Swett?”
“Or anyone else named Swett,” Jack snapped.
The fix of nicotine had soothed Angleton; the shivering had let up and a hint of color had seeped back into his skin. Even his voice was stronger. “Question of addresses,” he explained. “In the early fifties Dodgson delivered the Swett order to an apartment on Bradley Lane behind the Chevy Chase Club, which is where Kritzky lived when he married Adelle. Starting in 1954 the Swett order was delivered to the small house on Jefferson, in Georgetown, which Philip Swett purchased for his daughter when his twin granddaughters were born.”
“I’m at a loss for words,” Colby admitted. “I’m staggered. If it’s true…good God, if Leo Kritzky has been spying for the Soviets all these years do you realize what it means? He was in on Wisner’s roll-back strategy in the early fifties—he would have known about all of the Wiz’s Soviet-targeted ops. Kritzky knew about your mission to Budapest, Eb. He was Bissell’s ADD/O/A during the Bay of Pigs business—he knew the time and place of the landings, he knew the Brigade’s order of battle, he knew which ships were loaded with munitions and fuel. The possibility that the man who’s running the Soviet Division might be a KGB mole…”
“It happened before,” Angleton reminded Colby. “Don’t forget that Philby ran MI6’s anti-Soviet counterintelligence show after the war.”
Colby thought of something else. “His wife, Swett’s daughter Adelle, was a White House legislative aide during the Johnson Presidency. Imagine the inside stuff he could have gotten from her! It makes me sick to my stomach.”
“I’m not buying into this,” Ebby announced. “Leo’s a loyal American—“
Angleton, puffing away on his cigarette, seemed to grow calmer as the others became agitated. “It all fits like the pieces of an elaborate puzzle,” he said. “Leo Kritzky is a Russian speaker whose last name begins with K. In September of 1972 he vacationed in Nova Scotia for two weeks. On a number of occasions the cutout Dodgson—who had delivered liquor to Philby’s address on Nebraska Avenue—also delivered liquor to a client named Swett, who turns out to be Kritzky’s wife.” Angleton concentrated on Colby. “The evidence is overwhelming, Bill. Kritzky’s due back from a two-week bicycle trip in France on Sunday afternoon—“
“Jesus,” Manny exclaimed from his end of the table. He was horrified at the conclusion Angleton had drawn from the AE/PINNACLE serials. “What are you going to do, arrest him?”
“That seems like the obvious place to start,” Angleton remarked.
“The evidence is circumstantial,” Jack insisted. “The case is full of holes. It won’t hold water when we take a closer look at it.”
Colby doodled another circle into the chain on his yellow pad. “We’d have to be horses’ asses not to take a closer look at it,” he decided. “Let’s not forget that AE/PINNACLE is out there on a limb—if Kritzky is SASHA, we can’t afford to let him back into Langley.” He turned to Angleton. “The ball’s in your court, Jim. Run with it.”
Jack blurted out, “Damnation, Bill, you’re giving him a blank check.” Angleton gathered up his papers. “This isn’t a garden party, gentlemen.” Colby said, “A blank check, within limits.” Jack said, “Whose limits?”
Manny rang again. When nobody answered, he tried the door of Nellie’s top-floor loft. It was unlocked. He stuck his head inside. “Anybody home?” he called. “Nellie, you there?” He went in, kicked the door closed and looked around. The long, narrow living room was aglow with flickering candlelight. Sheets of typing paper, each with a bare footprint traced on it, were set out on the floorboards. With a laugh, Manny followed the footprints and wound up in front of a not-quite-closed door at the end of the corridor. On the floor in front of it was an open bottle of Dom Perignon in a silver bucket filled with crushed ice, and two glasses. He eased the door open with an elbow. Candles set into two candelabras bathed the misty room in sulfurous hues. Stretched languorously in a bathtub filled with steaming water was Nellie; only her head and a single toe broke the surface. Overhead, a three-quarters moon could be seen through the condensation on the skylight. “You’re ten minutes late,” she announced in a throaty whisper. “The ice was starting to melt. Me, too.”
