The Company

by Robert Littell

  “Tovarish Andropov, I have the response from SASHA to your most recent queries.” He held out a sheet filled with typescript, knowing that the General Secretary was too ill to read it for himself.

  Andropov’s eyes twitched open and something of the old combativeness glistened in them; Starik caught a glimpse of the unflinching ambassador who had put down the Hungarian uprising and, later, run the KGB with an iron hand.

  “What does he say?” the General Secretary demanded.

  “The Pentagon has asked the CIA for real-time satellite intelligence updates on the twelve trains filled with ICBMs that we keep shuttling around the country. Their Joint Chiefs have also requested a revised estimate of Soviet missile readiness; they specifically wanted to know how long it would take us to launch ICBMs from missile silos once an American attack was spotted and the order to shoot was given and authenticated.”

  Andropov collapsed back into the pillows of the hospital bed, drained of hope that his analysis of Reagan’s intentions had been wrong. “SASHA’s information has always been accurate in the past…”

  “There is more,” Starik said. “We have deciphered a cable to American detachments guarding medium-range nuclear missile bases in Europe cancelling all leaves as of twenty-fifth November. The NATO exercise designated ABLE ARCHER 83 has been advanced two weeks and is now scheduled to commence at three A.M. on December first.”

  Andropov reached for the oxygen mask and held it over his mouth and nose. The act of breathing seemed to take all his strength. Finally he tugged the mask away from his lips, which were bluish and caked with sputum. “The only hope of avoiding a nuclear holocaust is if KHOLSTOMER can damage them psychologically—if the capitalist system collapses around them Reagan and his people may lose their nerve. The world would accuse them of starting a war to divert attention from the economic crisis. Under these circumstances they may hesitate.”

  “There could be widespread unrest, even riots,” Starik agreed. He was starting to believe the scenario that Andropov had invented and he had confirmed. “It is not out of the realm of possibility that their military establishment will be too preoccupied with maintaining order to wage war.”

  The General Secretary scraped the sputum off his lips with the back of his arm. “Do it,” he wheezed. “KHOLSTOMER is our last hope.”

  From his corner table near the back of the courtyard restaurant in Dean’s Hotel, Hippolyte Afanasievich Fet, the gloomy KGB rezident, kept an eye on the CIA officers drinking bottles of Murree beers at the first table off the seedy lobby. The Americans talked in undertones but laughed boisterously—so boisterously no one would have guessed that there was a war raging beyond the Khyber Pass, half an hour by car down the road. At half past seven, the Americans divided up the bill and counted out rupees and noisily pushed back their chairs to leave. Fet’s two table companions—one was the rezidentura’s chief cipher clerk, the other a military attaché at the Soviet consulate—exchanged smutty comments about the comportment of Americans abroad. You could tell Americans, one of them remarked, the minute they walked into a room. They always acted as if the country they were in belonged to them, the other agreed. Fet said, They throw rupees around as if they were printing them in the back room of the CIA station. Maybe they are, said the military attaché. All three Russians laughed at this. Fet excused himself to go to the lavatory. Get the bill and pay it but don’t tip like an American—the Pakistanis overcharge as it is, he instructed the cipher clerk.

  Fet ambled across the restaurant to the lobby. Walking past the door to the lavatory, he continued on out the front door and made his way to the parking lot behind the hotel. The Americans were lazily climbing into two Chevrolets. Fet walked around to the passenger side of one and motioned for the acting chief of station to roll down the window.

  “Well, if it isn’t Boris Karloff in the flesh,” the American commented. “Got any state secrets you want to sell, Fet?”

  “As a matter of fact, I do.”

  The smile was still plastered across the American’s face but his eyes were bright with curiosity. Sensing that something unusual was occurring, he signaled with a hand. The others spilled out of the cars and surrounded the Russian. Two of them walked off a few paces and, turning their backs on Fet, peered into the parking lot to see if there were other Russians around.

  “Okay, Fet, what’s all this about?” demanded the acting chief of station.

