The Company

by Robert Littell

  His voice faded as he settled heavily into the chair and braced himself for the lesser pain of the inevitable migraine.

  The red bulb burning in the darkroom had turned Starik’s skin fluorescent—for an instant he had the eerie feeling that his hands resembled those on the embalmed corpse of Lenin in the mausoleum on Red Square. Under Starik’s lucent fingers, details began to emerge on the twelve-by-fifteen black-and-white print submerged in the shallow pan filled with developer. Using a pair of wooden tongs, he pulled the paper out of the bath and held it up to the red light. It was underexposed, too washed out; the details that he had hoped to capture were barely visible.

  Developing the film and printing enlargements had calmed Starik down. He had returned from the showdown in the Kremlin in a rage, and had actually spanked one of the nieces on her bare bottom for the minor transgression of wearing lipstick. (He had fired the maid who had given it to her.) Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev, the First Secretary of the Communist Party and the rising star in the Soviet hierarchy, had lost his nerve, and no amount of persuasion could induce him change his mind. Starik had first briefed Brezhnev on KHOLSTOMER the year before. The First Secretary had been impressed with the meticulous planning that had gone into the project over a twenty-year period; impressed also by the fact that sizable sums of hard currency had been squirreled away with infinite patience and in relatively small doses so as not to attract the attention of the Western intelligence services. The potential of KHOLSTOMER had staggered Brezhnev, who suddenly saw himself presiding over the demise of the bourgeois capitalist democracies and the triumph of Soviet Socialism across the globe. The history books would elevate him to a position alongside Marx and Lenin; Brezhnev would be seen as the Russian ruler who led the Soviet Union to victory in the Cold War.

  All of which made his current reticence harder to fathom. Starik had gotten approval for the project from his immediate superior, KGB Chairman Yuri Andropov, as well as the Committee of Three, the secret Politburo panel that vetted intelligence initiatives, then gone to the Kremlin to clear the final hurdle. He had argued his case to Brezhnev with cool passion. American inflation was soaring and consumers were feeling the pinch: sugar, for instance, had doubled to thirty-two cents a pound. The Dow Jones industrial average had plummeted to 570, down from 1003 two years earlier. The hike in crude oil prices after the 1973 Middle East war (to $11.25 a barrel, up from $2.50 at the beginning of that year) made the American economy particularly fragile; an attack on the dollar stood a good chance of accelerating the crisis and throwing the economy into a recessionary spiral from which it would never recover. On top of everything, the single American who might have exposed Soviet intentions had been discredited and sent into retirement. Conditions for launching KHOLSTOMER couldn’t be more propitious.

  Tucked into a wicker wheelchair with a blanket drawn up to his armpits and a small electric heater directed at his feet, wearing a fur-lined silk dressing gown buttoned up to the neck, Brezhnev had heard Starik out and then had slowly shaken his massive head. Khrushchev had attempted to destabilize the Americans when he installed medium-range missiles in Cuba, the First Secretary had reminded his visitor. Starik knew as well as he did how that episode had ended. John Kennedy had gone to the brink of war and a humiliated Khrushchev had been forced to withdraw the missiles. The Politburo—Brezhnev in the forefront—had drawn the appropriate conclusions and, two years later, had packed Khrushchev off into forced retirement.

  Brezhnev had kicked aside the electric heater and had wheeled himself out from behind his vast desk equipped with seven telephones and a bulky English dictaphone. His bushy eyebrows arched in concentration, his jowls sagging in anxiety, he had informed Starik that he didn’t intend to end up like Khrushchev. He had given KHOLSTOMER his careful consideration and had become convinced that an economically weakened America would react to an attack on the dollar like a cornered cat, which is to say that Washington would provoke a war with the Soviet Union in order to save the American economy. Don’t forget, he had lectured Starik, it was the Great War that had saved the American economy from the Great Depression that followed the stock market crash of 1929. When the economy needed boosting, so the Kremlin’s Americanologists argued, the capitalists invariably turned to war.