“For Christ’s sake, Nellie—“
“I’m not naked as a jaybird for Christ’s sake, I’m doing this for your sake.” She grinned lewdly at him. “So why don’t you slip into something more comfortable, like your birthday suit, and we’ll guzzle Champagne in the tub while you try to fend off my advances.”
Manny filled the two glasses with Champagne and handed one to her as he settled onto the edge of the tub. He looked down at her body. Her brown nipples and blonde pubic hair were visible under the crystal-clear water.
Nellie sipped her Champagne. “So what do you think are my physical flaws?” she inquired. “Be brutal. Don’t be afraid to hurt my feelings.”
Manny toyed with the stem of his glass. “Your nose is too big, for starters. Your nipples are too prominent, your thighs are too thin, too girl-like as opposed to woman-like, your shoulders are too bony, your pubic hair is too sparse—“
“I pluck it, dodo, so it won’t show when I climb into my yellow-polka dot bikini.”
“Your pubis looks like a teenage girl’s—there’s no meat on your pelvis bone. Your feet are too gangly, your eyes are set too far apart, your belly button is too conspicuous…” His voice grew thicker. “Your skin in the moonlight is gorgeous, your body takes my breath away…”
“Come on in,” she murmured, “I’ll give you mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.”
Manny gulped down some of his drink. “You don’t leave a guy much room to maneuver.”
“You don’t have to look so grim about it. Elizabet says working for the Company can be dangerous for your mental health. I talked to her on the phone tonight—Mom said your father came back from the office looking like death warmed over; looking pretty much the way you look now, come to think of it. You guys have problems?”
“We always have problems,” Manny said vaguely.
“Want to share them?”
“Can’t.”
“Try.”
He shook his head.
“Give me a hint. Is the earth going to collide with an asteroid? Are the Russians going to launch a preemptive first strike? Is Congress going to reduce your budget by a billion or two?”
“Psychologically speaking, all of the above and then some. Someone I know—someone I like and respect—is in trouble…” He let the sentence trail off.
“Is it going to spoil our night together?”
“There isn’t going to be a night together, Nellie. That’s what I came to tell you. I thought you’d understand if I told you in person…Do you understand?”
Nellie polished off her Champagne and thrust it out for a refill. She gulped that down, too, then splashed out of the tub. Wrapping herself in an enormous white towel, she stomped from the bathroom. Carrying the bottle, Manny followed her wet footprints. “So how do you expect a girl to understand when you don’t say anything?” she fumed, flinging herself onto a couch, her legs spread wide, the towel parting to reveal a bony hip and a white thigh.
Manny said, “Look, I need to be somewhere in three quarters of an hour. It’s an all-hands-on-deck situation. I’d stay and talk some more–”
“If you could, but you can’t.”
Manny set the bottle down at her feet. He bent over to kiss her but she leaned away.
“I was just getting used to the idea that you had a crush on me,” he said. “I don’t have a crush on you, Manny. I love you.”
“Right now you look as if you hate me.”
“I’ll call as soon as I can.”
“Do that. Just don’t think I’ll be satisfied with the crumbs you throw my way. I want a whole loaf, Manny. That or nothing.”
The Air France Airbus touched down at Dulles International minutes after four in the afternoon. Leo and Adelle, stiff from the long flight, queued at the passport control counter, then tugged two bags off the conveyor belt and made their way down the “Nothing to Declare” passageway toward the exit. They could see Vanessa waving to them from behind the glass partition.
“Oh, Daddy, Mom, welcome back,” she cried, kissing her mother and then flinging herself into her father’s arms. “How was the trip?”
“Great, except for the time your father didn’t turn up at the chateau until eleven at night.”
“I took a wrong turn and wound up in a village with a name I couldn’t pronounce,” Leo explained sheepishly. “And I didn’t know the name of the chateau we were supposed to be going to.”
“So what happened?”
