by Archer Mayor
I stayed where I was, waiting for more. “My turn—why?”
“Because he thought Antonov was going to tell me something about Snowden.”
“Was he?”
The older man shrugged. “We’ll never know.”
Irritated, I turned the handle. “Guess,” I said.
Rarig hesitated and then gestured wearily to my chair. “Sit back down. It’s a bit of a story.”
We all three resumed our seats, which seemed to revive Rarig’s self-confidence. “Would any of you like coffee, by the way? I should have asked earlier.”
“Enough,” Willy warned.
“Okay. I’m sorry,” he said, steepling his fingers before his chin, his elbows propped on the arms of his chair. “Twenty-five years ago, when I was, as you guessed, working out of Vienna, we had a plan to make one of our defectors—let’s call him Yuri—appear as if he wanted to return to the old country. He and his wife had been living in DC for years. He’d gotten a Ph.D. and had been working for our Army Intelligence, so the Soviets were definitely interested. We floated rumors he’d become unhappy with his new life, and that if the Russkies wanted him back, he’d have some nice stolen tidbits to help them let bygones be bygones. It was an attractive bait. He’d been working in areas sensitive enough that some of the Army Intel guys actually still did distrust him.”
John Rarig shook his head at the memory. “He was a straight shooter, of course. I’d met him soon after his arrival, and he, his wife, and I became pretty close over the years. I was ordered to use that friendship to make this scheme look attractive to him.”
“You didn’t fight it?” Sammie asked, her own strong sense of loyalty stung.
Rarig pursed his lips. “I didn’t know what was really going on.”
Willy burst out laughing, to my irritation. “And you had your pension to think about. You guys are good. I thought I hung out with assholes.”
In a touchingly protective gesture, Olivia Kidder reached out and squeezed Rarig’s forearm. He smiled at her. “No. He’s right. I’d been in the game since the war. Benefits were a real concern. I should’ve smelled a rat, but I was told the point of the plan was to use Yuri to lure a Soviet bigwig we were after out into the open where we could grab him. It meant the end of Yuri’s work for the Army, but he’d had a good run, and he was well positioned for a cushy civilian job. But it was risky placing an old defector in a town like Vienna, so close to the Hungarian border, and I did put on blinders about that.”
I looked at his downcast eyes as he spoke, and remembered his impotent yearning to return the inn to its utopian roots. In a job where the truth had been so routinely expendable, it had to have been tough not to make lying a natural reflex. His sudden openness, after such coyness moments earlier, made me very suspicious.
“Anyhow,” Rarig resumed, “it all went bust. Yuri went to the meeting, somehow our grab team got lost, and Yuri was never seen again. We found out later the Soviet plan had been the exact reverse of ours. Something went wrong, though, and Yuri was killed. One source told me they overdid the chloroform. Not that we knew anything at the time.”
Rarig, still looking at the rug, let out a small puff of air. “So, the Company brass came down like buzzards, trying to find out what had gone wrong. The problem was, there were several possible scenarios. One theory was that Yuri had in fact re-defected, meaning everything we’d gotten from him over ten years was now suspect. Another was that some Russian mole within the Company had blown the whistle on our operation, thereby saving the Soviet target and getting rid of Yuri in one swoop. And then there was what turned out to be the truth, somewhere in the middle.”
Sammie was looking understandably confused and fell back on her more conventional police training. “What happened to Yuri’s backup?”
For the first time since he’d begun his tale, Rarig looked up at us, his face brighter. “Ah,” he said, holding a finger in the air. “That, as they say, is the nub of it, or at least what they ended up focusing on at the end. Had Yuri been lost through carelessness? Had he shaken us off so he could make a clean run? I was inclined to look elsewhere, which is what brought me to focus on Gil Snowden. He was a Young Turk with a doting DDO, born into the right family tree, and with connections to burn. This had been his first overseas operation. I thought at the time he’d messed up somehow, but I could never prove it. His DDO threw a protective cloak over him and that was that. When the ax finally dropped, it fell on Yuri, predictably enough, whom they blamed for losing touch with his own team.”
“What’s a DDO?” Sammie asked.
