"Language mirrors the world we live in; if we use screwed-up language to define reality, if you're always looking to use language to put 'spin control' on something instead of trying to accurately describe it, then you actually end up with a screwed-up reality-at least for you. Alices who misuse language end up eventually living in their own Wonderlands. Lousy language hurts the people who use it, as well as the society they live in; if you use sloppy language, then you end up with sloppy perceptions. So it's easy to fool these people simply by using their corrupted vocabulary; tell them what they want to hear. They'll not only believe what you say, but they'll believe in you."
"Precisely," Acton said, nodding his head as he stared at me intently. Now Mary eased herself down next to me. Only Garth remained in a squatting position, absently tracing invisible patterns on the stone in front of him with his index finger. "They use the language of cannibals, which eats up people's perceptions and sensibilities, and sometimes their lives. But the language of cannibals also consumes the people who use it; they become fools, as easily manipulable as their intended victims."
I said, "It's no wonder you were so taken by that painting of Jack Trex's. You knew exactly what he was talking about."
"Yes," Acton replied simply.
"Well, in the country you come from-"
"This is my country too, Frederickson," Acton said in a strong, steady voice. "I felt that way even before I found out that my father was an American."
"I think you're full of shit, Acton; don't try to use cannibal language on us. And as far as that kind of language is concerned, the Russian communists make American right-wingers look like grammar school students. There you have-or used to have-an entire government and bureaucratic infrastructure totally committed to distorting reality with smoke and mirrors."
"Just like this country," Acton replied evenly.
"Except that we have a free press to counter it."
"You won't get an argument from me on that, Frederickson. You might be surprised to know how I really feel about a lot of things-American and Russian."
"I’m sure I’d be astonished. In the meantime, you've been spying on this country since you were a teenager. I'll bet I'd also be astonished to learn how much classified information is leaked by right-wingers inside the government to right-wingers outside it."
"I don't think you'd be astonished at all; obviously, you realize it."
"But your primary task wasn't to gather information, was it, Acton?" It was Garth, who was still squatting with his head down, tracing patterns on the stone with his finger. "Your primary task was to act as a provocateur."
"That's right, Garth," Acton said evenly, glancing at my brother. "I see you understand. Provoking extreme or bizarre behavior was-is-the primary task for all of us."
Now Garth looked up. "All of us?"
Acton, a faint smile on his face, glanced first at Mary, then me, then turned his attention back to Garth. "Lady and gentlemen," he said drily, "there are probably almost as many KGB operatives working inside the American right wing as there are Nazi collaborators and sympathizers, and I can assure you there are plenty of them."
Mary, who was showing signs of immensely enjoying herself as the scope and impact of what Jay Acton was describing dawned on her, laughed loudly.
I said, "Jesus Christ."
Garth said, "Are they all like you, Acton? Do they all look and sound American?"
"Not all. Many came in with the Nazis and Nazi collaborators the CIA and State Department brought to this country to use against Russia in the cold war. I can't be sure, but I believe that there are others like me, also-although there can't be many who are actually American-bred; I didn't even know that about myself until Garth told me about my. . father. The Russians have what are called American Academies set up deep inside the Soviet Union; I know of two of them, because I've been inside them, but there may be more. These are large complexes constructed and designed to imitate small American towns, down to the minutest detail. They are, of course, elaborate schools for spies, and it's considered a great honor to be chosen to go to one. The government selects candidates when they're quite young, and the children literally grow up in these 'American' towns, seeing their parents only once or twice a year, and sometimes not at all. They learn to speak American English without an accent, are surrounded by American pop culture, and so on. The best of the students, as determined by psychological profiles and a vast battery of tests, are smuggled into America when they're in their midteens; legends have been created for them, and they go to live with KGB operatives who are already in place here."
I asked, "Do you know who any of these other people are?"
"No, Mongo-if I may call you Mongo."
"I'd rather you didn't, and I still think you're full of shit."
Acton merely smiled, shrugged. "Nevertheless, what I'm telling you is true. All of us in this operation, at least those at my level, are kept totally insulated from one another for obvious reasons of security; when you have time to reflect on it, you'll see that the precaution is totally logical. However, at our indoctrination sessions in Russia, we are occasionally given progress reports and success stories involving other operatives like ourselves. Being the kind of operative that's called a 'solitary' can be hard on the spirit, and these little information-sharing sessions are designed to keep up our morale. At one session I heard a tape recording of a conservative spokesman calling Ronald Reagan a dupe of the communists because he'd signed an arms treaty with us. That tape was the source of a lot of jokes, because-or so I was told-it was sent to my controller by one of our own people, who is a third-term senator from a western state and who's considered a possibility for a seat on the Supreme Court whenever the conservatives in this country get into power again. If that happens, a KGB officer is going to be helping to interpret your Constitution for you. No, I don't know which senator it is, and no, I don't know the names of the other KGB personnel who occupy high administration positions in various federal agencies. I was just told they're there."
Mary laughed again, even louder.
