The Company

by Robert Littell

  Casey waved both of them to leather-covered easy chairs. “I don’t need to tell you how glad I am you got your ass out of there,” he remarked. Sinking back onto the couch, he asked Manny about the escape.

  “Anthony gets the credit,” Manny said, and he went on to explain how Jack’s son had turned a can of insecticide into a blowtorch to burn away the wire mesh on the window. “I’d slipped through and Maria Shaath was halfway out when the guerrilla leader—“

  Casey, renowned for his photographic memory, had read the cable that Manny filed from Islamabad. “The one who calls himself Commander Ibrahim?” he said.

  “Commander Ibrahim, right. They’d just buried the fighter who’d been shot in the attack and Ibrahim turned up at the door and gave the alarm. In the darkness I scrambled down into a ravine and up the other side. Headlights came on above me, illuminating the area. There were shots. I threw up my arms as if I’d been hit and fell over the lip of a bluff. Then I just let myself roll downhill. After that it was a matter of walking for three days in the general direction of the rising sun.”

  The DCI, a lawyer by training who had been chief of the Special Intelligence Branch of the OSS at the end of World War II, savored the cloak-and-dagger side of intelligence operations. “You make it sound easy as falling off a log,” he said, leaning forward. “What did you do for food and water?”

  “Water was no problem—I came across streams and rivulets. As for food, I took a refresher survival course at the Farm before I went out to Peshawar, so I knew which roots and mushrooms and berries were edible. Three days after my escape I spotted a campfire. It turned out to be an Afridi camel caravan running contraband over the Khyber from Afghanistan. I gave them the five hundred-dollar bills hidden in my belt. I promised them that much again when they delivered me to Peshawar.”

  When Jack turned up Manny had to go through the escape again for him. Director Casey, whose lack of patience was legendary, fidgeted on the couch. Jack, his face tight with worry, asked, “What condition was Anthony in when you last saw him?”

  “He wasn’t wounded in the kidnapping, Jack,” Manny said. “He was in great shape, and very alert.”

  The Director said, “As far as I’m aware, we don’t have string on a Commander Ibrahim.”

  Jack said, “There was nothing in Central Registry. The Afghanistan desk at State never heard of him. The National Security people have no string on him either.”

  “Which means,” Ebby said, “that he’s just come out of the woodwork.”

  “Aside from the physical description Manny’s provided, what do we know about him?” the Director asked.

  “He spoke English with what I took to be a Palestinian accent,” Manny offered. “Which could mean he was brought up in the Middle East.”

  “He might have cut his teeth in one of the Hezbollah or Hamas training camps,” Jack said. He turned to the Director. “We ought to bring the Israelis in on this—they keep close tabs on Islamic fundamentalists in the Palestinian ranks.”

  “That’s as good a place as any to start,” Casey agreed. “What about the report from the Kalasha informant?”

  Jack, quick to clutch at any straw, said, “What report are we talking about?”

  Ebby said, “This came in late last night. We have an informant among the Kalasha, which is an ancient tribe of non-Muslims living in three valleys along the Afghanistan frontier, who claims that a Palestinian named Ibrahim had been running arms into Pakistan and selling them in Peshawar. According to our Kalasha, Ibrahim has made a trip every two months—he bought automatic weapons in Dubai, crossed the Gulf and Iran in trucks, then smuggled the stuff into Pakistan and up to the Tribal Areas on pack animals.”

  “Did your informant provide a physical description?” Jack asked.

  “As a matter of fact, yes. The Kalasha said Ibrahim was tall and thin, with long hair and an amulet on his cap to protect him from sniper bullets. His right arm was partially paralyzed—“

  “That’s Commander Ibrahim,” Manny said excitedly. “He ate, he manipulated his worry beads with his left hand. His right arm hung limply at his side or lay in his lap.”

  “That’s a start,” Casey said. “What else did the Kalasha have on this Ibrahim character?”

  “He described him as a rabid fundamentalist in search of a jihad,” Ebby said. “He dislikes Americans only slightly less than he despises Russians.”

  “Well, he’s found his jihad,” Manny commented.

  “Which brings us to the fax that landed in the American consulate in Peshawar,” Casey said, impatient to move on. His expressionless eyes regarded Ebby through oversized glasses. “Are we sure it came from this Ibrahim character?”