  Brezhnev had not closed the door entirely on KHOLSTOMER. Perhaps in five or seven years, when the Soviet Union had built up its second strike capacity to the point where it could deter an American first strike, he would be willing to take another look at the project. In any case it was a good card to keep up his sleeve, if only to prevent the Americans from one day attacking the Soviet economy in a similar way.

  Now, in his attic photography shop at Apatov Mansion in Cheryomuski, Starik set the timer on the Czech enlarger to seven seconds, then exposed the photographic paper and slipped it into the pan filled with developer. After a while details began to emerge. First came the nostrils, then the eye sockets and oral cavities, finally the rosebud-like nipples on the flat chests of the bony klieg-scrubbed bodies. Using wooden tongs, Starik extracted the print from the bath and slipped it into a pan of fixative. Studying the washed-out enlargement, he decided that he was reasonably pleased with the finished product.

  In a curious way photography had a lot in common with intelligence operations. The trick with both was to visualize the picture before you took it, then attempt to come as close as possible to what had been in your imagination. To succeed required endless patience. Starik consoled himself with the notion that his patience would pay off when it came to KHOLSTOMER, too. Brezhnev wouldn’t be around forever. He had suffered a series of mild strokes earlier in the year (caused, according to a secret KGB report, by arteriosclerosis of the brain) that left him incapacitated for weeks on end. Since then an ambulance manned by doctors who specialized in resuscitation accompanied him everywhere. Andropov, who had been head of the KGB since 1967 and a member of the Politburo since 1973, had already confided to Starik that he saw himself as Brezhnev’s logical successor. And Andropov was an ardent champion of KHOLSTOMER.

  The first December blizzard was howling outside the storm windows when Starik settled onto the great bed that night to read the nieces their bedtime story. Electricity cables, heavy with ice, had sagged to the ground, cutting all power to the Apatov Mansion. A single candle burned on the night table. Angling the frayed page toward the flickering light, Starik came to the end of another chapter.

  “Alice ran a little way into the wood, and stopped under a large tree. ‘It can never get at me here,’ she thought: ‘it’s far too large to squeeze itself in among the trees. But I wish it wouldn’t flap its wings so—it makes quite a hurricane in the wood.’”

  The nieces, snuggling together in a tangle of limbs, sighed as if with one voice. “Oh, do read us a tiny bit more,” begged Revolución.

  “Yes, uncle, you must because we are too frightened by what was chasing Alice to fall asleep,” Axinya insisted.

  “If you will not read to us,” pleaded the angelic blonde Circassian who had been spanked for wearing lipstick, “at least remain for a long while with us.”

  Starik moved to get up from the bed. “I am afraid I still have files to read,” he said.

  “Stay, stay, oh, do stay,” the girls cried altogether. And they clutched playfully at the hem of his nightshirt.

  Smiling, Starik tore himself free. “To become drowsy, girlies, you must plunge deeper into the wonder of Alice’s Wonderland.”

  “How in the world can we do that if you will not read to us?” Revolución inquired.

  “It is not terribly difficult,” Starik assured them. He leaned over the night table and blew out the candle, pitching the room into utter darkness. “Now you must try, all of you, each in her own imagination, to fancy what the flame of a candle would look like after the candle is blown out.”

  “Oh, I can see it!” exclaimed the blonde Circassian.

  “It is ever so pretty,” Revolución agreed, “drifting across the mind’s eye.”
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  “The flame after the candle is blown out looks awfully like the light of a distant star with planets circling around it,” Axinya said dreamily. “One of the planets is a wonderland where little nieces eat looking-glass cakes and remember things that happened the week after next.”

  “Oh, let’s do go there quickly,” Revolución cried eagerly.

  “Only close your eyes, girlies,” Starik said gruffly, “and you will be on your way to Alice’s planet.”

  INTERLUDE

  THE CALABRIAN

  Alice thought with a shudder, “I wouldn’t have

  been the messenger for anything!”