“We actually called the police,” Adelle said. “They found him drinking Calvados at a bistro twenty-two kilometers away. Was he red in the face when they brought him and his bicycle back in one of their fourgons.”
“You guys are something else,” Vanessa said admiringly. “When I tell my friends my parents are bike riding through France, they flip out.”
Leo noticed a young man in a belted Burberry regarding him from the street door. The man approached. “Sir, are you Mr. Kritzky?” he asked.
Leo was suddenly wary. “Who are you?”
“Sir, I have a letter for Mr. Kritzky from his office.”
“Why don’t you mail it?”
The young man never cracked a smile. “I was told to deliver it by hand, sir.”
Leo said, “All right, I’m Kritzky.”
“Sir, could I see your passport.”
Leo fished the passport out of his pocket. The young man looked at the photograph and then at Leo’s face, and returned the passport. He handed Leo a sealed envelope.
“What’s all this, Daddy?” Vanessa asked.
“Don’t know yet.” He tore open the envelope and unfolded the letter with a flick of the wrist. His eye went immediately to the signature: Bill was scrawled in blue ink over the words William Colby, DCI. “Dear Leo,” the letter began.
Sorry to hit you over the head with business as you step off the plane, but something important has come up that needs your immediate attention. Would you come straight out to the campus—I’ll fill you in when you get here.
“Sir,” the young man said. “I have transportation waiting.”
Leo studied the young man. “You know what’s in the letter?”
“Sir, I only know what I’m told. What I’m told is to have a car and driver waiting to take you to the person who wrote the letter.”
Adelle asked, “What’s happening, Leo?”
“Bill Colby’s asked me to come over to Langley,” he said in a low voice. “Vanessa, you take your mother home. I’ll make it back on my own steam. If I’m going to be delayed I’ll call.”
“Sir, if you’ll follow me…”
Leo kissed his daughter on each cheek and smiled at Adelle, then fell into step alongside the young man in the raincoat. “Which Division do you work for?” he asked.
“The Office of Security, sir.”
The young man pushed a door open for Leo and followed him through it. A gray four-door Ford sedan was waiting at the curb. The driver held the back door open for Leo, who ducked and settled onto the back seat. To his astonishment a burly man squeezed in next to him, pushing him over to the middle of the seat. To his left, the door opened and another man with the bruised face of a prizefighter climbed in the other side.
“What’s go—“
The two men grabbed Leo’s arms. One of them deftly clamped handcuffs onto each wrist and snapped them closed. Outside the car, the young men in the Burberry could be seen talking into a walkie-talkie. Up front, the driver slid behind the wheel and, easing the car into gear, pulled out into traffic. “Lean forward, with your head between your knees,” the burly man instructed Leo. When he didn’t immediately do as he was told the prize-fighter delivered a short, sharp punch to his stomach, knocking the wind out of his lungs. Leo doubled over and threw up on his shoes. “Oh, shit,” the burly man groaned as he pressed down on the back of Leo’s neck to keep him hunched over.
The Ford was obviously caught in traffic. Leo could hear horns blowing around them. His back began to ache from his cramped position but the hand pushing down on his neck didn’t ease up. Forty minutes or so later he felt the car turning off a thoroughfare and then slipping down a ramp. A garage door cranked open and must have closed behind them because they were suddenly enveloped in darkness. The burly man removed his hand from the back of Leo’s neck. He straightened and saw that they were in a dimly lit underground garage. Cars were scattered around in the parking spaces. The Ford drew up in front of a service elevator. The burly man got out and hauled Leo out after him. The prizefighter came up behind them. The elevator door opened and the three men entered the car. The prizefighter hit a button. The motor hummed. Moments later the doors opened and Leo was pulled down a dark hallway and pushed into a room painted in a creamy white and lit by an overhead battery of surgical lights. Two middle-aged women dressed in long white medical smocks were waiting for him. The prizefighter produced a key and removed the handcuffs. As Leo massaged his wrists, the two men took up positions on either side of him.
“Do precisely as you are told,” one of the women ordered. “When we tell you to, you will remove your clothing item by item, and very slowly. All right. Begin with your left shoe.”