  “The fax appears to be authentic,” Ebby said. “It was hand-printed in English, in block letters. There were two grammatical mistakes—verbs that didn’t agree with their subjects—and two misspellings, suggesting that English was not the writer’s native language. There was no way to trace where the fax originated, of course. It came in sometime during the night. Our people found it in the morning. It spoke of three hostages—Manny would have escaped by then but Commander Ibrahim probably thought he’d been killed and didn’t want to advertise the fact, which makes sense from his point of view.”

  “They want Stingers,” Jack said.

  “Everybody out there wants Stingers,” Manny noted.

  “Not everybody who wants Stingers has hostages,” Jack observed glumly.

  Casey said, “I’m all for giving them Stingers—I’m for anything that makes the Russians bleed—but the praetorians around the President are chickenshit. They’re afraid to escalate. They’re afraid to make the Russians mad.” The Director’s head bobbed from side to side with the futility of it all. “How is it that we always wind up fighting the Cold War with one hand tied behind our back? Everything we do has to be so goddamned licit. When are we going to fight fire with fire? The Contra guerrillas in Nicaragua are a case in point. I have some creative ideas on the subject that I want to throw at you, Ebby. If we could get our hands on some cash that the Senate Committee on Intelligence doesn’t know about—“

  The red phone next to the couch purred. Casey snatched it off the hook and held it to his ear. “When’d you get back, Oliver?” he asked. “Okay, let me know as soon as the payment is transferred. Then we’ll work out the next step.” He listened again. “For Christ’s sake, no—you tell Poindexter that the President has signed off on this so there’s no need to bring the details to his attention. If something goes wrong he has to be able to plausibly deny he knew anything about it.” Casey snorted into the phone. “If that happens you’ll fall on your sword, then the Admiral will fall on his sword. If the President still needs another warm body between him and the press, I’ll fall on my sword.”

  “Where were we?” Casey said when he’d hung up. “Okay, let’s plug into the Israeli connection to see if Commander Ibrahim’s Palestinian accent leads anywhere. Also, let’s see if the people who read satellite photos can come up with something—your report, Manny, mentioned two tarpaulin-covered trucks, a bunch of Jeeps and about sixty Islamic warriors. If a snail leaves a trail on a leaf, hell, these guys ought to leave a trail across Afghanistan. To buy time we’ll instruct Peshawar Station to respond to the fax—“

  “They’re supposed to put an ad in the personal column of the Islamabad English-language Times,” Jack said.

  “Let’s establish a dialogue with the kidnappers, however indirect. Let them think we’re open to trading Stingers for the hostages. But we want proof that they’re still alive. The thing to do is stall them as long as we can and see where this goes.”

  Nellie cleared the dishes and stacked them in the sink. Manny refilled the wine glasses and carried them into the living room. He sank onto the couch, exhausted both physically and mentally. Nellie stretched out with her head on his thigh. From time to time she lifted her long-stemmed glass from the floor and, raising her head, took a sip of wine. On the radio, a ne
w pop singer named Madonna Louise Ciccone was belting out a song that was starting to make its way up the charts. It was called “Like a Virgin.” “The Mossad guy brought over seven loose-leaf books filled with mug shots,” Manny said. “I saw so many Islamic militants my eyes had trouble focusing.”

  “So did you find this Ibrahim individual?”

  “Nellie?”

  Nellie laughed bitterly. “Whoops, sorry. I must have been out of my mind to think that just because my occasional lover and absentee husband was shanghaied by an Islamic crazy he’d let me in on Company secrets, such as the identity of the Islamic crazy in question. I mean, I might go and leak it to the New York Times.”

  “We live by certain rules—“

  “It’s a damn good thing I love you,” Nellie said. “It’s a damn good thing I’m too relieved you’re back to pick a fight.” She put on a good show but she was close to tears; she’d been close to tears since he returned home. “I hate that fucking Company of yours,” she said with sudden vehemence. “One of the reasons I hate it is because you love it.”