“Deputy director of operations,” Willy said sourly. “I met a couple of them in ’Nam. Assholes with rank.”
Rarig smiled. “Crude but occasionally true. I wouldn’t argue the point in this case.”
There was a brief lull, after which I asked, not bothering to hide my incredulity, “That’s it? Twenty-five years ago, you all get your pal Yuri killed, and that’s why Boris or Antonov or whatever the hell his name is gets strangled on your front lawn? By a CIA boss, no less? You’re going to have to do better than that.”
Olivia raised her hand politely, like a student asking permission to speak. “Perhaps I can clear that up a bit. Have you ever heard of James Angleton?”
“Sure. He was your big counterespionage head for a long time.”
She nodded. “That’s right, for twenty years. He and John began at about the same time, as I did, for that matter. Hunting out moles became an obsession with him. He’d ruin a career on a rumor, or discredit a good defector on little more than a hunch.”
“He took one of my defectors,” Rarig added, “and locked him up for two solid years because he thought he was a double. He wasn’t. And there wasn’t one shred of evidence. Angleton was a sick man.”
“In 1973,” Kidder resumed, “just before the Vienna fiasco, William Colby was made director. One of the first things he did was to fire Angleton and dismantle his operation. He reduced counterintelligence from three hundred people to eighty, almost overnight.”
She sat forward in her chair for emphasis. “The reason he did that was because counterintelligence zealotry was crippling the organization. Real or not, we’d become totally paranoid that everyone was reading everyone else’s mail. So, after Angleton was retired—when Yuri came up missing—nobody wanted to return to the bad old days and go hunting for a mole. Nobody.”
“Except me,” Rarig said.
“But you had nothing on Snowden,” I repeated.
Olivia Kidder explained more fully. “John found out through private sources that Snowden had been approached by the KGB immediately following Yuri’s disappearance. No one knows what was discussed, and nothing ever surfaced to incriminate Snowden, but it was a damning piece of coincidence.”
I finally saw where this had been heading. “And the KGB bigwig Yuri was being used to lure into the open was Sergei Antonov,” I said.
“Better,” Rarig corrected me. “It was his boss—my counterpart in the area—Major Georgi Padzhev. And it was Padzhev who supposedly contacted Snowden later.”
I got up and walked to one of the windows facing the ginkgo tree, which was now shimmering like a ghost in the glow from the inn’s lights. Rarig’s and Kidder’s appraisal of Gil Snowden matched my own gut reaction that he was connected to the attempt on my life in DC. To hear of an oddly similar scenario, in which someone actually had been killed, sent a chill down my spine. The more I hoped I’d found a dimly marked path toward vindication, the less I was questioning its highly dubious source—and the readiness with which it had been offered.
I turned to face them both, paying lip service to my doubts. “If Snowden’s been so squeaky clean all these years, couldn’t the meeting between him and Padzhev have been arranged so news of it could be leaked to you—just to make Snowden look bad?”
John Rarig laughed. “That’s good, Lieutenant. That was a common ploy. The problem is only I got news of it, and since I was already known as pr
o-Yuri and anti-Snowden, I would’ve been a poor choice to discredit him.”
“Gil Snowden was a small fish then,” Kidder added. “Georgi Padzhev wouldn’t have known or cared about him. Logically, a meeting between Snowden and Padzhev would have originated with Snowden, and handing Yuri to the Russians would’ve been the perfect way for Snowden to show good faith.”
It was all so neat and tidy, and so conveniently unprovable. But paranoia’s catching, and I was in need of answers. Still, I struggled.
“When I went down to DC,” I said, “I was almost killed by a man with a knife the night before I was to meet Gil Snowden—a supposed mugger. But Snowden seemed to know all about it the next morning, which was unlikely unless he’d had prior knowledge. If you two are right about him, then why did he try to take me out? I’m a nobody, and everything I knew was shared by my department. Why such a high-risk move?”
“Because that was merely plan A,” Rarig explained. “Since it failed, plan B’s the mess you’re in now.”
“The CIA is framing Joe?” Sammie burst out.