  “I wish to defect. Do not attempt to talk me into defecting in place. I will come across here and now, or not at all.” He patted his jacket pockets, which were stuffed with thick manila envelopes. “I have all the correspondence between the Centre and the rezidentura for the last month in my pockets. And I have many other secrets in my head—secrets that will surprise you.”

  “What about your wife?” one of the Americans asked. “Things will go badly for her if you skip out?”

  A cruel smile stole across Fet’s sunken cheeks; it made him look even more like Boris Karloff. “My wife last night announced to me that she has fallen in love with the young head of our consulate, a prick if there ever was one. She asked me for a separation. I will give her a separation she will never forget.”

  “I think he’s serious,” said one of the Americans.

  “I am very serious,” Fet assured them.

  The acting station chief weighed the pros and cons. Inside the kitchen of the restaurant one of the Chinese chefs could be heard yelling at another in high-pitched Mandarin. Finally the American made up his mind; if for some reason Langley didn’t like what they had hooked, hell, they could always toss Fet back into the pond. “Quickly, get in the car,” he told Fet.

  Moments later the two Chevrolets roared out of the parking lot and swung onto Saddar Road, heading at high speed toward the fortress-like American Consulate across town.

  Bundled in a sheepskin jacket with a printed Sindhi shawl wound around her neck like a scarf, Maria Shaath sat hunched over the crude wooden table, scratching questions on a pad by the shimmering light of the single candle burning on the table. From time to time she would look up, the eraser end of the pencil absently caressing her upper lip as she stared intently into the yellow-blue flame. As new questions occurred to her, she bent back to the pad to note them down.

  Anthony and Maria had been strolling around the compound that morning when Ibrahim emerged from his dwelling. The air was sharp; snow was falling in the mountains, lowering visibility for Russian helicopters that were said to be marauding through the labyrinth of valleys. In the hamlet below two skinny boys were pulling a hump-backed cow along the dirt trail. A group of fundamentalist fighters back from a three-day patrol, their long shirts and long beards and fur-lined vests caked with dust, could be seen filing up the road, Kalashnikovs casually perched on their shoulders. From a firing range in a hidden quarry came the sound of hollow metallic drumbeats, each one containing its own echo. Just inside the great double doors of the compound, which were open during the day, an old man wearing plastic sunglasses to protect his eyes from sparks was sharpening knives on a stone wheel turned by a girl hidden in a dark brown burqa.

  “You are a remarkable man,” Maria had said. She looked at him intently. “Why don’t you let me interview you?”

  “Interview me?”

  “Well, that’s what I do for a living. You have all this gear around—surely you can come up with a television camera.”

  Ibrahim seemed interested. “And what would you ask me in such an interview?”

  “I would ask you where you come from and where you’re going. I would ask you about your religion, your friends, your enemies. I would ask you why you fight the Russians, and what will be your next jihad when the Russians are gone.”

  “What makes you think there will be another jihad?”

  “You are in love with holy war, Commander Ibrahim. It’s written on your face. Cease-fire, peace—they bore you. I’ve met people like you before. You will go from one war to the next until you get your wish—�
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  “Since you know so much about me, what is my wish?”

  “You want to become a martyr.”

  Maria’s comments had amused Ibrahim. “And what would you do with the tape of an interview if I consent,” he had asked.

  “You could arrange for it to be delivered to my office in Peshawar. Within twenty-four hours it would be on the air in New York—what you say would be picked up and broadcast around the world.”

  “Let me think about it,” Ibrahim had said. And with his Shadow trailing two-steps behind him, he had stridden past the knife-sharpener and out of the compound in the direction of the barracks at the edge of the hamlet below.

  Maria had turned to Anthony. “Well, he didn’t say no, did he?”