I said, "Shit."
Garth said, "Who dreamed this thing up, Acton?"
"Three Russian patriots in the NKVD who were eventually murdered by Beria during one of Stalin's purges. Their names wouldn't mean anything to you. The plan came into being in the late forties and early fifties, after the infrastructure of the American Communist party collapsed with the revelations about Stalin's terror campaign and his earlier pact with Hitler. Russia, of course, was collapsing too; Stalin was murdering millions of our citizens, and the entire country was convulsed with terror and paranoia. The American Communist party had become a joke, with most of the membership leaving. There were people in Russia, such as these three NKVD men, who realized that the dream of communism would die unless something was done to tarnish the image of America and the dream it represented; ours was the better dream, but our own leaders were destroying it with their madness. Propaganda wasn't enough, because few people outside Russia believed it, and Stalin was giving the American propagandists a field day. You'd emerged from the war not only a military but an economic giant; as the saying went, most of the rest of the world believed that the streets of America were paved with gold. You had individual freedoms, and we had
Stalin and Beria killing us in droves. Everyone who could was coming to America, and we could only keep our own citizens inside our borders by force and by bringing down the Iron Curtain around the captive nations. It looked as if you would bury the dream of Marxism before it had ever had a chance to flower-unless a way could be found to dilute the ideological strength of the United States.
"And then Joseph McCarthy rose to power, and he was the answer to our planners' prayers. The KGB was astonished at the degree of paranoia, terror, and divisiveness this one man and his followers were able to generate as he searched for wicked communists in American government and the military. Our planners realized that the American right wing would happily decimate Americ
an cities, throw people out of work, and in short do just about anything, as long as they believed they were defending America against Russia. We didn't have to subvert or attack; the right wing was all too happy to subvert and attack the fiber of their own country for us. The planners realized that we could actually use this anticommunist atmosphere McCarthy was creating to vastly improve our operations here. McCarthy and the ultraconservative right wing were studied closely. And then our program was instituted. My mother, of course, was one of the pioneers, the first to offer up herself and her son to exile in order to further the communist cause by weakening America. As Garth has correctly pointed out, our primary task was to act as provocateurs. We were to infiltrate organizations like the Ku Klux Klan, the American Nazi party, and organizations like Elysius Culhane's would come to be, in order to provoke the organizations' members into the kinds of extreme behavior and rhetoric that would polarize America, divide her from her allies, and tarnish her image in the eyes of the rest of the world. The communists would hide in the last place that anticommunists, and even your counterintelligence people, would think to look: right in the heart of the fascist sector of America.
"Again, we were given success stories to boost our morale. One of our jobs was to make it seem like the Republican party wants to steal the country every time it gets into power. I don't know if this is true, but I was told that Watergate and the subsequent attempt by Nixon and his plumbers to cover it up were instigated-inspired, perhaps, is a better word-by operatives like me, as was the subsequent exposure; Deep Throat may have been a KGB operative, and one of the 'plumbers' may have been also. The same with Iran-Contra. Our people pushed the politicians for the. invasion of Grenada because it made Americans look like reckless fools to the rest of the world. Actually our job was-is-easy because it entails simply goading the extreme rightists to do what they want to do anyway. Thus, Elysius Culhane's death squad. He's always wanted to control a death squad to quickly and efficiently kill people he thought represented a danger to the country, and in effect I gave him permission to do so by subtly, but repeatedly, telling him what a good idea it was, and then suggesting ways it could be done. I'm not saying that the American government, like the Soviet government, can't do stupid and self-destructive things all on its own; what I'm saying is that some-maybe most-of the more spectacularly stupid and self-destructive behavior of the past few conservative administrations has been inspired in no small part by KGB operatives like myself. The KGB loves it when Americans keep electing conservatives to power; administrations like Kevin Shannon's present much more difficult problems of infiltration and manipulation."
When Acton finished, we were all silent for some time. The KGB operative studied us, looking from one face to another, apparently waiting for some response. I was the one who finally broke the silence.
"You've talked a lot, Acton, but you still haven't answered my question. Did you kill Michael Burana and Harry Peal-your father?"
"No," Acton replied in a flat voice. "I never laid eyes on Michael Burana, and I never knew that he'd discovered my secret. And I didn't kill my father."
I looked at Garth, who nodded to me. "He could be telling the truth about that, Mongo. He cried when I told him who his father was and what had happened." He paused, shifted his gaze to Acton. "Then again, he wouldn't have known who Harry Peal was when he killed him."
"I knew who he was," Acton said quietly. "I didn't know that he was my father, but Harry Peal was always one of my idols."
"Why are you being so hard on him?" Mary asked, looking back and forth between Garth and me. "If it hadn't been for Jay, the three of us wouldn't be alive now."
"The question becomes one of why he saved our lives," Garth replied evenly, gazing steadily at Acton. "If you didn't kill Burana and your father, then who did?"
"I have to assume it was the same man who tried to kill me-a KGB assassin."