“What are you looking for?” Leo managed to ask.
The burly man slapped him sharply across the face. “Nobody said nothing about you talking, huh? The shoe, Mr. Kritzky.”
His cheek stinging and tears brimming in his eyes, Leo stooped and removed his left shoe and handed it to the man who had struck him, who passed it on to one of the women. She inspected it meticulously, turning it in her hands as if she had never seen this particular model before. Working with pliers she pried off the heel, then with a razor blade cut open the leather to inspect the inside of the sole and the underside of the tongue. Finding nothing, she cast Leo’s left shoe aside and pointed to his right shoe. Item by item, the two women worked their way through every stitch of clothing on Leo until he was standing stark-naked under the surgical lights. One of the women fitted on a pair of surgeon’s latex gloves. “Spread your legs,” she ordered. When Leo was slow to comply the prizefighter kicked his legs apart. The woman knelt on the floor in front of him and began feeling around between his toes and under his feet. She worked her way up the inside of his crotch to his testicles and his penis, probing all the folds and creases of his groin. Leo chewed on his lip in humiliation as she inspected his armpits and threaded her fingers through his hair. “Open wide,” she ordered. She thrust a tongue depressor into his mouth and, tilting his head toward the surgical lights, inspected his teeth. “All rightie, let’s take a gander at your anus, Mr. Kritzky.”
“No,” Leo said. The word emerged as a sob. “I demand to see—“
“Your asshole, asshole,” the prizefighter said. He punched Leo hard in the stomach and folded him over with a deft judo lock on one arm. The woman stabbed a gloved finger into a jar of Vaseline and, kneeling behind him, probed his anus.
When he was permitted to straighten up, Leo gasped, “Water.”
The burly man looked at the woman wearing the surgical gloves. When she shrugged, he went out and came back with a paper cup filled with water. Leo drained it, then, panting, asked, “Am I still in America?”
The prizefighter actually laughed. “This is like the Vatican, pal—it’s extraterritorial. Habeas corpus don’t exist.”
One of the woman dropped a pair of wh
ite pajamas and two scuffs onto the floor at Leo’s feet. “You want to go and put them on,” she said in a bored voice.
Leo pulled on the pajama bottoms; there was no elastic band and he had to hold them up. One by one, he slipped his arms into the top. His hands were trembling so much he had trouble buttoning the buttons with his free hand. Finally the prizefighter did it for him. Then, clutching the waist of the pajamas and shuffling along in the backless slippers, Leo followed the burly man through a door and down a long dark corridor to another door at the far end. The man rapped his knuckles on it twice, then produced a key, unlocked the door and stepped back. Breathing in nervous gasps, Leo made his way past him.
The room in which he now found himself was large and windowless. All the walls, and the inside of the door, were padded with foam rubber. Three naked electric bulbs dangled at the ends of electric cords from a very high ceiling. A brown army blanket was folded neatly on the floor next to the door. A lidless toilet was fixed to one wall and a tin cup sat on the floor next to it. In the middle of the room stood two chairs and a small table with a tape recorder on it; the table and both chairs were bolted to the floor. James Jesus Angleton sat in one of the chairs, his head bent over the loose-leaf book open before him. A cigarette dangled from his lips; an ashtray on the table overflowed with butts. Without looking up, he waved Leo toward the seat opposite him and hit the “record” button on the tape machine.
“You’re Yale, class of fifty, if I’m not mistaken,” Angleton remarked.
Leo sank onto the seat, mentally exhausted. “Yale. Fifty. Yes.”
“What college?”
“I was in Timothy Dwight for two years, then I lived off campus.”
“I was Silliman but that was before your time,” Angleton said. He turned to another page in the loose-leaf book to check something, then flipped back to the original page. “How about if we begin with your father.”
Leo leaned forward. “Jim, it’s me, Leo. Leo Kritzky. These goons abducted me from the airport. They roughed me up. I was strip-searched. What’s going on?”