by Paul Vidich
“What did he say?”
“That you’d fill me in.”
“Good. Fill you in I will. Walker is playing a game.” Altman talked quickly. That was his style. His speech came in staccato bursts. “A game that we don’t want to play. His game. His rules. We’ll play our game. Use our rules.”
Altman moved to the bookcase and a combination safe camouflaged by a painting. Liquor inside. Altman poured himself a generous glass and offered a round to the others. Mueller didn’t touch his.
“We need a new approach that doesn’t involve the FBI. They are too eager to have us look bad. Nothing would please them more than to prove we’ve got a traitor among us.”
He repeated the word traitor as if shocked by it. Mueller preferred double agent. It was easier on the ear, more ambiguous.
Altman threw back his drink, finishing it. Leaned against the wall. “A new approach is what we need. You agree, don’t you, David? You haven’t said a word. Silence is consent here. A new approach. In six months not one name has come off the list. That’s a failing grade.”
The list. Five people knew of this list. Four were in the room. Twenty case officers who could be Protocol. Protocol had become the catchall that came to mind whenever something went wrong. It was human nature to blame losses on a calculating intelligence rather than on the sloppy work of demoralized staff. And the Council knew they had to take care not to conflate what might be several bad apples into the work of a single man. Doubt, Coffin liked to remind them, was more precious than certainty.
The names on the list had been painstakingly assembled by matching known compromised operations against officers with foreknowledge of the plans; broadened further to include men who could have gotten access if they’d sought it; broadened further to obvious security risks—heavy drinkers, men spending beyond their means, officers with a grudge, men at risk because of some moral weakness. It was a long list. Too long.
Mueller’s name could have been on the list, as could the director’s for his well-known womanizing, but the list wasn’t meant to be a witch hunt. The Council selected men who they believed had access to the Agency’s secrets and a motive. Twenty names. Each suspect. The list itself was secret. Mueller knew of it, as did the other men in the room, and the director had seen it. Secrecy protected the investigation from compromise, but it also protected the reputations of the innocent. The end of a good case officer’s career was to have guilt unproven and suspicions remain.
Mueller had volunteered his name for the list in the long, spirited debate that accompanied its compilation. He fit the profile, he’d said, without an ounce of irony. No, no, no, he was told. The director pointed out how ridiculous it would look to have a lead investigator be among the prime suspects. “You are in one category or the other, George. Not both. We’ve chosen you to investigate this, so your name can’t be included.”
Mueller had been grateful for the vote of confidence, but he was disappointed he hadn’t succeeded in his ploy to be taken off the Council. Mueller knew the list had a problem. Friendships had protected some of the men in the Agency whose names had been part of the culling process, but were removed because an officer had vouched for his friend. Mueller joked to the Council that there should be another investigation with outsiders to investigate the investigators. They had all laughed. He’d been just a little provocative, but serious too.
“What’s the approach?” Mueller asked. He looked at Coffin, who’d been silent since his comment about the bad outcome. Coffin was a brooder, a quiet man, a hard man to know. His style was flinty and precise, and his handwriting was a cramped expression of this tendency toward precision, as was his speech. “Roger will fill us in, George.”
Altman stood at the window looking at the Potomac fading in the early dusk. He turned suddenly, enthusiastically. “We need to take the initiative, George. We need our own source. We need to recruit someone high up in the Soviet embassy.”
“Break the law?”
“It’s not breaking the law, George, if it’s getting intelligence, which is what we do, what our charter requires. The FBI won’t know that the intelligence we’re seeking is counterintelligence until we’re ready to tell them. We need to control this. Have you got a better idea?”
“What makes you think we can recruit a principal?”
“They think we can. They follow their own people. They’re worried about defectors. We need to find one who will come to us.”
“What’s next?” Mueller knew what was next, but he wanted them to lay it out and build their case so he could hear the conviction in their voices. Coffin and Altman looked at Mueller, as did Downes. Ganged up. Mueller gazed back. He didn’t have to do this, he thought.
