Джозеф Файндер - Extraordinary Powers

The rain was beginning to let up. Moore had spread out an array of files on a well-burnished oak library table near the French doors. They concerned the abolition of the KGB and the East Bloc intelligence services: the steady flow of secrets, and personnel, from Moscow and Berlin and everywhere else behind what was once called the Iron Curtain. There were extracts from debriefings of KGB officials who were attempting to sell their secrets for protection in the West, or who were offering bundles of files for sale to the CIA or to Western corporations. There were decoded cables reporting morsels of information seeping out of KGB stations around the world, which (I could tell at the briefest glance) had the potential for being explosive.

“You see,” Moore said gently, “there’s quite a bit of information that we’d all just as soon had remained buried in the Lubyanka.”

“What do you mean?”

He sighed. “You know about the Wednesday Club, I’m sure.”

I nodded. The Wednesday Club was a regular social gathering of former CIA muckamucks — former directors and deputy directors and so on who enjoyed each other’s company enough to eat lunch together at a French restaurant in Washington every Wednesday. The younger folks in the Agency called it the Fossils Club.

“Well, there’s been quite a bit of talk in the last few months about just what we’re seeing coming out of what used to be the Soviet Union.”

“Anything useful?”

“Useful?” He looked at me intently, owlishly, over his glasses. “Would you consider it useful to receive irrefutable documentary proof that the Soviet Union engineered the assassination of John F. Kennedy?”

I started for a second, then shook my head. “I don’t think it would make Oliver Stone very happy,” I said.

He burst out laughing. “But for a second you believed me, didn’t you?”

“I know your sense of humor quite well.”

He laughed a few moments longer, then pushed his glasses up his nose. “We’ve had KGB and Stasi generals coming over and trying to sell us information on KGB assets around the world. Names of people who worked for them.”

“I’d think that would be a great boon.”

“Maybe, in some historical sense,” Moore said, and removed his glasses. He massaged the bridge of his nose. “But who really cares much now about some washed-up old Red who cooperated thirty years ago with a government that no longer exists?”

“I’m sure some people do.”

“No doubt. But that’s not what interests me. A few months ago at one of our Wednesday lunches I heard a story about Vladimir Orlov.”

“The former chairman of the KGB?”

“More precisely, the last chairman of the KGB, before Yeltsin’s people did away with it. Where do you imagine a fellow like that goes when his job is pulled out from under him?”

“Paraguay or Brazil?”

Moore chuckled. “Mr. Orlov knew better than to hang around in his dacha outside Moscow, waiting for the Russian government to decide to prosecute him for doing his job to the best of his ability. He went into exile.”

“Where?”

“That’s the problem.” He selected a stapled set of papers from the table and handed it to me. It was a photocopy of a cable from a CIA officer in Zurich station reporting the appearance of one Vladimir I. Orlov, former chairman of the Soviet KGB, in a café on Sihlstrasse.

He was accompanied by Sheila McAdams, executive assistant to Director of Central Intelligence Harrison Sinclair. The cable was dated less than one month earlier.

“I’m not sure I understand,” I said.

“Three days before Hal Sinclair died, his executive assistant and — I trust I’m not revealing anything you don’t already know — mistress , Sheila McAdams, met in Zurich with the ex-chief of the KGB.”

“So?”

“The rendezvous was apparently cleared by Sinclair himself.”

“Presumably they were transacting some sort of business.”

“Of course,” Moore said impatiently. “The following day, the name of Vladimir Orlov disappeared from most CIA data banks, at least those accessible to all but the top five or six officials. Then Orlov himself disappeared from Zurich. We don’t know where he went. It was as if Orlov had given Hal’s assistant some quid pro quo in exchange for removing him from our sonars, our sights. But we’ll never know. Two days later Sheila was killed in that alley in Georgetown. Next day Hal perished in that awful ‘accident.’”

“So who would have murdered them?”

“That, my dear Ben, is exactly what Alexander Truslow would like to know.” The fire was dying, and Moore poked at it idly. “There’s turmoil in the Agency. Terrible turmoil. A dreadful power struggle.”

“Between—?”

“Listen to me. Europe is in a frightful mess. Britain and France are in bad shape, and Germany’s virtually in a depression. The specter of feuding nationalist elements—”

“Yes, but what does that have to do—”

“The talk — it is only talk, I grant you, but it is from supremely well-connected Agency retirees — is that certain elements within the Agency have found a way to insinuate themselves into the chaos in Europe.”

“Ed, that’s awfully vague—”

“Yes,” he said, so sharply that it startled me. “ Certain elements ... and insinuate ... and all the other muzzy little phrases we employ when all we know are wisps. But the point is, old men who should be playing golf and enjoying bone-dry martinis are frightened. Friends of mine who used to run the organization speak of enormous sums of money changing hands in Zurich—”

“Meaning that we paid off Vladimir Orlov?” I interrupted. “Or that he paid us off for protection?”

“Money isn’t the point!” His too-even teeth were an unnatural yellow.

“Then what is?” I asked gently.

“Let me just say that the skeletons haven’t yet begun to emerge from the closet. And when they do, the CIA may well join the KGB on the ash heap of history.”

We sat for a long time in silence. I was about to remark And would that be so bad ? when I glimpsed Moore’s expression. His face was now chalk-white.

“What does Kent Atkins think?”

He was silent for half a minute. “I don’t really know, Ben. Kent is scared to death. He was asking me what I thought was going on.”

“What did you tell him?”

“That whatever these Agency renegades are trying to accomplish in Europe will not simply involve the Europeans. It will directly involve us as well. It will involve the world. And I shudder to think what sort of conflagration is in store for us all.”

“Meaning what, specifically?”

He ignored my question, gave a small, rueful smile, and shook his head. “My father died at the age of ninety-one, my mother at eighty-nine. Longevity runs in my family. But none of them fought in the Cold War.”

“I don’t understand. What sort of conflagration, Ed?”

“You know, in his last few months in office, your father-in-law was quite obsessed with saving Russia. He was convinced that unless CIA took serious action, forces of reaction would take over in Moscow. And then the Cold War would be a sweet memory. Maybe Hal was onto something.”

He clenched his small liver-spotted fist, and pressed it against his pursed lips. “We take risks, all of us who work for Central Intelligence. The rate of suicide is quite high, you know.”

I nodded.

“And although it’s actually quite rare for any of us to be killed in the line of duty, it happens.” His voice softened somewhat. “You know that.”

“You’re afraid you’re going to be killed?”

Another smile, a shake of the head. “I’m approaching eighty. I don’t plan to live my remaining years with an armed guard beside my bed. Assuming they’d provide one. I see no reason to live in a cage.”