“Snowden is,” Kidder answered. “Whoever else might be involved is anyone’s guess. That’s why John and I are keeping such a low profile. Otherwise, we would have gone straight to the appropriate oversight committee and blown the whistle. As it is—and given what’s happened to you—we’re going to need more than a few hunches before we can show our heads and survive.”
“The reason you’ve been targeted,” Rarig said, “is because you have a reputation for doggedness. You don’t give up. Snowden’s a corporate animal. He knows that if you knock off an organization’s primary mover—or better still, discredit him—everyone else will end up milling around in circles.” He paused and then added, “Had any pressure lately to solve the ‘Boris’ case?”
“That’s why we’re here, wise guy,” Willy said.
“But you’re acting on your own, and at some risk to your jobs.”
“He’s right,” I said. “Nobody’s interested in Boris anymore. We’re the only ones who think he’s the key to all this.”
Willy pointed at our hosts. “Then we better hitch our wagon to someone else, ’cause these two’re getting ready to give you the screwing of a lifetime.”
There was an uncomfortable pause while we all considered what he meant. He shook his head at our stupidity. “Jesus Christ. We been sitting here for God knows how long, listening to a bunch of teary-eyed war stories, totally missing the obvious. What’ve we got so far? That some CIA bureaucrat came flying out of Washington to whack a Russian on Rarig’s front step so the beans wouldn’t be spilled about some supposed conversation that took place a quarter century ago—a conversation which, of course, only Rarig ever heard about, and which never led to anything. Then, once the body’s been discovered in a quarry Snowden couldn’t have possibly known about, he shows his hand by inviting you down to DC, where he tries to get you killed one day, and then shows off that he knew all about it the next. And finally, just in case our taste for bullshit is still running strong, we’re supposed to believe that, failing to kill you, he set up the world’s fanciest frame on the assumption that without our fearless leader, the rest of us are going to act like chickens with our heads cut off.” Willy stopped long enough to give us all an incredulous look. “Get real.”
I cupped my cheek in my hand, staring at the opposite wall. My entire life was disintegrating before my eyes, and every time I tried to grab hold of it, the opportunity was pulled away. Willy had just done it again, throwing water on the hopefulness I’d been trying to ignite.
Stubbornness replacing reason, I argued the point. “Okay,” I told him, “finish it up. If their story stinks, what replaces it?”
“Plain as the nose on your face,” he said. “Rarig’s brought in on the Yuri operation. He’s supposedly Yuri’s friend, the current Austrian field man, knows the lay of the land, the identities of his Soviet counterparts. He’s perfect. But Rarig’s getting long in the tooth, pissed off at the young bucks coming up like Snowden, and he sees a chance to make everything right. He’ll sell Yuri to Padzhev for a tidy Swiss bank deposit, get out of the Company come retirement, and have a time bomb against Snowden—courtesy of Padzhev—in case he ever needs it. He farts around for a few years, dissipating any suspicions, and finally cashes in some of the loot, buys a Vermont inn, and becomes the country squire.
“Only things go wrong. Padzhev’s old right-hand man shows up. He’s Mafia now, driven by greed instead of the old red flag, and he threatens to squeal unless he’s paid off. Rarig knocks him off, dumps him in the quarry, and sets up this whole frame against you to get both us and Snowden’s people off his scent. He didn’t count on that crummy tree, though, and on our tracing it back to him, so now he cooks up this cock-and-bull story because he knows if we swallow it, there’s nothing we can do about it. We can’t go charging into the CIA to bust one of their guys, and we ain’t going to be able to persuade anyone else to do it for us.”
It was, as I’d feared, as plausible as what Kidder and Rarig had told us; more so, in fact. The hopes I’d been stacking up against all logic—regardless of the consequences—collapsed.
As a cop, it was true that I’d become like a dog with a bone, making up in labor what I might have lacked in brains, depending on the evidence to light my way. Now I was at a loss. Nothing had clarity, and my growing inner turmoil was giving every hypothesis equal weight.
I rose to my feet one last time and walked to the door. “Willy’s right,” I said, feeling the pull of my own emotional exhaustion. “This is all just a bunch of stories. There’s no reality to it anymore.”