“Let him come to you,” Altman said. “Make yourself an attractive target. Give him a reason to approach you. Draw him in and when he thinks you’re a prospect we’ll close in. They make mistakes too.”
“I’m the bait?”
No one answered.
“I’m the bait?”
Altman paused. “You’re tired, George. Everyone knows you want out. The reason you want to leave is the same reason we need you to stay and see this through. You’re a credible risk.”
Mueller choked back an impulse to laugh. The twisted logic of this blandishment appalled his sense of reason. “How long?”
“Two months,” Coffin said.
“That’s optimistic.” Two months would become five, then ten. Mueller knew this was a job he couldn’t resign once he was tapped. He didn’t have to do this.
“We are confident it can be done in two months,” Coffin repeated. “We can’t lose another man like Leisz.”
It gave Mueller satisfaction to know that he had the power to disappoint them. He had made the mistake of sharing his unhappiness in the Agency with his colleagues and they were using it against him. “Who is he?”
“Vasilenko. Maybe Chernov.”
Mueller received the two dossiers that Coffin sent sliding across the conference table. He glanced at Vasilenko’s blurred photo, taken, it was obvious, surreptitiously at a distance through a crowd of pedestrians, and Mueller thought it made the Russian look thuggish. Chernov’s was a formal head shot.
“They’re both in a position to know about Protocol,” Altman said.
“Assuming Protocol exists,” Mueller added.
“I thought we were over that,” Coffin said. “Roger and I are past that point.”
“Yes, yes,” Altman snapped. “We’ve stipulated he exists. But we need proof. Vasilenko and Chernov are in a position to know. They might not have his name, but they’ll have something—a clue, a lead, a crack to let sunshine in. We’ll get something that points to the real name.”
There was a debate among the four men. Mueller listened skeptically.
“Chernov is the best choice,” Coffin said. “Head of GRU in the embassy. Intelligence arm of the Soviet Army. He might be Protocol’s handler. His wife made the drop. Old-line Soviet thug.”
Mueller read the dossier. Born 1920 or 1921. Private first class, then corporal in the Red Army and one of the lucky few drafted in the summer of 1941 still alive on Victory Day. Served as a machine gunner on the Volkhov front in the Battle of Leningrad. Developed chronic chills in the swamps. Strong, cheerful personality. Model worker, party protégé of Malenkov on the Central Committee. GRU—the main intelligence directorate of the Soviet Army.
“You think he can be turned?” Mueller said this with doubt.
“No,” Altman replied. “And he isn’t suitable for another reason. The FBI keeps track of him. Two cars have him under surveillance at all times. He knows that. He thought his wife was safe.”
Mueller open the second dossier.
“Vasilenko is new,” Coffin said. “He’s come here from the consulate in New York as head of the trade mission. Metallurgy. But we think he is NKVD, State Secu
rity, tied to the Beria faction, Directorate K, counterintelligence. Rival of Chernov. It’s fluid now with Stalin dead. We still don’t know if he died of a stroke, as Russian papers report, or murdered, as rumors suggest. . . . Before New York we tracked him in Berlin and before that we had him in Vienna—’forty-eight.” Coffin looked at Mueller. “It says you knew him.”
Mueller nodded. The file had their history. Case officers met their Soviet counterparts and made notes to the file of the meetings, and this was the way both sides kept track of authorized contact.
“We worked together with the Brits in MI6 on the food riots. People were starving. It got very tense. He was practical about it.”
“Practical?”
“He didn’t pound on the table and blame the bloody capitalists. People were dying. We worked together to get aid brought in.”
“Chernov?”
“I don’t know him. I never dealt with Soviet military intelligence.”
“Vasilenko is the best bet. He’ll need to come to you.”
“How?”
Coffin flicked his wrist with a fly-fisherman’s practiced hand and reeled in an imaginary catch. “Still water. Patience. A good lure.”