  At dusk Ibrahim had sent word that he consented to the interview, which would take place in the room under the attic at midnight. Included in the note was a list of things he would refuse to talk about: questions concerning his real identity and his past were prohibited, along with anything that might reveal the location of the mountaintop he called Yathrib. When Maria and Anthony climbed down the ladder at a quarter to midnight, they found that the communal kitchen had been transformed into a crude studio. Two kleig lights, running off a generator humming away outside the house, illuminated the two kitchen chairs set up in front of the chimney. A beardless young man holding a German Leica motioned for the two prisoners to stand with their backs to a poster of the Golden Dome Mosque in Jerusalem and then snapped half a dozen shots of them. (It was this photo that turned up on front pages around the world a few days later.) Maria regarded the camera with an impatient smile; she was eager to get on with the interview. Anthony managed an uncomfortable grin that editorialists later described as sardonic. With the photo op out of the way Ibrahim, wearing an embroidered white robe that grazed the tops of his Beal Brothers boots, appeared at the door and settled onto one of the chairs. His long hair had been combed and tied back at the nape of his neck, his short henna-tinted beard had been trimmed. A bearded mujaheddin wearing thick eyeglasses fiddled with the focus of a cumbersome Chinese camera mounted on a homemade wooden tripod. Maria, pulling the Sindhi shawl over her shoulders, took her place in the second chair. A red light atop the camera came on. Maria looked into the lens. “Good evening. This is Maria Shaath, broadcasting to you from somewhere in Afghanistan. My guest tonight—or should I say my host, since I am his guest, or more accurately, his prisoner—is Commander Ibrahim, the leader of the commando unit that kidnapped me and the American diplomat Anthony McAuliffe from the streets of Peshawar in Pakistan.” She turned toward Ibrahim and favored him with a guileless smile. “Commander, it’s hard to know where to begin this interview, since you have given me a list of things you refuse to talk about—“

  “Let us start by correcting an error. Anthony McAuliffe is posing as an American diplomat, but he is actually a CIA officer attached to the CIA station in Peshawar at the time of his…apprehension.”

  “Even if you’re correct, it’s still not clear why you kidnapped him. I thought the American Central Intelligence Agency was helping Islamic fundamentalist groups like yours in the war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.”

  Ibrahim’s fingers kneaded the worry beads. “The American Central Intelligence Agency could not care less about Afghanistan. They are supplying antiquated arms to Islamic fundamentalists in order to bleed the Soviet enemy, much as the Soviets supplied arms to the North Vietnamese to bleed their American enemy in Vietnam.”

  “If the situation were reversed, if you were fighting the Americans, would you accept aid from the Soviet Union?”

  “I would accept aid from the devil to pursue the jihad.”

  “If you drive out the Soviet occupiers—“

  “When we drive out the Soviet occupiers—“

  Maria nodded. “Okay, will the war be over when you drive out the Russians?”

  Ibrahim leaned forward. “We are engaged in a struggle against colonialism and secularism, which are the enemies of Islam and the Islamic state we will create in Afghanistan, as well as other areas of the Muslim world. The war will go on until we have defeated all vestiges of colonialism and secularism and inaugurated a Muslim commonwealth based on the pure faith—the Islam— of the Prophet you call Abraham and we call Ibrahim. Such a state, governed by Koranic principles and the example of the Messenger Muhammad, would be characterized by total submission to God. This I believe.”

  Casey and his deputy, Ebby, stood in front of the enormous television set in the Director’s office on the seventh floor of Langley, drinks in their fists, watching the interview.

  On the screen Maria was glancing at her notes. “Let me ask you some personal questions. Are you married?”

  “I have two wives and three sons. I have several daughters also.”

  Casey tinkled the ice cubes in his glass. “Surprised the son-of-a-bitch even bothered mentioning the female children.”

  Maria could be heard asking, “What is you favorite film?”

  “I have never seen a motion picture.”

  “He’s trying to qualify for Islamic sainthood,” Casey quipped. “Which political figures do you admire most?”

  “Living or dead?”

  “Both. Historical as well as living figures.”