I opened the door and stepped out, seeing Sammie rise to join me, and hearing Willy exclaim paradoxically, “Jesus. You can’t quit now.”
Sammie caught up to me halfway across the lawn. “Joe, wait. What’re you doing?”
I turned to face her. “I’m tired, Sam, and I’ve run out of ideas. I don’t know what those two are up to—they’re probably crazier than rats in a can—and I don’t think they give a damn about us. Right now, I just want to go home. Maybe I’ll come up with something in the morning.”
“Willy was right about something else,” she said as I turned away. “You can’t quit.”
I stopped again and placed my fingertip against my temple. “I know that up here,” I admitted, “but right now I’m feeling like maybe there’re some puzzles that just can’t be worked out.”
She looked into my eyes. “You gotta keep at it.”
I didn’t share her optimism, but at this point, their faith in me was quite possibly the only life raft I had left.
“All right,” I finally said, fighting every instinct. “Get Willy out of there and we’ll try hashing this out on the way back home.”
Chapter 14
WILLY, OF COURSE, DIDN'T SEE A RETREAT as making any sense at all. “You gotta be shittin’ me,” he snarled back in the car. “We just clobbered ’em in there. Right now, they’re beating their brains out trying to keep alive. Jesus, if a bunch of dumb cops have ’em pegged, how far behind can the bad guys be?”
“What bad guys?” I asked, genuinely baffled that he’d left that conversation with anything that made sense. “Who do we choose from?”
He rubbed his forehead like a frustrated tutor. “Who cares? CIA, KGB, Russian Mafia—it doesn’t matter. Those two old fossils’re the lightning rod, and we just went from being part of the rod to being part of the lightning. The first shock was Boris. Whether Rarig iced him or not, his showing up was a sure sign to Rarig that his retirement days were over. Our hitting him tonight is the second shock. They have got to do something now. ’Cept if we cut ’em any slack, chances are they’ll get away with it. We need to watch ’em like hawks.”
“What’d you expect them to do?” Sammie asked.
“Move, for one thing. They’re sitting ducks here.”
“Hold it,” I said. “What about your theory five minutes ago? Where Antonov was out to black
mail Rarig for a quarter-century-old indiscretion?”
Willy waved that away like a fly. “Bullshit smoke screen. I wanted them to think I was an idiot—think local, act local. You know, get their guard down. If what I said really happened, all Rarig would have to do is play dumb and keep his mouth shut. We don’t have any proof. Why do you think they told us all that crap about Vienna if they didn’t think their past was about to eat ’em up? They’re sweatin’ something out, and Antonov was just the tip of it. Rarig may not have killed him, but I do think he dumped him to buy some time.”
He put the car into gear, swung it around, and drove out of the inn parking lot. “What we need to do is sit and wait—not keep flapping our gums.”
He drove the quarter mile to where the driveway met the road, pulled over and killed the engine. “Right?”
Sammie was sitting in the backseat. Her voice was carefully neutral in the dark night air. “It does look like they’re the only game we have.”
I looked straight ahead, across the deserted road at the black wall of trees opposite. I found myself slowly emerging from the emotional air pocket that had almost swallowed me. The situation hadn’t changed, but the company had. The two people we’d just left had learned to forecast the future using rumors, inference, and suspicion, while covering their own tracks sowing confusion and deceit. Theirs was a world of convenient realities, none necessarily based on the truth. Sammie and Willy, by contrast, inhabited a clear-sighted universe of cause and effect—they smelled a scent, and they followed it to the end.
Their simple lucidity was a welcome tonic.
“How’ve you two been working your surveillance so far?” I asked.
“Catch as catch can—no regular rotation,” Sammie answered. “When one of us can carve out a few hours unnoticed, we spell the other guy. I think the chief knows we’re up to something, by the way, but he’s choosing to ignore us, so we’ve got a fair amount of slack.”
“Okay,” I said. “Let me help. I have to keep checking in with the state police, but I can reach my answering machine through my cell phone and pretend I’m still at home. And sure as hell I have more free time than either of you. Who wants to pull first shift?”