Mueller saw both men opposite patiently waiting for his response, and he saw in each face a terrible compulsion for patriotism. He didn’t have to do this.
3
* * *
LEISZ’S WIFE
MUELLER LOOKED up to see Mrs. Leisz with her head out the third-floor window and staring down at him with a puzzled expression. He’d said his name on the intercom, but he had no reason to believe that she’d remember who he was. He’d said he’d come about her husband. She yelled down that the door buzzer was broken and then she dropped a sock weighted with a key. He let himself in the lobby. Mueller prepared for the questions she would ask that he would have to avoid, politely of course, and still provide sympathy. He couldn’t let on any of what he knew beyond what the police had already told her.
The stairs were grim: fluorescent lights, yellowing paint, and hand-me-down baby strollers on each landing that he had to maneuver past on his climb. Fried onion smells filled the air and faint voices drifted up the stairwell. So this was where Alfred Leisz lived. Agency salaries permitted better housing, but European recruits hoarded their earnings. Mueller was uncomfortable entering the private world of the Hungarian émigré whom he’d known only from his work tapping into Soviet telephone conversations from the listening station a block from the embassy. Mueller had found Leisz in a displaced persons camp and brought him to America for his skills as a linguist, translator, and cryptographer. Leisz had discovered that the Soviet voice encryption machines had a serious problem. They sent a faint echo of the uncoded message with the coded one. He was able to figure out how to extract the echo and reveal the clear text, which he transcribed and translated in the basement room that connected to embassy lines via a tunnel dug under Sixteenth Street. Mueller had found Leisz in his basement cubicle. The damn fool Leisz had broken the rules and let someone in.
“I know you,” Mrs. Leisz said when Mueller stood at the third-floor landing. She wore an ankle-length smock and held a restless infant in one arm, while a young boy tugged at her free hand. “You were at the funeral.”
Mueller nodded. A frown creased his forehead. “Yes.”
She blocked the door, but then remembering, pulled her son aside and made room for Mueller to pass. “You were the one who called?” She spoke English confidently with a slight accent.
“Yes.”
Mueller found himself in a small living room with a jumble of toys scattered across the floor, which he stepped over, avoiding the littered field of play as best he could. He sat where she directed, a dark sofa that hid its stains. Steam hissing from the cast iron radiators wastefully heated the apartment. Floor-to-ceiling shelves were filled with technical books and literature in several languages.
Mrs. Leisz sat in a bergère chair opposite Mueller. She had thin pale arms, chafed hands, no makeup, prematurely graying hair wound into a bun on top of her head, and tired eyes that she opened wide. “What documents?” she asked. She rocked her infant child and shifted to make herself more comfortable.
Mueller pulled a file from his attaché case and kindly patted the boy’s head. “Can I speak openly?”
“Yes, of course. Speak.”
“We’ve arranged for you to receive his civil service benefits. We want to make sure you’re doing okay. I’m here to answer any questions.” Mueller opened the file. “Has anyone contacted you?”
She looked confused.
Mueller leaned forward, consciously sympathetic. “If anyone comes here and asks questions about his death, I’m happy to have you direct them to me. It’s best that we do that so you don’t have to be troubled.”
“What questions? Who?”
“The insurance company, for example. We want to make sure that you’re taken care of.”
She nodded, said nothing.
“This must be very hard for you. We want to help. We have expedited your benefits. Payments will come monthly to your account. It starts in two weeks.” He pulled out an envelope with cash which he proffered, but she didn’t reach for it so he placed it on the coffee table. “This will help in the meantime.”
“Anton, stop,” she scolded when her son took the envelope. The baby had fallen asleep in her arms. Mrs. Leisz turned to Mueller. She tried to look grateful, but her face went blank and words tumbled out.