  In fact, Manny had come across Ibrahim in the Mossad books. Two hours and twenty-minutes into the session one mug shot had leapt off the page—Ibrahim was younger and leaner and wearing his hair short but there was no mistaking him. Curiously, this earlier version of Ibrahim had the eyes of someone who was hunted—not the hunter. The Israelis identified the man in the photograph as Hajji Abdel al-Khouri and quickly came up with a profile on him. Al-Khouri, born in September 1944 in Jidda, Saudi Arabia, turned out to be half-Saudi, half-Afghan, the youngest son of Kamal al-Khouri, a Yemeni-born Saudi millionaire who had founded a construction empire that built roads and airports and shopping malls in the Middle East and India. The second of his three wives, the ravishing seventeen-year-old daughter of a Pashtun prince he met in Kabul, was Hajji’s mother. In his late teens Hajji, then an engineering student at King Abdul-Aziz University in Jidda, abandoned his studies, assumed the nom de guerre of Abu Azzam and moved to Jordan to join Fatah, the forerunner of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Arrested by the Israelis in Hebron on the West Bank of the Jordan for the attempted murder of a Palestinian suspected of collaborating with the Israeli Shin Bet, Abu Azzam spent two years in a remote Negev prison. After his release (for lack of evidence) in 1970 he broke with the PLO when he became convinced that its leader, Yasser Arafat, was too willing to compromise with the Israelis. In the early 1970s the PLO sentenced Abu Azzam to death in absentia for vowing to kill Arafat and King Hussein of Jordan, at which point the Fatah renegade fled to Baghdad, founded the Islamic Jihad and masterminded a series of terrorist actions against Israeli and Arab targets, including the 1973 occupation of the Saudi Embassy in Paris. When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979 Abu Azzam assumed still another identity—henceforth he was known as Ibrahim—and moved the Islamic Jihad to the Hindu Kush Mountains east of the Afghan capitol of Kabul. Making use of an estimated hundred million dollars that he had inherited from his father, he established secret recruiting and training centers around the Arab world and forged links with Pakistan’s radical Islamic Tablighi Jama’at, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hezb-i-Islami and other extremist Islamic splinter groups in the Middle East. What all these groups shared was a fanatic loathing of both the Soviet invaders of Afghanistan and the Americans who were using Islamic warriors as cannon fodder to oppose them; Ibrahim and the others associated Westernization with secularization and a rejection of Islam’s dominant role in defining the cultural and political identity of a country. Ibrahim in particular looked beyond the Soviet defeat and the Afghan war to the establishment of strict Koranic rule in Afghanistan and the overthrow of the feudal Saudi ruling family; if oil rich Saudi Arabia were to fall into the hands of the fundamentalists, so Ibrahim reasoned, Islam—by controlling the quantity of petrol pumped out of the ground, and the price—would be in a strong position to defend the faith against Western infidels.

  Jack was exultant when he learned that Manny had succeeded in identifying Ibrahim. “Jesus H. Christ, you’re one hundred percent sure?” he demanded on a secure intra-Company line, and Manny could hear the sigh of relief escape Jack’s lips when he told him there was no doubt about it. Jack raced down one flight to Millie’s suite of offices—she was now, in addition to her regular public relations chores, the Company’s senior spokesperson—and pulled his wife into the corridor to share the hopeful news out of earshot of the half-dozen assistants and secretaries in her shop. “It’s the first step in the right direction,” he told her, grasping her clammy hand in both of his giant paws, nodding stubbornly as if he were trying to convince himself that the story would have a happy ending. Thanks to the Israelis, he whispered, the Company now had a mug shot to go with Manny’s description. A top-secret Action Immediate was on its way to all Stations, signed by the DCI himself, William Casey, and countersigned by the Deputy Director/ Operations, yours truly, John J. McAuliffe, using my middle initial, which is something I never do, to emphasize its importance. The Company, it said, considered the identification and eventual infiltration of Islamic Jihad’s recruiting and training centers in the Middle East to be of the highest priority. A Company officer’s life was on the line. Any and all potential sources with ties to Islamic groups should be sounded out, IOU’s should be called in, the expenditure of large sums of money was authorized. No stone should be left unturned. The quest to find Commander Ibrahim and his two hostages should take priority over all other pending business.

  “What do you think, Jack?” Millie asked. She could see how drawn he looked; she knew she didn’t look much better. “Is there any possibility of getting Anthony out of this alive?”

  “I promise you, Millie…I swear it…”

  Millie whispered, “I know you’ll do it, Jack. I know you’ll succeed. You’ll succeed because there is no alternative that you and I can live with.”

  Jack nodded vehemently. Then he turned and hurried away from the woman whose eyes were too full of anguish to look into.