  CIVITAVECCHIA, THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 28, 1978

  AT 6:40 A.M., UNDER A BLEAK SKY, SAILORS ON THE FIVE-THOUSANDTON Vladimir Ilyich singled up all lines and cast off from the pier. The moment the ship was no longer attached to land, a whistle sounded. The deckhand standing at the stern pole lowered the Soviet flag as a signalman raised another on a halyard. An Italian tug pulled the bow out and cast off the hawser, and the freighter, loaded with a cargo of Fiat engines, heavy lathes and refrigerators, slipped out on the morning tide toward the open sea. On the flying bridge, atop the wheel house, a reed-like figure with a wispy white beard watched as the Italian coast transformed itself into a faint smudge on the horizon. Starik had been up since midnight, drinking endless cups of instant espresso in the dockside warehouse as he waited for the messenger to bring word that the threat to KHOLSTOMER had been eliminated. Seventeen minutes after three, a dirty yellow Fiat minicab had drawn up before the side door. The Calabrian, walking with a perceptible limp, had come into the room. A man of few words, he had nodded at Starik and had said, “La cosa e fatta.” Starik’s niece, a wafer-thin half-Italian, half-Serbian creature called Maria-Jesus, had translated into Russian. “He tells you,” she said, thrilled to be useful to Uncle, “the thing is done.”

  From the deep pockets of a Dominican cassock, the Calabrian retrieved the small metal kit with the syringe, the tumbler with traces of doped milk, the phial that had contained uncontaminated milk, the surgeon’s gloves and the lock-pick, and set them on a table. Then he handed the Russian a brown dossier with the words KHOLSTOMER printed in Roman letters on the cover. Starik motioned with a finger and the girl handed the Calabrian a sailor’s canvas duffle bag containing $1 million in used bills of various denominations. The Calabrian opened the flaps and fingered the packets of bills, each bound by a thick rubber band. “If you again need my services,” he said, “you will know how to find me.”

  Standing in the wheel house of the Vladimir Ilyich at first light, Starik had watched as the Master worked his way down the checklist for getting underway. The engine room telegraph was tested. The rudder was swung from port to starboard and back to midships. Sailors posted at the windlass phoned up to the bridge to say they were ready to trip the riding pawls and let go the anchors if an emergency arose. Deckhands in black turtleneck sweaters and oilskins prepared to single up the heavy lines dipped onto the bollards and retrieve the fenders.

  While these preparations were going on, a small fishing boat fitted with powerful diesel engines quit a nearby quay. Once clear of the breakwater it turned due south in the direction of Palermo. Both the Calabrian and his Corsican taxi driver with the broken, badly set nose were on board. Peering through binoculars, Starik spotted them standing on the well deck; one was cupping the flame of a match so that the other could light a cigarette. Over the radio speaker in the pilothouse, a program of early morning Venetian mandolin music was interrupted for an important announcement. Maria-Jesus provided a running translation. There were reports, so far unconfirmed, that Pope John Paul I, known as Albino Luciani when he was the Patriarch of Venice, had suffered a cardio-something attack during the night. The last rites of the church had been administered, leading some to speculate that the Pope, after a reign of only thirty-four days, was either dead or near death. Cardinals were said to be rushing to the Vatican from all over Italy. When the regular program resumed, the station switched to solemn funereal music. As the lines were being singled up on the Vladimir Ilyich, Starik raised the binoculars to his eyes again. The fishing boat was hull down already; only the lights on its mast and tackle were visible. Suddenly there was a muffled explosion, no louder than a distant motor coughing before it caught. Through the binoculars Starik could see the mast and tackle tilt crazily to one side, and then disappear altogether.

  Filling his lungs with sea air, Starik fondled the back of Maria-Jesus’s long neck. He craved one of his Bulgarian cigarettes; on the advice of a Centre doctor he had recently given up smoking. He comforted himself with the thought that there were other pleasures to be taken from life. Like Alice, he had run fast enough to stay in the same place; the messenger had been buried at sea and the Pope, who had made no secret of his intention to crack down on the money-laundering activities of the Vatican bank, would take the secrets of KHOLSTOMER with him to the grave. And in five days time Starik would be home with his adopted nieces, reading to them from the fable that taught the importance of believing six impossible things after breakfast.

  PART FIVE

  BLIND ALLEY

  “Look, look!” Alice cried, pointing eagerly.

  “There’s the White Queen running across the country!

  She came flying out of the wood over yonder—

  How fast those Queens can run!”