“I don’t know what’s happened.” She stared. “He was a sunny, open man. He came home at night and read to our son, and he was kind to me. Our apartment was a lively place where friends came to eat and drink and talk. Then something happened. Alfred returned from the library on Friday and he wasn’t his usual self. He didn’t read to the boy. He sat there and drank. He didn’t talk. He was a different person. I just knew something was terribly wrong. The whole weekend was very melancholy and then he said he’d made a mistake. He said he was going to lose his job. He wouldn’t tell me anything else.
“It was the weekend of the big storm and everything was closed down Friday night. Trolleys weren’t running. Cars were buried. He wanted to fix the mistake, he said, but the city was shut down. No trolleys, no way to get to the library. Weather that weekend was cold and gray and deepened his worry. The children picked up his mood. I told him, go outside, take a walk, so we could have some peace here, but the snow wasn’t shoveled and had drifted chest high. He came back up and sat there where you’re sitting and drank. I wanted to strangle him.”
Mrs. Leisz suddenly put her hand out, touching Mueller, who flinched. “I don’t mean that. I loved him, but he was in a dark mood.”
Mrs. Leisz rocked her sleeping child and brought her eyes back to Mueller. “That night he was quiet at the dinner table. I said it’s a shame the adults in this family have stopped talking. On Sunday night he just had to get out of the house so we left the children with a neighbor. The new film about Martin Luther had just opened and he picked to see it. I thought it an odd choice. It was a serious movie,” Mrs. Leisz said. “Not one to see if you’re depressed.”
She paused. “Alfred went to work early the next morning to change his report, or fix it. I couldn’t understand what was so important. It’s just a report, I told him. But he wouldn’t listen. I confronted him. He said he couldn’t talk about it. I said You work in a library bookshop. You translate Russian newspapers. What is so important?”
Her agitated voice stirred the baby and she rocked back and forth cooing and shhhing. Mueller watched her carefully. She knows nothing. Alfred Leisz had kept his wife in the dark about what he did and who his employer was.
“Read me this book,” the boy said, hopping on the sofa. Mueller smiled at the boy.
“On the phone,” Mrs. Liesz asked, “you said ‘freak accident,’ that he was found in a puddle of electrif
ied water? Face burned? How did that happen in a library?”
Mueller nodded. “Yes. It’s from the police report.” Lies to assure a closed casket.
Mueller could do nothing more for her, and he didn’t want to stick around to take her awkward questions. Time to leave. Mueller laid the package of materials, including the police report, on the coffee table. He’d brought Alfred Leisz’s personal items from his cubicle: a framed photograph of his son, a fountain pen, a second pair of eyeglasses. Useless to her, but a keepsake perhaps. He put the release form for expedited death benefits in front of her to sign.
“I need my glasses,” she said.
When she disappeared in the bedroom, Mueller turned to the boy. “How old are you?” He took the boy on his lap. The same age as his son, Mueller thought.
The boy held up one hand and counted each finger. “Five. I’m a big boy.”
“I have a boy like you. I don’t see him enough. How do you like being a big boy?”
“Oh, it’s okay. I don’t cry anymore. My sister cries. She’s still a baby.”
“Do you take care of your sister?”
“Oh, yes.”
Mueller smiled at the boy’s eagerness. He felt an enormous sadness for the moment his mother had told him his father was dead—and explained what death was. No young child should suffer that darkness. The boy reminded Mueller of his own son—same pink cheeks, same curious eyes, same sweet innocence. For no reason, Mueller flashed on his last supervised visit, when it tore his heart to leave his crying boy pleading for Mueller to stay.
“How old is your boy?” the child asked.
“Six,” Mueller said.
“I will be six.” He held up two hands. “When I’m six I will be smart. What does he look like?”
Mueller smiled kindly. “He looks like you. I love him like your mother loves you.”
“Can I play with him?” the boy asked.
“He doesn’t live here.” Mueller opened the illustrated storybook and they read together. Mueller watched the boy without letting the boy know he was being watched.