"Why would the KGB want you dead?" I asked. "You have to be one of their most important assets."
"I would no longer be of any value at all if I was exposed as a KGB operative. Also, they may have feared that I'd become unreliable; that was always the fear with people like me and the reason we were never given high rank. And in my case, they feared me being caught and telling American intelligence what I'm telling you."
"How did this attack take place?"
"A poison gas grenade was lobbed through my bedroom window at around the same time Garth was driving up from New York to see you in the hospital. If I'd been in bed asleep, I would have died almost instantly, and all an autopsy would have shown was that I died of a heart attack; the grenade itself would have been retrieved. As it happened, I was in the bathroom, with the door closed. I heard the window break and the grenade hitting the floor, and I immediately knew what was happening. I managed to escape through the bathroom window before the gas got to me. I had a spare set of keys taped under my car's bumper. I drove here, got into these clothes. The machine I used to monitor all Culhane's calls is in my home, but there's an electronic hookup to my telephone that I can activate by remote control. I played back the tapes of his most recent conversations, heard what he'd said to Gregory Trex, and realized what had happened. Then I went to the Community of Conciliation mansion to try and head off the death squad."
"If you're not in the business of killing people, why would the KGB give you all the weapons you have up here?"
"The KGB never provided me with anything but communications and wiretapping equipment. I got my weapons from the same places Culhane got his-various arms dealers in the western states and Florida. I trained myself to use them. He supplied the death squad with their weapons."
Garth grunted, said, "What exactly do you want from us, Acton?"
"I want the two — of you to walk me in, to get all of us in the hands of people you trust, and who can guarantee our safety. Supposedly you have powerful friends in Washington and elsewhere; Culhane claimed you have a personal relationship with the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Is that true?"
"It might be," Garth replied evenly.
"Do you have other friends in the intelligence community, people you trust completely?"
"Maybe."
"We have all the communications equipment we need up here. I would like you to contact whoever can get us safely off this mountain and to Washington, where I'll talk to your counterintelligence people. They'll have to guarantee our safety for an indefinite period of time. Thousands-maybe tens of thousands-of people in federal and state governments, and in conservative political organizations, are going to have to be vetted; and others are going to have to vet the vetters. It won't be as formidable a task as it might sound to flush out the other KGB people like me, because the legends constructed for us aren't as complex as they'd be if we were engaged in ordinary espionage. It was never anticipated that anyone would delve too deeply into our birth records or other background. But it must be done. Only when my story has been accepted by your people, and the process of rooting out the other KGB plants has begun, will the four of us be safe from assassination; the KGB is more likely to leave us alone if there's nothing to be gained by killing us and if our murders could be logically blamed on them. I need the three of you to back up my story and then support me."
Garth and I exchanged glances, and I could see in his eyes that we were thinking the same things. We both looked back at Acton, waited.
"You don't seem too taken with my proposal, gentlemen," Acton continued at last in a slightly wry tone, turning to look at Mary. "Maybe you don't realize how much danger we're all in.
This is the most important and productive operation the KGB has ever mounted. You can be sure that a crack assassin-or maybe even a team of assassins-is searching for us right now. And if we're caught by the police, we die; the people who are after us would be perfectly willing to blow up a police station, or even the town of Cairn, to keep this operation secret and the KGB plants in place. I'm not sure you understand-"
"Okay, you'
ve already played the tune for us, Acton," I interrupted, "and it's a real spooky one. We're all properly impressed with your story. What my brother and I are wondering is if it's true. You've had such success bullshitting Culhane and his friends, maybe you think you can bullshit us and our friends. Maybe there is no KGB assassin, no assassination team; maybe the story about the right wing and the government being infiltrated by a load of carbon-copy Americans manufactured by the KGB is just a fairy tale. Maybe there's just you. Maybe it was you, after all, who murdered Michael and Harry."
"Then why would I save your lives?"
"Because your cute game with Culhane and his lunatic friends and followers was over, no matter what happened to us. You'd listened to Culhane's telephone conversations, so you knew I'd already told Culhane about you, and I'd contacted the head of the FBI's counterintelligence unit, as well as Dan Mosely. While it's true that those people might have done nothing more than conspire to make you disappear back to Russia, that's probably the last thing you wanted, and want. Having lived most of your life in the United States, you didn't find the idea of a Kim Philby existence in Mother Russia all that appealing. You weren't ready to retire, and the only way you could stay on the job would be to find a new way to make yourself useful to your KGB masters. Not only could you cause massive disruption, erosion of morale, and loss of confidence in the government if you had FBI counterintelligence vetting everyone from congressmen to secretaries, but you'd top it off by graciously accepting a job with the CIA. The KGB would flip; they would not only have caused divisiveness and disruption in the United States government, but they'd have a new mole. You might have just a bit of difficulty getting anyone to believe you on your own, so you want Garth and me to help you, to vouch for you. Garth and I just aren't all that anxious to become KGB accomplices-without pay, no less."
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