  Jack buttonholed Ebby at the end of the workday. The two sat knee to knee in a corner of the DDCI’s spacious seventh-floor office, nursing three fingers of straight Scotch, talking in undertones. There was a hint of desperation in Jack’s hooded eyes; in his leaden voice, too. “I stumbled across an Israeli report describing how the Russians dealt with a hostage situation,” he said. “Three Soviet diplomats were kidnapped in Beirut by a Hezbollah commando. The KGB didn’t sit on their hands, agonizing over what they could do about it. They abducted the relative of a Hezbollah leader and sent his body back with his testicles stuffed in his mouth and a note nailed—nailed, for Christ’s sake—to his chest warning that the Hezbollah leaders and their sons would suffer the same fate if the three Soviets weren’t freed. Within hours the three diplomats were released unharmed a few blocks from the Soviet embassy.” Jack leaned forward and lowered his voice. “Look, Ebby, we’ve identified the kidnapper—this Ibrahim character has to have brothers or cousins or uncles—“

  There was an embarrassed silence. Ebby studied his shoelaces. “We’re not the KGB, Jack,” he finally said. “I doubt if our Senate custodians would let us get away with employing the same tactics.”

  “We wouldn’t have to do it ourselves,” Jack said. “We could farm it out—Harvey Torriti would know who to go to.”

  Ebby said, “I know how scared you must be, Jack. But this is a nonstarter. The CIA is an endangered species as it is. There’s no way I’m going to sign off on something like this.” He looked hard at Jack. “And there’s no way I’m going to let my Deputy Director/Operations sign off on it, either.” Ebby climbed tiredly to his feet. “I want your word you won’t do anything crazy, Jack.”

  “I was just letting off steam.”

  “Do I have your word?”

  Jack looked up. “You have it, Ebby.”

  The DDCI nodded. “This conversation never took place, Jack. See you tomorrow.”

  Keeping one eye on the odometer, Tessa jogged
along the treadmill in the Company’s makeshift basement gymnasium at Langley. “I prefer to run down here,” she told her twin sister, Vanessa, “than on the highway where you breath in all those exhaust fumes.”

  Vanessa, an IBM programmer who had been hired by the Company the previous year to bring its computer retrieval systems up to date, was lying flat on her back and pushing up a twenty-pound bar to strengthen her stomach muscles. “What’s new in the wide world of counterintelligence?” she asked.

  A stocky woman wearing a sweat suit with a towel around her neck, something of a legend for being the first female Station Chief in CIA history, abandoned the other jogging machine and headed for the shower room. Tessa waited until she was out of earshot. “Actually, I stumbled across something pretty intriguing,” she said, and she proceeded to tell her sister about it.

  In part because she was the daughter of Leo Kritzky, Jack McAuliffe’s current Chief of Operations, in part because of an outstanding college record, Tessa had been working in the counterintelligence shop since her graduation from Bryn Mawr in 1975. Her most recent assignment had been to pore through the transcripts of English-language radio programs originating in the Soviet Union, looking for patterns or repetitions, or phrases or sentences that might appear to be out of context, on the assumption that the KGB regularly communicated with its agents in the Americas by passing coded messages on these programs. “Seven months ago,” she said, “they gave me the transcripts of Radio Moscow’s nightly shortwave English-language cultural quiz program, starting with the first broadcast made in the summer of 1950.”

  Sliding over to sit with her back against a wall, Vanessa mopped her neck and forehead with a towel. “Don’t tell me you actually found a coded message in them?” she said.

  “I found something in them,” Tessa said. She glanced at the odometer and saw that she’d run five miles. Switching off the treadmill, she settled down next to her sister. “You remember how I adored Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass when I was a kid. I read them so many times I practically knew both books by heart. Well, at the end of every quiz program they give a line from some English-language classic and ask the contestant to identify it. In the thirty-three years the program has been on the air—that’s something in the neighborhood of twelve thousand fifteen-minute broadcasts—they used Lewis Carroll quotations twenty-four times. They naturally caught my eye because they were the only questions I could personally answer.” Tessa cocked her head and came up with some examples. “‘The more there is of mine, the less there is of yours.’ Or ‘If I’m not the same, who in the world am I?’ Or ‘Whiffling through the tulgey wood.’ And ‘I don’t like belonging to another person’s dream.’”