  “Historically, I admire and respect the Messenger Muhammad—he was not only a holy man who lived a holy life, he was a courageous warrior who inspired the Islamic armies in their conquest of North Africa and Spain and parts of France. Historically I admire, too, Moses and Jesus, both prophets who brought the word of God to the people but were ignored. I also hold in high esteem the sultan of Egypt, Saladin, who defeated the first colonialists, the Crusaders, and liberated the sacred city of Jerusalem.”

  “Too bad he’s holding one of our people,” Casey decided. “This is the sort of guy who could really bloody the Russians.”

  On the television screen Maria asked, “How about living figures?”

  “She is certainly a handsome woman,” Reagan said as he and his National Security Advisor, Bill Clark, watched TV on the second floor of the White House. “Remind me what her, uh, name is?”

  “Maria Shaath,” Clark said. “The Ibrahim character is the one who thinks we’ve agreed to trade Shaath and the CIA fellow for fifty Stingers.”

  “Living figures,” Ibrahim was telling Maria, “are more difficult.”

  “Why is that?” she inquired.

  “Because it will be fifty or a hundred years before you can have enough historical perspective to weigh what a leader has done.”

  “You take a long view of history?”

  “I measure things in centuries.”

  “Go out on a limb,” Maria insisted. “Give it your best shot.”

  Ibrahim smiled faintly. “I admire Qaddafi for not being intimidated by the colonial powers. I respect Iraq’s Saadam Hussein and Syria’s Hafez al-Assad for the same reasons. On the other hand, I despise Jordan’s King Hussein and Egypt’s Mubarak and Saudi Arabia’s entire royal family for their failure to stand up to the colonial and secular West. They have in fact been co-opted by the secular West. They have become agents of secularism in the Islamic world.”

  Reagan asked, “What did I, uh, decide about those Stingers, again, Bill?”

  “You felt it would be a mistake to supply them to Islamic fundamentalists like this Ibrahim character. So the Stingers we’re sending in with the Israeli raiding party have had their firing mechanisms removed.”

  “You speak often about colonialism and secularism,” Maria was asking on the screen. “What about Marxism?”

  “I hate Marxism!” Reagan muttered to himself.

  “Marxism is as bad as capitalism,” Ibrahim replied. “Marxism is colonialism with a secular packaging.”

  Reagan perked up. “Well, he’s not a Marxist!” he decided.

  “He certainly isn’t,” agreed the National Security Advisor.

  “I don’t see what we have to lose by arming
him with, uh, Stingers if he uses them against the Marxists,” Reagan said.

  “A lot of Senators are saying the same thing,” Clark observed.

  Reagan stared with troubled sincerity at his National Security Advisor. “Are you suggesting that supplying Stingers to the, uh, Afghan freedom fighters would be popular in Congress?”

  “I suppose it would be,” Clark conceded.

  “Well, maybe we need to take another look at this, uh, Stinger business after all,” Reagan ventured. “I’m not saying we should give them Stingers. On the other hand, if they use them to shoot down Russian planes… Hmmmmmm.”

  Leo Kritzky had just returned from Baltimore, where he’d personally debriefed Hippolyte Fet, the former KGB rezident in Peshawar who had been spirited out of Pakistan immediately after his defection, flown to America and installed in a Company safe house. Pulling into his Georgetown driveway after dark, Leo was surprised to see a familiar gray Plymouth already parked there. Jack was slouched in the driver’s seat, the radio on and tuned to a station that gave the news every hour on the hour. Both drivers emerged from their cars at the same moment. “Jack,” Leo said. “What brings you out at this hour?”

  “I badly need a drink,” Jack moaned as they headed toward the front door of Leo’s home. He glanced at his old Yale roommate and scull-mate. Physically, Leo had pretty much recovered from Angleton’s draconian inquisition nine years before; his hair had grown back ash-colored and was worn in a brush cut popular with Army officers. The gauntness had given way to a sturdy leanness. If there were vestiges of the ordeal, they were to be found in Leo’s dark eyes, which still looked haunted, more so tonight than usual, or so it seemed to Jack, who said, “You look as if you could use a dose of alcohol, too, old buddy.”