  “There’s some enemy after her, no doubt,” the

  King said, without even looking round.

  “That wood’s full of them.”

  Snapshot: the amateur black-and-white photograph, which made front pages around the world, shows the two American hostages being held somewhere in Afghanistan by Commander Ibrahim, the legendary leader of the fundamentalist splinter group Islamic Jihad. The young woman, the well-known television journalist Maria Shaath, regards her captors with an impatient smile; one of her producers in New York said she looked as if she were worried about missing a deadline. Standing next to her, his back to a poster of the Golden Dome Mosque in Jerusalem, is the young American whom Islamic Jihad identified as a CIA officer and the US government insists is an attaché assigned to the American consulate in Peshawar, Pakistan. The American stares into the camera with a detached, sardonic grin. Both prisoners appear pale and tired from their weeks in captivity.

  1

  PESHAWAR, THURSDAY, OCTOBER 13, 1983

  SO MUCH DUST HAD BEEN KICKED UP ON THE DIRT FIELD NEXT TO THE sprawling Kachagan Refugee Camp that the spectators in the wooden bleachers heard the hoofbeats before they saw the horses. “The Pashtun tribesmen call the game buzkashi—literally ‘goat-grabbing,’” Manny explained. He had to shout into Anthony’s ear to be heard over the clamor of the crowd. On the field, twenty horsemen wheeled in a confused scrimmage, pushing and punching each other as they leaned from saddles to reach for something that had fallen to the ground. “Think of it as a rougher version of polo,” Manny went on. “They toss a headless goat onto the field. Anything goes short of using knives. Your team gets points when you wrestle the carcass away from the other team and drop it into the scoring circle.”

  “How long does this go on?” inquired Anthony, newly arrived from Islamabad and still wearing the sweat-stained khaki suit and Clark boots he had traveled in.

  Manny had to laugh. “It goes on nonstop until the horses or the riders collapse from exhaustion.”

  Anthony McAuliffe was a gangly twenty-three-year-old six-footer with open, rugged features and a mop of flaming-red hair, the spitting image of his father, Jack. He gazed across the field at the scores of young men sitting on a low wooden fence, passing joints (so Manny had said) from hand to hand as they egged on the riders of their favorite team. Suddenly Cornell’s fraternity parties, basic training at the Farm, his initial tour of duty at Langley all seemed like images from a previous incarnation. Behind the bleachers, half-naked kids fought over a dead chicken as they imitated the adults on horseback. Beyond the playing field, Anthony co
uld make out a mass of low mud houses stretching off as far as the eye could see. Back in Islamabad, the briefing book for officers posted to Peshawar said that so many refugees had come over the mountain passes from Afghanistan since the start of the jihad against the Soviet invasion, almost four years before, that the international agencies had given up trying to count them.

  Manny must have noticed the expression on Anthony’s face. “Culture shock is curable,” he observed. “In a week or two all this will seem perfectly ordinary to you.”

  “That’s one of the things I’m worried about,” Anthony shot back.

  A roar went up from the crowd as a rider wrenched the goat’s carcass from the hands of an opponent and spurred his horse away. With a whoop, the opposing team tore after him in hot pursuit. Once again the riders were lost in the dust billowing from the playing field. One of Manny’s two bodyguards, a bearded tribesman wearing a thick woolen vest with a jeweled knife in his belt and a double-barreled shotgun under one arm, pointed to his watch. Manny led Anthony off the bleachers and the two started toward the parking lot. The second bodyguard, a giant of a man with a black turban around his head, brought up the rear. Manny’s driver, slouched behind the wheel of an old Chevrolet, a joint sticking out of his mouth, came awake. “Where to, chief man?” he asked.

  “Khyber Tea Room in Smugglers’ Bazaar,” Manny ordered as he and Anthony settled onto the rear seat. One of the bodyguards slid in next to Manny, the other rode shotgun up front.

  “Where’d you scrounge these guys?” Anthony asked under his breath. “Central casting?”

  “They’re both Afridis, which is the tribe that controls the Khyber Pass,” Manny said. “The one with the knife in his belt used to slit the throats of Russians the way Muslims slaughter goats for holy day feasts.”